I don't know about half, that number is harder to pin down than I would have originally thought.  However, most private money is for highly focused research.  The only folks who fund true Blue Sky research are in the government institutes. I suspect I'm the only one here who's actually sat in study sections and decided who got money and who didn't.

I help companies claim the federal and state research & development credits.  That provision came into law in 1981 because Congress saw a reduction in US R& D spending between 1967 and 1978. Congress wanted to help US companies leverage the cost of their innovation via this tax credit.

One limitation to the credit is that the company must be at financial risk for failure.  That means no time-and-materials pricing on contracts, and no grants, governmental or otherwise.

Companies are absolutely spending their own money on research. According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, the federal R& D credit used by companies to reduce their tax liabilities will be about $12 billion in 2020.

Muh antisemitism...get the fuck outta here with you SJW shit.

You don’t spend much time trying to read the room, do you?  You just throw shit like a monkey in a cage.

The election.

I thought that was evident to everyone. Or should be.

Of course the same people believe the same guy that didn’t campaign, didn’t give speeches, didn’t really run, can’t complete a cogent sentence, and has handlers to tell him which way to turn in the rose garden is the same guy who got the most legitimate votes for any president, ever.

As I often point out (but it gets me accused of trolling on PoA) a peer-reviewed review of the randomized clinical trials of the effect of the general public wearing cloth masks to prevent the spread of influenza like illnesses (Jefferson et al 2020) found that of 14 such trials none, that is 0 of 14, showed a statistically significant effect. They concluded that probably such mask usage provided little to no protection.

Bundgaard et al, the large Danish study which was concluded last year also failed to find a significant effect.

So while it sure seems like they should work based on intuition and laboratory studies say they should, the randomized trials show they don’t actually help much, if at all. This is a rather common result with proposed medical treatments.

I’ve read similar. The masks aren’t about protection. They are about compliance, subjugation, and virtue signaling.

Way too early to announce, and politically not a good idea.

 Right now our country is in a crisis over the resident in the WH.   I firmly believe that oatmeal brains and the prostitute will be removed from office, and we'll see a situation similar to the Ford presidency in which we will have two unelected individuals occupying the WH as care takers until the next election. 

So much damage has been done by Biden/Harris that it will take a few years to dig out.  We'll see the next congress slowly undoing the damage left by the Pelosi years.

True, and this how he shoots himself in the foot.

When your opponent is fucking up, step out of the way.  He’d be fine pointing out the fuckups - do it every day. But don’t make the story about you running or not, instead of Biden’s collapse.

I don’t think it would have been very different. If people stayed home when sick with symptoms, or at most the whole family stays home, that would have been enough. Otherwise keep all businesses open, no mask silliness, no six feet apart in line at the grocery checkout, no one way aisle silliness, I think all of that was worse than useless.

^^^^^This, exactly. Do what we’ve done for a hundred and fifty years. Keep the sick people home, and the healthy get on with your lives.

My in-laws thing Biden is doing a wonderful job.

They think banning the pipeline in the US will help stop global warming.
They are glad he is restricting oil and gas exploration on Federal land
They think we should be helping the poor and taxing the rich.
They think we should be out of Afghanistan.

But they don't care about Biden pushing other countries to pump more oil or subsidizing pipelines in other countries that benefit our enemies.
They don't believe that it is the middle class, and their kids and grand kids that are going to be taxed the hardest.
They are convinced that the fucked up Afgthanistan withdrawal was inevitable and Trumps fault. (They actually think both those things are true.

I"m with you guys on almost everything, but I disagree with you all on the Covid vaccine, so you can all go ahead and keep on being pissed at me.