'YouCut' Targets National Science Foundation Budget 760
jamie writes "As some of you may have heard, the incoming Republican majority in Congress has a new initiative called YouCut, which lets ordinary Americans like me propose government programs for termination. So imagine how excited I was to learn that YouCut's first target — yes, its first target — was that notoriously bloated white elephant, the National Science Foundation."
Cut YouCut (Score:3, Informative)
The smart move is to cut YouCut, because your Congressman should already be cutting the crap you dislike,
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:5, Informative)
Agreed. That and cut congressional perks too.
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:4, Insightful)
If we start with the TSA I'll support the program, silly as it is.
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:5, Informative)
"The YouCut Citizen Review will look at grants issued by the National Science Foundation and identify those that you consider wasteful"
From http://republicanwhip.house.gov/YouCut/Review.htm [house.gov]
Should be interesting... (Score:4, Insightful)
"The YouCut Citizen Review will look at grants issued by the National Science Foundation and identify those that you consider wasteful"
This should be an interesting exercise since there seems to be nothing to stop non-US citizens submitting ideas. Don't like the way that US IT firms are so successful, well clearly any NSF research to do with computers must be a waste of time. Fed up with better security technology catching all your terrorist plots? Well obviously all those innovative sensor projects should clearly go.
Re:Should be interesting... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Remember - basic scientific research is a public good; we all benefit from it, so everyone would rather wait for someone else to do it
I'm not so sure about this. In my somewhat limited experience, US universities aren't always doing the most interesting research, but they are very good at technology transfer (well, in comparison with their European counterparts, not necessarily in absolute terms). A small decrease in funding of academic research in the USA now could provide a considerable competitive advantage to other countries in 5-10 years. If I ran a research-driven company outside the USA, I'd be very interested in a cheap way of
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It doesn't appear that they're cutting the foundation itself, or even any money that the foundation is able to grant. They're instead focusing more on who's getting the grants and why and if any of them are deemed wasteful (of which I have no doubt), those grants would then be available to other more worthy causes. It's highly unlikely that the budget will ever be less than it was the year before, no matter WHO is in charge of Congress. And in all fairness, it doesn't really matter. If they simply refus
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:5, Insightful)
Who cares where we start as long as we start. Waste is waste isn't it?
I mean seriously, this is exactly the type of thing the democrats championed. I mean it's participation in the government by the people, it's the government (pretending at least) listening to the people, it's wet dream of sorts.
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:5, Insightful)
Well here's a hint, you don't target the hundreds of thousands per individual science grant, that people will oppose simply upon the basis that they don't understand the science behind them nor it's potential benefits. Just imagine some idiot decrying research into the genetics of fruit flys, how dumb can you be not to realise how that genetic research can be used in other fields and even used in that field itself to control a pest that destroys hundreds of millions of dollars worth of food every year hint dumb enough to be a vice presidential candidate apparently.
Want to save money than tackle the big ticket items first, aircraft, ships and tanks designed to fight a world war the no longer exists and even if it did, would simply result in mutual nuclear annihilation. So no new planes, tanks or ships for a decade, make do with what is already in the arsenal which is greater than the rest of the world combined. Also an end the the exorbitant cost of militarising the police, the only result of which is to generate tens of millions of dollars of successful lawsuits for the excessive use of force.
So what is YouCut all about, obviously one thing and one thing only to direct peoples eyes away from the billion dollar wasts, such as no bid contracts, the military industrial complex and bridges to no where and get them focused on things they don't understand and they feel superior about when they laugh at them. The ignorant wallowing in the ignorance.
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I think that many of the problems in scientific research stem from the fact that politics is getting too involved in the allocation of scientific funds. I could mention a few hot-button issues right now that would likely get this post modded down strictly because I'm goring somebody's ox, so I won't give any specific examples.
My point is that by injecting politics into science through the government grant process, it is wasteful spending and something that really shouldn't be done... for the sake of advanc
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Never heard of the blatantly obvious, obviously. How many other countries have attack carriers that you need to defend against for example. The principle is if you going to make a big bullshit yarn about people choosing what is cut, then it should be open slather not selectively targeted at what Republican hill billies least understand, science. So the bullshit in it should have been blindingly obvious even to you, unless of course you have a propaganda axe to grind.
So how about no health care for electe
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Why yes, I know what you mean. I know a couple poor people who refuse to give up their cable TV and all the options on the phone and internet because it's not that much money. And when you really look at it, they crank up the heat in the winter because every 3 degrees is only 5% of their heating bills right. I mean 5% doesn't make a different so why should they turn the furnace down to 69 or 72 degree.
