On Sat, Jan 26, 2013 at 9:04 PM, Steve Richfield <[email protected]>wrote:
> That's incredible. Meanwhile, really basic stuff like a scanning UV > fluorescence microscope that would greatly help this, AGI, medicine, and > other projects, go unfunded for lack of a few million dollars. > > What an incredible waste of money. I see that there is no shortage of > competent naysayers. I don't see ANY potential success scenario, because > even if he somehow got something to work, which nearly everyone doubts, > like the human genome, it would be WAY beyond human understanding, and > hence would be worthless. > > I wonder how things like this can happen? Do you understand how this > happened, despite the presence of cooler heads? > > It's kind of like how the bailouts happened. The rational decision would have been to bail out the actual homeowners, thereby making the bad loans into excellent ones. However it's much easier to give money to a few greedy hands, and hope it gets to the right place -- which as we saw with the bailouts didn't happen, instead of in turn bailing out the homeowners they foreclosed on them, keeping the bad debt, and handed out the bailout money as bonuses. Similar it is here, this Markram guy claims to be integrating tens of thousands of researchers, kinda like how banks are lending to (taking advantage of) tens of thousands of people. So he is requesting money, so he can better take advantage of them, for his relatively fruitless aims, much like how the bankers just kinda sit on their money, make some mansions and underground bunkers -- very little for the economy. Similar to the bailout problem, the better solution would have been to simply fund a large variety of projects with potential, kind of how venture capitalists fund lots of entrepreneurs even though only a relatively small percentage will actually succeed, however even that limited success is sufficient to allow venture capitalists to continue. Europeans being socialists, perhaps they could instead of looking at capitalist monetary value, look at the social benefits of the research, so if some of the programs end up having great social benefits they are more likely to get re-elected. Steve > ==================== > > On Sat, Jan 26, 2013 at 11:03 AM, <[email protected]> wrote: > >> >> http://www.nature.com/news/billion-euro-brain-simulation-and-graphene-projects-win-european-funds-1.12291 >> **** >> >> ** ** >> *AGI* | Archives <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now> >> <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/10443978-6f4c28ac> | >> Modify <https://www.listbox.com/member/?&;> Your Subscription >> <http://www.listbox.com> >> > > > > -- > Full employment can be had with the stoke of a pen. Simply institute a six > hour workday. That will easily create enough new jobs to bring back full > employment. > > *AGI* | Archives <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now> > <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/5037279-a88c7a6d> | > Modify<https://www.listbox.com/member/?&;>Your Subscription > <http://www.listbox.com> > ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-f452e424 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-58d57657 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
