A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
Say it with me:
No. Research. Is. Useless.
If we say that research is useless because it doesn't bring you mo ey we could stop teaching children math beyond the absolute basics because "it doesn't brinf them anything". This is stupid, because those are the fundamentals that tech children to thing logically and become useful member of society. Same with research. It teaches us the things necessary to maybe invent some of the most useful stuff ever seen
I’m too stupid to understand. How does this all connect?!
Its actually quite simple. Snaily often eat crops and thereby reduce the production of said crops. The more snails reproduce, the more crops will be eaten. When you know how their reproduction works you can start looking for solutions on how to reduce their reproduction (and so the production of crops).
reproductive habits of some insects are of critical importance in pest control in agriculture
natural product chemists (it's a subfield of organic chemistry) find and identify new weird shit in obscure organisms (esp marine organisms) all the time. because amounts are tiny, then their work is on synthesis of the same thing. some of these turn out to be useful
Roasts are equally lost on them, these people only understand bullying
Yes! I was just reading a few scientific articles about the mating patterns of darkling beetles. (not a gov't employee tho)
It's also helped develop advances in flight, metamaterials, physics.
But Barbie makes a good point with a meme about how she treats her cuck husband.
"preventing next corn plague" with resources used being a box of soil and bunch of underpaid grads seems pretty efficient to me, but i guess that since the common clay of the new west already voted they can be safely disposed of
at USDA, they're turning beetles kinky! 😡
The Onion buying Infowars is the only good news I've heard this week.
Yeah, we've been studying the sex lives of various different animals (including ourselves!) for centuries now, yet nobody bat an eye until now. 🙄
In addition, government research in the sciences is miniscule. You could cut ALL of science funding and be no where close to the 1 trillion that Musk claims he'll be able to reduce the budget by
He actually claimed 2 trillion.
I knew Elongated Muskrat was a dumbass but I didn't know he also can't do math.
I don't think he even attempted to do math. Someone asked him about it and said what the current budget was, and he just rectally sourced 2 trillion. I assume he said that because it's big enough to sound huge, but less than half of spending so people don't panic that everything will be cut.
It's meaningless bullshit until he actually says specifically what will be cut. Republicans have been claiming they can cut huge chunks of spending for years, but it never materializes. They only know how cut government income without paying for it.
Regardless, he'll claim he cut 500 bajillion dollars no matter what he ends up doing
My bet is that if he expects to cut 2 trillion, he will end up increasing the budget by 4 trillion.
Now if he could start making cuts to the military…
How dare you threaten the poor defense contractors.
also, entire military is just under 1tn - all of it, including completely nonmovable things like nuclear silos and submarines. ripping enough copper from the walls to get 2tn would involve massive cuts to social security and healthcare, and maybe education. but nooo heavens forbid that progressive tax on income be introduced
The DoD itself spent $820B in 2023. To get over $1T, you also have to include veterans benefits, like the VA hospital system.
The full bill for Vietnam started coming 20 years after the fact as all those veterans got older and started heavily using the benefits they were promised. From the start of the War on Terror, we're about at that same point right now. So unless the plan is to rug pull those benefits from people who really need them, then there's going to be a huge bill coming that no amount of efficiency trimming can ignore.
If Democrats did the rug pull, Republicans would cry bloody murder. If Trump did it, they will cheer him on while veterans suffer.
i, for one, would like to see more air defense assets going to Ukraine
Genuinely why bother at this point
"hey why bother going against a nationalist land grab? i am the real antiimperialist" gee i wonder
most of the rest can be made in europe, even if it would require some scaling up of production
e:
i can see you have came here with your instance-issued portable public opinion influence brigade. will you bitch and moan again when you get defederated from another instance?
nationalist land grab
Is that what you actually think this is? Russia, famously lacking land.
If your "defence of democracy" requires replacing a democratically elected government with a nazi puppet regime in a violent coup, supporting that regime as it commits 8 years of terrorism against its minorities, and forcing it to kidnap old men to the front lines to keep the profitable meat grinder going...maybe you're not actually doing anti imperialism? Just a thought. Like when the swastikas came out and the genocide in Palestine kicked off, you should have realized we're the baddies, and baddies lie.
But epistemology aside, why bother from a practical standpoint? The war is over. Anything sent over at this stage is either going to the scrap heap or a military warehouse in the Russian Federation. Also lol, you will not be scaling up domestic weapon production to any meaningful degree, because we, the US, blew up Europe's pipeline and ate it's energy sector, and now Volkswagen can't even keep making it's cute little nazi cars.
The point is not gain of land for Russia but removing land from another state, as a punitive measure for trying to get away from russian influence. This is also not the first time it is happening. Because of how nationalist Putin's supporters base has become over time, he chose to use small invasions like 2008 invasion of Georgia as a tool to increase his domestic popularity. This parallels 1999 false flag bombings and response in form of second Chechen war and 2014 invasion of Donbas. In all these cases, as well as for two first weeks of 2022 war, approval rating of Putin's government soared which was exactly the point the entire time. Because of how much of that comes from nationalists, he can't back off because he'd come across as weak and lose support, he can't advance much faster because he's physically unable to, and his best bet is this kind of slow grind like we see now. Any western military aid will make it harder, so of course russian influence operations are directed against it, and you know that too
Also you will not be scaling up domestic weapon production to any meaningful degree
Speak for yourself. Orbital ATK buys european explosives, we have scaled up weapons manufacture in France, Germany, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Czechia and few others, there are new Rheinmetall plants in Ukraine too.
Ukrainians don't lack resolve. In 2022, something like 85% (iirc) said that fight should go on if nuclear weapons were used by Russia. Even now 80%-ish don't think that any territorial concessions should take place in any peace agreement. They have some of their own defense industry, lots of things (other than mostly air defense, and parts of aircraft manufacture) we can do in Europe, even if it requires some scale up, then there's South Korean deliveries and few other things that still can happen.
Like when the swastikas came out and the genocide in Palestine kicked off, you should have realized we’re the baddies, and baddies lie.
who the fuck "we" is supposed to mean there? in middle east i wish everyone involved regime change, situation is fucked with any of current people in power staying in power. Put Netanyahu, Assad, Erdogan, Khamenei and their cabinets and top people from Hezbollah in Hague then we can talk. but it's severely off topic so maybe don't
Love to see a Westerner demanding regime change in Arab countries and calling other people imperialists.
Didn't realize George W Bush was computer literate enough to use a reddit clone.
I, for two, would like to see the same
And so the US lost decade becomes the medieval dark ages
It'd be fascinating as an outsider if the choices made by the US didn't basically impact everything, everywhere.
I thought we were done with the "medieval dark age" myth.
How’s Neo-Feudal Gilded Age strike you?
One giant leap forward, one roundhouse kick back.
Sure, that's great but it's not even the point. Fundamental research and other type of "useless" scientific endeavors help humanity as a whole to better understand our universe but would never be privately funded because they don't have any concrete and immediate financial benefits. This is precisely what a government should finance, because no one else would do it and yet it's small stuff like that that make us collectively move forward as a species
Musk fans don't want humanity to advance. They hate technological progress.
For OTHERS, yes. But many want the cutting edge for themselves, at no cost to themselves.