Here is the problem you are looking past. A lot of little things add up to one big thing. So if you save 5% a month on a $100 bill, it's only what $60 a year? But if you do that for 10 different things, it's now $600 a year. So dismissing something because it's insignificant or small is pretty much why poor people tend to remain poor- even with ever increasing incomes.
This is a bit of a false analogy. Of course little things can add up. But it is a bit ingenuous to complain that they're not saving $60 a year by keeping the hit up three degrees when they're dropping $900 a year on the poolboy. If you're looking to save money, you should look at your big ticket items.
According to this page Google gave me [wisegeek.com], "general science" gets about 7.2 billion a year. Which sounds like a lot, except it's the smallest category. America spends more on *everything* else besides science. If
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But we NEED a mach 8 railgun!
How else are we going to stop the terrorists?
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:5, Insightful)
Explain to me why the largest military in the world 'needs' another carrier or two.
If we were to cut ALL military spending across the board by 80%, the US military would still be the largest military in the world by about 35% over China.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures [wikipedia.org]
Maybe if the US military wasn't required to be the world's policemen by the US govt, we could get meaningful debt AND deficit reduction. Not spending half a trillion dollars a year might lead to some fiscal responsibility.
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If I'm not mistaken the point of building another pair of carriers is to replace existing ones which are becoming quite old and outdated. To put things in perspective,the USS Enterprise was commissioned in 1961, which means it is pulling 50 years by now. If you aren't familiar with engineering practices, important equipment is designed with a design life of 50 years. Only civil engineering structures which are considered fundamental for a society to function, such as bridges, damns, hospitals, power plan
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:5, Informative)
Do you really want your tax dollars going toward research for Soccer (Football everywhere else in the world) and video game sounds?
As one might expect, the characterization you allude to from the YouCut project page isn't quite accurate. First off, here's links to actual research info on the so-called "soccer research" [plosone.org] (actually research into a means of quantifying individual contributions to team performance) and the sound rendering for physically based simulation project [cornell.edu]. Here's some snippets from a news article [msn.com] regarding the projects:
But the researchers behind these projects say Smith has misrepresented their work and the amount of money spent on the projects. ... ... ...
"This was not $750,000 given by NSF for us to develop an algorithm to look at the performance of soccer players," Northwestern University engineering professor Luis Amaral told LiveScience. Amaral, who was the lead investigator on the soccer study cited by Smith, called the congressman's portrayal of his work "not only incorrect, but misleading."
"This was $750,000 that was given to a larger team of researchers to study a very broad range of questions related to creating provocative, efficient teams of researchers who innovate," Amaral said.
Amaral's soccer study, published in June [plosone.org] in the open-access journal PLoS ONE, was supported by two NSF grants. The first was a $450,000 award to develop efficient methods to evaluate the productivity of researchers and research institutions. The second was a $300,000 grant to study how teams collaborate. By quantifying researchers' contributions to their fields, Amaral and his colleagues hope to help funding agencies like the NSF allocate money more effectively.
How do those grants translate to studying soccer? According to Amaral, an M.D./Ph.D. student was rotating through Amaral's lab to learn the computer software Amaral and his colleagues use to model complex systems such as to explore how creativity and innovation arise from networks of researchers. The researchers decided to train the young scientist using easily available data from the World Cup. Soccer was particularly appealing, because team performance is difficult to rank using regular statistical methods, Amaral said.
Smith's second target, research to model the sound of breaking objects, is supported by an ongoing $1.2 million grant given to three researchers over four years. The goal of the research is to create advanced simulation technology for virtual environments, Cornell's James told LiveScience.
"Just think of the impact of computer-graphics rendering, and now imagine the combined potential for realistic computer-sound rendering," he said, citing possible uses of realistic simulations for engineering cars, aircraft and even spacecraft. The results may also be useful in designing rehabilitation and training simulations like those used in the military. Even robots could become better at navigating their environments with higher-level sound processing, James said.
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's an article from Wired [wired.com].
It doesn't directly mention NSF, but rather specific scientific research which can be construed as frivolous.
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:4, Insightful)
Since the blog linked in the summary is down, here is the link to the site itself: http://republicanwhip.house.gov/YouCut/ [house.gov] I might be missing something but I don't see anything about the National Science Foundation, never mind being the "first target". The first chosen cut was something called "New Non-Reformed Welfare Program"
http://republicanwhip.house.gov/YouCut/Review.htm [house.gov]
They specifically target NSF projects here. They suggest that regular people go through the NSF list of grants and report anything that they think is wasteful. Which will be everything. Regular people have no idea how much science costs or have any capacity to evaluate what is and is not sound science. Its such a fucking scumbag move.
