According to the article, NASA's response to the leaked study is to start developing fuel depots in addition to continuing its new rocket program. Because, after all, who doesn't need more cool stuff.
Undoubtedly NASA reacted this way because the US Congress has legislatively mandated development of a new heavy-lift rocket to preserve jobs in states with influential (Republican) senators, as a substitute for the cancelled Constellation program. It no longer matters what NASA itself thinks is the most efficient and technologically feasible solution. Even if the fuel depot plan would save twice as much, in practice it is ultimately subject to Congressional veto.
What is to say that DOE (aka the US govt) can't lease the light sources to a private corporation to run for profit? The corporation as I mentioned in my original post could be a joint venture between many corporations, essentially selling back research time in proportion to funds paid into the project. Any extra time would be sold at 'market' rates to non-members.
I think it's possible this could work. I have two reservations, however. One is that the DOE has already partially shifted to private contractors to run some of the national labs - because of security issues (like a floppy disk going missing!), the University of California could only renew their contract to run Los Alamos and Livermore by partnering with large defense contractors (I forget which ones, but they're well-known names). Everything I've heard about the effects has been negative - the new bosses don't give a shit about science as long as there are no security leaks, they've cut benefits, and some long-term employees have left as a result. The second is that I'm not convinced that the fabled efficiency of the private sector will make any difference. These facilities are already run 24/7 as much as possible, and the employees who work there now are already the most qualified for the job. So I'm hard-pressed to think of a way to make a profit other than raising the cost of use, or slashing pay and benefits. Alternately, they could sell more time to companies and leave less for academics, which I wouldn't be thrilled about either. (Just to clarify, the way it works right now is that individual groups operate user facilities at the light sources, which they pay for themselves. Academic groups pay very little on top of this to use the facility, with the restriction that all work must be published relatively quickly. Companies which do not wish to publish their results pay an additional fee, on the order of $1000/hour, which helps fund operation costs.)
But that's not to say that it's impossible; I've wondered in the past whether a convincing business plan could be made for this. I'm really most worried by the fact that neither Paul nor his fans have given any thought to such practical aspects - if they're not simply going to shut down a huge fraction of the US's basic scientific research capacity, what are they going to do instead? Waving your hands and saying "the free market will find a solution" and "we won't miss those welfare queens anyway", like most of the arguments I've seen in favor, isn't a convincing answer.
I would be 100% in favor of closing the DOE lab (Argonne National Lab) where I worked. It would have absolutely no impact on the amount of important new scientific discoveries coming out, only on the number of scientific papers coming out.
The Advanced Photon Source at Argonne is one of the most powerful synchrotrons in the world, and is used by biotech and pharmaceutical companies to solve crystal structures of proteins bound to drug candidates. (Yes, they pay a premium for this.) Of course academics use it too for more basic research on protein structure. If you think that knowing the 3D structure of fundamental cellular machinery is unimportant and has no relevance to our lives, you need to go back to school.
I think pulling all that stuff from the federal government would be a good thing. If it's really important to you, form a research non-profit and build up a private endowment for the sort of reasearch you want done.
As a scientist who works for the federal government, I actually agree with you, but only in principle. In the real world, the government currently funds a great deal of undirected basic research, and operates a number of shared facilities that are unparalleled in the world. There aren't any non-profits with that kind of money which can suddenly pick up the slack and continue onward as if nothing had happened. The immediate result of slashing these activities will be that all foreign scientists go back to their home countries, and a number of US scientists follow them. The commercial activities that tend to naturally flow from academic research (like the entire biotech industry) will either wither or move. Maybe in a decade we'd be able to rebuild to the point where we were before - the single largest producer of basic scientific research in the world - but by that point, we'd be far behind the rest of the industrial nations, who would no doubt see this as an excellent opportunity to capitalize on our losses.
Now, as I pointed out above, if you believe that we're headed towards national bankruptcy and economic collapse anyway, maybe this is inevitable, and better to get it out of the way now, to improve our chances of recovery. And I'm not entirely unsympathetic to that point of view. But it's delusional to pretend that everything would just work out, and the private sector would take care of the problem.
What guarantees that they'll continue to be parks? There's lots of old-growth timber and valuable minerals just waiting to be exploited. I'm sure you could find companies which genuinely believe in keeping them parks, but what happens when they get bought by far-away investors who decide to make a quick buck? This isn't some random hypothetical - read up on what happened to the privately owned Northern California redwood forests.
Bell Labs was a premier research institution when their largest customer was the U.S. Government, and specifically the War Department -- which is what it was called back in the day. It could be done, but the culture of corporations is "show me the money". They're interested in immediate profits and short-term ROI. They are NOT interested in fundamental research and long-term roadmaps.
I've seen it claimed that Bell Labs was also something that AT&T did to help keep federal regulators at bay.
Regardless, there are really only a handful of companies in the world that have both the money and the interest to pursue more-or-less undirected basic research. Google, Microsoft (yes, really), IBM, Genentech, and Novartis are the big ones that spring to mind. I'm a biochemist by training, so I'm most familiar with the latter two (and I know people who work in both places). Being a scientist at Genentech is almost like being on the faculty at a major research university, except the pay is better. But even they have to get the legal department to sign off on anything they want to publish.
