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The problem (partly) is that the F-35 program puts money into 307 congressional districts in 45 states [1]. These insanely expensive defense projects are wealth

by skuhn 6y ago

The problem (partly) is that the F-35 program puts money into 307 congressional districts in 45 states [1]. These insanely expensive defense projects are wealth transfer programs that make contractors like Lockheed and their many sub-contractors rich, and also create jobs in these communities. That a fighter plane may or may not come out the other end is only nominally important, the key is to spend the money. The more money spent, the more people get work. That keeps people elected. Arecibo had 120 FTE employees, mostly in Puerto Rico. Politically speaking that makes it inconsequential. If you want different outcomes, then the political incentives need to be fundamentally re-aligned. [1] https://harpers.org/archive/2019/06/the-pentagon-syndrome/ https://harpers.org/archive/2019/06/the-pentagon-syndrome/

ISL 6y ago
The FTE employee-count alone underestimates the impact of national-scale science infrastructure. naic.edu is down right now (I suspect they're busy at the moment), but their data is used by tens to hundreds of institutions, each partially employing faculty, postdocs, and students. For agencies like NSF, the science is sometimes almost secondary. What matters perhaps the most is that qualified and capable students continue to emerge from, and sustain, America's scientific institutions. Arecibo has been fighting for its fiscal life since I was an undergraduate in the early 2000s. I couldn't understand then why anyone would want to cut funding to it, as the facility is unique and capable. As a more-mature scientist, I now understand that older instruments sometimes must sadly make way for new endeavors. This collapse is a powerful moment for US radio astronomy. Will the community redirect the funds to promising new instruments, buck up and rebuild an upgraded Arecibo, or use the fleeting prominence of the moment find a way to grow the funding pie and do both? It is embarrassing for the planet's leading scientific nation to have China's larger modern copy of Arecibo (FAST) come on-line in 2016 and our venerable telescope collapse without replacement in 2020. We owe it to ourselves to do better than this.
- Arubis 6y ago
  Yours is a convincing argument. How do we get better optics on this for the public at large, so as to better present arguments for funding science?
  - ISL 6y ago
    It never, ever, hurts to write to your federal representative and senators. They and their staffers do listen and their votes directly determine the funding and oversight for NSF, NASA, and DOE. I don't have great advice for direct advocacy (A billboard that says, "America's scientific infrastructure is collapsing -- fund science now!"?). At the grassroots level, providing opportunities for people to engage directly with science -- outreach, lab tours, science field trips, etc. help people to learn to understand the world around them, engage with science, see the infrastructure, and take ownership. Every time I have given a lab tour, I thank everyone who attends for underwriting the science with their tax dollars. Essentially all fundamental research in the US is funded by you, the taxpayer. We are really, really grateful for the opportunity to learn something new about nature and share it with everyone. Thank you.
  - Frost1x 6y ago
    Not to digress too far but the general public at large won't even push to get funding for their own direct interests (e.g. COVID related stimulus right now). I don't know how we expect to get the general public to push for science. Much of our society runs on pure momentum and very few people have the power to slightly shift the direction of that momentum. One of the other large radio astronomy observatories in Greenback is also hurting for funding from what I understand. I've worked on a few collaborative research efforts utilizing the data and working with the observatory and the picture painted doesn't look promising there either. That may have changed more recently given the state of Arecibo.
  - the8472 6y ago
    If it works for defense projects... Calculate how many jobs it takes to build a thing. Keep building things. Advertise job numbers?
    - skuhn 6y ago
      It would be nice to fix the societal issue that ties up people's self-worth, status and sheer survival with their job, but that's a much bigger ask. Now you're into things like universal healthcare, UBI, mental health, education, etc. Still, we should work towards improvements on all fronts. I think that in today's world, if you want science to get funded like defense projects, you'll have to embrace all of the grossness of defense projects. Lobbyists, sub-contractors, patriotic jingoism, fear, etc. Look at how we got to the moon.
- claydavisss 6y ago
  A new Arecibo would only generate mountains of more useless data. This isn't a troll. There is nothing we can presently do with incremental data from observatories beyond what we've already collected. We are centuries away from leaving the solar system - if we placed a moratorium on observatory construction for a century, we would still have fifty years to build new observatories in time for the data to be of use. The NSF should be focused on the immediate and pressing matter of environmental degradation.
- skuhn 6y ago
  I agree that the impact of Arecibo and these kinds of installations is actually very outsized relative to the number of FTE employees who directly work on it. The larger scientific community are the ones who booked time on the telescope after all. My point is that politically none of that matters. No one is getting elected because people got to book telescope time for their research. The incentives are not correctly aligned to support research and science. To go back to the F-35 comparison: the NSF has annual funding of $8.3 billion. The F-35 program is projected to cost $21.7 billion per year through its lifespan (2001-2070). I bet it winds up even higher than that, because nothing has yet changed to prevent endless overruns. So the F-35 makes jobs and maybe a little bit of interesting work gets done as a result of the project despite itself. We as a society could buy so much more than yet another war machine (and maybe not even a useful one) with that money and effort. What could NSF do with another $13 billion every year?
  - mumblemumble 6y ago