I went to that site and entered my own submission - I told him he's a scumbag motherfucker. Not very gracious, but after watching his video, that's how I felt. I encourage other slashdot users to go there and add their own comments!
-Taylor
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:5, Interesting)
The economic problem is not the central problem of mankind. Knowledge, innovation, technology is. In times like these when biz is sitting on trillions of cash, govt needs to step up to prevent suffering and encourage the continuing advance of innovation. Our creativity is what keeps our currency strong, by producing things others want.
When have predictions about the deficit causing doom and gloom ever come true in the US? Lincoln printed over $400 million greenbacks, and it worked. Under FDR the govt took over some 40% of GDP, and it worked. Reagan tripled the debt, and it worked.
Why should money creation automatically be tied to debt? Because bankers profit that way? Why can't our elected representatives create debt-free money to fund a robust safety net (or basic income [google.com]) and encourage innovation through challenges (nothing prevents private companies like Google and Netflix from holding challenges too of course)?
If you look at the figures for US foreign-owned debt [treasury.gov], you will see that we could pay off China with the recently-passed tax cut for the richest 2%. Note that the second largest holder of US foreign debt is Japan, with its 200% debt-to-gdp ratio. Also note that foreign debt totals some $4.2 trillion; most of the rest is government owing money to itself - which can be forgiven or written down. So the debt crisis is not nearly as scary as politicians focused on elections want you to believe!
Fears about the debt are a pure political ploy, an appeal to emotion and bad analogies with personal finances, designed to scare the voters with predictions about their grandchildren that have been made ever since this country was founded and Alexander Hamilton assumed the states' war debts. But govt can do things that individuals can't, like print money, and declare war. And this visualization [singularityhub.com] of the last 200 years shows that none of the predictions about grandchildren being worse off have come true.
Recognize the fears about the debt for what it is: simply a means to get attention. Everyone knows the debt doesn't matter, especially Republican presidents, who are strongly correlated with increases in the debt [wikipedia.org].
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Why can't our elected representatives create debt-free money
Mostly because there's no such thing. If I get a dollar from you I expect to be able to get something from that dollar, otherwise it's worthless. So every time you print money you either owe more, or you make the value of each dollar less so you maintain the total debt by taking a haircut of everyone's savings. It should be more than obvious from some of the extreme examples in history that a country can't print itself to infinite riches which is what debt-free money means, it'll only collapse the currency
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Um, no [washingtontimes.com].
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I would say that our Congressman's salary should be the first item on YouCut.
Perhaps the Republicans would like to man up [lasvegassun.com] and be the first to go? ;)
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:5, Funny)
Gets to be a two-term President. Yes, we've already been over that. Can you just accept it and move on please?
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:4, Insightful)
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Just being able to pronounce the word "nuclear" properly instead of like a fucking inbred is an improvement over the last guy.
Who, I might add, also did not show us his grades.
You really shouldn't make fun of the way Jimmy Carter pronounced "nuclear". Granted, he only served on submarines... I mean, what we he know about nuclear stuff. I would say that his knowledge of all things "nucular" is much greater than yours will ever be.
And calling Carter "inbred" just because he's from Georgia shows that you are just a bigot.
When Admiral Hyman G. Rickover (then a captain) started his program to create nuclear powered submarines, Carter wanted to join the program and was interviewed by Rickover. On 1 June 1952, Carter was promoted to Lieutenant. Selected by Rickover, Carter was detached on 16 October 1952 from K-1 for duty with the U. S. Atomic Energy Commission, Division of Reactor Development in Schenectady, New York. From 3 November 1952 to 1 March 1953, he served on temporary duty with the Naval Reactors Branch, U. S. Atomic Energy Commission, Washington, DC to assist "in the design and development of nuclear propulsion plants for naval vessels."
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:5, Insightful)
That's why we have a representative democracy rather than a pure democracy. The Founding Fathers knew all too well not to trust the reasoning abilities of the "common man"
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That's why we have a representative democracy rather than a pure democracy. The Founding Fathers knew all too well not to trust the reasoning abilities of the "common man"
Many of our states have a mix of the two. It has been a disaster for California but here in Colorado it hasn't been all that bad. In about half the states voters can directly enact legislation by initiative and even more local governments have such processes in place.
Here in Colorado about 5% of voters can sign a petition to initiate a law or amend the state constitution. Voters have enacted a balanced budget amendment, a law requiring voter approval for all tax hikes (known as the Taxpayer Bill of Rights
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Your book is fiction. We have a representative democracy precisely because of things like this.