For less established companies, it would be just plain stupid to spend large amounts of time (and money) on something that has no obvious and relatively immediate commercial value, i.e. the great majority of bioscience research. A friend of mine works at a (flourishing) biotech startup, and was initially placed on a project that turned out to be of great intrinsic scientific interest, and potentially a major publication. After a year or so, management said "fuck this, we need products", stopped work on this project, and transferred him to a different team. He's totally cool with this - it's an eminently sensible business decision, and he's being paid well for his work. But if basic research is the goal, it's a shitty way to do science.
The claims of "the private sector will take up the slack" simply have no basis in fact, and anyone who has worked in R&D (academic or corporate) knows this. To whatever limited extent public-funded science does the "development" part, yes, I expect the private sector will do much of that. But there's just so much serendipity involved in transferring basic research to marketable products, that they'll surely miss something. And they're not going to do undirected basic research, because why the hell would they? So ultimately, you're going to have to rely almost entirely on either private donations or state governments. I take no stance on the ethics or morality of such a change, let alone its long-term effectiveness as policy - I'm just annoyed at some of the claims I hear.
I can think of some immediate impacts that shutting down the DOE would have. One is that protein crystallography research, both academic and corporate, would screech to a halt, because the DOE runs most of the synchrotrons used to generate high-intensity X-rays. (The exception is at Cornell, and it's not as advanced as most of the DOE's machines.) So crystallographers would have to fly to Japan, Canada, or Europe to do most of their data collection, until someone coughs up the several billion dollars to replace these machines (which would take several years to build, anyway). I think it's safe to say that the US would permanently lose leadership in the field (it currently has the largest output of any country); Big Pharma is all multinational anyway, and I'm sure China will be happy to build more synchrotrons. Again, whether this is going to happen anyway due to soaring debt, or whether it's better to adhere to a limited-government creed than have flourishing biomedical research, is a separate argument. Let's just not pretend that the magical free market will make everything better.
Capital gains are not proportional to the amount effort you put in, they're proportional to the amount of money you put in. They're also exponential. If you reinvest, you're going to make more next year than you did this year. You're don't just make money, you make more money the more money you make.
Unless, of course, you lose money, because there is always risk involved. One of the reasons for the capital gains tax being relatively low is to encourage re-investment into the economy. I don't know at what point the capital gains rate becomes high enough to hurt the economy, although I'm sure some economists have ideas. And it does sometimes involve effort, as I'll explain below.
Your father may have spent a lot of effort, but was it work? What was accomplished? When someone goes to work at the widget factory, something has changed. Several people who did not previously have widgets now do. The stock market? From a distance to me it looks like a continuous racetrack with a lot more horses.
He put his money back into the economy, which means that theoretically, someone could have started a widget factory using his money, which is certainly accomplishing something. (Not that he ever had enough money to start a factory - I think my parents were somewhere in the top 5%, but above that point the gaps between each percentile start to become enormous.) But more generally, you're thinking about capital gains in too narrow a sense. If I buy a house in need of repair, fix it up and remodel it over the course of a year, and sell it for twice what I paid for it, that's capital gains, but it certainly accomplishes something useful to society. Should it be taxed at the same rate as ordinary income? Sure, if it's the primary source of income, I can't think of a good reason why not. But it's not "unearned", which is what the parent poster was claiming.
By the way, if it's not obvious I'm at least partly playing devil's advocate here. But I have to admit that I cringe when I hear some of the arguments made in favor of more steeply progressive taxation. I agree that it's appalling that we went into debt because of upper-class tax cuts, and it's even more appalling that some people want to increase taxes on the working poor. But I also consider some of our major public expenses to be indefensible, and I also don't believe that it's moral to expect other people to pay for everything that strikes our fancy. And I say this as someone who earns well under $100,000/year, and will probably never be genuinely rich. Getting back to the original thread, I don't include NASA among the indefensible budget items (and of course it's a relatively small fraction), but if we raise taxes on the top 1%, it should be to pay off the debt and strengthen our social safety net, not start a colony on Mars (or buy more supercarrier groups, for that matter). And I'm also one of the people who genuinely hopes that someone does start a colony on Mars someday - I just don't really expect this to happen in my lifetime.
There's earned income, and there's unearned income (capital gains, interest, etc.)
I don't want to get caught up in another endless thread about class warfare, but how are capital gains and interest "unearned"? Investing money can be hard work, and that money isn't just sitting there - it becomes available for other purposes, such as funding new companies. I grew up watching my father spend many hours each week looking over the family's investments and planning for the next several decades of our lives - he managed to pay for several college educations this way. But according to you, he didn't "earn" any of the money he made through his investments, so it's okay to confiscate it?
Now, the argument that people who make the majority of their income solely through capital gains should be taxed at the same rate as the rest of us - that I can pretty much agree with. But they earned it just as much as I earn my salary. I also have no problem with the concept that the tax burden should be proportional to income, or that the working poor should get a steep reduction in taxes. I don't really object to taxing the rich at a slightly higher rate either. But I'm really not comfortable telling someone that they don't deserve their wealth and should forfeit it to the government, especially given some of the batshit insane things we spend it on. And yes, colonizing Mars falls into that category.
Or, ya know, it could be those really big nukes that would turn most of those countries into a glass pit.
Beat me to it. Supercarrier groups are weapons of offense, not defense; all we really need to defend our borders is a large number of tactical nuclear missiles and a heavily armed citizenry, both of which we can have for far less than the nearly $1 trillion a year we currently spend on our military.
Would you be willing to see your taxes double to pay for it? Would you be willing to give up one of the big government expenses/entitlements (Social Security, the military, Medicare) and funnel that money to NASA?
