The problem (partly) is that the F-35 program puts money into 307 congressional districts in 45 states [1]. These insanely expensive defense projects are wealth transfer programs that make contractors like Lockheed and their many sub-contractors rich, and also create jobs in these communities.

That a fighter plane may or may not come out the other end is only nominally important, the key is to spend the money. The more money spent, the more people get work. That keeps people elected.

Arecibo had 120 FTE employees, mostly in Puerto Rico. Politically speaking that makes it inconsequential.

If you want different outcomes, then the political incentives need to be fundamentally re-aligned.

[1] https://harpers.org/archive/2019/06/the-pentagon-syndrome/

The FTE employee-count alone underestimates the impact of national-scale science infrastructure. naic.edu is down right now (I suspect they're busy at the moment), but their data is used by tens to hundreds of institutions, each partially employing faculty, postdocs, and students.

For agencies like NSF, the science is sometimes almost secondary. What matters perhaps the most is that qualified and capable students continue to emerge from, and sustain, America's scientific institutions.

Arecibo has been fighting for its fiscal life since I was an undergraduate in the early 2000s. I couldn't understand then why anyone would want to cut funding to it, as the facility is unique and capable. As a more-mature scientist, I now understand that older instruments sometimes must sadly make way for new endeavors.

This collapse is a powerful moment for US radio astronomy. Will the community redirect the funds to promising new instruments, buck up and rebuild an upgraded Arecibo, or use the fleeting prominence of the moment find a way to grow the funding pie and do both?

It is embarrassing for the planet's leading scientific nation to have China's larger modern copy of Arecibo (FAST) come on-line in 2016 and our venerable telescope collapse without replacement in 2020. We owe it to ourselves to do better than this.

I agree that the impact of Arecibo and these kinds of installations is actually very outsized relative to the number of FTE employees who directly work on it. The larger scientific community are the ones who booked time on the telescope after all.

My point is that politically none of that matters. No one is getting elected because people got to book telescope time for their research. The incentives are not correctly aligned to support research and science.

To go back to the F-35 comparison: the NSF has annual funding of $8.3 billion. The F-35 program is projected to cost $21.7 billion per year through its lifespan (2001-2070). I bet it winds up even higher than that, because nothing has yet changed to prevent endless overruns.

So the F-35 makes jobs and maybe a little bit of interesting work gets done as a result of the project despite itself. We as a society could buy so much more than yet another war machine (and maybe not even a useful one) with that money and effort. What could NSF do with another $13 billion every year?

> So the F-35 makes jobs...

I wonder about that. It's been a while since I studied, but the phrase "deadweight loss" looms large in what I remember of the one economics class I took in college. So I wouldn't be surprised if the program is actually a net negative for job creation.

Only that doesn't matter, either, because the point is not to create more jobs; the point is to influence job creation in a way that benefits the people who hold the purse strings. If the cost of doing so outweighs the benefits, that's inconsequential. Those costs are so widely dispersed as to be invisible, immeasurable, and difficult to discuss except on theoretical grounds. They'll never be as compelling as a staged photograph of a senator in a suit and a hard hat, sticking a shovel in the ground.

I haven't really looked into it all beyond a superficial level, but I certainly think that things like the F-35 program are a net negative to society when viewed at a distance.

As another example, I wonder if Wisconsin's sweetheart deal with Foxconn actually had a negative impact on employment. Clearly Foxconn's promised jobs never materialized, but the threat of them coming to town to spend big money may have had a chilling effect on existing or prospective new employers in the area.

Back to the F-35 program, the jobs it creates may be deadweight, deadend careers that don't produce real value. And then you can't just have these people unemployed and starving, so I guess we'll need an F-35+1 program for them and their descendents. And so on forever, until we break this cycle.

Versus something else that you could buy with the same money that has a future and does create real value (like say, solar panels?). But you're right, its just about the perception of jobs and that photo op.

I have family that lives in the area where the Foxconn plant was set up. The rumor, which I'm sure will never be publicly substantiated, was that there have been businesses that decided to steer clear of or pull out of Wisconsin over concerns about the economic blowback from state policies including (but not limited to) the Foxconn boondoggle. Including some that offered higher quality (if not as news-worthy, since they didn't count as "tech") jobs than the ones Foxconn would have created under even the rosiest of projections.

> Back to the F-35 program, the jobs it creates may be deadweight, deadend careers that don't produce real value. And then you can't just have these people unemployed and starving, so I guess we'll need an F-35+1 program for them and their descendents. And so on forever, until we break this cycle.

