Having done it for a number of years, I'd have to disagree. There's a huge difference between having simple questions answered in minutes and answered in days or longer.
This isn't business. There are no bosses.
I had a boss, called a "research adviser", when I was doing my research. And I can't imagine what you think research is. Because you're ignoring both business-related research as well as research-oriented government organizations like CERN and NASA, which do have bosses. And classrooms, for that matter (the boss being the teacher). Hierarchical structures happen all the time in research just like they do in any other sufficiently populous human endeavor.
The French telecommunications network has been actually built by the government (as everywhere) and its operation has been privatised only recently (in the last decade).
Let me be a little more clear here. France's government didn't sponsor the telecommunication network. It got in the way. You don't see the vibrant telecommunication market that would have existed, if it weren't for the various monopolies (far from just being in France) that occupied that sector for so long.
Opportunity cost is most notable for being nearly invisible. It's hard to miss what you didn't know you could have had.
In a population, we have various groups (companies, governmental organisations, families, non-profits, teaching classes, fan clubs,...) and the "compete for market share and profit by selling a product/service" model only really describes one of them well.
Which one? I see three up there, companies, governmental organizations, and non profits that have to do that. Fan clubs and teaching classes have to do at least a modest degree of that, or they lose membership.
The thing about so-called "company metrics" is that most of the metrics are near universal and apply to a wide variety of groups. Basically, if you spend money for a reason, through careful choices can spend that money in a more useful way, and have a significant enough organization or possible benefits that the effort is worthwhile, then you can benefit from many of these metrics.
The French telecommunications network has been actually built by the government (as everywhere) and its operation has been privatised only recently (in the last decade).
Sure. What you are saying is that the infrastructure is not sponsored by France now (which is what I stated) but was at one time.
The inability to verify a secret ballot is a feature, not a bug.
Until, your vote is not counted as you intend. Then it becomes a bug.
How about this approach? You case a vote. At that time, a cryptographically strong hash of your vote is made and printed out as a receipt. The raw data of your vote remains with a special ID generated at the time of the vote and tied to that receipt.
You can query against the data base to generate your hash. If that hash changes, then possibly your vote changed as well. Or a vote tabulator can query against the data base to get how many votes for each candidate.
But the act of tying a particular vote to particular voters, would require both the receipt and access to the raw data of the database. Similarly, changing the vote tabulation without being caught would require either creating phantom voters or getting hold of those receipts and then changing the vote associated with the receipts you obtain. Neither is impossible, but beyond the reach of much of the would-be vote manipulators out there.
Sure they are both have people behind them at some point, and those are made of atoms, but that doesn't imply that we can (or at least should) apply company metrics to governments.
The "can and should" are implied by us wanting our activities to be useful. It's worth remembering here that "company metrics" are really about doing things, for example, the generic activity of spending money. Since companies and governments do a lot of similar activities, the metrics apply just as well to either.
But as an aside, do you know of any country that has a wide broadband infrastructure not sponsored by the government?
France, for example. The label, "sponsoring" implies that the wide broadband infrastructure wouldn't be there without sponsorship. But France has both strong private providers and a decent customer base, willing to pay. That's what you need.
I read through this thread and came across this gem of mendacity you wrote earlier:
I've seen economists say that you can't buy an annuity on the free market that would give you as good a return as Social Security.
It's one of those things that the government can do more efficiently than private enterprise.
There's one word that describes what is happening here, "fraud". The US government is keeping tens of trillions of dollars of liability, just from Social Security, off the accounting books. That would be jail time for anyone doing the same thing in the private world.
Saying that a program is efficient merely because it gives away money, relatively efficiently, completely ignores the other aspects of the program such as: Can they keep doing that? No. Could US society be spending the money better by some other means than Social Security? Yes.
And why then can't you just go to your local university library to get access?
Even if it is free as in beer (and they aren't always free as in beer), it's not zero-cost. It can take days or longer to order an article via interlibrary loan. And you have to go to the library to pick it up. Spending the money then and there can get you the article in minutes, and answer promptly questions you might have rather than you having to say for several days: "Gee, boss, I don't know if this is relevant to our work or not. The article hasn't been faxed to the library yet." Speed isn't everything, but you can lose valuable time via the interlibrary approach.
