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'YouCut' Targets National Science Foundation Budget
jamie writes "As some of you may have heard, the incoming Republican majority in Congress has a new initiative called YouCut, which lets ordinary Americans like me propose government programs for termination. So imagine how excited I was to learn that YouCut's first target — yes, its first target — was that notoriously bloated white elephant, the National Science Foundation."
The smart move is to cut YouCut, because your Congressman should already be cutting the crap you dislike,
Look, I'm not an American, I'm just looking over the fence and respectfully trying to make sense of what I'm seeing. But that's just obscene.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
yes, that should be the first thing to cut money from indeed ! because, then, texas education board can claim that jefferson was a godless whore, and instead put the name of an obscure preacher in front of him as a founding father. of course, right after approving school curriculum books that say 'world has been created in 6 days' is a valid theory ...
kudos americans. you have succeeded in giving a second chance to the morons who have awarded the world with a neverending war on terror, a turmoil in middle east, violation of all constitutional and modern civil rights, kidnappings, torture, wall street DEregulation (and corresponding scam), and body scanners and many, many more !
heaven knows what they will do to you (and the world, if they can) with this second chance. maybe the first thing they will mandate will be mandatory cavity searches in airports.
Read radical news here
Cuts hurt. Taxes hurt. Our economy is in shambles and both solutions make no sense. I guess the only stance worth fighting for anymore is legalizing marijuana, at least that way I won't care what happens.
With our national debt at 100% GDP and our unfunded mandates at 8 times that, we're more than broke. We're spending our grandchildren's tax dollars.
When it comes down to choosing between "free" healthcare, "free" medicine, and everything else "free" the government owes people, why is it a surprise that what people think here is "honest" and "important" will fall by the wayside.
Welcome to Idiocracy.
.... same acronym.
Not Sufficient Funds.
Have gnu, will travel.
Private companies typically do not engage in long-term research that isn't likely to lead to directly commercializable results. I know this flies in the face of red-blooded 'merican "all socialism is evil" doctrine, but public sector research, funded by tax-payer money, is needed to build the foundations for tomorrow's industries. Quantum computing, like many other bleeding edge fields, is too immature, too high-risk, and with pay-offs that are far too distant for the private sector.
Research and education are both investments that can yield fantastic returns, but they are long-term investments that require steady commitment rather than periodic outbursts of zeal punctuating long periods of apathy. A minor cut now might help balance the books today, but the lost opportunities down the road will more than negate that. Top researchers don't hang around after you cut the funding they run their labs and pay their students and post-docs with. They won't wait a few years until times are good again. What they will do is go where the money they need to work is, and if they can't find that in the U.S., they'll likely find it in Canada, China, Australia, etc.. The U.S. is far from the only country doing quality research in QC these days.
Unfortunately, some U.S. politicians are of the opinion that they can make political hay by screwing over those "pinko" scientists. They're smart enough to know what they're sacrificing, but votes for them are a worthier cause! The only way to fight this kind of thinking is to call up your local representative/senator/etc. and let them know you're not buying it. The only way to make them stop this kind of thing is to make them think they'll lose votes today, because that's all they care about.
That is a lot easier to do with capitol letters and punctuation in the proper place. Writing like that just makes you look either uneducated or stoned.
Cut "defense" spending, airport security, congress critter perks, and tax breaks for those who least need them. That should bring our deficit to negative. The republicrats can thank me later.
Great Intellect...
Cut the NSA, CIA, FBI, ATF, DEA, and all that anti-democratic shit.
Circumcision is child abuse.
It works for me. Where are the "get the government out of my choices" voices for this?
If nothing else, it would cut part of the prison population and increase the tax base.
All you need to do is make it a multiplier for other crimes. Murder? And high? Looks like you get an additional 5 years.
And how about fixing the tax system a bit? Why does Bill Gates need a tax cut? Why does he need a tax cut MORE than a guy who makes $30K a year? Why does Paris Hilton need to protect more of her inheritance?
Can some enterprising person divide up the budget of the House of Congress itself onto a YouCut type site.
I am sure some people would like less brass in the new bathrooms.
Or perhaps cuts to "fact finding" missions.
Maybe we could do with fewer congress critters. Save lots of $ there.
-- Or perhaps the salaries could be cut --
In 2006, congresspersons received a yearly salary of $165,200.[173] Congressional leaders were paid $183,500 per year. The Speaker of the House of Representatives earns $212,100 annually. The salary of the President pro tempore for 2006 was $183,500, equal to that of the majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate.[174] Privileges include having an office and paid staff.[122] In 2008, non-officer members of Congress earned $169,300 annually
"And instead of buying computers for every little snotnosed curtain climber, let's just focus on getting them able to READ and WRITE"
Because computers never helped anyone learn either of those skills, let alone any other useful skills that they will use later in life...
Great Intellect...
This is exactly the kind of framing that brings joy to those with a grudge against effective government - playing entirely in their end zone, scoring point after point when they're supposed to have the ball.
Corporations have proven that, given the option, they will simply not do basic research. Now, we're using recent tax breaks (plus extra double tax cuts for the rich) causing further massive deficits to argue that huge swaths of basic research be eliminated, because they're too luxurious for us to afford (compared to the utter non-luxury of war-time double-tax-cuts for the mega-rich).
Basic science is really our only path towards actually knowing how to solve a lot of deep, inherent, and growing problems in our world. Problems that will only get worse as more resources are pulled into the hands of the few who will never let that money out of their small investment circles and estate holdings by choice.
The rich (frequently) aren't villains - they're just those that are good at gathering resources, the natural end result of selecting for people who can best acquire resources from others. The dynamic of a glut of rich getting more controlling over more resources is an ancient dynamic - the very word Crass is an example of this - take a little time to read up on Marcus Licinius Crassus adventures in emergency real estate acquisitions if you want a little insight into to today's real estate capitalism. Of course, he did die getting gold poured down his throat after his overreach - but he also created an empire too.
Sacrifice research on the alter of making room for tax breaks, however, and you're selling the very soul of your nation's future. You're creating an empire at the cost of drowning your future in your acquired gold.
Ryan Fenton
If you go to the site, they're not saying we should cut ALL of the NSF funding. They're asking people to suggest specific grants that are not good uses of tax dollars. The OP is essentially saying that there can't possibly be waste anywhere in the NSF budget at that anyone who would even suggest such a thing must necessarily be anti-science.
There is no "incoming Republican majority in Congress" because Republicans will only have a majority in the House. Congress = House + Senate.
Yes, it's been said on /. a million times before: end the freakin' wars. Stop the runaway military spending. It's that simple. NSF's annual budget = $7.4 billion (source: NSF). That's about a week in a half in Iraq, if memory serves.
Um, at first glance this looks like this is a bunch of Republicans inviting citizens to go through and try to spot dodgy expenditures and grants given out by the NSF.
You know, transparency, holding the government accountable, stuff like that. Basically half of Obama's platform, really.
They are ridiculously wasteful and artificially prop up the price of ethanol when we should be producing them with grasses and weeds instead of corn stalks.
Or how about the TSA?
If progressives use this weapon aganst them, they can be forced to put their money where their mouth is.
Private companies typically do not engage in long-term research that isn't likely to lead to directly commercializable results. I know this flies in the face of red-blooded 'merican "all socialism is evil" doctrine, but public sector research, funded by tax-payer money, is needed to build the foundations for tomorrow's industries.
Could you name a few things that 'public sector research' has come up with 'as the foundations of tomorrow's industries' which private companies wouldn't have done themselves for far less?
Flat taxes are inherently regressive. Go national sales tax or VAT, that way people are taxed on sonsumption, not earning, and frugality can be rewarded.
