Ooh - '60's canadian TV gets automatic upvote from me.

Oh, those innocent days when most of Canada was still forest, the main soure of transportation was either dogsleds or canoes without engines, and interactive venues were limited to transistor radios and fishhooks that were accidently embedded in your earlobes...

*nostalgic sigh...

That being said: who was the dumbass that gave those eight-year-old kids a hatchet and dumped them in front of a frickin' forest fire?

^ I'm trying to figure out what the point is that you're trying to make. Are you trying to say that because you're highly educated, and working in the field of science, you should automatically be guaranteed higher pay and benefits than a factory worker?

Is it just to say that the situation is unfair, and the unfairness is being caused by unions?

Now, let me say, I generally agree that the situation seems backwards. Our society should value the services of people doing pure research more, and by that I mean more funding for the research itself, as well as better pay/benefits for the workers.

But unions don't create that problem. In a capitalist economy, everything has to show a return on investment. Pure research usually doesn't produce results that can bring a monetary return that exceeds the money spent to produce the result.

Under the market paradigm, this means we should spend fewer resources on pure research, because they're something of a long shot investment -- you might discover something really useful, like a transistor, or you might just figure out that bisphenol A causes medical problems over long periods of exposure, which just means the government is going to make you spend a lot of money for no reason.

Organizations that unify people around the cause of improving the societal valuation of pure research don't hurt. It might even help improve pay & benefits for your type of work.

Don't call it a union though, because then they'd be subject to a lot of animosity for no apparent reason.

^no offense, but wikipedia pages are less than 3 pages. you think you can become an expert on the transistor or its history by reading 3 pages? how is that proof that incentives made them progress faster? wikipedia is not a sufficient source, and I doubt any source exists (how could you compare the progression of the transistor with and without government incentives if it wasn't developed in parallel--one with regulation and one without, with the exact market conditions. there is just no way to prove what you are saying is true. even if the government did fund these projects, how can you say they would not have been successful without funding? if it was a legitimately good idea, it would be profitable and many people would be interested in investing in it. many such examples abound on a local level every day.

you are a scientist. so can you humor me for a second, and try to think of any possible way you could generate funding to support your projects without government assistance?

also, you haven't addressed any of my points...

MRI Industry:
Reflecting the fundamental importance and applicability of MRI in the medical field, Paul Lauterbur of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Sir Peter Mansfield of the University of Nottingham were awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their "discoveries concerning magnetic resonance imaging".

Microwave Industry & Cellular Communication Industry:
Maxwell, Hertz, and nearly half of all microwave parts that I can think of were first introduced at NIST... These two I am not going post supporting evidence for.


Nuclear Energy Industry:
Err... Quantum Mechanics- Hello?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics

Computer Industry(By way of the transistor, substrates, etc.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Edgar_Lilienfeld
He created it at the University of Leipzig. Funded by the German government.

Genetic Engineering Industry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymerase_chain_reaction

Your claim is that without government incentives, these industries would not exist, or would have progressed slower? Can you prove that?

How can I prove something wouldn't exist if people hadn't invented it? The best I can say is it would not have been invented when it was. And scientist wouldn't research whatever they wanted without funding, which companies wouldn't and don't pay for because it is to financially risky. How do I know this? I am a scientist.

Another good example is your IPod and the colossal magnetoresistor in it's hard drive.

^I'm trying hard to even respond to your claim, because it is so unfounded its unbelievable. give me a second.

Here are your examples:
MRI Industry
Microwave Industry
Cellular Communication Industry
Nuclear Energy Industry
Computer Industry(By way of the transistor, substrates, etc.)
Genetic Engineering Industry

Your claim is that without government incentives, these industries would not exist, or would have progressed slower? Can you prove that?

Here is proof you are dead wrong on at least one of those:
The first Nuclear power plant took 18 months to build. After government regulation, Nuclear power plants now take 12 years to build.

Here is what you fail to realize, and why your thinking is so narrow. When the government subsidies the Nuclear Energy Industry--what happened to all the alternative energies that were just opening, that didn't receive subsides? What about the solar manufacturer who just got put out of business because he can't compete with a Nuclear Industry funded by taxpayers?

And when the government chooses the solution to demand, what you are left with is not the best product (i.e the product which survives the natural selection of the market by either being lower in cost or higher in quality) you are left with whatever solution some government official decided was best for you. How can you think that is the best way to develop new technologies?

I'm sorry but you don't understand anything about economics...money is not created out of thin air. When the government gives money to one industry, but not another it is playing favorites, it is choosing for the consumer what products they receive. Why do you think we have an oil based economy when 100 square miles (real number, calculate it or look it up yourself) of solar panels could power the entire country?

I think risk is the primary deterrent. It is the same logic behind becoming a scientist, doctor, or lawyer.

It is a fact we make a lot of money, but not everyone does it. There are more factors than simply 'this is in my best financial interests'. You are presenting things as they are absolute black and white, which they are decidedly not.

>> ^imstellar28:
^tell me this. why do you need incentive for people to enter a $1,000,000,000,000 industry? you don't think the sheer profit available is enough?