This is a big part of the problem. If you give the F-35 program $1 billion and you give the NSF $1 billion dollars, the F-35 program is going to directly generate more jobs. They pay people less, and they need more unskilled labor. The NSF needs very little unskilled labor, relatively speaking. Scientists are expensive. Machinery for science is crazy expensive (although so are a lot of F-35 components). Machinery for science also often involves buying foreign parts, such as the replacement cables for Arecibo that were coming from Germany.

One way for the NSF to address that is by requiring parts to be US made like the DoD does. It will increase the price, and it will often result in less effective parts (as it often does for the DoD), but you can make an easier argument that cutting NSF funding will take away jobs. I don't know if that's a net win or not, but it would probably get them more funding.

It's also to maintain the capability. You need to keep people continuously employed in that area or else you run a high risk of losing the ability to field new aircraft.

It is not so different from subsidising farming (similar pros and cons) to ensure food security.

There is a lot going on in the supply chain that you need to maintain at a baseline level if you ever expect to have to fight.

From a very macro level whatever airframes get shipped may matter less than maintaining all the specialised knowledge and suppliers that you need to produce them. "Looking after the machine that makes the machine".

Unless the actual physical F35 planes end up delivering some kind of value to their purchasers (let's face it, they basically won't), funding the F35 is a lot like breaking Bastiat's window. It's a case of the seen vs the unseen, which is why so few are equipped to complain about it

It’s a game-theoretic problem that has a name:

Concentrated benefits and diffused costs.

Note that the NSF isn't the only agency funding science in the US. For example, the NIH spends nearly all of its $40 billion annual budget funding scientific research.

However, I think this does speak to your earlier point about politics. It's easier to get people on board with funding "health" (since everyone cares about their own health) than it is for "science"

> China's larger modern copy of Arecibo (FAST) come on-line in 2016

China's is not really a copy. It does not have transmit capability. What is really missing now in US, and international science is asteroid radar imaging and ranging.

Yeah. And the transmitter piece has been broken since Maria hit, so we've already gone quite some time without that capability.

I think fast is also limited to a much lower frequency than Arecibo due to trading off pointability vs surface consistency-- which it needs in part because its so much further from the equator.

That is not good. Was Arecibo the best instrument for early detection of asteroids? What are we using now?

Now, we use optical scanning telescopes with a wide field of view, and image differencing.

Optical instruments have a wide field of view and don't have the inherent SNR problems that radar does. (I.e., using the Sun to illuminate objects is more efficient than doing it yourself.)

As a side-effect, there are all kinds of other transient sources that these scanning telescopes pick up, like supernovae, relativistic jets from AGNs ("blazars"), exotic variable stars, etc. (http://crts.caltech.edu) It's a zoo out there!

Radar does play a role in orbit characterization, and recovery of object geometry, once the NEO gets close enough. But you can get orbits through optical techniques too.

The NASA center for near-Earth objects (NEOs) is: https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/about/search_program.html

NEO close approaches to Earth, tabulated: https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/. There was a really close one today, actually (a 5-meter object at 0.13 lunar distances).

For more about the role of planetary radar in NEOs, search for "radar" in this FAQ: https://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense/faq

I'd like to think that the near future will allow large space-based solutions in place of Earth-based and increasingly radiowave-polluted ones.

A far-side moon solution's probably still quite a way off, but I wonder if some sort of lagrangian or outward-facing satellites in geosynchronous orbit might work. I'm imagining satellites with large Earth-facing shields, sort of like a radiowave version of the sunshield on the James Webb Telescope. I'm probably missing some really obvious Physics 101-level reason that wouldn't work, but a girl can dream.

Yours is a convincing argument. How do we get better optics on this for the public at large, so as to better present arguments for funding science?

It never, ever, hurts to write to your federal representative and senators. They and their staffers do listen and their votes directly determine the funding and oversight for NSF, NASA, and DOE.

I don't have great advice for direct advocacy (A billboard that says, "America's scientific infrastructure is collapsing -- fund science now!"?). At the grassroots level, providing opportunities for people to engage directly with science -- outreach, lab tours, science field trips, etc. help people to learn to understand the world around them, engage with science, see the infrastructure, and take ownership.

Every time I have given a lab tour, I thank everyone who attends for underwriting the science with their tax dollars. Essentially all fundamental research in the US is funded by you, the taxpayer. We are really, really grateful for the opportunity to learn something new about nature and share it with everyone. Thank you.

Not to digress too far but the general public at large won't even push to get funding for their own direct interests (e.g. COVID related stimulus right now). I don't know how we expect to get the general public to push for science.

Much of our society runs on pure momentum and very few people have the power to slightly shift the direction of that momentum.

One of the other large radio astronomy observatories in Greenback is also hurting for funding from what I understand. I've worked on a few collaborative research efforts utilizing the data and working with the observatory and the picture painted doesn't look promising there either. That may have changed more recently given the state of Arecibo.

