US Can't Meet The "Grand Challenges" of Physics 444
BlueSky writes "A new report paints a troubling picture of the state of physics research in the US, which the authors believe has dire consequences for the competitiveness of the US. 'The report identifies six key questions that will represent the grand challenges that materials science will face over the coming decade, the ones most likely to produce the next revolution. But it also raises fears that those challenges will be met by researchers outside of the US. It highlights the fact that government funding has not kept up with the rising costs of research at the same time that the corporate-funded research lab system has collapsed. As a result, US scientific productivity has stagnated at a time when funding and output are booming overseas.'"
And who can weee thank for this? (Score:3, Insightful)
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The New White House Memorandum (Score:4, Funny)
Re:And who can weee thank for this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Bush is no more the sole responsible party for this then Clinton was, or Bush the Elder was, or Reagan was.
Re:And who can weee thank for this? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:And who can weee thank for this? (Score:4, Interesting)
But that's not the worst of it. In 2006, Republicans and Democrats managed enough intransigence and sheer orneriness between them they didn't pass a proper FY 2007 budget. Only 2 out of the 11 necessary appropriations bills could be passed. In lieu of passing these parts of an actual FY07 budget, Congress gave up and passed a Continuing Resolution that simply repeated the 2006 budget less a 1% rescission. This severely impacts many parts of the government, including the DOE, which through its Office of Science is responsible for funding most government research into the physical sciences.
A Continuing Resolution wouldn't be so bad -- funding cuts in the physical sciences have been pretty much continuous since the Congressional Democrats killed the SSC in 1993 -- except that Congress insists on micro-managing the budget. So the specific funding allocations were carried over from 2006. This means large new projects that were supposed to ramp up in FY07 can't, because their money has blindly been allocated to projects that have ended in 2006.
Read about the initial effects of the FY07 Continuing Resolution here [aps.org] on the APS website.
If Slashdot or mainstream journalism cared about the sciences, they would have reported on this. But most people are totally unaware of the federal budget. The FY07 continuing resolution has not been reported on even once by Slashdot. It is a travesty for the US and should be a major embarrassment, but people remain blissful unaware. In substitute of actual, important news we have been fed five pseudo-news stories per week about the iPhone or about Paris Hilton.
Anyway, to make a long story short, the Bush Administration is not the main entity to blame here. Congress is. But don't let actual facts get in the way of the daily Bush-bushing orgy...
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Re:And who can weee thank for this? (Score:5, Interesting)
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The feds have increased the science and technology budget every year since Bush took office. The problem isn't the budget witch republicans have a relative good track record on. The problem is in how it is being spent, Most all of it is being assigned to global warming sciences because it has the current doom and gloom. Concoct your own convincing doom and gloom scenario and you will se
Re:And who can weee thank for this? (Score:4, Interesting)
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See http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTI CLE_ID=55824 [worldnetdaily.com]
or any of the other discussions about it. There are many. Only a fool would call this directive harmless. In the event of ANYTHING Bush chooses to call an emergency, he by self-proclamation assumes power over all government functions:
"When
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As for the WMDs... I gave you a link to the UN inspectors website with direct reports concerning them. The only reason you missed reading about them is because you refused to read about them. And don't call them the inquirer, it just shows ho
A physicist's perspective (Score:5, Informative)
The problem isn't funding--it's what we do with it. Oh, sure, we could use lots more money, but it's not the real problem. Before I get into the details, let's briefly pick apart some of the nonsense in the National Academy of Science's Condensed-Matter and Materials Physics report, such as their supposed "grand challenges":
When you increase the size of your system, your state space generally grows exponentially. Of course it gets complex. Figuring out the specific complex behaviors of various systems isn't a single grand challenge, it's a whole lot of little challenges (unless you're talking about superconductivity, which I'll revisit).
Long-term? It's probably fusion, which isn't a condensed matter problem; try nuclear and plasma physics.
This is bio-physics, not condensed matter. Condensed matter is only one of many fields contributing to bio-physics.
This one seems legitimate, although it would be more interesting if they framed it in terms of some of the big problems in non-equilibrium physics.
This doesn't even make sense as a research challenge. It could at least have been framed as a question involving nanotechnology.