This is wrong on so many levels. First off the NSF budget is just pitiful, 6.85 billion in 2009. The physical sciences are flat out starving. Come on, this is the groundwork of our entire technical civilization...how many trillion is that worth a year? And most importantly the examples that he gives...soccer grant, and grant for video game sound. Well all right. The video game industry (which is entirely predicated on math math math more math -- insert joke [head shots]) is like 50+ billion. I think that research may well pay off. The NIH budget is 29.5 billion. I am in the biosciences and if you cut that in half and it would make no difference to the health of this country. Cancer...the same...Alzheimers...Schizophrenia...no progress... My point is that of all the Government research agencies, the NSF is in the most need of some love. This is just shameful.
Cutting a few dollars from the education or science system isn't likely to make you much dumber, so why not?
Since educational standards have dropped while education spending has risen in real terms, you could make a strong argument that the best way to improve educational standards is to slash education spending.
How does the blogger conclude what he does from this short video?
It basically boils down to the Baby Boomers fucking up yet again. It's something they've done every decade since the 1960s.
In the 1960s, their naivety resulted in protests and riots, along with the rise of "isms" like feminism.
In the 1970s, they started to make their way into power. Their energy and economic policies were absolutely terrible. Stagflation crippled many Western nations' economies during the 1970s.
By the 1980s, they were reaching higher and higher levels of power in business and government. Their total avarice again stunted real growth of the American economy.
They achieved the ultimate level of power in the 1990s. Thanks to their horrid economic policies, they almost single-handedly enabled the Chinese economy to grow so quickly, while at the same time ruining the American economy using "free trade".
They retained power during the 2000s, fucking up the corporate landscape and the American economy even further. Getting older in age, they started turning to religion, leading to shenanigans like this.
Never has a single generation caused so much trouble.
First, we will take a look at the National Science Foundation (NSF) - Congress created the NSF in 1950 to promote the progress of science. For this purpose, NSF makes more than 10,000 new grant awards annually, many of these grants fund worthy research in the hard sciences. Recently, however NSF has funded some more questionable projects - $750,000 to develop computer models to analyze the on-field contributions of soccer players and $1.2 million to model the sound of objects breaking for use by the video game industry. Help us identify grants that are wasteful or that you don't think are a good use of taxpayer dollars.
http://republicanwhip.house.gov/YouCut/Review.htm
If we stopped the wars, and doubled the NSF budget, we'd be so much better off in a couple years.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
OK, all you hyperventilating science lovers, just relax!! No one is going to cut all of NSF's funding!!! All that will be cut are grants that are just idiotic, like the ones cited at the YouCut site!! So, just chill!!!!!!!
Except that Congress gives $x +/- $y to the NSF who then gives it out to people who submitted grant proposals. Congress itself as a body is not involved in deciding what proposals get the money (although I'm sure select committee members "suggest" projects in their home states). Like you don't get to say your tax money only goes to needy welfare recipients and not to military expenses. The thing about this uproar is that the NSF is just a foundation - it does not science itself. They just hand out grant money. If they are given less tax money then would-be researchers will need to seek money from other grant providers (the NSF is not the only one) or they will have to come up with projects that at least sound like the payoff to society is more immediate / tangible. Less hysterics about cuts to this foundation, please.
And while we're on the subject of cuts, please put National Endowment for the Arts and National Public Broadcasting on the chopping block.
Rocket technology
Early computers
Internet
Countless advances made by publicly funded scientists
Of course you could argue that EVENTUALLY, all these would have been done by private interests. I don't believe that is true, but even if it is... the question is becomes how long would it have taken and how closely would it be controlled?
Great Intellect...
*cut the military budget, it's the single largest section of the federal government weighing in at 800 billion a year.
*kill the NEA, we're locking away people for harming themselves... at a cost of nearly 200 billion a year and we aren't getting any tax money from sales tax on legalized drugs. Also gangs are like under alcohol prohibition funded by illegal activities like drug dealing.
*farm subsidies because we Americans so don't need more HFCS.
*clean up the entitlement programs, maybe even relegate them to the states.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
I think the average person has no idea what useful or good science is. I'm pretty sure that if it isn't directly related to medicine, energy, or climate change (...if they even think it is true...) most people would consider it useless. I do cognitive science/neuroscience research, and all the time people are confused why people pay us to figure out how the brain works without intentions to directly "help people." Hell, even that "soccer efficiency" study or whatever can probably be applied to some other thing our government likes that involves people working in teams, ie the military.
There is more to science than physics!
www.iomalfunction.blogspot.com
Slight correction, Congress as a body CAN cut funding to an ongoing NSF funded project, which is what this article is about. But they can do this for any federal program.
I've worked 10 years in biomedical research both in academia (where I got my paycheck from the NIH), and in industry (pharma & diagnostics).
I am ABSOLUTELY in making very deep cuts in the National Institutes of Health budget. It should be cut in half over the next 10 years.
I have witnessed the efficiency and progress in industry, and it make some of the top academic researchers look like true money and time wasters. The amount of truly useful work to come out of academia does not justify stealing from taxpayers.
It is the moral position to support cuts to the NIH, military, NSF, Dept of Ed, etc.
Understanding global warming, basic nuclear physics, basic quantum mechanics and the number theory underlying public key encryption come to mind. There is no profit in laying the groundwork for things like that. Such things aren't a specific thing you do and then market what came out of it. It's a rising tide of understanding that enable you to even think the thoughts involved in making products based on it.
If you can't learn to read and write without a computer, I don't want to hire you.
Supporter of the +1 Over Dramatic mod option. In memory of apk.
if public sector research developed something, how can you prove that private companies WOULD have done it for less? Unless they both happen to develop simultaneously, without knowledge of the other (so no cross contamination of work) you can't prove it. You also can't prove that if the private sector developed something that the public sector would have for far less (or more).
Annual defense budget: $700,000,000,000
Average annual taxes per American adult to defense: $3,050
NSF budget: $7,000,000,000
Average annual taxes per American adult to NSF: $30
I read recently that Newt Gingrich said he'd like to triple the NSF budget
I could never imagine I would ever come to the point of saying this: but Newt Gingrich is one of the few people left in the Republican Party I can respect.
I disagree with a lot -maybe most- of what he's saying, but he does have a brain, and he uses actual arguments, with premises and statements and conclusions and all that stuff. He's fluent in the English language, well read, and rather eloquent.
Now for the rest of his party..
And you know this how? Historically, scientific and technological progress has happened because it has produced near future benefits and advantages for those who engage in it. Even for the basic sciences. Claiming that the private sector isn't interested in research ignores that the money supplied from public funding is far greater and less accountable. You basically have a bunch of researchers with the business model "spend public fundings and look busy".
I see no reason to expect we'll get "quality research" merely because big checks are written. The remaining non-monetary incentives to conduct research are similarly being undermined. For example, peer evaluation runs into a game theory problem. If everyone gives out lazy evaluations, then their own research has a lower bar to meet. And anyone who doesn't play ball (say has a reputation for hard work or excellence can be undermined). I don't think it's prevalent today, but I don't see mechanisms in place to keep publicly funded research from sliding into complete mediocrity over the next few decades. The current generation being educated faces significant incentives to cheat, even at the graduate education level. I think a poor ethical upbringing will result in poor scientific output.
Ultimately, the only research that consistently produces quality results is stuff that someone discerning pays money for. Sure, the National Science Foundation is still to a degree such an organization. But the private world is chock full of people who pay for scientific results and get them. Further, there's still profitable private research. That has strong positive feedback for scientific quality.
Well first off you should figure out what NEA means. The NEA is the National Endowment for the Arts.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
And I would put a few hundred dollars on you not being in a position to hire anyone.