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:5, Insightful)
Excuse me, could you point to the private enterprise that developed TCP/IP ? Oh, right it was a wasteful government grant to those egghead liberals.
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:5, Insightful)
Heck, more to the point: if it was your typical industry focus group, it'd likely be not only patented to the brim, but they'd chase off people who want to make their standard more popular [pbmaster.org] by making, say, an open source implementation.
Every worthwhile industrial communication bus standard has the master implementation that's patent encumbered. In terms of TCP/IP, think of having to have a license to operate an ssh, telnet, http or ftp server. Only the clients would be free.
Never mind that actually implementing almost any popular industrial bus requires purchasing about $2000 worth of standards, and getting your brain to hurt while trying to understand the abstract descriptions offered. The most convoluted RFC is a breeze to understand compared to say IEC 61158.
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Actually, business is not very good at disruptive innovation like computers, the internet, nuclear power, space exploration, etc. That is govt's proper role, to fund long-term research and development. Biz is better at incremental innovation: making computers smaller, bringing the internet to the masses, etc.
Steven Johnson in a Salon interview [salon.com] about his book "Where Good Ideas Come From" says:
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no justification for tax revenue being spent on science because private enterprise can achieve more faster and cheaper than government sponsored boondoggles.
Privately-funded science produces things like Viagra and a Coke can made with 1% less aluminium.
Publicly-funded science produces things like vaccines and the Internet.
I know which of the above I think are a better use of time and money.
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What, you mean the one you crashed into my police box last we-
. . .
Oh dear. Terribly sorry. You'll find out in your near future, I guess.
Obscene (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Obscene (Score:4, Insightful)
At least don't cut any more funding for education. How else are we all going to learn Mandarin?
Re:Obscene (Score:5, Insightful)
The advances of science are not something you can just measure overnight and call profitable. Knowledge spreads around, and benefits everyone. Not to mention the fact that a lot of this grant money creates jobs (lab workers, grad students, aka FUTURE SCIENTISTS) and is spent on equipment made by American manufacturers.
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Re:Obscene (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know... maybe this little thing called the "internet", which was developed by DARPA, a government research agency?
Look up "CompuServe". (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit. Instead of the Internet, companies were more focused on isolated, for-pay environments. Such as CompuServe and AOL.
Re:Obscene (Score:5, Informative)
DARPA's research predates Metcalf's Law by more than a decade. As a leader in network research Metcalf must have been famliar with ARPANet. It is quite likely that work influenced Metcalf's perception of networking. Regardless, Metcalf's law doesn't say anything about network reliability.
Prior to DARPA the prevailing theory was that circuit-switched networks were the way to go. The entire phone system was built on circuit-switched networks. There is no reason to think a packet-switched network would have suddenly become popular without a little prodding by the government.
Long after DARPA's research, commercial entities such as AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe had their own ideas about how computer networks should function. If a commercial entity had invented the Internet it would have functioned like the AOL of 1993 where all content has to be approved by a single corporation. That corporation would collect a tax on all transactions. It would kick out anyone it did not agree with. It would be far, far different than the Internet we have today and it would have undoubtedly happened much later.
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DARPA's research predates Metcalf's Law by more than a decade.
Doesn't matter. Metcalf's Law is merely an observation about the dynamics of such networks.
If a commercial entity had invented the Internet it would have functioned like the AOL of 1993 where all content has to be approved by a single corporation. That corporation would collect a tax on all transactions. It would kick out anyone it did not agree with. It would be far, far different than the Internet we have today and it would have undoubtedly happened much later.
Unless of course, there were many competitors in that market. Only a standardized common ground is optimal under those conditions. And given that commercial activity on the internet didn't happen till late 1991 (while a number of commercial networks were around for years by that point), I really can't agree.
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Re:Obscene (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, when was the last time that a government science fund produced something worth $24,000,000,000? Every major invention I can think of came from a private company doing research for a specific need, not a government program doing research in order to keep scientists eating from the taxpayers' pork trough.
How ironic that your ability to communicate that to us is only due to DARPA funding what was the initial Internet. Lasers, most of moden medicine, the Internet, all resulted from government research. Private companies don't want to invest in basic research because the time 'till return is "too long" for them (5-20 years out). In short, you're a fucking moron.
Re:Obscene (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Obscene (Score:5, Insightful)
The post I responded to said "when was the last time that a government science fund produced something worth....". I take that to imply all government research, not just the NSF. Quite frankly, the NSF provides funding for a huge amount of research:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation [wikipedia.org]
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health. With an annual budget of about US$6.87 billion (fiscal year 2010), the NSF funds approximately 20 percent of all federally supported basic research conducted by the United States' colleges and universities. In some fields, such as mathematics, computer science, economics and the social sciences, the NSF is the major source of federal backing.