Well, I wouldn't be willing to see my taxes double, and since I'll never get to go on any of these space missions, I'd prefer to keep at least some insurance against dying on the streets at age 70. Given the choice, I'd prefer to see most of the $1 trillion or so we're flushing away on our military used to pay of the national debt, and/or refunded to taxpayers. But if the money needs to be spent, I'd prefer to see it go to the space program, and I think you'll find a lot of people in agreement.
I know the SCOTUS's docket is a perpetually flooded thing, and we've seen many instances where they passed on a case not because it lacked merit, but because they didn't want to open up a can of worms, so I'm hoping they take this one on and pass down a decision on it. This BS of making electronic devices (computers, cell phones, whathaveyou) a complete exception to rules of search is just insane and needs to be stomped down.
And you think the current SCOTUS will rule against law enforcement? Maybe, just maybe, we'll get lucky and Scalia will be in libertarian mode* instead of beat-the-hippie mode and will convince one or two of the other conservatives that this is a very bad practice, but I wouldn't put money on it.
(* He did, to his credit, write the majority decision in Kyllo v. US, which ruled that thermal imaging of houses [to detect pot farms] without cause was unreasonable search. He's had other fits like this in the past - Hamdi v. Rumsfeld is my favorite - but most of the time, his supposed originalism leads him to much darker places.)
It is quite amusing how educational and research institutions try to immediately flaunt their affiliations with the Nobel Laureates
Sometimes this gets downright embarrassing. Nearly a decade ago a former chemistry professor at the university where I worked won a Nobel, which the school lost no time in bragging about. What they didn't mention was that he was forced into mandatory retirement not long after he made the discovery for which the prize was awarded.
Actually, I forgot to mention that since this research is almost certainly NIH-funded, the article is required to be made public in the near future by depositing the manuscript in PubMed Central. I forget whether the requirement is six months or a year after publication - until then, it remains exclusive to Nature Publishing Group - but eventually it will be freely available.
Most likely, there will be a scientific paper containing the results, and as far as I know, scientific research papers are public (or maybe require a fee to read).
Yes, they require a fee to read - in this case, $32 - and yes, scientists are just as unhappy about this as everyone else, but we have no other way to prove our worth to prospective employers, funding agencies, and tenure committees other than prominent publications. However, the actual structure (including experimental data) is deposited in a public database, as required by every major journal in the field, and should be available shortly. (There is usually a little bit of lag time before these depositions are released to the public, but rarely more than a couple of weeks.)
The problem was solved within the context of a university driven research project (Foldit) which was geared towards finding out if humans could be more efficient then computer algorithms in finding protein folding solutions. Gamification in action but this isn't breaking any research paradigms.
Correct. Also, the reason why researchers didn't figure out the structure entirely on their own is not because they're dumb or closed-minded, but because manually fiddling with protein structures like this is very time-consuming, and they have better things to do with their time and other people's money. Outsourcing the problem to volunteers is a terrific idea, and I'm happy for them that it worked, but to suggest that the researchers were somehow embarrassed by gamers is to completely miss the point.
(To push a little further, since I actually work in this field I suspect there are other purely computational strategies that would have worked but hadn't been tried yet - most of these involve cutting out parts of the model instead of trying to fix them. But kudos to the Baker lab for their more creative solution.)
Let those engineers work in the private sector for a change, so we begin to wean ourselves from H1B visas and get those good-paying jobs to US citizens
I'm pretty sure a lot of the jobs involved are only available to US citizens anyway due to government-mandated security restrictions. In fact, I've seen this cited as something holding back American space efforts, as many otherwise qualified immigrants are unable to obtain these jobs.
When my ability to do research, and therefore the future of my career, is at stake I certainly stoop to using SSH accounts from previous institutions, long forgotten by the overworked sysadmins, to download papers. Shhhhhh, don't tell.
I've been doing this for the last eight years.:) Actually, at some point I finally forgot the password I used at my old school, but fortunately one of my current coworkers is happy to hook me up, via his alma mater.
It's more difficult for companies, which run a much greater risk of being sued if their employees are found to be "pirating" journal articles. A friend who works at a biotech startup told me they usually just ignore articles that aren't open-access, because $35 per PDF adds up quickly. However, mass storage is so cheap that I predict we'll see more and more academic scientists simply downloading entire journal archives in bulk onto their computers, and keeping these when they move to the private sector. (Whether the library subscriptions we use technically allow that, I'm not sure.) I'm in the process of acquiring every article that might be relevant to my work, and eventually I want to have all of them on my iPad. This wouldn't help with new publications, but most of those will end up in PubMed Central anyway (and increasingly they'll be published as open-access to begin with).
It takes copy editors, layout editors, graphics people, and people to simply keep the gears turning.
I forgot to address this in my first reply. One other big change that would make a significant difference is to throw out the concept of print journals altogether. There are really only two journals left that have any value as full magazines: Science and Nature. Any other journal, most people read them online and/or download and print the PDFs they care about. (Libraries will still subscribe to the print version, but the online subscription is far more valuable, because that way you don't need to compete with the entire molecular biology department for each new issue of "Cell".) Some journals still charge for color figures - as if I actually care whether they ever convert it to ink. Beyond some fairly minimal reformatting, I don't even care if they convert it to a fancy typeset layout. For "prestige" journals, so much of the content ends up in the supplemental material that the entire thing might as well be a PDF of a Word doc.
