[xondono]

> This is not true.

Pretty much all BSC activities are EU funded.

> Why are you harsh?

Where is the harshness? Asking “What’s the plan when the gravy train stops?” Is a perfectly valid question.

> Science is a good investment

Some science has been a good investment. Most (especially public funded, particularly in Spain) has been a very poor investment. As an obvious example, the new accelerator CERN is pushing for will have an atrocious ROI, just like most money spent on space exploration.

We should not be taxing blue collar workers so that middle class “scientists” can call dibs on historic milestones.

[mofeing]

> Pretty much all BSC activities are EU funded.

Depending on the department, about half of the private investment can be up to 50%.

> Where is the harshness? Asking “What’s the plan when the gravy train stops?” Is a perfectly valid question.

I'm pointing to the other comments. I also try to answer question in the last paragraph.

> Some science has been a good investment. Most (especially public funded, particularly in Spain) has been a very poor investment.

In _general_, science is a good investment. I don't agree that there have been poor investments in Spain. Do you have numbers or reports about that?

Most cases I know are that in Spain the Big Crisis cut investment and getting stable long-term fundship is almost imposible, which makes scientists' situation very unstable. And you need long-term investments in science to make returns.

> As an obvious example, the new accelerator CERN is pushing for will have an atrocious ROI, just like most money spent on space exploration.

It's not obvious to me. The LHC and space exploration have had huge indirect returns from the technology designed around it.

[wlst14]

https://www.bsc.es/sites/default/files/public/content/discov...

Revenue from services rendered / Ingresos por prestación de servicios 8.293.375,25 €

The rest is public funding.

[xondono]

> can be up to 50%.

An you can make up to 200% a year trading stocks! “Up to” is doing a lot of work there.

> In _general_, science is a good investment.

Citation needed. Most calculations of ROI that I’ve seen show that publicly funded science has lousy returns. They need to fuzz the numbers a lot just to make it sellable to the public.

> I don't agree that there have been poor investments in Spain. Do you have numbers or reports about that?

I’ve even worked for them, the UPC, just besides the BSC, has had historically wasted buttloads of public money.

I know of a department that blows > 1M€ of public funding every year in a project that was old news when it started, 15 years ago. It’s still ongoing. They’re not outliers by any stretch.

> Most cases I know are that in Spain the Big Crisis cut investment and getting stable long-term fundship is almost imposible, which makes scientists' situation very unstable

The number one issue is that most projects being chased are terribly obsolete. Spanish science is not underfunded, it’s just very poorly managed. I’ve personally seen managers wasting 20k€ in buying useless parts, because they could not be bothered to do the numbers first (5 minutes of back of the envelope calculations would have sufficed).

Let’s not forget that Spain has a whole ecosystem of semi-public companies (like Eurecat) whose business model is to find partners to justify getting grants. The most honest people there will tell you straight (this is an actual conversation I’ve had) : “this project isn’t going anywhere, but your company will make an easy 50k€, we’ll help you with the paperwork, and you’ll get something nice to post on Linkedin”.

> The LHC and space exploration have had huge indirect returns from the technology designed around it.

That’s the most absurd cop out people always use. “If we spend 100MM€ building this thing that barely has any uses, maybe, we might find some stuff around the way”. We are living in the era of Luck-based development, You point to a random goal and hope to make returns by stumbling into something along the way.

Even if we took all tech “developed” at CERN as a return, I’d not value it even closely to the money spent there.

If you don’t believe me, you can ask other people who have worked there, the amount of wasted money is ludicrous. Just as an example, my team designed a custom ASIC for the LHCb. There were literally 4 identical ASICS being designed in different teams.

And let’s not get on the promises made to sell these projects. Just check the writings and videos of Sabine Hossenfelder, and you’ll start to get a grasp of the grift, and IMO, she is too diplomatic about it.