Why Isn't the US Government Funding Research? 599
thesandbender writes "The recent post about GM opening its own battery research facility led me to wonder why the US government is pouring billions into buying companies instead of heavily funding useful research. You can give $10 billion to a company to squander or you can invest $10 billion into a battery research and just give the findings to the whole of the US industry for free. From a historical standpoint, the US government has little experience with commercial enterprise ... but has an amazing record for driving innovation. The Manhattan Project and the Apollo moon missions are two of the pinnacles of 20th century scientific achievement, yet it seems to me that this drive died in the '70s and that's when the US started its slow decline. To be true to the 'Ask Slashdot' theme, what practical research do you think the US government should embark upon to get the most return for its citizens and the world?"
That's Obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
The Manhattan Project and the Apollo Moon missions are two of the pinnacles of the 20th century scientific achievement
So, extrapolating from those two points, we just need a big, old-fashioned war. (hot or cold, as desired)
Corporate research doesn't want to compete (Score:4, Insightful)
Raw research properly conducted on unexplored issues always discovers something. Either the experiment worked or it did not, and either way, something was learned. It always pays dividends - if not in new products and methods, in the avoidance of the repetition of failed experiments. This doesn't help the profits of the corporations that fund the election of political tools. That's progress. Progress is not the government's goal. The purposes of government are to ensure its persistence and toward that goal to deplete the surplus productivity so as to eliminate a surfeit of leisure. An excess of leisure is an invitation to insurrection.
TFS is correct that the US government forgot these things for a while, but they've remembered them since.
But... to answer the question: the big and the small. The fast and the slow. The literal, the virtual and the speculative. Most importantly, how to get offsite backup on the human genome. If we don't do that then nothing else matters.
Re:Its simple.... (Score:5, Insightful)
How is getting some public governmental research entity started going to be remotely cost effective and efficient
Of course you're right. Government research is always so wasteful and inefficient. Remember that DARPAnet thing? What a dumb idea! Fortunately, it sank like every inefficient government research program inevtably will, and we can now discuss the glories of the Invisible Hand here on free-market forums such as Compuserve, Prodigy, and GEnie.
It is (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Medical research (Score:5, Insightful)
Lobbyists and insurance companies are what got us into this mess.
Doctors and medical establishments learned that they had insurance companies by the balls at one point. Approved procedure could cost whatever they wanted, and insurance would pay it. Then they got all butthurt because real people couldn't afford to pay that much at all. Then insurance companies got revenge when everyone decided that doctors were a blank check in terms of lawsuit money. Insurance companies then offered insurance against lawsuits to the doctors, for a very high price.
So now what we have is a system where it costs two weeks worth of pay for the average American to get a single fucking X-ray that department stores were doing for free in the 60s. Of course I expect the expert opinion of the doctor to cost some money, but its ridiculous. And one of the reasons is because of this never ending war between doctors, lawsuits, and insurance companies.
I say we research some way to break the cycle. Like maybe making doctors and medical establishments explain why that aspirin costs a patient $100, when the entire bottle of 500 costs them 5% of that if they were to buy it themselves at a wholesale pharmacy.
Because they're funding Iraq (Score:5, Insightful)
End of transmission...
Re:morons in charge (Score:3, Insightful)
Model T also had what, like 20 horsepower?
Now we can get 20MPG out of what, like 200 horsepower on something that weighs 2000 pounds more, is safer both to drive and less likely to kill pedestrians if it hits them (yes, they are engineered to be less pedestrian-fatal), start in cold weather, and generally run hundreds of thousands of miles. So remind me, where's the comparison here?
Oh, right. Back to reality. Research pays for itself more than investing in corporations. However, corporations have our society by the balls, so what is to be expected? In short, we have given corporations too much rights. We need to be investing in ourselves aka research.
Re:That's Obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
War certainly has driven a great deal of innovation.
But I think the question is why doesn't the government fund research outside of war? I know people didn't like McCain but he did want to fund research and offer reewards for things like new battery technology. Why doesn't Obama?
Baby Boomers (Score:4, Insightful)
I blame the baby-boomers, they were raised on idea of continual gain of benefits. Whether it was from capitalism, increased government benefits, or lower taxes. They continually have driven everything out of total self interest an screw society.
You say I am crazy? It was not my generation that,
I may be generalizing about baby boomers as a whole, but the leadership from my generation has not become CEOs, congressmen or senators, the baby boomers have.
Strange story (Score:2, Insightful)
why the US government is pouring billions into buying companies instead of heavily funding useful research. You can give $10 billion to a company to squander or you can invest $10 billion into a battery research and just give the findings to the whole of the US industry for free
You're linking two not-really-related issues. Bailouts for large companies are intended to avoid a chain reaction of collapses and thus preserve economic confidence. Publicly funded "Blue Sky" [wikipedia.org] research will provide for very long term improvements to the human race from scientific progress. If you're wanting to increase the money supply to prevent a recession, you're better off allocating the cash to areas that can absorb them readily (such as construction and consumer finance). Or just get Ben Bernanke a helicopter...
