The EPA solution would be to impose a whey tax, part of which would be used to subsidize truckers to move the whey from New York to Wisconsin. This would be done in coordination with the USDA and DOT. It would NOT be sent to Yucca Mountain.

“Underidentified” is a brand new word for me, and even though it lacks Anglo-Saxon compactness, it nevertheless is a most useful word.

Wintercow evokes many subjects, and I assume his purpose is to get our minds up and running, and to his credit did not get off-topic talking about $85 billion a month, but did refer to the solar picnic table, Solar Dok. Solar Doc is the robot being developed by the University to provide affordable medical services to the citizens of Rochester.

Could you give me your opinion/reasoning on government’s role in the funding of basic R&D? As I’ve said before I’m a small-governemnt classical liberal type, and as such I take issue (much the same way you do) with government funding of projects that are not necessarily in the public interest, but rather more in the special interests of a few.

But, for all my reasons against such projects, I’ve always been stumped to come up with a solution to the problem of how basic research ought to be funded. It is expensive, and much of it is simply for the purpose of expanding human knowledge without necessarily any direct profit motive. Biologists might work hard for years to understand the workings of some particular mechanism in yeast cells while it’s connection to human biology or medicine might be almost nonexistent, or an astronomer may want to point his billion dollar telescope at the sky just to see what’s out there. The connection to any measurable benefit is hard to see, but it is there. The physicists who uncovered the principles behind MRI machines had no interest in medicine, yet that knowledge is now used for that purpose and saves lives. No one could have possibly predicted that. I assert that no one can predict the impact of any basic R&D.

So the question would be: How on earth does the money go where it needs to? If not from private interest (I suppose IBM’s Bell Laboratories was an example of private basic R&D funding), then how do “we” as the public make a decision on how much and to whom? That’s more than a tough set of questions, but if you have any thoughts I’d love to hear them, as I am at a loss for ideas. Also if you have any reading suggestions, that would be appreciated.

Thanks!