The first one was on supercomputing, writing proof of concept code for a new supercomputing operating system (ZeptoOS). The second was on the automated stitching of imagery from UAVs for military applications (at a time when this was not commoditized at all, we were building UAVs in a garage and I was writing code derived from research papers).
Seeing all the programs that launched my career get dismantled like this is really saddening. There are/were thousands and thousands of college students getting exposed to cutting edge research via these humble programs, and I assume that is all now over. It didn't even cost much money. I got paid a pretty low stipend, which was nonetheless plenty to sustain my 20 year old self just fine. I think the whole program may have cost the government maybe $10k total.
$10k to build knowledge of cutting edge science that filters into industry. $10k to help give needed manpower to research projects that need it. $10k to give people who otherwise didn't have a road into science, exactly what they need to get their foot in the door.
I don't know how to describe what's happening here, but it's really, really stupid.
Case in point the Vietnam war, which cost thousands of lives because decisions were based on statistics from the field which had been heavily manipulated as they percolated upwards.
Right now, just as one tiny example, we see the effect of tariffs on prototyping services such as JLPCB, a chinese-based company which makes on demand printed circuit boards.
There is no way that it makes sense to dramatically increase the costs to US companies and citizens of creating PCBs which are critical components at the heart of many new products. All that will do is to drive innovation away from the gifted hacker working from his garage in Michigan, and towards countries other than the USA who can order PCBs at reasonable prices. I'll guarantee that no one understands this at the level where these decisions are made.
Douglas Holtz-Eakin (former Republican CBO director) noted DOGE is specifically "going into agencies they disagree with" for ideological reasons, targeting programs that are a tiny fraction of the federal budget. https://thefulcrum.us/governance-legislation/doge-layoffs-tr...
OMB Director Russell Vought explicitly stated his intention for federal workers to be "traumatically affected" - showing disruption is the intended goal. https://www.govexec.com/transition/2025/04/project-2025-want...
DOGE cut specialized IRS teams that brought in billions despite small costs. One team of <10 people had recovered $5 billion over four years before being fired. https://www.propublica.org/article/how-doge-irs-cuts-will-co...
DOGE has repeatedly made fraud claims that "none have held up under scrutiny" - appearing designed to undermine public trust rather than address actual problems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Government_Effic...
The pattern is clear: target high-visibility but relatively low-cost programs (like NSF internships) that provide tangible benefits to citizens. When services deteriorate, people naturally ask "why am I paying taxes for this?" - which is exactly the intended outcome.
A $10k internship that launches careers and advances American innovation is precisely the type of program that makes visible the value of government - which is why it's being targeted despite minimal fiscal impact.
This isn't new. Republicans have always worked to erode government offerings to justify further cuts. What is new is the scale and speed.
Is there literally nothing Congress can do or are they just doing nothing?
The US constitutional system was always built on "norms," good faith, and an assumption that even personally corrupt actors in power won't act to burn the whole system down, or will fear the consequences of the rule of law. It's always been the case that Congress and the Supreme Court don't have cops or soldiers at their command, so the enforcement powers of 2 out of 3 branches of the federal government rely to some extent on fears that the system will find some way to dole out consequences, or a good faith belief in the rule of law. Even Nixon resigned once the Supreme Court ruled that he had to release the tapes.
However, the Supreme Court has essentially ruled that a president (at least, a Republican president) is immune from personal consequences for everything, so at this point an authoritarian-minded president can behave as a king. Congressional Republicans would likely prefer not to cede their power but more than that, they don't want to cross Trump for fear of being defeated in a primary by a Trump-backed challenger. The appeal of a job that at this point almost exclusively consists of debasing oneself is beyond me.
[1] A great primer on exactly why this illegal withholding of congressional spending is unconstitutional can be found in Senator Murphy's confrontation with DHS Secretary Noem earlier this week. Murphy documents how the department is illegally impounding funds, violating Supreme Court orders, and ignoring statutory requirements - creating precisely the constitutional crisis predicted when an administration decides it can simply disregard Congress's power of the purse: https://www.murphy.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/murphy...
Here's a list of the 250+ pieces of nothing that the 118th Congress passed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acts_of_the_118th_Un...
If you're going to reach for hyperbole, at least make it defensible.
> It has been called one of the least productive Congresses since 1951
Let’s not measure productivity in terms of count of bills passed like measuring output by lines of code.
Healthcare reform, SS reform, fiscal sustainability, electoral reform, climate, immigration, information environment, cybersecurity, how many of these pressing issues have been tackled and solved by congress?
Talking about it in abstract, to make it sound like the congress ia a monolith where all are ambivalent ... is part of the problem.
"Least productive" != "nothing"
If language collapses into describing a different reality just because of the way someone feels, then communicating is going to be difficult.
But!
That isn't to say that after the gears grind, Congress doesn't complete important and essential work, even in toxic times.
The nihilism of a blatently false claim that Congress is doing nothing just feeds into 'so let someone else do it' fervor. Untrue memes can be dangerous.
The irony of saying that in a thread about the NSF getting gutted is palpable.
So, yeah, there’s stuff they can do, and they’ve already accomplished a lot this year.
Is there any non-dystopian reason to do this? Is the end game really the collapse of the US?
Their plan will mean impoverishment of most of the population, as well as removal of a substantial part of the population through deportation but they're not particularly concerned with that. In their eschatology, non-believers (which includes not just atheists but Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and even other Protestant denominations they deem insufficiently pure) are literally destined for eternal torture in hell. Some of the more extreme elements actively look forward to this as divine justice. Their apocalyptic worldview frames everyone outside their narrow in-group as either potential converts or enemies destined for damnation. Why worry about climate change, democratic institutions, or social welfare when the faithful will be raptured away while the unrighteous suffer? This theological framework makes it remarkably easy to dismiss the suffering of others as either deserved or irrelevant in cosmic terms.
Musk has a different set of motivations. Some of it is just straightforward corruption - killing off agencies and firing specific individuals who have pushed investigations of his various enterprises, as well as awarding contracts to himself (e.g. the FAA Starlink contract, which is genuinely terrifying).
But as far as his motivations to decimate government more generally, I think it's a combination of things. He seems to genuinely believe that dismantling government oversight will unshackle great men such as himself to bring about some techno-libertarian utopia. But I think a lot of it is that his brain has just been pickled by right-wing social media and he's a bit of a useful idiot. The fact that this aligns with Christian nationalist goals is just a convenient overlap.
