Comments by "Lepi Doptera" (@lepidoptera9337) on "Should we defund academia?" video.

  1. Well, with the caveat that she is lying to you. ;-)
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  2. She is getting seriously wacky now. ;-)
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  3. Of course she is not crazy. She is a calculating troll who needs views. ;-)
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  4. Why are you telling us that you didn't go to an institution of higher learning? Is that supposed to make us like you better? ;-)
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  5. Bwaahahaha... two thumbs up. That really brought it down to the point. ;-)
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  6.  @ggzibugg  Neoliberalism is not anti-science. Neoliberal business people know exactly that they can't operate without academics. What you are seeing here is not neoliberalism. It's not even fascism. The Nazis were absolutely enamored with science and technology. They just didn't like the fact that Jewish scientists were the leaders in their fields.
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  7. So why are they defunding the NIH, then? Because doctors are treating people of all color? :-)
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  8. Westinghouse and GE NEVER funded astronomy or high energy physics. If you take the government funding out of academia (which no sane nation will do, and we can argue whether the US is still one of those), then you would simply lose all of your PhDs and MDs. The US makes way too few PhDs and MDs, by the way. Both of my cardiologists are from India and when I worked in DOE government labs myself we had roughly 40% foreign PhDs. Today it's more likely closer to 50% in those places.
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  9. @ If you are defunding academia then you won't get any brains at all. The best will simply move to wherever they still get to work on the research they are interested in. ;-)
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  10. The entire military industrial complex of the US is centrally planned. It is, most likely, by size the largest centrally planned economy in history. Works pretty well, for all I can tell. The US R&D system, which I was part of as an employee of the national labs, works extremely well. I have rarely seen organizations that were so efficient and well equipped to get the job done with lots of highly motivated and extremely intelligent people.
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  11. Sounds like the name of a porn star. ;-)
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  12. No they don't. Although some corporations are paying for part of the research by licensing it.
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  13.  @Cybrix  Sabine's usual complaint is that she was "overlooked" by the boy's club because she is a woman. ;-)
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  14. Why was she on that welfare, then? Why not have a "real job" in an Amazon warehouse instead? BTW... a postdoc salary barely pays the rent these days.
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  15. Academia didn't do anything. It works exactly the same as it did 100 years ago. Do you know what happened during the Bolshevik revolution to people in academia? Do you know what happened to them during the cultural revolution in China? They were accused of exactly the same "crimes" that you are hearing now on the internet. Do you know what happened to the USSR and China? Both countries fell 50 years behind because they destroyed their academic infrastructures. Neither has recovered, yet. Do you like to repeat other people's mistakes? :-)
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  16. @ Academics always do the same: they leave. Why? Because they can. Why else, do you think, did Einstein end up in the US... not because he wanted to. ;-)
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  17. @ I am in no way, shape or form responsible. I don't have a vote. Please use your mirror for guidance for who is at fault here. ;-)
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  18. @ I systematically have no vote in the US. Please talk to your mirror. ;-)
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  19. That is not true. Most of our research is being paid by taxpayer money, even in the US. It can't be any other way. There is zero corporate interest in things like astronomy, high energy physics, marine biology (or any other biology save very select topics related to medical research) and so on. Our output of research scientists with PhDs would drop to basically zero if we were to remove taxpayer money from the picture. You would not get any physicists, very few chemists, very few biologists and way fewer medical doctors educated. The US would collapse as a modern state within a few generations because there would be a total lack of people with sufficient knowledge about basic technologies like semiconductors and optical devices.
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  20.  @AdhiNarayananYR  And all the business people can tell you that that's more of a freak show than anything else. That's not how the financial industry actually makes money. Those physicists and mathematicians know that as well, but why refuse good money when it is being offered? ;-)
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  21. That's cool, Dude, but how do you imagine we raise around $1 billion a year for high energy physics in the US? With cookie sales? ;-)
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  22.  @Thomas-gk42  I spoke to a Trump voter once. Do you know why he voted for Trump? He wanted "creative destruction". What you call "fruitful debate" here is a euphemism for nothing but the explicit wish for destruction. It's not even hiding itself behind the word "creative" any longer. Absolutely nothing good can come out of such a mindset. We have been here before, by the way, during the Bolshevik Revolution, which destroyed science in Russia for a generation, and the Cultural Revolution, which has set China back by half a century. It still hasn't fully recovered. And that is, ultimately, the actual goal here. To destroy the West for good with a "cultural revolution" that will have similarly devastating effects. Who has an interest in that? The very countries that did it to themselves once, already.