Whether or not you can learn without a computer is irrelevant. The old education system is quickly falling apart, either because of its inherent flaws or inability to cope with change. "Go back to math and reading!" is not the answer and will only make the problem worse and hurt our ability to compete in an increasingly electronic world.
In short, what you want isn't relevant; adults are discussing important matters.
Great Intellect...
Ain't 'em de commies whut put up nekkid pichers and pretended they wuz art?
Faith: n. -- That human impulse that drives them to steal appliances when the power goes out
I would go 1 step further, and institute a Progressive sales tax. The most frivolous items (yachts, private jets, etc) are taxed the most heavily, while necessities such as food and shelter aren't taxed at all. In the wealthiest nation on earth, no one should have to die of starvation, alone on a rainy street corner. Sound melodramatic? It happens almost every day!
In other words, we don't train scientists in this country without NIH/NSF/DOE funding. It simply doesn't happen, because it is too expensive to do any other way. If those three agencies were all terminated this afternoon, grad schools across the country would suffer immediately. Eventually the number of new degrees issued would plummet and employers looking for PhDs would have to hire from abroad.
In other words, congratulations you just expressed support for accelerating the brain drain.
The amount of truly useful work to come out of academia does not justify stealing from taxpayers.
Just because you don't understand the work - or the value thereof - coming from academia does not mean it has no value.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Seriously... how much more science does the general populace need, anyway?
And I'm talking the new mythbusters aka "blow'd up", not the actual quasi-interesting stuff they used to do.
No, it doesn't. At least not for people with IQ > 60. Are you a computer compiler to not get past the syntax errors?
And if you are really educated, I suggest you to read "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" for a nice discussion about content and form.
on-topic:
kudos americans. you have succeeded in giving a second chance to the morons who have awarded the world with a neverending war on terror, a turmoil in middle east, violation of all constitutional and modern civil rights, kidnappings, torture, wall street DEregulation (and corresponding scam), and body scanners and many, many more !
Indeed. It is sad to see a country that once was a model of virtuosity to the world become the playground of a handful of greedy bastards. For instance the bill about 9/11 respondents that is being held until the bill about taxes is voted... how the fuck can they in their right mind do that? What distorted morals can justify that?
USoA values, RIP (1776-19??)
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
From time to time, I act as a grant reviewer and panelist for the NSF. I can quite frankly attest that the NSF is anything but bloated. The number of excellent and virtuous projects that do not get funded is always a crying shame. Of course, some proposals are utter rubbish. However, far fewer projects get funded than are deserving of funding. Not only that, the NSF provide us with a small *per deium*, from which we have to pay our own hotel, meals, transportation and everything else, apart from travel costs. One is lucky to break even, when working for the NSF. In addition, it is hard work! Our lunch break is usually just long enough to run across the road to a food court and then we eat as we work. In the evenings, there are summaries to write. I only do it because I believe that it makes the world a better place. However, if this is what the Republicans are intending, there will be no need for more business bailouts, as they will just outsource the whole country to multinationals (who usually don't pay tax, due to off-shore 'arrangements'). Thus, this is a strategy only Osama bin Laden could rationally endorse.
I think the average person has no idea what useful or good science is.
And the government is full of below average citizens. Pretty sure they have no place in determining what is useful or good science.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
To quote a song on my iPod "Majority rule don't work in mental institutions"
also, notice that there is not a "vote for" option, so really any small number of votes (maybe a couple thousand trolls) against anything can be used to discredit any potentially ground-breaking work. Looks to me like a very well disguised plan to provide ammunition against whatever research the politicians desire.
Witch hunt of the 21st century anyone?
Also the two examples they use, couldn't the research in soccer player dynamics be applied to swarm robot technology, potentially resulting in advanced search and rescue applications? Couldn't the sound of breaking glass modeling be applied to similar goals, or maybe security systems ("window just shattered in room X, according to the analysis it was a high-speed impact, likely bullet impact" vs "window just shattered in room Y analysis indicates slow projectile, i.e. thrown rock")
OK, after we get rid of all the "wasteful" spending at the NSF, can we take a look at the DoD? I have several hundreds of billions of dollars worth of recommendations for spending cuts on that front...
Republicans will truly be the death of this country.
And Democrats will just sit by and let them do it.
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
And lets not kid ourselves that cutting science and education funding is the wet-dream of the religious extremists in the United States.
"Remember when I said I would never lie? Well, that was the first time."
The Energy Department, of course. It has completely and utterly failed to live up to its stated goal at inception: to reduce our nation's dependence on foreign oil.
When politicians are involved, everyone loses.
What the hell is wrong with them? They vote to lose $700 billion in government funding by keeping the tax cuts and sustain two wars, but go after chump change science programs? It's clear that either the Republicans don't know money management, or are just anti-science. It's most likely the latter. I am always baffled at how hard the Republicans work to make America a bad country. They claim "reduction of government spending" yet invariably call for the cutting of budgetary drop in the bucket programs of infrastructure improvements, welfare, medical care, science, and anything remotely beneficial to America. Yet they let wars rage on for years and always find ways to cut more taxes on the rich. And yet they took the House and almost the Senate. What the hell, voters, what the hell?
Is there a way on Slashdot to say "block any story labeled Politics"? Because it appears that saying I don't want to see stories that are labeled politics only blocks those that are only politics, which defeats the purpose.
Advice: on VPS providers
If the scientists have a problem with their funding being under the scrutiny of the taxpayers who are paying for it, they're welcome to get their funding from some place else.
American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
Could you name a few things that 'public sector research' has come up with 'as the foundations of tomorrow's industries' which private companies wouldn't have done themselves for far less?
Therapy methods and assistive technologies that allow people with developmental disabilities to become educated and employable, thus making many of them contributing members of the economy rather than 100% welfare-dependent wards of the state.
There's a perfect xkcd for my sig but I'm too lazy to look it up. sudo someone go find it.
I think the average person has no idea what useful or good science is. I'm pretty sure that if it isn't directly related to medicine, energy, or climate change (...if they even think it is true...) most people would consider it useless. I do cognitive science/neuroscience research, and all the time people are confused why people pay us to figure out how the brain works without intentions to directly "help people." Hell, even that "soccer efficiency" study or whatever can probably be applied to some other thing our government likes that involves people working in teams, ie the military.
Shit, the average scientist can't evaluate the importance of someone else's research. If I were to summarize my study to a brief paragraph (something teabaggers reading a website can absorb) it wouldn't sound like much. That's why NSF (although my stuff is more likely to be funded through NIH or ED) makes you write long, boring tl;dr grant applications about it (that YouCut visitors certainly won't bother to read).
There's a perfect xkcd for my sig but I'm too lazy to look it up. sudo someone go find it.
Never ever ever happen. Never.
Even if it appears that it's been cut. It won't be.
Never.
The problem I'd have with that is that it would be too difficult to determine what is frivolous spending and what is not. Look at food: What do you tax more caviar or cheeseburgers? How about arugula or spinach? Do you tax mansions more then small houses? What if the small house is made of exotic wood and the mansion is made of pine?
You want to tax yachts; most yachts are used for business. What if the yacht is used for fishing? What if its used for impressing foreign business executives so that they bring thousands of fishing related jobs to the US? The fishing yacht only benefits the fisherman, the exotic wine-and-dine yacht benefits potentially thousands of fisherman.
How about something both personal and cosmetic like breast implants. Who do you tax more, a stripper or a women that has had a mastectomy. What if the stripper has a family to feed and the mastectomy patient has no financial reason to justify the procedure, only her own self image?
