Your poor kids are going to be woefully inept socially.
Compared to the zoo that is public education? You really need to rethink that.
The real world consists of a lot more people than a few kids in a particular, very narrow, age bracket. Where are those kids going to get experience with dealing with people who aren't like themselves? I learned that originally though my church (at the time, my family went to a Methodist Church), some music performance groups (orchestra and hand bells), and holding burger-flipping jobs.
The problem is you have a bunch of carpet apes in their own little world. No interaction with grown ups outside of the teacher/student thing means a bunch of young adults poorly prepared socially for dealing with the rest of the world. Colleges don't help much especially with the weird indoctrination stuff that often goes on.
I don't see home schooling being better here. But neither do I see it being worse.
YOU argued that CEOs faced plenty of liability and so, risk. Now you argue the opposite.
The two statements require some explanation, but they're not contradictory. For example, tax evasion, sexual harassment, and Sabanes-Oxley compliance are all significant risks for a CEO. Running a company into the ground can be, if the CEO owns a significant piece of the company or committed illegal acts/violations of regulatory law, but it otherwise isn't.
A huge part of the problem here is CEOs who have incentives greatly disengaged from the long term future of the business. That in turn is driven by institutional holders who don't have an interest in the long term future of the business either.
To summarize, my point here has been that the incentives (mostly in the form of "moral hazard" and "tragedy of the commons") in today's developed world societies are all wrong, if you want to reward foresight and long term planning. Further, a lot of proposed solutions just make the problems worse. They might be justifiable on other grounds, but not on the basis that they help with the future planning issue. For example, it seems counterproductive to me to appoint the notably ignorant US Congress to fund scientific projects because US businesses and other private groups can't be bothered under the current conditions to fund such things to the degree one would like.
I also will briefly mention that I still think economics applies to R&D. After all the goal is to discover and create things and ideas of value, even if they should happen to have a hypothetical value centuries down the road. If you want to do more of that and do it more effectively, you need to treat the problem economically. That means among other things actually evaluating the likely value of scientific endeavors rather than just writing a check for them because they're "science". As I originally noted, even the scientists in question pick and choose what to study when they don't have unlimited resources at their disposal.
Finally, I'll just talk a little about why I came to have these views. I have a strong interest in space development including related activities like space science. Frequently, when I discussed some of the economic choices that were available (for example, replacing expensive Shuttle launches with less expensive Delta IV Heavy launches or launching multiple probes at a time instead of one or two), I ran across a certain kind of argument. Namely, that there was no object to money spent on science. They didn't seem to care that space science was being done in very costly ways.
My rebuttal has always been the same. Would you still support space science, if all that money had to run through my fingers first? I only charge a 90% fee for my premium services so you're getting about as good a deal as if you were to use normal public funding routes (an order of magnitude rise in cost is typical for US publicly funded research over the private version).
Let's be honest... if you've been doing the job for many years, it's clear a college education isn't necessary to keep doing your job.
If we're going to be "honest", then I need to point out that she was fired because she lied about something material to her employment at AAAS.
This is the reality of the wealth inequity in America. The conservatives have hated public education since it was first introduced in the 1800s... and they've finally managed to find a way to destroy the American dream: Without higher education, there's no upward mobility. Without that, there's no middle class. It's game over.
So conservatives are responsible for federal subsidized student loans - which are the driver for higher education inflation in the US of the past few decades? Do tell.
You have a funny view of risk. Name a CEO that ended up in poverty (Actual poverty, not forced early retirement into an upper middle class lifestyle where they still don't have to give a damn what a gallon of milk costs) after running a corporation into the ground.
Why would they be risking poverty after running a business into the ground? You mentioned earlier that doing so was actually profitable for the CEO in question. So why would a successful businessperson end up in poverty? I wasn't claiming that running a business into the ground was risky, but rather that society had created a bunch of incentives to ignore future risk.
As for the corporate raiders, mostly they pocketed the gains for themselves and left the stock holders (at least the ones who didn't get out before the music stopped) and the employees holding the bag. Remember the Wall street adoration of Chainsaw Al? Turns out he was a crook.
Chainsaw Al wasn't a corporate raider. He was brought in by the businesses to downsize them and aggressively cut the unprofitable parts of the operation. A corporate raider might do similar things, but generally in opposition to current leadership at the business.
As for stock holding, the liquidity of the market is all about limiting the risk. If a company starts to go south due to failure to plan for survival beyond the quarterly report, you can dump it in a flash. Make it take days to unload a major position and make it expensive and you'll see investors become intensely interested in a company's long term prospects and planning.
These sorts of traders are the main prey of high frequency traders. Anyone who dumps a huge stake in a company "in a flash" is going to lose a lot of money.
Meanwhile, most of the respected scientists we learn about in school were financially independent enough that they had ample free time to fill somehow. They were not for the most part lower or middle class. They had no need to worry about the rent or where the food would come from next month (or year) and so they had time for intellectual pursuits. If you want to expand discovery, expand the pool of people who have time to pursue their intellectual curiosity and can afford a deferred payoff.
There's plenty of that opportunity in today's societies as it is. I don't see the need for a basic income.
Corporations are all about limiting risk and liability. They allow the people in charge to make high value short term moves secure in the knowledge that they can deploy their golden parachute before it all comes crashing down. The old stable corporations started crashing when day trading became more interesting than long term holding and the rise or the corporate raider.
You don't have correlation here, much less cause and effect. As to day trading and corporate raiders, they have value. Corporate raiders help break down businesses that have become stagnant and are worth more in pieces than they are whole. Day traders merely are small scale market makers, adding liquidity to markets.
Give the CEO and the board some actual liability and make holding stock more risky so that investors want to see a steady course and these problems will start to clear up.
