GLenH · HackerTrans

My wife (who teaches at a university, not to be named here) once had flesh-eating beetles FedEx'ed to her lab in order to clean skeletons for student use. Unfortunately the box had a hole punched in it sometime during transport, and the FedEx guy literally ran into her office, threw the box, with beetles coming out of it, on her desk and ran back out.

GLenH

há 9 anosdiscuss

Government: money expires after two years. Which means that if you come in under budget, you have to find something else to spend the money on - which is sometimes needed infrastructure, like upgraded computers, but is more often whatever happens to be in stock at Supply. Or you dump it on a contract with a services contractor with whom you already have a contract vehicle in place. Or you lose it. But you can't save it. You can't hold onto it to do more work on the project after the two years is up.

You also can't extend the deadline for project completion in case of unforeseen events. If you run out of time, but not money, you just have to stop, because the money evaporates.

GLenH

há 9 anosdiscuss

In the US we spend about half of our national budget on social programs, including Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, grants to build affordable housing, public education grants, the Veterans Administration (which mostly covers health care for veterans), and so on. We also spend a significant amount of money on agricultural subsidies of many kinds.

In contrast, we spend approximately 1% of our budget on all of NASA - including NASA's deep space exploration programs, it's earth sensing programs, and its manned spaceflight programs, in addition to the unsung work it does in aeronautics, which includes helping develop more efficient passenger planes and safer, more efficient air traffic control. Which means that we spend considerably less than 1% of the federal budget on deep space mission technologies like this one.

So I have a question for you in response to your question: if we can't solve world hunger by spending 50% of our national budget, why should I believe that we can solve it by spending 51%?

Can't we take just a little bit of our budget and spend it on something where we can make real technological progress, right now, and see where that leads us?

These kind of arguments have always struck me as similar to thinking that you can pay off your mortgage by cancelling your newspaper subscription. The math just doesn't work, and in the meantime you actively make yourself less educated.

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