Anyway, you can probably live 30 or 40 years with a narcotics dependence. That's a lot better than you'll do if you stop moving around at all and stay in bed.
Yeah, there's no denying that the Gates Foundation does some tremendous work. But the US government has a program called PEPFAR that focuses on AIDS, TB, and malaria. It is funded with about $12 every year, which is roughly 10x what the Gates Foundation distributes. The Gates Foundation dollars probably stretch further, but it is not correct to say the government is ignoring these issues.
And as for your assertion that the LHC couldn't possibly cost much less than it does, it's worth remembering here that the private world has a long history of making do with much less than public funded programs do. The big reason is simply that it's their money.
Actually, my assertion is that it is worth it, even with government waste factored in. My assertion is that no one else will fund such a beast.
I agree that they are burning other people's money. I agree that there is little repercussion for them if they go over budget. Where we disagree (I think) is that big science would progress at an acceptable rate without the government's money.
But who cares if hundreds of millions of people have their lives improved by the removal of various common and crippling parasites? There's no government competition because there's no cool pyramid to gawk at.
There is a ton of government money thrown at health. The NIH alone gets almost double the funding of NASA.
What are the odds that they are now or will eventually intentionally take you off the optimal route to view paid for advertising?
Pretty low, or I'd stop using the app!
I'm not sure I'd describe my use of the GPS as "blindly", either. The other day it tried to get me to make an illegal turn. Damned if I didn't survive it by, you know, ignoring the bad directions.
Oh my God, you made me look this up and you are right... there is a scruffy, hipster underground paying $20 for an "original" or about $1.25 for a recreation of a commercially unsuccessful soft-lead pencil. Then, when they find out that their soft-lead pencil doesn't last very long (which is why most people don't use them), they invent a two-step pencil sharpener that lets you start with a longer lead.
Considering the amount of time people spend checking to see which route is preferable, unless that route is at least 10 minutes shorter, there is no significant reason to alter your route.
Hmmm, I don't think that's right. As I walk to my car, I pull out my phone and see that the Waze widget (or Google Now if you prefer) says 19 minutes to home. Done. How did I waste time? Worst case, it has a longer-than-usual time and I turn on the navigation. What does that take, an extra 30 seconds at the outside?
I think he's referring to the Superconducting Super Collider. It would have cost $12 billion, which was the same as the estimate for the US portion of the ISS at the time. The two projects were commonly discussed at the same time. It's probably a bit of an exaggeration to say it delayed Higgs by 20 years - maybe it was only 15. But it was designed to do around 2.5x the energy of the LHC, so we won't know what other science was delayed until we build a 40 TeV collider someday.
here's nothing magical about the money from "Asia, the US, and European governments" that makes it spend better than private sources.
There's nothing magical about it, but it exists.
And there are a number of private sources already wealthy enough to donate that kind of money.
But they haven't. And I don't think that they will. It cost $9 billion just to build the Large Hadron Collider. The largest philanthropic organization in the world is, I believe, the Gates Foundation, and they "only" distribute about $1.5 billion per year. So yes, the Gates Foundation could probably have financed that single physics project - but I've seen no indication that they would. There are many foundations supporting research, but mostly in the fields of health.
Plus, you need to consider that the cost would probably drop significantly as one goes private. So instead of many billions you might have a billion dollars or less for a private equivalent. It would have less features, but it would be focused on developing new science rather than spending public funds.
That is probably true in some fields (space, ahem). But I doubt you will do much better than they already do in high-energy physics, where most of the skilled labor is done by low-paid graduate students. I certainly won't argue that the government runs things efficiently - I don't believe that to be the norm. I will continue arguing that relatively inefficient government-funded research is better than no or little research at all.
My post wasn't meant to justify anything - I'm simply saying that the US will not befriend NK to undermine China, because China is not that scary. China of 2003 is not analogous to USSR of 1970.