    > So the F-35 makes jobs... I wonder about that. It's been a while since I studied, but the phrase "deadweight loss" looms large in what I remember of the one economics class I took in college. So I wouldn't be surprised if the program is actually a net negative for job creation. Only that doesn't matter, either, because the point is not to create more jobs; the point is to influence job creation in a way that benefits the people who hold the purse strings. If the cost of doing so outweighs the benefits, that's inconsequential. Those costs are so widely dispersed as to be invisible, immeasurable, and difficult to discuss except on theoretical grounds. They'll never be as compelling as a staged photograph of a senator in a suit and a hard hat, sticking a shovel in the ground.
    - skuhn 6y ago
      I haven't really looked into it all beyond a superficial level, but I certainly think that things like the F-35 program are a net negative to society when viewed at a distance. As another example, I wonder if Wisconsin's sweetheart deal with Foxconn actually had a negative impact on employment. Clearly Foxconn's promised jobs never materialized, but the threat of them coming to town to spend big money may have had a chilling effect on existing or prospective new employers in the area. Back to the F-35 program, the jobs it creates may be deadweight, deadend careers that don't produce real value. And then you can't just have these people unemployed and starving, so I guess we'll need an F-35+1 program for them and their descendents. And so on forever, until we break this cycle. Versus something else that you could buy with the same money that has a future and does create real value (like say, solar panels?). But you're right, its just about the perception of jobs and that photo op.
- superkuh 6y ago
  > China's larger modern copy of Arecibo (FAST) come on-line in 2016 China's is not really a copy. It does not have transmit capability. What is really missing now in US, and international science is asteroid radar imaging and ranging.
  - njarboe 6y ago
    That is not good. Was Arecibo the best instrument for early detection of asteroids? What are we using now?
    - mturmon 6y ago
      Now, we use optical scanning telescopes with a wide field of view, and image differencing. Optical instruments have a wide field of view and don't have the inherent SNR problems that radar does. (I.e., using the Sun to illuminate objects is more efficient than doing it yourself.) As a side-effect, there are all kinds of other transient sources that these scanning telescopes pick up, like supernovae, relativistic jets from AGNs ("blazars"), exotic variable stars, etc. (http://crts.caltech.edu http://crts.caltech.edu) It's a zoo out there! Radar does play a role in orbit characterization, and recovery of object geometry, once the NEO gets close enough. But you can get orbits through optical techniques too. The NASA center for near-Earth objects (NEOs) is: https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/about/search_program.html https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/about/search_program.html NEO close approaches to Earth, tabulated: https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/ https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/. There was a really close one today, actually (a 5-meter object at 0.13 lunar distances). For more about the role of planetary radar in NEOs, search for "radar" in this FAQ: https://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense/faq https://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense/faq
  - notabee 6y ago
    Yeah. And the transmitter piece has been broken since Maria hit, so we've already gone quite some time without that capability.
  - nullc 6y ago
    I think fast is also limited to a much lower frequency than Arecibo due to trading off pointability vs surface consistency-- which it needs in part because its so much further from the equator.
- detritus 6y ago
  I'd like to think that the near future will allow large space-based solutions in place of Earth-based and increasingly radiowave-polluted ones. A far-side moon solution's probably still quite a way off, but I wonder if some sort of lagrangian or outward-facing satellites in geosynchronous orbit might work. I'm imagining satellites with large Earth-facing shields, sort of like a radiowave version of the sunshield on the James Webb Telescope. I'm probably missing some really obvious Physics 101-level reason that wouldn't work, but a girl can dream.
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
We need to adopt similar strategies for getting e.g. green energy production off the ground. Thinking of things like solar panel production.
- moftz 6y ago
  Except there is money to be made in the green energy industry. There's no money to be made building a giant radio telescope. Sometimes corporations have a need for scientific institutions and their patronage helps keep the lights on but I really can't think of any way that can apply to something meant to stare at the stars. What could help is designing a radio telescope that have both scientific use and military use like China's telescope in Argentina. You have one user willing to pay plenty for time on it and another user that is just happy to get some work done.
  - jbay808 6y ago
    As proof of your point, Arecibo was originally built as a military project with general scientific value as a bonus.
- skuhn 6y ago
  There was a brief push by the government to encourage funding of things like Solyndra under Obama, but obviously that didn't all pan out. I think that putting substantial funding into making the US the world leader in climate change related technology is such an obvious slam dunk that it defies belief for me that there seems to be no political will to do it. Argue about the reality of climate change if you must, but the simple facts are that there is finite oil, finite coal, finite natural gas and the extraction and processing of those fuels is an expensive and dirty business. Of course solar, wind, hydro and nuclear don't compete yet -- how about putting in the same R&D money as fossil fuels? And when you make it work, the entire world will buy this tech from you. It could clearly be the US's next economic gold rush, after the Internet and post-WW2 manufacturing (and, I guess, the gold rush). I do wonder if the economic approach is just doomed to be a non-starter, and if the faster way is to frame it as a national security issue. That leads to a number of other problems, but time is clearly of the essence and they know how to spend money over there.
wavefunction 6y ago
I think it's high time for Puerto Rico to become a US state. Puerto Rico has twice the population of the two Dakotas combined and the only way they'll receive more-equitable treatment is if they become a state. I think the will is there locally but there has been resistance from established political factions in the US who fear a place that might tip the balance of power one way or the other.
- claydavisss 6y ago
  The only people really invested in this are the citizens of PR, mostly because it will mean a fiscal lifeline. For a citizen of the present USA, there is no upside to incorporating PR as a state.
