8 ms·

I so very much hate socialism. The state, with the money it took from all of us through taxes is presented as a benefactor because it gives small amounts of tho

I so very much hate socialism. The state, with the money it took from all of us through taxes is presented as a benefactor because it gives small amounts of those money back to research. And she wants the state to have more share from successful research. The state, any state, is a very bad administrator of funds, because the so called state are basically a bunch of people spending other peoples money on things that they dont understand and they dont really care about. What they care about is building their own public image with those money in order to be reelected. I'd feel much more confortable in having to pay lower taxes and let the private investors do the investment, because VCS actually care about how their money are spent.

justicezyx 12y ago
The state, any state, is a very bad administrator of funds Can you explain how China managed to accelerate its development speed through "state-managed funding" on all and everything?
robotresearcher 12y ago
I'd feel less comfortable without NASA, NIH, and DARPA, since I have benefitted a great deal from the work they sponsored. I doubt very much I would have had those benefits so soon without these grossly inefficient agencies that have no idea what they are doing carelessly spending other people's money on creating the space age, the Internet age, and the age of genomics respectively. I don't believe for a second that private investment would have done these earlier or better if the greedy government had stolen less tax money from you. edit: downvotes yay! Please enjoy using the Internet to show your distain for giving credit for revolutionary federally-funded technology projects.
- tsotha 12y ago
  Of the three, I think private investment would have done better than the first two. Even DARPA is notable for a handful of home runs that may have been just luck.
  - robotresearcher 12y ago
    But since the first two actually did it, it's up to you to convince me of that. For bonus points, try to do your job today without making use of federally-bootstrapped technology. edit: also, Fede_V's sibling comment is spot-on.
    - tsotha 12y ago
      >But since the first two actually did it... Did what?
  - Fede_V 12y ago
    You realize that is exactly the model of VC? :) You bet on a lot of very long shots, but the few mega successes pay off sufficiently to make it all worth it.
    - tsotha 12y ago
      Right. Are VC's normally using public money?
- anaolykarpov 12y ago
  If it wasnt for the cold war and the space race, I really doubt that NASA would have ever been created. Should we seek for another cold war because its a medium in which some kind of innovation occur? So are regular wars? Should we demand our states to start wars because technology advances during those times?
  - nmrm2 12y ago
    Or we could demand our states care as much about advancing human knowledge during peace time as they do during war time.
- dnautics 12y ago
  >I'd feel less comfortable without NASA, NIH, and DARPA, since I have benefitted a great deal from the work they sponsored. I doubt very much I would have had those benefits so soon without these grossly inefficient agencies... I don't believe for a second that private investment would have done these earlier. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” -Upton Sinclair Interestingly, one of your examples, genomics, is exactly contradicted by Celera. At the time of inception the human genome project was slated to take 20 years! (We'd only be halfway done with it now). Say what you want about their idiotic and immoral business model - patenting and licensing human genes - the "private arm" of the human genomics project pushed for shotgun sequencing and got the genome sequenced in 3 years; and the hapmap shortly thereafter.
  - nmrm2 12y ago
    > “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” -Upton Sinclair The author met that they've benefited in the sense that we all have benefited. I very much doubt that there are many people in the world who have directly benefited (i.e., received grants from) all of NASA, the NIH, and DARPA.
    - dnautics 12y ago
      Even if the benefit is indirect, it's still hard to see how alternatives are possible, even when the evidence is right there in front of you. Did you even know we eradicated two diseases without the NIH (Smallpox, eliminated in the US by 1897, long before the NIH existed) - and Polio, eliminated through the private nonprofit March of Dimes.
  - robotresearcher 12y ago
    The Celera example is a good one, and you are right they did speed up genomics in a specific way. I'm certain they used many people trained-in-NIH-funded-labs and built directly on NIH-funded work, but it's still a good point. The "idiotic and immoral business model" is seriously not cool though. Clinton banned patenting human genes directly, which might make pure capitalists cross.
