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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."
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
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.
Agreed. That and cut congressional perks too.
-- Alastair
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.
Or we could tax the rich, close the loopholes on capital gains and outsourcing, enact tariffs against countries with environmental and labor protections weaker than ours, and use the revenue to put the unemployed to work on new infrastructure.
Hah, as if. We'll continue to cut taxes (20 for the rich, 1 for the poor, 20 for the rich, 1 for the poor, etc), then hit the deficit cap and slaughter Social Security and Medicare, and finally end up a destitute 3rd world nation, under god.
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...
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 we start with the TSA I'll support the program, silly as it is.
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.
Gets to be a two-term President. Yes, we've already been over that. Can you just accept it and move on please?
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...
"The YouCut Citizen Review will look at grants issued by the National Science Foundation and identify those that you consider wasteful"
From http://republicanwhip.house.gov/YouCut/Review.htm
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
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.
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.
Excuse me, could you point to the private enterprise that developed TCP/IP ? Oh, right it was a wasteful government grant to those egghead liberals.
Another day closer to redwood heaven
The economic problem is not the central problem of mankind. Knowledge, innovation, technology is. 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.
When have predictions about the deficit causing doom and gloom ever come true in the US? Lincoln printed over $400 million greenbacks, and it worked. Under FDR the govt took over some 40% of GDP, and it worked. Reagan tripled the debt, and it worked.
Why should money creation automatically be tied to debt? Because bankers profit that way? Why can't our elected representatives create debt-free money to fund a robust safety net (or basic income) and encourage innovation through challenges (nothing prevents private companies like Google and Netflix from holding challenges too of course)?
If you look at the figures for US foreign-owned debt, you will see that we could pay off China with the recently-passed tax cut for the richest 2%. Note that the second largest holder of US foreign debt is Japan, with its 200% debt-to-gdp ratio. Also note that foreign debt totals some $4.2 trillion; most of the rest is government owing money to itself - which can be forgiven or written down. So the debt crisis is not nearly as scary as politicians focused on elections want you to believe!
Fears about the debt are a pure political ploy, an appeal to emotion and bad analogies with personal finances, designed to scare the voters with predictions about their grandchildren that have been made ever since this country was founded and Alexander Hamilton assumed the states' war debts. But govt can do things that individuals can't, like print money, and declare war. And this visualization of the last 200 years shows that none of the predictions about grandchildren being worse off have come true.
Recognize the fears about the debt for what it is: simply a means to get attention. Everyone knows the debt doesn't matter, especially Republican presidents, who are strongly correlated with increases in the debt.
That's why we have a representative democracy rather than a pure democracy. The Founding Fathers knew all too well not to trust the reasoning abilities of the "common man"
How about we start with lower hanging fruit like weapons platforms that the military doesn't even want or need first? I bet cutting one of those will fully fund the "fat" in the NSF budget!
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Bullshit. Instead of the Internet, companies were more focused on isolated, for-pay environments. Such as CompuServe and AOL.
Except industry often isn't better at incremental innovation either because those steps are often taken on the backs of basic science research that the government funds. A classic example is IBM taking state sponsored research that discovered GMR and fine tuning it to make better HDD's. I doubt anyone looking at the grant proposals for guys playing with thin layers of metals could see that it would lead to better HDD's 15 years later. Thinking that you can just fund the big stuff and leave everything else to industry is almost as ignorant as saying that all research should be private.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Heck, more to the point: if it was your typical industry focus group, it'd likely be not only patented to the brim, but they'd chase off people who want to make their standard more popular by making, say, an open source implementation.
Every worthwhile industrial communication bus standard has the master implementation that's patent encumbered. In terms of TCP/IP, think of having to have a license to operate an ssh, telnet, http or ftp server. Only the clients would be free.
Never mind that actually implementing almost any popular industrial bus requires purchasing about $2000 worth of standards, and getting your brain to hurt while trying to understand the abstract descriptions offered. The most convoluted RFC is a breeze to understand compared to say IEC 61158.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
There is no justification for tax revenue being spent on science because private enterprise can achieve more faster and cheaper than government sponsored boondoggles.
Privately-funded science produces things like Viagra and a Coke can made with 1% less aluminium.
Publicly-funded science produces things like vaccines and the Internet.