Repeat after me: the government is not a company, it makes no sense to view it as a company. The government is not a company...
I think you don't get it. Companies are just groupings of people to achieve certain goals, just like a government. Sure, they aren't identical, but one would have to be rather foolish, such as you are in your post above, to fail to realize that the differences aren't that significant.
The government has a budget just like a company. It has very similar limits though being generally more power, the limits of a government can be stretched in various ways that a company is unable to do, such as consistently lose money until the heat death of the universe.
Notions like "competition" and "market" (and pricing, profit, etc..) make no sense at all, that's just economists (who have a lot of spotlight nowadays) superimposing their limited model on a much more general construct that has a different purpose from a company.
Nonsense. There's nothing in the definition of either "competition", "market", or many other economic terms that is somehow solely restricted to "companies". Economics has such a high profile in politics because at some point you need to prioritize and pay for what you do and what you want. That process of allocating resources to match desires is the heart of economics. It's something that applies to governments and societies, just as it does to the business.
Yes, economy is important, but the economy should be a tool of the government (and thus obviously in the service of the population), not vice versa (like the current USA).
Government should be another tool, just like a market. When it is elevated above that, then it becomes more important than the society it is attached to.
There is no point in having a free market by and in itself.
No one has a market for the sake of having a market. The point of markets is to expedite trade. So that sentence is pointless.
The problem of the USA is not "too much/little free market/competition/...", but a corrupt government that is owned by the economy. That last part should be fixed.
The problem is voters and ideologues who give away the store every time some shyster promises whatever they want to hear. Free high speed internet installed everywhere in the country? You got my vote!
If I were French, the first question I'd be asking is it really worth 20 billion euro to connect all of France via high speed broadband to the internet? Second, could we get the same result for less?
No offense, but I just don't see that much value to hooking up society completely to the internet. Plus anyone who really wants to get on the internet in a developed country can find a way. My take is that most of the value of the internet is already here. Making it a little faster on the user side or adding a few more users, just isn't that valuable.
Cost-wise, I gather you're spending something like a thousand euro per household to connect up. That seems rather pricey especially given that a good fraction of those households are already connected.
If we were in your fantasy "government isn't subject to the laws of economics", then we might as well spend as much as we can, to spread the wealth around. Why spend only a thousand euro for a barely adequate connection, when we could be spending a million euro for a really sweet connection and some hot hardware on the user side? It's just economics.
But since we're not in fantasy land, we have to remember that money could have been spent for other purposes or not spent at all! Even in the complete absence of any sort of government support, we will still have high speed broadband because that's what customers want and providers provide.
The greatest falsehood of our political debate is that the government can't do things more efficiently than private enterprise.
It'd help your argument, if the falsehood was actually false.
I've compared industries where the government was working side by side with private enterprises, and it was straightforward to compare the results. For example, in the electric industry, there are private, federal, state and locally-owned power generation plants. Everybody in the industry agrees on the standards to judge them -- basically the percentage of downtime and cost per kilowatt-hour. The federally-run power plants, like the Tennessee Valley Authority, were consistently at the top of the list. Some of the private plants were at the top, some of them were at the bottom. The government did a good job.
And if the TVA were playing on an even field, it'd be at the bottom of those lists. If I didn't have to follow a bunch of costly federal laws and had some large, cozy monopoly markets, I bet I'd be at the top of that list as well.
If you don't believe the government can do anything efficiently, then go out and look at the data, and see if it supports your hypothesis. When I look at the data, it doesn't.
One merely needs to look at your example to see that you aren't looking.
The major entitlement spending is for Medicare and Social Security. People are entitled to Medicare and Social Security because they paid for them all their lives.
We don't need to go any further. They are not so entitled. Keep in mind that the entitlement is larger than the amount put in and the amount put in was never invested in the first place by the politicians who those "people" above appointed to oversee this process.
Fundamentally, we're being asked to honor a con job. Too bad we don't have to. Unadjusted inflation will take care of the problem.