- skuhn 6y ago
  I agree with you, and I'll go a step further. The US should not have any colonial territories or federal districts where US citizens live who have second-class rights compared to citizens of the 50 states. That means DC, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa (collectively 3.8 million US citizens) should all be made states. There are undoubtedly lots of issues and hiccups with implementing that, but fundamentally I think that having classes of citizens with abridged rights is wrong.
  - Frondo 6y ago
    I'll go even further: find a way to grant them all the rights of citizenship (representation for their taxation) and let them decide for themselves on statehood. If there's any downside (I honestly don't know, maybe there is?), those people should be given the choice to determine their course of action for themselves. But I agree completely, having people who pay taxes and can't access all the machinery of government they fund is criminal. (This also includes disenfranchised felons, but especially disenfranchised ex-felons.)
    - skuhn 6y ago
      I think we're maxed out on this thread for who to enfranchise, which is good! I believe one of the big downsides for citizens of Puerto Rico that has caused issues with the push for statehood is that they don't currently pay federal income tax. So it isn't exactly a taxation-without-representation situation, but they are obviously at the mercy of the US in many ways and don't have access to all of the levers of power that are available to others. Witness the suffering at our delay in suspending the Jones Act (requiring two days of debate) during the Hurricane Maria relief campaign. I doubt that Puerto Rico's lot would fundamentally change if they were a separate country though, they would still be largely at the mercy of their main trading partner and dominant regional power (the US). I was also thinking of felons in my earlier comment, but it didn't quite fit my narrative. I don't find the rationale that they would just vote for there to be no laws particularly compelling.
bmurphy1976 6y ago
> The problem (partly) is that the F-35 program puts money into 307 congressional districts in 45 states [1]. These insanely expensive defense projects are wealth transfer programs that make contractors like Lockhead and their many sub-contractors rich, and also create jobs in these communities. I agree with this. I've been saying for years that our military programs are giant socialist jobs programs in disguise (that unfortunately have the side effect of propping up the military industrial complex). If we were honest with ourselves and re-allocated that money to actual jobs programs we would get a much better ROI. Given the obscene amount of resources wasted we could reallocate a significant chunk of it without hurting our military preparedness one bit.
- colechristensen 6y ago
  One important piece of military preparedness is having a population of experienced engineers, manufacturing infrastructure, leadership, R&D, etc. Institutional knowledge is very real. Weapons programs also simply take decades. You might be able to churn out web apps in a few months, but cutting edge aircraft, not so much. What do we have? Unprecedented world peace. Why do we have it? American foreign policy. You have to remember our military budget covers all of NATO in an intentional bid to reduce the military power of our allies which helps keep them peaceful.
  - Frondo 6y ago
    I would sooner credit the 35th rule of acquisition ("Peace is good for business") than American foreign policy for the lack of a global conflict.
    - mnw21cam 6y ago
      Bad example. It's not to be confused with the 34th rule of acquisition (war is good for business).
    - colechristensen 6y ago
      But then what changed between 1900 and 1945? We had two world wars between those years and nothing but small localized wars never between major powers after? Weapons. We developed weapons that could sanitize the planet, and in the case that someone might challenge our intention to actually use them, we developed weapons that ran the spectrum so that war against us would always seem a major losing proposition. The only thing left is insurgency and proxy wars, always carefully enough to not trigger major action. Given that game becoming economically codependent and the world is the best play for the available game, and then indeed “peace is good for business”.
blkknightarms 6y ago
Lockheed
VikingCoder 6y ago
I've begun imagining that for Defense spending, government money that's spent in a State must have come from that State's federal income taxes. I'm exhausted seeing data that indicates that states like mine put in more money than they get from the Federal government, and watching people from states that receive more than they put in talk about welfare state, wealth redistribution, etc.
- TMWNN 6y ago
  No state pays a cent to another state or to the federal government. It is residents of each state that pay federal taxes, which the federal government in turn uses to provide funding and services to states and individuals. The Rockefeller Institute data (https://rockinst.org/issue-areas/fiscal-analysis/balance-of-payments-portal/ https://rockinst.org/issue-areas/fiscal-analysis/balance-of-...) shows that it's not so much "blue states" as frequently claimed, but taxpayers of four very wealthy Northeast states (the Tri-State area plus Massachusetts) that account for the vast bulk of citizens paying more than they receive from the federal government. After them come CO, NE, UT, and MN, of which half voted for Hillary/Biden and half for Trump. All other states, including CA, are net beneficiaries of the taxpayers in the top eight (and, again, really, it's the top four). The 10 states at the bottom of the Rockefeller report's per capita list—that is, the states that benefit from the most federal spending per person compared to how much each person pays in federal taxes—are Hillary/Biden-voting states: VA, NM, MD, HI, 1/2 of ME Trump-voting states: KY, AK, AL, WV, MS, 1/2 of ME
  - VikingCoder 6y ago
    Yes, thank you for explicitly phrasing the problem the way I should have. Cato has different numbers than Rockefeller. https://www.cato.org/blog/winner-loser-states-centralized-government https://www.cato.org/blog/winner-loser-states-centralized-go... I've lived in multiple blue states, and they're all "losers" by this definition.
  - masklinn 6y ago