Here it seems like private industry is doing a very good job with the short-to-medium term. Long term, the answer may well be quantum information, which is my own field. Some of the approaches to building quantum computers are condensed matter-based, but many aren't.
The big thing I'm surprised not to see on the list is superconductivity. One estimate I heard was that something like 40% of all physicists have worked on it at some point in their careers (for me, it was as an undergrad, albeit peripherally). Despite the enormous research effort, we still don't have a really solid handle on how it works.
I'm really unimpressed by the "grand challenges" the NAS was able to come up with; it reeks of committee work. For comparison, I could write a much better list for my own field. Just off the top of my head:
Similarly, the NAS suggestions also seem to be the product of a shy and timid committee. There's the usual--more outreach, more women/minorities, more education, more money. There's also a pining for the old days of Bell labs and such, but no realistic consideration of how to bring it back (which would of course start with figuring out why it left), beyond a call for more discussions.
The countries that do the most to meet [the challenges] will benefit the most economically.
(Playing devil's advocate) Why is that so? Basic research is available to everyone. The country that benef
Intelligent Design Advocates (Score:4, Insightful)
It's like having Satanists run a local Baptist Church. No good will come of it.
Re:Intelligent Design Advocates (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Intelligent Design Advocates (Score:5, Interesting)
Global Warming Advocates too (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Global Warming Advocates too (Score:4, Insightful)
There may be zealots in the environmentalist movement, but they're not anti-intellectual. That's something else entirely. An anti-intellectual is trying to debunk the scientific process and show that knowledge is not acquired by reason but by faith.
A Global Warming zealot actually agrees with science. They may be fanatical, but they view science as an ally on the one true path. Hence they are not anti-intellectual.
Most of those who fanatically oppose environmentalism are anti-intellectual, however. Sadly, some have responded to them by becoming zealots themselves. It's to be expected, given the political climate.
In conclusion, pro-science zealotry is bad, but not as bad as anti-intellectual zealotry.
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The next time someone says "there's no time for debate" please think about
The people trying to filibuster science. THEY are a real threat.
Litmus Test (Score:4, Insightful)
If they say it's 6000 years old, you can disregard anything that person says for the rest of their life.
Re:Litmus Test (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Intelligent Design Advocates (Score:5, Insightful)
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<sarcasm> Oh come now, you know that's not true. For example, I'm sure everyone with a piece of the Haliburton pie has seen a very nice return on their investment. And as we know from the intuitive wisdom which is trickle-down economics, giving more money to those who are already ridiculously rich is the best way to help those who are struggling economically. Ergo, I'm sure our economy has flourished as a result of this war spending. </s
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I can see it now. "Pro Sacrifice: life and choice just don't eliminate the problem"
;-)
Re:Intelligent Design Advocates (Score:5, Interesting)
DC and the city of Atlanta spend something like over $10,000 per child, have the lowest test scores and they still ask for more money. Poor performing schools aren't berated but praised with more money, good teachers have their hands tied behind their back and are punished by having to step down their lesson plans to accomodate non-english speaking students (at least where I live).
Basically we're stuck with a government agency that is hell bent on making sure that our highest aptitude students get the best quality education that the lowest attitude students can handle.
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No.
What hurts is the advent of groupthink among scientists. Who gives a fuck if the universe was created in a big bang, or if it was created ~5400 years ago to LOOK like it was created in the big bang. Adopting either as dogma is ludicrous, and hurts science education -- they are both firmly beyond the realm of expermintally provable.
"Physics research" is getting more and
The Church of Commercialism is far more powerful.. (Score:5, Interesting)
I think commercialism is far more easily the culprit.
We have rapidly entered an area where people want to invest heavily (401K, etc.). But everyone is after
Investment in research in this country is probably declining because we have become so heavily profit-motivated and no one sees any profit in research.
Further, I think most of the "low-hanging-fruit" of scientific learning was done between 1945 and 1980. But now perhaps we are reaching the time of diminishing returns, where it requires much heavier investment in the research to produce (profitable) results.
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OTOH the IRA in its heyday were not supporters of terrorism. They were just terrorists.
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9/11 proved that terrorism was simply never going to work for them. Adams and co knew that they were never going to get their lads to fly airplanes into buildings and even if they could find a suicide squad they couldn't bomb people into submission.
