Comment by donnachangstein | Hacker News Reader

Comment by donnachangstein | Hacker News Reader

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donnachangstein

> I think the whole program may have cost the government maybe $10k total.

Your numbers are off by an order of magnitude. There is no government program in existence that costs $10k total, you are almost assuredly ignoring overhead and all other costs. It's like calling a contractor to repair something, then crying foul when he charges $350 because you found the part on Amazon for $15.

But let's assume it was $10k.

> $10k to build knowledge of cutting edge science that filters into industry. $10k to help give needed manpower to research projects that need it. $10k to give people who otherwise didn't have a road into science, exactly what they need to get their foot in the door.

To be blunt, you are upset because you got to work on a fun boondoggle project and others are being denied that privilege. I won't doubt it was fun and educational but I can't in all honesty pretend that is a good value for the taxpayers.

Unless you are producing something of value to the public, it's wasteful, and that $10k deserves to be returned to the taxpayers.

Taxpayers are not on the hook to keep you busy with pointless yet fun busy-work. That is private industry's job.

Money "wasted" by the NSF is far better spent than money wasted in, say, the Google Graveyard or any other monument to private malinvestment. This is because science has a value capture problem by design, making it systematically uninvestable by the private market, making opportunities plentiful -- and making it an archetypal example of a place where government investment has a role to play, because we can capture value as a country that is impossible to capture as a company.

The real scandal is that we don't do more of it: our global competitors do not share the same contempt for science that is increasingly infecting the USA, and slowing our jog as they pass us is the worst strategy I can possibly imagine.

This is an opportunity for private industry to step up and step in, while drastically reducing the size of government.

I hear the Juicero had an outstanding power supply.

For all the waste, some folks probably learned a lot about power electronics.

It seems odd to me that of all places, a forum run by a VC outfit, thinks a government jobs program to churn STEM grads with nonsense projects is the way to go.

> This is an opportunity for private industry to step up and step in, while drastically reducing the size of government.

Did... you actually read the comment you're replying to? They're explicitly stating that there is a large pool of work that _the private sector is actively disincentivized to invest in_, and the only way it gets done is for other mechanisms to fill the gap.

The alternative to federal investment in research isn't the private sector picking up slack. It's for the old patronage system of the 1800's to come back. But that system was effective only when the size of problems was relatively "small" - we need to leverage economies of scale to efficiently pursue many types of cutting edge research.

Those STEM grads took years to train through NSF-funded programs. Why would private industry waste their quarterly revenues on STEM grads who will become useful only after 4-6 years of training?

Being in such a forum doesn’t mean that many of us aren’t educated about economics.

Also, I bet VCs are far _more_ aware than the average Joe of the wide body of worthwhile but uninvestable ideas. After all, they are responsible for saying "no" to them and gently redirecting them to government/patronage/charity while asking to keep in touch in case the field becomes investable (because that's the story of how their boss got rich).

"Value capture problems don't exist because capitalism is perfect" is the kind of misconception that can only survive far away from the actual process of finding investments and making returns.

Perhaps consider why it is that even here, of all places, so many people see this kind of bullshit for what it is?

Do you think Juicero wanted to end up with a bunch of people who learned how to make an outstanding power supply and nothing else to show for it? Did the actual work on the power supply end up being available to anyone else? Maybe we should have an organization that actively wants to invest in things like this, rather than depending on the waste of VCs?

> I won't doubt it was fun and educational but I can't in all honesty pretend that is a good value for the taxpayers.

The students who work on these types of projects go on to create technology, companies, and jobs. The skills and experience they learn is a direct injection into our innovation economy.

And of course that's not even to mention that a lot of the things they work on will never get vetted in private industry, so we'll never even know if there is value hidden in the weeds.

The assumption that if something doesn't have a clear and immediate ROI it can't possibly have any value is extremely myopic.

It’s also easily abused…the parent post is a pretty solid example of how that happens. More than any individual action by the administration, decades of reinforcement and reification of this thinking in a major segment of society is what is going to doom us.

People celebrating their own destruction by spouting the propaganda they’ve been fed is somehow both terrifying and uniquely interesting to me.

Sure, but there needs to be some justification or measuring stick to decide what's worth researching and what isn't. Otherwise you're just burning up money and labor on fruitless tasks.

Reading some of the comments in this thread it sounds like people are in favor of spending any amount of money on researching any topic without any discrimination whatsoever. That doesn't sound like a good idea to me.

Strawman. No one is suggesting that. These programs are vetted by people whose job it is to assess realistic returns.

It's far more extreme - and far less rational - to assert they're worthless, and therefore need to end, based purely on vibes and ideology.

This entire discussion is a 180 from the truth.

These programs shouldn't need defending. Whatever the cranks believe, the returns have been proven decade after decade after decade.

The people who are axing them are the ones who need to justify themselves, not just economically but constitutionally and morally.

So far they've only tried to justify themselves ideologically, which is not even close to being a credible argument.

Who exactly made you in charge of speaking for all the taxpayers?

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