<story><title>Most Americans think NASA’s $10B space telescope is a good investment</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/19/23270396/nasa-james-webb-space-telescope-online-poll-investment</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>2OEH8eoCRo0</author><text>How many factory or construction jobs does &amp;quot;hard-science&amp;quot; funding create? I love science but defense invests in the entire &amp;quot;stack&amp;quot;. It creates factory jobs but it also creates jobs for basically every STEM field.&lt;p&gt;From a practicality standpoint- military spending is difficult to beat. Improves defense, improves the defense of allies, creates factory jobs, creates science and engineering jobs. It has everything.&lt;p&gt;The only thing that comes close is if there were some green arms race where we are funding and building wind, solar, nuclear, fusion, etc.</text></item><item><author>paulmd</author><text>It is - and that&amp;#x27;s $10b upfront cost for an asset that will operate for a decade.  $1b a year is a steal for that compared to the other shit the US wastes federal money on.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d personally vote to 10x or 100x our hard-science funding in general, we spend an absolute pittance compared to military funding or corn subsidies or whatever other bullshit.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>danny_codes</author><text>Eh, everything except useful output. Sure, a by-product of military research could be something useful, but that money would go a lot further if we just went for the useful thing immediately. The F35 is a good example. Whatever technology gains came out of that project are likely useful in general, but presumably it&amp;#x27;d have been several orders of magnitude cheaper to just directly invest in that tech instead of building a weapon.</text></comment>
<story><title>Most Americans think NASA’s $10B space telescope is a good investment</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/19/23270396/nasa-james-webb-space-telescope-online-poll-investment</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>2OEH8eoCRo0</author><text>How many factory or construction jobs does &amp;quot;hard-science&amp;quot; funding create? I love science but defense invests in the entire &amp;quot;stack&amp;quot;. It creates factory jobs but it also creates jobs for basically every STEM field.&lt;p&gt;From a practicality standpoint- military spending is difficult to beat. Improves defense, improves the defense of allies, creates factory jobs, creates science and engineering jobs. It has everything.&lt;p&gt;The only thing that comes close is if there were some green arms race where we are funding and building wind, solar, nuclear, fusion, etc.</text></item><item><author>paulmd</author><text>It is - and that&amp;#x27;s $10b upfront cost for an asset that will operate for a decade.  $1b a year is a steal for that compared to the other shit the US wastes federal money on.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d personally vote to 10x or 100x our hard-science funding in general, we spend an absolute pittance compared to military funding or corn subsidies or whatever other bullshit.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>xg15</author><text>If job creation is the only factor, why not invest the 10B into digging holes and filling them up again?</text></comment>