131–140 of 214 posts
I am concerned about the incredible concentration of money and resources into a few academic institutions. Obviously Stanford is an incredible school, but I am not sure Stanford will do more with $1B than 10 2nd tier schools would do with $100M each.
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> The United States is more of a petro-state than most people realize or energy independent, depending on how you want to look at it.
This is one people get a bit confused about: 1) In 2021, the United States imported about 8.47 million barrels per day (b/d) of petroleum from 73 countries. (EIA) 2) In 2021, the United States exported about 8.63 million b/d of petroleum to 176 countries and 4 U.S. territories. The reasons you can't just say, halt exports and halt imports and be 'energy independent' are varied: there's regional demand (oil produced i…
Isolated self-sufficiency is one way to achieve that, but so is a balanced book of imports and production.
The U.S. today is more energy independent than in the past. To be specific, OPEC cannot do to the U.S. today what it did in the 1970s because they have far less pricing power. As they cut supply to raise prices, domestic fracking projects go back into the black and we increase supply.
I fully support transitioning to renewable energy sources, but it’s not necessary for energy independence. That is one of the least compelling reasons to change.
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This is a very fair concern. First off, most of this funding will go to a building. The rest will go mostly to an endowment. The concentration of mega-gifts at the top has very perverse impacts. Harvard built a $100M building a few years ago that is used by a total of 100 people a year. Philanthropy combines prestige, PR, and “legacy” in a way that massively overvalued those three vs. any kind of measurable impact. T…
I worked in the Broad building at Caltech (Eli Broad), and I watched for 2 years as they demoed the parking lot outside my office to build the 200 million dollar Chen neuroscience building. It is a complete and total waste of money, and I say that cognizant of arguments like 'attracting talent'...etc. At one point we calculated the number of neuroscience postdocs we could hire for that money and easily came to the co…
There must be something I'm missing because I don't get eg what Bill Gates is doing. He says he wants to give away most his fortune to fix the biggest problems facing humanity - great. And then he's going for Malaria. Not that that's not a great goal too, but climate change really seems like the obvious one to me. I don't get it, climate change doesn't even appear on their list of top causes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundat... The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation endowment is larger than Harvard's (and slightly more than Musk spent on buying Twitter), with that kind of money they could have moved a lot of things already.
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wait, is the 200 million just for the building, or for the entire facility (new equipment, etc)? Building a new facility in itself seems a worthwhile enterprise - though as a postdoc myself I'd rather have pay bumps for the postdocs :)
I believe at least 170 million was slated initially for construction costs, which may have run over. I don't know how much was for new equipment, but I can't imagine it was a significant fraction (and likely it was an additional expense over those numbers).
One thing that I don't get - if I was in the enviable position to make such donations, the one thing that I'd do is fund a company/foundation with a single goal - capture the maximum amount of carbon (+equivalents, +research into other ways to fixing climate change). There must be something I'm missing because I don't get eg what Bill Gates is doing. He says he wants to give away most his fortune to fix the biggest p…
What do your do with a degree in climatology? It’s not a good idea to get these odd degrees as they are not good for signaling to potential employers.
It actually does make more sense to pursue a physics degree with an emphasis on fluid dynamics (atmospheric and oceanic circulation being of great interest to future climate forecasts), or a chemistry degree with an emphasis on analytical measurement and kinetics (global elemental cycling, particulate dynamics, oceanic and atmospheric chemistry all being similarly important), or a biology degree with an emphasis on e…
One thing that I don't get - if I was in the enviable position to make such donations, the one thing that I'd do is fund a company/foundation with a single goal - capture the maximum amount of carbon (+equivalents, +research into other ways to fixing climate change). There must be something I'm missing because I don't get eg what Bill Gates is doing. He says he wants to give away most his fortune to fix the biggest p…
One thing that I don't get - if I was in the enviable position to make such donations, the one thing that I'd do is fund a company/foundation with a single goal - capture the maximum amount of carbon (+equivalents, +research into other ways to fixing climate change). There must be something I'm missing because I don't get eg what Bill Gates is doing. He says he wants to give away most his fortune to fix the biggest p…
Also, I think you are underestimating how terrible malaria is
> Globally, the World Health Organization estimates that in 2020, 241 million clinical cases of malaria occurred, and 627,000 people died of malaria, most of them children in Africa. Because malaria causes so much illness and death, the disease is a great drain on many national economies. Since many countries with malaria are already among the poorer nations, the disease maintains a vicious cycle of disease and poverty.