A faction called the 'Real IRA' murdered another 28 people until they were put out of business by a c
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The US government had been very happy for terrorists to raise money in the US for bomb attacks on their allies the British, so long as they didn't get bombed themselves. Only after someone else attacked America did they decide that supporting terrorism was a bad thing.
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Seems like a better question would be when hasn't Satan been running the Catholic church? Okay, okay, that was loaded but I have your attention. One only has to look at history, both in modern times and as far back as we have records on the church, to see the woe that comes from that cult (IMO, they are the largest cult in history). Heck, they even supported and aided the Nazis during WWII. Most recently, shared children between priest
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If the Catholic leadership had any kind of conscience, they'd dissolve themselves and start again - giving all of their as
Not science but nationalism (Score:5, Insightful)
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"A nation with a history of major scientific output has heavily cut back on research funding. The government has not increased to meet higher costs and the corporate research labs there have been disappearing. Other countries are increasing their own funding for research and there is hope that the added funding elsewhere will compensate for this loss of scientific interest."
Now, when a major research entity (yes, the US has in the past been a big spender on scientific re
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More developed nations, more research (Score:4, Insightful)
Globally the state of physics research is good; it's even growing in the USA, but just growing harder world-wide. This will mean that the world will be able to solve its most pressing problems bar one: the hunger for money of the US corporations. The US should be so wise to realize that they'll be the third or fourth biggest economy of the world in a couple of years and start specializing in a few markets, leaving bulk production to China and India.
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The problem with the idea of "leaving bulk production" to another nation is that you just sacrificed your independence and control of your own future, because
The Bleak Future of the U.S. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ultimately we will face a day when another nation has far exceeding power in weaponry because of their advances over us in physics, chemistry or nanotech/engineering. Then they will be in position to enforce their will upon us like we do to other nations today.
Our nation has become the big dumb bully rich preppy that we all fought against in high school.
Re:The Bleak Future of the U.S. (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe someone will come up with a foolproof radar and AA missile combo or a stealth missile platform that can be maneuvered close enough to a carrier group to sink most of it. Success in war is frequently about economics. Who ever can afford to fight longest will win. If I can sink your billion dollar battlegroup anchored off my coast using a few million dollars worth of missiles, negotiation becomes a much cheaper and more attractive proposition (I know the US still has a lot of nukes to fall back on but using them in anger for anything short of the US or a major ally actually being physically invaded is likely to cause so much backlash it will have been a self defeating exercise).
I don't see anyone developing new offensive technology in the short term such that the US is being threatened but I can see a day in the not so distant future when carrier groups can no longer be sent to a region for fear of being sunk or air campaigns are not a viable option because most the planes are likely to shot down. It's not going to be the end of the US, just means they can no longer wield the big stick with impunity.
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Re:The Bleak Future of the U.S. (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that there are plenty of examples from WWII where aircraft were shown to be not all that great against ships armored enough to survive hits from 16" shells (not to mention bristling with antiaircraft guns). Consider the effort it took to sink ships such as the Bismarck or the Yamato, or how several surplus and captured battleships remained floating even after two nuclear blasts at Bikini.
Battleships didn't go away because an airplane can sink them, they went away because airplanes can sink destroyers and other such smaller capital ships at a greater range than a battleship. Battles like Midway were notable for how the engagements took place with the fleets nowhere near gun ranges, not "ZOMG, you sunk my battleship!"
It wasn't the aircraft carrier that brought about the demise of the Royal Navy (the British could build aircraft carriers too, after all), it was getting smacked around in two different oceans by two different enemies for the better part of a decade as part of the bloodiest conflict in human history.
"or a stealth missile platform that can be maneuvered close enough to a carrier group to sink most of it."
Yes, it's called "a submarine."
"Who ever can afford to fight longest will win."
That plan worked so well in Vietnam and is doing wonders in Iraq.
"If I can sink your billion dollar battlegroup anchored off my coast using a few million dollars worth of missiles"
Note the phrase "off my coast." The main point of these carriers is the same as the main point of the battleships: to project power. So long as these engagements happen off your coast and not our coast, the cost will still be justified.
