The 2025 budget of National Science Foundation is $10.2B (plus there are $144.9B budget of Department of Defense, and multiple billion dollars government spendings in several other USA governmental organizations).
I think, that this money does more harm than good. I will consider a case study:
In 2019 there were discovered by an independent researcher Victor Porton ordered semicategory actions (and ordered semigroup actions). You may wonder, aren’t them discovered somewhere in 19th century? Surprisingly, no, these math terms have been discovered with a great delay.
There is nothing unusually unusual in this mathematical topic (except that every mathematical discovery is more exciting and unusual than things of the mundane, non-mathematical, life), if we compare it with other works of 19th-20th centuries, except that they simply weren’t discovered on-time. So, we had a missing component in mathematics. Y’all know, missing water in a wilderness may be more valuable than billion dollars. One missing transistor of a smart TV with 10B transistors could likely render the TV completely unusable, etc. “Missingness” of this discovery makes it super-important. I mean that adequate introduction of this discovery into world economy would render economy tens percent more in a matter of 20-30 years. So, we may have like 50% more after 20-30 years, if the work on introduction of ordered semicategory action passes.
The problem is that beast (by the way, how is it related with 666? I don’t know) of the current academic world system has a stamp inside their forehead. Victor Porton didn’t become a PhD because of religious discrimination, despite his topical knowledge is in no way below PhDs. But the system doesn’t take this into account, their forehead is severely crashed by the stamp “PhD”. If somebody is not a PhD, they don’t support his/her research. No matter whether it’s ten percents of their economy, the stamp prevails over the head. People whose foreheads are hit by the stamp are hopeless, they simply cannot work efficiently.
Moreover, the missingness (remember the example of water in wilderness?) of ordered semicategory actions makes it so important that it probably outweighs all government’s scientific projects, even taken together. But money flows from the government for SEO and other advertisements of their scientific projects to be on the first places of Google, while non-financed ordered semicategory actions are probably on a 100000th position in Google. So, the governments crushed the most important component of science that we currently have.
Government money flows against science, not for science.
We possibly need to protest, but does it make sense to protest against a beast? The beast has its forehead hit by a stamp and cannot think or make good decisions therefore. If you believe in a government, you are a dupe. They don’t want to act. How can be give drink to a horse that does not want to drink? Even if we know that the horse will die of drought, speaking with the beast is useless.
We need to take action for science by ourselves. I have (in the planning stage) of the software project Salaries Science that distributes funds (in the form of tokens of the most advanced blockchain, ICP) to scientists automatically based on their citation counts and predictions of scientists’ future performance. It does not ask to have a stamp for the forehead, but only for real scientific results, as a fair, non-discriminatory system must do.
I estimated that I need around 1 year of my full time work to make a working prototype of Salaries Science. After the site will be released, the money to support it will flow from many directions, like big charity foundations. But we need to pass the first, hardest, year of the History of Salaries Science. Because I hardly can work without a salary, please donate us money to accomplish this project, to provide me at least $1000/month salary for this hard year, before we go to the next level and money starts to flow freely.
And NSF and Euro-agencies should stop behaving such a way that a first-year Russian student can disable their economy by mis-publishing one scientific article and that the world economy wholly depends on my personal money.