I missed the part in the article where it mentioned the new technologies they are utilizing to achieve this price reduction.
Do we really need grocery store slashvertisements?
They did mention the technique of sampling the particular products Amazon/Whole Foods announced as becoming cheaper. That's some mighty impressive new biased sampling technology.
Innocent until proven guilty, right? Until you can prove, my car is killing the life on planet, kindly keep the screeching to the confines of your safe space. Thank you.
You are playing semantic games and build straw men. First, the standard of "proof" in law is very different in law, science, and logic. In criminal law, it's "beyond reasonable doubt". In civil law it's "preponderance of evidence".In logic, its "undeniable in all imaginable worlds". I don't want you to go to prison, I want you to stop polluting the planet. That's a civil matter. That standard was met long before. The "beyond reasonable doubt" standard was met, arguably, 15 years or so ago. The logic standard will never be met (see Descartes' Evil Demon), so demanding that just means you are a useless obstructionist. If you were serious about that, you would demand "logical proof" that breathing is worth the effort, and then die a quick death when our reality reasserts itself over hypothetical ones.
Your sarcasm is unwarranted and misses the point. In fact, it's much simpler: conservatives want higher education to teach conservative values and ideas, while leftists want higher education to teach leftist values and ideas.
Evolution and climate change, to name two hot spots, are not "values and ideas", they are well-tested theories that yield useful results when we apply them to reality. Or, in other words, they are as close to factual as science will take us. I find it strangely depressing that US conservatives nowadays take the worst ideas of post-modernism as their new gospel...
IDo you know that Ann Coulter could not speak at Berkeley this year because of these threats and the inability to have a reasonable chance at her safety?
Do you understand that in any way? At a fucking university, you can not have someone come express their thoughts without fear of death. Worse, the students were proud of this...Yeah man, we shut down free speech!
You presume facts not in evidence. Anne Coulter is an intellectual nincompoop. She is all opinion, with not a thought in evidence. And she enjoys free speech, with lots of channels for spouting her incoherent propaganda all around. Why on earth should a university offer her another platform? It's not going to increase her reach. Neither the material nor the speaker is fit for academic debate. All an invitation to speak at a proper university will do is to add to her prestige. I'm very much a free speech absolutist. I'm fine with everybody's opinion being heard. But nobody owes you, or Coulter, a platform. If the students, as part of the university, don't want her, expressing that opinion is their right.
If you want debate, invite conservative thinkers, not mere noisemakers. Donald Kagan comes to mind, or Richard Epstein, or Niall Ferguson.
If one believes that life starts at conception, then abortion is murder. While I can see why you wouldn't believe in creationism as that takes a leap of faith, I really don't get why you can't understand opposition to something as brutal as the slaughter of the innocent.
Are you aware of the fact that about half of all pregnancies spontaneously abort without any intervention in the first few weeks, often without anybody noticing either the pregnancy or its end? If "life starts at conception", god has designed a pretty awful system for keeping life alive.
From a theological perspective, with original sin there are no "innocents". And from a humanistic/scientific perspective, life itself (even human life, if you think every cell is human) is something we kill every time we scrub our hands, or pick our nose, or scratch an itch. Much of the dust in your house is dead skin cells your body dropped off. Life definitely plays second fiddle to mind, in my mind.
And from a practical perspective, it looks as if good and cheap access to contraceptives and sex ed are a lot better at reducing the rate of abortions than legal restraints. So is offering financial aid and career support for pregnant women. So if you really want to reduce the number of abortions, it's better to offer additional choices, not to restrict choices.
[...[I felt like an enemy to the Obama administration. They supported and condoned people who want me dead.
As the old saying goes: You make peace with your enemies, not your friends. Defusing the situation in the Near East is much more likely to result in liberalisation than the so-called "War on Terror" (that pretty much looks like a massive terror campaign from the other side). With all its limitations, Iran at least has surprisingly democratic elections, and in 2016 elected a more-or-less liberal parliament and in 2017 re-elected a more-or-less modernist president. That does not make it a human-rights paradise, but it sure is better than Saudi-Arabia in that respect.
50% of murders in the USA are committed by a demographic group that consistently votes over 90% democrat (FBI crime stats).
The remaining 50% are going to be fairly evenly divided.
