Take that, already meager science budget! They will definitely be used to make society better.
I'm thinking the outcome of this may be even more sinister.
I know there is already plenty of corporate hands in science, doing what they can to fund research they want and making it more difficult for potentially damning results to come out.
Fun wild experiments won't go away, they'll still get funded, but only at the mercy of the corporation that bankrolls their study.
This is a regularly done conservative tactic. Attack research because it’s frequently stupid sounding. But sometimes stupid sounding research leads to incredible things.
Sometimes you research the mating habits of red eyed tree frogs and you learn a lot for conservation efforts and stuff about the species. Conservatives love this because they can hand wave and go “who cares about this thing I personally don’t care about”
But those science nerds sometimes do stuff like researching gila venom in the 70s which eventually led to ozempic now, one of the potential major treatments for t2 diabetes, a scourge of our morbidly obese modern society. This has gigantic positive implications for public health and financial benefits
The whole point is you can’t know until you’re done what will be groundbreaking
Take literally any scientific idea and you can easily imagine a conservative mocking it.
"They want to male a huge bomb, sit on it, and go to space!"
"They're looking at mold from their days old sandwiches and call it science!"
I tried googling whether penicillin was mocked "pencillin was mocked as stupid" just out of interest. The third result (or first after "people also ask") on Google, The Stupid Reason That Elon Musk Is Complaining About Scientists Spraying Bobcat Urine on Alcoholic Rats
Around and around and around
It's an even more fundamental conservative tactic. What they do is find a single example of something they think they can easily deride and hold it up as representative of that entire thing. Think welfare, immigration, criminal justice, reproductive rights, gender identity, and much more. Right wing media is full of single cases they beat into their viewerships' minds while ignoring all other cases
I heard the explanation "conservatives stop thinking if they like the current result".
If immigrants committed any crime, the obvious solution is to deport all of them. Less immigrants, less crime, sounds great, no further research needed.
But if it's about something like social security, they go to the ninth layer of indirection to "prove" that it's bad, because now they found a study that slightly agrees with one of their talking points (p ≈ room temperature).
They don't want groundbreaking though, unless it's profitable. They want people to suffer unless they can profit from their relief. They don't want the government funding this sort of research. They want the government funding their companies that then perform this sort of research at a 5000% mark-up.
instead give it directly to Elon, he will know what to do with the extra money!
This isn't about efficiency, it's about attacking science as a tool for evaluating truth. It's a way to discredit the authority of expertise and shape the course of research with selective funding and demonization.
I think it's because Elon Musk just really wanted to be the head of a department called "D.O.G.E.". The whole attacking science thing is just a bonus.
Yeah how much is this “office” going to cost the taxpayers? I would guess a lot more than $100k on a sunfish experiment.
Elon Musk: now singlehandedly responsible for the US falling further behind China in innovation and research (for the record, fuck the CCP).
I seriously hope the UK takes advantage and offers visas and funding for the research. We've already got a good research sector though it took a hit from Brexit. Taking in these US scientists, even if it's only for four years, would accelerate the UK's growth, suck it Yanks!
p.s. also the EU would love to have them as well.
Especially if you'd add up all the inefficiencies already introduced in the name of efficiency. All those grant proposals, superfluous fluff articles to bump impact factors, etc. are all required overhead to game a system designed to seem efficient.
How much do we pay for politicians and their security to go golfing?
I personally don't think that politicians should be given elaborate security details. Their performance or lack of performance should determine how safe they are from the populace they're tasked with serving.
Ehhh, with a large enough population you’re bound to find someone crazy enough to do it for no reason at all.
Rather have an assassination problem than a school shooter problem. If we let those crazy people shoot the president instead of a school, they can work out their hatred of humanity without harming anyone important.
Sunfish I can't find the actual study, it appears it was done in 1975, and was a big thing that congress at the time used as the examples of wasteful spending.
First 2 I can't really say the value or lack of value of. I mean they were studies on effects of dangerous substances on behavior. and yes of course like all studies you pick animals that you might be able to get the effects of. Obviously a lot of science is just randomly probing around looking for oddities that give you a hypothesis to try and refine later into something useful. Obviously addictive substances is an important topic to understand, and poking around randomly might actually give solutions that could be discovered IMO.
Now the last one is the only one I'd agree, isn't exactly super useful.
was done in 2016.
All that being said... lets also take a serious statement on cost here... a million dollars in 2016. That's like, 15 minutes of iraq war money.
Another comment explains the moon landing one. It's a hexbear comment and probably not federated to a lot of instances, so copying it here:
The Moon landing line is a pretty important thing to study, actually, since we know what the rehearsed line was: “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” Without that “a” it’s a very silly line.
Armstrong for years claimed he said the line right and that it must’ve been garbled in the radio transmission, and in recent years has been vindicated as better signal:noise algorithms processed the recording and found the missing word. Researchers aren’t blowing money to find out if Armstrong was a liar, they’re using it to develop more sensitive receivers, better transmission protocols, and more advanced algorithms to parse signal out of noise, all of which have massive impacts in other domains. An algorithm that’s better at parsing data out of noise in particular is going to be useful in loads of places like MRI machines where improving resolution will take billions in research but improving parsing is just updating the software.
Can't really blame people for defederating though. It's a slog to find the treasure in the shit. In this same thread there's both "Death to America" and "kill all honkeys" non-sequiturs. I can see why they drove off their admins in a stupid struggle session recently. I'm just waiting for another struggle session when they discover the etymology of "bad" and have to rename !badposting@hexbear.net:
It is possibly from Old English derogatory term bæddel and its diminutive bædling "effeminate man, hermaphrodite, pederast," which probably are related to bædan "to defile."
wow, yeah thanks for the repost of it then, and yeah seems even further to go in there, when conservatives comb for examples of the terrible things they are fighting... and it seems like over and over again, even their cherry picked examples seem to fail
How much is it gonna cost us to create this new “D.O.G.E.” Department and pay Musk? The cost of these studies is completely irrelevant to the situation, like others have said the GOP props up ridiculous situations and makes it seem like they represent the entire situation, and they do it to disguise what they’re doing which is fleecing taxpayers money to private corps.
Well, that was something that benefitted women, so it's clearly not efficient for any of the grey, white men in this committee
Knowing your wife is pregnant definitely benefits men too.
As if any of them give the first fuck about any of their spawn
ETA: wait, whoops, forgot Trump wants to fuck his daughter
Have you ever watched Game of Thrones, or played Crusader Kings 3? Children are valuable assets!
valuable assets
Thanks for the reminder, I was wrong. Trump actively wants to fuck his daughter, so I guess at least one of them gives a fuck
including trans women, which they also hate
They hate women; ergo they hate trans women.
That's not true. The rethoric is easily explained. They're not women if you can't "grab them by the pussy"
This is the predictable outcome of empowering ignorance. When your opinion is as valid as my facts, bad things are going to happen.
Studying fly development has led to cancer treatments targeting the sonic hedgehog pathway.
Here's the tweet in question: https://xcancel.com/DOGE/status/1858540521096089876#m
Anyone know what studies it's referring to?
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/06/21/533840751/episode-779-shrimp-fight-club
It's a great listen and conservatives as usual can't stop being fucking retards.
Wait, but which is it? Tequila or Gin? I need THE SCIENCE!!
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