I already explained why it can be. 2 million euro is getting spent per alleged job created. You're probably looking at 50 or so jobs (today or some point in the future) ended for each of those jobs created. That's why it's such an awful selling point.
The infrastructure improvement is the obvious good here. I don't disagree with that. My point as described with my "Great Flood" example, is that stating the number of jobs created has gone to embarrassing places.
So that's what the "NBN" is. As to the rest of your post, it's fairy tale material. I wasn't commenting on nor do I care how France plans to spend its money. I just pointed out the silliness of spending vast amounts of money and then bothering to add as a selling point that it creates a minuscule number of jobs.
I don't know where the claim of 10,000 jobs created came from. Perhaps it was just the overactive imagination of the submitter. But given that the figure is 2 million euro per alleged job created which is a ridiculous figure should job creation have been any sort of priority, it seems incredibly stupid to try to make that a selling point of the scheme.
Consider for example, the global flood that is the main point of drama in the classic story of Noah's Ark. It kills almost everyone and everything; it cleanses the world of sin for a time; and it creates 8 high value jobs!
No. Merely a correct observation. Read the Geneva Conventions sometime and see what protections they offer to military forces who don't play by the rules.
Most businesses fail. So there is your 50/50 odds of pissing away all that money.
But at least you've learned something useful about running a business. And there's always the chance you succeed. With some college choices, you can lose a lot of money without getting anything of value (such as an education or a degree).
I think we need more tracking in highschool. To set people up for their path. Either meaningful college, tech schools, or straight to the workforce.
Hmmm, this actually puts your comments in a different light. But I still would point out that a high school graduate could be wealthy enough and smart enough to go to college, but that would still not be the best choice for them.
If you have an average US highschool grad who can afford to go to college, wouldn't you tell him to go get a degree? It's a real downer to accept that, even though you were smart enough and had enough money, that you probably shouldn't even try to get a good life. That you should lie down and accept a blue-collar job of hard work and a shitty retirement when you're too old to break your back every morning. There's a big push to be successful. That's normal. And success is pretty much defined as getting a good job, by having a good degree.
I don't get this sort of post. What if your arm became infected and I gave you medical advice that would lose you your arm? Would you still do it just because I was so earnest about my advice and how it was going to save your arm? Or would you prudently ignore me?
I feel here that you are giving bad advice. A high school grad capable of affording to go to college could afford to do other things as well, such as a start a business or a family. Further, the right blue collar job can pay better than what the college degree can buy. It's foolish to advise something that can harm a person for the rest of their lives.
People should be aware that there are other options (including working that blue collar job) than borrowing a lot of money to get a college degree of dubious value. It may turn out that getting the degree might well be the best choice, but it's no longer the obvious choice it might have been way back when in the 60s.
Then why are they done? Because the Geneva Conventions still matter. It's worth noting that several of these don't actually contradict the Geneva Conventions because the enemies in question (the "unlawful combatants") aren't adhering to the Geneva Conventions and hence, lose a lot of the protections that would normally be granted by the Conventions.
So you're suggesting we take screaming hot exhaust gas from coal plants and chill it to -109.3F or -78.5C to separate the CO2 as a solid?
Yes. You can get it to freeze below -56 C, BTW at a pressure of about 5 atmospheres (that's roughly where the triple point is). Removing heat (especially since that is the whole reason for burning/reacting the coal in the first place) is just not that hard.
and just considering getting the CO2 to sublimate would take 571 kJ/kg or 35904 GJ/day. a Ton-equivalent of coal is 29.3076 GJ, so you'd be burning 1225 tons of coal a day just to take -78.5C CO2 to -78.5C dry ice.
You missed a sign there. That's an exothermic transition. Turning that dry ice back into a gas does take a lot of energy, but that can be extracted directly from the atmosphere or other normal heat reservoir rather than burning coal.
If government spends money efficiently only on good things, then sure you have a point. It doesn't. At this point, I habitually divide reported costs by ten to estimate the actual cost of publicly funded research projects in the US. Sometimes even that is still too high. But since research is generally considered to generate the "highest returns", I doubt enough people will look closely at research efficiency until the money dries up due to fiscal issues.
