All gambling does is exploit some people's need for immediate gratification to cash in.
You might blow $100 in a good drunk at a posh bar in one night, but you could blow that in minutes, if not seconds, at a casino.
You don't ban gambling because you are against somebody gambling, when they may not be able to help it. You ban gambling because there's some jackass at the other end just taking in money for doing nothing. That the government wants to be that jackass is just criminal.
I guess the question is, is the data of today's living really that important? I mean, sure, you might wish you had every bit of minute info from the builders of the pyramids, but, does it really undermine our life to not have it? Indeed, can the imagination and argument required to envision how the past was actually make the past more relevant to us today?
I almost wonder if, instead of having data that lasts forever, if we should have data that deletes itself when you die.
Although I can hear you now, except you'll replace the refrain with "bleeding heart liberal" or something similar.
Well, let's put our money where our mouth is, shall we. I've got two American cars in my driveway, and when they die, I'll have two more American cars. I may be a right wing lunatic but if it says Made-in-USA and has that UAW sticker on the window, then those are the wheels for me.
Not all conservatives are National Review buy Japanese to screw the union traitors. Last time I checked, there's a lot of guys that came back from World War II and -built the union-, their sons fought in Vietnam and their sons fought in Desert Storm and quite frankly their sons are sitting in Iraq and Afghanistan and I don't think its too much to ask that Americans, well, do the conservative thing and support American companies.
There is a limit to which we take animosity over social issues. No, I'm not in love with unions, but I'd proudly drive my cars with the UAW sticker on the window, because it also says Made in USA. No, I'm not in love with a lot of liberal screenwriters or actors, but I'll watch their movies, because they are Made in USA. And I'm not in love with a lot of the militant gay stuff out there, but I'll tell you this, if I had a choice between driving a car made by an American gay atheist communist, or, a straight god fearing German guy.... I'm buying the American car. It's like, one can bicker about culture, but slitting your own economic throat because of it is just stupid.
You can't have America the melting pot without having a sense of nationalism deep enough to overlook one's cultural and ideological background. And I think its more conservative to say that, and a damn site more conservative to say it than the idiots at the NRO who say that they are going to go buy Japanese cars because they are bitter that GM is getting a federal bailout... one has to ask, are they going to give up on American food too...?
I'm pretty serious about this and the web site in my sig has a lot to say to about it. I've got the state flag of Alabama redone as a Japanese flag after Jeff Sessions made his remarks about... oh jeez we can't help GM because its not fair to Honda. I've got an essay that pretty much shows how protectionism actually made the USA what it was by first helping the North to win the civil war and then later laying the groundwork for the economic explosion that took place from 1870 to 1920.
Re:The "energy loss" is a red herring.
on
The Great Ethanol Scam
·
· Score: 2, Informative
People concerned with corn ethanol are worried that the liquid ethanol that comes out of the process contains less energy than the liquid petroleum that goes into the process
Yeah, but corn ethanol isn't where the future is. It's cellulosic ethanol. Besides, the vast amount of energy for corn ethanol is in distillation and you don't need petroleum to do that. You could make a still out of solar power, or gasp, coal.
Aren't we comparing an implementation of Ruby to an implementation of Lisp? Excuse me, but I think that saying one programming language is faster than another is like saying English is faster than French. A language is just a set of formalisms for communicating. I'd be more than willing to bet that one could have an implementation of Ruby that could smoke Lisp or and be on par with the likes of C# or.NET. I mean, what if one wrote a Ruby with its guts in straight assembly....
If that were the case, the Pacific War would have been over before the war in Europe start
In those days conservatives were strict isolationists and they had considerable support among the American people for getting into any war overseas. Roosevelt might have wanted war sooner, and in fact, it probably would have been easier for the allies to fight World War II in 1936 rather than 1941, but the people were dead set against it.
Every energy system that is used as fuel ultimately loses energy as a transport. It's just a question of how much. When sunlight is converted to coal and oil, over millions of years, energy is lost. When biodiesel is created, energy is lost. This is simple physics.