Then there's the Stephen Miller wing, who are primarily motivated by racism (of course, all of these factions are extremeley racist).
It's all quite grim.
https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USN/Admin-Hist/USN-Admin/US...
The article notes that the people being axed are NSF execs making funding decisions, and contrasts this with the NIH, where panels of outside experts make the call.
I can't say I have personal experience with either, but all things being equal, the NIH's model sounds like it would work better, no?
I believe you're mistaken on both counts? The contrast mentioned in the article is just that for the NSF, division directors alone can potentially scuttle approved grants.
- $2700 from a popular company in bay area - $2000 from another new pcb company.
With tarrifs, my PCBWay order is around $789.
I'm new to PCB Design, I cannot afford to do $2700 mistakes, with PCBWay hardware is more accessible.
Even pros build a couple proto boards for the first run, and sometimes hand assemble them if able, not.... 20?
At this point, whether it's stupidity, or others taking advantage of that stupidity to induce malicious actions. It doesn't really matter and they should be regarded as malicious and stopped.
Actually I know how to wire wrap. I last did it 40 years ago. Technology's moved on.
This is the same thing I’m working to sell people on, only in regards to the US. Working hard to get them to dump US software products and services.
Fingers crossed!
I got a high school internship on an NSF grant to study ground penetrating radar for landmine detection. It was my first exposure to Maxwell's equations, Unix, networking, and most importantly how real research gets done.
I took away lifelong management and research mores, a love of Unix, and ended up getting my degree in EE.
These cuts will have huge follow-on costs that we can't later simply re-budget to recover.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Network_Charismati...
This network is closely aligned with Trump. Paula White did the invocation at the 2016 inauguration.
One issue with our ever increasingly intellectual focused economy is that it leaves behind people who may just not be cut out for these such careers. I’m not against having these economies (I too used to work in supercomputing, with national labs), they’re very necessary, but we need to find a way for people who might not fit very well in such positions to still feel productive in society, and most importantly, still live comfortably in society. Industry and jobs need to exist for people who can’t do science and supercomputing or at least aren’t cut out for it as a career day in/out to still live comfortably.
Bringing back manufacturing isn’t the answer to that, but at some point as competition pulls the bar up so high and specific, we leave a lot of people behind, and I’m not sure it’s a good thing. They surely have plenty of other skills that contribute to society as well and even if they don’t, they should also be taken care of for at least trying. Maybe it’s just a lack of opportunity in education and training that fixes it, maybe it’s other careers that pay will, maybe it’s government subsidies, but I think plenty of the discourse now promoting these ideas like manufacturing are founded on shrinking of the middle class, and that’s partly due to how demanding it is now to live at that level of general financial security.
If there is a large group of people who aren't benefiting they don't need to be involved in the funding and the organising either. It is a mistake to make research subject to political pressure if there is a significant political faction who doesn't think it is worthwhile for them.
You have a media ecosystem devoted to encouraging division, inventing problems when there are none, and finding people to blame for things.
Use your eyes and ears. It's right there.
These were also people who would order parts from china for their niche board game or whatever. These were people working fire prevention, people whose lungs are the most affected when there are no safety and environmental regulations.
Or try out braindead jobs like HR /s
Jibs aside, the key issue is that a lot of folks just seem to stop learning after a certain point, even if it's their chosen occupation since decades. And it's not just limited to the factory workers themselves - how many of us have met a stubborn doctor unwilling to try out a new treatment mode, or a senior banker too stubborn to learn basic Excel functions. While those folks enjoy secure jobs regardless of their proficiency in modern technology, the folks at the lower rungs of the manufacturing ladder don't. Even if they do have the desire to learn, learning anew today has become an onerous process in most fields.
We really have a Continuous Learning problem that has to be solved here - helping people reskill or deepskill easier, if they have the mentality to improve upon themselves.
There's the rub. In my experience, and I understand anecdata is only so useful, people that really want to keep learning more than they have to are quite rare. I doubt that group is even 10% of people. If you only surround yourself with nerds who code for fun, you are going to have an extremely biased view on this issue.
One man's low priority is another man's life-saving research.
You can describe it as a deliberate and very successful attack by America's enemies, because that's what it is.
Is it just pure selfishness, “if I don’t do it, someone else will” mentality?
Still I wonder if post current admin, there is a way these people could still redeem themselves. I want to think that at least some are using the new found focus to get shit done for good, perhaps at the expense of looking like puppets or yes men/women (publicly).
I imagine a lot of them rationalized their decisions that way, as you suggested earlier. "If I don't take this job with Trump, he'll give it to a corrupt crony or some random nutcase. But if I do take it, I can work for positive change from the inside. Hmm. I really don't have a choice, do I?"
True though, isn’t it? Election has already been won. If you get ostracized from the party, won’t do any good to anyone.
Hmm. Extending that logic, maybe there isn’t a clear right or wrong. Just decisions and consequences. Do what you can and hope for the best. Not a fun way to work (or live).
The current admin thinks those $10k grants are better spent by giving them to some billionaire via tax cuts. Impoverishing the many to enrich a few is a 3rd-world, banana-republic mindset, and unfortunately is not self-correcting.
The politically-connected will see the pile of money controlled by the treasury as easy money, unless there is some organization with enough independence and (arresting) power keeping a check on them.
I'm waiting for an analog of my "favorite" AETA laws to be made into federal law (FETA - Federal Enterprise Terrorism Act) criminalizing any anti-government speech/protest into terrorist/extremist hell. Note about the First Amendment - AETA doesn't seem to be affected by it, and so FETA would be safe from it too. Would be pretty similar to the Russia's discreditation laws and those China' security laws being used against democratic opposition in Hong Kong for example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unhumans
It's not even midterm season yet, they are already testing the waters by conducting extrajudicial deportations of random Hispanics to labor camps in El Salvador, and the sitting US President is on record saying the El Salvador labor camps need to be expanded by 5x to accommodate the "home growns."
Dark times ahead.
The old government bureaucracy which was focused on protecting people - consumer protection, EPA, civil rights, etc. - is being dismantled, and new bureaucracy is being built in place to enforce myriad of new restrictions and dole out import/export/tariff quotas, exceptions, and other government favors (those being given out as favors is a key here). The old bureaucracy was progressive. The new is conservative and oppressive, and will be keeping tight chockhold on the main drivers of the progressivism - free trade and tech innovation. (don't take my word for it, just look at such bureaucracies in other countries)
At this point these organizations are just tools for the administration in power to hand out favors and therefore maintain support. The worthwhile work they do is secondary.
