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Comment by decasia | Hacker News Reader

It basically is like having politically motivated human chaos monkeys running around the data center randomly killing systems and seeing whether anyone notices.

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…which seems like not the worst idea?

The very fact that it takes such a battle to even get read only access to analyze where the money is going is evidence enough that there is insanely baroque levels of waste and unnecessary services happening here.

If it’s that important it can be put back.

Why is it so scandalous that conservatives want a smaller government, got elected, and are now making the government smaller?

You wouldn't be saying "if it's important it can be put back," if it was a government service important to you, like water service to your house. Scientists actually need to use pubmed.

Equating government-funded research programs (completely optional) to water provision isn’t remotely coherent. Pipes in the ground are a natural monopoly.

I'm glad I have the chance to explain this to somebody. Research is also a natural monopoly, because a fundamental particle can only be discovered once. Repeated development of what's under the hood of a car isn't wasted because every car is different, but repeated invention of internal combustion would be wasted time and energy.

I don’t believe your second sentence to be true; in fact quite the opposite: research seems infinitely parallelizable.

The discovery part is what happens at the end.

What I mean by wasted time and energy is, it is wasteful for 1,000 researchers working in secret at private companies to independently discover the same protein, without telling anyone, when instead one person could have discovered it and then shared the information. It's like 1,000 companies digging trenches for water pipes under the same road.

This seems to conveniently ignore how patents work.

Working with the most charitable interpretation of your view, is the idea that Peter Higgs would have patentented the Higgs boson, CERN would have paid him royalties to attempt to produce it, and CERN and Higgs together would have sold the rights to a trust that was able to collect royalties on all products whose invention required the use of electroweak theory? It would have to be a patent term that lasted about 100 years, otherwise Maxwell wouldn't have been able to fund Maxwell's laws.

This presupposes that CERN in its current implementation, scale, and efficiency is a net good for society.

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