The reality is, whether or not ethanol is a "net energy" gainer is a red herring frankly cooked up by people who are pro-drilling. The only reason ethanol is taking a beating now is because gas prices are low again, but if they go back up to $4 a gallon, and they will at some point, then, ethanol will be roaring back into demand.
Whether or not engines are destroyed from it, only means that we need better engine designs.
Strictly speaking I think America went to war with Japan because the Japanese attacked them first. American volunteers had been helping out in China before that, but that's a far cry from an official declaration of war.
Check out this diplomatic cable from the Australian foreign minister to the Australian government recalling a conversation with FDR, some six months before World War II officially started.
Your premise that the USA has historically been "buddies" with Japan is entirely wrong. The USA sailed in Japan with a fleet of modern warships in the 1850s and forced Japan to essentially surrender without so much as half a fight. "The black ships" was one of the most humiliating episodes in Japanese history and there are plenty of Japanese that haven't forgotten it.
The deal is, historically, if anything, the USA has had a much better relationship with China. We accepted numerous Chinese immigrants and we went to war with Japan because of Japanese atrocities against China.
The thing is, I really don't see, long term, why the USA should set itself up against China. Keep them out of the pacific, yes, but if China wants to play hard with Korea or Japan, then, is it really our problem?
Perhaps statements like this are part of the reason why some South Koreans 'hate' the US?
I could care less about what South Koreans think about the USA at some point. The car issue which you write about is pretty damned important to me. The USA place itself on first the conventional defense and now nuclear defense obligations so that our so-called allies can dump their products on the USA. What kind of a dumb deal is that?
Maybe you're just not thinking hard enough, although we can't all agree on the best solution, there are several that are better than letting mass murderers do whatever they damn well please.
Seriously, who appointed the USA the world wide stopper of mass murderers? I would think that if China and Russia were concerned about North Korea having the bomb, they would actually not be blocking action in the UN. But they are. Since they are both close to this insane new nuclear buddy, and can live with it, then why should we worry about it.
It's not our corner of the world. Let China deal with it.
In the Bush era, I suppose I would have really worried about this and even posted on slashdot that this proves how dumb liberals are at reading the intentions of dictators....
but, electoral disasters have a way of clarifying political ideas and I have to ask, why is the USA even bothering to defend North Korea? Since half of South Korea hates the USA and the other half riots at the prospect of having more open trade on their side, one has to ask, why is the USA in Korea at all? Right away, if North Korea and South Korea destroyed each other, it would be better for American car companies. We wouldn't have as many Hyundais and Kias running around the USA.
At some point, the USA needs to let go of trying to run the world. There's no gain in it for America, and the world doesn't want to be run anyway.
So North Korea gets the bomb. I don't care. Neither should you. The USA can build a missile defense system based on Aegis that can stop some ballistic missiles, and anyway has a pretty good retaliatory capability.
The problem isn't a lack of smart American kids. It's that for the last decade the smart American kids became quants on Wall Street making a million a year, rather than a grunt at Boeing make 50k.
data.gov is a super idea, long overdue, but, the available of data in a computer usable form is very scarce. Certainly the EPA has more than a handful of CSV or XML downloads available from its databases. Everything should be public this way. It's just going to take millions, if not billions of dollars, to get there. Shall we start bidding?
It's not more free. The user is not allowed to sell the software or take ownership of it. That's not free at all. It's, a public ownership, but its not more freedom. Freedom implies ownership, and if there is no ownership, there is no freedom.
I'm not saying the GPL is somehow wrong. It isn't. It's good at what it does. But it's about community and openness, not freedom. Freedom is the right to own, the right to have secrets. The right to do whatever you want.