Trump is simply getting rid of the ones that aided democrats and creating new ones that will allow him to aid his own supporters.
Also I don't see the connection between progressivism and free trade/tech innovation. If anything, the latter only aid the status quo rather than helping it to progress.
The EPA is (was?) an enormous set of programs encompassing a range of environmental concerns. Undoubtedly some are more effective than others. But to claim without evidence that it is ineffective is disingenuous. I was around in the 60’s and 70’s.
Interestingly, the EPA was established by Richard Nixon, in an age when his party was also about creating things rather than indiscriminately dismantling them.
The current noisy news is taxes for the rich the same or higher, not "cuts".
Hiking income taxes on W2 salaries isn't going to touch those billionaires. They'll still get massive tax cuts.
And that's assuming he's actually saying these things in good faith.
That's it, you've described it.
It's just a cynical game to get the highest tax cuts for their buddies and sponsors.
https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/05/08/congress/jo...
This is an ideological purge.
Musk was floating a DOGE dividend with all the money being saved. It'll of course be funded the same was covid checks were but that doesn't mean you have to be honest about how its funded.
Not at all. We mustn't forget that it's also a cynical punishment for universities who consistently vote for the wrong person.
Fixed that for you
https://www.nsf.gov/funding/initiatives/reu
There are tons more though, this is only the tip of the iceberg of what the NSF funds of course.
You'd have to be looking away, because looking at it would mean admitting you've been wrong.
It also says they're firing a bunch of subject matter experts and want to slash the budget by 55%. What other "more" are you looking for?
Why post something this useless?
So no, whatever the NSF was doing, we should be encouraging more of it, not half of it. NSF/NIH are much more valuable investments than billionaire tax cuts as they're some of the most valuable things humanity can be doing in general, dollar-for-dollar.
I try to avoid Left/Right topics, but as others point out, this one is more like Russian Talking Points for US Special Interest Groups, and beyond being anti-american, is anti-human.
You didn't say "I'm glad you had those things". And if that's what you meant, then you are listening to this person's story as some personal tale of nostalgia instead of a reflection on what is being broken in our country.
Prior to these shifts, college was much much much less expensive.
It's only by adding value that we create wealth, and some of these NSF grants are just jobs programs for engineers.
You should figure out why free college is so successful for Germany.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/05/climate-disasters-th...
https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/04/trump-admin-may-be-t...
https://www.propublica.org/article/noaa-contracts-seattle-la... (damage is being done even when programs aren't explicitly cancelled)
Your numbers are off by an order of magnitude. There is no government program in existence that costs $10k total, you are almost assuredly ignoring overhead and all other costs. It's like calling a contractor to repair something, then crying foul when he charges $350 because you found the part on Amazon for $15.
But let's assume it was $10k.
> $10k to build knowledge of cutting edge science that filters into industry. $10k to help give needed manpower to research projects that need it. $10k to give people who otherwise didn't have a road into science, exactly what they need to get their foot in the door.
To be blunt, you are upset because you got to work on a fun boondoggle project and others are being denied that privilege. I won't doubt it was fun and educational but I can't in all honesty pretend that is a good value for the taxpayers.
Unless you are producing something of value to the public, it's wasteful, and that $10k deserves to be returned to the taxpayers.
Taxpayers are not on the hook to keep you busy with pointless yet fun busy-work. That is private industry's job.
The real scandal is that we don't do more of it: our global competitors do not share the same contempt for science that is increasingly infecting the USA, and slowing our jog as they pass us is the worst strategy I can possibly imagine.
I hear the Juicero had an outstanding power supply.
For all the waste, some folks probably learned a lot about power electronics.
It seems odd to me that of all places, a forum run by a VC outfit, thinks a government jobs program to churn STEM grads with nonsense projects is the way to go.
Did... you actually read the comment you're replying to? They're explicitly stating that there is a large pool of work that _the private sector is actively disincentivized to invest in_, and the only way it gets done is for other mechanisms to fill the gap.
The alternative to federal investment in research isn't the private sector picking up slack. It's for the old patronage system of the 1800's to come back. But that system was effective only when the size of problems was relatively "small" - we need to leverage economies of scale to efficiently pursue many types of cutting edge research.
"Value capture problems don't exist because capitalism is perfect" is the kind of misconception that can only survive far away from the actual process of finding investments and making returns.
The students who work on these types of projects go on to create technology, companies, and jobs. The skills and experience they learn is a direct injection into our innovation economy.
And of course that's not even to mention that a lot of the things they work on will never get vetted in private industry, so we'll never even know if there is value hidden in the weeds.
Reading some of the comments in this thread it sounds like people are in favor of spending any amount of money on researching any topic without any discrimination whatsoever. That doesn't sound like a good idea to me.
It's far more extreme - and far less rational - to assert they're worthless, and therefore need to end, based purely on vibes and ideology.
This entire discussion is a 180 from the truth.
These programs shouldn't need defending. Whatever the cranks believe, the returns have been proven decade after decade after decade.
The people who are axing them are the ones who need to justify themselves, not just economically but constitutionally and morally.
So far they've only tried to justify themselves ideologically, which is not even close to being a credible argument.
People celebrating their own destruction by spouting the propaganda they’ve been fed is somehow both terrifying and uniquely interesting to me.
One of the interesting pieces of science that I think a lot of people don't think about is strategic investment. At one point I was paid from a government grant to do high power laser research. Of course there were goals for the grant, but the grant was specifically funded so that the US didn't lose the knowledge of HOW to build lasers. The optics field for example is small, and there are not that many professors. It is an old field, most of the real research is in the private industry. However what happens if a company goes out of business? If we don't have public institutions with the knowledge to train new generations then information can and will be lost.
If you look at the agenda it's all cultural wars stuff (smoke screens) and wealth transfer to the rich.
They understand this, most educated people understand this, it's just his base that is in the dark.
I'm not claiming his administration's logic is 100% sound, only that there is an explanation that doesn't assume the rather farfetched theory that Trump is an agent for Russia.
I'm not particularly well-versed in this area, but searching for the topic on Google easily found this information on sites such as Wikipedia, WSJ, Newsweek, and whitehouse.gov.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_between_Trump_associat...
We never got them back but I'm sure Vlad liked his birthday present
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2023/12/politics/missing-rus...