"FBI crime stats" is not a proper citation, it's another unsubstantiated claim. And while you are dog whistling, that does not make your argument any more sound. So you suggest that blacks commit about 50% of murders (may be in the statistics, but it's questionable how good they are) and that 90% of blacks vote democratic (which is reasonable at least on the national level). But then you seem to suggest that these two are statistically independent, so you can infer (or at least suggest) that 90% of the 50% vote democratic. That's quite an assumption. I'd suspect that many of the 50% are convicted felons who don't vote at all. And, less hair-splittingly, I would assume that most of the 50% are from very much socially disadvantaged groups that rarely vote at all.
I know you are being sarcastic. But according to what I've read, firearm murders by Democrats outnumber those from Republicans 2 to 1.
What do you read? Seriously - do you have a source for that? Preferably not Alex Jones or Breitbart...
I suspect it's probably true. Correlation not causation. I'm sure there is a race/economic factor involved. The poor have higher gun crime numbers. The poor are much likely to vote democrat.
It's quite possible that it's true - but it's also possible that it's just based on some unreliable fake news blogger who pulled it out of his (or her) ass. That's why I'm asking for the source. If there is a reliable source, we can next see what it actually says in context.
Why don't you just go to one of the countries that already has the gun control you so crave? Progressive Americans could go anywhere in the 1st world if they really wanted to live in a society with those policies. Many of them even speak English primarily or entirely! By contrast, conservatives can go nowhere else.
Why not? It's only that most of the countries with "conservative" laws are 3rd world hell-holes. Maybe there is a relationship there?
This is a clear case of correlation not implying causation. I'd suppose that the causal chain is the other way round - people in rich countries can afford to use a lot of energy, and they can also afford to buy a lot of gadgets that use energy.
Estimates for the agreement would about $100 billion in funds per year to help out developing nations until 2025.
Whose estimates? Do you have a reasonable source for that claim?
The whole things sounds like the UN, where every country has a vote and a commitment to provide funds and supplies for the common good. However, countries rarely provide funds or supplies when asked; except for the US.
Are you aware of the fact that the US is about 1.3 billion US$ in arrears with
respect to commitments it has voluntarily entered into?
wind and solar energy are cheaper than other sources of energy (even without subsisdies),
If this is true why is the electricity price in green renewables Germany twice as high as their neighbour France which relies on nuclear power for nearly all of its electricity generation?
It's really weird since Germany actually generates most of its electricity from brown coal and Russian gas which is dirt-cheap.
First, prices in Germany are not twice as high as in France (though they are significantly higher). Secondly, while there are subsidies for renewables in Germany, there are also massive subsidies for nuclear in France. EDF, which effectively has a monopoly in France, is state owned, as is Areva, the nuclear reprocessing company, and there is significant doubt that the reserve funds for decommissioning and long term nuclear waste storage are remotely realistic.
English is a Germanic (which is the grouping for all languages dominantly descendant from Old Norse) language with strong Gaelic influences and minor inclusion of vocabulary from other language groups including Latin and Greek, but also including Cyrillic, Japanese, Chinese, aboriginal Australian, the whole range of 15th century American cultures, and a fair splattering from less widespread language groups.
English is a Germanic language, but neither it nor the Germanic languages in general descent from Old Norse. Rather, Old Norse is one of several Germanic languages, and more or less contemporary with Old English. Modern English has some indirect influence from Old Norse via the Vikings (and even more indirectly via the Normans), but both languages evolved from Proto-Germanic, English via West Germanic (with a lot of influence fron Northern Germanic), Old Norse more directly from Northern Germanic.
This is a city in Sweden, so it's safe to assume that health insurance comes from the national health insurance program, the city would not be buying private coverage for their employees. Thus, even if it the 6 hour days save money overall for the government at all levels, it costs the city money they don't have.
This is only half correct. First, in Sweden, employees salaries are paid by the employer (i.e. the city) for the first 14 days of every sickness period. Secondly, while Sweden has a national health care system, it's largely financed on the local level and by local taxes.
As long as taxes are non-zero the populist call will be taxes are too high. No matter how benefit, army, police, roads, civil structure, (health care in advanced nations), laws people get out of it, there will always be some who call for lower taxes.
And your plan as I said has no impact on what other people will do, or have been doing. China does not give a shit about your position, they care about economic power and growth (as well as protecting that power with Military).
I wish I could trust "academic experts". I really do. But all my experiences with academia and academics have been very disappointing.
Failed too many exams?
