So they might not actually have done anything and they most likely haven't done anything inappropriate and they don't have any obligation to reveal what they've used the powers for, but let's pretend they're all doing evil things with it 24/7 because it makes for a better article.
That is a fair assumption to make about power. And since the BBC isn't a citizen but a public organization with a bit of power, there's no concept of "innocent until proven guilty". If they're not willing to show what they're doing with that power, then I'm not willing to assume that they aren't abusing it. That's how I roll.
The money doesn't go to the UK government, so I'm not sure how it's "just another one of the UK government's stealth taxes".
Well, I imagine a great majority of the other money that goes to the UK government doesn't actually go to the government either. It goes to people, businesses, and whatnot, that just happen to be, like the BBC, doing stuff that the government decided to force their citizens to pay for.
Do you think we haven't thought of funding through direct taxation?
To be very blunt, I think your country is insane for letting the BBC have that kind of power over you. And yes, I don't think your country has thought about it. Else they would be funded differently.
My own pessimism comes from watching an unsustainable economy (basically a Ponzi scheme based on perpetual growth) on a collision course with the laws of physics in a finite world.
Please, show us this economy so that we may observe it as well. If you're referring to pensions and other schemes that depend on new blood working to pay directly the old blood, well the simple solution is simply that those pensions and other such things pay less than they used to. If you're referring to economic growth, please be aware that one can grow an economy via innovation and that is a more effective way to grow the pie than via population growth. We also need to keep in mind that the function of an economy is to distribute things of value, not to grow at a particular rate. The developed world economies do a pretty good job of that.
I'm convinced there must come a time when the population stops growing, when the birth rate matches the mortality rate. It might be really messy. And the lack of political will to address the fundamentals makes me pessimistic and cynical.
Already happened in Europe. Not as bad as advertised.
Well, I doubt there's any disagreement that wealth makes more wealth at the small end. Having some capital is a clear advantage over having none. And managing the return from capital can be significantly lower effort than working.
But we're not speaking of people at that end, but the wealthiest of the wealthiest. There are several effects which I think contribute to diminishing returns. First, complexity increases as amount of wealth increases. Sure, a single person could manage trillions, if it all went into US federal treasuries. Just roll the money back into US treasuries when some comes due. But that doesn't have a very high return on investment compared to most businesses. It doesn't take a lot of expansion to get to the point where one needs a small army running things. At that point, you have a situation far beyond the capabilities of one person to handle.
Second, once you get to that small army running your investments, conflicts of interest show up. There's no magical way to perfectly align the interests of your employees with you.
Third, there's only a limited number of means for getting extremely high profits. Some jobs I can do, just showing up with the clothes on my back. So effectively, I can get returns from a day of work comparable to the resources I put in (clothes and perhaps food). That's not going to scale to trillions of dollars in assets.
Venture capitalists specialize in funding small businesses in the hopes that some of them become large, successful businesses. But there's not an infinite number of such businesses or of opportunities. Having ten times the capital to throw at startups doesn't create ten times as much profit.
Drilling for oil might be extremely profitable at times, but there's only so many orders of magnitude you can grow oil production before everyone has all the oil they want at any price that would make you a profit.
Let's give a couple of examples. For a time, the two richest US residents were Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. They both probably blew up their initial wealth by at least a factor of ten thousand. It wouldn't even make sense to try to increase that wealth by another factor of ten thousand. There simply isn't enough wealth in the world. Second, while Buffet has some magic still left (being more a trader and investor, which has broad applicability), Gates pretty much has used up his niche and his wealth has been declining for some time, even without the massive charity donations.
Then there's the matter of nimbleness. Suppose some global change radically changes human society and how we value different assets. The person with nothing just gets a new job, maybe with some retraining. The mutual fund which used to have 100 billion dollars in assets has to sell off what lost value and move it to the new thing. Because it is so large and has so much invested, it either moves fast and greatly shifts in an adverse direction, the values of the assets it is trying to obtain or discard. Or it moves in a glacial manner, slowly adapting to what may be a far faster moving situation. It might take many years to adjust to the new normal, all the while, the giant is losing wealth relative to the smaller wealthy who can shift investments more rapidly and adapt much faster.
