Larofeticus: You've never worked in public science, have you?
90% of it is a money pit. Make-work for grad students and professors. I myself am guilty of being on the dole, but I don't intend to make a career out of it. It is by no means an efficient way of producing knowledge but the stimulus will keep it going at the expense of everyone else.

I always get a kick out of people who think scientists are living high on the hog with public grant money. Considering how little of the allocated money is actually used for science, I'm surprised sometimes that any science actually gets done.

Mentat: I'm surprised sometimes that any science actually gets done.

Me too.

Nucleus:

MFL


You seriously don't believe that shiat? Do you?

Purchasing the opportunities of tomorrow by investing in education and science? Of course I do. Without committing to research and development there never would have been a silicon valley, a tech boom, and we wouldn't be on the cusp of a biotechnology revolution.

You can go back further in time and see how the same set of properly aligned priorities enabled drug discovery, superconductors, and better algorithms. All of this technology gets ported to the private sector and creates jobs.

Where did you think this stuff comes from?

Bell Labs, mostly.

So, you're saying that the function of government in business is to develop new technologies, and let business use them?

* FACEPALM *

Gen. Jim

GeneralJim: Bell Labs, mostly.

Don't look now, but they are closing their basic sciences, including material and superconductor research.

There is a great deal of basic research that business won't fund, but contributes to the general welfare.

brainiac-dumdum: Sweet Jesus, you STILL don't get the strategy behind the stimulus bill?

Macroeconomics is the tinfoil hat that Obama wears to keep Jesus out of his budget.

Mentat: I always get a kick out of people who think scientists are living high on the hog with public grant money. Considering how little of the allocated money is actually used for science, I'm surprised sometimes that any science actually gets done.

This is somewhat akin to the widespread belief that government agencies are rolling in unlimited money, despite the fact that they cant fill high education/high demand positions. For example, IT ... believe it or not, most IT professionals with options would rather not work for 60% of their potential open market salary in dreary, nearly dilapidated buildings with rejected furniture from the 1970's with little to no chance at upward movement.

I've worked as an IT consultant to the private and public sector ... if I were starting a business, Im looking for a government agency IT director. What those people can build with some proverbial bailing wire and chewing gum is nothing short of awe-inspiring. Meanwhile, most corporate IT middle management is filled with nothing more than charlatans and professional bullshiat artists who have talked their way up the ladder on the golf course.

General Jim


Bell Labs, mostly.

So, you're saying that the function of government in business is to develop new technologies, and let business use them?


Bell labs? No, you would be dead wrong. Most innovation is done in the academic sector. Not just top tier institutions like MIT, and Stanford but universities and medical research facilities in every medium large sized city in the country.

Developing new technologies is largely a military endeavor, that it has a role in business, energy, and medicine is a beneficial side effect.

MFL: Nucleus Purchasing the opportunities of tomorrow by investing in education and science? Of course I do. Without committing to research and development there never would have been a silicon valley, a tech boom, and we wouldn't be on the cusp of a biotechnology revolution.

So...the biotechnology revolution that's going to be created by the stimulus package is going to create an economic boom that is going to pay for the trillions of dollars of debt we are putting ourselves in. What are we going to clone mexicans to work at GM fro 20 cents an hour?

What we are looking at in the upcoming months because of this "investment" is a weaker dollar and inflation...and a government that won't eventually be able to fund these worthy projects you mention in the long term. We could potentially have a generation of wealth lost before we get back on track.

We need to fix the economy we have now, not 15 years from now.


You are a now term thinker. You want the food hot before you put it in the microwave just like a large part of the American culture that demands instant gratification but doesn't want to work for it. 15 years on the scale of the nations is a very short term.

What will the biotechnology boom do? Grow stronger livestock and crops, thereby feeding more people on less land, water, and fertilizer.

Tease out chemical metabolic processes making it possible to produce drugs, industrial intermediates, maybe even energy just as cheaply and easily as we currently produce the ethanol for your beer and the citric acid for your soda - and do it all cleaner than we did before producing less toxins and pollutants that cause disease and drive up the cost of health-care.

Cure diseases, promote effective and efficient management of our ecosystem and finite resources, strengthen our nation against outside threats.

Try using your brain.

Larofeticus: Nucleus: Purchasing the opportunities of tomorrow by investing in education and science

You've never worked in public science, have you?
90% of it is a money pit. Make-work for grad students and professors. I myself am guilty of being on the dole, but I don't intend to make a career out of it. It is by no means an efficient way of producing knowledge but the stimulus will keep it going at the expense of everyone else.

Making statements about the magnitude of a recession do nothing to solve a problem of kind. Emotional appeals don't cancel the fact that Joe-Six-Pack's mortgage is a toxic asset and poisoning the banking sector in it's current unliquidated form. That's just another nessecary adjustment of asset prices that needs to happen to end the recession, but stimulus and bailouts will delay.

Picking the winners and losers counts as central planning in my book. Ethanol got picked as pork for the midwest and now it's failing. The winners with cap and trade will be the people that manage the market for it. Green technology is annointed as a winner so heavily that it will probably be the next bubble to inflate and pop.



What a bunch of horseshiat. I do work in public science currently. A visit to pubmed will show you how effective the grant review process has been over the years and the payoff has been an incalculable benefit.

The American family is not an asset to be turned over for banking profits. You would do well to remember that.

Investment in renewable resources will begin the end of the boom-bust cycle. What else could you expect from the current system that depletes a resource to nothing and then moves on like a parasite?

Cap and trade is a necessary tool of reducing the ecological stress we put on our only habitat. It is not some commoonist anti-free-for-all market hating conspiracy.