The first problem can be summed up with the old saying, "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach, research.". That's exactly what we see in academia: those who couldn't cut it outside of academia with their bachelor's degree end up back in academic circles, often for the rest of their lives. Academia provides a safe playpen for those who were below the standards of the real world.
LOL. Any given tenure track position has typically 30-100 applicants - and all of these are, of course, already PhDs. Grant applications have 5-30% acceptance rates, depending on the agency and program. There are few fields that are as competitive as academia.
The second problem, which is somewhat related to the first, is that many academics are completely out of touch with reality, and full of, for a lack of a better term, total bullshit. My background is in computer systems design.
Then you may have heard about, e.g. BSD Unix, RISC, SUN-1, X11, TCP/IP - all products of "useless academics".
[...]
The fourth problem is when you take all of the above and add money into the mix. That's when everything really goes to hell. This is a sure-fire way for even the sciences, which are generally among the least-inept of the academic subjects, to become highly politicized. It's no longer just about inept people doing inept research. Now it's about inept people doing inept research but always finding the "correct" results for politicians who need to legitimize otherwise illegitimate practices like carbon taxes and excessive and costly regulation.
So when such a flawed system provides results or information for my consideration, I have to take what they're saying with a very, very, very big spoonful of salt grains. None of it can be trusted, from the individual level all the way through to entire fields of study.
Pray tell us, what is your secret source of wisdom? How do you "know" these things about academia? Why do you trust these sources and what is their motivation? Who paid Fourier for nefariously discovering the greenhouse effect in 1824, or Arrhenius, who first quantified its effect on the atmospheric temperature in 1896 (and got close to current estimates on the climate sensitivity, but completely underestimated our release of CO2)?
Making America great again by "encouraging low- and mid-level jobs to go to American workers"? How about "enabling American workers to fill highly qualified positions"?
If Prof. Beaker publishes an unexpected result with large implications, a lot of other scientist will try to refute, refine, or reaffirm that result, without the EPA ever stepping in.
And where do these scientists get their funding? Prof. Beaker might have been funded by, let's say, very big pharmaceutical industries with a direct interest in the outcome, and Prof. Beaker might be depending for 90% on that kind of funds.
Now, who is going to pay the independent scientists to reproduce the research?
In other words: dream on, 'science' doesn't work the way you describe it. Maybe it should, I agree, but it doesn't.
If Prof. Beaker is Prof. Beaker, he will be paid by a university, and he will most likely have tenure, so his personal income is safe - this is what the tenure system is all about. And his additional research funding will come from a large number of different sources - from the NSF, from NASA or ESA, from the European Union or the Chinese Academy of Sciences. And, of course, potentially also from industry partners. But not all Beakers get their money from the same sources. See e.g. the sad Andrew Wakefield story - which eventually got corrected, just as expected.
We have this story right on the frontpage where an average biology graduate makes $31,000 a year.
If you follow your article to it's source, you can see that US$ 31000 is the salary of the average fresh biology bachelor. To work as a scientist in biology and the life sciences, a Ph.D. is essentially a requirement. A bachelor degree is a start, but hardly something that enables you to evaluate serious scientific reports. And biology is not the only subject - statisticians with a bachelor make around US$50000, . And those salaries do not include employer payroll taxes and benefits.
In words, that is One Million Dollars [youtube.com], or, with overheads, maybe around 5 qualified employees.
If the EPA's overhead is 84.5% for paperwork, not even novel science, it's time to end the program.
As pointed about, your salary costs are way off. And then you need to figure in office space and equipment, potentially lab space (and equipment), and yes, administrative and managerial overhead. For desk jobs, a factor of between 2 and 3 seems to be normal in the US - more in countries with a substantive social security system. For lab jobs, the factor is certainly a lot higher. So I doubt that "around 5 qualified employees" is far off even for a reasonably efficient organisation.
Slashdot Mirror
I missed the part in the article where it mentioned the new technologies they are utilizing to achieve this price reduction.
Do we really need grocery store slashvertisements?
They did mention the technique of sampling the particular products Amazon/Whole Foods announced as becoming cheaper. That's some mighty impressive new biased sampling technology.
Innocent until proven guilty, right? Until you can prove, my car is killing the life on planet, kindly keep the screeching to the confines of your safe space. Thank you.