And the irony is that, the GPL really only solves a problem that really can't exist anymore. The whole motivation behind the GPL was that RMS was ticked off because someone grabbed and sold emacs and there wasn't a damned thing he could do about it because it was in the public domain. The threat, held up, is that, if you don't enforce openness, in the GPL, and prohibit commercialization, then, that would undermine the ability of users to get the free software. But, even in the case of emacs, it didn't. In fact, the free emacs is the one that has survived, and all the companies that tried to commercialize it and close it off don't exist any more. Same thing with C++, Unix in particular. Where's SCO at? Gone. Where's Sun Solaris at? Dying. Where's AIX at?
You could make the argument that the GPL isn't even necessary.
I think the reason for this is actually engineering. Let's say I wanted to take Linux and sell it and close it off, and could do it. Well, first off, I'd have to add a lot of extra value to Linux to be able do that. Otherwise, nobody would pay for something that they could get for free. Chances are, if you have to add that much value, now you are probably going to have rework original code to do it. So at best then, the free thing becomes a scaffold and you have to eat the costs of developing all of it. SO there's a whole catch 22. If you commercialize free software, you don't get the sales because you didn't do anything with it. If you rewrite everything to add a bunch of new features to get the sales, you aren't really getting the benefit of the free software.
The GPL and the FSF help protect freedom, unless you define freedom as 'I get to do whatever the hell I want and screw the rest of you.'
That is, in fact, what freedom is. If you want genuinely free software, go public domain. Free software isn't free. It should be called restricted public software, not "free".
I'm not a fan of Clinton, but Dubya and Cheney just fucked this country up.
Actually, truth be told, what has really fucked this country up the most is the one policy both political parties actually agreed upon - free trade, and using trade concessions to get military bases. The chickens of decades long process of replacing a diverse manufacturing base with banking jobs came home to roost for Bush, but already by the end of Johnson's term trade and budget deficits forced the USA off of the gold standard, somewhere during Reagan the USA became a debtor nation, trade deficits exploded under Clinton, and Bush pretty much tried to keep the ball rolling but unlike other terms, the fundamentals were very broken. The great irony is that of all the past Presidents, only Reagan would ever actually act to curb imports when he put the Japanese on an import quota for cars. Bush's response to Detroits malady was of course idiotic, but Obama's been worse - instead of nationalizing the companies, he should have just quota'd all the imports for a decade. Once you guarantee market share, capitalization would have immediately followed.
Biden is the Democratic senior member of the foreign relations committee. He presided over Bill Clinton's foreign policy, which has been widely seen as more successful than Dubya, who hadn't even been to Europe before he became president (why do we need "experience" in quotes?)
What was successful about Bill Clinton's foreign policy? Was it the support for Boris Yeltsin even when he was a drunk? Was it picking the wrong side in the Balkans war? Was it all those failed peace agreements? Or perhaps it was the birth of record trade deficits (that admittedly even Bush could not deal with).
Don't hear too many protests about that one. And of course, there's the famous outing of Air America, and its successor in Latin America. You have Dianne Feinstein confirming covert American operations in Pakistan, and so on.
Pretty much, Democrats don't really care about the secrecy of anything in the CIA, unless it suits them. 99% of the outrage over Valerie Plame's outing is obviously and utterly false.
Not true at all. Camp David (and the Clinton policy as a whole) wasn't about "pushing for a Palestinian state" by any means, far from it
Of course it was. That was the whole point of the Oslo accords, but Arafat broke his promises, and they broke down, and then you had the Wye accords, which Arafat broke, and then, you had the whole final acords that Araft walked out of, and broke by declaring war on Israel...
Clinton did everything any US President could do for Palestine, and Arafat pissed all over him.
and yet you found time to decide that wars in the Balkans were about doing a favor for muslim
Dude, the stuff that you just wrapped about was completely irrelevant. Torture? Stature? Blue Dogs? RINOs? The Religious Right? Stripmining? There is not a single one of those things that will be remembered by any intellectually honest historian, but the narrative of American reaction to a perceived Islamic betrayal will. That's the problem with you lefties.... you make so much noise to try and get what you want that you forget that its actually noise.