We were furthermore told that we were responsible for maintenance and replacement if lost.
This is a classic public funding move. Put a ton of money into buying some hardware or infrastructure, but don't allocate a cent for maintenance or replacement.
Except that cutting spending now is like applying leeches to a sick patient. You cut spending when the economy is healthy to promote action by the private sector. You increase spending when the economy is unhealthy to backstop the potential for long term unemployment, which can ruin entire generations. An across-the-board spending cut to almost any government agency will do far more harm than good, but research--because it draws so heavily on international talent--is the most vulnerable.
Ignoring that the leech trick actually does work under certain circumstances, it's worth noting here that the economy probably has the potential to do better than it currently is even under the current legal and political environment, but a lot of what's holding it back is precisely the sort of thing that we're proposing to cut.
Maybe cutting welfare for scientists isn't the best choice for first round budget trimming, but that budget does have to go down at some point. Else, you get in the situation where no one will lend money to the US government at nice rates and the science stopped being funded at that point.
So as far as I can tell, you are just conjecturing that these departments will "cut the wrong things", that they have never actually been forced to cut before.
I have to agree with JaredOfEuropa. It's a classic move. To give an example related to what you mentioned earlier, NASA has on occasion threatened to cut more important or high profile programs in order to save their funding. For example, they've threatened to end Hubble Space Telescope on more than one occasion.
It's worth noting that all this discomfort only results in a drop of $85 billion. In part, that is because mandatory spending, which is something like 60% of the budget, isn't affected.
Still, looking at the list, there's a number of worthy budget cuts, such as the oversized federal law enforcement, small business loans, and various "government service" rent seeking. And one really has a hard time arguing against a 13% cut back in defense spending.
As I see it, the problem with sequestering isn't that it cuts government services, but that by its nature it can't target less effective spending or any mandatory spending at all.
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You clearly don't understand how research works.
Having done it for a number of years, I'd have to disagree. There's a huge difference between having simple questions answered in minutes and answered in days or longer.
This isn't business. There are no bosses.
I had a boss, called a "research adviser", when I was doing my research. And I can't imagine what you think research is. Because you're ignoring both business-related research as well as research-oriented government organizations like CERN and NASA, which do have bosses. And classrooms, for that matter (the boss being the teacher). Hierarchical structures happen all the time in research just like they do in any other sufficiently populous human endeavor.
The French telecommunications network has been actually built by the government (as everywhere) and its operation has been privatised only recently (in the last decade).
Let me be a little more clear here. France's government didn't sponsor the telecommunication network. It got in the way. You don't see the vibrant telecommunication market that would have existed, if it weren't for the various monopolies (far from just being in France) that occupied that sector for so long.
Opportunity cost is most notable for being nearly invisible. It's hard to miss what you didn't know you could have had.
In a population, we have various groups (companies, governmental organisations, families, non-profits, teaching classes, fan clubs, ...) and the "compete for market share and profit by selling a product/service" model only really describes one of them well.
Which one? I see three up there, companies, governmental organizations, and non profits that have to do that. Fan clubs and teaching classes have to do at least a modest degree of that, or they lose membership.
The thing about so-called "company metrics" is that most of the metrics are near universal and apply to a wide variety of groups. Basically, if you spend money for a reason, through careful choices can spend that money in a more useful way, and have a significant enough organization or possible benefits that the effort is worthwhile, then you can benefit from many of these metrics.
The French telecommunications network has been actually built by the government (as everywhere) and its operation has been privatised only recently (in the last decade).
Sure. What you are saying is that the infrastructure is not sponsored by France now (which is what I stated) but was at one time.
The problem with your approach is that it works right up until someone, sometime, learns the private key
There's no private key with a cryptographic hash. Well, unless someone back-doored it in the first place.
The inability to verify a secret ballot is a feature, not a bug.
Until, your vote is not counted as you intend. Then it becomes a bug.