Make a vocal, active, involved, interest group?

Hacker News, /. for Science?

Look - not everything is solved by collective action, nor everything solved by individual action.

Your strategy is determined by your terrain. The terrain here is a competitive field for human attention. Arecibo has nothing against dying puppies.

The beauty of the stars, the ambition of man? That has some scope.

But its still easier to find a few people who will regularly email and talk to your elected representatives, create networks that will work this out.

There MUST be some other people who want to contribute to this, and they may have resources other than cash to pool.

If it works for defense projects... Calculate how many jobs it takes to build a thing. Keep building things. Advertise job numbers?

It would be nice to fix the societal issue that ties up people's self-worth, status and sheer survival with their job, but that's a much bigger ask. Now you're into things like universal healthcare, UBI, mental health, education, etc. Still, we should work towards improvements on all fronts.

I think that in today's world, if you want science to get funded like defense projects, you'll have to embrace all of the grossness of defense projects. Lobbyists, sub-contractors, patriotic jingoism, fear, etc. Look at how we got to the moon.

Far too late for me to edit, but why was this downvoted? It’s a pretty plain question.

The F-35 is an example of the broken window parable[1] writ large. Sure it created a bunch of jobs, but that same money could have created a similar number of jobs while accomplishing something useful. I often wonder what the eventual consequences of this kind of resource misallocation will be for the US.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

It's not only about creating jobs or keeping jobs, it's about keeping a current capability of the US industrial complex running. And if you stop it it's like a bakeries oven, when you want to turn it on again it will not be ready in to produce in time for when you need it.

That's another side to projects like the F-35 that people on HN usually don't pay attention to. This programs not only "create" those jobs but they also keep the infrastructure and "machine" running that can design and build this very powerful weapons. The US had air superiority because of its technology for a while and if all that infrastructure and people just start doing something else, in like 5/10 years then the capacity to build this machines is dead, and it would take 10/15 years to get it back up and running.

And another reasons is that dollar is a world-wide reserves currency. This arrangement essentially creates unlimited credit for US. To maintain this status carriers, planes and other weapons are required.

While everyone in US benefits from this, (mostly) liberals disingenuously “protest”. You know, if you really care about this issue, then blue-collar protection policies, like some recent president tried, would go a long way to lift lower middle class and paradoxically reduce a need to project force world-wide all the time.

Trump is pro working class? That's a new one.

Well, many influential economists don't believe in the broken windows fallacy, or that it applies here. Joseph Stiglitz has said that he was in favor of literally paying people to dig holes then fill them back up as a form of fiscal stimulus.

The original statement of this idea is from John Maynard Keynes in his General Theory, and turns out to run

> If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coal mines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well tried principles of Laissez Faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing.

Actually we may already be paying them, only the holes aren't literal. The phenomenon also has a name: Bullshit Jobs [1].

How about paying people for 4 years to get a college degree on whatever subject they like, instead of having them grinding on a bullshit job?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

I've begun imagining that for Defense spending, government money that's spent in a State must have come from that State's federal income taxes.

I'm exhausted seeing data that indicates that states like mine put in more money than they get from the Federal government, and watching people from states that receive more than they put in talk about welfare state, wealth redistribution, etc.

No state pays a cent to another state or to the federal government. It is residents of each state that pay federal taxes, which the federal government in turn uses to provide funding and services to states and individuals.

The Rockefeller Institute data (https://rockinst.org/issue-areas/fiscal-analysis/balance-of-...) shows that it's not so much "blue states" as frequently claimed, but taxpayers of four very wealthy Northeast states (the Tri-State area plus Massachusetts) that account for the vast bulk of citizens paying more than they receive from the federal government. After them come CO, NE, UT, and MN, of which half voted for Hillary/Biden and half for Trump. All other states, including CA, are net beneficiaries of the taxpayers in the top eight (and, again, really, it's the top four).

The 10 states at the bottom of the Rockefeller report's per capita list—that is, the states that benefit from the most federal spending per person compared to how much each person pays in federal taxes—are

Hillary/Biden-voting states: VA, NM, MD, HI, 1/2 of ME

Trump-voting states: KY, AK, AL, WV, MS, 1/2 of ME

> The Rockefeller Institute data (https://rockinst.org/issue-areas/fiscal-analysis/balance-of-...) shows that it's not so much "blue states" as frequently claimed, but taxpayers of four very wealthy Northeast states (the Tri-State area plus Massachusetts) that account for the vast bulk of citizens paying more than they receive from the federal government.

Yeaaah… no. It only shows that under the default of 2018 BOP.