Even your math doesn't show a doubling of funding. The link you provided from the NIH's budget actually illustrates the point I was making.
That's a 33% increase in funding, its not doubling but it is pretty good.
If you look back at the other years included in that proposal, you can see the effective funding levels dropping, as the success rate, or the percentage of incoming grants that receive funding, decreases
Science is getting more complex. Complexity brings cost and that means some things are going to cost more, and less bodies will get funded.
Science and research took the back burner to Afghanistan and Iraq, in large part, and to a host of other issues here at home. And some people think that's the right choice. I just don't agree.
In my book if a scientist is receiving public funds for his or her research, he better damned well be driving an American car.
For christ sake's, MITs endowment is billions of dollars. If you are a guy working for GM, and you walk past a university lot stuffed with japanese cars, its pretty hard to argue that those guys deserve your tax money when you don't.
Universities have all this money, make millions of dollars in patents, just as much in tuition, are weighing in with ideological stuff that alienates half the country, and then they have the gall to ask the public to pony up for research?
At least let ROTC on the campus.
On the other hand, in the first three months of this year, an additional $200 million was added directly to the grant funding portion of the NIH's budget, which is not reflected in the current budget, as it was awarded after that budget was released. Call me selfish, but I think research is important, and I like it to get funded. And it's being funded better now
And 200 million for NIH is a fraction of the 2.2 billion crease that NIH got in Bush's first year. That's my point. To say Obama is better than Bush is simply not true. Obama has not increased NIH's budget more in his first year than Bush did.
Slashdot Mirror
as bump good as the bump asphalt bump as the concrete bump is a bump slab and the asphalt bump folds to the bump road.
All gambling does is exploit some people's need for immediate gratification to cash in.
You might blow $100 in a good drunk at a posh bar in one night, but you could blow that in minutes, if not seconds, at a casino.
You don't ban gambling because you are against somebody gambling, when they may not be able to help it. You ban gambling because there's some jackass at the other end just taking in money for doing nothing. That the government wants to be that jackass is just criminal.
I guess the question is, is the data of today's living really that important? I mean, sure, you might wish you had every bit of minute info from the builders of the pyramids, but, does it really undermine our life to not have it? Indeed, can the imagination and argument required to envision how the past was actually make the past more relevant to us today?
I almost wonder if, instead of having data that lasts forever, if we should have data that deletes itself when you die.
Although I can hear you now, except you'll replace the refrain with "bleeding heart liberal" or something similar.
Well, let's put our money where our mouth is, shall we. I've got two American cars in my driveway, and when they die, I'll have two more American cars. I may be a right wing lunatic but if it says Made-in-USA and has that UAW sticker on the window, then those are the wheels for me.
Not all conservatives are National Review buy Japanese to screw the union traitors. Last time I checked, there's a lot of guys that came back from World War II and -built the union-, their sons fought in Vietnam and their sons fought in Desert Storm and quite frankly their sons are sitting in Iraq and Afghanistan and I don't think its too much to ask that Americans, well, do the conservative thing and support American companies.
There is a limit to which we take animosity over social issues. No, I'm not in love with unions, but I'd proudly drive my cars with the UAW sticker on the window, because it also says Made in USA. No, I'm not in love with a lot of liberal screenwriters or actors, but I'll watch their movies, because they are Made in USA. And I'm not in love with a lot of the militant gay stuff out there, but I'll tell you this, if I had a choice between driving a car made by an American gay atheist communist, or, a straight god fearing German guy.... I'm buying the American car. It's like, one can bicker about culture, but slitting your own economic throat because of it is just stupid.
You can't have America the melting pot without having a sense of nationalism deep enough to overlook one's cultural and ideological background. And I think its more conservative to say that, and a damn site more conservative to say it than the idiots at the NRO who say that they are going to go buy Japanese cars because they are bitter that GM is getting a federal bailout... one has to ask, are they going to give up on American food too...?