How about this approach? You case a vote. At that time, a cryptographically strong hash of your vote is made and printed out as a receipt. The raw data of your vote remains with a special ID generated at the time of the vote and tied to that receipt.
You can query against the data base to generate your hash. If that hash changes, then possibly your vote changed as well. Or a vote tabulator can query against the data base to get how many votes for each candidate.
But the act of tying a particular vote to particular voters, would require both the receipt and access to the raw data of the database. Similarly, changing the vote tabulation without being caught would require either creating phantom voters or getting hold of those receipts and then changing the vote associated with the receipts you obtain. Neither is impossible, but beyond the reach of much of the would-be vote manipulators out there.
Sure they are both have people behind them at some point, and those are made of atoms, but that doesn't imply that we can (or at least should) apply company metrics to governments.
The "can and should" are implied by us wanting our activities to be useful. It's worth remembering here that "company metrics" are really about doing things, for example, the generic activity of spending money. Since companies and governments do a lot of similar activities, the metrics apply just as well to either.
But as an aside, do you know of any country that has a wide broadband infrastructure not sponsored by the government?
France, for example. The label, "sponsoring" implies that the wide broadband infrastructure wouldn't be there without sponsorship. But France has both strong private providers and a decent customer base, willing to pay. That's what you need.
I've seen economists say that you can't buy an annuity on the free market that would give you as good a return as Social Security.
It's one of those things that the government can do more efficiently than private enterprise.
There's one word that describes what is happening here, "fraud". The US government is keeping tens of trillions of dollars of liability, just from Social Security, off the accounting books. That would be jail time for anyone doing the same thing in the private world.
Saying that a program is efficient merely because it gives away money, relatively efficiently, completely ignores the other aspects of the program such as: Can they keep doing that? No. Could US society be spending the money better by some other means than Social Security? Yes.
And why then can't you just go to your local university library to get access?
Even if it is free as in beer (and they aren't always free as in beer), it's not zero-cost. It can take days or longer to order an article via interlibrary loan. And you have to go to the library to pick it up. Spending the money then and there can get you the article in minutes, and answer promptly questions you might have rather than you having to say for several days: "Gee, boss, I don't know if this is relevant to our work or not. The article hasn't been faxed to the library yet." Speed isn't everything, but you can lose valuable time via the interlibrary approach.
Repeat after me: the government is not a company, it makes no sense to view it as a company. The government is not a company...
I think you don't get it. Companies are just groupings of people to achieve certain goals, just like a government. Sure, they aren't identical, but one would have to be rather foolish, such as you are in your post above, to fail to realize that the differences aren't that significant.
The government has a budget just like a company. It has very similar limits though being generally more power, the limits of a government can be stretched in various ways that a company is unable to do, such as consistently lose money until the heat death of the universe.
Notions like "competition" and "market" (and pricing, profit, etc..) make no sense at all, that's just economists (who have a lot of spotlight nowadays) superimposing their limited model on a much more general construct that has a different purpose from a company.
Nonsense. There's nothing in the definition of either "competition", "market", or many other economic terms that is somehow solely restricted to "companies". Economics has such a high profile in politics because at some point you need to prioritize and pay for what you do and what you want. That process of allocating resources to match desires is the heart of economics. It's something that applies to governments and societies, just as it does to the business.
Yes, economy is important, but the economy should be a tool of the government (and thus obviously in the service of the population), not vice versa (like the current USA).
Government should be another tool, just like a market. When it is elevated above that, then it becomes more important than the society it is attached to.
There is no point in having a free market by and in itself.
No one has a market for the sake of having a market. The point of markets is to expedite trade. So that sentence is pointless.
The problem of the USA is not "too much/little free market/competition/...", but a corrupt government that is owned by the economy. That last part should be fixed.
The problem is voters and ideologues who give away the store every time some shyster promises whatever they want to hear. Free high speed internet installed everywhere in the country? You got my vote!
If I were French, the first question I'd be asking is it really worth 20 billion euro to connect all of France via high speed broadband to the internet? Second, could we get the same result for less?