The last one is a particularly harsh example, but I think it illustrates my point. On one hand you have an individual doing something politically distasteful that frees a group of children from poverty, on the other you have an innocent person disfigured by disease but who's purchase will benefit no one but her. My point here is that having anything other then a flat sales tax model allows for politicians to enforce morality or even "class warfare" (clumsy word, I know) via that form of tax code.
Cool art gallery, if you're into that sort of thing.
No, going back to just math and reading isn't a viable option. However, if you can't read and write without computer assistance and don't know how to do division without looking around for a calculator then you're not going to be an asset to an educated work force. Especially a work force that may be deprived of cheap technology as soon as the economy gets around to breathing its last shuddering gasp.
I do not believe that a lack of computers is what is making your literacy rates drop the way they are. That can be blamed (at least in part) on sinking grade standards, lazy teaching, and apathetic parents.
Supporter of the +1 Over Dramatic mod option. In memory of apk.
The NEA has just as much to do with this topic as Peyton Manning starting at QB does.
What, you mean the one you crashed into my police box last we-
. . .
Oh dear. Terribly sorry. You'll find out in your near future, I guess.
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
I was trying to find a nice way to calculate tax based on item cost (it would encourage companies to keep costs lower too) but it's tough not having an upper bounds...
As a crude example: $1 items would be taxed at, say, .01% and $1000 items would be taxed at 10% but that quickly gets bad for $1 million dollar items. ;)
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
The Republicans want me, an ignorant, uninformed American, to decide what to cut from the US Government budget?
I vote we cut the Republican Party.
Who's with me?
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
Sigh. If you're going to criticise grammar/spelling, then at least learn how to spell "capital".
Government's proper role is to fund the long-term research that private companies are too focused on next quarter's stockholders' report to invest in. Then when individuals have created the ground-breaking disruptive research (like the internet), business can take over and bring it to the masses.
And spending money on education is going to shit the kids don't need to learn properly. Computers waste money that could otherwise go to hiring better teachers, raising standards, and not making a bunch of texting morons.
Paper, pencils, and a good teacher. Worked for fucking centuries.
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
Well thank you Mr. (or Ms.) Pedantic. Department of Education... The NEA is the teacher's union too... not specifically what I meant.
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
Yep... and it's a shitty one.
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
Bullshit. Instead of the Internet, companies were more focused on isolated, for-pay environments. Such as CompuServe and AOL.
The irony is if biz had had its way, you'd be posting on Prodigy or Compuserve.
From Computer networks and the Internet: A brief history of predicting their future:
The Republicans don't have a majority in Congress, they have a majority in the United States House, one of the two houses of Congress, the other house, the United States Senate retains a Democratic majority.
"The YouCut Citizen Review will look at grants issued by the National Science Foundation and identify those that you consider wasteful"
This should be an interesting exercise since there seems to be nothing to stop non-US citizens submitting ideas. Don't like the way that US IT firms are so successful, well clearly any NSF research to do with computers must be a waste of time. Fed up with better security technology catching all your terrorist plots? Well obviously all those innovative sensor projects should clearly go.
But the thing about Socialism is... that there's no money in it. ;-)
"Ubuntu" - an African word meaning "Slackware is too hard for me."
The war in Afghanistan costs ten billion dollars a month. Let's cut that. End the war. Bring the troops home. Go to youcut and suggest that.
One might wonder how society invented anything prior to government's funding everything.
One might wonder about Thomas Edison inventing and plowing the profits into research labs.
One might wonder about JP Morgan bank rolling Nicoli Tesla.
One might wonder about the CEO of RIM, who made his fortune building blackberries... then funnels a large sum to the Perimeter institute of theoretical physics.
This is not to say government funded science doesn't lead to results.
But left alone, smart intelligent people seem to discover things on their own.
If you're truly smart enough to do ground breaking research... chances are you're going to do that with or without government help. You're naturally curious that way. Just like a musician is going to produce music regardless of whether the government funds them or not.
About the only thing I used to think government would do is provide big funds for things like the particle accelerator... but then I think... the CEO rim might fund that. Bill Gates is giving his billions in wealth to charity. Were there some scientist with a need to build it and governments were not doing it, they would probably do it.
Just like people will say things like 'the government started the internet'. Well sure.. but networks were not exactly groundbreaking. We would have ended up with digital communication regardless of the government's involvement. Lots of private companies were involved in their network business. It might not be called 'the internet'... but in the big picture, it would fulfill the task.
Truly brilliant people like einstein would do basic research on their own.
Other ideas are more practical and businesses would invest in the promise of profits.
Maybe government funded science speeds up the process... possibly...
but I don't think the world would be at a loss of discoveries if the government stopped funding science.
History seems to have found plenty of discoveries without government projects.
Ugh. I hate when I do that. I've been drinking, ok? I need the squiggly red line, but at least I use the fucking thing!
If it doesn't generate revenue directly, indirectly or by other means, it is frivolous by definition. Throwing politics into the equation is diverting attention from the realistic purpose of what government should be doing. We have no money anymore. Our currency is becoming a subset of the Chinese Yuan. At what point will you say this or that needs to go away to make the financials of our government sound? No one seems to talk about that. What is the limit? It is really bad when Hillary goes to China asking them to buy more American bonds and they look at our country like we are a bunch of spoiled rotten kids with a checkbook that is out of control. Apparently many do not understand that is the way they view us.
That kind of thinking led to Sputnik being the first satellite in space, and we got scared because of the military implications, hence NASA :)
So, pick a republican backed fundamental program (probably one which subsidizes big businesses) and this intelligent community can all go over and intelligently propose the same thing to YouCut. If they can shape media, so can we.
Maybe they could have come up with the internet, rockets, and various medical procedures, but they didn't. That slow clunky inefficient government got it done first. You can argue hypotheticals all you want, but private industry didn't invent these things. They had time. They had money.
Xavier Rabourdin for president 2012
And the government is full of below average citizens. Pretty sure they have no place in determining what is useful or good science.
And they don't. At NSF, grants are given funding by a panel of scientists with expertise in appropriate fields. These are current researchers who take time to serve at NSF for some amount of time.
It takes about 8 highly trained people quite a long time to distinguish good grant applications from bad ones. How do you think the general population will do?
4096R/EF7BAFA6 79E1 DF98 D09D 898F 9A11 F6F0 DDDC 23FA EF7B AFA6
One might wonder about the literacy rates prior to public education.
"Scientists" will. They just wont be U.S. scientists, because they will become rare. If you play your myopic view out to conclusion, the U.S. will be a technological backwater. Well, we'll have whatever we can manage to buy from more advanced countries that fund scientific research.
4096R/EF7BAFA6 79E1 DF98 D09D 898F 9A11 F6F0 DDDC 23FA EF7B AFA6
We have something called "social security benefits" and something else called "social security tax". Despite the similar-sounding names and date of origin, they are in no way related.
Taxes are taxes, and money is money. There is no sense in imagining distinct pools of money. We can use income tax to pay social security benefits, and social security tax to pay for the military. Arguably, we do! Every dollar is like every other, so how could you possibly say that we don't? You can't!
Disclaimer: I am funded by the NSF.
/rant.
First of all, having people who probably have little-to-no scientific training, let alone any training or expertise in the field that the grant is in, decide whether a particular research project is "a waste of time" is beyond stupidity. It is equivalent to allowing the average american to micro-manage troop movements on the war-zone, allocate ad hoc rations/supplies to each region of the world, etc. In other words, the solutions provided by the "people" will be far from efficient, far from optimal, and indeed probably just dead *wrong* (i.e. soldiers would starve because people thought "nah they don't need this cooking fuel there, they can use firewood!" or something along equally stupid lines.
