Comment Re:Of course (Score 1) 107
People seem to feel that money spent on exploration has no valuable return! Yet they spend countless billions on food stamps and welfare, yet these also have no tangible return.
They lose sight of the fact that 99% of the money spent on exploration is for the purchase of items made on earth and represents the labor expended to produce whatever item.
Take gold - it is free in the earth, but we pay the miners to drill, dig, break rocks, extract etc, and ever stage is almost totally for wages to deal with a raw material. Same for wood products, fibers. plastics, metals etc.
Research means we pay thousands of people to do intellectually challenging and technically difficult tasks to gain knowledge. Welfare and food stamps means we pay millions of people to sit on their bums and do nothing. Welfare and food stamps are a $$ sink. Sure they allow people to live without effort, without intellectual challenge, yet why do we spend more and more to grow this welfare and food stamp industry? We have given excess voting power to non-productive elements of society. In Roman times, only citizens of the city of Rome had the vote - none in the others could vote, to get these few votes, the voters were bribed by the senators (the only politicians of the age) with food and entertainment, which came to be called "Bread and Circuses" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
The huge empire of Rome declined and fell due to various forms of mismanagement and some say, lead in the wine? The USA is not immune to this.
If the research that underpinned all the gains the USA and the world have made in the past 100 years is not continued, we will decline into a morass of welfare grubs. It might take a while, but the decline has begun and will accelerate. We need both democrats and republicans to be isolated from the lack of a private ballot.
We thing that seeing how a politicians votes gives us accountability - it does not, it gives the lobbyist accountability - he sees his bribes at work.
We need to break this pathway. Can we? The politicians have grown used to their well feathered nests and will peck at the hands of those who want to change things.