The North American Thread

[Colonel Sun]

[Alph]

[Captain Murphy]

Alph, you're not quite right about research. That Washington University in St. Louis is "privately run" means, in effect, nothing. ? Likewise for a similarly-named, top-ranking research institution, the University of Washington, whose medical school ranks first in the nation and which also conducts research in medical imaging funded by organizations like the NIH (if I recall correctly, a principle source of funding for health and biomedical technology research).

At the front end of Intel's product development pipeline is university-sourced research. Not all of it is publicly funded, of course. Private consortia play a big role in mature industries like VLSI, but it's nonsense to claim that these would have existed without government research funding. The Colonel is right about VLSI and 3D graphics: these are the result of government work. The most sophisticated 3D hardware in the 70's, 80's, and 90's was sponsored by government funding and made its way directly into consumer-level hardware after Lockheed-Martin spun off its 3D business (which was then absorbed by either ATI or nVidia, can't remember which).

And who do you think produces the researchers at private firms? The companies themselves? Hardly. They're too cheap to train people properly. Given the option, they'll put the burden on universities (which they do) and look for PhDs who have been studying exactly what they want to implement. When the universities don't deliver, they tell the government it needs to do more.

Cutting edge research has rarely been the domain of companies run by clueless bean counters who use dubious measures of return on investment to plan operations.

[Colonel Sun]

[Caskhades]

Boundless respect for Alph aside, I'm definitely with CS and CM here. Don't know as much about Silicon Valley, I can say from personal experience that many, or even most of the great commercial successes achieved by high-technology companies in the Boston area in the past 15 years have first gone through years of tax-payer funded fermentation in MIT and Harvard labs before ripening into beautiful targets for buy-outs.

That said, I don't know enough about the intricacies of applying for NIH and NSF grants to comment on how effective they are at picking promising projects.

A potentially fatal flaw with the Prize system is that it requires an up-front capital expenditure that might stifle many attempts before they even start. The grant system, for all its warts, does not have that problem to the same extent, although it sure does help to have a successful lab when applying.

[Alph]

[Colonel Sun]

[Caskhades]

[Tinker]

Empower professional guilds to decide how funds are dispersed.

[Azrael]

[Endovelico]

[Demon of Undoing]

That's the problem. The mainstream types have painted Paul as some kind of nut when the fact is that he's the last conservative left. Just about everything he champions was once mainstream. thankfully , some of the new antigovernment TP types stepped out of line and voted against the PA and that is good. Maybe we can start unwinding some of these false strictures about conservatism and get back to something even our opponents can respect if not agree with. I think the movement felt like it won the Cold War and went on a bender.

But oh Johnny, the morning after ...

[Colonel Sun]

[Alph]

[Colonel Sun]

[Colonel Sun]

[AzariLoveIran]

[Colonel Sun]

[Demon of Undoing]

Hey , if you have nothing to hide , why worry , right ? More power to the police , get those dangerous evildoers !!!

Think of the children.

[Tinker]

Yay for zero-tolerance. No matter that it NEVER works, that it ALWAYS casts a wider net than is necessary, it makes the idiots on the right think that people are being tough on crime. I guess it's ok to be perennial wrong, cruel and hateful as long as you are tough. Long live the bullies!

[Caskhades]

[cincinnatus]

[cincinnatus]

[YMix]

Madafonos would tell you it was McKinley and his bullish VP with a bearish name.

[cincinnatus]

McKinley was Crassus. Teddy was Pompey.