Chemical Engineer <cheme...@gmail.com> wrote: In this case the Pioneer will be the US taxpayer.
Always has been. From canals through computers, the Internet, the GPS and human genome, taxpayers and Uncle Sam have led the way. > Jed's liberal sheep just lept from his wolfs clothing. I figured you were > a "tax the rich" guy. Worse than that! I *am* a rich guy. Like Theodore Roosevelt, Bill Gates and many other responsible rich guys, I favor taxing the rich. As Willie Sutton said of the banks, that's where the money is. They got it. They don't need it as much as other people do. They benefit from the government disproportionately. Look at it this way. After the government invented computers, lasers and the Internet, and after Al Gore helped transform the Internet into a national system, who benefited the most? Financially, that is. It was dot-com entrepreneurs, especially people such as Zuckerberg. He ran the last 100 meters of 50 km race. Uncle Sam invented the technology, handed it to him on a silver platter, and he made a few minor tweaks the led to Facebook. In return he earned billions of dollars. In my opinion, he owes a large fraction of that to Uncle. Everyone who has benefited from computers over the last 70 years owes Uncle, including me. No institution in history has contributed more to technology and science than the U.S. government. No other institution comes close. If PV solar takes off, who do you think will benefit most? Big corporations and wealthy people. If cold fusion becomes a reality, we can thank the governments of the UK, Utah, Italy and the US Federal government. Just about every dollar spent on it so far came from them. Fleischmann, Pons, Miles, Storms, Mizuno and most others were government employees for their entire careers. Private industry has contributed practically nothing, until recently. By the way, Fleischmann agrees with me on this issue. He is old school about economics. A member of the WWII generation. [Note: Sutton denied that he ever said it, but he published a book with a similar title.] - Jed