"I don't see anyone developing new offensive technology in the short term such that the US is being threatened but I can see a day in the not so distant future when carrier groups can no longer be sent to a region for fear of being sunk or air campaigns are not a viable option because most the planes are likely to shot down."
Those regions already exist. Any of over half a dozen European powers, Australia, and even our neighbor Canada have the military resources, technology and skill to smack down a carrier battlegroup that threatened its territory with near impunity. It would take a lot of US blood and lucre to, say, bring a war to Sweden. But all these countries, as well as others that might be capable of the technological breakthroughs that you envision, are all BFF with the States (which is why you overlooked them). The cultural and social environment needed for such technological breakthroughs to come about tend to be similar enough to our own to greatly mitigate the human causes of such a conflict.
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Color me intrigued. I think the United States could smack the shit out of Sweden in perhaps 24 hours assuming that a larger NATO/Russian/Chinese force didn't loom. I live in the U.S. so I wi
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Not sure who said that originally, but it sounds about right. The stealth missile platform you mention would most likely be a submarine; armed with supercavitating [wikipedia.org] torpedoes [wikipedia.org] and cruise missiles it would be very dangerous to surface ships. Carriers won't get completely obsoleted, but advances in missile technology will eventually force carrier groups underwater [wikipedia.org].
And why is this a problem? (Score:4, Insightful)
It does not really matter who is doing it as long as it gets done.
Maybe some people cannot swell with national pride but who cares about that...
Re:And why is this a problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone predicted the fall of USA some years ago to happen in the year of 2025. But once Bush was elected to be a president, he adjusted his estimation down to 2020. And then Bush was re-elected...
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"Idiocracy" said it best... (Score:2)
Plenty of money for research... (Score:5, Funny)
Huh? What do they mean? There is plenty of money in research, one just has to find a way to make it sound like 'research' will eventually kill more Iraqis, then 'research' will get plenty of money. Let's look at some examples:
1. Nanotech : By building tiny small robots we can kill Iraqis and they wouldn't even see us coming! == Cha-ching $1bn of funding over the next 10 years.
2. Particle Physics: By finding the Higgs boson we could kill Iraqis over great distances. The Higgs boson will create a micro singularity in Iraq and suck in all the Iraqis and leave us all the oil we want. When we burn it all, the Higgs boson will be equally effective against Iranians! == Cha-ching $2bn for a new particle accelerator.
Gosh!... didn't academia teach these physicists anything
Its nothing to ashamed of (Score:3, Funny)
What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What? (Score:4, Insightful)
United States? What's that? (Score:5, Interesting)
It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today!"
--Arthur Jensen, played by Ned Beatty, Network, 1976
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Physics department got lots of problems (Score:3, Insightful)
The biggest threat to America (Score:5, Insightful)
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The students of today are the world leaders of tomorrow. In American news I've only seen fate of students come up in Congress when they want to throw students in jail for listening to American culture without giving more money to already too powerful corporations.
Imagine the effect if the RIAA blackmailed all the Engineering students, taking their money, and forcing them to drop out and do blue collar jobs. The flow on effects would be catastrophic, yet I bet that is partially happening right now with the
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It's under the 10th reason, America Has Dynamic Typing for Careers.
Re:The biggest threat to America (Score:4, Interesting)
And point #10 is irrelevant to the discussion. The problem with K-12 schools in the US has NOTHING to do with specialization. The problem is that grade inflation has made people who don't understand bare-minimum first-order algebra equations still straight-A students, even though they're woefully unprepared for entering the university system and will need 6-months or more of remedial courses. There are still the few exceptional K-12 schools that resist the trend, and there will always be a small percentage of students that will learn on their own, but by and large, K-12 is turning out, and could be shortened by perhaps 4-6 years turning out kids equally well educated.
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Re:The biggest threat to America (Score:4, Interesting)
People come to the US because it is one of the few systems in the business of selling an education. Many other countries run their universities for their own people and only sponsor a few foreigners. It's easier for a german guy to get into a US university than a US person to go to Germany. Plus English is the common language so many will do a stint in the US to get better exposure. So it's not always that the US school is so great - it's that you can get accepted into it.
Read TFA (Score:2)
the article (Score:2)
Challenges (Score:5, Insightful)
* How do complex phenomena emerge from simple ingredients?