This doesn't mean switching to something like arXiv either, however. Informal publication is perfectly fine, and I wish biologists would be more open to the idea. But there's still no substitute for some kind of formal pre-publication review, and that will always require extra infrastructure. (And I'd argue that our system of hiring and advancement is very dependent on the gatekeeper role of journals - uploading a bunch of papers to arXiv isn't going to win a faculty job or tenure, but a single Nature article certainly will.)
So basically, the answer is "it's complicated, and it's harder than you think."
Speaking both as both a producer and consumer of scientific articles, there is actually a simple answer to this: granting agencies need to mandate open-access publishing as a condition of funding. This still costs money, obviously, but I think there's ample justification for the agencies taking this into account when calculating awards. There should be a limit, of course - publishing open-access in Nature costs something like $7000, compared to $1500 for most non-profit journals.
Howard Hughes Medical Institute already started requiring this several years ago, and it effectively forced the publisher Elsevier to accept its terms. The NIH eventually went even further and mandated that all future NIH-funded articles needed to be uploaded to the PubMed Central database after six months. I don't think they even agreed to compensate the journal publishers; NIH-funded research makes up such a huge fraction of biomedical publications that they can do whatever they want. Since virtually everyone, including biotech and pharma companies, despise the scientific publishers, there is considerable political support for further moves in this direction.
Your examples suck. The NIH is effectively a government funded subsidiary of the drug companies. Taxpayers fund the research, the drug companies cherry pick the profitable results. The resulting commercial products are then sold back to government supported health care at obscene mark ups.
It's pretty telling that the only example you could cherry-pick was Lipitor, which was actually discovered by Pfizer, and the similar drugs (statins) which preceded it were also discovered by pharmaceutical companies. Not that there aren't cases where the taxpayers have gotten screwed by patents on academic research (look up Ariad Pharmaceuticals for a particularly egregious case), but your characterization of the NIH as a subsidary of the drug companies has very little basis in reality.
Unfortunately, when it starts to happen again, there won't be anything we can do about it. Without the shuttle, another service mission is impossible. And with Hubble's successor (JWST) hanging by a fraying budgetary thread, there likely will be no replacing it with an improved telescope, either.
This has been repeated a number of times, but launching an entirely new Hubble into high orbit (without a shuttle, that is) would be substantially cheaper than maintaining the shuttle program in order to service the existing scope. I hope JWST pulls through, but I don't think NASA should get a blank check from the taxpayers.
We as a country have given up on science, unless it makes immediate profits for megacorporations or helps the military kill people more efficiently in foreign lands.
I'm not a fan of our budget priorities for the last decade, but I can understand why Congress is viewing JWST skeptically. The telescope isn't even supposed to launch until 2017 at the earliest and it's already billions of dollars over budget. Sure, this is a fraction of what we're flushing down the toilet in futile wars, but we're already stuck in those, and they're much more difficult to pull out of than a project that's still in the planning stages.
Except for servicing Hubble - a dubious justification - the shuttle was a terribly inefficient use of money for the science that came out of the program. As far as scientific funding in general is concerned, NASA continues to do great work with remote probes and will be sending another rover to Mars soon. The NIH and NSF managed to avoid major funding cuts in a year when most federal agencies got hit hard, and the DOE Office of Science, which was slated for a huge cut, also survived mostly intact. Speaking as a scientist involved with many of these agencies, I'm thrilled with the outcome.
Of course, an adversarial system's not so hot when the government has a good prosecutor and you get stuck with a crappy public defender; don't know if that was an issue in this case, but it's a well-known problem without any real good solutions...
I think the problem in this case was not so much with the lawyering - rather, the low quality of the evidence and testimony was not apparent until years later. (By which point the convict had already been executed, unfortunately.)
The NIH seems to function slightly better than NASA. Are there significant differences in the way Congress handles the two? Is the existence of private partners like Big Pharma enough to make the NIH work even with Congress' failings?
The other reply mentioned the main reason - the final funding decisions are largely in the hands of peer reviewers rather than Congressmen. But I'd also add that the NIH sponsors competing projects, which provides added motivation for the grant recipients to get something done as quickly as possible without wasting too much money. (It's basically applying the logic of free-market economics to public sector research.) The influence of Big Pharma is actually pretty minimal, although it can't hurt politically (nearly every PhD scientist working in biotech or pharma was funded by the NIH at some point). It's certainly nothing like the aerospace industry that depends on NASA for a large part of its business.
China just clarified [thehindu.com] our budget priorities for us yesterday. Last week China helped [reuters.com] with our diplomatic prerogatives.
The Chinese government whines about stuff like this all the time; they're notoriously thin-skinned when it comes to perceived international slights. Most of the time it doesn't have much of an effect; they were furious when Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize but in the end only about 19 or so countries were convinced to boycott the award ceremony (and if you look at the list, most were places that have an equally thuggish attitude towards dissent). Their blustering is primarily aimed at intimidating smaller and less-developed nations that are far more dispensable to the Chinese than the United States is, and which might otherwise be disinclined to back China's imperial ambitions. While I'm not at all enthusiastic about the prospect of going even further into debt, their ability to really screw us over remains very limited, because continued economic growth keeps the CCP in power, and crashing our currency would be suicidal. They may be authoritarian bureaucrats, but that doesn't mean they're stupid.