I know which of the above I think are a better use of time and money.
Who cares where we start as long as we start. Waste is waste isn't it?
I mean seriously, this is exactly the type of thing the democrats championed. I mean it's participation in the government by the people, it's the government (pretending at least) listening to the people, it's wet dream of sorts.
Do you really want your tax dollars going toward research for Soccer (Football everywhere else in the world) and video game sounds?
As one might expect, the characterization you allude to from the YouCut project page isn't quite accurate. First off, here's links to actual research info on the so-called "soccer research" (actually research into a means of quantifying individual contributions to team performance) and the sound rendering for physically based simulation project. Here's some snippets from a news article regarding the projects:
But the researchers behind these projects say Smith has misrepresented their work and the amount of money spent on the projects. ... ... ...
"This was not $750,000 given by NSF for us to develop an algorithm to look at the performance of soccer players," Northwestern University engineering professor Luis Amaral told LiveScience. Amaral, who was the lead investigator on the soccer study cited by Smith, called the congressman's portrayal of his work "not only incorrect, but misleading."
"This was $750,000 that was given to a larger team of researchers to study a very broad range of questions related to creating provocative, efficient teams of researchers who innovate," Amaral said.
Amaral's soccer study, published in June in the open-access journal PLoS ONE, was supported by two NSF grants. The first was a $450,000 award to develop efficient methods to evaluate the productivity of researchers and research institutions. The second was a $300,000 grant to study how teams collaborate. By quantifying researchers' contributions to their fields, Amaral and his colleagues hope to help funding agencies like the NSF allocate money more effectively.
How do those grants translate to studying soccer? According to Amaral, an M.D./Ph.D. student was rotating through Amaral's lab to learn the computer software Amaral and his colleagues use to model complex systems such as to explore how creativity and innovation arise from networks of researchers. The researchers decided to train the young scientist using easily available data from the World Cup. Soccer was particularly appealing, because team performance is difficult to rank using regular statistical methods, Amaral said.
Smith's second target, research to model the sound of breaking objects, is supported by an ongoing $1.2 million grant given to three researchers over four years. The goal of the research is to create advanced simulation technology for virtual environments, Cornell's James told LiveScience.
"Just think of the impact of computer-graphics rendering, and now imagine the combined potential for realistic computer-sound rendering," he said, citing possible uses of realistic simulations for engineering cars, aircraft and even spacecraft. The results may also be useful in designing rehabilitation and training simulations like those used in the military. Even robots could become better at navigating their environments with higher-level sound processing, James said.
Explain to me why the largest military in the world 'needs' another carrier or two.
If we were to cut ALL military spending across the board by 80%, the US military would still be the largest military in the world by about 35% over China.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures
Maybe if the US military wasn't required to be the world's policemen by the US govt, we could get meaningful debt AND deficit reduction. Not spending half a trillion dollars a year might lead to some fiscal responsibility.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Well here's a hint, you don't target the hundreds of thousands per individual science grant, that people will oppose simply upon the basis that they don't understand the science behind them nor it's potential benefits. Just imagine some idiot decrying research into the genetics of fruit flys, how dumb can you be not to realise how that genetic research can be used in other fields and even used in that field itself to control a pest that destroys hundreds of millions of dollars worth of food every year hint dumb enough to be a vice presidential candidate apparently.
Want to save money than tackle the big ticket items first, aircraft, ships and tanks designed to fight a world war the no longer exists and even if it did, would simply result in mutual nuclear annihilation. So no new planes, tanks or ships for a decade, make do with what is already in the arsenal which is greater than the rest of the world combined. Also an end the the exorbitant cost of militarising the police, the only result of which is to generate tens of millions of dollars of successful lawsuits for the excessive use of force.
So what is YouCut all about, obviously one thing and one thing only to direct peoples eyes away from the billion dollar wasts, such as no bid contracts, the military industrial complex and bridges to no where and get them focused on things they don't understand and they feel superior about when they laugh at them. The ignorant wallowing in the ignorance.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Never mind - they'll just end up cutting what they already want to, but will use the website votes as 'support' for their pre-selected motions (especially for the media). Even if the most-voted 'cut target' was 'creationism eductation for pre-schoolers', you can be sure that no such motion will ever make it to congress - or the public eye.
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader