Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

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> Europe explored the universe where America did not

I guess you never heard of a little project called the International Space Station?

The SSC was supposed to be a $4 billion project. That's what Congress was told in 1987. By 1993, it was projected as a $12 billion project. Guess where that $8 billion would have come from if the SSC project had continued? From other science projects--and most likely the ISS would have been the first on the chopping block.

America continued exploring the universe just fine--but with a broad approach instead of putting everything toward exploring one narrow area.

We're seeing a repeat of this with the new space telescope, although the outcome may be different this time. The projected costs have grown massively, and the projected launch date has been pushed WAY out. It's been defunded this year, with Congress specifically calling it out by name as to receive no funding. The Congressman who put that language in has said that this is meant to be a warning to the project's managers that they need to get their act together, and then funding can come back.

Are you seriously quibbling about $8bn when we happily spend $3500bn on bank bailouts, or $500bn/year for the military (not including the various wars)?

Budgets tend to be somewhat compartmentalized. If a project in compartment X goes over its budget, that tends to come at the expense of other things in compartment X.

$8 billion was a huge amount in the science compartment. It is completely irrelevant that some other compartments might have had much bigger budgets.

It is completely irrelevant that some other compartments might have had much bigger budgets.

While you may consider this point unrealistic or unhelpful to the argument, it cannot be characterised as irrelevant. Adding the word 'completely' only weakens your case.

It's completely relevant if your point is that we nickel-and-dime essential scientific funding but spare no expense when killing brown people across the globe. You don't have to go to too much effort to understand that's what the grandparent was driving at.

Your definition of 'essential' and my definition of essential are vastly different, and we are both very interested in science. Imagine the difference between your definition and most Americans who wind up paying for the thing. I personally would rather see the $8 billion go to medical research or energy research with a closer time horizon than physics research.

But current energy research would be much slower or impossible had it not been for previous long time horizon physics research.

Agreed. I'd like to see the energy industry fumble around with maps trying to locate oil deposits because this new fangled GPS-thing doesn't quite work right.

Personally I don't have a very strong opinion on where the funding should go at all, just that it should exist and that it should be increased by an order of magnitude at least. Even experts in a field can have a hard time deciding where to allocate resources, what hope do I have? And more importantly what the hell business does Congress have providing for these allocations? They don't know shit.

I would rather shovel billions at universities with little more than an unenforced request that they spend it on pure research, than allow Congress any control over scientific funding at all.

Mainly I just think that drawing attention to scientific funding as some kind of waste of taxpayer money when it is such a drop in the bucket is more about serving the interests of the American conservative establishment in villainizing intellectuals than actually solving a problem.

Somehow you added two zeros on to your $3,500bn on bank bailouts! In 2009, it looked like the actual cost would be about $350bn, which is a lot, for sure, but literally an order of magnitude less.

According to the treasury department, by 2010, projected cost of TARP was $30-50bn. That's /two/ orders of magnitude out.

You also handily miss out the multiplier effects of military spending, and act like the government is taking the money and shoving it up the ass of a small animal. In fact, the vast majority is given to US industry and to US citizens. I'm sure if you Google'd you'd find the source I'm looking for who described the US Military as the world's largest welfare system.

He is right. 3.45T are total costs of bailout. $2T Emergency Fed Loans (you can give shit-sandwich and exchange it to get real $$). $700B TARP. $300B Hope Now program. $310B Fannie/Freddie and AIG. And ya... we also added $140B Tax Breaks for Banks.

Did you intentionally ignore the $80bn to AIG? TARP was just one program of many used in the bank bailout. The OP didn't say TARP was 3500bn s/he said the total bailout(s) were that amount. Including the government taking on all the junkbonds.

What my peer means to say is that the Govt. spent a ton more than the TARP amount on buying what basically amounts to garbage debt - almost a pure gift. It's a less reported but much more important number. The banks, of course, like to claim that the TARP stuff was just a loan, to misdirect your eyes from the elephant in the room.

We should always be wary that we do not try to argue using whataboutism (http://edwardlucas.blogspot.com/2008/02/whataboutism.html).

Perhaps I'm misinterpreting indrax's comment, but I'm fairly sure it wasn't meant to be a jab at the United States. He was stating that while America chose to focus its exploration on the cosmos, Europe's exploration endeavors focus on the sub atomic level.

Europe's exploration of the universe has a different focus, not a better one.

You could call it division of labor. The US will obviously benefit from any discoveries the LHC makes, Europe will also benefit from the ISS.

It's comforting to hear you say that someone will benefit from the ISS, since so far it's been a dead loss.

Well, I’m not all that convinced of the usefulness of the ISS myself, I was trying to make a more abstract point.

If there are significant scientific discoveries to be made on the ISS, the Europeans will also benefit from them.

If you look into commercial space research, you'll find that a lot of it (maybe most) is done under non-disclosure. We usually don't get to hear about it until there is a successful product to show.

I am not a specialist on that matter, but I suspect it is called "International Space Station" rather than "American Space Station" for a reason.

Over half the funding comes from the United States.

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