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Oil companies weren't going to publish research saying leaded gas was bad. Tobacco companies weren't going to publish research saying cigarettes were bad. Have fun being healthy when you inhale leaded gasoline every day.
Forget about things like, you know, the internet. Or any medicine.
BTW, private companies are not paying for basic biological research. Good luck making a drug when no one knows what target to drug. VC firms will park their money in the bank instead. The value from biotechs is already marginal - investment basically vanished when interest rates went above 4.
Ive also been told in the past that its somehow ok that the government never breaks even, I can handle that maybe Im too stupid/uneducated to get it... but nobody ever even tries. Use little words, Im sure we will make progress. How can the government continue to exist and not go broke if it continually spends more than it brings in?
That's just one (big and easy to recall) example. There are countless.
Spending public money on public research grows the economy. Cutting it is penny wise and pound foolish.
I work at a biotech. We have $150 million in private funding. My biotech wouldn't exist, and I wouldn't have a job if it weren't for decades of public research doing the foundational work that allows us to target a protein to make a drug to help people. None of that would exist if not for NIH, NSF etc
And Musk has stumbled into several known right-wing conspiracy theories based on knee-jerk reactions, so I find it far more likely that he’s just fishing to validate his pre-held knee-jerk opinions rather than doing a careful investigation.