In the virtual world, I've run into several cases of diminishing returns. For example, Eve Online is a space opera-style massively multiple player game with a strong economic basis. Many players there discuss the diminishing returns that come from increasing wealth. Generally, they don't lose wealth (unless they're deeply invested victims of a big scam, they made a bad, massive gamble, or they just blow up a lot of internet space ships), but they do gain it slower than players with far less wealth.
Would the achievements of todays USA be matched by now?
I think so.
It's worth remembering that the primary benefit of a single government is simply a common legal and economic framework with some security tossed in. One doesn't need much of a government to provide that. The ability to engage in large projects just isn't very valuable. And where's the value in standardization of schools, anthems, and whatnot? I don't see it.
My take is that EU unification should have stopped prior to the creation of an oversized constitution. So maybe stop with a sparse implementation of the economic policies of the Maastricht Treaty.
But what of the accomplishments of the US requires a large national government? I'd say the military power. If it's split between four entities as your example, it's never going to be as effective, even each entity puts together a military as powerful, simply because the countries might often work at cross purposes.
The moon landing is achievable now by smaller countries than the US was at the time of Apollo. For example, the US had a real GDP (adjusted for inflation) of $2.8 trillion (in current dollars) per year in 1960 right before the start of Apollo. There are three countries, China, Germany, and Japan which have larger economies than that now. So right there, we have four countries with sufficient economic power to repeat Apollo as it was, a massive surge of spending for ten years. They also have the industrial capability as well. Brazil, France, Italy, and the UK aren't far off economically.
And frankly, there's better ways to do Apollo. I think we'll see rather bare-bones private attempts starting about twenty years from now. They won't be spending the equivalent of $150-200 billion to repeat Apollo, but trying a less ambitious but more economically viable approach.
There is a terrible inefficiency that could be avoided if they were more coordination and a common interest, instead of prioritising one's own state.
It's called "conflict of interest". And there's more of it as your country gets bigger.
Am I making a weird extrapolation between police and healthcare?
Sure, one is about prevent acts of harm by people on people and enforcing regulations. The other is about society paying for individual wants. No one has ever gotten around the inevitability. People will for the most part come down with health problems that could be made better for a period of time by lots of money. That can easily scale to more than the person could earn in a lifetime.
There's a lot of value in law enforcement for a society. It enforces the rules that make the society go. There's not much societal value in health care, unless it's for a preventable or treatable condition that has good cost/benefit (such as immunizations or prenatal care).
Well, consider why they don't do that right now. The app store is a lure to get the customer to buy the hardware at a premium. My view is that going to an app story only scheme is going to generate less profit for them than the current combined software/hardware scheme.
What difference? Such a lab would have to know ahead of time what was considered genetic modified and what wasn't. A similarly arbitrary criteria would be required to determine if people handling the crop were "black" or not.
they were careless (careless enough to skewer a reactor operator to a concrete slab with a control rod)
What makes that careless?
Mistakes happen, people die. But every time something bad happens, we send in very smart engineers and figure out what happened, and why, and design new and better processes so that the next time, fewer people die.
Which is exactly what happened with the accident above. It was a mistake. They sent in very smart people to figure out what happened. And they designed new and better processes so that next time, fewer people die.
Give each of them a different coinage, traffic laws, customs regulations, infrastructure policies, economic agenda, school programmes, "national" sports teams, anthems, you-name-the-other-200-things... congratulations, you have made your former country a far worse place.
Well, ok. It would be nice to have a common coinage and a little common trade infrastructure (but don't go crazy, chuck that ISO organization standards junk). Past that we really don't see eye to eye.
Different economic agenda? They should have that since they have different regional interests. And as in the US, it's a great way to test policies rather than just throw them on an unsuspecting public, EU-style, and really generate a lot of hope that it works this time.
Different school programs? They should have that since it allows for experimentation. The perfect school doesn't exist so why do just one system? Different "national" sports teams? You do realize that not every sport can be reasonably played everywhere?
Different anthems? I'm not seeing the problem. I live in a country that not only has a national song (the US anthem), but it also has 48 states and several territories with one or more state songs as well. There's remarkably little drama about that. I suppose if you people revert to stuffing hapless victims in ovens, then I suggest starting with the people who make a stink about national anthems.
In hindsight, it's a no-brainer that we have unified whatever political unification happened so far in world history*.