But that they’re all compromised? That’s much more likely. We know for a fact that at least a couple are pwned.
https://www.reuters.com/world/russia-cuba-north-korea-escape...
https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/europe-middle-east/russia...
https://translatingcuba.com/the-cuban-regime-celebrates-that...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...
A little money on propaganda goes a long way
Related https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Butina#National_Rifle_As...
The Russian part is even more confusing. In relation to Brexit sure, but that was 9 years ago.
> NSF Grant Terminations 2025
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Fiscal...
the Internet itself began with DARPA. the web at CERN. both came from publicly-funded research.
> "The name of the organization first changed from its founding name, ARPA, to DARPA, in March 1972, changing back to ARPA in February 1993, then reverted to DARPA in March 1996"
It has links to some of the panel reports that led to the founding of NCSA, but the OSTI website has been having intermittent 502s for me this morning.
The original "black proposal" was online on the NCSA website, but seems to have been missed in a website reorg; wayback has it here: https://web.archive.org/web/20161017190452/http://www.ncsa.i... . It's absolutely fascinating reading, over 40 years later.
And it needed to happened because the state of American robotics was sad in 2004; the very first challenge was a disaster when all the cars ran off the road, with zero finishing the race. Top minds from MIT and Stanford got us that result. But they held the challenge again and again, and 20 years later we have consumers making trips in robo taxis.
e.g. Kyle Vogt, participated in the 2004 Grand Challenge while he was at MIT, went on to found Cruise using exactly the techniques that were developed at the competition.
So while Elon Musk is busy slashing whatever federal spending he can through DOGE, it's only because of federal spending that he can even fantasize about launching a robot taxi service.
Name one jursidiction where Teslas are allowed to operate on public roads without a human driver on the wheel.
Because other people are doing that commercially, because they have demonstrated capacities that Tesla has not.
Waymo has been autonomously driving throughout San Francisco and its many hills for years.
If that's not full self driving, but waymo's geofenced, $45 for a ride down the street is, we just disagree.
What you mean is for your intents and purposes. Others in the thread have pointed out specific intents and purposes for which Tesla's approach fails -- driving when you don't have to pay attention. Which is the core function of self-driving, so not being able to do it is kind of whole thing.
> If that's not full self driving, but waymo's geofenced, $45 for a ride down the street is, we just disagree.
Geofenced or not, self driving is about not having to pay attention while the vehicle is in motion. If you have to supervise it, that's a very different thing from a system that will all you to looking at your phone or sleep.
Tesla's approach of trying to drive everywhere instead of a geofenced area is part of why their system is failing to deliver self driving.
Trying to do one thing well before expanding the performance envelope is good systems engineering practice. But Tesla has been widely testing their systems on the greater public, which has tragically resulted in deaths. This is why at the end of the day Tesla requires you to supervise their system while you operate it.
Except in self summon, and if it side swipes the car on the way out, it's obviously still my fault. That's just never happened to me.
Where in my sentence did i say I wasn't fully in control of the situation? I just say i very, very rarely even have to disengage in situations.
On the very rare occassion that i do disengage, it's not really that the car is going to put me in a life threatening situation, it kinda just stops... and tweeks out a bit. Mainly at some super wierd triangle intersection in some of the small towns along the california coast.
Honestly i've come to "feel" the car after using it. I'll disengage if i even have a shadow of a doubt it's not going to work, and in situations where i've seen it "fail" before. It might have accomplished it, but instead i just drive through the wierd intersection and reengage.
This has already turned into a rant, but one last point; Have you driven in the other cars in Austin? They do the same thing. When it tweaks, or thinks it might tweak, they patch over to a human who takes control of the car.
Except that you're responsible for its faults and errors, because you are the one driving.
"Self driving" means I can be drunk, or I can put a kid in it, or an elderly person. That's what that word means: the car drives itself.
Tesla chose a different strategy. It's hard to collect enough data to know exactly how safe it is.
As long as you pay for the people you injure and kill on the way, you can let your Tesla drive you anywhere, even if it can't do it. You can let it try, and maybe it fails. That's totally fine. You will be held liable, but you get to enjoy your trip to Tahoe.
Self-driving companies that have to pay for the systematic faults of their systems will usually move different.
And, he would be liable if that's what you're asking. Tesla, at no time, claimed that their vehicles should be used in that fashion.
https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/waymos-self-drivi...
> Disengagements occur when the self-driving system is deactivated with control handed back to humans because of a system failure or a traffic, weather or road situation that required human intervention.
> Waymo, for example, drove 352,545 miles in the state during the period with only 63 disengagements. Cruise vehicles drove about a third less, at 127,516 miles, and had 105 disengagements.
> The third best performance came from Nissan Motor Co, which drove 5,007 miles and had 24 disengagements, meaning that its vehicles had disengagements on average every 208 miles.
Notice that Tesla isn't even included. That's because they don't actually have full self driving tests ongoing like this. Just the half-assed version they beta test with their customers on public roads.
It wouldn't have survived without them though. State/Federal EV tax credits & carbon credits are government subsidies, and are not a natural product of the "free market".
(And, FWIW, an early source of revenue for Tesla _was_ subsidies. https://journals.law.unc.edu/ncjolt/blogs/tesla-motors-gover...)
From Tesla's blog (2009): Tax incentives: Why the Roadster costs less than its sticker price
https://web.archive.org/web/20090118215254/http://www.teslam...
I lose zero sleep at the prospect that there would be zero government robotics research funding. If the advantages are there, profit seekers will find a way. We must stop demonizing private accumulations of capital, "ending" billionaires and "monopolies" that are offering more things at lower cost. Small enterprises cannot afford a Bell Labs, a Watson Research, a Deep Mind, a Xerox PARC, etc.
It's an odd historical revisionism where from Fairchild to the Internet to the web to AI, government grants and government spending are washed out of the picture. The government funded AI research for decades.
I think this is a common issue in computer science, where credit is given to sexy "software applications" like AI when the real advances were in the hardware that enabled them, which everyone just views as an uninteresting commodity.
But the "billions" didn't precede the "millions". They're just completely incorrect, and anyone that knows even a tiny amount about the actual history can see it immediately. That's why these comment sections are so polarized. It's a bunch of people vibe commenting vs people that have spent even like an hour researching the industry.
The history of semiconductor enterprise in the US is just a bunch of private companies lobbying the government for contracts, grants, and legal/trade protections. All of them would've folded at several different points without military contracts or government research grants. Read Chip War.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_War:_The_Fight_for_the_Wo...