* How will the energy demands of future generations be met?
* What is the physics of life?
* What happens far from equilibrium and why?
* What new discoveries await us in the nanoworld?
* How will the information technology revolution be extended?
How can dicipline specific funding mechanisms address these issues effectively? I think, generally, unless funding agencies are willing to entertain joint proposals (say biology and solid state) these questions will be hard to address. How can you be sure that proposals don't get rejected just because they seem out of field?
--
Electricity without rate increases: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
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You're being a lot more generous than I was when I saw the list:
Ok. This could be physics.
That's not a physics problem. That's a sociology/economics problem.
Life is a chemistry problem... unless you're talking about crash test analysis.
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On the second, this may be a nod to cold fusion though I suppose the pellets in inertial confinement count as condensed matter initially. But, there is a definite chemistry component.
In the third, I see quite a lot of sports medicine looking to physics, but I'm thinking they are considering, for example, the wave function treatment of photosynthesis.
In the fourth, understandin
politics and science--not in the same time space (Score:2, Interesting)
Faraday knew how to talk to these people (Score:2, Interesting)
You're absolutely right about the SSC. I know a dozen physicists who lost not only that job but their research careers because of the closing of that project. One of them told me that the moment the funding was stopped, CERN put in a hiring freeze for several years so they wouldn't have to deal with the influx of ap
No worries (Score:3, Funny)
So no worries, if somebody outside of the USA will make research progress god will be sued...
Its the physist fault.... (Score:2)
If they did that then I have no doubt the Bush administration would be falling all over themselves in support.
Just look at the budget for military....
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http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/ArmsTrade
you don't have to denying evolution and global warming, just ignore it...
Don't forget about String Theory and Patents (Score:5, Insightful)
One the other said of Physics world, applied physics, you have the patent wars slowing things to a crawl. In fields like fusion and nanotechnology innovation is being stalled by patents. If you aren't writing a patent, you are figuring out how to get around someone else's patent. The amount of time wasted on patents is sad. The patent system needs to change such that the obvious and trivial can no longer be patented. Just because an invention occurred in nanotechnology or biotechnology does not mean it should be granted a patent simply because it sounds really, really technical.
In our society, we now value feeding corporations and lawyers more that we value knowledge and innovation. Meanwhile other countries like China, who do not respect our Copyright and Patent process pirate our products and will soon leap ahead of the US in physics research because they aren't encumbered by the capitalistic IP game.
I call bullshit (Score:4, Informative)
We outspend every other country by FAR on science and technology. This may be useful propaganda to get the US to reinvigorate public interest in science again, but private and governmental interest has never waned.
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/ [digitalelite.com]
The immigrant physicists (Score:5, Insightful)
The United States benefitted enormously from an influx of European physicists in the 1930s and 1940s, some of them escaping Hitler's Germany... Not to slight Harold Urey or E. O. Lawrence or Richard Feynman... but, call the roll of the people who gave us the scientific lead that led to our superpower status: Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, Isador Rabi, Stanislaw Ulam, E. P. Wigner, Hans Bethe... and don't forget the German scientists recruited just after the war, Werner von Braun. Immigrants, every one of them.
In today's anti-immigrant and xenophobic climate, we've actually been kicking out graduate students and postdocs with Middle Eastern origins and generally making their lives miserable with red tape and problems with student visas. With that sort of treatment, they'll probably end up pursuing careers somewhere other than the U. S.
We should all be lawyers (Score:4, Insightful)
Lawyers control everything: lawyers are judges, lawyers are politicians, lawyers are lobbyists, and of course, lawyers are lawyers. No way the social/political climate will ever turn against lawyers - not in the USA.
Lawyers are also among the highest paid professionals, second only to physicians - and that could change.
Get smart. Leave that technical baloney to foreigners. If you are not smart enough to be a lawyer, be a professional litigant. Msft is always looking for professional litigants.
I predict, that in the near future, everybody in the USA will earn their living by suing one another.
fear of progress (Score:3, Insightful)
Is this in and of itself really something to be afraid of? That scientific advances might happen without the U.S.'s participation does not seem so threatening to me. If anything that fact is just an obvious corollary to the fact that the U.S. has lost interest in mainstream science, and is currently spending much more heavily on all the military / "defense" related technologies and advancements they can.