It's silly obvious, really. Yet still there are people who insist that it's not worth it. Sure, there are usually short-term complications, but avoiding wars is by far not the only benefit.
A "no-brainer", huh? Do you mean one needs to be absent a brain in order to appreciate the value of unification? I could see how that might be necessary.
I know writing douments is the highlight of my day. I certainly wouldn't want to do anything else like watch a TV show or read a novel. Or just play with the kids before they turn into teenagers that don't want to talk to me. No I'd rather craft a fine document that nobody will read (except to verify it exists & then ignore it for 20 years until it gets purged in a shredding). Yep.
Well, I get the impression maybe you're not a live to work kind of person.
I know that every country want to get its money back and that ESA is a administrative mess, but
OTOH, sounds like a good reason to do it yourself. I guess I just don't see the value of a unified Europe. A Europe that doesn't kill tens of millions of people every few decades is nice, but past that, I don't see the value in going further.
As for the "efficiency" of Human Genome Sciences? The CEO Craig Ventnor crashed the stock and took a gigantic golden handshake on the way out the door and left shareholders high and dry. I'm too painfully aware as I was a major stockholder. The company was recently sold for pennies on the dollar. So much for your "efficiency" argument.
Uh huh. I didn't say everyone would be efficient. Bankruptcy and losing your money is what happens when you get too inefficient or don't deliver enough value for your cost, and that happens quite a bit.
whereas governnent, in contrast, by definition, has to take everyone's welfare into account
I see the fundamental flaw in your thinking. Government doesn't have to do that. For example, government routinely does things with high opportunity cost (such as tax productive workers and employers and dump the money into pathetic destinations such as unjustifiable subsidies, pointless entitlements, or corrupt and over budget big projects). How is the voter going to notice what they don't know they're missing?
Keep in mind that the EU and Germany in particular has strong protectionist policies in place via the use of complex standards that create such bureaucracy. For example, The ISO 9000 family of standards (which is a set of standards for documenting business processes and quality management systems) never made sense to me (since one can have terrible processes as long as they're documented properly), until I realized that it served as a simple means for filtering out foreign companies that were in areas too marginal to support those standards.
If you manufacture for the EU area, then it's a straightforward cost to implement them. But if you're a foreign exporter looking to enter Europe, then ISO 9000 standards become a significant and costly obstacle, especially, if you're mostly in markets where your competitors would drive you out of business should you implement these standards.
So you're keeping out the small Chinese businesses and whatever, with quality management system and other bureaucracy-enhancing schemes. It also has the advantage of employing people to chase after the paperwork.
The bureaucracy you see is IMHO imposed by government and standards bodies. And those governments and standards bodies have to follow their own rules. I imagine they have pretty dense bureaucracy as well.
Privately funded research is more likely to be directed toward shorter term and more immediately profitable goals while government research is more likely directed toward research that may have longer term benefits that eventually trickles down to private research.
One could view this research division as short term versus long term. Or one could look at it from accountability. When you research stuff that has near future application, you have to deliver. But longer term research doesn't have to deliver and for what I've seen, it often doesn't.
So many people are confident that research done will magically result in future benefit. Going back to aerospace, there's old research (both NASA and NACA, the predecessor to NASA) that's just being tossed wholesale by NASA's library. It's still in other places (particularly the Library of Congress which saves everything). But that's the fate for most research done by NASA before the computer era. It's written and stored in a dusty volume for a number of decades, then tossed. I doubt most of that has been read by a human being for a long time.
For example, there was some research on wing shapes launched by sounding rocket and reentering Earth's atmosphere at hypersonic speeds. You'd think that would be interesting to people for the past few decades, but the researcher we found (a coworker at a volunteer aerospace non-profit did the asking) hadn't been asked about that research since the 60s.
There's no interest at NASA in whether such research gets used down the road. You'd think that such an organization which does considerable open research would at least care that its old research was accessible and well-used.
The gov't stands out from private enterprise only because whenever society needs something done and it's too expensive to get anyone to pay for it we have the gov't do it.
The ignorance here is profound. First, government does a lot of stuff that neither needs doing nor is too expensive that only government can do it. Most congressional earmarks, for example, are easily affordable on the private side, if one were say, addicted to burning money. The small size is how those things get under the radar.