No offense, but I just don't see that much value to hooking up society completely to the internet. Plus anyone who really wants to get on the internet in a developed country can find a way. My take is that most of the value of the internet is already here. Making it a little faster on the user side or adding a few more users, just isn't that valuable.
Cost-wise, I gather you're spending something like a thousand euro per household to connect up. That seems rather pricey especially given that a good fraction of those households are already connected.
If we were in your fantasy "government isn't subject to the laws of economics", then we might as well spend as much as we can, to spread the wealth around. Why spend only a thousand euro for a barely adequate connection, when we could be spending a million euro for a really sweet connection and some hot hardware on the user side? It's just economics.
But since we're not in fantasy land, we have to remember that money could have been spent for other purposes or not spent at all! Even in the complete absence of any sort of government support, we will still have high speed broadband because that's what customers want and providers provide.
The greatest falsehood of our political debate is that the government can't do things more efficiently than private enterprise.
It'd help your argument, if the falsehood was actually false.
I've compared industries where the government was working side by side with private enterprises, and it was straightforward to compare the results. For example, in the electric industry, there are private, federal, state and locally-owned power generation plants. Everybody in the industry agrees on the standards to judge them -- basically the percentage of downtime and cost per kilowatt-hour. The federally-run power plants, like the Tennessee Valley Authority, were consistently at the top of the list. Some of the private plants were at the top, some of them were at the bottom. The government did a good job.
And if the TVA were playing on an even field, it'd be at the bottom of those lists. If I didn't have to follow a bunch of costly federal laws and had some large, cozy monopoly markets, I bet I'd be at the top of that list as well.
If you don't believe the government can do anything efficiently, then go out and look at the data, and see if it supports your hypothesis. When I look at the data, it doesn't.
One merely needs to look at your example to see that you aren't looking.
The major entitlement spending is for Medicare and Social Security. People are entitled to Medicare and Social Security because they paid for them all their lives.
We don't need to go any further. They are not so entitled. Keep in mind that the entitlement is larger than the amount put in and the amount put in was never invested in the first place by the politicians who those "people" above appointed to oversee this process.
Fundamentally, we're being asked to honor a con job. Too bad we don't have to. Unadjusted inflation will take care of the problem.
10,000 jobs is nothing to laugh at
I already explained why it can be. 2 million euro is getting spent per alleged job created. You're probably looking at 50 or so jobs (today or some point in the future) ended for each of those jobs created. That's why it's such an awful selling point.
The infrastructure improvement is the obvious good here. I don't disagree with that. My point as described with my "Great Flood" example, is that stating the number of jobs created has gone to embarrassing places.
So that's what the "NBN" is. As to the rest of your post, it's fairy tale material. I wasn't commenting on nor do I care how France plans to spend its money. I just pointed out the silliness of spending vast amounts of money and then bothering to add as a selling point that it creates a minuscule number of jobs.
I don't know where the claim of 10,000 jobs created came from. Perhaps it was just the overactive imagination of the submitter. But given that the figure is 2 million euro per alleged job created which is a ridiculous figure should job creation have been any sort of priority, it seems incredibly stupid to try to make that a selling point of the scheme.
Consider for example, the global flood that is the main point of drama in the classic story of Noah's Ark. It kills almost everyone and everything; it cleanses the world of sin for a time; and it creates 8 high value jobs!
Propaganda.
No. Merely a correct observation. Read the Geneva Conventions sometime and see what protections they offer to military forces who don't play by the rules.
Most businesses fail. So there is your 50/50 odds of pissing away all that money.
But at least you've learned something useful about running a business. And there's always the chance you succeed. With some college choices, you can lose a lot of money without getting anything of value (such as an education or a degree).
I think we need more tracking in highschool. To set people up for their path. Either meaningful college, tech schools, or straight to the workforce.
Hmmm, this actually puts your comments in a different light. But I still would point out that a high school graduate could be wealthy enough and smart enough to go to college, but that would still not be the best choice for them.
If you have an average US highschool grad who can afford to go to college, wouldn't you tell him to go get a degree? It's a real downer to accept that, even though you were smart enough and had enough money, that you probably shouldn't even try to get a good life. That you should lie down and accept a blue-collar job of hard work and a shitty retirement when you're too old to break your back every morning. There's a big push to be successful. That's normal. And success is pretty much defined as getting a good job, by having a good degree.