Some telescopes are funded by philanthropy or higher education institutions, but you are typically talking about the millions of dollars as opposed to billions of dollars. Is it possible that the Higgs would have been found by some kind of private enterprise? I suppose. But I'm skeptical, since it took combined funding from Asia, the US, and European governments to actually get it built.
First, education. I do not believe that democracy can work in the long-term without a well-educated populace. Because I also believe in universal suffrage, I'm kind of boxed-in to providing a quality education to all Americans... otherwise we are Venezuela. I actually have come around to believe that we should probably extend our public school education another two years and make an associates degree the new high school diploma. It would be expensive and disruptive, but I think it is necessary. To your points, once we've done that, we can probably kill the student loans, or at least rethink the program. I also agree that our public school system needs reform - even down to the funding level. I like the idea of vouchers, though I would like to see the funding move to the state level - not just make the local government spit out voucher dollars while ALSO requiring them to run traditional public schools. I also recognize that some public schools are very good, and I don't see a need to disturb them (though perhaps they have become too expensive).
Research is a different matter. This is much more of a personal opinion - not fact-based. What is a fact is that certain things would not get much research money from the private sector - namely, things that probably won't lead to a profit: think supercolliders, space exploration, etc. It's also a fact that once you let government into something, you get all sorts of distasteful side effects. I personally feel that the research involved is important enough to put up with the waste, bureaucracy, market distortions, and outright slime and graft. We should, of course, always try to minimize that. I can totally see the other side of the argument, and admit it is reasonable enough... I just disagree:)
I agree that CFLs die faster than they should, but they also cost almost nothing anymore - payback period is no longer an issue. The reason I'm not going all-in with LED at this point is three-fold: 1) when CFLs first entered the market, they cost many times what they do today, so I'm kind of betting that history will repeat itself, 2) I'm not convinced that LEDs will meet their stated lifetimes, which is high-risk with an expensive bulb, and 3) in many cases, a cheaper CFL is good enough and has a similar energy draw.
I still use incandescents in closets and stuff. Hell, I think the closet bulbs are from the 70s:) I also use incandescents over the dining room table, because the high efficiency bulbs make the food look gross. I'm experimenting with LEDs in the kitchen - I think they'll be fine since I'm already using CFLs in the recessed cans and, worst case, I can switch on the under-cabinet halogens if the food is looking gnarly.
I'd say it's even simpler than that. A classic method of deflecting criticism is to set up an external boogeyman. People are starting to demand employment rights from the government. The government could change, or they could set up some big, bad, foreign companies to take the rap.
The only surprise is that they didn't choose a Japanese corporation. Oh, wait, they did...
Low. Our youth was not rioting. Even today, when the US is supposedly in shit-shape, US youth unemployment is lower than Europe. Only North Africa and the Middle East are worse than Europe.
Personally, I don't think we should have corporate taxes. I think we should tax capital gains (and all dividends) as ordinary income. This would more than make up for the relatively small revenue from corporate taxes, and would quash squeals of "double taxation".
85 billion isn't a meaningful budget cut when your annual deficit is well over 1 trillion dollars. It's like bailing out the Titanic with a bucket.
I agree completely. I don't really care too much how they close the deficit - budget cuts or taxes. But I think it is immoral to fund non-infrastructure expenses with debt. We are subsidizing our own lifestyle and passing the bill to our kids.
They did compromise - taxes went up on the rich. The sequester itself was a compromise between defense cuts and other discretionary spending. You might not have noticed because apparently this narrative doesn't sell commercial time.
What do you plan to use to move our cars around, if not electricty?
I don't really care. I can imagine a process of storing energy that is more efficient than batteries could be invented. And don't discount the cost of infrastructure - it is not free to replace all of our gas stations with quick-electric charging stations (or hydrogen stations, or LPG, or CNG, or LNG, etc). Imagine a factory that sits next to a nuke plant, solar plant, or wind farm. This factory sucks carbon out of the air, and nabs hydrogen from water, and puts together hydrocarbons in some efficient manner. Then you send it through a pipeline to existing refineries and distribute it with existing gas/diesel infrastructure. It would also feed the existing petrochemical industry.