Emphasis mine. Think about that ~$7 billion dollars the next time Wall Street requires $800 billion to be bailed out from a disaster of their own making.
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I personally would like to see NSF's budget being slowly increased to $100B over, say, the next 10 years. The DoD budget can be slashed to compensate, without any serious loss.
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You mean the one the government required Bell to fund so they could keep their monopoly? And the one that has now completely removed itself from material physics, basic science, and semiconductor research in favor of "immediately marketable areas"?
Re:Obscene (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you really think we'd have the internet, satellites (communication/weather/gps), advanced modeling tools, weather radar, numerous synthetics or alloys, and so many other things it would take hours to even dent the total list? Well, if you don't know, the answer is no. Many of them exist because of direct government funding of research, while the rest couldn't have even existed without the prior research that the government paid for.
Companies what research only on what they can immediately commercialize. The government gives grants to allow lots of research with no foreseeable immediate benefit. Did you know that when electricity was first being experimented with most people had no idea what use it was and would have happily stopped people from "wasting money" researching it if they could? Just imagine your life without electricity while you mull over that.
Newt Gingrich? (Score:3)
I read recently that Newt Gingrich said he'd like to triple the NSF budget
I could never imagine I would ever come to the point of saying this: but Newt Gingrich is one of the few people left in the Republican Party I can respect.
I disagree with a lot -maybe most- of what he's saying, but he does have a brain, and he uses actual arguments, with premises and statements and conclusions and all that stuff. He's fluent in the English language, well read, and rather eloquent.
Now for the rest of his party..
Re:Baby Boomers fucking things up yet again. (Score:4, Insightful)
As a Baby Boomer myself, I take offense at that. I'd like to point out that during the 70's, we had mostly Nixon and Ford in the White House, with poor Jimmy Carter only there for the remaining 4 yrs. Then the 80's were all Reagan and Bush. In the 90's, Clinton balanced the budget and left a surplus, which was quickly squandered by Bush II on a trumped up war in Iraq.
All of the Republican Presidents named ran up huge deficits, while claiming to be "fiscal conservatives."
"Real" Baby Boomers, who were the ones protesting in the 60's and 70's, were NOT Republicans. I think I can say that pretty much as a blanket statement. They were, by definition, liberals. They opposed war in all its forms. They were for cutting the budgets of the "military-industrial complex" (Eisenhower's words*). They were for solar energy, and earth homes and dozens of other ways of cutting our dependence on foreign oil.
So don't blame the Baby Boomers. Blame the Alex P. Keatons of that generation. They were NOT true Boomers. They just happened to ride along with us.
*"..We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex."--In Eisenhower's farewell address, Jan. 1961
the "true Scotsman" fallacy (Score:4, Informative)
My dad was a protesting baby boomer. He was and is a republican. He strongly supported the Vietnam War. He strongly supported building more nuclear weapons, more bombers, more submarines, and so on. He loved Reagan's proposed defense against ICBMs.
Yep, he'd be out there holding a sign to protest against nuclear treaties, defense cutbacks, etc. He got arrested for chopping down political signs for liberals. He would attend rallies for republicans. He did his best to support Goldwater. He wrote to congresscritters and talked to several in person. He wrote letters to the editor.
These days he spends his time at Tea Party meetings. He's certain that Obama wasn't born in the USA, based on an admission by Obama's own grandmother.
Science ! (Score:5, Insightful)
kudos americans. you have succeeded in giving a second chance to the morons who have awarded the world with a neverending war on terror, a turmoil in middle east, violation of all constitutional and modern civil rights, kidnappings, torture, wall street DEregulation (and corresponding scam), and body scanners and many, many more !
heaven knows what they will do to you (and the world, if they can) with this second chance. maybe the first thing they will mandate will be mandatory cavity searches in airports.
Re:Science ! (Score:4, Funny)
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That is a lot easier to do with capitol letters and punctuation in the proper place. Writing like that just makes you look either uneducated or stoned.
The irony...
Sigh... (Score:2)
Re:Sigh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Or we could tax the rich, close the loopholes on capital gains and outsourcing, enact tariffs against countries with environmental and labor protections weaker than ours, and use the revenue to put the unemployed to work on new infrastructure.
Hah, as if. We'll continue to cut taxes (20 for the rich, 1 for the poor, 20 for the rich, 1 for the poor, etc), then hit the deficit cap and slaughter Social Security and Medicare, and finally end up a destitute 3rd world nation, under god.
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Why not? (Score:3)
It works for me. Where are the "get the government out of my choices" voices for this?