If you select the last primary tab and look at the 4 years tally, you will see a picture rather more inline with the "folk knowledge", including that while Californians have had a BOP just shy of positive from 2017, their negative BOP in 2015 and 2016 puts them rather into the negative for the 4 years period. Less so than the tri-state or Colorado, but the picture you're painting is at best misleading.

Yes, thank you for explicitly phrasing the problem the way I should have.

Cato has different numbers than Rockefeller.

https://www.cato.org/blog/winner-loser-states-centralized-go...

I've lived in multiple blue states, and they're all "losers" by this definition.

Note also that VA and MD are in this category for very different reasons than KY, AL and WV. Virginia and Maryland are extensions of the Washington, DC government complex (the Pentagon is in Virginia). A large portion of the Federal spending that goes to these states is direct expenditure (salaries, rents, purchasing) for goods and services, while for WV it's much more biased towards entitlement spending (social security, disability, Medicaid, Medicare).

Yeah, 100% agree, and I wish they'd do it for everything.

My state is in the same boat, and I don't mind the taxes, but if the states getting it are going to whine about it, I don't want to force them to take it...

Are you saying that its unfair that money is being taken from you(r state) and being spent on people you don't believe deserve it?

I'm saying that I think there are programs that are good and beneficial, and others call them "evil, wealth redistribution." Well, if that's the majority view in a state, and that state also takes in more Federal dollars than its residents puts in, then maybe for Defense spending they shouldn't be able to take money from another state. They can self-fund it. And if they can't maybe it makes more sense that the jobs that come from Defense spending should go to a state whose residents are willing and able to pay for it.

Yeah but you don't get a say. Only all of us as a collective gets a say. That's in the fundamental nature of taxation.

My alcoholic racist uncle who beats his family receives welfare check for his disability. I am clearly paying into the system and he hates me extra for being an in interracial marriage. I don't like to have my money go towards him, but guess what?

Same here. You don't like that your money is being spent on people against your wishes? You just discovered the true nature of taxation.

> You don't like that your money is being spent on people against your wishes?

No, I'm fine with it. But there are entire states run by dinks who HATE IT, and yet they take it, cursing me and people like me all the while.

I think it's possible we could trick them into agreeing to laws or even a Constitutional Amendment which would prevent them from benefiting from a system they say they hate.

I honestly think that in principle it would be easy.

"Should wealth be redistributed from one state to another?" "No!" "Wow, that was way easier than I thought."

I wish we could just simply hand the money over and skip the part where we create the demand for eternal wars and the killing and maiming of millions of people.

Better yet, don't take the money in the first place. Let people keep more of their legitimate earnings.

The wind gently whispers: socialism.

More like a UBI. Or extended social security.

Socialism's more about the community owning and managing the means of production, and less about just giving people money. You could make a good case that the F-35 program, with all its bloat and cost overruns and inefficient distribution of funds by congressional district, is typical of a socialist jobs program -- granted, the F-35 also has a layer of capitalist shareholders parasitically skimming off the top, but if that were removed, the political pressures that result in the inefficiencies would remain.

The F-35 program is indeed a lot like socialism. And I think the layer of skim off the top is well represented in centrally planned economies like the Soviet Union. It was taken by well placed government ministers rather than business oligarchs.

My comment was intended to be more tongue-in-cheek. People fear socialism, but capitalism is not the answer to all of the world's problems.

People have basic needs: safety, sustenance, shelter, self-determination. They have higher level needs too, and we aren't living in a post-scarcity society yet, but we have the resources to meet these basic needs for at least 328 million people.

I think it's high time for Puerto Rico to become a US state. Puerto Rico has twice the population of the two Dakotas combined and the only way they'll receive more-equitable treatment is if they become a state. I think the will is there locally but there has been resistance from established political factions in the US who fear a place that might tip the balance of power one way or the other.

I agree with you, and I'll go a step further. The US should not have any colonial territories or federal districts where US citizens live who have second-class rights compared to citizens of the 50 states.

That means DC, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa (collectively 3.8 million US citizens) should all be made states.

There are undoubtedly lots of issues and hiccups with implementing that, but fundamentally I think that having classes of citizens with abridged rights is wrong.

I'll go even further: find a way to grant them all the rights of citizenship (representation for their taxation) and let them decide for themselves on statehood. If there's any downside (I honestly don't know, maybe there is?), those people should be given the choice to determine their course of action for themselves.

But I agree completely, having people who pay taxes and can't access all the machinery of government they fund is criminal. (This also includes disenfranchised felons, but especially disenfranchised ex-felons.)

I think we're maxed out on this thread for who to enfranchise, which is good!

