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by wladimir 5547 days ago
Maybe you're right, we'll see. A good climate for long-term science would be a sustained, growing economy, instead of the bipolar downswings/upswings that we're seeing the last decade.

Otherwise: There is a new upswing, all new projects, talk about going to Mars. Then a new crash, it's all cancelled again.. and so on.
1 comments
ars 5547 days ago
I agree about a stable economy, it's hard to do long term science if available resources keep changing.

I found this graph: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Real+Gross+Domestic+Pro... (Switch it to logscale.) The most obvious thing I notice about it is the totally flat result after 2000, then improvement (but not as fast as before), and now back where we started.

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wladimir 5547 days ago
It appears to me that the dent is really small (especially in log scale). What's all the fuss really about? Seems just that politicians are making a big issue out of this and using it as a rationalization to make cuts that they already wanted to do anyway.
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