If nothing else, it would cut part of the prison population and increase the tax base.
All you need to do is make it a multiplier for other crimes. Murder? And high? Looks like you get an additional 5 years.
And how about fixing the tax system a bit? Why does Bill Gates need a tax cut? Why does he need a ta
Um, we're broke? (Score:4, Insightful)
With our national debt at 100% GDP and our unfunded mandates at 8 times that, we're more than broke. We're spending our grandchildren's tax dollars.
When it comes down to choosing between "free" healthcare, "free" medicine, and everything else "free" the government owes people, why is it a surprise that what people think here is "honest" and "important" will fall by the wayside.
Welcome to Idiocracy.
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Re:Um, we're broke? (Score:5, Informative)
The bottom line however, isn't that this is the end of the world, the U.S. just needs to ensure that the deficit spending is being spent on things that will improve the economy in the long-term. However, tax cuts are absolutely the worst way to improve the GDP in the long-term. It would be better to spend the money on replacing aging infrastructure and building new infrastructure, or other things that have a direct and unambiguous effect on the economy.
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That's a bit of a deceptive way to view it since it makes it appear that debt was shrinking most of the time, when in fact it was growth in GDP (inflation) which is causing existing debt t
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The first projections for deficit for Obama's first budget was 1.8 trillion.. which happens to be more than it actually was. Your suggestion that Obama's numbers are "conservative" are basically bullshit.
Are t
Re:Um, we're broke? (Score:4, Insightful)
New name ... (Score:3)
.... same acronym.
Not Sufficient Funds.
Investing in the Future won't get you votes today! (Score:5, Insightful)
Private companies typically do not engage in long-term research that isn't likely to lead to directly commercializable results. I know this flies in the face of red-blooded 'merican "all socialism is evil" doctrine, but public sector research, funded by tax-payer money, is needed to build the foundations for tomorrow's industries. Quantum computing, like many other bleeding edge fields, is too immature, too high-risk, and with pay-offs that are far too distant for the private sector.
Research and education are both investments that can yield fantastic returns, but they are long-term investments that require steady commitment rather than periodic outbursts of zeal punctuating long periods of apathy. A minor cut now might help balance the books today, but the lost opportunities down the road will more than negate that. Top researchers don't hang around after you cut the funding they run their labs and pay their students and post-docs with. They won't wait a few years until times are good again. What they will do is go where the money they need to work is, and if they can't find that in the U.S., they'll likely find it in Canada, China, Australia, etc.. The U.S. is far from the only country doing quality research in QC these days.
Unfortunately, some U.S. politicians are of the opinion that they can make political hay by screwing over those "pinko" scientists. They're smart enough to know what they're sacrificing, but votes for them are a worthier cause! The only way to fight this kind of thinking is to call up your local representative/senator/etc. and let them know you're not buying it. The only way to make them stop this kind of thing is to make them think they'll lose votes today, because that's all they care about.
Re:Investing in the Future won't get you votes tod (Score:5, Informative)
Early computers
Internet
Countless advances made by publicly funded scientists
Of course you could argue that EVENTUALLY, all these would have been done by private interests. I don't believe that is true, but even if it is... the question is becomes how long would it have taken and how closely would it be controlled?
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One might wonder about the literacy rates prior to public education.
Better Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
How about these... (Score:4, Insightful)
Cut the NSA, CIA, FBI, ATF, DEA, and all that anti-democratic shit.
Where is the budget for the Congress itself ? (Score:2)
Can some enterprising person divide up the budget of the House of Congress itself onto a YouCut type site.
I am sure some people would like less brass in the new bathrooms.
Or perhaps cuts to "fact finding" missions.
Maybe we could do with fewer congress critters. Save lots of $ there.
-- Or perhaps the salaries could be cut --
In 2006, congresspersons received a yearly salary of $165,200.[173] Congressional leaders were paid $183,500 per year. The Speaker of the House of Representatives earns $212,100 annually.
Re:Where is the budget for the Congress itself ? (Score:4, Interesting)
I always wondered what it would be like if we gave Congress a giant pie charts instead of monetary figures. Every time they wanted to spend money they were given a percentage figure by a calculator and they would have to shrink other pie pieces to make it fit...
We'd have a branch set of charts. One is simply Domestic and Foreign and the others list the subparts of those two. Any change in spending for each chart would require a 2/3 approval as well as any change in the Domestic/Foreign chart.
Congressmen would not know how many actual dollars go to each program by looking at it, but maybe the top 10 items would be listed by percentage next to it. I'm sure some will be able to use a calculator and figure out the raw dollar value, but the purpose of the pie chart is to be able to see at all times where the bulk of their spending is going. It will make the "big budget" items giant targets for allocating to new projects.
