[StarvingLion]

Capital is totally destroying Science, the only antidote to Peak Oil, and the Physicists are now in complete agreement as to the guilty party:

https://thiscondensedlife.wordpress.com ... iometrics/

"This raises a number of questions in my mind. It is well-acknowledged within the community and even the blogosphere that the focus on publication number and short term-ism within the condensed matter physics community is detrimental. Both Ross McKenzie and Doug Natelson have expressed such sentiment numerous times on their blogs as well. From speaking to almost every physicist I know, this is a consensus opinion. The natural question to ask then is: if this is the consensus opinion, why is the modern climate as such?"

There is no mystery...this physicist says it loud and clear:

Neoliberalism (Capital). The maggots that the americandream(er) creep hangs with.

http://condensedconcepts.blogspot.ca/se ... liberalism

The Physicists are given the hopeless task of making the solar cell replace all of oil and coals functions. And what do the maggots of Capital do to help them? The parasites consume the host and fly away. What a disgrace those bum cokeheads are.

[americandream]

Capital is the accumulation you live by, doofus. It is not the banks or the traders, its the extra buck you make from using your investment. Man, some people are dim.

[SeaGypsy]

Common scientific awareness has become drastically uncommon over the last few decades. Evidence abounds that most people haven't the slightest clue about scientific method. This ignorance provides fertile ground for all kinds of pyramid schemes, often not even attempting to obscure the fact, apparently comfortable in the awareness so few people can see obvious flaws in logic that their impact on marketing will be somewhere between negligible & non existent. Since governments set the primary syllabus of education, willfully encouraging the death of science, blame must primarily fall to government. Since government has become the agent of capital along the same timeline & the emergence of the neocons fits perfectly, the conspiracy is obvious.

AD's psuedo-scientific psycho babble is utterly valueless to me, I see him as a severely socially retarded weirdo who manages to impress some folks here with his rhetoric, probably for the same reason as described in the first paragraph.

[americandream]

Aaaaaahhhhhh. Gobble gobble gobble. Damnit. How difficult is this shit.

I got a buck. I make widgets using joe at 20 cents a pop for his labour. That buck is capital, I sell said widget for a buck and a half, the half a buck is my profit.

Duh!!

[JimBof]

The problem is short term W***ing. Nobody is prepared to wait 5 or 10 years for a return.

Pure science does not make an obvious return so is being ignored. The problem is the results of pure science make everything else possible.

[americandream]

The problem is short term W***ing. Nobody is prepared to wait 5 or 10 years for a return.

Pure science does not make an obvious return so is being ignored. The problem is the results of pure science make everything else possible.

R&D is an overhead. It is always going to be an overhead and difficult to capitalise unless you can sweetalk an angel investor. Thats just the nature of the game. You take the risk and if it works you then capitalise on it. That is capitalism...risk, then reward.

[americandream]

Example...some dude in New Zealand has just invented a hands free wheelchair......he has a working model he built with his own money and now he is crowdfunding its movement to market.

[Outcast_Searcher]

The problem is short term W***ing. Nobody is prepared to wait 5 or 10 years for a return.

Pure science does not make an obvious return so is being ignored. The problem is the results of pure science make everything else possible.

You're right in principle, but WAY OFF on the timeframe. Pure science (i.e. "basic") research has a typical payoff period in multiple decades. Call it 30 to 50 years.

So, companies like IBM, which used to do lots of basic research are now focused on targeted applications research -- because they want a time frame of more like 5 or 10 years on the return. And private companies are willing to wait 5 or 10 years, lest you think fully autonomous cars and Watson clones will blanket the earth in 3 years, to cite two examples.

Pushing for ever-higher tax rates on corporations (of which the US has the third highest in the world, of course disincentivizes such research. But since Bozos like Obama think that too much profit is bad, then long term scientific research suffers.

http://taxfoundation.org/article/corpor ... world-2015

[americandream]

The problem is short term W***ing. Nobody is prepared to wait 5 or 10 years for a return.

Pure science does not make an obvious return so is being ignored. The problem is the results of pure science make everything else possible.

You're right in principle, but WAY OFF on the timeframe. Pure science (i.e. "basic") research has a typical payoff period in multiple decades. Call it 30 to 50 years.

So, companies like IBM, which used to do lots of basic research are now focused on targeted applications research -- because they want a time frame of more like 5 or 10 years on the return. And private companies are willing to wait 5 or 10 years, lest you think fully autonomous cars and Watson clones will blanket the earth in 3 years, to cite two examples.

Pushing for ever-higher tax rates on corporations (of which the US has the third highest in the world, of course disincentivizes such research. But since Bozos like Obama think that too much profit is bad, then long term scientific research suffers.

http://taxfoundation.org/article/corpor ... world-2015

Aaahhh....credible link strikes again.

[ennui2]

So, companies like IBM, which used to do lots of basic research are now focused on targeted applications research

IBM is a shell of its former self. You can't expect them to operate the same way as they did 30+ years ago. Laying the blame on Obama is ridiculous. Short-term profits is how capitalism works today, period. Those that have bucked that trend have faced withering criticism every step of the way, like Jeff Bezos running up huge debts with Amazon and now Musk running up huge debt in order to scale Tesla up.