Re:That's Obvious (Score:2, Insightful)
well outside maybe the 1920's, I can't think of a particular time America has been at peace for 10+ years.
not that it's good or bad, just how it is... I'd say we have such internal peace cause we've always had external conflicts, not unlike Britain or Rome's rise and fall.
-maybe we will beat the fall somehow
--someone's gotta be the first
It was not the 70's. (Score:5, Insightful)
The US Government IS Funding Research! (Score:2, Insightful)
The US Government IS Funding Research!
The US has fantastic research. And, it is huge. Very few countries are in that ball-park, and can only compete on a per capita level, e.g. Switzerland, Sweden etc.
The scientific production in the US is great, and is the norm everyone else is measuring against. OK, again, a few per capita level runners up. But, in general, US research is well funded.
The Far East and Europe are catching up, but with the US economy as large as it still is it may take more than a decade.
Finally, the US Government IS funding research also through the system with tax reduction for private funds. Very few other governemnts would allow that, where research is funded via the tax bill only.
Re:That's Obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
Another part of the puzzle is the war must be against another superpower.
Of course. It has got to be a real fight to the finish. No one fights harder, or is more inventive, than when their back's against the wall. It's not like we're in any danger of Vietnam or Iraq coming over here, and kicking our ass.
Re:That's Obvious (Score:3, Insightful)
War on Terror, War on Drugs, War on x+1.
What was that again?
Why Isn't the US Government blah blah blah (Score:3, Insightful)
17 days ago STS-125, the forth in-orbit service of Hubble, ended successfully
12 days ago Gov. Schwarzenegger dedicated the largest laser on Earth to fusion research
Last week the DOE produced video [nanowerk.com] of a potential carbon nanotube memory device in operation.
3 days from now 7 people will blast into orbit, rendezvous with the ISS and further the construction of a giant orbital laboratory.
No government in history has ever, is now, or will ever again (post dollar collapse) facilitate as much raw research as the US federal government.
Just STFU please. Thanks.
Re:That's Obvious (Score:1, Insightful)
It's true that warfare or the threat of warfare accelerates progress, but the cost is too great. I would rather have technology go a little bit slower in an economically competitive, peaceful environment, than have it go fast at the expense of billions of lives and the destruction of environment/society.
Re:That's Obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
But I think the question is why doesn't the government fund research outside of war?
Because it's pretty easy to get people to agree to spend the necessary money, if it might save their, or their children's, lives. And, there's really no other situation where that threat is quite as real, as during war.
Global warming might end up killing us all, but that's a diffuse and abstract concept. The guy pointing nuclear missiles at your city, or launching mortars at your kid is much more concrete.
Re:Its simple.... (Score:3, Insightful)
I think your forgetting the differences between state and local governments and the federal US government. Post roads is explicitly place under the domain of the US federal government where Fire and police services aren't. In fact, there are special rules that need to be followed before a US marshal or FBI agent gains legal jurisdiction over a violation of law.
All of this is spelled out in the constitution in which is outlines what the Federal government can do. The constitution wasn't designed to limit the government, it was designed to specifically empower it with the remaining duties being left to the state or the people respectively. The bill of rights and amendments either limit the government in obvious ways or change how some constitutional authority operates.
What is left is operated by the states or local governments and it would entirely depend on their constitution and laws to weather they are capable of doing something like that or not.
To further expand on this, the government has a duty to not waste the money it imposes the obligation for on the people. It would be just as risky of a bet for any government to tax the people and take the tax money to the horse track. This obligation is no different then you becoming the executor of an estate or trust when someone else is the receiver and having to be prudent in the investments or risk not only jail time but having to repay any losses in the process.
Re:We gave it all to poor people instead (Score:3, Insightful)
You know, money given to the poor doesn't just disappear. The poor spend it, and actually spend more of their income than any other demographic. In fact, giving money to the poor is one of the best ways for a government to boost economic activity and help everyone.
Re:That's Obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
The Manhattan Project and the Apollo Moon missions are two of the pinnacles of the 20th century scientific achievement
So, extrapolating from those two points, we just need a big, old-fashioned war. (hot or cold, as desired)
Just to keep the noise down on the other continents, could you maybe make it a civil war this time? Or maybe something with Canada and/or Mexico... Thanks!
Re:Its simple.... (Score:5, Insightful)
There is surely a market for long lasting batteries, and as in the case of GM, companies have been investing heavily in new technologies. How is getting some public governmental research entity started going to be remotely cost effective and efficient, because we all know that government departments are the model of efficiency?
You've answered your own question. For profit corporations are not good research vehicles, because they are too efficient at raising profits. This means they will efficiently allocate resources to researching technology with obvious (near) immediate commercial returns. So yes, you'll get research on longer lasting batteries (if only so that they can be patented and kept off the market as long as possible), and GM, etc. However the areas of science which might be today's equivalent to the physics of electricity or of genetics will not be discovered by this kind of effcient R&D.