CEO and the board do have actual liability so there's no point in complaining about its absence. And holding stock is risky. You're last in line for bankruptcies. Here, what I think is going on is that a huge portion of the stock of publicly traded corporations is held by institutions acting as proxies for the actual shareholders. As a result, the control of the corporation has become divorced from the ownership (and risk) of the corporation (since the interests of those institutions is at best weakly connected to the interests of the individual shareholders).
And that dynamic has been driven by a vast flood of capital from pensioners (and in the US IRA and 401k holders). Societal attempts to reduce future risk have backfired to some degre.
The basic income allows people to actually make a long term plan rather than sweating next month's rent or will they get a pink slip for Christmas. It gives curious minds an opportunity to experiment and discover, much like Volta or RÃntgen. There is a such thing as too much risk.
You do have a valid point. But I have to say that I don't see evidence that in the developed world scientists would be making so little that they would have to be that concerned about survival. When R&D is done well and in a valuable area, it's a valuable thing that people are willing to pay a lot for. It seems to me that there's more issues with access to capital, but again that's something that the private world is better at than government.
Natural disaster? No such thing.. It was a natural event that became a disaster due to lack of foresight and the decision to take a gamble that didn't quite pan out. Disaster, like beauty, is in the eye...
There isn't enough foresight to eliminate disaster. It's lack will always be with us. If on the other hand, you were to say that insufficient efforts were made to anticipate and reduce the occurrence and harm of disaster, then you'd have a valid point to make.
I still would defend the actions of TEPCO and the Japanese government, because I think it's vastly difficult to anticipate such things. And because we best learn by experience. Hypothetical risks are treated differently than demonstrated risks.
The reason short term management has gained so much traction is simply because that is what creates the most profit for the CEO and his in group now and they don't really give a damn about the people whose retirement is in hedge funds anyway so long as they get theirs. That's why we have seen so many large and apparently stable for decades corporations flame out.
Why did large and apparently stable corporations start flaming out? Why is short term management so profitable now when it wasn't when those large and apparently stable corporations were created? Well, I think I got the reason why - moral hazard from society's mitigation of future risk.
The corporate world has never been particularly good at basic research of the type that eventually pays off in huge ways.
Compared to who? And all I can say is that when one actually looks at the history of research, business-side research has been very productive. And it's also funded some very productive non profit research as well.
Bell labs is sort-of an exception
I can think of several companies off the top of my head that ran comparable research institutions: Xerox, Lockheed, Du Pont, IBM, General Electric, and Hewlett Packard.
It's always been mostly individuals (occasionally with funding from universities or other patrons) that has done that.
It's not like there's any non-individuals in science (unless we develop some sort of gesalt mind or the like). So it's always been individuals, maybe a lot of individuals working cooperatively.
Also, I have nothing against private funding of science basic or otherwise. That is a big way that businesses can fund science and it works pretty well.
If we want to get advancements and long term thinking back on track, we should phase out corporate charters all together and implement the basic income.
There's no benefit to phasing out corporations. They fill an important niche - people who want to invest in a business, but don't have the time or skills to own and run a business. And I don't see the connection between ending corporations and somehow regaining long term thinking. It doesn't follow.
As to the "basic income", it reduces future risk and hence introduces some degree of short term thinking as a moral hazard. There may be plenty of good reasons for doing so. But implementing such a thing for the purpose of encouraging long term thinking is counterproductive.
I have an alternative here. Drop most public funding of research (aside from the usual areas of national need). Maybe compensate for the near future turmoil with tax subsidies on research either in a business or as a donation to an appropriate non profit. Any business which does productive research gets a bigger edge than they'd have today.
In other words the moment the facility was operating with any chance of exceeding its design basis it should have been left shut down.
And that's exactly what happened. Also, how large a chance is "any chance"? There's always a chance that a large asteroid will crater a nuclear plant, for example.
The 2009 flu happened to kill more third world people as a fraction of people infected. Any actual pandemic of considerable lethality would likely do the same. But then maybe caring whether people live or die is a first world problem.
That's why I don't use the word, greedy. It's just a negative connotation word for a class of interest. You might not be overly concerned with furthering your own interests, but that doesn't mean that you don't have interests which can cause just as much harm as greed can.
Perhaps we've finally reached the stage that what's natural for the individual isn't healthy for the society, and vice versa.
For example, this sentence indicates the possibility of unhealthy interests. What has changed so that individual interests are more unhealthy for society now than they've been in the past? I don't see it at all.
Instead, I see the opposite. In prehistoric times, tribes needed a great deal of cooperation from their members. Someone not pulling their load could kill other members of the tribe. That's no longer true. Now, we can pursue radically different beliefs or goals without causing a great deal of harm (unless, of course, the beliefs or goals are inherently harmful, like killing members of ethnic groups you dislike).
What I see nowadays is a society-level tendency to create public goods with the resulting tragedy of commons exploitation by the public, and then trying to stamp out this manifestation of individual self-interest rather than fixing or removing the public good that led to the problem in the first place.
Those people seem to have all sorts of problems with natural individual behavior. But those who anticipate human nature and account for that in their schemes don't have that kind of problem.
So when someone says obviously false statements about "climate change", it's a medical condition like Tourette Syndrome?
What's of concern is that there's a new player at the table: human activity.
Ok, so it's a "concern". I imagine some future historians will be interested in all the word games and rationalizations that pro-AGW advocates have used over the years.
And whether it's altering climate fast enough to damage human life. And possibly render species extinct at a rate not seen in 65 million years.
Let's note two things. First, there are basic behavior and structural changes that can be made right now which would greatly mitigate the alleged effects of AGW, even if we never do anything about AGW itself. For example, if the US stops subsidizing the construction of property in flood-prone areas via public flood insurance. Or if we connect natural areas with wilderness corridors (and otherwise worked on reducing habitat destruction) so that plants and animals have means to migrate and adapt to whatever future changes happen.