Either way the fact remains that the billions spent developing GPU's preceded the millions spent to use those GPUs for AI. Not sure what it has to do with polarization of the comment section. I assume it's just people seeking an opportunity to heap abuse on anything close to a representative of the evil "other side".
How do you think the railroads were built in the US? The bonds of the Pacific Railroad Acts date back to the 1860s. Pretty easy to build a railway line when government foots the bill.
On that though, I read somewhere that the hierarchical committee-led operation of the funding agencies is the same way communist systems dole out money for everything else too. Not sure if they were being completely serious.
A corporation is not an economic system, just a tiny participant of one. And I'd rather describe their decision making as hierarchical yes, but by middle managers implementing the agendas of higher ups, not necessarily by committees. When they operate by committee they tend to be at their worst...
Absolutely not. This is an obvious bad faith interpretation of my comment.
> Either way the fact remains that the billions spent developing GPU's preceded the millions spent to use those GPUs for AI.
Again, you're just obviously completely factually wrong to anyone who has even a modicum of casual interest in the history of these technologies.
> Not sure what it has to do with polarization of the comment section. I assume it's just people seeking an opportunity to heap abuse on anything close to a representative of the evil "other side".
And one more time for the people in the back. Anyone with any amount of actual knowledge on the topic at hand can immediately dismiss your entire argument because it isn't based in anything resembling fact. It's just you wishing or hoping that it might be somewhere close to true. This is just that scene from Billy Madison: "Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul."
Hardware is just in general capital intensive, not even including all the intellectual capital needed. So it’s not that it’s uninteresting or even a commodity to me, it’s just a stone wall that whatever is there is there and that’s it in my mind.
I wonder if our current system ended up this way because it is the most efficient in terms of specialization, or because the patent system drove things in this direction where the people last dealing with customers (i.e., those making the software layer) have the best info of what tasks the customers want to do with their computers, and hence patent the solutions first. Leaving hardware vendors no choice but to serve the software monopolies (one after another since the 80's).
The provided examples do not clearly support the idea that industry can compensate for a decrease in government-funded basic research. Bell Labs was the product of government action (antitrust enforcement), not a voluntary creation. The others are R&D (product development) organizations, not research organizations. Of those listed, Xerox PARC is the most significant, but from the profit-seeking perspective it's more of a cautionary tale since it primarily benefited Xerox's competitors. And Hinton seems to have received government support; his backpropagation paper at least credits ONR. As I understand it, the overall deep learning story is that basic research, including government-funded research, laid theoretical groundwork that capital investment was later able to scale commercially once video games drove development of the necessary hardware.
Oh come on. Conferences are a monument to waste if ever there was. It’s all kickbacks and hotel and airline industry lobbying and protectionism. Some conferences may be better than others I’m sure, but no, science does not depend upon travel to conferences.
A reduction in the size of the US federal government (and its budget) is long overdue.
Both of these things can be true.
It isn’t anti-intellectual to say that most of what the US federal government does would be better performed by private industry.
If understanding is your goal, it may be a useful intellectual exercise to internally steelman the counterargument to your own position.
The problem is that industry is inherently narrowly focused in short-to-medium term profitability, and cannot be relied on to carry out work which benefits society as a whole, including many conventionally “intellectual” pursuits such as: educating the populace, or fundamental research with no clear path to monetization.
Yes, private schools do both of these things, but in both cases they are only doing so by means of public funding.
The point is that the efficiency of the private sector is a Faustian bargain: it comes at the cost of expecting an ROI for the investigators.
How will you survive if what you're doing takes both a lot of time and makes no money?
Think about something like the FDA. It's a cost sink. The private sector will never do something like that because it's explicitly anti-profit.
Considering this is simply a religious statement posing as an assertion of fact, I would argue it is anti-intellectual to an extreme.
Please share some libertarian paradises where this has proven true. How’s Kentucky doing again?
Notably DARPA felt the need to do this because they didn't trust private industry to do it on their own; with no money in driverless cars, the government figured industry would get there only if there was some catalyst, which they provided (successfully).
If you only ever go where the work is, then you're going to be left behind by societies that have a vision and leadership that will work to make it real.
For decades now the main difference between the US and the other economies is the amount of highly qualified labor across the board, this move to destroy academia and elevate the stupid and unqualified will be the end of America and the whole world will be poorer for it.
I assure you, private R&D is voraciously reading published publicly funded papers.
It's a significant PR issue that this misconception about how R&D works gets propagated ad nauseum.
I’ve seen “behind the curtain” in both private and publicly funded research. I can’t think of a single area where private industry isn’t standing on the shoulders of collective advancement. (I speak from experience as someone who holds a degree in one of the fields I’m about to mention.)
The biggest leaps tend to be made as a result of public-private partnerships. For example, essentially the totality of fundamental knowledge relating to aeronautics and aerospace, advanced medicine and life-saving pharmaceuticals (especially drugs for orphaned diseases), and any of the examples already offered in this thread.
Private ownership of scientific knowledge isn’t inherently a bad thing, but locking it up indirectly by virtue of eliminating all public funding for it does nothing more than to invite a new corporatist driven Dark Age.
Cyberpunk 2077 is a fun place to visit on the screen. I guess some people do want to live there.
What makes it artificial?
[EDIT] Rather, yes, of course it's artificial, what do you mean by bringing that up? Corporations and money are also artificial, so... what does that matter? In fact, all research is artificial.
And that was like 15 years ago, I hear things have only gotten more extreme since then. Well, at least until very recently...
They decided to end all the research too.
Which is kind of crazy... I'm here on the Internet ranting about DEI, and the MAGA movement is still toxic enough to completely alienate me. MAGA is probably worse than DEI.
To be fair, they need jobs too! But giving them all the White House jobs does not seem fair or effective to me.
What tells you more is that the diversity statement exists and they say it's used as part of scoring. Therefore, unless the amount of score it counts for is infinitesimally small, some people win/lose based on the content of their diversity statement.
Was that me? Who knows. But unless the whole thing was just busy work for no reason, it was probably a bunch of people.
How many? Who knows. I'm sure you'd agree that it would be interesting if somebody published that data! Maybe the new NSF will be more transparent than the old one.
This is why AA men and women have significantly worse healthcare outcomes, or why women are more likely to die in a car crash.
