Billionaires With Big Ideas Are Privatizing American Science
1–10 of 107 posts
Re: Billionaires With Big Ideas Are Privatizing American Science
#2Obama thinks this is a problem? SPEND MORE ON RESEARCH!
Re: Billionaires With Big Ideas Are Privatizing American Science
#3Universities also privatize science through patents and IP. Research publications privatize research by bundling and charging exorbitant fees for journals and proceedings. Our generation doesn't have a NASA or Bell Labs. The closest thing to those outfits are vanity projects from billionaires... SpaceX, etc.
Re: Billionaires With Big Ideas Are Privatizing American Science
#4Obama thinks this is a problem? SPEND MORE ON RESEARCH!
I may be wrong, but the way I understand it he couldn't do that even if he wanted to due to congress having ultimate authority to approve/disapprove spending?
Re: Billionaires With Big Ideas Are Privatizing American Science
#5Universities also privatize science through patents and IP. Research publications privatize research by bundling and charging exorbitant fees for journals and proceedings. Our generation doesn't have a NASA or Bell Labs. The closest thing to those outfits are vanity projects from billionaires... SpaceX, etc.
The only reason we have a shot at affordable commercial spaceflight, as well as an eventual affordable journey to Mars, is because of that vanity project. If it was left up to the public sector alone, I don't think we'll be able to go to Mars in 20 or 30 years.
But this hasn't really changed. Even in NASA's hey day space missions weren't government-only projects - The space capsules and Saturn V were built by contracted private firms like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, North American Aviation. Nothing really has changed in that regard - NASA is still contracting private companies, only now we have an American company, SpaceX, that can not only build a rocket, but design and launch one as well.
Ultimately having innovators like SpaceX who can contract out to more than just the American government will drive the cost of spaceflight down. This can only be a good thing, in my book.
Musk is doing the same thing with electric cars. As far as I can tell the only way we're going to get highly reliable, affordable, mainstream electric vehicle in the next ten years is because of his vanity project, Tesla.
I mean, I'm as skeptical as anyone about pinning the future hopes of humanity on a few extremely rich people. But it's also comforting that incredibly wealthy people like Elon Musk are preoccupied with how to benefit humanity, and not just themselves.
Re: Billionaires With Big Ideas Are Privatizing American Science
#6Obama thinks this is a problem? SPEND MORE ON RESEARCH!
I may be wrong, but the way I understand it he couldn't do that even if he wanted to due to congress having ultimate authority to approve/disapprove spending?
Not to mention that we are already in deep debt. We may have allocate part of our budget from other areas to science.
For example, reallocate defense spending to pure scientific research.
Re: Billionaires With Big Ideas Are Privatizing American Science
#7Universities also privatize science through patents and IP. Research publications privatize research by bundling and charging exorbitant fees for journals and proceedings. Our generation doesn't have a NASA or Bell Labs. The closest thing to those outfits are vanity projects from billionaires... SpaceX, etc.
The only reason we have a shot at affordable commercial spaceflight, as well as an eventual affordable journey to Mars, is because of that vanity project. If it was left up to the public sector alone, I don't think we'll be able to go to Mars in 20 or 30 years. But this hasn't really changed. Even in NASA's hey day space missions weren't government-only projects - The space capsules and Saturn V were built by contrac…
They are engineering projects, rather than something that discovers something new, per se. Even so, extending our capability to explore space allow us to do more scientific research, rather than less of it. With the advent of electric vechicle, the money that went to buying gas and doing maintenance can be better spent on something else.
Re: Billionaires With Big Ideas Are Privatizing American Science
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only reason we have a shot at affordable commercial spaceflight, as well as an eventual affordable journey to Mars, is because of that vanity project. If it was left up to the public sector alone, I don't think we'll be able to go to Mars in 20 or 30 years. But this hasn't really changed. Even in NASA's hey day space missions weren't government-only projects - The space capsules and Saturn V were built by contrac…
They are engineering projects, rather than something that discovers something new, per se. Even so, extending our capability to explore space allow us to do more scientific research, rather than less of it. With the advent of electric vechicle, the money that went to buying gas and doing maintenance can be better spent on something else.
Yeah, I think SpaceX's main win is that they're taking tech that has existed in various forms for decades, and updating/optimizing it. That's not quite the same as aerospace research, but it's useful. Of course, the research is also needed, or there would be no existing designs and prototypes to update/optimize, which is a big part of why they can do their work more cheaply.
Re: Billionaires With Big Ideas Are Privatizing American Science
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
I may be wrong, but the way I understand it he couldn't do that even if he wanted to due to congress having ultimate authority to approve/disapprove spending?
Not to mention that we are already in deep debt. We may have allocate part of our budget from other areas to science. For example, reallocate defense spending to pure scientific research.
It seems to have gone more in the other direction. At least in CS, if you want big funding nowadays you need to do DARPA research, because their budget has fared better. And DARPA research has gotten more micromanaged; gone are the days where they'd hand out large block grants to promote general American excellence in areas of "national importance". Nowadays they partner you with effectively a professional "minder" (called an "integrator") from a contractor like Lockheed or BBN, whose job is to make sure your research stays on the DARPA agenda and is going to deliver what they want.
Partly because I think we no longer feel much of a need to prove we're better in science/tech than a major rival, which was once the Soviets, so general science/tech advancement is a harder sell.
Re: Billionaires With Big Ideas Are Privatizing American Science
#10i absolutely hate paywalled sites and refuse to read the articles.
that said, this is entirely unsurprising since scientific and mathematics research were almost entirely patronized fields until the rise of the modern university. this is very similar to computing in that first monolithic centralized computing was the path, then it was the PC, then it was the cloud, now it's moving back to a decentralized network. these things are bound to yo-yo and academic research is no different than most human-designed processes.