The North American Thread

[Hans Bulvai]

Forget free speech.

We have bigger problems to deal with....

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/womans-candy-e ... 9-459.html

I grew up on those things.

[Demon of Undoing]

[Endovelico]

[Mr. Perfect]

[AzariLoveIran]

.


I suspected, all signs were showing, ..


That was pretty much clear .. that shows his 2nd term re'election was a farce ..


Question is who was the real American President during his 2nd term ? ?


.

[Colonel Sun]

[Colonel Sun]

Of course, if you're not doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to worry about.

[~]

[Hans Bulvai]

Shocking...

http://www.voltairenet.org/article168006.html

[Colonel Sun]

[jerryberry]

[Colonel Sun]

Very unfortunate. And accurate from what I've read and heard.

There's another issue. For example, one can higher very highly qualified people in science and engineering in parts of E Europe [including Russia] at about JPY 1,700 per hour. Many are hard working and very good at problem solving. This works out to about USD 20 per hour. An individual with similar skills in the US would quote about USD 120 to 150 per hour.

At the moment the US is still quite innovative, however, I don't see how in the future one can have an economy that consists of Google, Facebook, Twitter, and FIRE [Finance, Isurance, and Real Estate].

[AzariLoveIran]

[jerryberry]

ALI-He's not trying to get rich. He's an Engineer because of natural curiosity. CS, In the U.S. are good Engineers asking too much for a steady US$60,000.00 a year salary to stay employed, is it coming to this?

[AzariLoveIran]

[Colonel Sun]

[Alexis]

...Time to worry about arsony ?

[Tinker]

[Tinker]

[Endovelico]

Even those people who are not overtly appreciative of the US recognize the quality of American scientists, engineers, managers. What most people in the world are waiting for is those capable Americans learning how to oust incompetent and malicious politicians and replace them with honest, principled, non-corrupt ones.

[Endovelico]

[AzariLoveIran]

[Colonel Sun]

[monster_gardener]

[Alph]

Colonel Sun,

The arguments for spending money on R&D and infrastructure are slight of hand.

The USG is spending about $100 billion on transportation infrastructure right now. The USG spend $13 billion a year over 35 years to build the Interstate Highway system. (Both figures are in 2006 dollars.) The problem isn't that transportation infrastructure doesn't have enough money, but that it's being spent poorly.

The same is true of government research grants. Research is smaller, about 2% of government spending instead of 3% like transportation, but the problem isn't what we spend but what we get for it. A far more effective way to solve actual problems and encourage basic research and economic growth would be something like choosing the 70 largest problems that could be solved with technology and putting a a billion dollars into a trust for each of those seventy problems to be awarded to the first entity to discover a solution to it, within strict parameters, and make that solution public domain. (This would cost about what we spend now.) Bigger or more significant problems could be awarded multiple shares a year. Imagine a prize fund for anyone producing technology providing abundant, cheap, green energy (whether fusion, solar, or something else) with a hundred billion dollar prize attached to it, in the form of a cash account of actual money already deposited from having twenty of this plan's shares a year put into it for five years. That would attract some effective attention, would it not? And once the money was placed there, it would attract the attention forever until solved, at no additional cost regardless of how many times the private sector failed to make the goal. This would get the government out of the business of choosing winners and losers before we know which sorts of research will bear fruit and get private entities back into the business of basic research.

But you can set all that aside, because the problem with the argument that infrastructure and R&D research should increase is even more fundamental. The argument is the equivalent of a stock broker who is too leveraged resisting calls to trim his personal budget or pay down debt because of his previously high returns from stock market investing. Are the current R&D and infrastructure investments yielding anything? No. But past ones did. So surely if he only had a few million more to spend in his leveraged stock account, it would all be like it used to be. That's not a position of wisdom, but of addiction and desperation from someone not willing to face their situation.