Hindsite wrote:
Yale University was awarded a grant for just shy of $385,000 to study duck genitalia and its plasticity. Why? It helped us better understand evolution.
Seven hundred thousand dollars — that’s how much grant money researchers at the University of New Hampshire received a few years back to study cow gas.
The College of Charleston in South Carolina received more than half a million dollars in grant money to study the difference in endurance between healthy shrimp and those that were exposed to various illnesses and bacteria.
http://www.cheatsheet.com/personal-fina ... ?a=viewall
The study of evolution and climate change, such as in these examples, is fundamental to our understanding of our ecological relationship to the rest of the natural environment. Since our continued survival on this planet relies on this understanding, 1.6 million is actually quite a bargain.
The U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research spent $300,000 on a study that concluded the first bird on Earth probably had black feathers.
The Department of Health and Human Services provided an $800,000 subsidy to build and IHop in Washington, D.C.
The National Institutes of Health has given $1.5 million to Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston to study why “three-quarters” of lesbians in the United States are overweight and why most gay males are not.
The U.S. government spent $505,000 “to promote specialty hair and beauty products for cats and dogs” last year.
NASA spends close to $1 million per year developing a menu of food for a manned mission to Mars even though it is being projected that a manned mission to Mars is still decades away.
https://commercialobserver.com/2013/10/ ... -money-on/
The armed forces spend a stupid amount of money on stupid things. They also spend a stupid amount of money on smart things. The first statement does not disprove or contradict the second. Without further information, I cannot say which describes the bird colour study.
Subsidies to private companies are not relevant to a discussion on the financial merits of scientific studies.
The US desperately needs to figure out why so many of you are overweight regardless of sexual orientation.
Any money spent on getting humans living on other planets is well spent when we consider the long term survival of the species.
A total of $3 million has been granted to researchers at the University of California at Irvine so that they can play video games such as World of Warcraft.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture gave the University of New Hampshire $700,000 this year to study methane gas emissions from dairy cows.
$615,000 was given to the University of California at Santa Cruz to digitize photos, T-shirts and concert tickets belonging to the Grateful Dead.
A professor at Stanford University received $239,100 to study how Americans use the Internet to find love.
The National Science Foundation spent $216,000 to study whether or not politicians “gain or lose support by taking ambiguous positions.”
The National Institutes of Health spent approximately $442,340 to study the behavior of male prostitutes in Vietnam.
Approximately $1 million of U.S. taxpayer money was used to create poetry for the Little Rock, New Orleans, Milwaukee and Chicago zoos.
The Conservation Commission of Monkton, Vermont got $150,000 from the federal government to construct a “critter crossing”. Thanks to U.S. government money, the lives of “thousands” of migrating salamanders are now being saved.
In California, one park received $440,000 in federal funds to perform “green energy upgrades” on a building that has not been used for a decade.
The National Science Foundation gave the Minnesota Zoo over $600,000 so that they could develop an online video game called “Wolfquest”.
Almost unbelievably, the National Institutes of Health was given $800,000 in “stimulus funds” to study the impact of a “genital-washing program” on men in South Africa.
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/arch ... g-money-on
All of these have economic benefits (such as the first and fourth examples), benefits in terms of understanding climate change (the second example), historical benefits (the third and fifth examples), medical or social science benefits (examples number six and eleven), cultural benefits (the third and seventh examples), or ecological benefits (examples eight, nine, and ten).
This is actually far more reasonable than I am accustomed to seeing when it comes to government spending.