As a lay person, it was pretty ridiculous and slightly horrifying to learn how much time and effort my scientist friends have to put into fulfilling irrelevant academic criteria just to be allowed to work on the research they are incredibly passionate about.<p>In &#x27;Scientific Progress Goes &quot;Boink!&quot;&#x27;, Calvin and Hobbes build a duplicator machine out of a cardboard box. If they were researchers, they&#x27;d first have to go to school for X years, graduate, apply for a position at a research institution that kind-of does research into duplicators, get accepted, and then spend years working research around how cardboard boxes work, spend more time writing grants and trying to publish their cardboard box research, and maybe one day a board will green-light them for actually being able to research how to duplicate something.<p>How can we tell the people with money to stop funding this stupid system?