There may also be a fourth chart for average taxes taken from their citizens to remind them how much they are taking (if we had a uniform tax code, this chart may have more weight... but whatever.)
Drowning in the bathtub. (Score:5, Interesting)
This is exactly the kind of framing that brings joy to those with a grudge against effective government - playing entirely in their end zone, scoring point after point when they're supposed to have the ball.
Corporations have proven that, given the option, they will simply not do basic research. Now, we're using recent tax breaks (plus extra double tax cuts for the rich) causing further massive deficits to argue that huge swaths of basic research be eliminated, because they're too luxurious for us to afford (compared to the utter non-luxury of war-time double-tax-cuts for the mega-rich).
Basic science is really our only path towards actually knowing how to solve a lot of deep, inherent, and growing problems in our world. Problems that will only get worse as more resources are pulled into the hands of the few who will never let that money out of their small investment circles and estate holdings by choice.
The rich (frequently) aren't villains - they're just those that are good at gathering resources, the natural end result of selecting for people who can best acquire resources from others. The dynamic of a glut of rich getting more controlling over more resources is an ancient dynamic - the very word Crass is an example of this - take a little time to read up on Marcus Licinius Crassus [wikipedia.org] adventures in emergency real estate acquisitions if you want a little insight into to today's real estate capitalism. Of course, he did die getting gold poured down his throat after his overreach - but he also created an empire too.
Sacrifice research on the alter of making room for tax breaks, however, and you're selling the very soul of your nation's future. You're creating an empire at the cost of drowning your future in your acquired gold.
Ryan Fenton
I Call Shenanigans (Score:4, Insightful)
If you go to the site, they're not saying we should cut ALL of the NSF funding. They're asking people to suggest specific grants that are not good uses of tax dollars. The OP is essentially saying that there can't possibly be waste anywhere in the NSF budget at that anyone who would even suggest such a thing must necessarily be anti-science.
Re: (Score:3)
Simple Solution to this Budget Problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Simple Solution to this Budget Problem (Score:4, Informative)
No it's not that simple. I wish the people saying this would go to the Congressional Budget Office web site and actually try reading some of the budget projections instead of parroting some line which happens to fit their worldview.
In a nutshell, U.S. military spending has more or less been steadily declining [cbo.gov] as a percentage of the GDP and percentage of the budget [urban.org], up until 9/11. After 9/11 it started to tick upwards, but is still near the lowest it's been since WWII [truthandpolitics.org]. It's actually one of the few parts of the budget which has been getting smaller over the last 50 years.
What's killing the budget are the social programs. Specifically Medicare/Medicaid, though Social Security rears its head every now and then. Medicare and Medicaid are projected to grow so much [cbo.gov] and so quickly that if we completely eliminated all military spending - dropped it to zero - within about 20-25 years the growth in Medicare/Medicaid will have consumed all of the savings.
This isn't a conservative problem, this isn't a liberal problem. It's a straight-up accounting/math problem, and I know most of the folks here are pretty good at math. Put aside any preconceptions you may have. Go read the the CBO report on the budget [cbo.gov]. See for yourself where the problems in the budget are.
Tea Party Dullards (Score:3)
This is wrong on so many levels. First off the NSF budget is just pitiful, 6.85 billion in 2009. The physical sciences are flat out starving. Come on, this is the groundwork of our entire technical civilization...how many trillion is that worth a year? And most importantly the examples that he gives...soccer grant, and grant for video game sound. Well all right. The video game industry (which is entirely predicated on math math math more math -- insert joke [head shots]) is like 50+ billion. I think that research may well pay off. The NIH budget is 29.5 billion. I am in the biosciences and if you cut that in half and it would make no difference to the health of this country. Cancer...the same...Alzheimers...Schizophrenia...no progress... My point is that of all the Government research agencies, the NSF is in the most need of some love. This is just shameful.
Make The Cuts Broad & Deep (Score:3, Insightful)
I've worked 10 years in biomedical research both in academia (where I got my paycheck from the NIH), and in industry (pharma & diagnostics).
I am ABSOLUTELY in making very deep cuts in the National Institutes of Health budget. It should be cut in half over the next 10 years.
I have witnessed the efficiency and progress in industry, and it make some of the top academic researchers look like true money and time wasters. The amount of truly useful work to come out of academia does not justify stealing from taxpayers.
It is the moral position to support cuts to the NIH, military, NSF, Dept of Ed, etc.
