As that arsenal was reduced, Russia's importance would surely shrink too.
There were still doubters out there, somewhere, beyond the clouds of fluttering paper, but their ranks are surely shrinking.
That number will surely shrink further as GM implements its plans to close down another half-a-dozen factories and sack another 20,000 workers.
To add insult to injury, Russian budget revenues, half of which come from oil and gas, will suffer greatly, and Gazprom, the state-run gas monopolist and cash cow for the Russian ruling elite, will surely shrink.
Ironically this may actually be good for existing tech powerhouses, as those immigrants who are willing to come to America — a number which has surely shrunk considerably in the last month — will want to go to demonstrably pro-immigrant locales like California, New York, and Boston … meaning the best tech talent will get even more concentrated in those places.
While some critics might portrait this manuscript as a complete exaggeration and an unwarranted "the end of the world is near" song, the underlying facts and numbers are quite clear – the number of old-school R01-supported labs is slowly but surely shrinking.
It's now down to about 4,000 companies, and given its steep downward trend will surely continue to shrink.
But surely, with a shrink-the-government Congress in control (except, perhaps, of its own members' occasionally intriguing behavior), Congress would tighten its own purse strings, wouldn't it?
Just as surely as any shrink-wrapped Microsoft disk, the human genome is a program, a set of precisely coded instructions that evolution has written for the design, operation and unfortunately rather limited maintenance of a person.
In men, excess testosterone can promote baldness and breast development while causing the testicles to shrink; surely no athlete wants to accumulate these side effects on the way to larger biceps!
