Gough
Moderator
- Sep 29, 2006
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- AFL Club
- Hawthorn
- Moderator
- #76
The CSIRO's scientific narrative had a habit of making the Liberal Party and it's members look very very stupid, it's better to defund than let facts get in the way of their feelings.and this attitude is why australia sucks at investing in science today.
back in the day, companies like 3M and IBM required their tech heads to spend a certain amount of time each month on blue sky projects. Nothing with a specific commercial aim, but just pure science which they funded and which was solely inspired by the researcher.
the reason why was not because of altruism, it was because often these projects would go into unforeseen directions which would have commercial benefits.
for us, the biggest moment of stupidity we had was when we decided to defund the CSIRO from nearly all pure science research, and have them only focus on making a better type of yarn. And we wonder why 300-600 australian scientists are flocking to china (which is an absolute disgrace, because those patents they create are our future, and we are basically giving them away - as we did with the likes of solar technology to the USA)