I'm pretty serious about this and the web site in my sig has a lot to say to about it. I've got the state flag of Alabama redone as a Japanese flag after Jeff Sessions made his remarks about... oh jeez we can't help GM because its not fair to Honda. I've got an essay that pretty much shows how protectionism actually made the USA what it was by first helping the North to win the civil war and then later laying the groundwork for the economic explosion that took place from 1870 to 1920.
People concerned with corn ethanol are worried that the liquid ethanol that comes out of the process contains less energy than the liquid petroleum that goes into the process
Yeah, but corn ethanol isn't where the future is. It's cellulosic ethanol. Besides, the vast amount of energy for corn ethanol is in distillation and you don't need petroleum to do that. You could make a still out of solar power, or gasp, coal.
Aren't we comparing an implementation of Ruby to an implementation of Lisp? Excuse me, but I think that saying one programming language is faster than another is like saying English is faster than French. A language is just a set of formalisms for communicating. I'd be more than willing to bet that one could have an implementation of Ruby that could smoke Lisp or and be on par with the likes of C# or .NET. I mean, what if one wrote a Ruby with its guts in straight assembly....
If that were the case, the Pacific War would have been over before the war in Europe start
In those days conservatives were strict isolationists and they had considerable support among the American people for getting into any war overseas. Roosevelt might have wanted war sooner, and in fact, it probably would have been easier for the allies to fight World War II in 1936 rather than 1941, but the people were dead set against it.
Every energy system that is used as fuel ultimately loses energy as a transport. It's just a question of how much. When sunlight is converted to coal and oil, over millions of years, energy is lost. When biodiesel is created, energy is lost. This is simple physics.
The reality is, whether or not ethanol is a "net energy" gainer is a red herring frankly cooked up by people who are pro-drilling. The only reason ethanol is taking a beating now is because gas prices are low again, but if they go back up to $4 a gallon, and they will at some point, then, ethanol will be roaring back into demand.
Whether or not engines are destroyed from it, only means that we need better engine designs.
Strictly speaking I think America went to war with Japan because the Japanese attacked them first. American volunteers had been helping out in China before that, but that's a far cry from an official declaration of war.
Check out this diplomatic cable from the Australian foreign minister to the Australian government recalling a conversation with FDR, some six months before World War II officially started.
http://www.info.dfat.gov.au/info/historical/HistDocs.nsf/(LookupVolNoNumber)/5~40
Note that FDR has told the Australians that he would not tolerate any additional Japanese expansion even if it meant war with the USA.
And, the flying tigers was actually paid for by the US Gov't. You might think of them, as well, privateers or mercenaries...
Your premise that the USA has historically been "buddies" with Japan is entirely wrong. The USA sailed in Japan with a fleet of modern warships in the 1850s and forced Japan to essentially surrender without so much as half a fight.
"The black ships" was one of the most humiliating episodes in Japanese history and there are plenty of Japanese that haven't forgotten it.
The deal is, historically, if anything, the USA has had a much better relationship with China. We accepted numerous Chinese immigrants and we went to war with Japan because of Japanese atrocities against China.
The thing is, I really don't see, long term, why the USA should set itself up against China. Keep them out of the pacific, yes, but if China wants to play hard with Korea or Japan, then, is it really our problem?
Perhaps statements like this are part of the reason why some South Koreans 'hate' the US?
I could care less about what South Koreans think about the USA at some point. The car issue which you write about is pretty damned important to me. The USA place itself on first the conventional defense and now nuclear defense obligations so that our so-called allies can dump their products on the USA. What kind of a dumb deal is that?
And you know, this being slashdot and all, maybe you heard of a little company named Samsung [samsung.com],
Some other company could pick up the slack.
But let me put it to you this way. How many American men are you prepared to part with for you to get a better TV?
Maybe you're just not thinking hard enough, although we can't all agree on the best solution, there are several that are better than letting mass murderers do whatever they damn well please.