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According to the article, NASA's response to the leaked study is to start developing fuel depots in addition to continuing its new rocket program. Because, after all, who doesn't need more cool stuff.
Undoubtedly NASA reacted this way because the US Congress has legislatively mandated development of a new heavy-lift rocket to preserve jobs in states with influential (Republican) senators, as a substitute for the cancelled Constellation program. It no longer matters what NASA itself thinks is the most efficient and technologically feasible solution. Even if the fuel depot plan would save twice as much, in practice it is ultimately subject to Congressional veto.
What is to say that DOE (aka the US govt) can't lease the light sources to a private corporation to run for profit? The corporation as I mentioned in my original post could be a joint venture between many corporations, essentially selling back research time in proportion to funds paid into the project. Any extra time would be sold at 'market' rates to non-members.
I think it's possible this could work. I have two reservations, however. One is that the DOE has already partially shifted to private contractors to run some of the national labs - because of security issues (like a floppy disk going missing!), the University of California could only renew their contract to run Los Alamos and Livermore by partnering with large defense contractors (I forget which ones, but they're well-known names). Everything I've heard about the effects has been negative - the new bosses don't give a shit about science as long as there are no security leaks, they've cut benefits, and some long-term employees have left as a result. The second is that I'm not convinced that the fabled efficiency of the private sector will make any difference. These facilities are already run 24/7 as much as possible, and the employees who work there now are already the most qualified for the job. So I'm hard-pressed to think of a way to make a profit other than raising the cost of use, or slashing pay and benefits. Alternately, they could sell more time to companies and leave less for academics, which I wouldn't be thrilled about either. (Just to clarify, the way it works right now is that individual groups operate user facilities at the light sources, which they pay for themselves. Academic groups pay very little on top of this to use the facility, with the restriction that all work must be published relatively quickly. Companies which do not wish to publish their results pay an additional fee, on the order of $1000/hour, which helps fund operation costs.)
But that's not to say that it's impossible; I've wondered in the past whether a convincing business plan could be made for this. I'm really most worried by the fact that neither Paul nor his fans have given any thought to such practical aspects - if they're not simply going to shut down a huge fraction of the US's basic scientific research capacity, what are they going to do instead? Waving your hands and saying "the free market will find a solution" and "we won't miss those welfare queens anyway", like most of the arguments I've seen in favor, isn't a convincing answer.
I would be 100% in favor of closing the DOE lab (Argonne National Lab) where I worked. It would have absolutely no impact on the amount of important new scientific discoveries coming out, only on the number of scientific papers coming out.
The Advanced Photon Source at Argonne is one of the most powerful synchrotrons in the world, and is used by biotech and pharmaceutical companies to solve crystal structures of proteins bound to drug candidates. (Yes, they pay a premium for this.) Of course academics use it too for more basic research on protein structure. If you think that knowing the 3D structure of fundamental cellular machinery is unimportant and has no relevance to our lives, you need to go back to school.
I think pulling all that stuff from the federal government would be a good thing. If it's really important to you, form a research non-profit and build up a private endowment for the sort of reasearch you want done.
As a scientist who works for the federal government, I actually agree with you, but only in principle. In the real world, the government currently funds a great deal of undirected basic research, and operates a number of shared facilities that are unparalleled in the world. There aren't any non-profits with that kind of money which can suddenly pick up the slack and continue onward as if nothing had happened. The immediate result of slashing these activities will be that all foreign scientists go back to their home countries, and a number of US scientists follow them. The commercial activities that tend to naturally flow from academic research (like the entire biotech industry) will either wither or move. Maybe in a decade we'd be able to rebuild to the point where we were before - the single largest producer of basic scientific research in the world - but by that point, we'd be far behind the rest of the industrial nations, who would no doubt see this as an excellent opportunity to capitalize on our losses.
Now, as I pointed out above, if you believe that we're headed towards national bankruptcy and economic collapse anyway, maybe this is inevitable, and better to get it out of the way now, to improve our chances of recovery. And I'm not entirely unsympathetic to that point of view. But it's delusional to pretend that everything would just work out, and the private sector would take care of the problem.
Currently-federal parks can go private.
What guarantees that they'll continue to be parks? There's lots of old-growth timber and valuable minerals just waiting to be exploited. I'm sure you could find companies which genuinely believe in keeping them parks, but what happens when they get bought by far-away investors who decide to make a quick buck? This isn't some random hypothetical - read up on what happened to the privately owned Northern California redwood forests.
Bell Labs was a premier research institution when their largest customer was the U.S. Government, and specifically the War Department -- which is what it was called back in the day. It could be done, but the culture of corporations is "show me the money". They're interested in immediate profits and short-term ROI. They are NOT interested in fundamental research and long-term roadmaps.
I've seen it claimed that Bell Labs was also something that AT&T did to help keep federal regulators at bay.
Regardless, there are really only a handful of companies in the world that have both the money and the interest to pursue more-or-less undirected basic research. Google, Microsoft (yes, really), IBM, Genentech, and Novartis are the big ones that spring to mind. I'm a biochemist by training, so I'm most familiar with the latter two (and I know people who work in both places). Being a scientist at Genentech is almost like being on the faculty at a major research university, except the pay is better. But even they have to get the legal department to sign off on anything they want to publish.
