Like advertisements, right? Those one or two ads you see don't make you buy the gizmo because you are a sophisticated consumer who doesn't pay attention to ads.

And yet, there are entire marketing departments who can show you precisely what their ad dollars bring in. Why should you assume VGs have no effect until they reach some unspecified saturation level far above any ads you'll be subjected to in the course of a day?

Nope. Most scientists want to do pure science, that's why they got into it. Very few scientists working in industry are doing pure science. Even now, financial concerns are pushing academic scientists into the more applied realm so that unis can suck their research for royalties.

Embracing capitalism means you'll be out of job after 40 or 50 unless you have achieved that pinnacle of moral impropriety, management. Many "research" departments have been abandoned on the altar of capitalism. IBM is whacking theirs, HP has already given up the ghost. Strangely, the chemical industry has done better, but they too are getting invaded by pencil necked MBAs intending to further their early MBA retirement. Private industry is precisely where you do not go if you are interested in science, but not for political concerns. Scientists aren't that stupid.

Most scientists do not get grant funding. There goes your theory.

" they do agree on what the next "hot topic" is: curing cancer, social media, whatever"

Nope, academics of maybe 500 years ago would straddle enough areas to have valued opinions on what the next big thing is. These days, to get a PhD in, say, Physics, means you pretty much stay to Physics and your particular area of Physics.

And agreeing with common thinking won't get you funding. If your grant proposal reads like litany of what's already believed, you'll get no funding because you aren't doing anything new. That does not include attempting to field a theory proposing that gravity is all wrong and doesn't exist.

Admittedly, there is a balance between proposing something entirely new as opposed to something which is merely adding epicycles to an existing theory. Most research is of the latter types these days because most of the low hanging fruit is already picked. There is also a balance between "I'm going to prove gravity incorrect" and "I'm going to investigate how well gravity correlates to known star motion." The first gets labeled "crackpot", the second gets labeled, "might be interesting".

Well, as the climate change policies have only been proposed, it seems a bit ludicrous to ask for scientific evidence they won't achieve their goals. Hint, they've never been tried before, probably because no one realized climate was such a problem.

However, science is here to deliver you from ignorance. You do not have to *believe* in man induced climate change in order to figure out dumping a lot of extra CO2 into the atmosphere is a bad move. The oceans are acidifying because of the CO2. You recall the ocean from grade school, yes? Base of the food chain? Ring a bell? Just a hunch, screwing up the base of the food chain probably won't end well...maybe you require scientific evidence for this as well.

Nice straw men. Try comparing murder rates between Europe where guns are hard to get and the U.S. where guns are easy to get. Comparing U.S. cities is just silly.

We let well-trained (in most cases) police and body guards carry weapons, unless you live in Texas where just about any yokel can arm up. Now that should make you feel real safe, eh? Now, let's make sure only the non-crazy people get those permits to carry a gun. How do you tell which are the crazy ones? You just have to ask them.

It isn't just HR, it is the entire rest of the company. The problem with is that they have no understanding of what a well-fit team can accomplish or how different individuals can contribute. You wouldn't want an organization where everyone had the same skills....hmmm...yet that's what Agile Nonsense aims at. One wonders if it isn't just a management tool in the naughty sense of tool.

And if capitalism decrees that workers older than 40 should not be allowed to work any longer, we should salute capitalism because it has achieved optimum performance? Capitalism does a lot of things well, but it does a lot of things poorly as well. It underlies uninsurance companies cherry picking only healthy people, leaving government to pick up the tab on the uninsured and sick leftovers. Them includes many of those over 40 which no longer have jobs.

Capitalism doesn't do well with pollution, it rewards passing that pollution onto someone else to clean up, probably government. It doesn't do well with global warming where it cannot point the finger quickly enough at those causing the problem since it may not be a problem until 40-50 year after the pollution that causes it, leaving government to figure out what to do.

Capitalism doesn't do well in funding poor people to go uni so they'll get better jobs since they have precious little capital to secure the loans necessary to go, leaving government to provide those loans in its stead. Capitalism gives us payday loan sharks so the gullible get gulled more often, many of these tend to hold low paying jobs with little education leaving government to pick up the tab.

See a trend here?

We have allies? Where? Name one who isn't a disarmed weenie.

You must mean something like scientifically driven baseball which relies heavily on statistics. Just about all the major teams use it now.

However, it's already been done in a perverse form, Clinton used polls to see what he believed that week, Hillary is no better. The Republicans were so horrified that they've decided to become ideologues incapable of changing any belief contradicted by facts or science.

At its base, politicians don't have it in them to understand science or how it works. Science doesn't provide directions, it provides limits, something anathema to politicians. Providing a direction requires a sixth sense, not ideological fervor or its close cousin, ideological fever.

Ideology also provides limits, but they are brittle limits and temporally centered, the might work for a time (as in zeitgeist) but then the turn rancid and rot creating a stench around those holding on to them for too long. Scientific limits have a much longer shelf life and will get jettisoned if found faulty. Ideology admits no self-correcting mechanisms. This makes them tailor made for politicians because to change one's beliefs required hard intellectual thought. If they were capable of that, they'd have become scientists.

Yeah, you are right, we should all only have sellable careers because the world and the U.S. doesn't need to learn any history. Maybe you figure we'll be better automatons if we all have tech majors?

That said, she's a dolt, but not because she studied Medieval history.

Well, that and it is so tidy that they are attempting to get NASA out of the sort of science that tells the Republicans they have shit for brains.

Yep, and Rand is really stand up guy. He didn't want to go through the opthamologists boards in Kentucky, so he created his own board and self-certified under that. He's also claimed he has a biology degree, which he doesn't. He does have a medical degree from Duke, though, maybe he got them confused. He's also been caught plagiarizing wikipedia.

Yep, agile strikes me as shoot from the hip design philosophy. Have something complicated to produce? Produce a small bit of it, then add to that, then add to that, then refactor (if possible), then add to that, etc...until you have reached Massive Dirty Snowball. Now stop screwing around (for the "stakeholders"), throw it out, and design something quickly...but continue to have sprints, daily meetings, reflection meetings, meetings with managers, etc...until you are getting nothing done. Now stop, take a deep breath. Shoot the "stakeholders", and get proper teams set up, get a proper design, get proper coordination, and tell the scrum leader to shove it.

Republicans scare me as well, but so too do the Democrats. Who thought turning over even more health care to the insurance companies was a good idea? They're the slimeballs who screwed it up in the first place. And try to get Democrats to understand the problem we'll have paying for all entitlements when they come due. They look at you like you are from Mars, claiming, by the way, the SS trust fund has x dollars in it. Really? The SS trust fund is merely an accounting device. The Democrats actually do think there is a giant mattress stuffed with x dollars hidden away somewhere. They do not understand, and have no way of understanding, that it will come out the hides of working people at the time it comes due. No amount of flim-flam accounting is going to change that.

Democrats also believe in the Biden Foreign Policy of acting like a scared rabbit because then the rest of the world will like us. The world order is somehow going to be preserved from the likes of China and Putin all by itself, that the militarily self-decommissioned Europe won't be cowed by a resurgent USSR that Putin is putting back together. See the Estonians for how much this vision excites them. They somehow believe the trade the U.S. does will not change with a Chinese and Russian centered world, or that the Islamists will be satisfied only fighting among themselves. They believe in the bunny world Biden has promised them and Obama believes he is delivering.