    > The Rockefeller Institute data (https://rockinst.org/issue-areas/fiscal-analysis/balance-of- https://rockinst.org/issue-areas/fiscal-analysis/balance-of-...) shows that it's not so much "blue states" as frequently claimed, but taxpayers of four very wealthy Northeast states (the Tri-State area plus Massachusetts) that account for the vast bulk of citizens paying more than they receive from the federal government. Yeaaah… no. It only shows that under the default of 2018 BOP. If you select the last primary tab and look at the 4 years tally, you will see a picture rather more inline with the "folk knowledge", including that while Californians have had a BOP just shy of positive from 2017, their negative BOP in 2015 and 2016 puts them rather into the negative for the 4 years period. Less so than the tri-state or Colorado, but the picture you're painting is at best misleading.
lmilcin 6y ago
You do realize the money spent on these projects comes out of pockets of all taxpayers? So we are really talking about wealth transfer from all taxpayers to some taxpayers who are usually doing well already plus huge losses on the way. Obviously, there is a bunch of technology being developed that benefits US but let us not kid ourselves, it is not the most cost effective way of doing research.
- snakeboy 6y ago
  I don't think the OP was at all suggesting that it's a good system. They were just explaining the current incentive structure.
sandworm101 6y ago
>> the political incentives need to be fundamentally re-aligned. Being the first president to announce the detection of an extraterrestrial intelligence would be a big deal. Clinton certainly jumped on the mic pretty fast when we thought life had been found on mars. Such possibilities could provide the political motivation to keep the next giant telescope funded.
- lkbm 6y ago
  It's an incentive to keep things going for up to eight years -- arguably only four. "This needs maintenance or it'll collapse in five years" has little political weight if your term ends in four years.
andrepd 6y ago
I wish we could just simply hand the money over and skip the part where we create the demand for eternal wars and the killing and maiming of millions of people.
- skuhn 6y ago
  The wind gently whispers: socialism.
  - earhart 6y ago
    More like a UBI. Or extended social security. Socialism's more about the community owning and managing the means of production, and less about just giving people money. You could make a good case that the F-35 program, with all its bloat and cost overruns and inefficient distribution of funds by congressional district, is typical of a socialist jobs program -- granted, the F-35 also has a layer of capitalist shareholders parasitically skimming off the top, but if that were removed, the political pressures that result in the inefficiencies would remain.
    - skuhn 6y ago
      The F-35 program is indeed a lot like socialism. And I think the layer of skim off the top is well represented in centrally planned economies like the Soviet Union. It was taken by well placed government ministers rather than business oligarchs. My comment was intended to be more tongue-in-cheek. People fear socialism, but capitalism is not the answer to all of the world's problems. People have basic needs: safety, sustenance, shelter, self-determination. They have higher level needs too, and we aren't living in a post-scarcity society yet, but we have the resources to meet these basic needs for at least 328 million people.
- perryizgr8 6y ago
  Better yet, don't take the money in the first place. Let people keep more of their legitimate earnings.
blackrock 6y ago
Perhaps Lockheed should make a telescope that’s so big, it spans 45 States?
- lkbm 6y ago
  How spread out can the receivers in a Very Very Large Array be? My understanding is that with radiotelescopy they can be widely dispersed, but I'm far from an expert. Really, you just need manufacturing/contractors in many places. This part built in Pennsylvania, that one in Michigan.
  - avz 6y ago
    VLBI arrays [1] are networks of radio telescopes that combine data from multiple instruments spread out over a continent or the whole planet. A network like this emulates a continent-size or a planet-size radio telescope and produces radioastronomy's highest resolution images. The most sensitive VLBI array is the European VLBI network [2] which spans the sort of scales you have in mind. A VLBI array can also incorporate space-based nodes, see e.g. [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very-long-baseline_interferometry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very-long-baseline_interferome... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_VLBI_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_VLBI_Network [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HALCA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HALCA
dylan604 6y ago
Then let's build a new Arecibo-esque observatory in each of the 50 states and other territories. We'll combine all of them together to make the VLA look tiny. That'll be 120 employees multiple by the number of locations so we're talking > 6000 employees. Plus, all of that science.
disown 6y ago
> These insanely expensive defense projects are wealth transfer programs that make contractors like Lockheed and their many sub-contractors rich, and also create jobs in these communities. I wish we'd go back to calling the "Defense Department" the "War Department" as it was originally called. And stop calling it "expensive defense projects" but "expensive war projects". Call it for what it really isn't. We aren't defending ourselves from anyone. We are the one's attacking everyone.
AlexandrB 6y ago
The F-35 is an example of the broken window parable[1] writ large. Sure it created a bunch of jobs, but that same money could have created a similar number of jobs while accomplishing something useful. I often wonder what the eventual consequences of this kind of resource misallocation will be for the US. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
- nickff 6y ago
  Well, many influential economists don't believe in the broken windows fallacy, or that it applies here. Joseph Stiglitz has said that he was in favor of literally paying people to dig holes then fill them back up as a form of fiscal stimulus.
  - schoen 6y ago
    The original statement of this idea is from John Maynard Keynes in his General Theory, and turns out to run > If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coal mines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well tried principles of Laissez Faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing.
  - m000 6y ago
    Actually we may already be paying them, only the holes aren't literal. The phenomenon also has a name: Bullshit Jobs [1]. How about paying people for 4 years to get a college degree on whatever subject they like, instead of having them grinding on a bullshit job? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
- pvarangot 6y ago
me_me_me 6y ago
That money would be better spent building roads etc, fuck just give it for free to the worker. Some would end up running local businesses instead of stuffing offshore accounts.