That brings us to the second point which is that a lot of what government does is remarkably useless and overpriced. For example, I work with a non-profit aerospace group out of Sacramento. Last winter we put an airship up to 95,000 feet and moved it around a bit. Total cost was roughly $30,000 plus one or two man-years of volunteer work (which including the launch of balloon systems to vet gear that was to go on the airship).
Northrup Grumman recently announced a half a billion dollar project (funded by the US Department of Defense) to launch three airship prototypes for reconnaissance work. The first will go up to 20,000 feet. While I doubt any of them will near 95,000 feet altitude, it's still clear that they have a lot of features and functionality that our airship didn't have (such as a three week loiter time, versus a vehicle that went up and then down or considerably higher power delivery). On the other hand, there's three orders of magnitude difference in cost and our vehicle likely will go higher.
That leads me to the last point. It's worth remembering that one can inflate costs of a project by changing the requirements for the project, namely, adding bells and whistles until it's firmly in big project territory. This is a popular game among contractors and politicians. It is common for someone to say, "Sure, you can do it for less, but then you wouldn't get all these cool features!" They ignore that many of these features never get used and many of the rest can be dropped without impacting the value of the project significantly.
For example, the Space Shuttle had excellent cross range capability (they could shift several hundred miles side to side as they were gliding towards a landing. It could handle payloads up to roughly 25 tons. That capability drove up the cost of the Shuttle considerably and generated some additional compromises (such as the delicate tiles of the thermal protection system and low launch frequency).
A more modest vehicle would have fit NASA's budget much better. Didn't happen though.
Same is true for drugs. You didn't think those companies actually PAID for their research, did you?
Yes, they did. In the US, private funding of medical research is more than half of overall funding.
The United States invests over $35 billion annually in medical research. Federal
support accounts for about 38 percent of this total, and private industry about half; the rest
comes from various public and private sources. Federal support of medical research has
also grown substantially: between 1986 and 1995 real federal expenditures on medical
research increased by 46 percent, reaching $13.4 billion annually.1 This is more than one fifth
of federal outlays on research and development.
But if some government wants to vastly overpay for my research efforts, then go ahead and make my day.
I don't see a strong central government as being relevant. Pure communism was alleged to be stateless by Marx, but that's not the only form of communism.
It's observation (of things that really happened or as the case may be didn't happen) as I said before.
For example, I currently work in Yellowstone National Park, a US park for a private company owned by a multinational. They approach construction projects differently than the National Park Service (the NPS is part of the Department of the Interior) does.
For example, my company completed a significant renovation of the Old Faithful Inn (the famous hotel that overlooks Old Faithful geyser) on schedule, opening the place a week later in the season than it usually opens. Similarly, they're working on Canyon Lodge (a complex that is right by the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone) and look ready to complete the work on the Lodge itself and parking area by the end of the season. While one can reasonably argue that these construction projects should have been done some time ago, it's noteworthy that my company has strong incentives to make sure any construction work that they pay for, gets done as soon as possible. That's because they lose money, if those projects run over.
So what happens to NPS construction projects? A typical example is road work from Madison Junction to Norris Geyser Basin. They were to build a new bridge and route traffic around a notorious chokepoint at a place called Gibbons Falls (the road at that point is cut into the side of the cliff and is narrow without a shoulder). They screwed around for about 6-7 years and then, when the Obama stimulus kicked in around 2009 and 2010, they redid the plan (putting a new bridge in at Gibbons Falls, shortening the stretch that original was to go around Gibbons Falls, and widening the road in the process). They're now repeating that drawn out process with some road damage near the southeast entrance caused by a landslide last year.
My understanding is that the NPS takes in 50-100 million dollars every year from park revenue. That revenue goes into the federal government's general fund and is allotted as Congress sees fit. Not much goes back to the park beyond paying the NPS staff and some infrastructure cost (such as running their fire/ranger departments and health clinics), and what is left over tends to be squandered on half-assed projects.
So there's an example where private enterprise trounced public sector.
Slashdot Mirror
So they might not actually have done anything and they most likely haven't done anything inappropriate and they don't have any obligation to reveal what they've used the powers for, but let's pretend they're all doing evil things with it 24/7 because it makes for a better article.