Second, when we compare measurements of modern extinction rates to prehistorical mass extinctions, we're comparing apples and oranges. The vast majority of modern species have limited scope spatially and temporally. If they had existed during the end of the Cretaceous, they probably would never have left a fossil record. We see far more of the species that exist in the world now than if we were to look only at the fossil record 65 million years from now.
So when discussing extinction rates and percentages, we need to remember that relatively common and long lasting species with durable body parts would be most likely to be present in the fossil record. The frog that appears around a single waterfall or stream or the bird that nests only on a particular island would most likely be lost forever. So those mass extinctions of the past were of organisms that were typically more prevalent and long lasting than most of the species we see around us today. The mass extinctions of the past are worse than they appear, because we will never know of most of the species that existed back then.
Further, we need to recall that most of the die-off of large animals, a traditional feature of mass extinctions, has already happened. A lot of species present 20,000 years ago have since died out or dwindled greatly in population. That may have had something to do with the global warming following the end of the glacial period, but it more likely had to do with overhunting by humans. And it's a fait accompli. Even a complete reversal of the effects of human activity (not just of AGW effects) won't bring back many of those species.
The fact is, nobody considered the Crookes tube as a light source. I don't consider the types of experimentation I discussed as not a lot of work, but they are exactly the sorts of things that would get the axe in today's penny wise and pound foolish management style.
I wouldn't characterize that as a fact, but rather as an opinion.
As to today's "foolish management style", why do you think that even gets traction? If there really is as big a payoff for R&D as supporters claim, then why don't business succeed more often at it? As you and others have mentioned, the myth is that research somehow doesn't have much of a payoff to the business world, something which was shown false in the industrial revolution. But since that isn't actually true, what can causing business to abandon R&D and embrace a short term management?
I think the answer is simple. Public funding of R&D has turned it into a public good which anyone, no matter how lazy or short sighted can use. Further, there's not much point to a business, or individual researchers and engineers trying to do their own R&D unless they can somehow do better than the relatively well funded public R&D can do. Similarly, private donations to R&D usually go to stuff that isn't publicly funded for whatever reasons. Most people want such donations to make a difference, not disappear into obscurity eclipsed by far more well funding public efforts.
Developed world society has worked fairly hard to remove future risks to businesses and individuals. This has resulted in a typical moral hazard - short term thinking is now rewarded much more than it used to be. And I think a key part of that risk cocoon is public funding of R&D.
My take is that if you want businesses to think about the future again (which I think more important than the alleged value of publicly funded R&D), then elimination of most public funding of R&D is one of the steps you'll need to take.
It's just that you're operating under assumption that technology development is the most important thing.
[...]
but now I believe health and sanity are primary
Suit yourself. I'll just note a couple of things. First, the risks discussed here are local and no more extreme than the safety requirements of a typical machine shop. Second, we don't need to have a majority of people on board in order to do interesting things with technology or to remove most risks to third parties which might come from developing or using this technology.
Third, there seems to be a cottage industry for finding imaginary risks. It's not particularly useful to me to read scare stories which don't bother to evaluate or discuss the risks, but merely hype up a possible risk.
What's "it"? They couldn't be researching lighting because they hadn't discovered neon yet?
It was all the sort of idle curiosity that would likely get the axe in favor of working on more practical probklems like boosting the output of a steam engine.
I see no "idle" curiosity here. And the steam engine led directly to thermodynamics. Practical problems have always led to less mundane stuff.
As for the pile, An experiment that produced something that can be used for more experiments? Where's the ROI in that?
Significant resources go into these experiments. Enabling new experiments or making current experiments more effective is a return.
Surely the Wrights should have been working on something that stood a chance of success?/quote>
And they did work on something that stood a chance of success, especially since it did succeed. It's worth noting that they applied the research technologies of the day, such as building a wind tunnel to reduce the cost of their experimentation.
There's a long history of idle experimentation for experimentation's sake.
All I see is a history of certain people mischaracterizing hard work and effort as "idle experimentation". And that mischaracterization seems to be solely intended to justify poorly thought out and dreadfully wasteful public funding of scientific research today.
Unfortunately, block-buster movies, second-tier weapons, and computer technology are owned by the USA.
Even if that were true, so what? Arbitrary and frivolous US sanctions against allies for protecting asylum seekers would be an excellent opportunity to fix that sort of thing.
Cut off a few percent of food exports to China and the place will explode in food riots.
Or they'll buy food from the numerous other countries that sell it. It might just be my unique, Slashdot-certified insight into reality, but I think buying cheap food remains a better approach than the food riots.
No, I'm applying what they knew at the time. Computers or the electric grid infrastructure are after all much stronger arguments for researching electromagnetism than glowing glass containers. But they didn't know about those things.
For example, the Crookes tube gave off a tiny bit of greenish light.
And? You're trying to tell me that they wouldn't be interested in a much brighter light source along those lines? There was already a great deal of research into electricity-based lighting by this point.
Volta's pile was a primary battery and a handy source of DC current...if there had been any technology at the time that used electricity that might have been really cool.
Handy source of DC current for ongoing experiments? Why that's useful!
So what was the apparent ROI of the Crookes tube before the X-ray was discovered?
A light source. The neon tube is derived from this angle on the research.
Or all that goofing around with radium?
Discovery of new elements often leads to a variety of new alloys with new properties. And once radium was discovered, it's luminescence turned out to be of considerable practical value, being used for instruments used in darkness such as watches, dials on submarines, etc.
All those loons who thought they could build a flying machine?
Easiest of the lot. Getting from point A to point B faster has considerable economic value. Flying also has game-changing military value for reconnaissance.