Pipe dream? Maybe. But one could say the same about a battery technology that is affordable and allows a roughly 10-minute meaningful charge time. Even if such tech were invented, it would need to be affordable and require massive power feeds to charge stations, which may or may not coincide with existing gas stations sites. Apartment and street-parking solutions would need to be considered as well - remember that more than 30% of housing is rented, and many owner-occupied units have no on-site parking. Even for homes with a driveway or garage, many people will need to upgrade their electrical systems. I'm "lucky" because a tree fell on our power main and when the service was replaced they upped (downed?) the wire gauge.:)
Here's the thing I don't get. What makes you think we're shirking that responsibility? Because we can shovel a few billion more dollars down a dark rathole?
I didn't say we were shirking our responsibility. Level of funding is a very subjective topic - I was just defending the practice. I think government support of education and research is important.
Until the moment China decides: "no more _cheap_ solar panels for _you_". Then suddenly it makes all your enterprise to be at a disadvantage compared to native Chinese manufacturing.
Yes, well, I mentioned that scenario. If they managed to corner the market and then curtailed demand, they would reap some short-term benefit. Agreed.
Oh, and also China would get an R&D infrastructure built and ready so you won't be able to overtake them.
I used to have that opinion, and then I saw how quickly China built up their industrial base. I no longer have that opinion:)
Slashdot Mirror
A chiropractor?
Anyway, you can probably live 30 or 40 years with a narcotics dependence. That's a lot better than you'll do if you stop moving around at all and stay in bed.
Yeah, there's no denying that the Gates Foundation does some tremendous work. But the US government has a program called PEPFAR that focuses on AIDS, TB, and malaria. It is funded with about $12 every year, which is roughly 10x what the Gates Foundation distributes. The Gates Foundation dollars probably stretch further, but it is not correct to say the government is ignoring these issues.
And as for your assertion that the LHC couldn't possibly cost much less than it does, it's worth remembering here that the private world has a long history of making do with much less than public funded programs do. The big reason is simply that it's their money.
Actually, my assertion is that it is worth it, even with government waste factored in. My assertion is that no one else will fund such a beast.
I agree that they are burning other people's money. I agree that there is little repercussion for them if they go over budget. Where we disagree (I think) is that big science would progress at an acceptable rate without the government's money.
But who cares if hundreds of millions of people have their lives improved by the removal of various common and crippling parasites? There's no government competition because there's no cool pyramid to gawk at.
There is a ton of government money thrown at health. The NIH alone gets almost double the funding of NASA.
What are the odds that they are now or will eventually intentionally take you off the optimal route to view paid for advertising?
Pretty low, or I'd stop using the app!
I'm not sure I'd describe my use of the GPS as "blindly", either. The other day it tried to get me to make an illegal turn. Damned if I didn't survive it by, you know, ignoring the bad directions.
artisinally-sharpened Blackwing 602 pencils
Oh my God, you made me look this up and you are right... there is a scruffy, hipster underground paying $20 for an "original" or about $1.25 for a recreation of a commercially unsuccessful soft-lead pencil. Then, when they find out that their soft-lead pencil doesn't last very long (which is why most people don't use them), they invent a two-step pencil sharpener that lets you start with a longer lead.
Considering the amount of time people spend checking to see which route is preferable, unless that route is at least 10 minutes shorter, there is no significant reason to alter your route.
Hmmm, I don't think that's right. As I walk to my car, I pull out my phone and see that the Waze widget (or Google Now if you prefer) says 19 minutes to home. Done. How did I waste time? Worst case, it has a longer-than-usual time and I turn on the navigation. What does that take, an extra 30 seconds at the outside?