You are playing semantic games and build straw men. First, the standard of "proof" in law is very different in law, science, and logic. In criminal law, it's "beyond reasonable doubt". In civil law it's "preponderance of evidence".In logic, its "undeniable in all imaginable worlds". I don't want you to go to prison, I want you to stop polluting the planet. That's a civil matter. That standard was met long before. The "beyond reasonable doubt" standard was met, arguably, 15 years or so ago. The logic standard will never be met (see Descartes' Evil Demon), so demanding that just means you are a useless obstructionist. If you were serious about that, you would demand "logical proof" that breathing is worth the effort, and then die a quick death when our reality reasserts itself over hypothetical ones.
Your sarcasm is unwarranted and misses the point. In fact, it's much simpler: conservatives want higher education to teach conservative values and ideas, while leftists want higher education to teach leftist values and ideas.
Evolution and climate change, to name two hot spots, are not "values and ideas", they are well-tested theories that yield useful results when we apply them to reality. Or, in other words, they are as close to factual as science will take us. I find it strangely depressing that US conservatives nowadays take the worst ideas of post-modernism as their new gospel...
I never managed to get a GED or go to college, but I did manage to sell my last company for $110M. You?
Went to university, got a masters degree, got a PhD, and sold my last company for $666M. As they say, education pays off. Or I'm bullshitting you.
IDo you know that Ann Coulter could not speak at Berkeley this year because of these threats and the inability to have a reasonable chance at her safety? Do you understand that in any way? At a fucking university, you can not have someone come express their thoughts without fear of death. Worse, the students were proud of this...Yeah man, we shut down free speech!
You presume facts not in evidence. Anne Coulter is an intellectual nincompoop. She is all opinion, with not a thought in evidence. And she enjoys free speech, with lots of channels for spouting her incoherent propaganda all around. Why on earth should a university offer her another platform? It's not going to increase her reach. Neither the material nor the speaker is fit for academic debate. All an invitation to speak at a proper university will do is to add to her prestige. I'm very much a free speech absolutist. I'm fine with everybody's opinion being heard. But nobody owes you, or Coulter, a platform. If the students, as part of the university, don't want her, expressing that opinion is their right.
If you want debate, invite conservative thinkers, not mere noisemakers. Donald Kagan comes to mind, or Richard Epstein, or Niall Ferguson.
If one believes that life starts at conception, then abortion is murder. While I can see why you wouldn't believe in creationism as that takes a leap of faith, I really don't get why you can't understand opposition to something as brutal as the slaughter of the innocent.
Are you aware of the fact that about half of all pregnancies spontaneously abort without any intervention in the first few weeks, often without anybody noticing either the pregnancy or its end? If "life starts at conception", god has designed a pretty awful system for keeping life alive.
From a theological perspective, with original sin there are no "innocents". And from a humanistic/scientific perspective, life itself (even human life, if you think every cell is human) is something we kill every time we scrub our hands, or pick our nose, or scratch an itch. Much of the dust in your house is dead skin cells your body dropped off. Life definitely plays second fiddle to mind, in my mind.
And from a practical perspective, it looks as if good and cheap access to contraceptives and sex ed are a lot better at reducing the rate of abortions than legal restraints. So is offering financial aid and career support for pregnant women. So if you really want to reduce the number of abortions, it's better to offer additional choices, not to restrict choices.
[...[I felt like an enemy to the Obama administration. They supported and condoned people who want me dead.
As the old saying goes: You make peace with your enemies, not your friends. Defusing the situation in the Near East is much more likely to result in liberalisation than the so-called "War on Terror" (that pretty much looks like a massive terror campaign from the other side). With all its limitations, Iran at least has surprisingly democratic elections, and in 2016 elected a more-or-less liberal parliament and in 2017 re-elected a more-or-less modernist president. That does not make it a human-rights paradise, but it sure is better than Saudi-Arabia in that respect.
50% of murders in the USA are committed by a demographic group that consistently votes over 90% democrat (FBI crime stats).
The remaining 50% are going to be fairly evenly divided.
"FBI crime stats" is not a proper citation, it's another unsubstantiated claim. And while you are dog whistling, that does not make your argument any more sound. So you suggest that blacks commit about 50% of murders (may be in the statistics, but it's questionable how good they are) and that 90% of blacks vote democratic (which is reasonable at least on the national level). But then you seem to suggest that these two are statistically independent, so you can infer (or at least suggest) that 90% of the 50% vote democratic. That's quite an assumption. I'd suspect that many of the 50% are convicted felons who don't vote at all. And, less hair-splittingly, I would assume that most of the 50% are from very much socially disadvantaged groups that rarely vote at all.