I believe one of the big downsides for citizens of Puerto Rico that has caused issues with the push for statehood is that they don't currently pay federal income tax. So it isn't exactly a taxation-without-representation situation, but they are obviously at the mercy of the US in many ways and don't have access to all of the levers of power that are available to others.

Witness the suffering at our delay in suspending the Jones Act (requiring two days of debate) during the Hurricane Maria relief campaign.

I doubt that Puerto Rico's lot would fundamentally change if they were a separate country though, they would still be largely at the mercy of their main trading partner and dominant regional power (the US).

I was also thinking of felons in my earlier comment, but it didn't quite fit my narrative. I don't find the rationale that they would just vote for there to be no laws particularly compelling.

PR residents are actively against the idea mainly because they don't pay fed taxes. only reason democrats are for the idea is because they believe it'll give them another two reliable seats in the senate.

PR residents voted in favor of statehood in a referendum[0] in the most recent election cycle. 52.34% voted in favor, based on a turnout of 52%.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Puerto_Rican_status_refer...

well that's new.... I was there back in 2017 and everyone I spoke to was very against it, and I remember when I looked up the stats they also showed the majority weren't for it. Still looks like it's a close issue, statehood is a big deal and affects everyone dramatically, kinda feel like it should have overwhelming support, not 51% of 52% of ppl... that's actually only 26% of eligible voters voting for it.

Would you believe, almost exactly the same proportion of the U.S. electorate that voted for Donald Trump in 2016?

What’s the relevance of that stat?

What? He got 46%.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/4/16385658/p....

> Puerto Rico is a US territory and not a state, so its residents don’t pay federal income tax unless they work for the US government. Even so, workers there pay the majority of federal taxes that Americans on the mainland pay — payroll taxes, social security taxes, business taxes, gift taxes, estate taxes and so on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Puerto_Rico_locations_....

> In 2017, Puerto Rico had a median household income of $19,775 — the lowest of any state or territory in the United States.

----

> PR residents are actively against the idea mainly because they don't pay fed taxes.

They do. They don't pay income tax which with their low incomes is marginal anyway.

Your argument basically boils down to: well they do pay some tax so they can pay more anyways... not a great argument.

They recently voted for statehood in a plebescite. I believe the official GOP platform does actually support statehood, but I'm of the view that GOP politicians and voters don't actually know what their platform is beyond revanchism

Obviously, they will official support it for cosmetic purposes of promoting “democracy”. In practice, however, they know it will cause them to lose power, so they won’t vote for it.

Same reason Washington DC residents don’t have representation in the Senate. Or why the popular vote does not matter for the president.

Washington DC isn't a state because it was literally created to not be a state.

If they want to give DC residents voting rights they should make it impossible to be a DC resident and instead anyone who lives within DC should vote as part of the state the land was taken from for federal elections.

That solves everyone's problems (well aside from the democrats who are trying to get another 2 seats in the senate).

Local issues should still be decided at the federal level because that's the whole reason it exists, so a state can't take the seat of fed gov hostage as happened in 1783 in philly.

If you don't want DC to be controlled by the fed then it should be swallowed by maryland or virginia. Making a single city a state unto itself doesn't make any sense unless you're specifically trying to make political hay.

DC has nearly the same amount of people as North Dakota.

Having two Dakotas doesn't make any sense from a political representation point of view either, but here we are.

two wrongs don't make a right.

That this is clearly a partisan issue for you in your own words instead of an issue of Americans receiving their due representation is disappointing.

One can ensure people have their due representation without making DC state. e.g., giving DC special senators and representatives in House (with regular voting powers) without making DC state (and thus keeping US congress exclusive jurisdiction over DC).

The fact that you feel so smugly confidant in your hyper-condescending self-righteousness is similarly disappointing. Especially because I gave two real solutions that make a lot more sense and you dismissed them out of hand because they're "partisan", when they're absolutely the opposite. both my solutions make a lot more sense from an objective standpoint, because they preserve the due representation and one of them also preserves the original intent in making DC independent.

It's kinda mindblowing that you can't identify your own hypocrisy right off the bat and actually posted this comment.

State creation has been partisan for much of this country's history for what it's worth. I find any excuse for not giving the district two senators and a representative (or more) to be unconscionable and based in partisan politics. You are welcome to argue otherwise.

Wait, so in your first comment you’re upset that I’m being partisan, and then here you’re saying it has to be partisan?

That’s quite the turn around.

You’ve also made some pretty bold claims without explanation. What makes you feel that it’s “unconscionable and based in partisan politics” to not give a single city two senators and instead follow the two options I proposed?

ETA: Your hypocrisy is brought into even starker relief with this comment. You’re like the people who were arguing for packing the courts (before the election) because it just makes sense (for whatever inane “nonpartisan” reason they could come up with), and then when asked “What if Trump wins?”, their face just drops...

