• TheFogan@programming.dev
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    5 days ago

    https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4263280/#:~:text=Results showed that male quail,test (Coc → Sal).

    Sunfish I can’t find the actual study, it appears it was done in 1975, and was a big thing that congress at the time used as the examples of wasteful spending.

    First 2 I can’t really say the value or lack of value of. I mean they were studies on effects of dangerous substances on behavior. and yes of course like all studies you pick animals that you might be able to get the effects of. Obviously a lot of science is just randomly probing around looking for oddities that give you a hypothesis to try and refine later into something useful. Obviously addictive substances is an important topic to understand, and poking around randomly might actually give solutions that could be discovered IMO.

    Now the last one is the only one I’d agree, isn’t exactly super useful.

    https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/2033014/feds-blow-700k-to-find-out-what-really-happened-on-the-moon/

    was done in 2016.

    All that being said… lets also take a serious statement on cost here… a million dollars in 2016. That’s like, 15 minutes of iraq war money.

    • m_f@midwest.social
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      5 days ago

      Another comment explains the moon landing one. It’s a hexbear comment and probably not federated to a lot of instances, so copying it here:

      The Moon landing line is a pretty important thing to study, actually, since we know what the rehearsed line was: “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” Without that “a” it’s a very silly line.

      Armstrong for years claimed he said the line right and that it must’ve been garbled in the radio transmission, and in recent years has been vindicated as better signal:noise algorithms processed the recording and found the missing word. Researchers aren’t blowing money to find out if Armstrong was a liar, they’re using it to develop more sensitive receivers, better transmission protocols, and more advanced algorithms to parse signal out of noise, all of which have massive impacts in other domains. An algorithm that’s better at parsing data out of noise in particular is going to be useful in loads of places like MRI machines where improving resolution will take billions in research but improving parsing is just updating the software.

      Can’t really blame people for defederating though. It’s a slog to find the treasure in the shit. In this same thread there’s both “Death to America” and “kill all honkeys” non-sequiturs. I can see why they drove off their admins in a stupid struggle session recently. I’m just waiting for another struggle session when they discover the etymology of “bad” and have to rename !badposting@hexbear.net:

      It is possibly from Old English derogatory term bæddel and its diminutive bædling “effeminate man, hermaphrodite, pederast,” which probably are related to bædan “to defile.”

      • TheFogan@programming.dev
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        5 days ago

        wow, yeah thanks for the repost of it then, and yeah seems even further to go in there, when conservatives comb for examples of the terrible things they are fighting… and it seems like over and over again, even their cherry picked examples seem to fail

    • tyler@programming.dev
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      5 days ago

      How much is it gonna cost us to create this new “D.O.G.E.” Department and pay Musk? The cost of these studies is completely irrelevant to the situation, like others have said the GOP props up ridiculous situations and makes it seem like they represent the entire situation, and they do it to disguise what they’re doing which is fleecing taxpayers money to private corps.

      • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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        4 days ago

        I was furious when I learned about the “Schools are offering litter boxes to trans students who identify as cats!”

        Not because it was a lie, but because it was based on truth.

        The truth? Schools in areas with heavy gun violence now have litter boxes so that pooping can be done in the advent of a school shooting.

        It’s absurd, but because of a problem the Right made, not because of a “misguided solution” of the Left