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Comment by bithive123 | Hacker News Reader

The information age is built on gathering raw data and doing pure research, neither of which are profitable activities.

The implied threshold for wastefulness here is offensively low; basically any project that might require one moderately competent PhD researcher for a year.

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You hit the nail on the head, pure research is not a profitable activity. This is why we can't trust companies and corporations to research.. their motives are almost always profit driven. This only underlines the importance of government funded research, and the need to have a government in place who is willing to put the advancement of our society over their own personal gain (We don't have that right now..).

You're forgetting about the $1.9 trillion nonprofit sector, of which 15% is spent on health research, 12% on public + social benefit...[1]

That seems to bely the need for a government that can fund research that 'puts the advancement of our society over their own personal gain.'

[1]https://philanthropynewyork.org/sites/default/files/resource...

Non-profit does not mean the system is working outside of capitalism or people are not making money.

I don't understand your issue with people making money. Why should people not make money while doing beneficial research for humankind? Is there some reason why making money and helping people are mutually exclusive?

Its not about waste. Its about the identity politics of coal miners and sticking it to "globalists".

Precisely, this is Trump trying to raise his poll numbers.

Even assuming that the 100K doesn't include indirect costs, and is only for one-year (and I'm not convinced either one of those assumptions is correct)...yeah, that's basically "All projects"

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