I'm always stunned by how many people cruise right through a disabled traffic light (that is, completely dark).
I'm right behind you - I just had remote start installed on my wife's car.
(Though in all fairness, she was just sitting in the cold car for 10 minutes waiting for the defroster anyway...)
Certainly there wasn't a delay of 2 decades.
I think he's referring to the Superconducting Super Collider. It would have cost $12 billion, which was the same as the estimate for the US portion of the ISS at the time. The two projects were commonly discussed at the same time. It's probably a bit of an exaggeration to say it delayed Higgs by 20 years - maybe it was only 15. But it was designed to do around 2.5x the energy of the LHC, so we won't know what other science was delayed until we build a 40 TeV collider someday.
here's nothing magical about the money from "Asia, the US, and European governments" that makes it spend better than private sources.
There's nothing magical about it, but it exists.
And there are a number of private sources already wealthy enough to donate that kind of money.
But they haven't. And I don't think that they will. It cost $9 billion just to build the Large Hadron Collider. The largest philanthropic organization in the world is, I believe, the Gates Foundation, and they "only" distribute about $1.5 billion per year. So yes, the Gates Foundation could probably have financed that single physics project - but I've seen no indication that they would. There are many foundations supporting research, but mostly in the fields of health.
Plus, you need to consider that the cost would probably drop significantly as one goes private. So instead of many billions you might have a billion dollars or less for a private equivalent. It would have less features, but it would be focused on developing new science rather than spending public funds.
That is probably true in some fields (space, ahem). But I doubt you will do much better than they already do in high-energy physics, where most of the skilled labor is done by low-paid graduate students. I certainly won't argue that the government runs things efficiently - I don't believe that to be the norm. I will continue arguing that relatively inefficient government-funded research is better than no or little research at all.
My post wasn't meant to justify anything - I'm simply saying that the US will not befriend NK to undermine China, because China is not that scary. China of 2003 is not analogous to USSR of 1970.
Some telescopes are funded by philanthropy or higher education institutions, but you are typically talking about the millions of dollars as opposed to billions of dollars. Is it possible that the Higgs would have been found by some kind of private enterprise? I suppose. But I'm skeptical, since it took combined funding from Asia, the US, and European governments to actually get it built.
China is a hell of a lot less scary today than the USSR was.
The US was not a part of the UK during any part of the 19th century, though the Brits did manage to burn DC two decades prior to the first Opium War.
Do you have a reason why you think that?
Yes.
First, education. I do not believe that democracy can work in the long-term without a well-educated populace. Because I also believe in universal suffrage, I'm kind of boxed-in to providing a quality education to all Americans... otherwise we are Venezuela. I actually have come around to believe that we should probably extend our public school education another two years and make an associates degree the new high school diploma. It would be expensive and disruptive, but I think it is necessary. To your points, once we've done that, we can probably kill the student loans, or at least rethink the program. I also agree that our public school system needs reform - even down to the funding level. I like the idea of vouchers, though I would like to see the funding move to the state level - not just make the local government spit out voucher dollars while ALSO requiring them to run traditional public schools. I also recognize that some public schools are very good, and I don't see a need to disturb them (though perhaps they have become too expensive).
Research is a different matter. This is much more of a personal opinion - not fact-based. What is a fact is that certain things would not get much research money from the private sector - namely, things that probably won't lead to a profit: think supercolliders, space exploration, etc. It's also a fact that once you let government into something, you get all sorts of distasteful side effects. I personally feel that the research involved is important enough to put up with the waste, bureaucracy, market distortions, and outright slime and graft. We should, of course, always try to minimize that. I can totally see the other side of the argument, and admit it is reasonable enough... I just disagree :)
I'm not lying. This year, rich people will pay a higher percentage of their income to taxes. That is a tax increase.