Corporate research is excellent at delivering technological improvements, less so at fostering scientific innovation.
Re:We gave it all to poor people instead (Score:3, Insightful)
The trade imbalance, however large, is not even close to our total economic output. The multiplier effect is still in play. The poor still buy American-made food, get their hair cut by Americans, and so on. Your argument is essentially that the poor disproportionately contribute to the trade imbalance, and even if that were true, the money supplied in the actual trade mechanics (and industrial design) would be significant.
Second, it's quite rich to claim the poor would just subsidize China when, really, the reason places like Wal-Mart exist is that middle class incomes haven't increased in 30 years. With a robust middle class, our trade wouldn't be in such dire straits.
Re:Its simple.... (Score:5, Insightful)
In basic, the "Guvmint" exists to keep us safe and provide basic infrastructure. I would add in water, police, firemen... Oh, and the EPA, FDA, etc. we need those kinds of watchdog agencies.
Does the government own GM now? ... No. No it does not. It's just a big shareholder.
You seem to place great store in the ability of the "market" to innovate. You bash the government for being inefficient. Have you ever worked for a large company? Man.... Trust me, the government doesn't have a monopoly on being stupid and slow.
And so freaking what if government did open source a battery and undermined a companies research dollars? Really... so what? Who gave companies some kind of right? No one is guaranteed the right to profit.
I'm rather tired of this magic land where companies would do what's best for all of us due to the power of the "free market". You know what? The first thing most successful and large companies do is strangle the free market to death so they can retard innovation and competition. It's happened over and over again in pretty much every single industry I can think of. Don't go crying Commie on me... I love the theory of capitalism. It turns human greed into technological progress. It's awesome... but there has to be limits and consequences to the behaviour of large companies. And man, they do NOT need any protections!
Think of this... Big business pays almost no taxes. They create something, sometimes with government subsidies or loans. They sell it to us at a profit. Then they dump their waste into the public rivers. We pay for them to make stuff. We pay to get the stuff. Then we pay to clean up the waste from the process. W.T.F!
Oops... calm down... no ranting... It's ok..... Phew!
I love it when the government does research and puts the results out there. Everyone benefits and we all pay so very little for such a big gain. That's the magic of government. It doesn't have to be driven by the almighty Profit. It can do the right thing at a loss, just because it needs to be done. We all benefit, and our slice of the payment is so very tiny.
People whine about the inefficiency of the government, then they drive on the roads, enjoy the protections of police and firemen, use the public school systems, buy homes that aren't death traps thanks to building codes, reap the benefits of cheap shipping due to interstate highways..... etc etc etc.
ah, ah... calm... yes....
For my two cents, I would love to see the government do basic research in:
batteries and capacitors. We need this very badly.
infrastructure... build high speed rails so we can ship a house across the country for a nickel.
Power savings... Why isn't there an open source home design for builders to use? Seriously, something so simple....
I could go on, but those would be a nice start.
-Tony
Next question, please (Score:5, Insightful)
led me to wonder why the US government is pouring billions into buying companies instead of heavily funding useful research. You can give $10 billion to a company to squander or you can invest $10 billion into a battery research and just give the findings to the whole of the US industry for free.
Because the immediate problem is the recession.
GM can't build an electric car if the company goes into liquidation. GM can't sell an electric car if its dealers go into liquidation.
Mechanics can't service an electric car if they go bankrupt with their suppliers.
Infrastructure once damaged is very difficult and expensive to rebuild.
You have to stop the bleeding first.
Research isn't a panacea.
It would be easy to aquander $10 billion on projects that have no realistic prospect of success within a reasonable time frame.
The geek isn't an unbiased observer here.
It should be obvious that a very generous cut of that $10 billion he wants the government to spend will be headed his way - and not to the auto worker on the line in Detroit.
Check the Constitution... (Score:4, Insightful)
Frankly ,looking over the constitutional powers allotted to the federal government they have no f**king business buying businesses, funding research, baling businesses out, or a large host of other "responsibilities" they have taken on illegally. They're supposed to protect our borders and manage to screw that up. Run a post office, they do a lousy job of that. Supposed to regulate interstate commerce which they interpret to mean "involve themselves in anything they want to" rather than just making sure trade amongst the several states is fair. They are supposed to collect tariffs on imports rather than tax the citizenry. They seem to screw up just about everything. What's worse is the population of complete morons who continually vote for Democrats and/or Republicans and expect things to change for the better rather than staying the same. Even worse the population is made up of liberal sissy wymynists who would rather cower than do anything about it.
Re:Baby Boomers (Score:4, Insightful)
As something of a tangent, this is a canard parroted by people who do not know much about banking regulations. It is worth pointing out, for example, that a number of industrialized countries that had no banking problems (like Canada) have never had a regulatory equivalent of the Glass-Steagall whipping boy. Ironically, that body of regulation was modified over the last few decades in order to *reduce* the number of bank failures, which it did, by allowing them to diversify their business. If diversifying investments was so bad it would 1) not be one of the fundamental rules of investment generally and 2) I would expect the industrialized countries without any such restrictions to have fared far worse than they did.
