How is the US Govt Shutdown Affecting your Research

[Genohub]

Curious to hear how this is immediately affecting the research community.

- Genohub

[samanta]

It is helping us incredibly.

Edit. Not being sarcastic.

[dpryan]

Among the many reasons I'm happy to have moved away from the US...

[SNPsaurus]

So what is the silver lining on this, Samanta?

[samanta]

You are asking that question in 2013? That is five f***ing years too late.

Look, US financial system went insolvent in 2008. The proper solution would have been to send the bankster crooks to jail, ask the bank bondholders (wealthy class) to take proper losses and let the country go through reset to adjust for past profligacy.

Instead, the government took the bank/housing losses on its own book, promoted the bankster crooks to even higher positions, continued to keep a huge and expensive military, created another expensive NSA bureaucracy to snoop on us, put young college kids through student debt wringer and then to make sure the academic class does not protest, gave them small change in the form of extra research money. That worked like magic, except for one problem - all those 'good' things came out of borrowed money.

Now that the government itself is heading into insolvency and will go into triage mode to keep its most favored teat-suckers well-fed, the researchers are waking up to find out that they are not the most favored ones. Geez!! and you expect those clueless jokers to find cure for cancers, when they could not even add simple balance sheet for five years to figure out what was coming.

Here is the silver lining, if you ask me. The current 'crisis' will be over in a month or two, because it is fake and self-imposed. However, there will be a real one in 2-3 years, when the shutdown gets imposed by the financial market. The financial market does not belong to any political party and you cannot 'vote out' your lender. At that time, the government will have no solution other than to go into triage mode to save itself. If you are not the most favored teat-sucker now, do not expect anything from the government at that time. Better use the remaining time to wean yourself away from US government, however difficult that task is.

This crisis tells us, which parts of government will get closed for good during a real crisis.

[SNPsaurus]

You are asking that question in 2013? That is five f***ing years too late.

Well... I was asking for your opinion, specifically, so the question was only 12 hours late or so! You have a plausible scenario, there.

[samanta]

some thoughts -

http://www.homolog.us/blogs/blog/2013/10/14/us-science-funding-let-us/