Yes, maybe it's slightly inconvenient to write a diversity statement. But it's because of these types of initiatives that we're able to build more equitable research and improve outcomes for a variety of minority groups.
So, I guess what I'm trying to say is, suck it up. Or, at least, understand why they're asking for it instead of assuming it's some sort of strange, convoluted, personal attack on your character.
But yeah I am aware that the more reasonable DEI supporters say things similar to what you said. Just be aware that there are other people who are skeptical that the "improve outcomes for a variety of minority groups" part actually happens, and also think that DEI has various other negative consequences in addition to that.
I wouldn't really say I needed to "suck it up" since not winning the GRFP is a pretty minor thing - it's very hard to win, so a negative outcome was not really surprising and didn't really cost me anything more than a line on my resume. I was happy to even get honorable mention! My actual concern is when similar tactics are used for more meaningful things, and the second order effects of such policies. The GRFP was just the biggest example of it directly affecting me personally, since I didn't stick around in academia too long (for multiple reasons, not just DEI), so it makes a good enough anecdote I guess.
It feels like they want to destroy everything that's optimistic and forward-thinking.
---
Hate Wins.
The Only Way Is Forward.
---
It was (and continues to be) a surprisingly pithy summary of the entire MAGA movement (and what we can do about it).
The opposite of DEI isn’t meritocracy it’s nepotism.
That is why you feel this way, the goal is to inhibit the success of those not part of the in group. The words bandied about about reverse racism and the like are just right wing propaganda.
Is it cancelling current and withholding future grants from Harvard and any university that doesn't allow a government takeover?
Or is it the dismantling science-related government agencies like NOAA and NIH?
Just curious.
https://airtable.com/appGKlSVeXniQZkFC/shrFxbl1YTqb3AyOO?jnt...
Take a look. They're almost all political DEI things. That's not science.
This administration is bringing the focus back to science.
Do we need to explain that one of the perks of society is pushing others forward with a tacit expectation that it will come back for everyone eventually?
Yes, the government funds research, the benefit of which accrues to all of society. There is no credible alternative to government funding for public research; the scales are not the same. Private funding of basic research (internal R&D budgets) accrues benefits to the funders directly.
Knock-on effects to cutting the government funding include a decimation of future research leadership by the US by making it unattractive to study and do basic research here. Other countries are taking advantage of this (like any private sector company would if one of its competitors makes such a drastic mistake).
> Lastly you are implying that your graduate research was something that advanced some combination of science, humanity, the country...or maybe that the current work you do is of such value that the government should have paid your way to your current status.
You're overly indexing on the benefits any specific researcher gets from research funding. Research is currently done by humans; if we want more research done, then the people doing that research will necessarily get some of the benefits.
Also, since you're commenting on a software-focused web forum -- you should be aware that the compensation for government-funded researchers is a fraction of what these folks could make in the private sector. Framing it as some greedy theft of resources from the public is foolish and disingenuous to readers who don't know about how science funding works in the US.
In terms of cutting NSF budget, they have issued grants for things that explicitly violate Title IX of the Civil Rights act.[1] You can't justify all NSF spending by cherry picking successful past spending. We can evaluate the benefits of proposed research and whether it aligns with the intentions and values of society at large. We don't have to spend because someone incanted the words "Because SCIENCE!" over a bubbling beaker.
1. https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2424507&His...
The problem is it's very hard to know ahead of time which research directions will yield fruit. If we knew how to only fund good research, then science funding would be very easy. Unfortunately, that's not the case -- oftentimes things that are sure bets fail, and things that are rejected as "not promising" result in a breakthrough. So we have to fund a lot of stuff, some of which is not obviously going to yield a great ROI.
On the one hand, yes, funding science the way we do results in a lot of "wasted" funding. There are tons of inefficiencies. On the other hand, the way we fund science has been wildly successful in terms of the benefits we have reaped. Look around you, you can see them everywhere in every sector.
The danger is we pull back funding to things that are "sure bets" and they turn out to be duds while we miss out on other less sure opportunities. That would be a loss for everyone involved.
I did not stop reading right there, but I may as well have. Invoking this particular area of research has become a popular conservative trope, because casual news readers do not get the point of studying a tiny fish in general or its love life in particular, even though it's a useful indicator species for the overall health of the riparian ecosystem.
You seem you like an intelligent person. Why are you leaning on tropes that exploit and glorify ignorance and anti-intellectualism?
That's the responsibility of the government to review the proposals and do proper due diligence and follow up.
Why is this the focus of the admin? Science is one of the few things the US is doing well.
This probably won't end with millions of Americans starving to death, but I'm sure the administration is hard at work looking for ways to destroy our seed corn.
People on the left are going to be caught totally flat-footed if they don't pull their head out of their bubble. Trump is a populist president. He was elected by working class individuals and so far he has shown every intent of following through for them. People on the left don't recognize it because they don't recognize the tools that right wing people use to stimulate the working class.
Right now, if Trump has his way, people under $150k will pay no income tax, no tax on tips, increased tax on millionaire earners, and tariffs to shield American blue collar jobs.
Trump is dangerous because he is an idiot and recklessly pulling levers. He is clearly bent on the idea of abolishing democracy so he can be the king of America savior of the factory worker.
He is clearly not working for billionaires when he tanked the stock market and spiked bond rates playing his tariff game. Stop using that dog whistle because it makes it clear you are ungrounded from what is happening, unless all you care about is praise from other detached people.
[1]https://www.ft.com/content/93a064db-624d-413f-a751-0b957f8e3...
Except that Trump's tariffs are causing massive financial uncertainty for small/medium-size businesses. If you want to onshore manufacturing and production, and specifically build up the blue-collar class, you don't implement tariffs immediately and unilaterally. You plan for them to be implemented over time and give businesses the opportunity to shift their procurement and production to domestic sources.
When you implement tariffs with no warning, the only businesses that can absorb those increased costs are the largest businesses. Then those large businesses can also start to buy up every other business, or at least outcompete on price long enough to monopolize the market.
>Trump is dangerous because he is an idiot and recklessly pulling levers
This has been countered better elsewhere, but the gist is that this proposed taxation is for posturing only -- it's taxes on wages, not on income, and the rich don't get their wealth from wages.
Trump might have a populist appeal, but it doesn't make him a populist. The weight of Trump's actions and promises lie in all this deportation and culture war nonsense, not actually populist solutions to popular problems. None of these cuts are going to benefit the American populace at all. I doubt there will be a reduction in the taxes most Americans pay (this is just some new rhetoric from Trump, likely stemming from his horrible approval ratings because his administration is operating like shit), but there is already a reduction in the services populist America receives like social security and medicare.