I doubt very much that Volta could have suggested a likely ROI on his piles nor Ãrsted for his research.
Did we ask for an accurate ROI estimate for this research or a payoff next quarter? NO. Volta discovered ways to store energy, which are useful in their own right and the discovery of simple mathematical rules for capacitors which saved considerable effort in determining the use of such devices. Saving physicists' time is near future value.
Orsted's work was notable in that it tied electricity and magnetism. The latter had applications such as navigation (the magnetic compass) and some ability to move physical objects (this eventually would become the electric engine which was developed during the latter part of Orsted's life).
If every research endeavor had to be measured against an expected ROI, we'd still be grunting in a cave.
They were and we are. Modern buildings are just the latest high tech cave.
I think people forget how valuable scientific research has always been. They didn't do this research for entertainment or a vague sense of accomplishment, but because it changed the world in their time - both their understanding of it and their capabilities in that world.
That's not to say that some research isn't throwing way too much money at nothing, but we want to be careful not to get too stingy unless we want to be seen as a dark age by future generations.
I trust that future generations and their goofy opinions can take care of themselves. My view is that like any other human endeavor, when you separate the funding of research from any feedback on the success of that research (such as evaluating the near future ROI of that research), then you will end up with mostly useless research. I think big science projects already suffer from that effect, such as the Internation Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor or the International Space Station, whose funding is way out of line with what they're trying to do.
Suppose those nanoparticles acts as a catalyst for some dreadful consequences to show in 10 years in the future. If it happens to be so, how can anyone show a need for protection from them now?
Well, we'll know in ten years (or actually much less since these devices have been around for some time). But this is a case of arguing from ignorance. We can't know that the particular combination of things we do today won't kill us in 10 years.
But ask yourself, why did some people -- scientists, nonetheless -- even raise the possibility of danger?
I think it's a psychological thing. Some people are naturally risk adverse about unknown things that they are made aware of. I think such an outlook is a poor fit for technology development.
I think it's pointless to be cautionary about something merely because we're somewhat ignorant of relevant details. A reasonable response is to ask how much of this sort of thing are we currently exposed to? For example, terrestrial dust contains glass fragments known to be as small as 2000 nanometers. So there's exposure to nanoparticles in our current environment.
Second, as I keep saying, there's no consideration of concentration or toxicity.
Trickle-down economic policies don't work, but they do work when you don't implement them???
It's a well known aspect of designing in engineering. I'm used to the phenomenon in space industry. For example, the Ares I rocket (which was part of the mid 2000s NASA program called Constellation) was determined to be the best possible approach. They even cheated on some of the criteria in order that the correct choice be chosen.
Nine billion dollars and one launch of a stunted prototype later, they dropped the whole thing. The paper rocket flew great, the real rocket not at all.
While the original poster may have some other idea in mind when he typed those words, my experience has been that ideas unblemished by any exposure to the real world work great.
Indeed, you only need to cancel 5110 HAARP programs to cover the Afghanistan costs.
That's not many HAARP programs I see. I bet there's a lot more than that out in number and funding. They might not be scientifically themed, but they all have most of the same excuses. And most of those thousands of programs like HAARP have the consequence of protecting a lot of funding. It secures votes for the status quo. It creates a dependency on government funding.
Sure, researchers narrow their projects when funding is tight, but do those narrowed projects ultimately have the same ROI or do we just end up with a few inexpensive projects that provide low returns while missing out on the big win from left field?
My take is that they have a better ROI than when they enough funding that they don't narrow the scope of their projects.
If you pick projects based on your estimate of their return, you necessarily pick projects where we already know a lot since you can't estimate the return on an unknown.
Well, that's how we do all human endeavors. And I see no evidence that this approach is at all suboptimal. After all, you're just as likely to hit that unknown benefit with a conservative course of action as well as a more adventurous one.
So we get pills that grow peach fuzz on your head but no blockbuster antibiotics for example.
Experience has shown that the peach fuzz is harder than the blockbuster antibotics.
That is an example of the saying "an accountant is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing".
Except that we're speaking of scientists and knowledgeable laymen who do happen to know the value of a lot of relevant things.
Designing for safe shutdown and containment in case of a natural disaster is very much within the scope of nuclear engineering. A reactor isn't supposed to fail in this way even during a natural disaster
The Fukushima reactors were designed to fail in the way that they did. The whole point of encasing that reactor in a lot of concrete was to contain an uncontrolled meltdown. That negates the conclusion that something must have gone wrong on the human side.
There is a good argument to make here that the design had long been obsolete because Japanese society's tolerance for the risk of meltdowns has gone down greatly over the years. But the design of the reactors and their dependence on active cooling was known for decades.
In this case, as far as I can gather, the plant's engineering relative to its design basis was solid, but the initially chosen design basis was too low, based on significant underestimates of what a worst-case storm surge would look like. That was apparently discovered some years ago as storm-surge estimates improved, but the plant was not upgraded or replaced, for some mixture of regulatory/financial/etc. reasons.
That doesn't mean anything went wrong just because there were "reasons". After all, the plant was scheduled to be decommissioned. Why apply costly upgrades to a plant that will be decommissioned shortly? Even when it's life was extended a few years ago, it was still with the understanding that it would be decommissioned after that point.
The most well known mistakes for TEPCO and its regulators were the placement of generators and important electrical conduits on lower elevation areas that were flooded, not decommissioning Fukushima, and some slip ups during the emergency (particularly letting the fuel rod pool for reactor 4 dry out and its fuel rods to overheat). Some of these mistakes were foreseeable. But I think it's foolish to go from these mistakes to the story that malfeasance was responsible.
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Your poor kids are going to be woefully inept socially.