Another example would be letting people decide civil engineering matters. Like, let's use the cheap steel for the bridge, it's good enough! Or, let's route this highway right through over there, look it's wide open! -- without understanding all the effects and repercussions that taking any of these actions would have (which a properly trained civil engineer etc. would be more likely to recognize).
Of course, one of the explicit stated purposes of the NSF is to broaden appreciation and understanding of science. It's so important that it's almost impossible to get a grant without being able to convincingly show that your project will have broader impacts outside of your subfield. Of course, the people who would be going through the grants by this YouCut thing wouldn't understand why certain seemingly retarded research projects are important (e.g. why bother measuring the weight of the Earth's core, who cares? I want a new car and a TV.) when really it could be a very serious question that many other projects hinge upon (e.g. geothermal energy, satellites that might be affected by the magnetic field that is generated by the core, etc...). Unless people understand this they would vote against it as wasteful. A lot of projects, and the goal of the NSF, is to make it easy for people to understand these relationships and to respect the science, but I have a feeling that people won't go out of their way to even bother to try to understand it.
Anyways,
ignores that the money supplied from public funding is far greater and less accountable.
Uh, that's because industry is choosing not to make more investments in research, we're talking about less than $7B in total grants vs the $2T in cash reserves private industry is sitting on. They could fund 10x more research than the NSF for 30 years only touching the interest on that money!
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
My dad was a protesting baby boomer. He was and is a republican. He strongly supported the Vietnam War. He strongly supported building more nuclear weapons, more bombers, more submarines, and so on. He loved Reagan's proposed defense against ICBMs.
Yep, he'd be out there holding a sign to protest against nuclear treaties, defense cutbacks, etc. He got arrested for chopping down political signs for liberals. He would attend rallies for republicans. He did his best to support Goldwater. He wrote to congresscritters and talked to several in person. He wrote letters to the editor.
These days he spends his time at Tea Party meetings. He's certain that Obama wasn't born in the USA, based on an admission by Obama's own grandmother.
Do you think so? Because *my* Congressman *doesn't* seem to be cutting much of anything.
The cuts always seem to be "scheduled." When does that "schedule" happen? What does it mean when they say "the cuts are scheduled."?
And when they cut, isn't total spending supposed to go down? What do they mean by "cut"?
Where can I get me one of those Congressman of which you speak?
I'm _really_ confused.
Math fail. Percentage rates are inherently progressive - the more you make, the more you pay.
Oh bullshit. Nobody's dying of starvation in this country except for the mentally ill homeless who are too god damn crazy to get help.
Ranting about someones spelling just to further one's barbaric and moronic agenda and then writing "capitol letters" gets "insightful" mods. Yeah, way to go here.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
The economic problem is not the central problem of mankind.
then proceed to saying
In times like these when biz is sitting on trillions of cash, govt needs to step up to prevent suffering and encourage the continuing advance of innovation. Our creativity is what keeps our currency strong, by producing things others want.
these two contradict.
in a dog eat dog world you eventually end up with one very fat dog, or a pack of very fat dogs.
who's going to do innovation, when the established wealthy are sitting on top of all resources. or, owning patents. or owning the means of distribution. and when you, god forbid, attempt to innovate by inevitably making them partners, you inevitably get bought/ousted in the end. just look at how many i.t. pioneers had to sell out and leave, because of the pressure they have been put under for doing so. the few which resisted, and had the good fortune to startup without having to get owned beforehand by major investors, are known as internet celebrities today. and even today they are too under pressure from various sources - the established corporate machinery is trying to squash them and subdue them.
and you come up saying that the problem is not economical.
yeah. you give the ownership of 80-90% of resources/services in a land to 3-4 major dukes. and then you say the system is not the reason of so many being unwilling to active in economic/political life.
indeed the problem is not economical. its mental. because people like you, can make 2 consecutive, contradicting, ignorant statements.
Read radical news here
"House Overwhelmingly Approves New $725 Billion Military Spending Bill" -> just a few hours ago.
Read radical news here
I vote for YouFund over YouCut any day.
New York Times already came out with something like this. It doesn't let you work with individual programs, but it only takes a few minutes of clicking before you realize that scrutinizing every detail of a (deliberately distorted) bad NSF decision actually doesn't save you much money compared with, say, raising taxes back to Clinton levels or ending the war in Afghanistan.
It makes me despair for the Republican party, because it makes me think that they might actually be drinking their own KoolAid. And that is never a good sign.
That is a lot easier to do with capitol letters and punctuation in the proper place. Writing like that just makes you look either uneducated or stoned.
The irony...
Good research is usually applicable in other places as well. For example, this "frivolous" research such as understanding sound might translate into advances in sonar or sonic weapons or sonic manipulation, and "frivolous" research into soccer player dynamics could translate into better AI for robotic warriors, UAV's, etc. People researching pointless game theory for making Checkers AI can translate into improvements in AI such as robots that can play Jeopardy or outsmart opponents on the battlefield. Even completely unrelated things can be useful when there are mathematical or computational similarities that aren't obvious at the surface. For example, the problem of moving a jointed arm is essentially identical to the problem of reconstructing a 3D camera, and it might be solved using a technique that was originally invented as a path-finding algorithm for a soccer player. If you only fund research specifically related to, say, military designs, then these happy accidental discoveries wouldn't happen so much and fewer people would be interested in doing research in 1 particular area that is deemed "worthy."
When I did my Ph.D. I had the good fortune to meet Charles Townes, the inventor of the maser. According to him he was told it was very interesting, but there would never be any real use for it.
Hope there's nothing to do with finding out how old the Earth is. Here in Alabama we all know the answer to that already!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Given this Gallup Poll then perhaps the backers of science ought to be worried. After all it is the domain of the liberal,elite, socialist atheist fascists. All god-fearing Christians know that everything is described in teh bibul, no need for this science nonsense.
Capitol? Those in glass houses, as they say. And being "stoned" causes your grammar to slip away? An idiot AND ignorant. I bet your parents are very proud.
Don't you get it??? It's not the government deciding here... it's popular vote. The votes are being cast by a number of constituents... including those who understand the benefits of science and those who believe in the benefits of welfare and social programs. Understanding this are you really surprised that NSF loses here?
I will never live for sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
Here's a proposal where we can cut in the "science" spending: All the pseudoscience projects rooted in some kind of religious bull.
If they have something worth funding at all, the James Randi Educational Foundation has a million dollars waiting for them.
In general, it is safe and legal to kill your children. -- POSIX Programmer's Guide
That is a lot easier to do with capitol letters and punctuation in the proper place. Writing like that just makes you look either uneducated or stoned.
If you are going to be a grammar nazi, make sure you read your own post thoroughly and follow your own rules. They are called capital letters, not capitol letters.
I dont read
This is just one proposal.