A good example of this would be:

MRI Industry
Microwave Industry
Cellular Communication Industry
Nuclear Energy Industry
Computer Industry(By way of the transistor, substrates, etc.)
Genetic Engineering Industry

Basically anything except Railroad and Oil...

Hey wait... Those had incentives... Carnot is basically the founder of thermodynamics. And the British Government gave him tons of money to research steam engines. And research into the science of mining for oil is supported by the government, too. So yeah, I guess your question is silly. Regardless of the profits to be made governments have always provided incentives in one form or another to support industry, because ensuring a good economy is in their best interests.

Can I get an amen?

>> ^charliem:
= CERN invented the internet, they invented MRI, they invented the concentrated x-ray for blasting cancer sites, they invented super conductors, as Brian mentioned, they've also come up with a new method of cooling, they've even invented and built a brand new parallel internet with massive capacity and the ability to have distributed processing / applications running over it (google "The GRID - CERN"), they invented the integrated circuit, the transistor (and as a result, PLENTY of other complex digital structures)...


CERN:

1)invented the internet. False, invented at MIT. Though it is true, Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet

2) they invented MRI. False, it was invented at Stony Brook.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_resonance_imaging

3) they invented the concentrated x-ray for blasting cancer sites.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godfrey_Hounsfield

4) they invented super conductors. False, discovered by Onnes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heike_Kamerlingh_Onnes

I don't have the time to debunk all of this. Most it is wrong, half truths, or misguided.
Here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN is where you can see there accomplishments.

The line for scientific research should never be drawn, not ever.
Look what happened in the arab world when the ruling class at the time around 500 AD decided that questioning the unknown is encroaching on gods doorstep, essentially drawing a line in the sand and saying "no more research, what you don't know now, you never will, cause it doesn't suit our needs".

How many nobel laureates are from the mid-east ?

1...and he shares it with a british fellow.

Seriously, there should never be any kind of discussion where drawing a line in the sand is ever a consideration for research, ever.

CERN invented the internet, they invented MRI, they invented the concentrated x-ray for blasting cancer sites, they invented super conductors, as Brian mentioned, they've also come up with a new method of cooling, they've even invented and built a brand new parallel internet with massive capacity and the ability to have distributed processing / applications running over it (google "The GRID - CERN"), they invented the integrated circuit, the transistor (and as a result, PLENTY of other complex digital structures)...

ALL of those technologies came as a result of EXPLORATION DRIVEN SCIENCE, where noone doing the research at the time had any kind of insight as to what might come of it.

You cant simply sit there and claim that exploration driven science should be stopped because it costs too much, AND you cant foresee its benefits, that's just a failing on your imagination, not on the scientific process.

As much as I admire the older chap for his position within the british academia, it is people with attitudes like him that enable the idiots of this world to hang shit on people with a passion for understanding how it all works.

Once you start saying "maybe thats a bit too far", you open the door for a lot more, just look at what Bush has done to the credibility of scientific reporting by essentially removing the ability for the scientists to report their findings without running it through the "washington filter" first....a disaster.

Transfixed by transistors. A fascinating look into the secret life of vacuum tubes. Soon, this will become a lost art, and all of this archaic craftsmanship will be a thing of the past. Nice sift -- beautiful.

(So glad I paid attention in high school french class)

evan if a computer had the mathamatical computatoinal power of 6 billoin human minds it would still be fairly basic and very stupid compared to a single human brain . raw speed dosent realy mean that mutch intmers of emulating ore creating something as inteligent as a human brain .

its going to be decades before researches asemmble a computer with an arcutecture simula to a human brain where each transistor conects simutanously to 300,000 other ones ( ore something equivelnt) and then we would have to write/ have it write its own software which is another story all together.

allso i wish people would stop making documentries like this boring long and no real informatoin

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> Paul Volcker is one such exception, but as you yourself pointed out - Greenspan made 180k per year. I don't know if you quite get this, but the average American makes around 33k per year.
Average American doesn't have Greenspan's qualifications. The point is that someone like Greenspan could make over a million per year by accepting a position in private sector. And a quick google search shows that Greenspan's family wasn't rich either.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/m/martin-greenspan.html



> "The Congress would always be pressured to lower the interest rates and stimulate the economy, regardless of long-term consequences."
> Here's one question for you - assuming the Congress took over control of the monetary system(as they have the right to do), what would be the purpose of an interest rate? The interest rate only sustains the profits and dividends of member shareholders of the Fed - operating costs are covered by the budget of money the Fed has allotted itself to print. So why would there be a need for an interest rate?

The Fed could loan money at 0% interest rate. Since the Fed can print money, that means it would hand out free money to any bank that asks. Surely you don't think that would be a good idea?


> FYI - I do not sustain any faith for the Capitalist system, as the end result of Capitalism is ultimately Plutocracy(which is what we are currently living under today - people that represent the richest 5% of the population control 95% of the population) - so, just so you know, I would have no qualms with abandoning the Capitalist system entirely.