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  23. That's why we also have the best healthcare money can buy. It simply takes a lot of money. The only reason to be against it is if you can't afford either and are jealous that other people can. ;-)
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  24. @ Huh?
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  25. @ Sarcasm doesn't translate on the internet. ;-)
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  26. How so? Most academic institutions are patenting their research and then they are licensing it to industry. That is, if anything, capitalism pure. ;-)
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  27. @ Why are you telling me that you have never been in an institution of higher learning? ;-)
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  28. @ You do, do you? :-)
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  29. @ You do, do you? ;-)
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  30. @My parents can't have children any longer. ;-)
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  31. @ Thank you for telling the truth for once, even if it was accidental. ;-)
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  32. @ Where you were trying to pull a Nigerian Prince scam on me. ;-)
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  33. @ And you weren't even honest. ;-)
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  34. @ And you still aren't. ;-)
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  35.  @JungleJargon  I don't spend much time on lies in general. ;-)
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  36.  @JungleJargon  No, I was always too busy laughing about kids like you who were cowering in fear in the back of science class. :-)
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  37.  @JungleJargon  I leave the bullshitting to you. ;-)
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  38.  @Cybrix  You are taking the cake for best projecting of the day. ;-)
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  39. @ See, you are doing it again. :-)
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  40. @ See, you are doing it again. ;-)
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  41. @ I am just feeding a lonely little boy some attention until Mommy comes home. :-)
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  42.  @Cybrix  And you are projecting again. ;-)
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  43. @ See, you are begging again. ;-)
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  44. @SabineHossenfelder Whipping up an unnecessary controversy will make sure that you never go hungry. You seem to enjoy throwing stones anyway, so keep throwing them. :-)
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  45. @ I did. All I found were some very lonely people on the internet begging for my attention. ;-)
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  46. During the Cultural Revolution the Chinese sent their academics to "reeducation camps", which were designed to basically destroy these people. As a result China fell 50 years behind and it still hasn't recovered. A similar thing happened in the Soviet Union.
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  47. @ Astronomy is people looking at the stars. Radio R&D is people looking at circuit diagrams. Kid, you need to get an education. ;-) At CERN there were approx. 8,000 PhDs and students working on one of the detectors and a similar number on the another during the peak of the construction. A smaller but still significant number of PhDs was needed to design and build the accelerator and support infrastructure. I would estimate that in total close to 100,000 academics (mostly PhDs and engineers specialized on scientific hardware) were needed for those experiments from start to finish over the over 30 years that LHC has been in the planning and running. If these are "small numbers" to you, then you have absolutely no clue what you are talking about.
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  48. @ I keep meeting high school drop outs on the internet who think that they are smarter than PhDs. Your self-assessment has the value of a snowflake in the Sahara. In any case, let me give you some more attention until your Mom comes home to fix your dinner. :-)
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  49. The US is probably graduating half of the PhDs the US economy needs and has been for many decades. How do I know? I am a foreign PhD who worked at several US national labs. How did I get there? The same way the other 40% of my immigrant colleagues got there: by active recruitment by the US government. ;-)
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  50. ​@ And there is the guy who doesn't know the science history of lasers. ;-)
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  51. Formula 1 is not a non-profit organization. I don't know why you think it would be. Maybe you also think that pro wrestling is a sport. ;-)
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  52. Almost all startups lose money for their investors and go under. Their technologies are rarely being picked up by competitors. If academia had that kind of loss, it would have been defunded many centuries ago. SpaceX is a very rich man's hobby. It's not making any money and it does not have to. ;-)
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  53. Did you hear that from Q? :-)
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  54.  @peppermintgal4302  In China it continued all the way to the 1960s. China still hasn't recovered from that.
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  55. Why did she dress up like a homeless person, anyway? Is that supposed to make her look desperate? ;-)
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  56. She wasn't "replaced" by an ethnic transgender female. The positions she applied to simply went to Caucasian and potentially Asian males who are better theorists than she is. ;-)
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  57.  @skyper94  You can ask Sabine how being a woman worked out for her. She promptly got hired by the best institutions just for the fact that women are poorly represented in physics. Oh.... wait. ;-)
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  58. @ In science you are being selected for the quality of your work. It's just very, very hard to deliver high quality work. ;-)
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  59. Corporations are paying most of the highest salaries that one can possibly get as an employee. That money has to come in one way or another.
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  60. Of course not. So that means that you won't have airports and highways, either, because most people will not want to pay for them. They only use them because they are there, not because they are actually willing to pay their cost. ;-)
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  61. @ You did? :-)
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  62. She is just fooling you for clicks. ;-)
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