Compared to the zoo that is public education? You really need to rethink that.
The real world consists of a lot more people than a few kids in a particular, very narrow, age bracket. Where are those kids going to get experience with dealing with people who aren't like themselves? I learned that originally though my church (at the time, my family went to a Methodist Church), some music performance groups (orchestra and hand bells), and holding burger-flipping jobs.
The problem is you have a bunch of carpet apes in their own little world. No interaction with grown ups outside of the teacher/student thing means a bunch of young adults poorly prepared socially for dealing with the rest of the world. Colleges don't help much especially with the weird indoctrination stuff that often goes on.
I don't see home schooling being better here. But neither do I see it being worse.
YOU argued that CEOs faced plenty of liability and so, risk. Now you argue the opposite.
The two statements require some explanation, but they're not contradictory. For example, tax evasion, sexual harassment, and Sabanes-Oxley compliance are all significant risks for a CEO. Running a company into the ground can be, if the CEO owns a significant piece of the company or committed illegal acts/violations of regulatory law, but it otherwise isn't.
A huge part of the problem here is CEOs who have incentives greatly disengaged from the long term future of the business. That in turn is driven by institutional holders who don't have an interest in the long term future of the business either.
To summarize, my point here has been that the incentives (mostly in the form of "moral hazard" and "tragedy of the commons") in today's developed world societies are all wrong, if you want to reward foresight and long term planning. Further, a lot of proposed solutions just make the problems worse. They might be justifiable on other grounds, but not on the basis that they help with the future planning issue. For example, it seems counterproductive to me to appoint the notably ignorant US Congress to fund scientific projects because US businesses and other private groups can't be bothered under the current conditions to fund such things to the degree one would like.
I also will briefly mention that I still think economics applies to R&D. After all the goal is to discover and create things and ideas of value, even if they should happen to have a hypothetical value centuries down the road. If you want to do more of that and do it more effectively, you need to treat the problem economically. That means among other things actually evaluating the likely value of scientific endeavors rather than just writing a check for them because they're "science". As I originally noted, even the scientists in question pick and choose what to study when they don't have unlimited resources at their disposal.
Finally, I'll just talk a little about why I came to have these views. I have a strong interest in space development including related activities like space science. Frequently, when I discussed some of the economic choices that were available (for example, replacing expensive Shuttle launches with less expensive Delta IV Heavy launches or launching multiple probes at a time instead of one or two), I ran across a certain kind of argument. Namely, that there was no object to money spent on science. They didn't seem to care that space science was being done in very costly ways.
My rebuttal has always been the same. Would you still support space science, if all that money had to run through my fingers first? I only charge a 90% fee for my premium services so you're getting about as good a deal as if you were to use normal public funding routes (an order of magnitude rise in cost is typical for US publicly funded research over the private version).
I read below that there's a name collision with the acronym "AAAS".
Let's be honest... if you've been doing the job for many years, it's clear a college education isn't necessary to keep doing your job.
If we're going to be "honest", then I need to point out that she was fired because she lied about something material to her employment at AAAS.
This is the reality of the wealth inequity in America. The conservatives have hated public education since it was first introduced in the 1800s... and they've finally managed to find a way to destroy the American dream: Without higher education, there's no upward mobility. Without that, there's no middle class. It's game over.
So conservatives are responsible for federal subsidized student loans - which are the driver for higher education inflation in the US of the past few decades? Do tell.
You have a funny view of risk. Name a CEO that ended up in poverty (Actual poverty, not forced early retirement into an upper middle class lifestyle where they still don't have to give a damn what a gallon of milk costs) after running a corporation into the ground.
Why would they be risking poverty after running a business into the ground? You mentioned earlier that doing so was actually profitable for the CEO in question. So why would a successful businessperson end up in poverty? I wasn't claiming that running a business into the ground was risky, but rather that society had created a bunch of incentives to ignore future risk.
As for the corporate raiders, mostly they pocketed the gains for themselves and left the stock holders (at least the ones who didn't get out before the music stopped) and the employees holding the bag. Remember the Wall street adoration of Chainsaw Al? Turns out he was a crook.
Chainsaw Al wasn't a corporate raider. He was brought in by the businesses to downsize them and aggressively cut the unprofitable parts of the operation. A corporate raider might do similar things, but generally in opposition to current leadership at the business.
As for stock holding, the liquidity of the market is all about limiting the risk. If a company starts to go south due to failure to plan for survival beyond the quarterly report, you can dump it in a flash. Make it take days to unload a major position and make it expensive and you'll see investors become intensely interested in a company's long term prospects and planning.
These sorts of traders are the main prey of high frequency traders. Anyone who dumps a huge stake in a company "in a flash" is going to lose a lot of money.
Meanwhile, most of the respected scientists we learn about in school were financially independent enough that they had ample free time to fill somehow. They were not for the most part lower or middle class. They had no need to worry about the rent or where the food would come from next month (or year) and so they had time for intellectual pursuits. If you want to expand discovery, expand the pool of people who have time to pursue their intellectual curiosity and can afford a deferred payoff.
There's plenty of that opportunity in today's societies as it is. I don't see the need for a basic income.
Corporations are all about limiting risk and liability. They allow the people in charge to make high value short term moves secure in the knowledge that they can deploy their golden parachute before it all comes crashing down. The old stable corporations started crashing when day trading became more interesting than long term holding and the rise or the corporate raider.
You don't have correlation here, much less cause and effect. As to day trading and corporate raiders, they have value. Corporate raiders help break down businesses that have become stagnant and are worth more in pieces than they are whole. Day traders merely are small scale market makers, adding liquidity to markets.
Give the CEO and the board some actual liability and make holding stock more risky so that investors want to see a steady course and these problems will start to clear up.