Ummm... (Score:5, Interesting)
In other words, we don't train scientists in this country without NIH/NSF/DOE funding. It simply doesn't happen, because it is too expensive to do any other way. If those three agencies were all terminated this afternoon, grad schools across the country would suffer immediately. Eventually the number of new degrees issued would plummet and employers looking for PhDs would have to hire from abroad.
In other words, congratulations you just expressed support for accelerating the brain drain.
The amount of truly useful work to come out of academia does not justify stealing from taxpayers.
Just because you don't understand the work - or the value thereof - coming from academia does not mean it has no value.
As an occasional NSF Reviewer... (Score:5, Informative)
From time to time, I act as a grant reviewer and panelist for the NSF. I can quite frankly attest that the NSF is anything but bloated. The number of excellent and virtuous projects that do not get funded is always a crying shame. Of course, some proposals are utter rubbish. However, far fewer projects get funded than are deserving of funding. Not only that, the NSF provide us with a small *per deium*, from which we have to pay our own hotel, meals, transportation and everything else, apart from travel costs. One is lucky to break even, when working for the NSF. In addition, it is hard work! Our lunch break is usually just long enough to run across the road to a food court and then we eat as we work. In the evenings, there are summaries to write. I only do it because I believe that it makes the world a better place. However, if this is what the Republicans are intending, there will be no need for more business bailouts, as they will just outsource the whole country to multinationals (who usually don't pay tax, due to off-shore 'arrangements'). Thus, this is a strategy only Osama bin Laden could rationally endorse.
It's all up to me? (Score:3, Interesting)
The Republicans want me, an ignorant, uninformed American, to decide what to cut from the US Government budget?
I vote we cut the Republican Party.
Who's with me?
Republican Majority (Score:3, Informative)
The Republicans don't have a majority in Congress, they have a majority in the United States House, one of the two houses of Congress, the other house, the United States Senate retains a Democratic majority.
Maser (Score:3)
I am officially not a Republican anymore (Score:4, Insightful)
This makes me want to throw-up.
Having "the people" review NSF grants, the same people of whom half believe that antibiotics kill viruses (imperiling all of us when they strong arm their spineless doctors into prescribing antibiotics for colds) and think that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time, is a freaking ridiculous idea. Furthermore, the idea that targeting grants individually in NSF, whose budget, at $7 billion is 0.2% of the total budget is an effective way of cutting the deficit is asinine. And to top it all off, that measly $7 billion is one of the major reasons the United States is still a power in science and technology at all, especially as private R&D collapses in the face of the recession (in the short term) and Wall Street's fetish for quarterly results.
Fuck you, Eric Cantor. Fuck you, ignorant Republican douche-bags. I am D-O-N-E done. We are going to Hell in a handbasket, and instead of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic (which would be bad enough), you are stealing life jackets from children and setting them ablaze because the water is cold and we need to keep warm.
Re: (Score:3)
Because computers never helped anyone learn either of those skills, let alone any other useful skills that they will use later in life...
Re: (Score:3)
Whether or not you can learn without a computer is irrelevant. The old education system is quickly falling apart, either because of its inherent flaws or inability to cope with change. "Go back to math and reading!" is not the answer and will only make the problem worse and hurt our ability to compete in an increasingly electronic world.
In short, what you want isn't relevant; adults are discussing important matters.
Re: (Score:3)
Paper, pencils, and a good teacher. Worked for fucking centuries.
Re: (Score:3)
Multiple FAIL: It is not Republicans who put up this site but a Republican, Rep. Cantor. "YouCut Targets National Science Foundation Budget" is unnecessarily inflammatory and factually incorrect: one or two of the science grants with titles like "collaboration among soccer players" and "sound of breaking objects" were given as examples of unnecessary gov. spending. No cuts to NSF budget were proposed or voted in by anybody. It is ridiculous that something like this is posted on the front page. I long notice
Re: (Score:3)
Ok, so we eliminate some questionable grants that the NSF hands out and reduce the deficit by something on the order of .000001%. Great.
Look, I don't have any problem with trying to eliminate earmarks or funding for the Department of Silly Walks, but pretending this is anything more than a principled stand against waste is foolhardy. We're not going to eliminate the deficit by nibbling around the edges. We're going to need pretty heavy cuts across the board and tax increases for everybody. That's the wa
Re: (Score:3)
Personally, I think the modeling of sound for shattering objects is some pretty cool stuff with actual applications in industry. Not sure what that soccer player project was about, but that website doesn't really provide enough details for people to make an informed judgment about these projects.
Re: (Score:3)
If you can track and model every player on the soccer field, it makes it that much easier to track and model every person in an airport, busy street... just guessing on that.