- marknutter 12y ago
  Would you feel less comfortable without the NSA? Or put another way, are you just cherry-picking the agencies you happen to like in order to make your point?
  - nmrm2 12y ago
    The NSA's primary charter is security, not science. Science that happens at the NSA is a happy accident. NASA and the NIH are explicitly research-focused. And DARPA may be part of DOD, but its charter is right in the name -- advanced research.
  - robotresearcher 12y ago
    No, I just don't know much about the NSA (and maybe they like it that way) and I mentioned the ones I am most confident about. If you're asking if the federal government has wasted a lot of my money on things I don't like: sure they have. First, that's not the topic at hand, and second, private ventures also waste fortunes on stupid things, and sometimes with my money e.g. pension funds.
nostromo 12y ago
Have you ever read Thus Spoke Zarathustra? You might like this short chapter: http://4umi.com/nietzsche/zarathustra/11 http://4umi.com/nietzsche/zarathustra/11
Frondo 12y ago
"a bunch of people spending other peoples money on things that they dont understand and they dont really care about"... That sounds like it describes the purchasing department in any big corporation, or the got-the-job-through-nepotism nephew or cousin of the owner in a small business. You know what they say, right? Capitalism works...in theory.
- jsprogrammer 12y ago
  Yep, the cognitive dissonance here is pretty strong. What is a public corporation, but 'a bunch of people [C-level,VP-level,Manager-level] spending other people'[sic]s[shareholder's] money on things that they[shareholder's] don'[sic]t understand and they[shareholder's] don'[sic]t really care about[shareholders seem to only care about 'ROI' and/or 'ROE']'.
littletimmy 12y ago
I completely agree. Let's get rid of taxes, disband the military and the police. We'll see who owns your "money" after that.
bobwaycott 12y ago
This reads as little more than pure emotion coupled with sweeping universalizing--the state is universally evil, private capital is universally good. Absolutely nothing about states or capital investors can be so easily reduced to such a binary conclusion. Private capital, and the humans who administer it, has repeatedly mismanaged funds, and been responsible for enormous fuck-ups that have far-reaching and devastating social, environmental, political, economic, material, and global impacts. Private investors routinely make bad investments. They also rather frequently are found to prioritize the extraction of value from their investments in spite of the potential or realized impacts of such extraction. The state does not take money. We no longer live under feudalism, friend. We no longer labor under the unquestionable divine right of kings. The modern democratic state is, by the free association and choice of its underlying organizational units, and the continued consent of its citizens, asked to assume the role and responsibilities, at least in the US, of the following: - form a more perfect union - establish justice - insure domestic tranquility - provide for the common defense - promote the general welfare - secure the blessing of liberty to its citizens and their posterity Private capital could never fulfill these obligations, because its focus is most definitely on extracting value from that which it invests in. I doubt very much you'd enjoy living in a world where its investment in you was dependent on extracting value from you (well, actually, you already do, but you don't feel the full brunt of that burden thanks to ... you guessed it ... the state). Now, if you'd much rather live under feudalism, serfdom, obedience to divine kings, etc., well cool. But those are sociopolitical conditions under which people lived for centuries where they definitely were able to "pay lower taxes and let the private investors do the investment". Those are the systems under which money/property was actually taken from people, because people had no methods or institutions by which they can seek to protect themselves from the arbitrary whims of value extraction, or engage in political action that can bring change. That's why most now-democratic states saw revolutions in their past--it was the only way to make change happen, the only way to abolish systems of unfettered value extraction and replace them with something that protected the masses. At least in the US, even the revered and worshipped founders realized pretty quickly after becoming an independent nation that taxes were unavoidable, because without public funds, the state could not fulfill the obligations for which it was instituted. I shudder at the thought of living in a world where people trust VCs to provide that which the state, even in its dysfunction, works to provide.