CEO and the board do have actual liability so there's no point in complaining about its absence. And holding stock is risky. You're last in line for bankruptcies. Here, what I think is going on is that a huge portion of the stock of publicly traded corporations is held by institutions acting as proxies for the actual shareholders. As a result, the control of the corporation has become divorced from the ownership (and risk) of the corporation (since the interests of those institutions is at best weakly connected to the interests of the individual shareholders).
And that dynamic has been driven by a vast flood of capital from pensioners (and in the US IRA and 401k holders). Societal attempts to reduce future risk have backfired to some degre.
The basic income allows people to actually make a long term plan rather than sweating next month's rent or will they get a pink slip for Christmas. It gives curious minds an opportunity to experiment and discover, much like Volta or RÃntgen. There is a such thing as too much risk.
You do have a valid point. But I have to say that I don't see evidence that in the developed world scientists would be making so little that they would have to be that concerned about survival. When R&D is done well and in a valuable area, it's a valuable thing that people are willing to pay a lot for. It seems to me that there's more issues with access to capital, but again that's something that the private world is better at than government.
Natural disaster? No such thing.. It was a natural event that became a disaster due to lack of foresight and the decision to take a gamble that didn't quite pan out. Disaster, like beauty, is in the eye...
There isn't enough foresight to eliminate disaster. It's lack will always be with us. If on the other hand, you were to say that insufficient efforts were made to anticipate and reduce the occurrence and harm of disaster, then you'd have a valid point to make.
I still would defend the actions of TEPCO and the Japanese government, because I think it's vastly difficult to anticipate such things. And because we best learn by experience. Hypothetical risks are treated differently than demonstrated risks.
Your entire post can be summed up in one word:
Projection.
The reason short term management has gained so much traction is simply because that is what creates the most profit for the CEO and his in group now and they don't really give a damn about the people whose retirement is in hedge funds anyway so long as they get theirs. That's why we have seen so many large and apparently stable for decades corporations flame out.
Why did large and apparently stable corporations start flaming out? Why is short term management so profitable now when it wasn't when those large and apparently stable corporations were created? Well, I think I got the reason why - moral hazard from society's mitigation of future risk.
The corporate world has never been particularly good at basic research of the type that eventually pays off in huge ways.
Compared to who? And all I can say is that when one actually looks at the history of research, business-side research has been very productive. And it's also funded some very productive non profit research as well.
Bell labs is sort-of an exception
I can think of several companies off the top of my head that ran comparable research institutions: Xerox, Lockheed, Du Pont, IBM, General Electric, and Hewlett Packard.
It's always been mostly individuals (occasionally with funding from universities or other patrons) that has done that.
It's not like there's any non-individuals in science (unless we develop some sort of gesalt mind or the like). So it's always been individuals, maybe a lot of individuals working cooperatively.
Also, I have nothing against private funding of science basic or otherwise. That is a big way that businesses can fund science and it works pretty well.
If we want to get advancements and long term thinking back on track, we should phase out corporate charters all together and implement the basic income.
There's no benefit to phasing out corporations. They fill an important niche - people who want to invest in a business, but don't have the time or skills to own and run a business. And I don't see the connection between ending corporations and somehow regaining long term thinking. It doesn't follow.
As to the "basic income", it reduces future risk and hence introduces some degree of short term thinking as a moral hazard. There may be plenty of good reasons for doing so. But implementing such a thing for the purpose of encouraging long term thinking is counterproductive.
I have an alternative here. Drop most public funding of research (aside from the usual areas of national need). Maybe compensate for the near future turmoil with tax subsidies on research either in a business or as a donation to an appropriate non profit. Any business which does productive research gets a bigger edge than they'd have today.
In other words the moment the facility was operating with any chance of exceeding its design basis it should have been left shut down.
And that's exactly what happened. Also, how large a chance is "any chance"? There's always a chance that a large asteroid will crater a nuclear plant, for example.
Another first world Problem.
The 2009 flu happened to kill more third world people as a fraction of people infected. Any actual pandemic of considerable lethality would likely do the same. But then maybe caring whether people live or die is a first world problem.
I'm not.
That's why I don't use the word, greedy. It's just a negative connotation word for a class of interest. You might not be overly concerned with furthering your own interests, but that doesn't mean that you don't have interests which can cause just as much harm as greed can.
Perhaps we've finally reached the stage that what's natural for the individual isn't healthy for the society, and vice versa.
For example, this sentence indicates the possibility of unhealthy interests. What has changed so that individual interests are more unhealthy for society now than they've been in the past? I don't see it at all.
Instead, I see the opposite. In prehistoric times, tribes needed a great deal of cooperation from their members. Someone not pulling their load could kill other members of the tribe. That's no longer true. Now, we can pursue radically different beliefs or goals without causing a great deal of harm (unless, of course, the beliefs or goals are inherently harmful, like killing members of ethnic groups you dislike).
What I see nowadays is a society-level tendency to create public goods with the resulting tragedy of commons exploitation by the public, and then trying to stamp out this manifestation of individual self-interest rather than fixing or removing the public good that led to the problem in the first place.
Those people seem to have all sorts of problems with natural individual behavior. But those who anticipate human nature and account for that in their schemes don't have that kind of problem.
What's of concern is that there's a new player at the table: human activity.
Ok, so it's a "concern". I imagine some future historians will be interested in all the word games and rationalizations that pro-AGW advocates have used over the years.
And whether it's altering climate fast enough to damage human life. And possibly render species extinct at a rate not seen in 65 million years.
Let's note two things. First, there are basic behavior and structural changes that can be made right now which would greatly mitigate the alleged effects of AGW, even if we never do anything about AGW itself. For example, if the US stops subsidizing the construction of property in flood-prone areas via public flood insurance. Or if we connect natural areas with wilderness corridors (and otherwise worked on reducing habitat destruction) so that plants and animals have means to migrate and adapt to whatever future changes happen.