For less established companies, it would be just plain stupid to spend large amounts of time (and money) on something that has no obvious and relatively immediate commercial value, i.e. the great majority of bioscience research. A friend of mine works at a (flourishing) biotech startup, and was initially placed on a project that turned out to be of great intrinsic scientific interest, and potentially a major publication. After a year or so, management said "fuck this, we need products", stopped work on this project, and transferred him to a different team. He's totally cool with this - it's an eminently sensible business decision, and he's being paid well for his work. But if basic research is the goal, it's a shitty way to do science.
The claims of "the private sector will take up the slack" simply have no basis in fact, and anyone who has worked in R&D (academic or corporate) knows this. To whatever limited extent public-funded science does the "development" part, yes, I expect the private sector will do much of that. But there's just so much serendipity involved in transferring basic research to marketable products, that they'll surely miss something. And they're not going to do undirected basic research, because why the hell would they? So ultimately, you're going to have to rely almost entirely on either private donations or state governments. I take no stance on the ethics or morality of such a change, let alone its long-term effectiveness as policy - I'm just annoyed at some of the claims I hear.
I can think of some immediate impacts that shutting down the DOE would have. One is that protein crystallography research, both academic and corporate, would screech to a halt, because the DOE runs most of the synchrotrons used to generate high-intensity X-rays. (The exception is at Cornell, and it's not as advanced as most of the DOE's machines.) So crystallographers would have to fly to Japan, Canada, or Europe to do most of their data collection, until someone coughs up the several billion dollars to replace these machines (which would take several years to build, anyway). I think it's safe to say that the US would permanently lose leadership in the field (it currently has the largest output of any country); Big Pharma is all multinational anyway, and I'm sure China will be happy to build more synchrotrons. Again, whether this is going to happen anyway due to soaring debt, or whether it's better to adhere to a limited-government creed than have flourishing biomedical research, is a separate argument. Let's just not pretend that the magical free market will make everything better.
Capital gains are not proportional to the amount effort you put in, they're proportional to the amount of money you put in. They're also exponential. If you reinvest, you're going to make more next year than you did this year. You're don't just make money, you make more money the more money you make.
Unless, of course, you lose money, because there is always risk involved. One of the reasons for the capital gains tax being relatively low is to encourage re-investment into the economy. I don't know at what point the capital gains rate becomes high enough to hurt the economy, although I'm sure some economists have ideas. And it does sometimes involve effort, as I'll explain below.
Your father may have spent a lot of effort, but was it work? What was accomplished? When someone goes to work at the widget factory, something has changed. Several people who did not previously have widgets now do. The stock market? From a distance to me it looks like a continuous racetrack with a lot more horses.
He put his money back into the economy, which means that theoretically, someone could have started a widget factory using his money, which is certainly accomplishing something. (Not that he ever had enough money to start a factory - I think my parents were somewhere in the top 5%, but above that point the gaps between each percentile start to become enormous.) But more generally, you're thinking about capital gains in too narrow a sense. If I buy a house in need of repair, fix it up and remodel it over the course of a year, and sell it for twice what I paid for it, that's capital gains, but it certainly accomplishes something useful to society. Should it be taxed at the same rate as ordinary income? Sure, if it's the primary source of income, I can't think of a good reason why not. But it's not "unearned", which is what the parent poster was claiming.
By the way, if it's not obvious I'm at least partly playing devil's advocate here. But I have to admit that I cringe when I hear some of the arguments made in favor of more steeply progressive taxation. I agree that it's appalling that we went into debt because of upper-class tax cuts, and it's even more appalling that some people want to increase taxes on the working poor. But I also consider some of our major public expenses to be indefensible, and I also don't believe that it's moral to expect other people to pay for everything that strikes our fancy. And I say this as someone who earns well under $100,000/year, and will probably never be genuinely rich. Getting back to the original thread, I don't include NASA among the indefensible budget items (and of course it's a relatively small fraction), but if we raise taxes on the top 1%, it should be to pay off the debt and strengthen our social safety net, not start a colony on Mars (or buy more supercarrier groups, for that matter). And I'm also one of the people who genuinely hopes that someone does start a colony on Mars someday - I just don't really expect this to happen in my lifetime.
There's earned income, and there's unearned income (capital gains, interest, etc.)
I don't want to get caught up in another endless thread about class warfare, but how are capital gains and interest "unearned"? Investing money can be hard work, and that money isn't just sitting there - it becomes available for other purposes, such as funding new companies. I grew up watching my father spend many hours each week looking over the family's investments and planning for the next several decades of our lives - he managed to pay for several college educations this way. But according to you, he didn't "earn" any of the money he made through his investments, so it's okay to confiscate it?
Now, the argument that people who make the majority of their income solely through capital gains should be taxed at the same rate as the rest of us - that I can pretty much agree with. But they earned it just as much as I earn my salary. I also have no problem with the concept that the tax burden should be proportional to income, or that the working poor should get a steep reduction in taxes. I don't really object to taxing the rich at a slightly higher rate either. But I'm really not comfortable telling someone that they don't deserve their wealth and should forfeit it to the government, especially given some of the batshit insane things we spend it on. And yes, colonizing Mars falls into that category.
Or, ya know, it could be those really big nukes that would turn most of those countries into a glass pit.
Beat me to it. Supercarrier groups are weapons of offense, not defense; all we really need to defend our borders is a large number of tactical nuclear missiles and a heavily armed citizenry, both of which we can have for far less than the nearly $1 trillion a year we currently spend on our military.
Would you be willing to see your taxes double to pay for it? Would you be willing to give up one of the big government expenses/entitlements (Social Security, the military, Medicare) and funnel that money to NASA?
