Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
To take advantage of the exponential investment curve, people need to start investing as early as possible! If you wait too late, it will be much more difficult to retire comfortably, if not impossible. Because lots of people will fail to invest early, this makes Social Security incredibly important.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyGsH_oa8nY
Is the finance industry helping the economy, or just putting a lot of human and regular capital into moving money around in ways that make money for people with money but not actually investing in things that make everyone better off?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIsQHkTLlxY
“In the US, basic science research, studying how the world works for the sake of expanding knowledge, is mostly funded by the federal government. The NIH funds the vast majority of biomedical research, and the National Science Foundation (NSF) funds other sciences, like astrophysics, geology, and genetics. The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) also funds some biomedical research, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funds technology development for the military, some of which finds uses in the civilian world, like the internet.
The grant application system worked well a few decades ago, when over half of submitted grants were funded. But today, we have more scientists — especially young ones — and less money, once inflation is taken into account. Getting a grant is harder than ever, scientists I spoke with said. What ends up happening is that principal investigators are forced to spend more of their time writing grant applications — which often take dozens of hours each — than actually doing the science they were trained for. Because funding is so competitive, applicants increasingly have to twist their research proposals to align with whoever will give them money. A lab interested in studying how cells communicate with each other, for example, may spin it as a study of cancer, heart disease, or depression to convince the NIH that its project is worth funding.
Federal agencies generally fund specific projects, and require scientists to provide regular progress updates. Some of the best science happens when experiments lead researchers in unexpected directions, but grantees generally need to stick with the specific aims listed in their application or risk having their funding taken away — even if the first few days of an experiment suggest things won’t go as planned.
This system leaves principal investigators constantly scrambling to plug holes in their patchwork of funding. In her first year as a tenure-track professor, Jennifer Garrison, now a reproductive longevity researcher at the Buck Institute, applied for 45 grants to get her lab off the ground. “I’m so highly trained and specialized,” she told me. “The fact that I spend the majority of my time on administrative paperwork is ridiculous.””
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“The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) has a funding model worth replicating. It is driven by a “people, not projects” philosophy, granting scientists many years worth of money, without tying them down to specific projects. Grantees continue working at their home institution, but they — along with their postdocs — become employees of HHMI, which pays their salary and benefits.
HHMI reportedly provides enough funding to operate a small- to medium-sized lab without requiring any extra grants. The idea is that if investigators are simply given enough money to do their jobs, they can redirect all their wasted grant application time toward actually doing science. It’s no coincidence that over 30 HHMI-funded scientists have won Nobel Prizes in the past 50 years.”
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/370681/science-research-grants-scientific-progress-academia-slow-funding
“Many other developed countries with established pharmaceutical industries such as Japan, Canada, and the UK have implemented or are working to roll out their own incentives to spur antibiotic development. The Pasteur Act dwarfs these. This could potentially drive pharmaceutical companies to flock to the US market to make drugs deemed important there and not in other places.
“The size of the Pasteur Act is going to be so large that it ultimately draws developers to only focusing on the United States, only developing the drug so that it can be used appropriately in the United States, and only registering the drug in the United States, because that’s ultimately going to be sufficient revenue and incentive for what otherwise is not a very profitable market,” explained Rohit Malpani, a senior policy advisor at the Global Antibiotic Research and Development Partnership, or GARDP.
Cirz added that with a steady influx of Pasteur Act funds, pharmaceutical companies may be less interested in investing additional funds to figure out ways to manufacture their antibiotics more cheaply. Usually companies would continue investing so they can increase their profit margins by lowering manufacturing costs, but if profit margins are set by the US government, then there’s less incentive to make an approved drug cheaper, when it can divert attention to making even more drugs. Without that innovation for affordable production, the act may unintentionally prohibit developing countries such as India from being able to independently manufacture the drug.
Finally, while Americans with federal health insurance plans are guaranteed access to antimicrobials that receive support from the act, the proposed legislation does not provide any stipulations or guidance for ensuring global access to these drugs. Pharmaceutical companies are left to make decisions regarding pricing, manufacturing, and distribution of whatever antibiotics might be funded by the program, argued Ava Alkon, global health advocacy and policy adviser at Doctors Without Borders.
“What the act doesn’t do is attach any meaningful conditions to facilitate affordable access to people outside of those federal programs, and certainly not outside of the US,” said Alkon.
“From our years of work on access issues around the world, this generally results in products being sold to the highest bidder and being inaccessible in many contexts where they’re needed,” she said.”
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/367247/antibiotic-resistance-bacteria-pasteur-act-big-pharma
“Less than 17 percent of the $1.1 trillion those laws provided for direct investments on climate, energy and infrastructure has been spent as of April, nearly two years after Biden signed the last of the statutes.”
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“Trump has said he should have the power to refuse to spend congressionally appropriated money he considers wasteful, despite a 1974 law that says otherwise. This raises the prospect that he could attempt to pare Biden-era funding even if it’s at an advanced stage of distribution.”
https://www.politico.com/interactives/2024/biden-trillion-dollar-spending-tracker/
“The clean energy subsidies that undergird President Joe Biden’s climate agenda have just prompted one Norwegian manufacturer to choose Michigan, not Europe, as the site of a nearly $500 million factory that will produce the equipment needed to extract hydrogen from water. And other European-based companies are being tempted to follow suit, people involved in the continent’s hydrogen efforts say — making the universe’s most abundant substance the latest focus of the transatlantic trade battle on green energy.
The Norwegian firm, Nel, announced its decision in May, nine months after Congress approved Biden’s flagship climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act. The move takes 500 new jobs to the other side of the Atlantic, despite the European Union’s efforts to position itself as the obvious place for clean tech investment.”
How Tariffs and the Trade War Hurt U.S. Agriculture Alex Durante. 2022 7 25. Tax Foundation. Tracking the Economic Impact of U.S. Tariffs and Retaliatory Actions Erica York. 2022 4 1. Tax Foundation. Lessons from the 2002 Bush Steel Tariffs Erica York.
“foreign investors hold just 3.1 percent of all privately owned agricultural land in the United States, according to the most recent USDA report, which covers through the end of 2021. The numbers vary by state, but overall, investors from Canada own the most, and foreign-owned land was most often timber or forest.”
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“Chinese investors own less than 1 percent of foreign-owned acreage nationwide. The total share of acreage owned by foreign investors and entities has been growing rapidly over the past few decades, but the overall numbers remain small.”