Second, when we compare measurements of modern extinction rates to prehistorical mass extinctions, we're comparing apples and oranges. The vast majority of modern species have limited scope spatially and temporally. If they had existed during the end of the Cretaceous, they probably would never have left a fossil record. We see far more of the species that exist in the world now than if we were to look only at the fossil record 65 million years from now.
So when discussing extinction rates and percentages, we need to remember that relatively common and long lasting species with durable body parts would be most likely to be present in the fossil record. The frog that appears around a single waterfall or stream or the bird that nests only on a particular island would most likely be lost forever. So those mass extinctions of the past were of organisms that were typically more prevalent and long lasting than most of the species we see around us today. The mass extinctions of the past are worse than they appear, because we will never know of most of the species that existed back then.
Further, we need to recall that most of the die-off of large animals, a traditional feature of mass extinctions, has already happened. A lot of species present 20,000 years ago have since died out or dwindled greatly in population. That may have had something to do with the global warming following the end of the glacial period, but it more likely had to do with overhunting by humans. And it's a fait accompli. Even a complete reversal of the effects of human activity (not just of AGW effects) won't bring back many of those species.
The fact is, nobody considered the Crookes tube as a light source. I don't consider the types of experimentation I discussed as not a lot of work, but they are exactly the sorts of things that would get the axe in today's penny wise and pound foolish management style.
I wouldn't characterize that as a fact, but rather as an opinion.
As to today's "foolish management style", why do you think that even gets traction? If there really is as big a payoff for R&D as supporters claim, then why don't business succeed more often at it? As you and others have mentioned, the myth is that research somehow doesn't have much of a payoff to the business world, something which was shown false in the industrial revolution. But since that isn't actually true, what can causing business to abandon R&D and embrace a short term management?
I think the answer is simple. Public funding of R&D has turned it into a public good which anyone, no matter how lazy or short sighted can use. Further, there's not much point to a business, or individual researchers and engineers trying to do their own R&D unless they can somehow do better than the relatively well funded public R&D can do. Similarly, private donations to R&D usually go to stuff that isn't publicly funded for whatever reasons. Most people want such donations to make a difference, not disappear into obscurity eclipsed by far more well funding public efforts.
Developed world society has worked fairly hard to remove future risks to businesses and individuals. This has resulted in a typical moral hazard - short term thinking is now rewarded much more than it used to be. And I think a key part of that risk cocoon is public funding of R&D.
My take is that if you want businesses to think about the future again (which I think more important than the alleged value of publicly funded R&D), then elimination of most public funding of R&D is one of the steps you'll need to take.
It's just that you're operating under assumption that technology development is the most important thing.
[...]
but now I believe health and sanity are primary
Suit yourself. I'll just note a couple of things. First, the risks discussed here are local and no more extreme than the safety requirements of a typical machine shop. Second, we don't need to have a majority of people on board in order to do interesting things with technology or to remove most risks to third parties which might come from developing or using this technology.
Third, there seems to be a cottage industry for finding imaginary risks. It's not particularly useful to me to read scare stories which don't bother to evaluate or discuss the risks, but merely hype up a possible risk.
And that's it. Neon hadn't been isolated yet.
What's "it"? They couldn't be researching lighting because they hadn't discovered neon yet?
It was all the sort of idle curiosity that would likely get the axe in favor of working on more practical probklems like boosting the output of a steam engine.
I see no "idle" curiosity here. And the steam engine led directly to thermodynamics. Practical problems have always led to less mundane stuff.
As for the pile, An experiment that produced something that can be used for more experiments? Where's the ROI in that?
Significant resources go into these experiments. Enabling new experiments or making current experiments more effective is a return.
Surely the Wrights should have been working on something that stood a chance of success?/quote> And they did work on something that stood a chance of success, especially since it did succeed. It's worth noting that they applied the research technologies of the day, such as building a wind tunnel to reduce the cost of their experimentation.
There's a long history of idle experimentation for experimentation's sake.
All I see is a history of certain people mischaracterizing hard work and effort as "idle experimentation". And that mischaracterization seems to be solely intended to justify poorly thought out and dreadfully wasteful public funding of scientific research today.
Unfortunately, block-buster movies, second-tier weapons, and computer technology are owned by the USA.
Even if that were true, so what? Arbitrary and frivolous US sanctions against allies for protecting asylum seekers would be an excellent opportunity to fix that sort of thing.
Cut off a few percent of food exports to China and the place will explode in food riots.
Or they'll buy food from the numerous other countries that sell it. It might just be my unique, Slashdot-certified insight into reality, but I think buying cheap food remains a better approach than the food riots.
You are applying your hindsight.
No, I'm applying what they knew at the time. Computers or the electric grid infrastructure are after all much stronger arguments for researching electromagnetism than glowing glass containers. But they didn't know about those things.
For example, the Crookes tube gave off a tiny bit of greenish light.
And? You're trying to tell me that they wouldn't be interested in a much brighter light source along those lines? There was already a great deal of research into electricity-based lighting by this point.
Volta's pile was a primary battery and a handy source of DC current...if there had been any technology at the time that used electricity that might have been really cool.
Handy source of DC current for ongoing experiments? Why that's useful!
So what was the apparent ROI of the Crookes tube before the X-ray was discovered?
A light source. The neon tube is derived from this angle on the research.
Or all that goofing around with radium?
Discovery of new elements often leads to a variety of new alloys with new properties. And once radium was discovered, it's luminescence turned out to be of considerable practical value, being used for instruments used in darkness such as watches, dials on submarines, etc.
All those loons who thought they could build a flying machine?