Well, I wouldn't be willing to see my taxes double, and since I'll never get to go on any of these space missions, I'd prefer to keep at least some insurance against dying on the streets at age 70. Given the choice, I'd prefer to see most of the $1 trillion or so we're flushing away on our military used to pay of the national debt, and/or refunded to taxpayers. But if the money needs to be spent, I'd prefer to see it go to the space program, and I think you'll find a lot of people in agreement.
I know the SCOTUS's docket is a perpetually flooded thing, and we've seen many instances where they passed on a case not because it lacked merit, but because they didn't want to open up a can of worms, so I'm hoping they take this one on and pass down a decision on it. This BS of making electronic devices (computers, cell phones, whathaveyou) a complete exception to rules of search is just insane and needs to be stomped down.
And you think the current SCOTUS will rule against law enforcement? Maybe, just maybe, we'll get lucky and Scalia will be in libertarian mode* instead of beat-the-hippie mode and will convince one or two of the other conservatives that this is a very bad practice, but I wouldn't put money on it.
(* He did, to his credit, write the majority decision in Kyllo v. US, which ruled that thermal imaging of houses [to detect pot farms] without cause was unreasonable search. He's had other fits like this in the past - Hamdi v. Rumsfeld is my favorite - but most of the time, his supposed originalism leads him to much darker places.)
It is quite amusing how educational and research institutions try to immediately flaunt their affiliations with the Nobel Laureates
Sometimes this gets downright embarrassing. Nearly a decade ago a former chemistry professor at the university where I worked won a Nobel, which the school lost no time in bragging about. What they didn't mention was that he was forced into mandatory retirement not long after he made the discovery for which the prize was awarded.
Actually, I forgot to mention that since this research is almost certainly NIH-funded, the article is required to be made public in the near future by depositing the manuscript in PubMed Central. I forget whether the requirement is six months or a year after publication - until then, it remains exclusive to Nature Publishing Group - but eventually it will be freely available.
Most likely, there will be a scientific paper containing the results, and as far as I know, scientific research papers are public (or maybe require a fee to read).
Yes, they require a fee to read - in this case, $32 - and yes, scientists are just as unhappy about this as everyone else, but we have no other way to prove our worth to prospective employers, funding agencies, and tenure committees other than prominent publications. However, the actual structure (including experimental data) is deposited in a public database, as required by every major journal in the field, and should be available shortly. (There is usually a little bit of lag time before these depositions are released to the public, but rarely more than a couple of weeks.)
The problem was solved within the context of a university driven research project (Foldit) which was geared towards finding out if humans could be more efficient then computer algorithms in finding protein folding solutions. Gamification in action but this isn't breaking any research paradigms.
Correct. Also, the reason why researchers didn't figure out the structure entirely on their own is not because they're dumb or closed-minded, but because manually fiddling with protein structures like this is very time-consuming, and they have better things to do with their time and other people's money. Outsourcing the problem to volunteers is a terrific idea, and I'm happy for them that it worked, but to suggest that the researchers were somehow embarrassed by gamers is to completely miss the point.
(To push a little further, since I actually work in this field I suspect there are other purely computational strategies that would have worked but hadn't been tried yet - most of these involve cutting out parts of the model instead of trying to fix them. But kudos to the Baker lab for their more creative solution.)
Let those engineers work in the private sector for a change, so we begin to wean ourselves from H1B visas and get those good-paying jobs to US citizens
I'm pretty sure a lot of the jobs involved are only available to US citizens anyway due to government-mandated security restrictions. In fact, I've seen this cited as something holding back American space efforts, as many otherwise qualified immigrants are unable to obtain these jobs.
This may be damning with faint praise, but that was one of the most insightful posts I've ever read on Slashdot. Thank you!
When my ability to do research, and therefore the future of my career, is at stake I certainly stoop to using SSH accounts from previous institutions, long forgotten by the overworked sysadmins, to download papers. Shhhhhh, don't tell.
I've been doing this for the last eight years. :) Actually, at some point I finally forgot the password I used at my old school, but fortunately one of my current coworkers is happy to hook me up, via his alma mater.
It's more difficult for companies, which run a much greater risk of being sued if their employees are found to be "pirating" journal articles. A friend who works at a biotech startup told me they usually just ignore articles that aren't open-access, because $35 per PDF adds up quickly. However, mass storage is so cheap that I predict we'll see more and more academic scientists simply downloading entire journal archives in bulk onto their computers, and keeping these when they move to the private sector. (Whether the library subscriptions we use technically allow that, I'm not sure.) I'm in the process of acquiring every article that might be relevant to my work, and eventually I want to have all of them on my iPad. This wouldn't help with new publications, but most of those will end up in PubMed Central anyway (and increasingly they'll be published as open-access to begin with).
It takes copy editors, layout editors, graphics people, and people to simply keep the gears turning.
I forgot to address this in my first reply. One other big change that would make a significant difference is to throw out the concept of print journals altogether. There are really only two journals left that have any value as full magazines: Science and Nature. Any other journal, most people read them online and/or download and print the PDFs they care about. (Libraries will still subscribe to the print version, but the online subscription is far more valuable, because that way you don't need to compete with the entire molecular biology department for each new issue of "Cell".) Some journals still charge for color figures - as if I actually care whether they ever convert it to ink. Beyond some fairly minimal reformatting, I don't even care if they convert it to a fancy typeset layout. For "prestige" journals, so much of the content ends up in the supplemental material that the entire thing might as well be a PDF of a Word doc.
