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Comment by ardy42 | Hacker News Reader

> Is this a symbol of the degradation of human intellectual capability in the 21st century?

No, it's a symbol of the degradation of US political capability in the 21st century.

To be more explicit: why build a telescope like this if you axiomatically believe the free market will do everything worth doing and that the government projects are waste by definition? There was a time when those ideas weren't so dominant, and that's when the US built many of its nice things that we still celebrate today.

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China built a bigger one called FAST (Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope) at a cost of 1.2 billion USD.

The political leaders of the CCP are all trained engineers and it helps not having to explain your actions to fickle voters.

> The political leaders of the CCP are all trained engineers

I've heard this a lot, and I know they value engineering as a cultural trait, but according to a quick search, it doesn't seem as prevalent now. Around 2010, apparently 8 of 9 Politburo members were scientists or engineers, but that appears to have dropped in recent years.

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/21...

You have to also consider they don't have voters.

It turns out the free market is extremely good at innovation, but horrible for maintenance or long lived projects - as soon as something is not deemed "profitable" any more, it gets shut down. No matter how useful it is for literally millions of people (Google Reader comes to a mind).

There's also demand for the things that shouldn't need to be profitable, to be profitable. I saw a news article like a week ago making a HUGE STINK about how a bridge was "losing tons of money" when they looked at the bridge toll vs the expenses. A.. publicly owned bridge, of course! And they made it sound scandalous.

Like seriously. What? It's like people talking about how unprofitable public transit is.....

That's not really the point, is it?

In a way, it's a mirror to the lowest common denominator of human nature. As should be expected if you think about it. A lot of our instincts don't scale well, e.g. eating too much sugar and fat when it's in abundance, because it used to be evolutionarily advantageous. So do we throw our hands up and say that's inevitable, or try to incentivize our better selves?

“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance” — Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus

Yet government space travel is dead, and private space travel (SpaceX) is booming. So there's that. Just because it doesn't happen on your timeline doesn't mean private is inferior to government. It means private is waiting for it to be financially feasible. Which if the government did things that way, we wouldn't be $136 trillion dollars in debt.

One could easily imagine the incentive for private initiative in the field of space travel.

But fundamental research on a huge scale is something that governments are axiomatically the best supporters of. Let's not drink the Ayn Rand Amazing Kool-Aid here.

Private space travel funded by government contracts.

> Private space travel funded by government contracts.

So, just like the 60s. Per Wikipedia:

The Apollo Command and Service Module was built by North American Aviation (now part of Boeing) and the Lunar Module by Grumman (now Northrop Grumman) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_(spacecraft)). The Saturn V was build by Boeing, North American, and Douglas (the latter two now part of Boeing) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V).

The Saturn V wasn't called The Boeing Falcon, and Von Braun didn't work for Boeing.

>There was a time when those ideas weren't so dominant,

That was also a time when three news networks controlled everything on TV. Print media had "journalistic integrity" (i.e. was buddy-buddy with existing institutions) so you never got to hear about it when the police kicked in a black guy's skull for no reason or when a construction project turned into a boondoggle handout for someone well connected. It was also a time with less government. People didn't have to put up with (as much) bureaucratic run around in order to build a deck on their house or to open a business.

The reason there's no faith in government these days is because there's people telling us how that sausage is made and we eat so much of it we're sick of it.

> less government

It's enough to look at the current holocaust in the Dakotas to understand the true value of that "philosophy".

If government wasn't all up in all sorts of stupid things (or was all up in them to a lesser degree) people wouldn't be apprehensive about it being involved in the kinds of things government needs to be involved in, like public health and funding research that has no profit use.

>"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?" >"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course." >"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?" >"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the >wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"

This view isn't new, right now half the US is celebrating that we have elected a career politician because he is better then the millionaire that was previously elected...

People in the streets are angry because the media is telling them to be angry. How many riots and demonstrations occurred after Snowden revealed that the government was breaking the law and spying on it's citizens? Or when the telecom companies were given retroactive immunity for doing so?

People in the streets are angry because the media is telling them to be angry.

Media may have been something different in years past, but from now on, the only time it will cease telling people to be angry is when it's more profitable to spend all its time telling them to be afraid. It's not as though there isn't reason to feel dissatisfaction with our rulers. [0]

[0] https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

> People didn't have to put up with (as much) bureaucratic run around in order to build a deck on their house or to open a business.

I think the problem is in the way things are handled vs the regulations themselves. I believe there very much should be legal standards and licensing processes for building residential and business structures. I also think that getting things inspected and approved should be a really easy, streamlined, cheap, non-profit process. Hell, I'll go one further: I think there should be financial encouragement to bring outdated unsafe facilities up to code, in cases where there isn't already such a thing (and there usually is).

"The free market shall decide" and "let the buyer beware" are great until you eat a sandwich and find out the ground beef was cut with sawdust, or buy a house with a deck, have a party, and the deck collapses because the previous owner built it wrong.

> "The free market shall decide" and "let the buyer beware" are great until you eat a sandwich and find out the ground beef was cut with sawdust, or buy a house with a deck, have a party, and the deck collapses because the previous owner built it wrong.

Or have pay for expensive destructive inspections of every house you intend to buy (as part of your due diligence), because you can assume literally nothing about it. The current regime of building codes and inspections is far more efficient than that (e.g. make sure the inspection happens before covering stuff up).

"Let the buyer beware" doesn't necessary cut down on hassle, it just moves it around and in many cases makes it more onerous.

As someone else wrote in this thread, US funding of these types of projects has gone up not down.

This is simply a decision on which kind of projects to fund not a reduction in science as a whole.

The suggestion that you make here is that when the telescope was funded in the 1950s, our national political leadership class identified itself less strongly as a capitalist free-market nation than it does today.

For reference, the nation's leadership in the 1950s included the likes of Senator McCarthy, and his famous hearings ran through about 1954. Have you heard of the "Red Scare"? No, Arecibo is the brainchild of the Cold War military-industrial complex, originally meant to help steer anti-ballistic missiles (as part of the DEFENDER program), and we should not shed too many tears that those days are over.

> The suggestion that you make here is that when the telescope was funded in the 1950s, our national leadership identified itself less strongly as a capitalist free-market nation than it does today.

Those terms don't have a consistent meaning. What was considered typical "capitalist free-market" thinking then is not typical "capitalist free-market" thinking now. For instance: Atlas Shrugged was only published in 1957 and Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom in 1963, and it took until the 1980s for those ideas to start to have wide influence in popular culture and government.

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