The problem wasn't lack of regulation, but a lot of stupid regulation and arguably pervasive corruption that is still in place today. Add on top of this a regulatory monoculture in global banking that allowed exploits to propagate, and the problem starts to become obvious.
Re:Food Production (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, it's become less direct than it was. Now all that research money is funneled through Monsanto ('cept they don't call it research). Monsanto's investments in politicians and ties to bureaucrats have paid off well.
Re:Baby Boomers (Score:3, Insightful)
It was not my generation that,
Funny, usually the people behind the desk running most everything behind your list are fresh out of MBA school looking to make money fast like they saw on TV.
Re:Research is not the function of the Fed Gov't (Score:5, Insightful)
Private companies don't do basic research because basic research might or might not be profitable and if it might be profitable, then only in very long term. Private companies don't think in long term.
Also, stop bullshitting yourself in thinking that free market puts research dollars where they will be most beneficial. Free market researches everything what might bring a short term profit. It doesn't have to be beneficial at all and often it isn't.
Putting research dollars where they will buy the most votes, on the other hand, is doing research on what the public wants. And in many cases the public wants beneficial things.
Re:That's Obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
We flirted with colonialism circa 1900, decided we didn't really like it too much, then got involved in WWI. Managed to hide from war for 22 years, got violently drawn into WWII. Since then I think it comes down to, we've decided it's better to intervene in those little spats before they turn into world wars. Because world wars suck.
And I'll come down tentatively on the side of our involvement being good... If we don't want to play World Policeman I'm sure China would be happy to step in.
Invisible Hand (Score:3, Insightful)
A lot of people just don't get it.
Governments are not inherently less efficient than corporations. Just go look at various private companies (big and small) they're not all lean mean super efficient entities. Far from it.
And it's not a matter of size. It's a matter of quality.
You can have good or bad quality government (whether big or small).
There have been a number of people who decided to make the sacrifice and go into civil service/government to try to make things better, rather than make themselves richer in $$$$ terms.
Maybe nowadays there are too few people willing to do that.
And guess what, the Invisible Hand only does what the people want to do.
If only the bad guys want to be politicians, the voters will have to pick the least crappy.
If the voters keep voting for more crappy instead of less crappy, it doesn't help...
If only the lazy inefficient people want to work in the civil service, that doesn't help either.
It's like all the cells in your body doing all that hard work just for your body to not fall apart overnight. A poor good:bad cell ratio, and the body falls apart sooner.
Re:That's Obvious (Score:2, Insightful)
Global warming doesn't affect us now.
More importantly, actually doing anything about it would require the profits of entrenched special interests to suffer.
Our government can't do squat because it's being held hostage by corporate america.
Re:That's Obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
War certainly has driven a great deal of innovation.
That it has. Michelangelo got his engineering degree building war machines. Those machines have taught us a lot about ballistics, momentum, and other fields of physics.
But I think the question is why doesn't the government fund research outside of war?
The proper domains of the US government are to provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty. You've covered defense. General welfare is covered by the USDA and the FDA, where they ensure the food and drugs we get are (supposedly) wholesome and nutritious. The blessings of liberty need no research - they need common sense (in rare supply these days, I'll admit).
The true answer to your post lies in the US Constitution [wikipedia.org], Article 1, Section 8, clause 8: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
By encouraging intellectual property suits and elevating copyrights and patents to their present position we've gotten to the point where these things prevent the progress they were intended to promote. Since progress is the essential good that exclusive rights to inventions and creations were created for, it only makes sense to do away with the protections now that have come to subvert that need. We should immediately abolish and vacate all patents and copyrights, and prohibit their issue except in the cause of progress. When they issue they should be for no more than the original terms - 17 years for patents, 27 years for copyright, no extensions and whether or not the inventor or creator is dead is irrelevant.
Also, to post a patent you should have to post a $100,000 bond that the material is original. If the material is unoriginal, the bond would be forfeit. This will to some small degree decrease the trolls who use the spare time on their lawyer retainer contracts to file unuseful or obvious patents.
Before you argue with me on this, consider this merit of copyright: Sonny Bono believed that copyright should last "forever". When informed that this would violate the US Constitution's mandate of "for limited times" he offered "Forever, less one day". A lawmaker and intellectual property rights activist himself, he co-authored and promoted The Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) of 1998 [wikipedia.org]. This law prevented many thousands of works from falling into the public domain (your ownership and mine - essentially, "the pool of our culture"). Essentially, with this law they deprived you and me of stuff that would have been ours in due course. They stole from us. It spanned the time until the next extension of copyright which, although it doesn't guarantee perpetual protection of Steamboat Willie, does guarantee his protection until such time as they can extend it again, ad infinitum.