Your proposed solution creates its own host of problems. Someone can't vote in a state unless they are residents of that state, subject to the laws and jurisdiction of that state. For example - what does it mean for DC residents to vote in, say, Virginia, for a Federal election. Who defines the Congressional districts? Do you pre-dictate to Virginia that it gets a Congressional district that matches the boundary of DC? What if that district has radically more or fewer residents than other districts in the state?

I'm seriously considering your proposal and not mocking it, but I don't think it's any more or less sensible, on its face, than creating a new "state". Note, I put "state" in quotes because I don't see why we can't dictate in that state constitution that the state is administered by Congress.

Evidence leads me to believe PR would be competitive. GOP primary voters are overwhelmingly racist though, so the politicians feel an imaginary sword hanging over their heads.

You don’t have to think anything, there are millions of boricuas across the US who will happily fill you in on how divisive statehood is and how little mainland politics factor into it.

Thanks but they had to establish their boricuas outside of PR to have any input which makes me discount their input against the idea.

They're better off becoming independent. There's nothing for them in the United States. The statehood cry is only coming from cynical democrats and corrupt business politicians in PR whose only interest is in trade with the US for their own benefit because they have financial connections to the US, not ordinary Puerto Ricans. The only reason statehood gets so high in these polls is that the commonwealth, free association and independence voters have been boycotting the plebiscites forever.

We need to adopt similar strategies for getting e.g. green energy production off the ground. Thinking of things like solar panel production.

There was a brief push by the government to encourage funding of things like Solyndra under Obama, but obviously that didn't all pan out.

I think that putting substantial funding into making the US the world leader in climate change related technology is such an obvious slam dunk that it defies belief for me that there seems to be no political will to do it.

Argue about the reality of climate change if you must, but the simple facts are that there is finite oil, finite coal, finite natural gas and the extraction and processing of those fuels is an expensive and dirty business. Of course solar, wind, hydro and nuclear don't compete yet -- how about putting in the same R&D money as fossil fuels? And when you make it work, the entire world will buy this tech from you. It could clearly be the US's next economic gold rush, after the Internet and post-WW2 manufacturing (and, I guess, the gold rush).

I do wonder if the economic approach is just doomed to be a non-starter, and if the faster way is to frame it as a national security issue. That leads to a number of other problems, but time is clearly of the essence and they know how to spend money over there.

> There was a brief push by the government to encourage funding of things like Solyndra under Obama, but obviously that didn't all pan out.

Obama-era subsidies of clean energy definitely panned out (though solyndra was a failure). Drive from California to Texas some time, and count the windmills. Those were subsidized at about the same time as solyndra.

From what I could tell from reading placards on the sides of the (many) convoys that deliver more on a daily basis, they’re mostly made by GE.

Similarly, rooftop solar was bootstrapped on top of those subsidies (though the Chinese won the panel manufacturing part of that industry, the US did well on battery technology).

Also, this hasn’t been so much a brief push as a sporadic push. The three blade giant windmill design was invented during California’s big wind power push in the early eighties.

I realize that I could have phrased it better. You're totally right that there were successes, I just meant that not all of the investments panned out. But also, that's what investing is: taking a risk.

I find it comical that it's often presented as a giant boondoggle when, as you say, the world is already greener as a result.

But you are still missing the point. The same program that lost many on Solyndra made the government money overall (despite losing it on Solyndra and a few others): https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/In-Gear/2016/1017/Solyndr...

I was asked to do a bit of robotics consulting for Solyndra. I figured that it wasn't going to work out when the guy we talked to took us to a conference room that looked too nice, and admitted that he hadn't been on the production floor in the next building before me and my buddy asked to go check that out.

We took the job anyway because it looked interesting, started doing the preliminaries, and when we went to get the test panels a couple weeks later, a FBI lady shooed us away from the parking lot as they were taping the building up.

Very weird.

I think that Solyndra was specifically a terrible choice for the government to make an investment in, but it was exactly the type of industry they should generally be investing in.

But I guess at least Seagate got a nice building out of it.

Seriously? Solyndra was being hailed as the pinnacle of American technology, during Obama’s era.

When it closed up shop, people were blaming China, again, for stealing American technology, and putting another good American company out of business.

But from your description, it sounds like Solyndra was a scam to part investors and the American government, with their money.

I think skuhn put this nicely up-thread. There were both successes and misses, and investing is all about taking risks with the understanding not all of them will pan out. Apparently the program was profitable on net.

Yeah, it was a little bit. [1]

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/08/solyndr...