Currently up for vote, to be submitted to the house:
Eliminate Unnecessary Congressional Printing -- Potential savings of $35 million + over ten years
Refocus National Archives Activities On Preserving Federal Records -- Potential Savings of $10 million next year and $100 million over ten years
Terminate Broadcasting Facility Grant Programs that Have Completed their Mission -- Potential Savings of $25 million in the first year, $250 million over ten years
If these aren't to your liking, then you can go and submit your own suggestion here:
http://republicanwhip.house.gov/YouCut/YourIdea.htm
And again for those that can't RTFA or even visit the site, here are the previous ideas that were presented to the House to be cut:
Week One: Cut the New Non-Reformed Welfare Program ($25 Billion Savings)
Week Two: Eliminate Federal Employee Pay Raise ($30 Billion Savings)
Week Three: Reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac ($30 Billion Savings)
Week Four: Sell Excess Federal Property ($15 Billion Savings)
Week Five: Prohibit Hiring New IRS Agents to Enforce Health Care Law ($15 Billion Savings)
Week Six: Taxpayer Subsidized Union Activities ($1.2 Billion Savings)
Week Seven: Prohibit Stimulus Funding for Promotional Signage (Tens of Millions)
Week Eight: Prohibit Sleeper Car Subsidies on Amtrak ($1.2 Billion Savings)
Week Nine: Bipartisan Proposal to Terminate AEITC ($1.1 Billion Savings)
Week Ten: Require Collection of Unpaid Taxes From Federal Employees ($1 Billion Savings)
Week Eleven: Reduce Government Employment to 2008 Levels ($35 Billion Savings)
Week Twelve: Terminate the TARP Program Prohibiting Any Additional Bailouts
Week Thirteen: Terminate Taxpayer Funding of National Public Radio
Week Fourteen: Eliminate Unnecessary Congressional Printing
This is one of the first weeks where I did not see ideas that would cut billions out of the federal budget.
Interestingly, or rather, not surprisingly, the votes to make these cuts were nearly down party lines. I am not going to say that Republicans are more or less fiscally responsible, but rather it seems to me that no matter which party brings in the good idea, the other votes against it, almost in spite because the didn't think of it first.
There are always too many Democratic congressmen, too many Republican congressmen, and never enough U.S. congressmen. ~Author Unknown
Sig? What's a Sig?
Who cares where we start as long as we start. Waste is waste isn't it?
Profile before you optimize. The Pareto Principle applies here -- we're better off cutting the huge wastes before the relatively tiny ones.
See also, "We have to do something; X is something; therefore we must do X."
In general, it is safe and legal to kill your children. -- POSIX Programmer's Guide
Listen to the voice of the people! What we need is the average citizen deciding on the merits of research in quantum computing, string theory or evolution. What could possibly go wrong?
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
Um, at first glance this looks like this is a bunch of Republicans inviting citizens to go through and try to spot dodgy expenditures and grants given out by the NSF.
Nope - it's a bunch of Republicans going through NSF grants themselves and picking out ones to spin to the populace as being dodgy by misdescribing them, omitting important facts, and outright lying. See this comment someone made in a previous thread.
Sadly the NSF and Research Councils in the UK are vulnerable, and have fallen to corruption and group think, exacerbated by Seniority and Pork. This is NOT to say that they are not useful, or that is easy to do that job but it is to say that a dose of accountability is urgently needed and it can not be to more OLD BOYS groups.
While the whole matter is complex, and in research, anyway, you are lucky if 1% of your bets come in, BUT the rate of progress in Maths, the Hard Sciences (eg Physics, Chemistry and Biology) as well as in Medicine is disappointing with far too much incremental technology and not expected break-throughs.
This is symptomatic of Government enterprises, lots of Beaurocracy and not a lot of Leadership.
I would suggest the way to do it is to make a short list of headline areas in Science, Engineering and Medicine to get funding priority eg Safe Nuclear Fusion, Cure Virus Diseases, Interplanetary Travel to focus attention on National and International goals and needs. A pure lottery for 10% of the funding to prevent starving of outlier and unfashionable ideas and a Death Squad to go after, mostly fashionable me-too research in The Environment and Social Sciences.
One of the main problems of government is that loosers are never reaped eg the Shuttle and AGW because of beaurocracy, colligiality and face.
This leads to rediculous Political policies, eg Carbon Taxes, Renuables, where as Fission would let us systhesise oil where needed.
Oh bullshit. Nobody's dying of starvation in this country except for the mentally ill homeless who are too god damn crazy to get help.
Because, obviously, the mentally ill deserve to die. (Not forgetting, of course, just how.. flexible the definition of "mentally ill" is.)
for YouCut's critical assessment of people who get money and tax breaks to promote an invisible socialist voodoo king who lives in the sky with a plan to imprison billions of people in pits of fire for all of eternity because he loves them.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
First let's make sure that members of Congress get exactly the same pay and benefits as Florida school teachers. Next we can eliminate the Navy and most of the Air Force as that will keep us from invading foreign nations. After all, war is expensive. Next we will eliminate all emergency room care for illegal immigrants as well as all social services for them. Next we can use the Wall Street and bankers to rebuild our roads as punishment for messing up the economy. A few years of wrestling wet concrete and asphalt will sober them up a bit. Then we can pass laws that only allow plain and simple mortgages with no balloon payments, adjustable rates or any other nonsense attached to them. We will also require the original lender to carry the loan until it is paid off. Then we should hold all people caught with illegal drugs for ransom for 180 days. If the ransom is not paid we should execute them.Then we need to tax the hell out of the rich and also tax people a great deal if they have more than one child without regard to how many marriages they may have had.
Can you feel the billions upon billions we could save if we did this?
Uh, that's because industry is choosing not to make more investments in research, we're talking about less than $7B in total grants vs the $2T in cash reserves private industry is sitting on.
The NSF isn't the only source of free R&D. You also have the DoD, NASA, NIH, both DoEs (Energy and Education), a variety of intelligence agencies, and other government organizations.
Wrong. That may have been the case in America, but elsewhere in the world numerous alternative networking technologies were developed.
In Britain, Acorn developed Econet. It dates back to around 1981. This was eventually deployed in many schools, for example, as a school-wide network long before they moved over to Ethernet. My own (large) school had it and I even had fun writing a sort of simple e-mail like program on their BBCs that me and my friends used for a while. ISTR it was called AMP (Another Mail Program - classy name, eh? :-) )
The irony is if biz had had its way, you'd be posting on Prodigy or Compuserve.
What irony? Most of us do. We call them ISPs nowadays.
If non-US citizens participate in this vote, they'll probably vote according to their values. The Republican party's values and policies aren't exactly popular in the rest of the world, and (for the most part) the rest of the world likes science. Remember - basic scientific research is a public good; we all benefit from it, so everyone would rather wait for someone else to do it.
On a side note... do you honestly think the rest of the world is out to get you? You seem to be projecting (perceived) national and corporate political interests onto individuals... as if those individuals had no personal values of their own. That's like believing Swedish fathers are thinking "oh man, the US is beating us in nuclear weapons research... I need to switch professions and donate all my extra income to funding nuclear weaponry!".
Being reasonably alarmed, I actually looked at the YouCut website, which is oddly not linked in the summary. Every week they pick various user submitted ideas to cut spending and have people vote on them. They voted and it turns out people don't want to cut the NSF budget. That makes me feel pretty good, actually.
I have no problem with someone asking the question: "Is the NSF budget bloated?" I would have a problem with a politician who decides the NSF budget needs to be cut without trying to get some feedback first.
Also, the budget may not be huge, but the way NSF money is allocated certainly could be improved. The decades long focus on training has caused problems in the labor market, as you can easily get funding to train a PhD, but not funding to hire one. This results in lower quality work, as you are constantly teaching new people and never taking advantage of expertise. "Research" faculty used to be a common thing in physics (corporate research also used to exist), but you only find those positions in biological sciences now.
Their idea is clearly idiocracy, but the implementation is brilliant. Not only is it impossible to vote for science, its also impossible to leave a comment without voting against it... so if you want to explain why a grant is worthwhile, you have to do so by voting against it. They may be idiots, but they're damn good at it.
Republicans never really think through their online grandstanding. There is an easy solution here, just build yourself a perl script that submits grant numbers, all grant numbers. Or maybe just target fields relevant to defense like engineering, cryptography, number theory, etc.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
"capital" letters... :)
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
While I applaud the idea of citizens becoming more involved in their government to help cut wasteful spending, the initiative is looking/starting in the wrong place.