There was a time, I've been told, when the US actually worked with other countries rather than simply trying to dominate and control them all. If we don't go back to that before our government loses too much power throwing fits internationally, and spreading terror and submission nationally through it's ironically named "war on terror", the US will continue to drift more and more toward being what it used to accuse the USSR of being.
We should be HAPPY if other countries do with scientific research, we should form joint projects - Working together is not just a good idea on a personal level. This whole national attitude that we have to do everything better, first, and completely alone - that is a kind of psychosis [wikipedia.org] that should not be supported. It's pretty fucked up that even 1% of Americans are willing enablers for being abusive toward the rest of the world, let alone 29% or whatever it is today.
People with those kind of fears pushed us into war with Iraq, and the same group will push us into the blue light special war of the month for as long as we let them run our country. It's a _business_ for them, and it has nothing to do with (our) security.
Americans think money can solve any problem. (Score:3, Insightful)
I cannot count the amount of times I've seen this argument over and over again in political debates in America. It's the real downfall of America. In education, health care, scientific research, energy people just wave money around like some sort of cure-all when it isn't. What is really required is leadership and creativity and a lot of examining details in an even handed manner that the vast majority of people could care less about or would go over their heads. I think it's pretty reflective of the current trend of people not getting excited about any political issue unless it involves them getting some money from the government trough or money being taken away from them.
Really, who is surprised. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yet nobody so far seems to have noticed that this report was generated by an agency that feeds at the public trough and thus has a vested interest in creating the impression that they are being starved! Instead - to a man you've hared off on blaming the Usual Suspects, President Bush, the religious right, education, etc... etc...
Rather than asking why they aren't getting a bigger share of pork - why aren't you asking what they have done to adress the rising costs?
Re:Oh noes, some other country may pull its weight (Score:5, Informative)
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I, personally, prefer to walk everywhere I possibly can. When I lived in California, I didn't bring my car out for the first 6 months, because I simply walked or bicycled everywhere. Nothing was more than 5 miles from me, so it was okay. The first time I rode my bike 5 miles to someone's house,
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Re:Oh noes, some other country may pull its weight (Score:5, Informative)
On one occasion, I saw a very fit father, two young children, one infant, and two bags of groceries pedaling down the bicycle lane of the street. Seemed to be doing just fine, if a little sweaty.
Back here in the states, I find the sedan or minivan to be superior to the "Gas guzzling SUV" for transporting two or three kids and groceries. Though I have tried to get one of those bicycles over here, the shipping is completely prohibitive. I am intensely curious as to how practical the production Chevy Volt will be for a small family. I'm hoping it looks more like the Saturn Astra than the Saturn Sky, but at this point, who knows.
Ross
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Re:Oh noes, some other country may pull its weight (Score:4, Informative)
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in st louis, the public transit system is essentially broken. i will say that i've noticed many more scooters on the street since gas hit $3/gal,
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Currently 8 dollars a gallon in the UK (Score:2)
Gasoline is currently 8 dollars a gallon in the UK (and similar round most of Europe). Probably was ten years at least since it was 5 dollars a gallon.
Me, I cycle 8 miles to work in the morning (and obviously about the same bac
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The solution? On any nice day, I ride my bicycle the 25 mile round trip to work. On a nice week I can save the equivalent of about US$40 in driving costs.
Re:I Love this (Score:4, Insightful)
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Considering what happened to Rome, I think it's less pompous and more doomsaying...
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This comparison is nothing new for the American elite - why do you think their rulers are called Senators?
They also match Rome in decadence and orgies, but then again so I hear the German VW union leaders do too.
Re:I Love this (Score:4, Informative)
My biggest fear is that neither the US people, government, nor economy will be ready to be removed from the top position. We'll continue spending all our time and effort building walls to "keep the bad guys out" while forgetting that we need to "make some good guys within."
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Not true (Score:2, Insightful)
This is a consequence of several factors.
1) Sputnik.
Due to the USSR's dramatic achievements of the 1950s and 1960s, scientific research became a high priority for the US government and US society as a whole. Physics, chemistry, rocketry were funded by government and industry. To be interested in science as a kid did not nec