Cher, and Sonny Bono's estate are now suing [techdirt.com] Universal music over the profits from the rights to his music. Apparently this stalwart pillar of the community is accused of using accounting tricks and shell corporations to evade paying the estate of this esteemed artist his due share.
So when they say it's for the artist... beware. The truth is that in Hollywood a share of the net is a share of nothing - always. It's kind of ironic that the people he worked so hard to serve are robbing his grave, seeing as how he worked so hard to enable them to steal from us.
Re:Its simple.... (Score:5, Insightful)
The purpose of government is to execute the collective will of society. We as a people decided to get together and made a contract to create this organization to take care of certain things for us. If the collective will is only to pave roads and protect the borders, then that's what it will result in. If the collective will includes things like, making sure people don't starve to death in the streets or die of easily curable diseases, then that's what will happen. As it is, most people in the US are interested in some sort of health care system, which is why all the major candidates had a health plan. If the will of the people includes funding science or landing on the moon, or enslaving blacks, then it tends to happen, for better or for worse.
Agreed on the Camaro.
Re:Medical research (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, it goes a little deeper then insurance companies.
Medicare and medicaid pays based on an average costs of the approved treatments in the area. That places the hospitals interest into driving up those costs in order to get as much guaranteed money they can. Insurance companies negotiate based around the same standards and generally attempt to get lower prices but the prices are increased then discounted. This is why insurance pays different for in network and out of network access.
Sure, Insurance is part of the problem but government payments started it and still fuel it. The $100 dollar aspirin is an exaggeration but I know of hospitals charging $40 for one because a nurse has to give it to you and ask the doctor if it's ok first (yea, that's not covered in the already overpriced room and board). But when the government started paying like that, it more or less became a free ride because the more they can jump the averages, the more the government pays. I know a guy with no insurance and basically no way to pay- who broke his ankle and had to get pins placed in. The surgery was considered emergency and billed out at over 15k but they magically reduced the costs to around 2K if he agreed to make payments and kept current with them. I'm sure they didn't operate at a capitol loss by doing that, it probably more accurately reflect the real costs of the surgery even though they might not have pocketed as much profit.
Re:Baby Boomers (Score:2, Insightful)
Paying the lowest tax rates in the last 70 years
How do you figure? 70 years ago, there wasn't nearly the levels of income, property, utility, and sales taxes we have today. I'd be very happy to see a return to 1939 tax rates myself.
Re:That's Obvious (Score:1, Insightful)
anyone ever hear of the National Science Foundation? or National Institute of Health? DOE DOD... arent all these examples of gov funding research?
is the question, why doesn't the gov fund research rather than buy corporations?
-yours,
-big scaredy cat
Re:Fixed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:That's Obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, to post a patent you should have to post a $100,000 bond that the material is original. If the material is unoriginal, the bond would be forfeit. This will to some small degree decrease the trolls who use the spare time on their lawyer retainer contracts to file unuseful or obvious patents.
It also completely removes any opportunity for regular garage tinkerers to be able to patent something that they come up with. It may be rare these days, but it's not unheard-of.
The system needs an overhaul, but what you propose is so close to scrapping it that you may as well do it. Why should a concept that once worked be scrapped in its entirety because of the abuses that come from some changes to it? Wouldn't reversion to something closer to the older model be more appropriate?
Re:Because they're funding Iraq (Score:4, Insightful)
You do realize that the amount of money spent in the past few months on the so-called "stimulus" has already dwarfed the total amount spent over several years on the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan, right?
Re:That's Obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
America has a hard time being at peace in the present world because, as the top dog and de facto world policeman, we inevitably get drawn into everyone's little spats.
And there's a large part of the problem. No-one wants the US to be world policeman. What the world wants is for the US to be a team player. It just doesn't seem able to do that.
But being the bully of the playground isn't a basis for peace; it's the basis for confrontation.
I know that person by person US folk are wonderful, but as the USA, I wouldn't want you anywhere near me. It really doesn't help that the US elected a lying, corrupt, obsessively violent, cabal of thugs to represent it for eight years.
We flirted with colonialism circa 1900, decided we didn't really like it too much, then got involved in WWI. Managed to hide from war for 22 years, got violently drawn into WWII. Since then I think it comes down to, we've decided it's better to intervene in those little spats before they turn into world wars. Because world wars suck.
The US involves itself where it is politically expedient to do so. And where there is no convenient 'spat', it creates one.
There are tens, if not hundreds, of spats that the US could willingly involve itself for the good of the indigenous peoples. It picks and chooses those that are political expedient. This isn't policing, it's politicing, and deeply cynical to boot.
And I'll come down tentatively on the side of our involvement being good... If we don't want to play World Policeman I'm sure China would be happy to step in.
China seems to be the new "fear" tool in the US; used for the now routine confrontation arguments.
The US needs to mature, to grow up, politically and become a team player instead of presenting itself as an arrogant thug. This might take some time, especially bringing the majority of its electorate with it
Re:That's Obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
I suppose you're technically correct. By annexing Tibet first, it ceased to be another country.