That is a fair assumption to make about power. And since the BBC isn't a citizen but a public organization with a bit of power, there's no concept of "innocent until proven guilty". If they're not willing to show what they're doing with that power, then I'm not willing to assume that they aren't abusing it. That's how I roll.
The money doesn't go to the UK government, so I'm not sure how it's "just another one of the UK government's stealth taxes".
Well, I imagine a great majority of the other money that goes to the UK government doesn't actually go to the government either. It goes to people, businesses, and whatnot, that just happen to be, like the BBC, doing stuff that the government decided to force their citizens to pay for.
Do you think we haven't thought of funding through direct taxation?
To be very blunt, I think your country is insane for letting the BBC have that kind of power over you. And yes, I don't think your country has thought about it. Else they would be funded differently.
How you shut down the machine hasn't changed since windows XP. You press the freaking power button.
There's a reason that computers have software-based shutdown. Because less shit goes wrong than when you hit the power button.
A graph isn't an economy any more than a quip is. Where is this economy of which you speak?
My own pessimism comes from watching an unsustainable economy (basically a Ponzi scheme based on perpetual growth) on a collision course with the laws of physics in a finite world.
Please, show us this economy so that we may observe it as well. If you're referring to pensions and other schemes that depend on new blood working to pay directly the old blood, well the simple solution is simply that those pensions and other such things pay less than they used to. If you're referring to economic growth, please be aware that one can grow an economy via innovation and that is a more effective way to grow the pie than via population growth. We also need to keep in mind that the function of an economy is to distribute things of value, not to grow at a particular rate. The developed world economies do a pretty good job of that.
I'm convinced there must come a time when the population stops growing, when the birth rate matches the mortality rate. It might be really messy. And the lack of political will to address the fundamentals makes me pessimistic and cynical.
Already happened in Europe. Not as bad as advertised.
Well, I doubt there's any disagreement that wealth makes more wealth at the small end. Having some capital is a clear advantage over having none. And managing the return from capital can be significantly lower effort than working.
But we're not speaking of people at that end, but the wealthiest of the wealthiest. There are several effects which I think contribute to diminishing returns. First, complexity increases as amount of wealth increases. Sure, a single person could manage trillions, if it all went into US federal treasuries. Just roll the money back into US treasuries when some comes due. But that doesn't have a very high return on investment compared to most businesses. It doesn't take a lot of expansion to get to the point where one needs a small army running things. At that point, you have a situation far beyond the capabilities of one person to handle.
Second, once you get to that small army running your investments, conflicts of interest show up. There's no magical way to perfectly align the interests of your employees with you.
Third, there's only a limited number of means for getting extremely high profits. Some jobs I can do, just showing up with the clothes on my back. So effectively, I can get returns from a day of work comparable to the resources I put in (clothes and perhaps food). That's not going to scale to trillions of dollars in assets.
Venture capitalists specialize in funding small businesses in the hopes that some of them become large, successful businesses. But there's not an infinite number of such businesses or of opportunities. Having ten times the capital to throw at startups doesn't create ten times as much profit.
Drilling for oil might be extremely profitable at times, but there's only so many orders of magnitude you can grow oil production before everyone has all the oil they want at any price that would make you a profit.
Let's give a couple of examples. For a time, the two richest US residents were Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. They both probably blew up their initial wealth by at least a factor of ten thousand. It wouldn't even make sense to try to increase that wealth by another factor of ten thousand. There simply isn't enough wealth in the world. Second, while Buffet has some magic still left (being more a trader and investor, which has broad applicability), Gates pretty much has used up his niche and his wealth has been declining for some time, even without the massive charity donations.
Then there's the matter of nimbleness. Suppose some global change radically changes human society and how we value different assets. The person with nothing just gets a new job, maybe with some retraining. The mutual fund which used to have 100 billion dollars in assets has to sell off what lost value and move it to the new thing. Because it is so large and has so much invested, it either moves fast and greatly shifts in an adverse direction, the values of the assets it is trying to obtain or discard. Or it moves in a glacial manner, slowly adapting to what may be a far faster moving situation. It might take many years to adjust to the new normal, all the while, the giant is losing wealth relative to the smaller wealthy who can shift investments more rapidly and adapt much faster.