Easiest of the lot. Getting from point A to point B faster has considerable economic value. Flying also has game-changing military value for reconnaissance.
I doubt very much that Volta could have suggested a likely ROI on his piles nor Ãrsted for his research.
Did we ask for an accurate ROI estimate for this research or a payoff next quarter? NO. Volta discovered ways to store energy, which are useful in their own right and the discovery of simple mathematical rules for capacitors which saved considerable effort in determining the use of such devices. Saving physicists' time is near future value.
Orsted's work was notable in that it tied electricity and magnetism. The latter had applications such as navigation (the magnetic compass) and some ability to move physical objects (this eventually would become the electric engine which was developed during the latter part of Orsted's life).
If every research endeavor had to be measured against an expected ROI, we'd still be grunting in a cave.
They were and we are. Modern buildings are just the latest high tech cave.
I think people forget how valuable scientific research has always been. They didn't do this research for entertainment or a vague sense of accomplishment, but because it changed the world in their time - both their understanding of it and their capabilities in that world.
That's not to say that some research isn't throwing way too much money at nothing, but we want to be careful not to get too stingy unless we want to be seen as a dark age by future generations.
I trust that future generations and their goofy opinions can take care of themselves. My view is that like any other human endeavor, when you separate the funding of research from any feedback on the success of that research (such as evaluating the near future ROI of that research), then you will end up with mostly useless research. I think big science projects already suffer from that effect, such as the Internation Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor or the International Space Station, whose funding is way out of line with what they're trying to do.
Suppose those nanoparticles acts as a catalyst for some dreadful consequences to show in 10 years in the future. If it happens to be so, how can anyone show a need for protection from them now?
Well, we'll know in ten years (or actually much less since these devices have been around for some time). But this is a case of arguing from ignorance. We can't know that the particular combination of things we do today won't kill us in 10 years.
But ask yourself, why did some people -- scientists, nonetheless -- even raise the possibility of danger?
I think it's a psychological thing. Some people are naturally risk adverse about unknown things that they are made aware of. I think such an outlook is a poor fit for technology development.
I think it's pointless to be cautionary about something merely because we're somewhat ignorant of relevant details. A reasonable response is to ask how much of this sort of thing are we currently exposed to? For example, terrestrial dust contains glass fragments known to be as small as 2000 nanometers. So there's exposure to nanoparticles in our current environment.
Second, as I keep saying, there's no consideration of concentration or toxicity.
Trickle-down economic policies don't work, but they do work when you don't implement them???
It's a well known aspect of designing in engineering. I'm used to the phenomenon in space industry. For example, the Ares I rocket (which was part of the mid 2000s NASA program called Constellation) was determined to be the best possible approach. They even cheated on some of the criteria in order that the correct choice be chosen.
Nine billion dollars and one launch of a stunted prototype later, they dropped the whole thing. The paper rocket flew great, the real rocket not at all.
While the original poster may have some other idea in mind when he typed those words, my experience has been that ideas unblemished by any exposure to the real world work great.
Indeed, you only need to cancel 5110 HAARP programs to cover the Afghanistan costs.
That's not many HAARP programs I see. I bet there's a lot more than that out in number and funding. They might not be scientifically themed, but they all have most of the same excuses. And most of those thousands of programs like HAARP have the consequence of protecting a lot of funding. It secures votes for the status quo. It creates a dependency on government funding.
Sure, researchers narrow their projects when funding is tight, but do those narrowed projects ultimately have the same ROI or do we just end up with a few inexpensive projects that provide low returns while missing out on the big win from left field?
My take is that they have a better ROI than when they enough funding that they don't narrow the scope of their projects.
If you pick projects based on your estimate of their return, you necessarily pick projects where we already know a lot since you can't estimate the return on an unknown.
Well, that's how we do all human endeavors. And I see no evidence that this approach is at all suboptimal. After all, you're just as likely to hit that unknown benefit with a conservative course of action as well as a more adventurous one.
So we get pills that grow peach fuzz on your head but no blockbuster antibiotics for example.
Experience has shown that the peach fuzz is harder than the blockbuster antibotics.
That is an example of the saying "an accountant is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing".
Except that we're speaking of scientists and knowledgeable laymen who do happen to know the value of a lot of relevant things.
Designing for safe shutdown and containment in case of a natural disaster is very much within the scope of nuclear engineering. A reactor isn't supposed to fail in this way even during a natural disaster
The Fukushima reactors were designed to fail in the way that they did. The whole point of encasing that reactor in a lot of concrete was to contain an uncontrolled meltdown. That negates the conclusion that something must have gone wrong on the human side.
There is a good argument to make here that the design had long been obsolete because Japanese society's tolerance for the risk of meltdowns has gone down greatly over the years. But the design of the reactors and their dependence on active cooling was known for decades.
In this case, as far as I can gather, the plant's engineering relative to its design basis was solid, but the initially chosen design basis was too low, based on significant underestimates of what a worst-case storm surge would look like. That was apparently discovered some years ago as storm-surge estimates improved, but the plant was not upgraded or replaced, for some mixture of regulatory/financial/etc. reasons.
That doesn't mean anything went wrong just because there were "reasons". After all, the plant was scheduled to be decommissioned. Why apply costly upgrades to a plant that will be decommissioned shortly? Even when it's life was extended a few years ago, it was still with the understanding that it would be decommissioned after that point.
The most well known mistakes for TEPCO and its regulators were the placement of generators and important electrical conduits on lower elevation areas that were flooded, not decommissioning Fukushima, and some slip ups during the emergency (particularly letting the fuel rod pool for reactor 4 dry out and its fuel rods to overheat). Some of these mistakes were foreseeable. But I think it's foolish to go from these mistakes to the story that malfeasance was responsible.