Seriously, who appointed the USA the world wide stopper of mass murderers? I would think that if China and Russia were concerned about North Korea having the bomb, they would actually not be blocking action in the UN. But they are. Since they are both close to this insane new nuclear buddy, and can live with it, then why should we worry about it.
It's not our corner of the world. Let China deal with it.
In the Bush era, I suppose I would have really worried about this and even posted on slashdot that this proves how dumb liberals are at reading the intentions of dictators....
but, electoral disasters have a way of clarifying political ideas and I have to ask, why is the USA even bothering to defend North Korea? Since half of South Korea hates the USA and the other half riots at the prospect of having more open trade on their side, one has to ask, why is the USA in Korea at all? Right away, if North Korea and South Korea destroyed each other, it would be better for American car companies. We wouldn't have as many Hyundais and Kias running around the USA.
At some point, the USA needs to let go of trying to run the world. There's no gain in it for America, and the world doesn't want to be run anyway.
So North Korea gets the bomb. I don't care. Neither should you. The USA can build a missile defense system based on Aegis that can stop some ballistic missiles, and anyway has a pretty good retaliatory capability.
The problem isn't a lack of smart American kids. It's that for the last decade the smart American kids became quants on Wall Street making a million a year, rather than a grunt at Boeing make 50k.
data.gov is a super idea, long overdue, but, the available of data in a computer usable form is very scarce. Certainly the EPA has more than a handful of CSV or XML downloads available from its databases. Everything should be public this way. It's just going to take millions, if not billions of dollars, to get there. Shall we start bidding?
It's not more free. The user is not allowed to sell the software or take ownership of it. That's not free at all. It's, a public ownership, but its not more freedom. Freedom implies ownership, and if there is no ownership, there is no freedom.
I'm not saying the GPL is somehow wrong. It isn't. It's good at what it does. But it's about community and openness, not freedom. Freedom is the right to own, the right to have secrets. The right to do whatever you want.
And the irony is that, the GPL really only solves a problem that really can't exist anymore. The whole motivation behind the GPL was that RMS was ticked off because someone grabbed and sold emacs and there wasn't a damned thing he could do about it because it was in the public domain. The threat, held up, is that, if you don't enforce openness, in the GPL, and prohibit commercialization, then, that would undermine the ability of users to get the free software. But, even in the case of emacs, it didn't. In fact, the free emacs is the one that has survived, and all the companies that tried to commercialize it and close it off don't exist any more. Same thing with C++, Unix in particular. Where's SCO at? Gone. Where's Sun Solaris at? Dying. Where's AIX at?
You could make the argument that the GPL isn't even necessary.
I think the reason for this is actually engineering. Let's say I wanted to take Linux and sell it and close it off, and could do it. Well, first off, I'd have to add a lot of extra value to Linux to be able do that. Otherwise, nobody would pay for something that they could get for free. Chances are, if you have to add that much value, now you are probably going to have rework original code to do it. So at best then, the free thing becomes a scaffold and you have to eat the costs of developing all of it. SO there's a whole catch 22. If you commercialize free software, you don't get the sales because you didn't do anything with it. If you rewrite everything to add a bunch of new features to get the sales, you aren't really getting the benefit of the free software.
The GPL and the FSF help protect freedom, unless you define freedom as 'I get to do whatever the hell I want and screw the rest of you.'
That is, in fact, what freedom is. If you want genuinely free software, go public domain. Free software isn't free. It should be called restricted public software, not "free".
I'm not a fan of Clinton, but Dubya and Cheney just fucked this country up.
