brynndragon | (no subject)

McCain's campaign has finally posted its own answers to the Scientists & Engineers for America survey and now you can directly compare them. I'm going to go through my own responses below; I'm an Obama suporter, just so you know when you read them.

McCain's answer to the Innovation question is very business and politics-oriented (e.g his S&T Adviser idea sounds good on paper but relies too heavily on who the president picks and frankly I don't trust him to make a non-political-pure-science pick), while Obama's is very science-oriented. Obama's answer pretty much dovetails with what mine would be if I was asked the same question, such as more money for basic and high-risk-high-reward research (which is particularly important for problems like cancer, where currently most of the money goes to finding treatments that increase lifespan by mere months without even lip-service to quality of life). I feel McCain is either excessively vague (what the hell does "focus on addressing national needs" refer to?) or too focused on specifics to leave room for, well, innovation (he doesn't discuss space exploration, he discusses the unmanned probes that NASA is currently sending up). In general, the language that Obama uses shows a greater understanding of how science is actually done and what scientists themselves are trying to do.

For the Global Warming question I was rather underwhelmed by Obama's answer. We finally have a number's difference - McCain wants 50% less than 1990's emissions by 2050 while Obama wants 80% less by the same time. They're also both in favor of cap-and-trade. McCain's had some clear flaws - he talks about punishing evil CAFE avoiders but nothing about increasing the standards themselves, for example. McCain is again business-oriented, but this is a much more appropriate place for such an approach (although I'm concerned about the tax credit for R&D, because I'd want to examine the definition of R&D with a fine-toothed comb and also the last thing we need are more tax credits for large corporations). I like the idea of prizes for discoveries like McCain mentions, but I'm not sure the government should be involved in that aspects of things - I'd rather they spent money bringing the fruits of such efforts into the commercial arena (which I think McCain would be amenable to, to be fair). I do like Obama's idea of getting everyone together to make things happen - I've been rather upset that we haven't even been trying to lead this effort when we've got more of the blame and burden than anyone else (although China is trying really hard to catch up).

I'll look at more of the answers later, possibly not until Tuesday evening though - I've got an exam tomorrow.