Confirmed! Newfound Particle Is the Higgs

[PLATO]

You may not have an issue with gays or lesbians, but think about why, out of over a million line items of federal spending each year, this particular study was singled out for attention in the press? Substitute lesbians for a race or religious group, and do you think it would draw the same scrutiny and ridicule?

Absolutely. That one was, unfortunately for me, one I had just been reading about.

I agree with your other point that there are massively more wasteful topics that the federal government could cure, but I don't think that fact justifies the "Million here...million there...so what?" metality. 1.5 million may not be much compared to the total budget but it is still a lot of damn money and we should start somewhere.

[MichaeltheGreat]

So you're saying if there was a significant differential in obesity rates in blacks, or in whites, then 1.5 million to study the causes for that disparity would be subject to the same ridicule?

You don't harvest crops by picking the low-hanging fruit or the tallest ears of corn and leaving the rest. .8 cents per taxpayer equals four seconds at minimum wage. That's the amount of time it's worth talking about that study.

If you want to single out NIH, you don't play cherry-pick at whatever gets random press attention, you dig into their vetting and peer review and resource allocation process. That's a waste, because NIH's total budget is a dew days' of the DoD budget and a few weeks of DHS' budget.

[PLATO]

So you're saying if there was a significant differential in obesity rates in blacks, or in whites, then 1.5 million to study the causes for that disparity would be subject to the same ridicule?

No. I misunderstood what you meant by your question. If we want to study obesity, I don't think the place to start is with a small subset of the population. I am not even sure that there is any genetic difference between a lesbian woman or a straight woman. There is a genetic difference between blacks and whites. I have known of "straight" women who have ended up living in lesbian relationships, but I have never seen a white person end up black.

I believe that an obesity study would be a great thing, I just don't trust the results of a study with such a small segment of the population in which the differentation of the subset may or may not be valid for the study.

I know you are trying to debate me into a corner of being "anti gay" or "prejudiced", but that ain't it partner.

[Alexander's Horse]

How will the confirmed existence of the Higgs boson benefit the human race in any way?

It will show that terrible scientific names have their place.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

Mass drives gravity. Gravity drives the attraction of one body to another. If we can understand how this happens, it's the first step to overcoming it. And then maybe, just maybe, we'll be able to get our women to walk past shoe shops without being irresistibly drawn into the bastards.

[MichaeltheGreat]

No. I misunderstood what you meant by your question. If we want to study obesity, I don't think the place to start is with a small subset of the population. I am not even sure that there is any genetic difference between a lesbian woman or a straight woman. There is a genetic difference between blacks and whites. I have known of "straight" women who have ended up living in lesbian relationships, but I have never seen a white person end up black.

I believe that an obesity study would be a great thing, I just don't trust the results of a study with such a small segment of the population in which the differentation of the subset may or may not be valid for the study.

I know you are trying to debate me into a corner of being "anti gay" or "prejudiced", but that ain't it partner.

I don't think you're either. But I do think, whoever chose to first publicize that particular study, out of everything that goes on in government at a much, much larger scale, had an agenda to pick a trivial cost item that would push some buttons.

As far as the obesity study, there are dozens in public and private sectors on-going. Even though lesbians are a small minority, they cross every ethnic and racial boundary, so there is an interesting bit there about lesbians being outliers in one direction and gay men in another. It may partly be behavioral, but there may also be hormonal or genetic expression differences. That's the whole point of the study. You don't "trust" the conclusions of any scientific study. Find an apparent result, and that's the next thing you try to do - repeat it and/or break it.

There's an old Chinese saying (there really is ) quoted in Seven Samurai, but indirectly attributed by some sources to Ssu Ma I: "You don't worry about your beard when your head is about to be taken."

When I worked for USG in 2004-2005, I learned, among other things, that there were cost plus contracts from the Carter administration that hadn't been closed out. Nowadays, we've finally got those done, but there are still contracts from the first Reagan administration not closed out. Why? Well, to do a contract closeout, you have to get final data from the contractor, AND when Reagan came into office, as a "cost cutting" measure, he started reducing the number of warranted Contract Officers in USG service. Most of what a CO does is legally an "inherently governmental function" so by law, the really high-value stuff is reserved to the CO, not to contracted staff. You also need auditors to do cost plus closeouts, and the USG has about half the number of contract auditors it had during Reagan's tenure. Agency IG staffs have been hit just as hard, so there's no capacity to provide effective oversight. When I was in USG, I worked with one other CO, and a contracted administrated staffer, and we oversaw a book of just under 10 billion in existing procurements. With three people. How many purchasing and audit staff does a private sector company have for 10 billion in active contracts?

The ultimate reasons closeouts aren't done on cost plus contracts (what a coincidence, they're not an issue on T&M or fixed price) is because the contractors receive forward year cost adjustments based on projections of what their incurred direct and indirect costs will be. Then they get the "plus" portion allocated on top. So if you don't close it out, you don't have to worry about paying back all that money to the government once your "real" costs (inflated to the extent justifiable) are determined vis-a-vis your forward year adjusted cost claims (inflated more aggressively).

So looking at "fat lesbian studies" is just one big red herring to get people to jump all over it, while the real spending problems get ignored. It's like tossing a couple of pieces of kibble to a dawg so you can eat your Porterhouse steak without being bothered.

So I'm just tellin' you dawg, ignore the kibble and jump up on the procurement reform table - there's good eatin' to be had.

[MichaeltheGreat]

LOL some discoveries in physics were useful therefore all discoveries are. That's not retarded at all.

No, it's not, because life isn't a ****ing civ game where you can look up the tech tree and see what discoveries will be useful and how fast.

[giblets]

No, it's not, because life isn't a ****ing civ game where you can look up the tech tree and see what discoveries will be useful and how fast.

Are you claiming that a reasonable cost benefit analysis of a research proposal is impossible? Instead of attempting to anticipate what sort of benefits we might get from research we should just treat it like some kind of lottery and fund everything in sight in hopes we'll get lucky?

[Dr Strangelove]

Habemas Higgs!

[DaShi]

I would a lot rather spend money on this kind of science than studying why lesbians tend to be fatter than gay men.

Fundamental science is never a waste of money in my opinion.

He's just regurgitating a troll that was done better than he can. This is what passes for clever in some circles.

[Aeson]

Are you claiming that a reasonable cost benefit analysis of a research proposal is impossible? Instead of attempting to anticipate what sort of benefits we might get from research we should just treat it like some kind of lottery and fund everything in sight in hopes we'll get lucky?

You can do cost benefit analysis on a lottery too.

[Sava]

I think I'll just insult people who disagree with me.

*******

you dont need to disagree with me for me to insult you

cumsack

[MichaeltheGreat]

Are you claiming any scientific team anywhere gets experimentation time at facilities like LCH, Fermilab, Keck, Cerro Tololo, or anywhere else without a major vetting of competing research proposals?

Are you further claiming that these facilties are even built in the first place without even more stringent vetting?

If you want commerialization benefits, you don't get them immediately or directly from fundamental research.

[PLATO]

He's just regurgitating a troll that was done better than he can. This is what passes for clever in some circles.

[Sava]

I JUST WANT HOLODECK PORN OKAY
how long until that?