Actually, truth be told, what has really fucked this country up the most is the one policy both political parties actually agreed upon - free trade, and using trade concessions to get military bases. The chickens of decades long process of replacing a diverse manufacturing base with banking jobs came home to roost for Bush, but already by the end of Johnson's term trade and budget deficits forced the USA off of the gold standard, somewhere during Reagan the USA became a debtor nation, trade deficits exploded under Clinton, and Bush pretty much tried to keep the ball rolling but unlike other terms, the fundamentals were very broken. The great irony is that of all the past Presidents, only Reagan would ever actually act to curb imports when he put the Japanese on an import quota for cars. Bush's response to Detroits malady was of course idiotic, but Obama's been worse - instead of nationalizing the companies, he should have just quota'd all the imports for a decade. Once you guarantee market share, capitalization would have immediately followed.
Biden is the Democratic senior member of the foreign relations committee. He presided over Bill Clinton's foreign policy, which has been widely seen as more successful than Dubya, who hadn't even been to Europe before he became president (why do we need "experience" in quotes?)
What was successful about Bill Clinton's foreign policy? Was it the support for Boris Yeltsin even when he was a drunk? Was it picking the wrong side in the Balkans war? Was it all those failed peace agreements? Or perhaps it was the birth of record trade deficits (that admittedly even Bush could not deal with).
Agents that tortured
Don't hear too many protests about that one. And of course, there's the famous outing of Air America, and its successor in Latin America. You have Dianne Feinstein confirming covert American operations in Pakistan, and so on.
Pretty much, Democrats don't really care about the secrecy of anything in the CIA, unless it suits them. 99% of the outrage over Valerie Plame's outing is obviously and utterly false.
Not true at all. Camp David (and the Clinton policy as a whole) wasn't about "pushing for a Palestinian state" by any means, far from it
Of course it was. That was the whole point of the Oslo accords, but Arafat broke his promises, and they broke down, and then you had the Wye accords, which Arafat broke, and then, you had the whole final acords that Araft walked out of, and broke by declaring war on Israel...
Clinton did everything any US President could do for Palestine, and Arafat pissed all over him.
Oh, I'm sorry. I replied to your original post, but now that I read down a little further, I see you're just a bigot. Never mind my earlier message
This coming from a political spectrum that denies Americans the right of choice for their own education because they do not like religion.
and yet you found time to decide that wars in the Balkans were about doing a favor for muslim
Dude, the stuff that you just wrapped about was completely irrelevant. Torture? Stature? Blue Dogs? RINOs? The Religious Right? Stripmining? There is not a single one of those things that will be remembered by any intellectually honest historian, but the narrative of American reaction to a perceived Islamic betrayal will. That's the problem with you lefties.... you make so much noise to try and get what you want that you forget that its actually noise.
Even your math doesn't show a doubling of funding. The link you provided from the NIH's budget actually illustrates the point I was making.
That's a 33% increase in funding, its not doubling but it is pretty good.
If you look back at the other years included in that proposal, you can see the effective funding levels dropping, as the success rate, or the percentage of incoming grants that receive funding, decreases
Science is getting more complex. Complexity brings cost and that means some things are going to cost more, and less bodies will get funded.
Science and research took the back burner to Afghanistan and Iraq, in large part, and to a host of other issues here at home. And some people think that's the right choice. I just don't agree.
In my book if a scientist is receiving public funds for his or her research, he better damned well be driving an American car.
For christ sake's, MITs endowment is billions of dollars. If you are a guy working for GM, and you walk past a university lot stuffed with japanese cars, its pretty hard to argue that those guys deserve your tax money when you don't.
Universities have all this money, make millions of dollars in patents, just as much in tuition, are weighing in with ideological stuff that alienates half the country, and then they have the gall to ask the public to pony up for research?
At least let ROTC on the campus.
On the other hand, in the first three months of this year, an additional $200 million was added directly to the grant funding portion of the NIH's budget, which is not reflected in the current budget, as it was awarded after that budget was released. Call me selfish, but I think research is important, and I like it to get funded. And it's being funded better now
And 200 million for NIH is a fraction of the 2.2 billion crease that NIH got in Bush's first year. That's my point. To say Obama is better than Bush is simply not true. Obama has not increased NIH's budget more in his first year than Bush did.