Abandoning the system for what? Soviet-style Gulags? A lot of the inventions you are using right now are here thanks to capitalism. Take your computer for instance. Proof of concept transistor was developed in Bell Labs, and brought to the masses through capital ventures Shockley Semiconductors and Fairchild Semiconductors. Intel was one of the the child ventures. Those were all possible because of large investment. You need to have a workable alternative to capitalism, or admit that you don't care about progress. Neither communism, nor anarchy have proven themselves workable over long term.


> Bank runs are only a bad thing for the banks in most cases, because it shows, to their clients, exactly the level of corruption of a central banking system. Yes, people will lose faith - and they should. Yes, people will take what little money the bank has left for them out of the bank - AND THEY SHOULD.

It's not the banks that are hurt the most by bank runs, but the people who keep money in the banks. Banks are required to only keep 1/6th of the money it loans out on hand. So if everyone decides to take their money out, 83% of the people will be left holding an empty bag.

And when the people lose faith in banks and stop depositing money there, all the loan-takers will be hurt. How will someone get a mortage for a house? Or take an inventor with a bright idea who needs a large loan to develop it?

A worse thing would happen if public loses confidence in the Fed itself. The currency that we use are the Fed promissory notes. Without confidence in the currency, how will people continue their economic transactions? We could go back to barter, but that is annoyingly inefficient. Imagine having to find 2 goats, a hub-cap and a pile of dirt that someone wants in exchange for a new coat.


> They should be able to, as an exercise of power over the banks. In what is professed to be an ultimately Capitalist system, where is the competition to the banking industry that, should they mess something up, the public will exercise power over them?

What is the competition to the banking industry? The role of banking industry is to accumulate a large amounts of resources to direct into various areas of development. The capital is amassed because of people volunteering to store their capital is the banks. The main advantage of banking is that capital formation is done through volunteer means. One competition to this system is the Soviet-style system -- the government amasses resources through forceful means -- ie, by telling a million people to come together and dig a hole here and there. And if they don't want to dig a hole? Too bad, they should've been born in America.


> If there is to be a central bank, it must be addressable by the people themselves, SOMEHOW. The public themselves must be able to exercise some form of power over the bank in order to keep that very system in check...otherwise, the public is not responsible for what happens, and must not be legally bound to abide by such a corrupt system.


> Ultimately, if the banks are to be private, as the Federal Reserve currently is, the people should be allowed - encouraged, even, to create their own forms of currency to challenge the private form of currency.

What's stopping you from creating your own currency? Fed notes started by being promissory notes -- it was a note that you could exchange for a certain amount of gold if you brought to the bank. So likewise, you could hand out slips of paper, in promise to exchange them for something tangible if a person brings it back. In essence, shops handing out gift certificates are in essence issuing their own currency. There was a period of time in US when there was no universally accepted paper money. Each bank would issue their own promissory notes. However, because banks failed often, people would trust notes from bigger banks more. Eventually the "currency" from the biggest banks would outcompete everyone else.

> T-bonds/bills - what is a bond? The OED essentially defines it as an "Obligation," or a "promise to pay."

That's not the kind of bonds that government issues. The bonds are that the government issues are papers that US government promises to pay interest on. They don't promise to buy it back, and in fact, it's unlikely that the government will EVER buy it back. The government hasn't bought back any bonds since WWII.

> Can you imagine a form of currency that is not interest-bearing, that the people themselves CAN be held responsible for the rise or the fall of?

You really put a lot of trust in "the people". If people were so responsible, we could give each person a printing press and let them be directly in charge of the monetary policy. They would then rely on their superior knowledge of monetary policy and print more money exactly when it is needed. However, the reality of it is that people are greedy and irresponsible. In the scenario above, everybody would start cranking out money with no regard to economic harm that causes. That's a prime instance of the "tragedy of the commons"

The ideas you are advocating are far from new. People are by nature suspicious of rich people, especially bankers, and there have been many instances in the history when "the people" stepped in to "reign in their power of bankers." For instance, when Lenin carried out the revolution in then-capitalist Russia, his first targets were to take control of the railroads, the telegraph and the banks. The banks became the "property of the people", but that didn't help the people much when their savings have evaporated. My uncle worked as a pilot in Soviet far north for a decade and saved up an equivalent of $60,000 over the years, the savings that disappeared through governments mismanagement. Good politicians make bad bankers.

Or look at early American history. The ideas you are advocating are the credo of the Populist party, whose main ideal is to represent the rights of "the common people." Andrew Jackson was elected on the populist platform, and when he came to power, he destroyed the Central Bank by vetoing the renewal of it's charter. The government's money was then taken out of the bank, and distributed among various private banks. Needless to say it didn't work out too well, and US was back with a national bank 30 years later. You can read more about immediate effects here: http://www.maths.tcd.ie/local/JUNK/econrev/ser/html/destruction.html. Or read about "1837-1862: Free Banking Era" on "history of central banking" in Wikipedia.

The bottom line is that populist philosophy looks good in theory, but doesn't work well in practice, mainly because "the common people" are greedy and stupid. The current system isn't perfect, but it's better than the alternatives.


----

Interestingly, the Russians lost air-superiority because they designed for major nuclear war, and used vacuum tubes, instead of solid-state transistors.