Re:That's Obvious (Score:3, Insightful)
But I think the question is why doesn't the government fund research outside of war?
Because it's pretty easy to get people to agree to spend the necessary money, if it might save their, or their children's, lives. And, there's really no other situation where that threat is quite as real, as during war.
Global warming might end up killing us all, but that's a diffuse and abstract concept. The guy pointing nuclear missiles at your city, or launching mortars at your kid is much more concrete.
I think that you guys are missing a big point: the Apollo or Manhattan projects were, to some extent, "useless" research.
Building a nuclear bomb had nothing to do with cheap electricity, new materials, and such. The Apollo project was knowledge for knowledge's sake, and yet many of the things done on that project are now familiar to us in everyday life.
Re:Fixed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Its simple.... (Score:3, Insightful)
The government exists to disburse funds for paving roads etc., not to directly employ those who do the work. It's the way of collecting the money, sharing the cost across the citizenry, avoiding the arguments about who pays for what and making sure that everybody can get the essential services. In my part of the UK, government hires contractors for just about all the work, so the private sector is happy.
If government didn't mediate the service work, imagine the arguments about who pays for which bit of road. And just imagine the stink if you get poor and can't pay to get your garbage collected.
Re:That's Obvious (Score:2, Insightful)
Personally I think any such fee needs to be a percentage of income. That way it hits the small inventor guy and the large corporation at equal terms, ofc the rules needs to be written in such a way that a corporation can't just transfer the costs to a small unprofitable subsidiary(and thus get a lower cost than it would have otherwise)
Re:That's Obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm starting to see this more and more. People seem to think that party politics has civil war as some kind of eventuality, and merrily throw out the idea that it's time for a revolution. Of course, every single person who does it seems to think a violent uprising is somehow easier to establish than it is to disestablish our current political parties from their currently entrenched positions.
I mean, really. You think a country of 300 million people would fight itself before reorganizing a political party structure? Really?
Every single person, including the both of you two, seem to like the idea of tossing out a phrase like "me too, I'm in for the revolution", as if your token resistance to power structure is accomplishing anything. I hate to tell you this, but it isn't, because the only thing it does is engender similar sentiment, rather than do anything even remotely productive.
Anyone who shares an earnest similar sentiment is completely out of touch with reality and does not, it seems, understand the political structures that have made great this country function so well for almost a quarter of a millennium.
The American Revolution wasn't a bunch of people saying "me too, I hate those faggots" about the British. It was a mostly educated populace subjected to various transgressions which escalated to the point where self-governance was the only option. Without the clear thinking and intelligence of the majority of the people who fought as rebels to form a new government, it would have been an almost comically bad failure, and only almost comical because of the number of deaths it surely would have produced for no real benefit.
You two, and everyone like you, keep on writing your "me too, this sux", if you wish. But please don't delude yourself into thinking you are in any way similar to the founding fathers of the USA. You are children in school, who dislike their somewhat strict teacher, writing on your desks about how much he sucks, and will accomplish just as much.
Re:Invisible Hand (Score:1, Insightful)
There have been a number of people who decided to make the sacrifice and go into civil service/government to try to make things better, rather than make themselves richer in $$$$ terms.
Maybe nowadays there are too few people willing to do that.
I think there are two things that contribute to the apparent lack of people willing to work civil service at lower salary.
First is what appears to be a decline in community spirit going back to the 60s. The first half of the 20th century, at least in the US, was dominated by community-forming, homogenizing events: a couple of world wars, Depression, Cold War... The US has always romanticized rebels/loners, but has historically shunned them. In the 60s/70s, personal introspection and moral relativism really began to rise, and the emphasis on self began to take precedence over the emphasis on community (at least among the majority)
Second was the Reagan tax cuts. With a top tax bracket of 90%, the actual marginal, take-home benefit of a high paying job was much smaller than it is today. eg: $75k civil servant at 25% net tax takes home $56k. $1m CEO at net tax (today) ~30% takes home $700k; $1m CEO at 70% net tax (1970) takes home $300k. Private industry still paid more, but the differential was smaller. It cost less to be altruistic.
Re:It was not the 70's. (Score:3, Insightful)
Not sure what foreign students have to do with this discussion? Having foreign students here is not a bad thing. In fact, I would like to see us rethink it and offer easy citizenship paths for these, whereas the dems are about to offer easy citizenship paths to illegals who simply swam across the river or walk 2 days in the desert (what a waste of slots).
