US science agencies on track to hit 25-year funding low
nature.com
nature.com
Defense contractors would start pulling out the cost-saving technologies, etc that they've been sitting on to win bids, now that there's less money in the pot. Cost-plus contracts are whack, man.
Source: Way back when, worked in industrial augmented reality, and some colleagues came from defense (ship building) because of exactly this issue. Their prior employer had (quietly) pioneered various uses of AR in ship assembly, which drastically reduced costs, but wasn't actually deploying it because cost-saving actually reduces their profits, so they only actually use them when it comes time to win bids.
Pretty sure you're fishing for "we get attacked" tho, which I neither agree with, nor have the background to coherently argue against.
Certainly there would be irregular war akin to any of the irregular warfare the US military has faced and control might never be completely established, but it wouldn't have to be for it to be the end of the US as we know it.
Not being completely defeated during a bloody invasion isn’t the same as never being invaded.
(And who do you think has the resources to pull a Vietnam on the US?)
But holding up Vietnam and Ukraine as examples of successful outcomes is also missing the horror and destruction wrought on those countries and their people in the process.
The commenter I replied to is using the fantasy of armed citizens valiantly repelling invaders in their backyards in guerilla warfare to support the idea that “Literally nothing.” would happen without the US military.
In foreseen future, if West will not give aviation and long range rockets, Ukraine will need revolutionary restructure of economy to survive.
For example, before war, Ukraine was one of the top food exporters, but now, with limited access to sea, have to use land routes, which are just add too much to cost of raw grain.
An invasion force with a slightest chance of success would have massive seaborne and airborne components, along with armor, and would start with a massive aerial and missile attack at the area of prospective invasion. This is not something a well-regulated militia with small arms would be effective against. If the current war in Europe is any indication, small arms are not even effective against armed consumer-grade drones.
What a militia might be efficient against could be e.g. short-term incursions by drug cartels, or similar.
If the FBI terror watchlists are in any way accurate it's not threats from beyond the borders that the U(?)SofA would be threatened by.
Citation needed.
There are multiple elements to issuing grants. It's not simply moving money around from one line item to another. If agencies have been gutted or don't have the budget, then can't write requests for grant proposals or can't offer what they don't have.
Yours truly, Rip Van Winkle.
What is the conversation around science funding meant to look like? Spending money on productive investments is a great idea, but the practice of the US government is nowhere near that.
> I wouldn’t compare my $400k debt with my monthly income.
Pretty sure that is actually a fair way to assess your creditworthiness. I can see the conversation in the bank going "Yo I want $400k", "What is your income?", "$X", "Yea"/"Nay" with some basic due diligence.
If you look far enough out, the future is scary. If nothing else eventually we get hit by a meteor. So people generally don't look forward more than a week or few - because it is unpleasant and seems a little pointless. They live with whatever seems like a good idea right now. I just wish they'd let people who are a bit more math-oriented take on budgeting decisions. We're going to be eating consequences that we didn't have to because the US public can't sit down and agree that solvency is more important than whatever distraction came up this electoral cycle.
I've been arguing the fiscal responsibility side on HN for a long time. There is nearly no government program where a strident call for fiscal conservatism won't get a comment downvoted. It is a needle-threading exercise to make any points in favour of not spending money; it takes a lot of care, practice and timing to argue without kicking one of several hornet nests. And that in on HN where the crowds are more reasonable and logically minded.
> the culprits instead of the useful idiots
The useful idiots are the culprits. Being an idiot doesn't absolve someone of responsibility.
Without getting too inflammatory, if they were as knowledge seeking as they claim to be, they would not be fervent and unwavering about their ideas. Most of them are toothless insults anyway.
The issue at the moment is that the ratio is trending upwards until something breaks. And debts are hitting levels where not only is it reasonable to expect breakages, but it is also mad to expect that the debt can be repaid. If people keep going the way they are, can you even imagine a realistic scenario where it ends well? People are relying on a McConnell-Schumer-Trump-Biden-No Speaker-in-the-House controlled system to take a situation where everyone is acting unreasonably and suddenly start behaving with fiscal prudence. That is unlikely. It is more likely that catastrophic consequences will happen first, then courses will be changed.
I don't think there are even questions of rhetoric at this point, it looks to me like all the decisions have been locked in. I mean, they may as well bump up the budget for science at this point, why not. Great thing to spend money on. But where are the resources supposed to come from? The system is already in crisis and gridlock.
A government collecting more tax revenue than they spend is a sign things are going terribly wrong. Best case scenario it means they were temporarily, inadvertently overtaxing everyone. The government "printing money", and thus creating some level of inflation, is a good thing. Deflationary economies are failing economies.
By far the biggest difference is that to you, money and debt are real. If you don't have enough money, you can't pay for the things you need. If you have too much debt and can't pay, people will show up and commit violence against you. At the sovereign nation-state level ("sovereign" excludes countries that gave up control over their money supply to disastrous effect, like Greece), money and debt are far less concrete. Debt represents "buy-in" on your monetary system: If people and nations are owed money from a country, they have a vested interest in that nation's continued economic prosperity. Money is an infinite resource to a sovereign nation: it can simply print more. Via taxation, they effectively destroy money, since Infinity + 1 still equals Infinity. Thus, money from a nation-state's perspective isn't about balancing the books, it's about controlling the flow.
I'll happily agree that the limit is unknown and it might be higher than anyone expects - but at the current trajectory we're all going to find where it is as the US hits it face-to-wall-at-speed style. Years ago we crossed the limit where that debt was never going to be repaid in real terms. Now we're getting to levels where even the interest probably isn't going to be paid back in real terms.
And, in amongst this, it isn't really clear what the debate around science funding is supposed to look like. The US appears to be going broke. It'll probably struggle to find the money for big spending on science over the next few years. Even if they execute some sort of default they're still going to have to do a round of belt tightening.
Also - on Japan - topical news: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/10/ja...
Waiting for more empirical evidence that this will break everything is not a great strategy. By the time the evidence is in, everything will be broken and the US will be deeply in debt. The US is already acting like an economic system under significant stress (prosperous people don't elect Trumps). When the dust settles it'll probably turn out that there were huge costs to the debt and they just didn't turn up as inflation (for example, if people literally can't afford something, then price inflation won't matter).
Japan having high debt and the US having high debt is no evidence at all that the US will end up like Japan. They've got completely different laws and people. Plus the median Japanese income is something like 80-60% of the median US income [1] so that is hardly an economic outcome to aim for.
[0] Started out with "Noy wanting to" but I figured that couldn't be true.
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-in...
(1) There is no hard limit to how much dollars the government can issue.
(2) Of course, the government cannot just issue more dollars indefinitely, before Bad Things(TM) start to happen.
However, this (rather trivial) observation tells us nothing about "What is the limit (or rather, range) of how much dollars the US government can issue, before bad things start to happen?" Without explaining how you can estimate such a limit, (US debt / GDP) is just some number: There's no reason to believe that there is some hard, fixed limit X that this number is not meant to exceed.
This year's Nobel prize for chemistry went to three Americans (edit: I was mistaken, one of them was living in the USSR when his initial discovery was made, though he now lives in the US). Both the winners of the Nobel prize in medicine were American. and one of the three winners of the Nobel prize in physics was American. By what metric are we "nowhere near" productive in how we fund research?
Spending as a % of budget. I feel that was obvious given the article.
I suspect you're reading something that I didn't write though - I'm just pointing the US government doesn't have spare money lying around to increase their funding of science projects. It isn't a case of "oh we'll just budget a bit more for science". There are enormous cuts/tax increases needed before that conversation can even begin.