justicezyx 12y ago

The state, any state, is a very bad administrator of funds Can you explain how China managed to accelerate its development speed through "state-managed funding" on all and everything?

robotresearcher 12y ago

I'd feel less comfortable without NASA, NIH, and DARPA, since I have benefitted a great deal from the work they sponsored. I doubt very much I would have had those benefits so soon without these grossly inefficient agencies that have no idea what they are doing carelessly spending other people's money on creating the space age, the Internet age, and the age of genomics respectively. I don't believe for a second that private investment would have done these earlier or better if the greedy government had stolen less tax money from you. edit: downvotes yay! Please enjoy using the Internet to show your distain for giving credit for revolutionary federally-funded technology projects.

tsotha 12y ago
Of the three, I think private investment would have done better than the first two. Even DARPA is notable for a handful of home runs that may have been just luck.
- robotresearcher 12y ago
  But since the first two actually did it, it's up to you to convince me of that. For bonus points, try to do your job today without making use of federally-bootstrapped technology. edit: also, Fede_V's sibling comment is spot-on.
  - tsotha 12y ago
    >But since the first two actually did it... Did what?
- Fede_V 12y ago
  You realize that is exactly the model of VC? :) You bet on a lot of very long shots, but the few mega successes pay off sufficiently to make it all worth it.
  - tsotha 12y ago
    Right. Are VC's normally using public money?
anaolykarpov 12y ago
If it wasnt for the cold war and the space race, I really doubt that NASA would have ever been created. Should we seek for another cold war because its a medium in which some kind of innovation occur? So are regular wars? Should we demand our states to start wars because technology advances during those times?
- nmrm2 12y ago
  Or we could demand our states care as much about advancing human knowledge during peace time as they do during war time.
dnautics 12y ago
>I'd feel less comfortable without NASA, NIH, and DARPA, since I have benefitted a great deal from the work they sponsored. I doubt very much I would have had those benefits so soon without these grossly inefficient agencies... I don't believe for a second that private investment would have done these earlier. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” -Upton Sinclair Interestingly, one of your examples, genomics, is exactly contradicted by Celera. At the time of inception the human genome project was slated to take 20 years! (We'd only be halfway done with it now). Say what you want about their idiotic and immoral business model - patenting and licensing human genes - the "private arm" of the human genomics project pushed for shotgun sequencing and got the genome sequenced in 3 years; and the hapmap shortly thereafter.
- nmrm2 12y ago
  > “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” -Upton Sinclair The author met that they've benefited in the sense that we all have benefited. I very much doubt that there are many people in the world who have directly benefited (i.e., received grants from) all of NASA, the NIH, and DARPA.
  - dnautics 12y ago
    Even if the benefit is indirect, it's still hard to see how alternatives are possible, even when the evidence is right there in front of you. Did you even know we eradicated two diseases without the NIH (Smallpox, eliminated in the US by 1897, long before the NIH existed) - and Polio, eliminated through the private nonprofit March of Dimes.
- robotresearcher 12y ago
  The Celera example is a good one, and you are right they did speed up genomics in a specific way. I'm certain they used many people trained-in-NIH-funded-labs and built directly on NIH-funded work, but it's still a good point. The "idiotic and immoral business model" is seriously not cool though. Clinton banned patenting human genes directly, which might make pure capitalists cross.
marknutter 12y ago
Would you feel less comfortable without the NSA? Or put another way, are you just cherry-picking the agencies you happen to like in order to make your point?
- nmrm2 12y ago
  The NSA's primary charter is security, not science. Science that happens at the NSA is a happy accident. NASA and the NIH are explicitly research-focused. And DARPA may be part of DOD, but its charter is right in the name -- advanced research.
- robotresearcher 12y ago
  No, I just don't know much about the NSA (and maybe they like it that way) and I mentioned the ones I am most confident about. If you're asking if the federal government has wasted a lot of my money on things I don't like: sure they have. First, that's not the topic at hand, and second, private ventures also waste fortunes on stupid things, and sometimes with my money e.g. pension funds.

nostromo 12y ago

Have you ever read Thus Spoke Zarathustra? You might like this short chapter: http://4umi.com/nietzsche/zarathustra/11 http://4umi.com/nietzsche/zarathustra/11

Frondo 12y ago

"a bunch of people spending other peoples money on things that they dont understand and they dont really care about"... That sounds like it describes the purchasing department in any big corporation, or the got-the-job-through-nepotism nephew or cousin of the owner in a small business. You know what they say, right? Capitalism works...in theory.

jsprogrammer 12y ago
Yep, the cognitive dissonance here is pretty strong. What is a public corporation, but 'a bunch of people [C-level,VP-level,Manager-level] spending other people'[sic]s[shareholder's] money on things that they[shareholder's] don'[sic]t understand and they[shareholder's] don'[sic]t really care about[shareholders seem to only care about 'ROI' and/or 'ROE']'.

littletimmy 12y ago

I completely agree. Let's get rid of taxes, disband the military and the police. We'll see who owns your "money" after that.

bobwaycott 12y ago

This reads as little more than pure emotion coupled with sweeping universalizing--the state is universally evil, private capital is universally good. Absolutely nothing about states or capital investors can be so easily reduced to such a binary conclusion. Private capital, and the humans who administer it, has repeatedly mismanaged funds, and been responsible for enormous fuck-ups that have far-reaching and devastating social, environmental, political, economic, material, and global impacts. Private investors routinely make bad investments. They also rather frequently are found to prioritize the extraction of value from their investments in spite of the potential or realized impacts of such extraction. The state does not take money. We no longer live under feudalism, friend. We no longer labor under the unquestionable divine right of kings. The modern democratic state is, by the free association and choice of its underlying organizational units, and the continued consent of its citizens, asked to assume the role and responsibilities, at least in the US, of the following: - form a more perfect union - establish justice - insure domestic tranquility - provide for the common defense - promote the general welfare - secure the blessing of liberty to its citizens and their posterity Private capital could never fulfill these obligations, because its focus is most definitely on extracting value from that which it invests in. I doubt very much you'd enjoy living in a world where its investment in you was dependent on extracting value from you (well, actually, you already do, but you don't feel the full brunt of that burden thanks to ... you guessed it ... the state). Now, if you'd much rather live under feudalism, serfdom, obedience to divine kings, etc., well cool. But those are sociopolitical conditions under which people lived for centuries where they definitely were able to "pay lower taxes and let the private investors do the investment". Those are the systems under which money/property was actually taken from people, because people had no methods or institutions by which they can seek to protect themselves from the arbitrary whims of value extraction, or engage in political action that can bring change. That's why most now-democratic states saw revolutions in their past--it was the only way to make change happen, the only way to abolish systems of unfettered value extraction and replace them with something that protected the masses. At least in the US, even the revered and worshipped founders realized pretty quickly after becoming an independent nation that taxes were unavoidable, because without public funds, the state could not fulfill the obligations for which it was instituted. I shudder at the thought of living in a world where people trust VCs to provide that which the state, even in its dysfunction, works to provide.