Except there is money to be made in the green energy industry. There's no money to be made building a giant radio telescope. Sometimes corporations have a need for scientific institutions and their patronage helps keep the lights on but I really can't think of any way that can apply to something meant to stare at the stars. What could help is designing a radio telescope that have both scientific use and military use like China's telescope in Argentina. You have one user willing to pay plenty for time on it and another user that is just happy to get some work done.

As proof of your point, Arecibo was originally built as a military project with general scientific value as a bonus.

That money would be better spent building roads etc, fuck just give it for free to the worker. Some would end up running local businesses instead of stuffing offshore accounts.

> These insanely expensive defense projects are wealth transfer programs that make contractors like Lockheed and their many sub-contractors rich, and also create jobs in these communities.

I wish we'd go back to calling the "Defense Department" the "War Department" as it was originally called. And stop calling it "expensive defense projects" but "expensive war projects". Call it for what it really isn't. We aren't defending ourselves from anyone. We are the one's attacking everyone.

> The problem (partly) is that the F-35 program puts money into 307 congressional districts in 45 states [1]. These insanely expensive defense projects are wealth transfer programs that make contractors like Lockhead and their many sub-contractors rich, and also create jobs in these communities.

I agree with this. I've been saying for years that our military programs are giant socialist jobs programs in disguise (that unfortunately have the side effect of propping up the military industrial complex). If we were honest with ourselves and re-allocated that money to actual jobs programs we would get a much better ROI. Given the obscene amount of resources wasted we could reallocate a significant chunk of it without hurting our military preparedness one bit.

One important piece of military preparedness is having a population of experienced engineers, manufacturing infrastructure, leadership, R&D, etc. Institutional knowledge is very real. Weapons programs also simply take decades. You might be able to churn out web apps in a few months, but cutting edge aircraft, not so much.

What do we have? Unprecedented world peace. Why do we have it? American foreign policy.

You have to remember our military budget covers all of NATO in an intentional bid to reduce the military power of our allies which helps keep them peaceful.

> What do we have? Unprecedented world peace. Why do we have it? American foreign policy.

Wait, what?

There have been hundreds of armed conflicts going on around the world since the end of WW2, many of which were either directly instigated by the USA or at least involved the USA. There are dozens going on right now [1] some resulting in massive casualties. I don't think we will ever see world peace.

You don't mass-produce already-obsolete fighter jets in order to promote peace or as an innocent act of military preparedness and industry knowledge-building. You build them to fight war.

1;: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflict...

It isn’t about absolute peace, that is practically impossible.

It’s about relative peace, worldwide number of conflicts, casualty rate by population, geographical spread of conflicts, etc.

What is unprecedented is your chance of being killed in war has gone down substantially and stayed down after WWII. The types of conflicts have changed, civil wars now dominate, other types have gone down significantly or have been eliminated. There have not been conflicts between major military powers.

I worry about what happens when Pax Americana inevitably ends, as all things do, and if it will come in our lifetimes. I don't think that we have built a geopolitical system that will survive its absence.

Spending our money on a giant military behemoth makes sense in a mutually assured destruction / deterrence sense, but I think that approach only gets you so far. It also creates a gigantic war machine that exists only to find conflicts. The nuclear arsenal strongly deters conflicts from rising above a certain level (as long as rational people are on both sides...), but the rest of the machine gets put to use distressingly often.

You can't just stop funding it tomorrow, and you can't even really reduce its funding without considerable pain and risk, but we must find a way to transition more and more of our military power to economic and cultural diplomacy (which we also have always done, but which has been diminished in recent years).

I would sooner credit the 35th rule of acquisition ("Peace is good for business") than American foreign policy for the lack of a global conflict.

But then what changed between 1900 and 1945? We had two world wars between those years and nothing but small localized wars never between major powers after?

Weapons. We developed weapons that could sanitize the planet, and in the case that someone might challenge our intention to actually use them, we developed weapons that ran the spectrum so that war against us would always seem a major losing proposition. The only thing left is insurgency and proxy wars, always carefully enough to not trigger major action.

Given that game becoming economically codependent and the world is the best play for the available game, and then indeed “peace is good for business”.

Small localised wars??

Did you know that the Vietnam War had the biggest aerial bombardment in history[1], of all wars?

The body count in Vietnam easily exceeded 1 million and may be as high as 4 million[2].

Do you think that's a small, localised conflict?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bombing_campaigns_of_t...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War

Yes, I do. Another war between great powers in 1970 could have had a death toll in hundreds of millions.

Bad example. It's not to be confused with the 34th rule of acquisition (war is good for business).

>> the political incentives need to be fundamentally re-aligned.