In the virtual world, I've run into several cases of diminishing returns. For example, Eve Online is a space opera-style massively multiple player game with a strong economic basis. Many players there discuss the diminishing returns that come from increasing wealth. Generally, they don't lose wealth (unless they're deeply invested victims of a big scam, they made a bad, massive gamble, or they just blow up a lot of internet space ships), but they do gain it slower than players with far less wealth.
Would the achievements of todays USA be matched by now?
I think so.
It's worth remembering that the primary benefit of a single government is simply a common legal and economic framework with some security tossed in. One doesn't need much of a government to provide that. The ability to engage in large projects just isn't very valuable. And where's the value in standardization of schools, anthems, and whatnot? I don't see it.
My take is that EU unification should have stopped prior to the creation of an oversized constitution. So maybe stop with a sparse implementation of the economic policies of the Maastricht Treaty.
But what of the accomplishments of the US requires a large national government? I'd say the military power. If it's split between four entities as your example, it's never going to be as effective, even each entity puts together a military as powerful, simply because the countries might often work at cross purposes.
The moon landing is achievable now by smaller countries than the US was at the time of Apollo. For example, the US had a real GDP (adjusted for inflation) of $2.8 trillion (in current dollars) per year in 1960 right before the start of Apollo. There are three countries, China, Germany, and Japan which have larger economies than that now. So right there, we have four countries with sufficient economic power to repeat Apollo as it was, a massive surge of spending for ten years. They also have the industrial capability as well. Brazil, France, Italy, and the UK aren't far off economically.
And frankly, there's better ways to do Apollo. I think we'll see rather bare-bones private attempts starting about twenty years from now. They won't be spending the equivalent of $150-200 billion to repeat Apollo, but trying a less ambitious but more economically viable approach.
There is a terrible inefficiency that could be avoided if they were more coordination and a common interest, instead of prioritising one's own state.
It's called "conflict of interest". And there's more of it as your country gets bigger.
Am I making a weird extrapolation between police and healthcare?
Sure, one is about prevent acts of harm by people on people and enforcing regulations. The other is about society paying for individual wants. No one has ever gotten around the inevitability. People will for the most part come down with health problems that could be made better for a period of time by lots of money. That can easily scale to more than the person could earn in a lifetime.
There's a lot of value in law enforcement for a society. It enforces the rules that make the society go. There's not much societal value in health care, unless it's for a preventable or treatable condition that has good cost/benefit (such as immunizations or prenatal care).
Well, consider why they don't do that right now. The app store is a lure to get the customer to buy the hardware at a premium. My view is that going to an app story only scheme is going to generate less profit for them than the current combined software/hardware scheme.
There's the difference.
What difference? Such a lab would have to know ahead of time what was considered genetic modified and what wasn't. A similarly arbitrary criteria would be required to determine if people handling the crop were "black" or not.
they were careless (careless enough to skewer a reactor operator to a concrete slab with a control rod)
What makes that careless?
Mistakes happen, people die. But every time something bad happens, we send in very smart engineers and figure out what happened, and why, and design new and better processes so that the next time, fewer people die.
Which is exactly what happened with the accident above. It was a mistake. They sent in very smart people to figure out what happened. And they designed new and better processes so that next time, fewer people die.
Give each of them a different coinage, traffic laws, customs regulations, infrastructure policies, economic agenda, school programmes, "national" sports teams, anthems, you-name-the-other-200-things ... congratulations, you have made your former country a far worse place.
Well, ok. It would be nice to have a common coinage and a little common trade infrastructure (but don't go crazy, chuck that ISO organization standards junk). Past that we really don't see eye to eye.
Different economic agenda? They should have that since they have different regional interests. And as in the US, it's a great way to test policies rather than just throw them on an unsuspecting public, EU-style, and really generate a lot of hope that it works this time.
Different school programs? They should have that since it allows for experimentation. The perfect school doesn't exist so why do just one system? Different "national" sports teams? You do realize that not every sport can be reasonably played everywhere?
Different anthems? I'm not seeing the problem. I live in a country that not only has a national song (the US anthem), but it also has 48 states and several territories with one or more state songs as well. There's remarkably little drama about that. I suppose if you people revert to stuffing hapless victims in ovens, then I suggest starting with the people who make a stink about national anthems.