I don't get this sort of post. What if your arm became infected and I gave you medical advice that would lose you your arm? Would you still do it just because I was so earnest about my advice and how it was going to save your arm? Or would you prudently ignore me?
I feel here that you are giving bad advice. A high school grad capable of affording to go to college could afford to do other things as well, such as a start a business or a family. Further, the right blue collar job can pay better than what the college degree can buy. It's foolish to advise something that can harm a person for the rest of their lives.
People should be aware that there are other options (including working that blue collar job) than borrowing a lot of money to get a college degree of dubious value. It may turn out that getting the degree might well be the best choice, but it's no longer the obvious choice it might have been way back when in the 60s.
Then why are they done? Because the Geneva Conventions still matter. It's worth noting that several of these don't actually contradict the Geneva Conventions because the enemies in question (the "unlawful combatants") aren't adhering to the Geneva Conventions and hence, lose a lot of the protections that would normally be granted by the Conventions.
So you're suggesting we take screaming hot exhaust gas from coal plants and chill it to -109.3F or -78.5C to separate the CO2 as a solid?
Yes. You can get it to freeze below -56 C, BTW at a pressure of about 5 atmospheres (that's roughly where the triple point is). Removing heat (especially since that is the whole reason for burning/reacting the coal in the first place) is just not that hard.
and just considering getting the CO2 to sublimate would take 571 kJ/kg or 35904 GJ/day. a Ton-equivalent of coal is 29.3076 GJ, so you'd be burning 1225 tons of coal a day just to take -78.5C CO2 to -78.5C dry ice.
You missed a sign there. That's an exothermic transition. Turning that dry ice back into a gas does take a lot of energy, but that can be extracted directly from the atmosphere or other normal heat reservoir rather than burning coal.
If government spends money efficiently only on good things, then sure you have a point. It doesn't. At this point, I habitually divide reported costs by ten to estimate the actual cost of publicly funded research projects in the US. Sometimes even that is still too high. But since research is generally considered to generate the "highest returns", I doubt enough people will look closely at research efficiency until the money dries up due to fiscal issues.
We were furthermore told that we were responsible for maintenance and replacement if lost.
This is a classic public funding move. Put a ton of money into buying some hardware or infrastructure, but don't allocate a cent for maintenance or replacement.
Except that cutting spending now is like applying leeches to a sick patient. You cut spending when the economy is healthy to promote action by the private sector. You increase spending when the economy is unhealthy to backstop the potential for long term unemployment, which can ruin entire generations. An across-the-board spending cut to almost any government agency will do far more harm than good, but research--because it draws so heavily on international talent--is the most vulnerable.
Ignoring that the leech trick actually does work under certain circumstances, it's worth noting here that the economy probably has the potential to do better than it currently is even under the current legal and political environment, but a lot of what's holding it back is precisely the sort of thing that we're proposing to cut.
Maybe cutting welfare for scientists isn't the best choice for first round budget trimming, but that budget does have to go down at some point. Else, you get in the situation where no one will lend money to the US government at nice rates and the science stopped being funded at that point.
So as far as I can tell, you are just conjecturing that these departments will "cut the wrong things", that they have never actually been forced to cut before.
I have to agree with JaredOfEuropa. It's a classic move. To give an example related to what you mentioned earlier, NASA has on occasion threatened to cut more important or high profile programs in order to save their funding. For example, they've threatened to end Hubble Space Telescope on more than one occasion.
It's worth noting that all this discomfort only results in a drop of $85 billion. In part, that is because mandatory spending, which is something like 60% of the budget, isn't affected.
Still, looking at the list, there's a number of worthy budget cuts, such as the oversized federal law enforcement, small business loans, and various "government service" rent seeking. And one really has a hard time arguing against a 13% cut back in defense spending.
As I see it, the problem with sequestering isn't that it cuts government services, but that by its nature it can't target less effective spending or any mandatory spending at all.