by skuhn 6y ago

ISL 6y ago

The FTE employee-count alone underestimates the impact of national-scale science infrastructure. naic.edu is down right now (I suspect they're busy at the moment), but their data is used by tens to hundreds of institutions, each partially employing faculty, postdocs, and students. For agencies like NSF, the science is sometimes almost secondary. What matters perhaps the most is that qualified and capable students continue to emerge from, and sustain, America's scientific institutions. Arecibo has been fighting for its fiscal life since I was an undergraduate in the early 2000s. I couldn't understand then why anyone would want to cut funding to it, as the facility is unique and capable. As a more-mature scientist, I now understand that older instruments sometimes must sadly make way for new endeavors. This collapse is a powerful moment for US radio astronomy. Will the community redirect the funds to promising new instruments, buck up and rebuild an upgraded Arecibo, or use the fleeting prominence of the moment find a way to grow the funding pie and do both? It is embarrassing for the planet's leading scientific nation to have China's larger modern copy of Arecibo (FAST) come on-line in 2016 and our venerable telescope collapse without replacement in 2020. We owe it to ourselves to do better than this.

Arubis 6y ago
Yours is a convincing argument. How do we get better optics on this for the public at large, so as to better present arguments for funding science?
- ISL 6y ago
  It never, ever, hurts to write to your federal representative and senators. They and their staffers do listen and their votes directly determine the funding and oversight for NSF, NASA, and DOE. I don't have great advice for direct advocacy (A billboard that says, "America's scientific infrastructure is collapsing -- fund science now!"?). At the grassroots level, providing opportunities for people to engage directly with science -- outreach, lab tours, science field trips, etc. help people to learn to understand the world around them, engage with science, see the infrastructure, and take ownership. Every time I have given a lab tour, I thank everyone who attends for underwriting the science with their tax dollars. Essentially all fundamental research in the US is funded by you, the taxpayer. We are really, really grateful for the opportunity to learn something new about nature and share it with everyone. Thank you.
- Frost1x 6y ago
  Not to digress too far but the general public at large won't even push to get funding for their own direct interests (e.g. COVID related stimulus right now). I don't know how we expect to get the general public to push for science. Much of our society runs on pure momentum and very few people have the power to slightly shift the direction of that momentum. One of the other large radio astronomy observatories in Greenback is also hurting for funding from what I understand. I've worked on a few collaborative research efforts utilizing the data and working with the observatory and the picture painted doesn't look promising there either. That may have changed more recently given the state of Arecibo.
- the8472 6y ago
  If it works for defense projects... Calculate how many jobs it takes to build a thing. Keep building things. Advertise job numbers?
  - skuhn 6y ago
    It would be nice to fix the societal issue that ties up people's self-worth, status and sheer survival with their job, but that's a much bigger ask. Now you're into things like universal healthcare, UBI, mental health, education, etc. Still, we should work towards improvements on all fronts. I think that in today's world, if you want science to get funded like defense projects, you'll have to embrace all of the grossness of defense projects. Lobbyists, sub-contractors, patriotic jingoism, fear, etc. Look at how we got to the moon.
claydavisss 6y ago
A new Arecibo would only generate mountains of more useless data. This isn't a troll. There is nothing we can presently do with incremental data from observatories beyond what we've already collected. We are centuries away from leaving the solar system - if we placed a moratorium on observatory construction for a century, we would still have fifty years to build new observatories in time for the data to be of use. The NSF should be focused on the immediate and pressing matter of environmental degradation.
skuhn 6y ago
I agree that the impact of Arecibo and these kinds of installations is actually very outsized relative to the number of FTE employees who directly work on it. The larger scientific community are the ones who booked time on the telescope after all. My point is that politically none of that matters. No one is getting elected because people got to book telescope time for their research. The incentives are not correctly aligned to support research and science. To go back to the F-35 comparison: the NSF has annual funding of $8.3 billion. The F-35 program is projected to cost $21.7 billion per year through its lifespan (2001-2070). I bet it winds up even higher than that, because nothing has yet changed to prevent endless overruns. So the F-35 makes jobs and maybe a little bit of interesting work gets done as a result of the project despite itself. We as a society could buy so much more than yet another war machine (and maybe not even a useful one) with that money and effort. What could NSF do with another $13 billion every year?
- mumblemumble 6y ago
  > So the F-35 makes jobs... I wonder about that. It's been a while since I studied, but the phrase "deadweight loss" looms large in what I remember of the one economics class I took in college. So I wouldn't be surprised if the program is actually a net negative for job creation. Only that doesn't matter, either, because the point is not to create more jobs; the point is to influence job creation in a way that benefits the people who hold the purse strings. If the cost of doing so outweighs the benefits, that's inconsequential. Those costs are so widely dispersed as to be invisible, immeasurable, and difficult to discuss except on theoretical grounds. They'll never be as compelling as a staged photograph of a senator in a suit and a hard hat, sticking a shovel in the ground.
  - skuhn 6y ago
    I haven't really looked into it all beyond a superficial level, but I certainly think that things like the F-35 program are a net negative to society when viewed at a distance. As another example, I wonder if Wisconsin's sweetheart deal with Foxconn actually had a negative impact on employment. Clearly Foxconn's promised jobs never materialized, but the threat of them coming to town to spend big money may have had a chilling effect on existing or prospective new employers in the area. Back to the F-35 program, the jobs it creates may be deadweight, deadend careers that don't produce real value. And then you can't just have these people unemployed and starving, so I guess we'll need an F-35+1 program for them and their descendents. And so on forever, until we break this cycle. Versus something else that you could buy with the same money that has a future and does create real value (like say, solar panels?). But you're right, its just about the perception of jobs and that photo op.
superkuh 6y ago
> China's larger modern copy of Arecibo (FAST) come on-line in 2016 China's is not really a copy. It does not have transmit capability. What is really missing now in US, and international science is asteroid radar imaging and ranging.
- njarboe 6y ago
  That is not good. Was Arecibo the best instrument for early detection of asteroids? What are we using now?
  - mturmon 6y ago
    Now, we use optical scanning telescopes with a wide field of view, and image differencing. Optical instruments have a wide field of view and don't have the inherent SNR problems that radar does. (I.e., using the Sun to illuminate objects is more efficient than doing it yourself.) As a side-effect, there are all kinds of other transient sources that these scanning telescopes pick up, like supernovae, relativistic jets from AGNs ("blazars"), exotic variable stars, etc. (http://crts.caltech.edu http://crts.caltech.edu) It's a zoo out there! Radar does play a role in orbit characterization, and recovery of object geometry, once the NEO gets close enough. But you can get orbits through optical techniques too. The NASA center for near-Earth objects (NEOs) is: https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/about/search_program.html https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/about/search_program.html NEO close approaches to Earth, tabulated: https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/ https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/. There was a really close one today, actually (a 5-meter object at 0.13 lunar distances). For more about the role of planetary radar in NEOs, search for "radar" in this FAQ: https://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense/faq https://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense/faq
- notabee 6y ago
  Yeah. And the transmitter piece has been broken since Maria hit, so we've already gone quite some time without that capability.
- nullc 6y ago
  I think fast is also limited to a much lower frequency than Arecibo due to trading off pointability vs surface consistency-- which it needs in part because its so much further from the equator.
detritus 6y ago
I'd like to think that the near future will allow large space-based solutions in place of Earth-based and increasingly radiowave-polluted ones. A far-side moon solution's probably still quite a way off, but I wonder if some sort of lagrangian or outward-facing satellites in geosynchronous orbit might work. I'm imagining satellites with large Earth-facing shields, sort of like a radiowave version of the sunshield on the James Webb Telescope. I'm probably missing some really obvious Physics 101-level reason that wouldn't work, but a girl can dream.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago

We need to adopt similar strategies for getting e.g. green energy production off the ground. Thinking of things like solar panel production.

moftz 6y ago
Except there is money to be made in the green energy industry. There's no money to be made building a giant radio telescope. Sometimes corporations have a need for scientific institutions and their patronage helps keep the lights on but I really can't think of any way that can apply to something meant to stare at the stars. What could help is designing a radio telescope that have both scientific use and military use like China's telescope in Argentina. You have one user willing to pay plenty for time on it and another user that is just happy to get some work done.
- jbay808 6y ago
  As proof of your point, Arecibo was originally built as a military project with general scientific value as a bonus.
skuhn 6y ago
There was a brief push by the government to encourage funding of things like Solyndra under Obama, but obviously that didn't all pan out. I think that putting substantial funding into making the US the world leader in climate change related technology is such an obvious slam dunk that it defies belief for me that there seems to be no political will to do it. Argue about the reality of climate change if you must, but the simple facts are that there is finite oil, finite coal, finite natural gas and the extraction and processing of those fuels is an expensive and dirty business. Of course solar, wind, hydro and nuclear don't compete yet -- how about putting in the same R&D money as fossil fuels? And when you make it work, the entire world will buy this tech from you. It could clearly be the US's next economic gold rush, after the Internet and post-WW2 manufacturing (and, I guess, the gold rush). I do wonder if the economic approach is just doomed to be a non-starter, and if the faster way is to frame it as a national security issue. That leads to a number of other problems, but time is clearly of the essence and they know how to spend money over there.

wavefunction 6y ago

I think it's high time for Puerto Rico to become a US state. Puerto Rico has twice the population of the two Dakotas combined and the only way they'll receive more-equitable treatment is if they become a state. I think the will is there locally but there has been resistance from established political factions in the US who fear a place that might tip the balance of power one way or the other.