... that would save ~$3.5 billion per year, or less than 0.01% of the annual US budget.
Total annual US budget: $3.55 trillion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_States_federal_budget)
NSF annual budget: $6.87 billion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation)
Percentage of total budget: 0.193% (http://www.google.com/search?q=6.87+billion+%2F+3.55+trillion)
Even if the NSF budget were to somehow to cut by half through meticulous scrutiny
Can we start with just one of the other heavy hitters first, Defense/Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid, which represent 58.7% of the total budget? (http://www.google.com/search?q=(677.95+billion+%2B+453+billion+%2B+290+billion+%2B+663.7+billion)+%2F+3.55+trillion). No this isn't easy, but, cut 5% of wasteful spending in just one of those programs, much more significant impact. Or is this considered political suicide to talk about cutting any one of these elephants in the room?
I work in the research arm of a Fortune 500 company. Before that, I worked on contracts for DARPA.
The DARPA contracts all had forward-thinking, long term research objectives.
At my current company, all--and I do mean ALL--of the research is targeted towards acquiring new business in under 24 months. At least 75% of our research efforts are so closely tied to new business capture objectives that they actually have marketing money that comes in tow with the research, and a business development supervisor. I'm actually pretty happy with our strategy, and look at it as a responsible use of our company's money.
But to say that I agree with you in that "private companies typically do not engage in long-term research". Well, the evidence could not be more obvious that what you are saying is true.
C//
... is an ignorant citizenry.
"Citizen led" initiatives are great when the rich and powerful know they can easily manipulate what the masses want and believe.
I don't understand how the entire country can be having this conversation about reducing spending without any mention of the defense budget. Last time I checked it was nearly twice all other federal discretionary spending combined, without even counting the wars. And it's still massively disproportionate to the rest of the world. Seriously. No mention of it, at all, on news, radio, or paper? Not even NPR? I don't get it.
Yeah, but Goddard's work never went anywhere until German scientists working under the Nazis recognized its military potential, and then Uncle Sam figured out these rocket thingies might be a cool thing and spent a bundle on them. Of course Goddard died before he could see what his rockets could really do because private interests with money refused to support him in the 30s, but hey, you can't make a soulless capitalist dystopia without crushing a few souls, or something.
Try to name one private rocket manufacturer not beholden to Uncle Sam between 1950 and 1990 and you'll see what I mean.
For 99.99% of written history, in fact, computers never helped anyone learn to read and write... And in multiple languages too!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
You mean instead of using that company called Comcast to post on a site hosted by that company called Geeknet? Yes, the irony is very thick indeed!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The US left Saudi Arabia 7 years ago
We also don't have bases in Pakistan, India, or Iran. Three countries with a lot of suicide bombing. How about Russia, Sri Lanka, oh, and Sweden?
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Cut all federal entitlement programs. Let the states run and fund them.
That is a lot easier to do with capitol letters and punctuation in the proper place. Writing like that just makes you look either uneducated or stoned.
Not to mention the bad impression one can leave by using words improperly.
Science is about discovering the nature of this world, and this might or might not be directly useful for your day-to-day life.
However, science academia plants seeds for most of the major inventions, and often it takes a long time for anybody including academia and private industry to transform it into something you can harvest.
You're using LCD?
Who first discovered the liquid crystals? Yes, it's an Austrian chemist working at an Austrian university.
Did he invent LCD panel? Hell, no, it was RCA engineer who "invented" the fundamentals of LCD some 76 years later. At about the same time, UK government-funded engineers in Royal Radar Establishment developed long-lasting material that made the commercial application of LCD practical.
You're using GPS navigation?
You know that GPS was first proposed in 1956 as a test of general relativity by an American academic? That is because of the clocks running around in the earth bound orbit would have a different "tick" length than the ones on earth.
And general relativity was of course "invented" by another academic, a guy named Albert Einstein or something, in 1915.
And GPS was not possible without the accuracy of atomic clocks, which is entirely based on quantum mechanics of atomic transition, and the first guy who thought about using is as a clock is Lord Kelvin (1879), a British academic.
Oh, you're using internet? I wouldn't talk about DARPA, but anyway.
Between you and slashdot, your message goes through some fiber connection, and in that fiber travels laser light.
Yes, Laser.
It was Einstein (1917) who "invented" the theoretical foundation of laser, which is the rate equation for spontaneous and induced radiation. But that was of course based on Max-Planck's classical radiation theory.
But of course it was Bell Lab that patented the actual implementation of Laser in 1957 (BTW, unlike many many trivial patents filed by private corporations today, this was totally non-trivial).
And speaking of fiber connection, how about optical fibers, the principle of which was first demonstrated by French and Swiss physicists?
Are you seeing a pattern here?
Can you do without these useless, budget-eating science thingie?
Do the private companies care to invest in fundamental science which might or might not directly profit them in 50 years or longer?
I thought so.
You can wonder or you might look up the facts and actually KNOW.
The internet example you mentioned was not just applied technology. The fundamental mathematics that led to the invention of packet switched networks was academic research by Kleinrock at MIT. Not industrial.
Worse the great industrial labs of the 20th century are all gone. Bell Labs is an empty building in Holmdel NJ and memories of Nobel Prizes (7 at last count), Sarnoff Labs in Princeton NJ, GE Schenectady (the scion of Edison's Menlo Park) and IBM at Yorktown are no more or vastly diminished, working only on short term projects. And even many government programs aren't what they used to be. DARPA is focused on short term goals and doesn't do fundamental work any more.
The only significant sources of money for fundamental work are the DOE, NIH and NSF. And even that is being corrupted by Congress's insane desire for earmarks.
Now we hear from Congress a desire to cut these programs. I cannot think of ANYTHING worse.
Of course they're going to prefer it if the government sponsors that R&D -- but they didn't get to be industry giants by either sitting on their laurels or thinking only of the short-term bottom line.
That Eric "Discrete Hypothesis" Cantor is right. I just searched for "feces" and found 10 awards! Feces has a major role in smelling and monkey ballistic games and can't possibly be used for anything good. Plus, I doubt reputable scientists would try to include tangential applications in attempt to make their research seem worthwhile.
The problem with that is that our entire economy is [sadly] geared towards encouraging people to consume - consume at all costs, consume on credit, consume beyond your means - who cares about tomorrow, the economy needs you to spend your money TODAY! NOW! GO BUY SOMETHING!. Wait, you're a business? HIRE MORE PEOPLE! Doesn't matter if you don't need them - you need to CONSUME, so that those people can CONSUME, and enable yet more to CONSUME!
All the science you need to know is in the Bible. Or so the Republicans seem to be telling us.
It is hard to imagine any private company taking on the development of space exploration, yet public funding of NASA has resulted in massive innovation and whole new industries. Communication satellites, innovative materials, technologies for miniaturization of electronics and so on.
The GAO has estimated that the tax revenues arising from industries spun off from NASA's work far exceed the cost to taxpayers from of the space program.
From Wikipedia:
Other statistics and confirmation that "Space pays" may also be found in the 1976 Chase Econometrics Associates, Inc. reports ("The Economic Impact of NASA R&D Spending: Preliminary Executive Summary.", April 1975. Also: "Relative Impact of NASA Expenditure on the Economy.", March 18, 1975) and backed by the 1989 Chapman Research report, which examined just 259 non-space applications of NASA technology during an eight year period (1976-1984) and found more than:
-- $21.6 billion in sales and benefits;
-- 352,000 (mostly skilled) jobs created or saved,and;
-- $355 million in federal corporate income taxes
Other benefits, not quantified in the study, include: state corporate income taxes, individual personal income taxes (federal and state) paid by those 352,000 workers, and incalculable benefits resulting from lives saved and improved quality of life. According to the "Nature" article, these 259 applications represent ". . .only 1% of an estimated 25,000 to 30,000 Space program spin-offs. These benefits were in addition to benefits in the Space industry itself and in addition to the ordinary multiplied effects of any government spending."