Re:Next question, please (Score:1, Insightful)
GM HAD VIABLE ELECTRIC CARS IN THE 1960's, you never heard of them because they allowed drivers to use less/no oil/fuel..... which conflicts with the oil interests in the US. As for auto workers, if you only have a GED, you should NEVER make 30/hr.... Sorry, just not right. If on the other hand, you have a degree in anything decent you have no business doing a simple assembly line job. No factory assembly line worker should be making the pay these GM/union workers were getting, THEY BLED GM to death, and built CRAPPY cars in the process. My point: GM has had NUMEROUS chances to make real positive change in the way we travel, and thus the way we do this business, but they didn't. They have worked for 40 yrs to find a way to sell a 5-10000 vehicle for 25-50k. You buy a BMW or a land rover or even just a toyota/honda (or just test-drive one, or anything else that is actually well built, and compare it to
ANY 1980-2009 GM car. You will be shocked if you check things like welds, body panel alignment, basic quality of individual components (just scoure both vehicles top to bottom, and you'll never buy an american car again).
Example: My brother bought a 2001 chevy malibu. Within 6mos, replaced, steering column, transmission twice, intake manifold seal, then engine blew. ALL from factory work on a 1yr old model car. THEN GM refused to reconcile with him, forced him to go to court. He won in court and was released from the purchase. He got nothing back for it, just spent 15k on basically nothing.
Re:That's Obvious (Score:2, Insightful)
Why don't you restructure your government so you're involved in the decision making rather than handing your political power off to yet another Tyrant and wondering why he doesn't do stuff? You know you're going to be held accountable for the things he is doing, right?
Re:That's Obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
Because it's pretty easy to get people to agree to spend the necessary money, if it might save their, or their children's, lives.
Depends on perceived immediacy and plenty of legislation gets pushed through on public innumeracy. We'll all die of heart disease, stroke or cancer before we find Saddam Hussein's WMDs but lots of luck getting universal health care much less a _return_ to common intellectual property coming out of universities. The Manhattan Project and Apollo were before Saint Ronald Reagan proclaimed that research should be private and universities themselves should be run as a business.
Re:That's Obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
And there's a large part of the problem. No-one wants the US to be world policeman. What the world wants is for the US to be a team player.
No, they don't want the "US to be a team player". They want the US to intervene when it is in their interest (see former Yugoslavia) and not intervene when they perceive it as not being in their interest (see Iraq and Saddam Husein's payments to the French to eliminate the embargo).
Re:Fixed (Score:5, Insightful)
Wars on abstract concepts don't count.
They do when the money we're spending isn't abstract.
Re:That's Obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
As the Taliban advance through Pakistan the President of the United States of America Barack Obama requested for increased presence from NATO allies. He did not get it [timesonline.co.uk]
One only has to look at the funding the US spends on their military to see who is doing the bulk of the heavy lifting in ensuring the safety of the West. The West being Europe, North America, Australia/New Zealand, Japan, Israel, South Korea and what is becoming of India. And let us not forget that it was the US playing world police who saved Europe in WWII, changed Japan from a militaristic empire to the Western democracy that they are now, brought South Korea from poverty to wealth and has been a staunch ally of the only truly western country in the middle east.
I get tired of (in particular European) psuedo-intellectuals who proclaim a general distain for US foreign policy while they sit in the luxury provided by the protection of the US defense forces. I get tired of the people who believe that the US should never intervene themselves in foreign conflict, or alternatively believe that the US should involve itself in every foreign conflict. The US won the cold war not by physically conquering the Russian state but by ensuring that enough countries around the world remained free so as to be able to destroy communism through economy instead of bombs.
Iraq is a touchstone issue that divides right and left around the world. It symbolises US interventionist tactics in a way that Afghanistan, Vietnam, Korea and WWII could not. The US is no longer engaged in the cold war. It no longer has a great evil to overcome. But the US realises as a nation that if they allow small evils to grow that they become great evils. The US realises that the funding that Iraq was providing to terrorists probably would not reach US shores, but would be focussed on Lebanon and Israel and eventually would cross into European and asian countries.
The real lessons that the US learned, but that Europe seems to have missed out of WWI and WWII is that ideology is the most dangerous weapon and the most likely to bring destruction down on us all. Muslim extremism (-1 troll mod points right there) has already turned the prosperous jewel of the middle east - Lebanon - into a wartorn and unstable country who have no real, credible hope of being stable in the near future. It was being financially supported largely from oil money from Iraq and Iran, and though the two countries hated each other more than they hated the West, we were still caught in its clutches.
The US can do no right in the eyes of those who are wilfully blind. If she turns away from intervention then the world calls her crass, rude and evil for not addressing the injustice. If she goes to war against the evil and does everything in her power to minimise the loss of life on both sides she is accused of being warmongerers and extremists. The US cannot win such an argument and making it is only endangering the whole of western civilisation - the civilisation that has largely managed to feed, clothe and house its citizens and provided medical care and prosperity to the people as a whole.
Communism is largely dead now and we have the US to blame. When the US conquers the power behind religious extremism the US will again be the cause. Isn't that a country worth giving the benefit of the doubt? Isn't that a country worth cutting a little slack?
Re:That's Obvious (Score:3, Insightful)
Interesting. You seem to have given this some thought, but you may be starting with some skewed assumptions.
People seem to think that party politics has civil war as some kind of eventuality, and merrily throw out the idea that it's time for a revolution.
