The problem of course is that lots of people have their special interest (hence the term "special interest groups") and when they argue with each other they all say it's obvious someone else has too much money and you should take it from that guy over there and leave them alone
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy and
I think there's a lot of billionaires who need taxing, and I think there's a whole military-industrial complex that could use defunding Lots of people agree with me on that
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy and
The problem being the billionaires have trained attack dogs that fight viciously in their defense and the national security people have half the country convinced that relaxing the Pentagon budget even by a few percentage points will lead to their kids all speaking Mandarin
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy and
So we are where we are The problem is that I think very visible stuff like NASA, whose "practical benefit" is hard to articulate, becomes a lightning rod during hard times But I continue to maintain whether you love or hate space stuff it is not that big a deal
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I'm absolutely fucking disgusted by NASA because it epitomizes the fascist "cells of the body" view of humanity by justifying all current world suffering as a necessary down payment for some hypothetical glorious future for a handful of hypothetical people we will never be
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Replying to @Nymphomachy @arthur_affect and
Whom we are not, whom we will never get to be The Bidenist neoliberal view of "look, buddy, progress comes in increments", while *we literally do not have the fucking luxury of increments* This idea that the years of our lives are fungible—that what we need now is fine tomorrow
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Well that's any kind of big-picture research then isn't it Do you feel the same way about the Large Hadron Collider, and the even more abstract study of very tiny particles to try to figure out how the universe started billions of years ago
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The Large Hadron Collider seemed cool in the naughts when I had no idea that I was going to live through a pandemic ravaging civilization almost completely unchecked and now I'm disappointed both in what it delivered and what people feared it would deliver, that it did not
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Replying to @Nymphomachy @arthur_affect and
So yeah I'd rather we'd not have built it It confirmed the Higgs boson was real, right—we already pretty much thought it was, didn't we I'd rather that money had gone towards preventing the likes of Bolsonaro, Xi Jinping, Duterte, Erdogan et al from coming into power
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Replying to @Nymphomachy @arthur_affect and
Maybe it couldn't, idk But if it were going to cost as much money as it did, we certainly didn't get much out of it in the end So yeah it's kind of a disappointment it didn't form a giant black hole and consume the entire planet or something
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Enh I see this kind of thinking as a fallacy It comes from playing games like Civilization, like there's a "player" who is the Absolute Dictator of Earth and could just move money (or the resources money represents) around at will
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy and
Nobody has that power Like even if you, like Oliver Cromwell, dismissed all of Congress and became a tyrant and ruled the US federal government and its budget with an iron fist, you wouldn't control the whole US *economy*
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy and
The Soviets tried to do that -- the goal of a planned economy where the people in charge could just tell everyone in the country "Everyone work on this problem until it's solved" and it would happen Ironically the Space Race was specifically an attempt to prove this model worked
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