In hindsight, it's a no-brainer that we have unified whatever political unification happened so far in world history*. It's silly obvious, really. Yet still there are people who insist that it's not worth it. Sure, there are usually short-term complications, but avoiding wars is by far not the only benefit.
A "no-brainer", huh? Do you mean one needs to be absent a brain in order to appreciate the value of unification? I could see how that might be necessary.
I know writing douments is the highlight of my day. I certainly wouldn't want to do anything else like watch a TV show or read a novel. Or just play with the kids before they turn into teenagers that don't want to talk to me. No I'd rather craft a fine document that nobody will read (except to verify it exists & then ignore it for 20 years until it gets purged in a shredding). Yep.
Well, I get the impression maybe you're not a live to work kind of person.
I know that every country want to get its money back and that ESA is a administrative mess, but
OTOH, sounds like a good reason to do it yourself. I guess I just don't see the value of a unified Europe. A Europe that doesn't kill tens of millions of people every few decades is nice, but past that, I don't see the value in going further.
Are you trying to say that thieves have never made money?
So we see here communism and socialism overlap to some degree.
Well, this is one case where that cynical saying "dilution is the solution to pollution" holds.
As for the "efficiency" of Human Genome Sciences? The CEO Craig Ventnor crashed the stock and took a gigantic golden handshake on the way out the door and left shareholders high and dry. I'm too painfully aware as I was a major stockholder. The company was recently sold for pennies on the dollar. So much for your "efficiency" argument.
Uh huh. I didn't say everyone would be efficient. Bankruptcy and losing your money is what happens when you get too inefficient or don't deliver enough value for your cost, and that happens quite a bit.
whereas governnent, in contrast, by definition, has to take everyone's welfare into account
I see the fundamental flaw in your thinking. Government doesn't have to do that. For example, government routinely does things with high opportunity cost (such as tax productive workers and employers and dump the money into pathetic destinations such as unjustifiable subsidies, pointless entitlements, or corrupt and over budget big projects). How is the voter going to notice what they don't know they're missing?
Keep in mind that the EU and Germany in particular has strong protectionist policies in place via the use of complex standards that create such bureaucracy. For example, The ISO 9000 family of standards (which is a set of standards for documenting business processes and quality management systems) never made sense to me (since one can have terrible processes as long as they're documented properly), until I realized that it served as a simple means for filtering out foreign companies that were in areas too marginal to support those standards.
If you manufacture for the EU area, then it's a straightforward cost to implement them. But if you're a foreign exporter looking to enter Europe, then ISO 9000 standards become a significant and costly obstacle, especially, if you're mostly in markets where your competitors would drive you out of business should you implement these standards.
So you're keeping out the small Chinese businesses and whatever, with quality management system and other bureaucracy-enhancing schemes. It also has the advantage of employing people to chase after the paperwork.
The bureaucracy you see is IMHO imposed by government and standards bodies. And those governments and standards bodies have to follow their own rules. I imagine they have pretty dense bureaucracy as well.
Privately funded research is more likely to be directed toward shorter term and more immediately profitable goals while government research is more likely directed toward research that may have longer term benefits that eventually trickles down to private research.
One could view this research division as short term versus long term. Or one could look at it from accountability. When you research stuff that has near future application, you have to deliver. But longer term research doesn't have to deliver and for what I've seen, it often doesn't.
So many people are confident that research done will magically result in future benefit. Going back to aerospace, there's old research (both NASA and NACA, the predecessor to NASA) that's just being tossed wholesale by NASA's library. It's still in other places (particularly the Library of Congress which saves everything). But that's the fate for most research done by NASA before the computer era. It's written and stored in a dusty volume for a number of decades, then tossed. I doubt most of that has been read by a human being for a long time.
For example, there was some research on wing shapes launched by sounding rocket and reentering Earth's atmosphere at hypersonic speeds. You'd think that would be interesting to people for the past few decades, but the researcher we found (a coworker at a volunteer aerospace non-profit did the asking) hadn't been asked about that research since the 60s.
There's no interest at NASA in whether such research gets used down the road. You'd think that such an organization which does considerable open research would at least care that its old research was accessible and well-used.
The gov't stands out from private enterprise only because whenever society needs something done and it's too expensive to get anyone to pay for it we have the gov't do it.