I know you are being sarcastic. But according to what I've read, firearm murders by Democrats outnumber those from Republicans 2 to 1.
What do you read? Seriously - do you have a source for that? Preferably not Alex Jones or Breitbart...
I suspect it's probably true. Correlation not causation. I'm sure there is a race/economic factor involved. The poor have higher gun crime numbers. The poor are much likely to vote democrat.
It's quite possible that it's true - but it's also possible that it's just based on some unreliable fake news blogger who pulled it out of his (or her) ass. That's why I'm asking for the source. If there is a reliable source, we can next see what it actually says in context.
I don't know of any people going out trying to kill a mass of people in the name of Christ...please, enumerate them.
For a start.... And rather recently this event.
Why don't you just go to one of the countries that already has the gun control you so crave? Progressive Americans could go anywhere in the 1st world if they really wanted to live in a society with those policies. Many of them even speak English primarily or entirely! By contrast, conservatives can go nowhere else.
Why not? It's only that most of the countries with "conservative" laws are 3rd world hell-holes. Maybe there is a relationship there?
I know you are being sarcastic. But according to what I've read, firearm murders by Democrats outnumber those from Republicans 2 to 1.
What do you read? Seriously - do you have a source for that? Preferably not Alex Jones or Breitbart...
Energy use is correlated with GDP, so it's in a country's best interest to incentivize energy use.
This is a clear case of correlation not implying causation. I'd suppose that the causal chain is the other way round - people in rich countries can afford to use a lot of energy, and they can also afford to buy a lot of gadgets that use energy.
Estimates for the agreement would about $100 billion in funds per year to help out developing nations until 2025.
Whose estimates? Do you have a reasonable source for that claim?
The whole things sounds like the UN, where every country has a vote and a commitment to provide funds and supplies for the common good. However, countries rarely provide funds or supplies when asked; except for the US.
Are you aware of the fact that the US is about 1.3 billion US$ in arrears with respect to commitments it has voluntarily entered into?
wind and solar energy are cheaper than other sources of energy (even without subsisdies),
If this is true why is the electricity price in green renewables Germany twice as high as their neighbour France which relies on nuclear power for nearly all of its electricity generation?
It's really weird since Germany actually generates most of its electricity from brown coal and Russian gas which is dirt-cheap.
First, prices in Germany are not twice as high as in France (though they are significantly higher). Secondly, while there are subsidies for renewables in Germany, there are also massive subsidies for nuclear in France. EDF, which effectively has a monopoly in France, is state owned, as is Areva, the nuclear reprocessing company, and there is significant doubt that the reserve funds for decommissioning and long term nuclear waste storage are remotely realistic.
English is a Germanic (which is the grouping for all languages dominantly descendant from Old Norse) language with strong Gaelic influences and minor inclusion of vocabulary from other language groups including Latin and Greek, but also including Cyrillic, Japanese, Chinese, aboriginal Australian, the whole range of 15th century American cultures, and a fair splattering from less widespread language groups.
English is a Germanic language, but neither it nor the Germanic languages in general descent from Old Norse. Rather, Old Norse is one of several Germanic languages, and more or less contemporary with Old English. Modern English has some indirect influence from Old Norse via the Vikings (and even more indirectly via the Normans), but both languages evolved from Proto-Germanic, English via West Germanic (with a lot of influence fron Northern Germanic), Old Norse more directly from Northern Germanic.
This is a city in Sweden, so it's safe to assume that health insurance comes from the national health insurance program, the city would not be buying private coverage for their employees. Thus, even if it the 6 hour days save money overall for the government at all levels, it costs the city money they don't have.
This is only half correct. First, in Sweden, employees salaries are paid by the employer (i.e. the city) for the first 14 days of every sickness period. Secondly, while Sweden has a national health care system, it's largely financed on the local level and by local taxes.
As long as taxes are non-zero the populist call will be taxes are too high. No matter how benefit, army, police, roads, civil structure, (health care in advanced nations), laws people get out of it, there will always be some who call for lower taxes.
What have the Romans ever done for us?
Or, as Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote: "Taxes are what we pay for civilized society..."
I don't know where Scala is, but Java sounds like a nice place to live.
It's in Milan, Italy. See La Scala. Also a nive place to live.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/070228-mars-warming.html
Always look at page 2! "[Abdussamatov's] views are completely at odds with the mainstream scientific opinion," said Colin Wilson, a planetary physicist at England's Oxford University.