Nucleus:
If it's true you work in public science, and I were to guess... I'd say you're a Biology grad student... no masters yet, and they've probably got you running busywork Bio 101 labs for next to nothing. The FarkID fits with that scenario, too. I'm computer science myself; but I end up working with Bio people a fair amount.

The only noteworthy applications of biotech to food supply I've seen are using it to sell more RoundUp and using it to put more pus in the milk. And those were done by Monsanto. Everything else just seems to skrew up the genome and either result in mutations or cancer.

Yeah, I've got a few papers on pubmed, and like a vast majority of other papers there, nobody uses or cites them except for me and the people i have direct contact with.

"Investment in renewable resources will begin the end of the boom-bust cycle." In the boom-bust cycle, there can't be a bust unless it is a surprise. The vast majority of people can't see it coming, or else enough people would short everything to deflate it gently. Lots of people can measure how much of a single natural resource deposit is left and calculate when it will run out; when it does it is not a surprise. Besides, if running out of resources caused the boom-bust cycle, then you should be able to identify which resources ran out to cause certain busts. The 70's and the oil-shock is the only obvious one; you're theory can't explain the great depression, the internet boom, the housing boom, or any of the cycles in the 1800's. This statement is just asinine. You couldn't find an economist who would even listen to you say a second sentence after this one.

Cap and Trade is a gift to wall street. The key is in the word "trade." Wall street firms will be doing the trading, and earning a fat commission for every one. Hell, just a plan carbon tax would be better than that... and probably more effective... and less difficult to manage.

Eddie Adams from Torrance: Obama has been President for almost 6 months and he STILL hasn't fixed the economy.

WTF is this guy's problem?

Worst President EVAR!

You have got that right. Or don't your remember the libtards that were screaming for Bush to resign as soon as the election was completed. All the Dems were saying that Obama would have the economy fixed before the swearing in ceremony date. The only thing this "President" is doing is spending us into oblivion. Mark my words, his approval rating will be in the low 20% in a year and we will be lucky to not be in a full blown depression.

. Besides, if running out of resources caused the boom-bust cycle, then you should be able to identify which resources ran out to cause certain busts. The 70's and the oil-shock is the only obvious one;

It seems to me you're complaining about rampant speculators and unscrupulous investors and then decrying government intervention.

Come back when you get some reading comprehension or can form a coherent argument that doesn't wander all over the place.

You said renewable resource investment will stop the boom-bust cycle. That's crap. Maybe try and come up with a defense of that (even though you can't because it's crap) instead of wandering off into straw man land.

You couldn't even get Paul Krugman to agree with that statement.

Larofeticus: Come back when you get some reading comprehension or can form a coherent argument that doesn't wander all over the place.

You said renewable resource investment will stop the boom-bust cycle. That's crap. Maybe try and come up with a defense of that (even though you can't because it's crap) instead of wandering off into straw man land.

You couldn't even get Paul Krugman to agree with that statement.


Maybe its your reading comprehension that is the problem. Come back when you've fixed that. I said that renewables will begin to end the boom-bust cycle. In particular I'm thinking energy, but that can be extrapolated to include all consumables. Our economic model is largely built on consumption. Recycling and reprocessing is an unexplored market that requires development, but has enormous potential. Plastics, landfills, methane, gray water all of these are largely untapped resources.


Its a component, not an absolute. Another component is speculators. That Goldman-Sachs article in Rolling Stone was interesting.

The buisness cycle is a function of the interaction between real resouces being limited and the credit expansion of money being unlimited.

Green technology is limited by our ability to waste, which although quite impressive in it's own right, is not infinite, just like every other useful resource. Maybe it tweaks some numbers around the edges compared to other methods of doing things, and sure a nicer environment is a pretty good bonus, but fundamentally it changes nothing that would stop the buisness cycle. Energy can get cheaper, or more efficient, but it will never be free. Unless you think green technology is going to turn out like star trek, in which case I've got bad news...

Nucleus:

General Jim


Bell Labs, mostly.

So, you're saying that the function of government in business is to develop new technologies, and let business use them?


Bell labs? No, you would be dead wrong. Most innovation is done in the academic sector. Not just top tier institutions like MIT, and Stanford but universities and medical research facilities in every medium large sized city in the country.

Yeah, right. Bell Labs earned six Nobel Prizes, and was the home of the inventors of a FEW things you may have heard of:

The Radio Telescope
The Transistor
The Laser
Statistical Process Control
The discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation
The fractional quantum Hall effect
Microwave radio relay
Long distance television transmission
The first synchronous-sound motion picture system
The photovoltaic cell
Information Theory
Cryptography
The one-time pad cypher
MOSFETS
Electret microphone
Molecular beam epitaxy
The CCD
Fiber optics
the first single-chip 32-bit microprocessor
Digital speech encoding (scrambler)
The Vocoder - speech synthesizer
Stereo radio
UNIX
The 'C' Programming Language
C++
The Plan 9 operating system
Laser cooling
The first wireless local area network
The quantum cascade laser
VOIP
SCALPEL electron lithography
Concurrent Limbo programming language
DataBlitz
DNA machine prototypes

They're pretty much a dead issue now, as about a dozen spin-offs and mergers have eviscerated the group. Now they make phones. Sad, really.

So, what institution were YOU proposing as superior?

Gen. Jim

Nucleus:

Investment in renewable resources will begin the end of the boom-bust cycle. What else could you expect from the current system that depletes a resource to nothing and then moves on like a parasite?

Cap and trade is a necessary tool of reducing the ecological stress we put on our only habitat. It is not some commoonist anti-free-for-all market hating conspiracy.

Ah, I see you're a multi-disciplinary incompetent. I guess it's good to diversify...

Gen. Jim