I think there’s a critical mass of people who compare it to the “Green Revolution” in agriculture. They regard Malthusianism as a delusion that fails to recognize technological change.
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There’s a lot of side effects from next to everything.
Teflon was discovered when tetrafluoroethylene was examined as a potential refrigerant, and was found polymerized in the bottle. Then it was pushed into mass manufacture for the Manhattan Project. Which was indirectly kickstarted by Werner Heisenberg.
Many ways to deal with this. It’s still annoying, though.
Mostly, please, into the tools and instrumentation! These are the catalysts for further progress. With suitable prioritization put into research of methodology, the process can get autocatalytical.
On a side news, check out the new improvement of CRISPR. They found out that the positive-charged amino acids around the active site are causing false positives; the enzyme was genemodded to have neutral acids there, and the selectivity jumped up. Just an example.
Very much of it is applied science now.
Very interesting things were done even before the CRISPR. The major obstacle to deployment here, at least in Europe, are the cowardly governments with heads up their arses.
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Not stupid, it’s a silly place. Silly. (Do I need to post more Graham Chapman pics?)
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I’d have better chance to get laid in a silly place. So that. 
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And then, right after the end of WWII, about 2000 German rocketry scientists got to the USA and around 3000 were in the Soviet territory, but only a fraction of them were redistributed to other parts of the USSR for work on Russian missiles. Numbers aside, the USA got all the important guys early (von Braun and his team). Many of the guys we got had their backgrounds “scrubbed” of Nazi past, as part of Operation Paperclip. I don’t know what percentage of Nazis we imported.
Without the top guys, though, and their ability to say, “Oh hey, Frankenheimer knows about that; we got him, right?” …we would not have had a moon program. We could not have designed the Saturn V and everything leading up to it in the time frame that we did it, without those guys.
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Ironically, the prefix ultimately derives from an ancient Greek word for “pilot” (probably I steer a boat or an ox-cart, but still!
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For me taking off was always a piece of cake. Landing trickier - but once you get the hours in it’s all easier than driving. It does take a fair amount of humility and patience. Weather matters a lot more if you’re in the air.
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Taking off is optional. Landing is mandatory.
Fascinating.
A photo released by the White House showed the president and advisers gathered around a video phone, inside what looked like a standard blue tent, erected on the hotel’s floral carpets.
Apply palm directly to the face…
Maybe Fueltopia could stand for the futile reliance on fossil fuels.
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Dammit, I wanted to hear that. No fair.
I take back my 90% statement, and am going to embellish it. I would invest more heavily in public health and health education than any of this other R&D stuff. R&D under the @awjt administration would definitely get a hefty boost, but direct military appropriations would see a stiff decrease and concentration on protecting our interests with as little expense as possible. The 1% and .1% and higher would be on watch, too, as well as corporations with offshore holdings.
We didn’t start the Darktopia/Fueltopia thread yet, but this rant should go in it.
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Tobin tax?
Nobody talks about it anymore, but that would be the first thing to do. Maybe 0.01% on all trades?
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Yes, that.
“… as if millions of high-speed traders suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.”
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I’m also in favor of incentivizing innovations in the sciences and humanities. “Impact factors” are difficult to construct and are game-able, but I bet we could experimentally/iteratively design an impact factor that measures the reach of innovations and allows the creation of a meritorious reward system.
Under a meritorious system, .001%ers could still exist, but they’d have gotten there by wits, personal sacrifice and hard work, perhaps even some of them by cutthroat guile, and most of the pure-luck trust-funders and hedge-funders would be out of the picture. The speculators and accumulators with no real skills are the drag on our collective progress.
If the fat cats didn’t exist and the innovators and thinkers were elevated in their place, we would not have the pure-profit-motive, screw-the-environment capitalist pigs turning the Earth into a sewer. Innovations that emphasize efficiency, harmony and improvement would rule.
Or course this could be poorly implemented. But anything can be poorly implemented.
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Fucking high speed traders. Even the most dyed in the wool, egotistical libertarian should froth at the mouth at the mention. They do two things, skim artificial value and distort markets. If those assholes want to play the economic equivalent of Robot Wrestling, go do it by yourselves.
We need a new name for them. How bout High Speed Grifters?
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*new member @themostdyedinthewoolegotisticallibertarian joins bbs*
“Hey, don’t tell me what I should froth at the mouth about!”
ETA: (although, honestly, he’s probably been a member for years, we should just ask him where he stands…)
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I kinda want that username now…
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I kinda want to start a band called The High Speed Grifters…
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