I don't think it's really party politics that people view as leading to radical civil / revolutionary conflict, but rather that the duopoly created by the party system has developed it's own set of elite rulers that are completely out of touch with the views of the general populace. It's not the entrenched positions of the opposing parties leading to conflict, it's the entrenchment of the two parties in the political system, and behavior of leaders in both parties.
I mean, really. You think a country of 300 million people would fight itself before reorganizing a political party structure? Really?
Many of these 300 million (maybe 3% ?) have been working within the parties and/or political structure for some time, and are being frustrated at every turn. It was not the results of the most recent election that led to this frustration, but the events that led to the choices given to the voters in recent cycles. Many people entered the party and political machines attempting to make real changes, only to be chewed up and spit out by the machinery.
Every single person, including the both of you two, seem to like the idea of tossing out a phrase like "me too, I'm in for the revolution", as if your token resistance to power structure is accomplishing anything.
You get the gist of the feeling, but you missed where it's coming from. Often it's coming not from "armchair revolutionaries" (although there are no doubt plenty of those), but also from activists who have been crushed between the rock of the entrenched political apparatchik and the hard place of apathy and ignorance in the populace.
Anyone who shares an earnest similar sentiment is completely out of touch with reality and does not, it seems, understand the political structures that have made great this country function so well for almost a quarter of a millennium.
I think you missed the memo on this one. The only thing "working" at this point is keeping the ruling class in charge. In case you haven't noticed, the government has converted itself from being a servant of the people to becoming their master. It's one of those boiling frog things, as this has been happening through several administrations. The parties are cooperating on this - it's not something either one will speak against.
I believe that the most apt phrase in these times is (probably mangling the quote from whoever first said it, but) "It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards."
Hopefully it won't come to shooting or violence at all. There are plenty of educated patriots out here looking for a way to fix things, and while there may be revolution in the air, it's not a hot revolution - it's just a view that radical change is needed.
It was a mostly educated populace subjected to various transgressions which escalated to the point where self-governance was the only option.
Many of us still think it's still the only option, as anything else leads quickly to tyranny.
You are children in school, who dislike their somewhat strict teacher...
Not sure what this is alluding to. I was going to torture it as analogy, but that seems like a fruitless exercise in this environment. I will say this, though. If you think you are in a classroom, and are ready to sit quietly and do whatever the teacher tells you without challenging anything she has to teach, then you are part of the problem. Raise your hand and ask a few questions - try to think outside the box a bit. Hmmm... I guess I kind of did it anyway.
Re:Research is not the function of the Fed Gov't (Score:3, Insightful)
The free market is completely useless at researching anything with a small chance of a long term payoff and no short term benefit.
The government can manage those because it doesn't give a shit if it burns through billions of dollars with no result in site.
Of course in the US the constitution doesn't allow* the Federal Government to do that work anyway, so this should be irrelevant. Of course since the constitution is ignored completely no one cares.
With the rather large exception of military research which can easily be argued is part of defending the country.
Re:That's Obvious (Score:3, Insightful)
Um, why? I think the US govt does a good job of tracking mainstream opinion. Personally, I think the mainstream often does not act in its own best interests, but nevertheless so long as the majority is getting what they want (even if they want it for silly reasons), I don't see major discontent. I don't think the "culture wars" now are anything like what they were in the 60s, when assassinations were happening left and right.
Re: Star Wars? (Score:3, Insightful)
As to research, yes, he CUT research dollars greatly, and then shifted a lot more into DARPA spending. I know, because the research I was on back then was converted to DARPA.
Re:Fixed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What research we should do (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What research we should do (Score:2, Insightful)
What drives pharmaceutical research is profit. On the face of it, this has led to marvelous advances in western medicine.
The seamy underside is that research into common diseases that does not look profitable is not done. We know, for instance, that aspirin is effective in slowing the loss of function for victims of arthritis, And we've known that for decades. As prevalent as arthritis is, one might think that the use of aspirin in its treatment would be heavily researched by now-- but that isn't the case, since there is no likelihood of making money off of any findings, it makes business sense to put the research facilities to other work. Similarly, studies on how to manage the USA obesity crisis are not being funded, despite the severe impact of obesity-related diseases on individuals and on society.
As if that is not bad enough, there is a flip side to this. Any breakthrough in managing obesity or arthritis will definitely decrease the revenues that the health care sector now enjoys from palliative products. With their for-profit orientation, they will resist any research that might lead in those directions.
Okay, that sounds like conspiracy theory crap. Unfortunately I don't know how to write it any better. In a sense, it is a tacit conspiracy, in the same way that the overt and covert racism that subjugated blacks in the USA prior to the civil rights movement in the 1960s was a conspiracy by the dominant whites, both north and south.
I don't think you can expect any meaningful breakthroughs in medical research in the USA until the complex of health care deliverers, academia, insurance companies, and health care institutions is reformed. And that will take something akin to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (and the resulting chaos in a multitude of institutions, all off them full of people who think they are Doing Good Works).