I agree that CFLs die faster than they should, but they also cost almost nothing anymore - payback period is no longer an issue. The reason I'm not going all-in with LED at this point is three-fold: 1) when CFLs first entered the market, they cost many times what they do today, so I'm kind of betting that history will repeat itself, 2) I'm not convinced that LEDs will meet their stated lifetimes, which is high-risk with an expensive bulb, and 3) in many cases, a cheaper CFL is good enough and has a similar energy draw.
I still use incandescents in closets and stuff. Hell, I think the closet bulbs are from the 70s :) I also use incandescents over the dining room table, because the high efficiency bulbs make the food look gross. I'm experimenting with LEDs in the kitchen - I think they'll be fine since I'm already using CFLs in the recessed cans and, worst case, I can switch on the under-cabinet halogens if the food is looking gnarly.
IMHO, follow the money.
I'd say it's even simpler than that. A classic method of deflecting criticism is to set up an external boogeyman. People are starting to demand employment rights from the government. The government could change, or they could set up some big, bad, foreign companies to take the rap.
The only surprise is that they didn't choose a Japanese corporation. Oh, wait, they did...
Low. Our youth was not rioting. Even today, when the US is supposedly in shit-shape, US youth unemployment is lower than Europe. Only North Africa and the Middle East are worse than Europe.
Personally, I don't think we should have corporate taxes. I think we should tax capital gains (and all dividends) as ordinary income. This would more than make up for the relatively small revenue from corporate taxes, and would quash squeals of "double taxation".
85 billion isn't a meaningful budget cut when your annual deficit is well over 1 trillion dollars. It's like bailing out the Titanic with a bucket.
I agree completely. I don't really care too much how they close the deficit - budget cuts or taxes. But I think it is immoral to fund non-infrastructure expenses with debt. We are subsidizing our own lifestyle and passing the bill to our kids.
They did compromise - taxes went up on the rich. The sequester itself was a compromise between defense cuts and other discretionary spending. You might not have noticed because apparently this narrative doesn't sell commercial time.
What do you plan to use to move our cars around, if not electricty?
I don't really care. I can imagine a process of storing energy that is more efficient than batteries could be invented. And don't discount the cost of infrastructure - it is not free to replace all of our gas stations with quick-electric charging stations (or hydrogen stations, or LPG, or CNG, or LNG, etc). Imagine a factory that sits next to a nuke plant, solar plant, or wind farm. This factory sucks carbon out of the air, and nabs hydrogen from water, and puts together hydrocarbons in some efficient manner. Then you send it through a pipeline to existing refineries and distribute it with existing gas/diesel infrastructure. It would also feed the existing petrochemical industry.
Pipe dream? Maybe. But one could say the same about a battery technology that is affordable and allows a roughly 10-minute meaningful charge time. Even if such tech were invented, it would need to be affordable and require massive power feeds to charge stations, which may or may not coincide with existing gas stations sites. Apartment and street-parking solutions would need to be considered as well - remember that more than 30% of housing is rented, and many owner-occupied units have no on-site parking. Even for homes with a driveway or garage, many people will need to upgrade their electrical systems. I'm "lucky" because a tree fell on our power main and when the service was replaced they upped (downed?) the wire gauge. :)
Here's the thing I don't get. What makes you think we're shirking that responsibility? Because we can shovel a few billion more dollars down a dark rathole?
I didn't say we were shirking our responsibility. Level of funding is a very subjective topic - I was just defending the practice. I think government support of education and research is important.
Until the moment China decides: "no more _cheap_ solar panels for _you_". Then suddenly it makes all your enterprise to be at a disadvantage compared to native Chinese manufacturing.
Yes, well, I mentioned that scenario. If they managed to corner the market and then curtailed demand, they would reap some short-term benefit. Agreed.
Oh, and also China would get an R&D infrastructure built and ready so you won't be able to overtake them.
I used to have that opinion, and then I saw how quickly China built up their industrial base. I no longer have that opinion :)