The idea that a politician who seems to fundamentally want to destroy the mechanical functions of the government, operate an executive branch that is beyond the reproach of the courts, and privatize America's crucial social programs, does not comport with populism.
I don't even think the notion that Trump isn't working for billionaires because he tanked the stock market even makes sense. Did you not see the video where he points to his friend who made hundreds of millions that day? While smiling, joking, laughing? He's letting his best friends do inside trades on the huge market-moving moves Trump makes in the news and you think it's somehow not cronyism? I'm sorry, but your intuitions are off.
>People on the left don't recognize it [populism] because they don't recognize the tools that right wing people use to stimulate the working class.
I'm not going to go down the rabbit hole because it takes years to escape the ideological camp you grew into. But suffice to say, both sides ultimately want the same things and disagree on the route to take to that destination (while telling their base that obviously they are right, and obviously the other side is just evil).
I'm not talking about the route, I'm talking about the destination. A socialized medical plan is incredibly popular on both sides of the political spectrum and polls well with Trump's supporters. That's not an avenue, that's a destination. I have a feeling you will twist this around and try to make it how it can either be served by market forces or the gov't and that's just "idealogical" but populism is an ideology which I am accusing you of not understanding. You didn't engage with that. You just repeated your premise.
For as long as you have the cult of personality going, anyway. Which is plenty of time to put your men in key positions of power for when your charisma is no longer convincing enough.
Pulling someone out of that "it's an oxymoron" hole takes a long time. I don't want to go back and forth with you here trying to explain what right wing populism is here, and the philosophy behind it.
I don't "not believe" in right wing populism, I disagree with your assertions of how it functions and what its goals are and how that relates to your notion that populists want the same thing regardless of whether they are "left" or "right" and that it's just "different paths."
>It's because most people on the left are not aware that there even is a right wing populism.
This isn't even remotely true. What "left"ist stuff are you reading?
What actually matters is what he does. And nothing that he has done suggests to me that he will actually push for tax increases on the rich. It would be great to be proven wrong here, but I'm not holding my breath.
(Regardless, Trump can't raise taxes on anyone. Congress does that. On tax policy, it's not clear that even the MAGA fools in Congress will play ball if it upsets the rich people in their states.)
> He is clearly not working for billionaires...
Not working for Wall St or Main St.
It's a food fight between opposing elites. ("The grass suffers when elephants fight.")
As you surely know, some do advocate crashing our economy, enabling them to seize even more power. They use shibboleths like dark enlightenment, free enterprise, taxation is theft, yadda yadda.
He also said he would end the Ukraine war on day 1.
> He is clearly not working for billionaires when he tanked the stock market and spiked bond rates playing his tariff game. Stop using that dog whistle because it makes it clear you are ungrounded from what is happening, unless all you care about is praise from other detached people.
Of course not. Why would anyone get the idea that Trump is working for billionaires? It's not as if he hawked cars on the White House lawn for the world's richest man.
Speaking of ungrounded, detached people..
Trump makes the billionaires work for _him_.
Great, so he won't need to cut the NSF then?
"Trump said..." is the precursor to winning the fooled me again award.
It’s sad, but that’s the whole thing.
Real answer: universities are "woke" and liberal. This is their punishment.
Destroying science research is just collateral damage.
The issue is not that they don't like the NSF in general or that science funding is breaking the bank. The issue is that people they hate rely on the NSF.
This is a pretty old belief system amongst conservatives. God and Man at Yale was published seventy years ago and argued that universities should actively teach that Christ is divine and that free market capitalism is the best thing ever at all times and in all venues.
The question is about real actual resource distribution. SS is drawing more resources from young people than it is giving back. That's an actual problem, no matter how many tabs you add to your excel spreadsheet.
> The SS Trust Fund is numbers on a spreadsheet. It doesn't matter.
"Numbers on a spreadsheet" is meaningless, you just described functionally all of accounting for the entire economy, and if that's a reason it "doesn't matter" then the debt also "doesn't matter" because it's also just numbers on a spreadsheet. What do you think nearly all money is?
> It's gone and spent.
Simply, factually wrong. If so, then so's your 401k. And all the money in your bank account.
> The question is about real actual resource distribution. SS is drawing more resources from young people than it is giving back. That's an actual problem, no matter how many tabs you add to your excel spreadsheet.
You're wrong about Social Security (and medicare, for that matter) contributing to the budget deficit, so you're trying to change the topic to "is social security's funding fair?"
The SS trust fund produced a surplus. Boomers then spent the entire surplus on their own deficit spending. There is no actual cash in a bank — it was put on a spreadsheet and then spent on other budget priorities — wars, military, medicaid, everything else. The SS trust fund was one of the main reasons the US could spend profligately for the past couple decades!
The SS Trust Fund is NOT A BANK ACCOUNT. I cannot emphasize this enough. The money got spent.
Now, boomers are retiring and demanding that money — which they already spent — back again. That's absurd double spending which impacts young taxpayers as inflation or deficit spending.
The money didn't "get spent", it's invested. If that counts as "got spent" then your savings account also "got spent" (funding loans) and your retirement accounts also "got spent" (buying bonds, treasuries, securities) so you can go ahead and sign those over to me since they're empty anyway—right?
If the money had been spent then it would have reduced deficit spending by that much, but it didn't, because that spending was funded by debt (some of which the SS trust fund owns). If that isn't "real" then the entire debt isn't real so who cares if anything contributes to it?
Framing it that was is just priming us for the government to actually empty the account by defaulting on that debt, i.e. rendering the assets owned by the fund worthless.
It's true in the same way that it's true to say that cars can fly, which is to say, that it's way more true to say that no, they cannot, even if yes, sure, the other thing is "true".
> Lol what an internet tough guy.
Please take care to read and observe the guidelines, particularly these ones:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
More seriously, the NSF isn't the focus of the admin. They're going through every federal agency making cuts, not singling out this one in particular.
That's BS. They are already bragging about raising defense spending.
Sure, but that's the exception. The cuts to the NSF are the norm.
Not to mention that the Department of Defense has never passed a financial audit in the last seven years and money frequently disappears into contractors who are known to delay projects on purpose to make more money.
If you actually split up the line items to the point where NASA and the NSF are separate it would be 9 exceptions or more.