The ignorance here is profound. First, government does a lot of stuff that neither needs doing nor is too expensive that only government can do it. Most congressional earmarks, for example, are easily affordable on the private side, if one were say, addicted to burning money. The small size is how those things get under the radar.
That brings us to the second point which is that a lot of what government does is remarkably useless and overpriced. For example, I work with a non-profit aerospace group out of Sacramento. Last winter we put an airship up to 95,000 feet and moved it around a bit. Total cost was roughly $30,000 plus one or two man-years of volunteer work (which including the launch of balloon systems to vet gear that was to go on the airship).
Northrup Grumman recently announced a half a billion dollar project (funded by the US Department of Defense) to launch three airship prototypes for reconnaissance work. The first will go up to 20,000 feet. While I doubt any of them will near 95,000 feet altitude, it's still clear that they have a lot of features and functionality that our airship didn't have (such as a three week loiter time, versus a vehicle that went up and then down or considerably higher power delivery). On the other hand, there's three orders of magnitude difference in cost and our vehicle likely will go higher.
That leads me to the last point. It's worth remembering that one can inflate costs of a project by changing the requirements for the project, namely, adding bells and whistles until it's firmly in big project territory. This is a popular game among contractors and politicians. It is common for someone to say, "Sure, you can do it for less, but then you wouldn't get all these cool features!" They ignore that many of these features never get used and many of the rest can be dropped without impacting the value of the project significantly.
For example, the Space Shuttle had excellent cross range capability (they could shift several hundred miles side to side as they were gliding towards a landing. It could handle payloads up to roughly 25 tons. That capability drove up the cost of the Shuttle considerably and generated some additional compromises (such as the delicate tiles of the thermal protection system and low launch frequency).
A more modest vehicle would have fit NASA's budget much better. Didn't happen though.
Same is true for drugs. You didn't think those companies actually PAID for their research, did you?
Yes, they did. In the US, private funding of medical research is more than half of overall funding.
The United States invests over $35 billion annually in medical research. Federal support accounts for about 38 percent of this total, and private industry about half; the rest comes from various public and private sources. Federal support of medical research has also grown substantially: between 1986 and 1995 real federal expenditures on medical research increased by 46 percent, reaching $13.4 billion annually.1 This is more than one fifth of federal outlays on research and development.
But if some government wants to vastly overpay for my research efforts, then go ahead and make my day.
I don't see a strong central government as being relevant. Pure communism was alleged to be stateless by Marx, but that's not the only form of communism.
It's observation (of things that really happened or as the case may be didn't happen) as I said before.
For example, I currently work in Yellowstone National Park, a US park for a private company owned by a multinational. They approach construction projects differently than the National Park Service (the NPS is part of the Department of the Interior) does.
For example, my company completed a significant renovation of the Old Faithful Inn (the famous hotel that overlooks Old Faithful geyser) on schedule, opening the place a week later in the season than it usually opens. Similarly, they're working on Canyon Lodge (a complex that is right by the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone) and look ready to complete the work on the Lodge itself and parking area by the end of the season. While one can reasonably argue that these construction projects should have been done some time ago, it's noteworthy that my company has strong incentives to make sure any construction work that they pay for, gets done as soon as possible. That's because they lose money, if those projects run over.
So what happens to NPS construction projects? A typical example is road work from Madison Junction to Norris Geyser Basin. They were to build a new bridge and route traffic around a notorious chokepoint at a place called Gibbons Falls (the road at that point is cut into the side of the cliff and is narrow without a shoulder). They screwed around for about 6-7 years and then, when the Obama stimulus kicked in around 2009 and 2010, they redid the plan (putting a new bridge in at Gibbons Falls, shortening the stretch that original was to go around Gibbons Falls, and widening the road in the process). They're now repeating that drawn out process with some road damage near the southeast entrance caused by a landslide last year.
My understanding is that the NPS takes in 50-100 million dollars every year from park revenue. That revenue goes into the federal government's general fund and is allotted as Congress sees fit. Not much goes back to the park beyond paying the NPS staff and some infrastructure cost (such as running their fire/ranger departments and health clinics), and what is left over tends to be squandered on half-assed projects.
So there's an example where private enterprise trounced public sector.