Virtually every major technological objective of the modern era has failed: the superconducting supercollider, the “Star Wars” missile defense, the joint task force fighter, and dozens more.
The American people got nothing out of these trillions of dollars in research investment other than a global community of arrogant academics with specious resumes populated by irrelevant accolades.
One of President Clinton’s last major incentives was to get $1 trillion appropriated for repair of schools around the nation – mostly mechanical and structural repairs (EXCLUDING the $1 trillion in new equipment needed to comply with the dubious Freon Ban). This was needed just to get the buildings up to the 1990 Building Code.
The cost is likely three times that now. So, while the scientific community was building $3 trillion of projects that never panned out; the public schools were going in the red to the tune of $3 trillion. We owe it all to the enormous influence of special interests in Washington.
Then there is the case of the Israeli Defense Forces. For decades they have taken the best American technology – jets, missiles, armaments – and improved upon it, creating all together the most sophisticated arsenal in the world. The problem is that they do not share ANY of their technology back with the United States.
It’s an insult for our largess to be spurned so arrogantly. We funded their “Iron Dome” defense system. Now they won’t share one bit of it with us.
Americans invest enormous sums into our institutions of higher education. Over eighty percent of all basic research in the world is done on American university campuses. The American people fund all that, but most of the benefit goes to all the other nations in the world. We spend all our money and manpower on fundamental research; they spend all theirs on practical applications.
The classic example is Japan – they do virtually no basic research; but have the most sought after cars and electronics in America. Their products are cheap – even after shipping them around the world – because they have no research and development overhead to pay for; just technological innovation.
The crafts – carpentry, mechanics, and such – are not normally categorized as technology; but they are vital to the development of advanced technology nonetheless. The famous naval historian Alfred Mahan wrote that the South lost the Civil War because they did not have enough people in the trades.
Increasingly, America is becoming the same way because of cheap migrant labor. The American construction industry has become dangerously addicted to this cheap labor; and the American work force has become seriously disassociated from the fundamental crafts because of it.
Macintosh marketed a new PC a couple of years ago that they advertised as having dual processors. The effective speed was doubled, but the incremental increase in cost was nil because older central processor chips are virtually worthless. I’m quite sure the entire computer industry would LOVE to keep increasing the costs of their PC’s while just using two, then three, then four, etc.. paralleled chips.
The technology is there – the aerospace industry can parallel hundreds of chips easily – and the greed as well.
Not long ago, the company that manufactures the machines that make chips announced a huge loss – while the rest of the industry was doing quite well – what more evidence do you need? They don’t need new machines if they’re still making the same old chips, now do they?
Science funding is a complex business. Congress funded the Hubble telescope, for example. Then they indirectly funded the thousands of scientists and their research projects who have made an entire industry of evaluating the data from the Hubble.
The complete cost of the Hubble, then, is hundreds if not thousands times what the device itself cost. The same will probably happen with the data coming from the Mars survey missions. The American people need to reconsider their absolute trust in everything scientists say or do or think or plan.
Beginning in the late 90s, tens of thousands of high tech workers were given visas to come work in the U.S. Congress now regularly award 70,000 new visas a year to high tech immigrants. Just last month they upped that to 150,000.