Being the first president to announce the detection of an extraterrestrial intelligence would be a big deal. Clinton certainly jumped on the mic pretty fast when we thought life had been found on mars. Such possibilities could provide the political motivation to keep the next giant telescope funded.

It's an incentive to keep things going for up to eight years -- arguably only four.

"This needs maintenance or it'll collapse in five years" has little political weight if your term ends in four years.

Then let's build a new Arecibo-esque observatory in each of the 50 states and other territories. We'll combine all of them together to make the VLA look tiny. That'll be 120 employees multiple by the number of locations so we're talking > 6000 employees. Plus, all of that science.

Perhaps Lockheed should make a telescope that’s so big, it spans 45 States?

How spread out can the receivers in a Very Very Large Array be? My understanding is that with radiotelescopy they can be widely dispersed, but I'm far from an expert.

Really, you just need manufacturing/contractors in many places. This part built in Pennsylvania, that one in Michigan.

VLBI arrays [1] are networks of radio telescopes that combine data from multiple instruments spread out over a continent or the whole planet. A network like this emulates a continent-size or a planet-size radio telescope and produces radioastronomy's highest resolution images.

The most sensitive VLBI array is the European VLBI network [2] which spans the sort of scales you have in mind.

A VLBI array can also incorporate space-based nodes, see e.g. [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very-long-baseline_interferome...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_VLBI_Network

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HALCA

You do realize the money spent on these projects comes out of pockets of all taxpayers?

So we are really talking about wealth transfer from all taxpayers to some taxpayers who are usually doing well already plus huge losses on the way.

Obviously, there is a bunch of technology being developed that benefits US but let us not kid ourselves, it is not the most cost effective way of doing research.

I don't think the OP was at all suggesting that it's a good system. They were just explaining the current incentive structure.

And, unlike an F-35A, Arecibo has (sigh, _had_) a history of accomplishing its design goals.

RIP.

I think the F-35 is basically sorted, now, IIRC. The unit cost is down to about 85 million, which is far from cheap but roughly where a plane the does what the F-35 aims to do (As well as the different variants, the whole thing is designed to be an enormous airborne sensor fusion platform) should be.

I mean, this sounds nice and all, but it is CLEARLY false

James Webb Space Telescope: Proposed Budget: $500 mil Current Budget: $10 Billion

Space Launch System Current Budget: $20 billion

ITER: Proposed Budget : 22 Billion Euro Current Proposed Budget: 64 Billion Euro

There are lots of science projects that are funded. Some of them just get more attention than others

No, it's right.

> James Webb Space Telescope: Proposed Budget: $500 mil Current Budget: $10 Billion

That is over 40 years! Almost 30 years to build it and 10 years to operate it. That's $250 million per year.

> Space Launch System Current Budget: $20 billion

SLS is not a science program.

> ITER: Proposed Budget : 22 Billion Euro Current Proposed Budget: 64 Billion Euro

The proposed budget is 22 billion, not 64. That's for almost 40 years of construction and 20 years of operation. So we're talking 60 years of funding. Think about that, this is something that could revolutionize everything! Save the planet too. We're spending 360 million per year or so on it. That's absurd.

There are a few big science projects, and even they get very modest funding.

Let us put the F-35 into context. It will cost 1.7 trillion dollars for 55 years. That's an insane amount of money, 30 billion per year. https://www.stripes.com/news/us/pentagon-reportedly-estimate...

We fund science, which improves our lives and saves us from pandemics, at a pittance, and fund insane programs to bomb poor people at crazy levels.

It's funny you call out military spending, when military spending is what paid for this dish to be built in the first place.

NASA decided this dish wasn't worth even a few million a year in funding. Perhaps this dish simply wasn't worth maintaining? Which is the conclusion multiple organizations seemed to have settled on.

I’m very skeptical or maintenance quotes. It’s very rare something actually costs the government what it was quoted. For all we know it would have kept the satellite alive for barely another year.

Why did it fail? Was it a lack of ongoing maintenance?

Ultimately, it was old. It wasn’t designed to handle the stresses it experienced, and important things failed.

It is possible but far from certain that inspections could have found and fixed cable problems before ultimate failure.

The structure apparently was inspected several years ago and declared sound. I suppose one can always say "more thorough inspections!" but it looks like this was a surprise and would have happened on any reasonable budget.

You can design and inspect things like they were aircraft, but then everything you do is a large multiple more expensive. It’s hard to think of a one of a kind instrument that is an enormous outdoor installation failing after 57 years in operation is an outcome that deserves any blame.

It's also due to the nature of how it was built and assembled. You can't lower the big suspended machinery in the middle without dismantling the dish underneath it.

Damage from multiple hurricanes as well

Just say there are massive polar gold deposits on Mars. Funding solved end of next week.