This doesn't mean switching to something like arXiv either, however. Informal publication is perfectly fine, and I wish biologists would be more open to the idea. But there's still no substitute for some kind of formal pre-publication review, and that will always require extra infrastructure. (And I'd argue that our system of hiring and advancement is very dependent on the gatekeeper role of journals - uploading a bunch of papers to arXiv isn't going to win a faculty job or tenure, but a single Nature article certainly will.)
So basically, the answer is "it's complicated, and it's harder than you think."
Speaking both as both a producer and consumer of scientific articles, there is actually a simple answer to this: granting agencies need to mandate open-access publishing as a condition of funding. This still costs money, obviously, but I think there's ample justification for the agencies taking this into account when calculating awards. There should be a limit, of course - publishing open-access in Nature costs something like $7000, compared to $1500 for most non-profit journals.
Howard Hughes Medical Institute already started requiring this several years ago, and it effectively forced the publisher Elsevier to accept its terms. The NIH eventually went even further and mandated that all future NIH-funded articles needed to be uploaded to the PubMed Central database after six months. I don't think they even agreed to compensate the journal publishers; NIH-funded research makes up such a huge fraction of biomedical publications that they can do whatever they want. Since virtually everyone, including biotech and pharma companies, despise the scientific publishers, there is considerable political support for further moves in this direction.
Your examples suck. The NIH is effectively a government funded subsidiary of the drug companies. Taxpayers fund the research, the drug companies cherry pick the profitable results. The resulting commercial products are then sold back to government supported health care at obscene mark ups.
It's pretty telling that the only example you could cherry-pick was Lipitor, which was actually discovered by Pfizer, and the similar drugs (statins) which preceded it were also discovered by pharmaceutical companies. Not that there aren't cases where the taxpayers have gotten screwed by patents on academic research (look up Ariad Pharmaceuticals for a particularly egregious case), but your characterization of the NIH as a subsidary of the drug companies has very little basis in reality.
Unfortunately, when it starts to happen again, there won't be anything we can do about it. Without the shuttle, another service mission is impossible. And with Hubble's successor (JWST) hanging by a fraying budgetary thread, there likely will be no replacing it with an improved telescope, either.
This has been repeated a number of times, but launching an entirely new Hubble into high orbit (without a shuttle, that is) would be substantially cheaper than maintaining the shuttle program in order to service the existing scope. I hope JWST pulls through, but I don't think NASA should get a blank check from the taxpayers.
We as a country have given up on science, unless it makes immediate profits for megacorporations or helps the military kill people more efficiently in foreign lands.
I'm not a fan of our budget priorities for the last decade, but I can understand why Congress is viewing JWST skeptically. The telescope isn't even supposed to launch until 2017 at the earliest and it's already billions of dollars over budget. Sure, this is a fraction of what we're flushing down the toilet in futile wars, but we're already stuck in those, and they're much more difficult to pull out of than a project that's still in the planning stages.
Except for servicing Hubble - a dubious justification - the shuttle was a terribly inefficient use of money for the science that came out of the program. As far as scientific funding in general is concerned, NASA continues to do great work with remote probes and will be sending another rover to Mars soon. The NIH and NSF managed to avoid major funding cuts in a year when most federal agencies got hit hard, and the DOE Office of Science, which was slated for a huge cut, also survived mostly intact. Speaking as a scientist involved with many of these agencies, I'm thrilled with the outcome.
Of course, an adversarial system's not so hot when the government has a good prosecutor and you get stuck with a crappy public defender; don't know if that was an issue in this case, but it's a well-known problem without any real good solutions...
I think the problem in this case was not so much with the lawyering - rather, the low quality of the evidence and testimony was not apparent until years later. (By which point the convict had already been executed, unfortunately.)
The NIH seems to function slightly better than NASA. Are there significant differences in the way Congress handles the two? Is the existence of private partners like Big Pharma enough to make the NIH work even with Congress' failings?
The other reply mentioned the main reason - the final funding decisions are largely in the hands of peer reviewers rather than Congressmen. But I'd also add that the NIH sponsors competing projects, which provides added motivation for the grant recipients to get something done as quickly as possible without wasting too much money. (It's basically applying the logic of free-market economics to public sector research.) The influence of Big Pharma is actually pretty minimal, although it can't hurt politically (nearly every PhD scientist working in biotech or pharma was funded by the NIH at some point). It's certainly nothing like the aerospace industry that depends on NASA for a large part of its business.
China just clarified [thehindu.com] our budget priorities for us yesterday. Last week China helped [reuters.com] with our diplomatic prerogatives.
The Chinese government whines about stuff like this all the time; they're notoriously thin-skinned when it comes to perceived international slights. Most of the time it doesn't have much of an effect; they were furious when Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize but in the end only about 19 or so countries were convinced to boycott the award ceremony (and if you look at the list, most were places that have an equally thuggish attitude towards dissent). Their blustering is primarily aimed at intimidating smaller and less-developed nations that are far more dispensable to the Chinese than the United States is, and which might otherwise be disinclined to back China's imperial ambitions. While I'm not at all enthusiastic about the prospect of going even further into debt, their ability to really screw us over remains very limited, because continued economic growth keeps the CCP in power, and crashing our currency would be suicidal. They may be authoritarian bureaucrats, but that doesn't mean they're stupid.