claydavisss 6y ago
The only people really invested in this are the citizens of PR, mostly because it will mean a fiscal lifeline. For a citizen of the present USA, there is no upside to incorporating PR as a state.
skuhn 6y ago
I agree with you, and I'll go a step further. The US should not have any colonial territories or federal districts where US citizens live who have second-class rights compared to citizens of the 50 states. That means DC, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa (collectively 3.8 million US citizens) should all be made states. There are undoubtedly lots of issues and hiccups with implementing that, but fundamentally I think that having classes of citizens with abridged rights is wrong.
- Frondo 6y ago
  I'll go even further: find a way to grant them all the rights of citizenship (representation for their taxation) and let them decide for themselves on statehood. If there's any downside (I honestly don't know, maybe there is?), those people should be given the choice to determine their course of action for themselves. But I agree completely, having people who pay taxes and can't access all the machinery of government they fund is criminal. (This also includes disenfranchised felons, but especially disenfranchised ex-felons.)
  - skuhn 6y ago
    I think we're maxed out on this thread for who to enfranchise, which is good! I believe one of the big downsides for citizens of Puerto Rico that has caused issues with the push for statehood is that they don't currently pay federal income tax. So it isn't exactly a taxation-without-representation situation, but they are obviously at the mercy of the US in many ways and don't have access to all of the levers of power that are available to others. Witness the suffering at our delay in suspending the Jones Act (requiring two days of debate) during the Hurricane Maria relief campaign. I doubt that Puerto Rico's lot would fundamentally change if they were a separate country though, they would still be largely at the mercy of their main trading partner and dominant regional power (the US). I was also thinking of felons in my earlier comment, but it didn't quite fit my narrative. I don't find the rationale that they would just vote for there to be no laws particularly compelling.

bmurphy1976 6y ago

> The problem (partly) is that the F-35 program puts money into 307 congressional districts in 45 states [1]. These insanely expensive defense projects are wealth transfer programs that make contractors like Lockhead and their many sub-contractors rich, and also create jobs in these communities. I agree with this. I've been saying for years that our military programs are giant socialist jobs programs in disguise (that unfortunately have the side effect of propping up the military industrial complex). If we were honest with ourselves and re-allocated that money to actual jobs programs we would get a much better ROI. Given the obscene amount of resources wasted we could reallocate a significant chunk of it without hurting our military preparedness one bit.

colechristensen 6y ago
One important piece of military preparedness is having a population of experienced engineers, manufacturing infrastructure, leadership, R&D, etc. Institutional knowledge is very real. Weapons programs also simply take decades. You might be able to churn out web apps in a few months, but cutting edge aircraft, not so much. What do we have? Unprecedented world peace. Why do we have it? American foreign policy. You have to remember our military budget covers all of NATO in an intentional bid to reduce the military power of our allies which helps keep them peaceful.
- Frondo 6y ago
  I would sooner credit the 35th rule of acquisition ("Peace is good for business") than American foreign policy for the lack of a global conflict.
  - mnw21cam 6y ago
    Bad example. It's not to be confused with the 34th rule of acquisition (war is good for business).
  - colechristensen 6y ago
    But then what changed between 1900 and 1945? We had two world wars between those years and nothing but small localized wars never between major powers after? Weapons. We developed weapons that could sanitize the planet, and in the case that someone might challenge our intention to actually use them, we developed weapons that ran the spectrum so that war against us would always seem a major losing proposition. The only thing left is insurgency and proxy wars, always carefully enough to not trigger major action. Given that game becoming economically codependent and the world is the best play for the available game, and then indeed “peace is good for business”.

blkknightarms 6y ago

Lockheed

VikingCoder 6y ago

I've begun imagining that for Defense spending, government money that's spent in a State must have come from that State's federal income taxes. I'm exhausted seeing data that indicates that states like mine put in more money than they get from the Federal government, and watching people from states that receive more than they put in talk about welfare state, wealth redistribution, etc.

TMWNN 6y ago
No state pays a cent to another state or to the federal government. It is residents of each state that pay federal taxes, which the federal government in turn uses to provide funding and services to states and individuals. The Rockefeller Institute data (https://rockinst.org/issue-areas/fiscal-analysis/balance-of-payments-portal/ https://rockinst.org/issue-areas/fiscal-analysis/balance-of-...) shows that it's not so much "blue states" as frequently claimed, but taxpayers of four very wealthy Northeast states (the Tri-State area plus Massachusetts) that account for the vast bulk of citizens paying more than they receive from the federal government. After them come CO, NE, UT, and MN, of which half voted for Hillary/Biden and half for Trump. All other states, including CA, are net beneficiaries of the taxpayers in the top eight (and, again, really, it's the top four). The 10 states at the bottom of the Rockefeller report's per capita list—that is, the states that benefit from the most federal spending per person compared to how much each person pays in federal taxes—are Hillary/Biden-voting states: VA, NM, MD, HI, 1/2 of ME Trump-voting states: KY, AK, AL, WV, MS, 1/2 of ME
- VikingCoder 6y ago
  Yes, thank you for explicitly phrasing the problem the way I should have. Cato has different numbers than Rockefeller. https://www.cato.org/blog/winner-loser-states-centralized-government https://www.cato.org/blog/winner-loser-states-centralized-go... I've lived in multiple blue states, and they're all "losers" by this definition.
- masklinn 6y ago
  > The Rockefeller Institute data (https://rockinst.org/issue-areas/fiscal-analysis/balance-of- https://rockinst.org/issue-areas/fiscal-analysis/balance-of-...) shows that it's not so much "blue states" as frequently claimed, but taxpayers of four very wealthy Northeast states (the Tri-State area plus Massachusetts) that account for the vast bulk of citizens paying more than they receive from the federal government. Yeaaah… no. It only shows that under the default of 2018 BOP. If you select the last primary tab and look at the 4 years tally, you will see a picture rather more inline with the "folk knowledge", including that while Californians have had a BOP just shy of positive from 2017, their negative BOP in 2015 and 2016 puts them rather into the negative for the 4 years period. Less so than the tri-state or Colorado, but the picture you're painting is at best misleading.