In 2002, the aerospace industry contributed more than $95 billion to U.S. economic activity, which included $23.5 billion in employee earnings, and employed 576,000 people--a 16% increase in jobs from three years earlier (source: Federal Aviation Administration, March 2004).
Just 15 firms that received an initial $64 million in NASA life sciences research added $200 million of their own money and created a $1.5 billion return on investment in the form of sold commercial goods and services during 25 years.[9]
One might wonder about Thomas Edison inventing and plowing the profits into research labs
Thomas Edison did not do basic research. He did the type of development work that comments in this thread in favor of government research admit private enterprise does.
But left alone, smart intelligent people seem to discover things on their own. If you're truly smart enough to do ground breaking research... chances are you're going to do that with or without government help.
Like Isaac Newton, who invented the calculus without gov . . . wait, no, he was on government payroll most of his life. Though I must admit that in the great tradition of private enterprise, he tried to keep calculus secret for his own benefit for as long as he was able.
Bill Gates is giving his billions in wealth to charity.
And if his dollars funded research that the development of the internet relied on, you would need MS WindowsTM to access the web.
How about we start with lower hanging fruit like weapons platforms that the military doesn't even want or need first?
Why would a propaganda tool designed to increase public buy-in to the Republican Party's policy priorities start with an attack on one of the Republican Party's policy priorities.
After all, if you are a normal stupid person, you can't really understand what all of that "science" stuff is all about. All you know is the damfools who participate in it seem to think that the Lord's Creation is older than 6000 years and that we are descended from monkeys. Imagine that! Monkeys! And what has science ever done for us, really? Compared to, say, Jesus?
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
This makes me want to throw-up.
Having "the people" review NSF grants, the same people of whom half believe that antibiotics kill viruses (imperiling all of us when they strong arm their spineless doctors into prescribing antibiotics for colds) and think that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time, is a freaking ridiculous idea. Furthermore, the idea that targeting grants individually in NSF, whose budget, at $7 billion is 0.2% of the total budget is an effective way of cutting the deficit is asinine. And to top it all off, that measly $7 billion is one of the major reasons the United States is still a power in science and technology at all, especially as private R&D collapses in the face of the recession (in the short term) and Wall Street's fetish for quarterly results.
Fuck you, Eric Cantor. Fuck you, ignorant Republican douche-bags. I am D-O-N-E done. We are going to Hell in a handbasket, and instead of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic (which would be bad enough), you are stealing life jackets from children and setting them ablaze because the water is cold and we need to keep warm.
Capital!
Good points
Support SETI@home
. . . any topic!, only "for" That's the Republican version of democracy.
Regards, -- Chris Johansen
Your reply is stupid. There will always be mentally ill people who will die for a myriad of stupid reasons they don't need to die for. Help is available to the mentally ill, they just often don't go and get it.
Help is available to the mentally ill, they just often don't go and get it.
The net sum of help available to the mentally ill in the US, unless they can afford to pay for it themselves, is a five-minute consultation with a doctor to prescribe drugs that may or may not help and almost certainly come with unpleasant side-effects. Mental health provision in the US sucks.
NSF grants aren't just handed out. There is a great deal of accountability. Projects failing? You can get your money pulled, or will be turned down for your next grant.
Seriously people, the NSF is not the fucking DMV.
There is more to science than physics!
www.iomalfunction.blogspot.com
Yeah...no. The states have programs, in fact someone I know works for these programs. Generally you can get enough aid to have a roof over your head, food, any medications you need to keep from killing people, and even a case worker to help you do shit.
I will say some states tend to cut the funding to these programs first so they can load up their corrupt cronie buddies when revenue is low. See: Arizona budget and Joe Arpaio.
You can wonder... though the impact of public education on literacy is debatable.
Read
The literacy myth: cultural integration and social structure in the nineteenth century by Graffb
One can argue quite realistically that literacy was on the way up due to the introduction of the printing press.
Mass education was implemented more to control the reading so the government could control what the people were taught.
Much like how the in Europe the Church tried to control literacy to the clergy.
We certainly can't rerun history to find out... but I'd certainly say it is a possible alternative.
That's not just us, it's many things in nature. If you're a nice, slow-growing oak tree, you'll be taken down by the ravenous kudzu, which doesn't give a crap about diversity or indigenous ecosystems.
Why shouldn't we consume more, if we can?
Did you go to YouCut? Someone is simply putting up their own list of things they'd like to cut. You can "vote" on one of those items -- meaning you can pick one item from their list each week to cut. Vote for or against? No, just a simple vote against. Dialog appears to not be an option -- I couldn't find a "Contact Us" box on YouCut or the parent page. This is pure pandering to the lowest common denominator, complete with YouTube soundbite video from our "leaders". Will farm subsidies, military spending or any of the other very expensive programs show up on any of these weekly lists? Not likely. Frankly, I'm beyond disgusted.
I think Hanlon's razor adequately explains all that: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence."
The persons making grant decisions for the National Science Foundation are independent experts in relevant fields of study. I think they are qualified.
Do you need carrier battle groups, Vtol troups transports, attack helicopters and stealth bombers to defend against Al Qaeda?
The rightist rationale is that taxing the rich discourages entrepreneurship or something. Fine. Move taxation away from income and put it on weatlh; that way, people will have EVEN more incentive to make money, but those who just sit on it will be more penalized.
Of course they don't really believe this, as evidenced by their bullshit on the "death tax." If they weren't fundamentally aiming to reinstate feudalism, they would prefer that people be taxed when they don't need the damn money anymore. But what they want is to keep the rich rich,from generation to generation, at the expense of society.
YouCut is a fantastic idea. It's ridiculous we don't have more direct representation given the ease with which we can collect peoples' opinions these days. I say let them cut NSF. Sure, I'll lose my funding, my grad students will have to find another PI, but we'll save a fraction of what we need to balance the budget. Oh sure, we'll have eliminated the very instrument for creating new wealth for America in the future, but hey, it's what Americans want. I don't think we have much to really worry about though. Even if Americans stupidly target scientific infrastructure for the future I think their representatives will continue to fund it, just as they will always fund Defense research.
In the very least the Slashdot advertisers think that this site's readers are insightful and look to learn new things. Most of the public debate calling for deficit cutting to save the republic is ill-informed. The U.S. government if the monopoly issuer of our currency. Households and businesses must earn money to spend it. The U.S. government does not. U.S. government spending adds money to the system. Taxes and payments remove money from the system. Our economy had multiple trillions removed and severely cut demand. The U.S. government can spend thereby creating income which then can support increased demand. Jamie Galbraith presented a brief paper to the deficit commission that explains these points further. Look up Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and learn a little more.
Wasn't ARPNET a military project? Most universitys do military funded research, much to the dismay of pacifist undergrads. Wouldn't it be better to have youfund-it. Everyone gits one vote per hundred dollars of income tax paid.
That being said, it's not very often that things in nature consume *more* than they need to for survival. And that's where I'm saying the flaw is - let's consume what we need to. Or even what we want to. But let's not keep the government in the business of forcing consumption of goods, services, employees etc in the hopes that it will somehow cure our ills. Consumption beyond our means is what got is in this mess in the first place. (Say what you will about Wall Street and the banks -- if uneducated consumers did some research first, those "toxic mortgage assets" would never have come to be. The big banks and wall street took ruthless advantage of it, but didn't create it-- as least as far as this uneducated layman can see.)