And your plan as I said has no impact on what other people will do, or have been doing. China does not give a shit about your position, they care about economic power and growth (as well as protecting that power with Military).
China coal consumption declines for third straight year, and solar capacity grew 81.6 per cent, wind capacity grew 13.2 per cent in 2016 compared to 2015. The China excuse has lost its lustre.
I wish I could trust "academic experts". I really do. But all my experiences with academia and academics have been very disappointing.
Failed too many exams?
The first problem can be summed up with the old saying, "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach, research.". That's exactly what we see in academia: those who couldn't cut it outside of academia with their bachelor's degree end up back in academic circles, often for the rest of their lives. Academia provides a safe playpen for those who were below the standards of the real world.
LOL. Any given tenure track position has typically 30-100 applicants - and all of these are, of course, already PhDs. Grant applications have 5-30% acceptance rates, depending on the agency and program. There are few fields that are as competitive as academia.
The second problem, which is somewhat related to the first, is that many academics are completely out of touch with reality, and full of, for a lack of a better term, total bullshit. My background is in computer systems design.
Then you may have heard about, e.g. BSD Unix, RISC, SUN-1, X11, TCP/IP - all products of "useless academics".
[...]
The fourth problem is when you take all of the above and add money into the mix. That's when everything really goes to hell. This is a sure-fire way for even the sciences, which are generally among the least-inept of the academic subjects, to become highly politicized. It's no longer just about inept people doing inept research. Now it's about inept people doing inept research but always finding the "correct" results for politicians who need to legitimize otherwise illegitimate practices like carbon taxes and excessive and costly regulation.
So when such a flawed system provides results or information for my consideration, I have to take what they're saying with a very, very, very big spoonful of salt grains. None of it can be trusted, from the individual level all the way through to entire fields of study.
Pray tell us, what is your secret source of wisdom? How do you "know" these things about academia? Why do you trust these sources and what is their motivation? Who paid Fourier for nefariously discovering the greenhouse effect in 1824, or Arrhenius, who first quantified its effect on the atmospheric temperature in 1896 (and got close to current estimates on the climate sensitivity, but completely underestimated our release of CO2)?
Making America great again by "encouraging low- and mid-level jobs to go to American workers"? How about "enabling American workers to fill highly qualified positions"?
If Prof. Beaker publishes an unexpected result with large implications, a lot of other scientist will try to refute, refine, or reaffirm that result, without the EPA ever stepping in.
And where do these scientists get their funding? Prof. Beaker might have been funded by, let's say, very big pharmaceutical industries with a direct interest in the outcome, and Prof. Beaker might be depending for 90% on that kind of funds. Now, who is going to pay the independent scientists to reproduce the research? In other words: dream on, 'science' doesn't work the way you describe it. Maybe it should, I agree, but it doesn't.
If Prof. Beaker is Prof. Beaker, he will be paid by a university, and he will most likely have tenure, so his personal income is safe - this is what the tenure system is all about. And his additional research funding will come from a large number of different sources - from the NSF, from NASA or ESA, from the European Union or the Chinese Academy of Sciences. And, of course, potentially also from industry partners. But not all Beakers get their money from the same sources. See e.g. the sad Andrew Wakefield story - which eventually got corrected, just as expected.
We have this story right on the frontpage where an average biology graduate makes $31,000 a year.
If you follow your article to it's source, you can see that US$ 31000 is the salary of the average fresh biology bachelor. To work as a scientist in biology and the life sciences, a Ph.D. is essentially a requirement. A bachelor degree is a start, but hardly something that enables you to evaluate serious scientific reports. And biology is not the only subject - statisticians with a bachelor make around US$50000, . And those salaries do not include employer payroll taxes and benefits.
In words, that is One Million Dollars [youtube.com], or, with overheads, maybe around 5 qualified employees.
If the EPA's overhead is 84.5% for paperwork, not even novel science, it's time to end the program.
As pointed about, your salary costs are way off. And then you need to figure in office space and equipment, potentially lab space (and equipment), and yes, administrative and managerial overhead. For desk jobs, a factor of between 2 and 3 seems to be normal in the US - more in countries with a substantive social security system. For lab jobs, the factor is certainly a lot higher. So I doubt that "around 5 qualified employees" is far off even for a reasonably efficient organisation.