lmilcin 6y ago

You do realize the money spent on these projects comes out of pockets of all taxpayers? So we are really talking about wealth transfer from all taxpayers to some taxpayers who are usually doing well already plus huge losses on the way. Obviously, there is a bunch of technology being developed that benefits US but let us not kid ourselves, it is not the most cost effective way of doing research.

snakeboy 6y ago
I don't think the OP was at all suggesting that it's a good system. They were just explaining the current incentive structure.

sandworm101 6y ago

>> the political incentives need to be fundamentally re-aligned. Being the first president to announce the detection of an extraterrestrial intelligence would be a big deal. Clinton certainly jumped on the mic pretty fast when we thought life had been found on mars. Such possibilities could provide the political motivation to keep the next giant telescope funded.

lkbm 6y ago
It's an incentive to keep things going for up to eight years -- arguably only four. "This needs maintenance or it'll collapse in five years" has little political weight if your term ends in four years.

andrepd 6y ago

I wish we could just simply hand the money over and skip the part where we create the demand for eternal wars and the killing and maiming of millions of people.

skuhn 6y ago
The wind gently whispers: socialism.
- earhart 6y ago
  More like a UBI. Or extended social security. Socialism's more about the community owning and managing the means of production, and less about just giving people money. You could make a good case that the F-35 program, with all its bloat and cost overruns and inefficient distribution of funds by congressional district, is typical of a socialist jobs program -- granted, the F-35 also has a layer of capitalist shareholders parasitically skimming off the top, but if that were removed, the political pressures that result in the inefficiencies would remain.
  - skuhn 6y ago
    The F-35 program is indeed a lot like socialism. And I think the layer of skim off the top is well represented in centrally planned economies like the Soviet Union. It was taken by well placed government ministers rather than business oligarchs. My comment was intended to be more tongue-in-cheek. People fear socialism, but capitalism is not the answer to all of the world's problems. People have basic needs: safety, sustenance, shelter, self-determination. They have higher level needs too, and we aren't living in a post-scarcity society yet, but we have the resources to meet these basic needs for at least 328 million people.
perryizgr8 6y ago
Better yet, don't take the money in the first place. Let people keep more of their legitimate earnings.

blackrock 6y ago

Perhaps Lockheed should make a telescope that’s so big, it spans 45 States?

lkbm 6y ago
How spread out can the receivers in a Very Very Large Array be? My understanding is that with radiotelescopy they can be widely dispersed, but I'm far from an expert. Really, you just need manufacturing/contractors in many places. This part built in Pennsylvania, that one in Michigan.
- avz 6y ago
  VLBI arrays [1] are networks of radio telescopes that combine data from multiple instruments spread out over a continent or the whole planet. A network like this emulates a continent-size or a planet-size radio telescope and produces radioastronomy's highest resolution images. The most sensitive VLBI array is the European VLBI network [2] which spans the sort of scales you have in mind. A VLBI array can also incorporate space-based nodes, see e.g. [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very-long-baseline_interferometry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very-long-baseline_interferome... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_VLBI_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_VLBI_Network [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HALCA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HALCA

dylan604 6y ago

Then let's build a new Arecibo-esque observatory in each of the 50 states and other territories. We'll combine all of them together to make the VLA look tiny. That'll be 120 employees multiple by the number of locations so we're talking > 6000 employees. Plus, all of that science.

disown 6y ago

> These insanely expensive defense projects are wealth transfer programs that make contractors like Lockheed and their many sub-contractors rich, and also create jobs in these communities. I wish we'd go back to calling the "Defense Department" the "War Department" as it was originally called. And stop calling it "expensive defense projects" but "expensive war projects". Call it for what it really isn't. We aren't defending ourselves from anyone. We are the one's attacking everyone.

AlexandrB 6y ago

The F-35 is an example of the broken window parable[1] writ large. Sure it created a bunch of jobs, but that same money could have created a similar number of jobs while accomplishing something useful. I often wonder what the eventual consequences of this kind of resource misallocation will be for the US. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

nickff 6y ago
Well, many influential economists don't believe in the broken windows fallacy, or that it applies here. Joseph Stiglitz has said that he was in favor of literally paying people to dig holes then fill them back up as a form of fiscal stimulus.
- schoen 6y ago
  The original statement of this idea is from John Maynard Keynes in his General Theory, and turns out to run > If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coal mines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well tried principles of Laissez Faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing.
- m000 6y ago
  Actually we may already be paying them, only the holes aren't literal. The phenomenon also has a name: Bullshit Jobs [1]. How about paying people for 4 years to get a college degree on whatever subject they like, instead of having them grinding on a bullshit job? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
pvarangot 6y ago

me_me_me 6y ago

That money would be better spent building roads etc, fuck just give it for free to the worker. Some would end up running local businesses instead of stuffing offshore accounts.