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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Is anybody seriously proposing heavy Government spending on any specific problem right now, other than a wall against Mexico?

Some engineering problems have yielded to heavy spending. The Polaris submarine program. The Apollo program. RCA's color TV effort. AIDS treatment. Extreme ultraviolet photolithography. The H-bomb. Sometimes this works. With a narrow goal, a general idea of how to get there, and heavy funding, impressive results are possible.

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You left out the interstate system, one of the largest public works projects of American history with lasting economic, social, and political impact.

Big money does change stuff, it can just be really hard to determine what exactly it will change and if it will ultimately be good.

The Interstate highway system wasn't an attempt to solve a technology problem. It was just a big public works program. Expensive, but low-risk. The Pennsylvania Turnpike already existed, and its first section opened in 1940.

There were military reasons too. Several leaders during WWII noted how difficult it was to move between the coasts. Railroads were too easy to block and didn't have the capacity in an emergency. If you are worried about the Russians invading, you want big fast/wide roads between large cities.

Plus the fact that, by design, they have to support planes being able to land on them. Thus we not only have a great network to move goods, but also built-in landing strips across the nation.

I doubt they are in compliance with the latest heaviest planes the military fields, but still, pretty forward thinking and synergy of infrastructure spending for both economical and military needs.

> by design, they have to support planes being able to land on them.

http://www.snopes.com/autos/law/airstrip.asp

What does it mean when you look at that article and get upset that the illustration of the runway includes an upside-down 19? (It's supposed to be readable as 19 from the plane travelling at a compass heading of 190 degrees, south-southwest.)

Small planes on some small stretches of open highway. They look like runways but highways aren't. From the perspective of a landing pilot they are rough, uneven and nowhere near flat enough. Many are also built with slants in various directions to facilitate water runoff, which would scare the heck out of any pilot attempting to land any jet.

In particular, during WWI (not WWII), the government took over the railroads, which nearly melted down. (To what degree the meltdown was the result of the government takeover, I don't know.)

In 1919 (I think, plus or minus maybe one year), the Army sent a convoy by road from coast to coast. I forget how long it took, but it was at least 45 days, and maybe more like 90. And the Army said, moving stuff by road is hopeless with the current roads.

One of the people on that convoy was a Lieutenant Eisenhower. When he became president, the Interstate Highway System happened.

Fusion power is a problem that needs more funding.

Fusion would be a perfect candidate. We pretty much know that it will work, we know it would yield big benefits, we just need a lot of money to work out all problems.

I would personally greatly prefer massive directed spending at hard science problems than quantitative easing dropping cheap money on Wall Street. Let the money trickle down from spending on science equipment and scientist and engineering salaries.

There's also ARPANET, which is extremely ironic that the author of this piece overlooked it.

I don't know about ironic. It's actually fairly supportive of his point: it's a technical solution to a technical problem with a narrow scope, but which has evolved into a useful tool for social change.

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