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Comment by ijk | Hacker News Reader

Other than, say, the GPS on your phone, the internet that you're posting on, or anything like that--you want to know what government-funded basic science has done to benefit you lately, not any of these decade-long timeline projects that are best funded by institutions with long time horizons, such as governments. Yes, we must have results that are brought to market this quarter, so the government-funded research justifies itself in the free market.

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If my memory serves me correctly, the ones you mentioned were DARPA projects. Which is defense arm - and AFAIK defense budget is not being cut.

I am not against government spending for dominance but I am just simply asking a question when the deficit spending is high and soon the line item for interest expense is greater than the defense budget, is dominance still more of a concern than say, I don't know, Govt unable to pay its debt or inflating away the currency?

great example of a reverse gish gallop right here, select one point to argue in a response and attempt to discredit someone based on that

brandolini's law in full effect

You are posting in a thread about the NSF. The very least you could do is be informed about what the NSF actually does and has funded before asking questions.

Given that the article we're discussing explicitly mentions the NSF contribution to those projects and links to articles going into great depth about the details, including NSFNET, I'm going to assume you're working off prior assumptions.

Of course, in modern monetary theory GDP growth is one of the major factors keeping sovereign debt manageable [1], and NSF funding of about $9B [2] is about 0.2% of the national budget, and that money that is invested in basic research is generally found to significantly contribute to that economic growth [3], there are few ways I can think of to make the debt situation worse than to cut basic research.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt-to-GDP_ratio

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation

[3] https://www.sfn.org/-/media/SfN/Documents/NEW-SfN/Advocacy/2...

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