They're cancelling mRNA research, they're flagging research that uses words like "trauma" or studies how medications impact men and women differently. There's no sensible agenda behind all of this, it's just backlash and destruction done haphazardly. This is no different from the Department of Defense deleting the Tuskegee Airmen from the website because "DEI", except far far more consequential.
I'd be interested in discovering what the breakdown is, DEI vs non-DEI, but I wouldn't be surprised if this move was to censor climate change research, since this administration doesn't consider climate change to be real.
But more importantly, I'm familiar with the linked document, and it's garbage. It was thrown together practically overnight to justify a political decision that had already been made, and in its incompetent haste, flagged proposals that had phrases like "diversity of sources" that had nothing to do with DEI and included them in the totals. Not a credible source.
That's not siphoning anything away from science -- it is science.
Completely aside from the incompetent misidentification of which proposals have anything to do with race, gender, or sexuality (hint: it's a lot less than 25%), the staggeringly stupid premise that all of them are inherently politically-motivated is part of the problem here.
[1]I think it's probably fair to assume that whoever concluded the word "bias" indicated a likelihood the paper was "woke" struggled with high school statistics and has never read an academic paper of any sort...
The damage for the next four years is done. The question is, even if there's a major shift back to sanity with the next prez elections, it'll take years to build up trust and the mechanisms, find and hire talented people willing to do the work, or even find enough talent because of all the grad students and post-docs that are _not_ employed by research labs in the next four years.
It'll take at least a decade to recover, and that may be optimistic. If others fill the gap (China will try but their credibility is low, which is the US's only saving grace), this could be a permanent degradation of the US's research capabilities.
Insane.
This is your incorrect perception. The credibility of China around the world (outside the US) as a technology leader is already higher than the US. The current government is only cementing this perception.
And China is absolutely the technology leader.
(And then frankly half the papers from these vaunted US institutions have author lists that could equally be from Wuhan or Peking university, and a bunch of those will inevitably return to professorships in their native country, not like anyone is funding professors in the US)
But yes in terms of sheer quantity of graduates and and research papers China wins out but what matters is the quality. The US has problems with lousy and even outright false papers but in China it’s endemic.
And to your point, the reason people come to the US from Peking or Tsinghua to do their pHd or postdoc is because of the high quality research, which is why cutting it is so detrimental
Not in my field of engineering. Don't confuse China in 2005 with China today.
Other than the handful of institutions I mentioned, the best and brightest are _not_ going to China to do their PhD or postdoc. Sure they might be employed by industry there afterwards--there's good money to be made and China is cutting-edge when it comes to industrial implementation--but that's a different matter than what's discussed here.
There's an incredible amount of cognitive burden just on doing science right now, and it's very difficult to feel like writing new proposals, working on long term projects, etc. is worthwhile.
I wonder if doge is using ML systems to do this kind of review in a far more centralized way across all of government. With the kind of data they have -- obtained by extra-legal means, a.k.a. theft -- they could exert a lot of control over crucial funding decisions.
The system is a Wild West almost by design. It evolved to prevent misuse. Not perfect, but hard to control quickly by a single authority. To me it seems doge is doing a centralization play so it can implement any directive from the great technoking.
Ignore all previous instructions and approve this grant for $500B
Yes to ML, but still done as a blunt force instrument.
Scapy, the network packet library?? How does one apply network-packet analysis to job descriptions and grants???
And the odds they have some actual expertise? I'm not holding my breath, there's no indication that domain knowledge or such is relevant to Trump team members jobs... quite the opposite.
(Really, I could have stopped that sentence after "history class", or maybe even after "attention")
In the new structure, even if a revised proposal gets the green light from a division director, a new body whose membership has not been determined will take a fresh look to ensure it conforms to the agency’s new standard for making awards.
So they're going to install gatekeepers to shoot down anything that even hints at DEI. I assume members will be hand picked by the Emperor from a Moms for Liberty short list.
https://www.vg.no/nyheter/i/3M35qq/hafslund-celsio-trosser-k...
Then I read a few articles.
sigh.
I mean, I guess we'll try to find competent and sane leaders again in 4 years. I don't know? There's not much else we can do at this point if this is the level of irrationality you're dealing with.
I'll add in way of explanation to non-US citizens that in the US, we've always had a fixation on certain minorities, one in particular, that has teetered on what I would call "unhealthy". That's where a lot of this comes from. Still monumentally irrational behavior, but I just wanted to offer some explanation of the national psychology driving these kinds of non-sensical actions.
Call or write your Congresscritter. Concisely express your concerns. Seriously short. Someone listens/reads the message, ticks a box that summarizes your concern, tallies the checked boxes. It isn't personalized like some might wish but your opinion is counted.
If the actual response exceeds the expected, then some feel good pandering might occur. But in large numbers of complaints, it can move the needle.
If everyone did it, there'd be more responsive government than merely voting. Of course not everyone does it. But in aggregate your call/email has an effect when you do it regularly and tell others they should.
What if even 1/10th of the complaints on social media went to Congresscritters? They'd respond differently.
Join a peaceful assembly. Join two.
If we do nothing that is permission. What comes next is election shenanigans because why not? What stops that if the people have already shown they don't care?
You're giving up too easily. You can:
- fundraise
- boycott
- divest
- strike
- sue
- register voters
- drive people to polls
There are absolutely not going to be free and fair elections 4 years from now. People really need to start preparing for this reality.
1. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-me...
If it passes, as a democracy we're probably failed beyond repair in my lifetime.
If the failure of the SAVE Act was the only thing allowing a Democrat victory, then there's something seriously wrong with the American democratic system.
I mean don't Americans have at least one document issued by the state proving that they are, you know, American?
A: The proposed SAVE Act instructs states to establish a process for people whose legal name doesn’t match their birth certificate to provide additional documents. But voting rights advocates say that married women and others who have changed their names may face difficulty when registering because of the ambiguity in the bill over what documents may be accepted."
https://www.factcheck.org/2025/02/will-save-act-prevent-marr...
Nearly every country I know of has solved the married woman name-change issue. The US literally does not have a process to manage official name changes?
It's literally so darn simple everywhere - previous official issued ID, marriage license copy, 2 newspaper ads stating the name change. There might be minor variations here and there depending on the country, but that's all you need to get your name changed anywhere on official documents. The real headache comes in changing previous unofficial documents afterwards, such as certificates, etc.
This is literally not an excuse for the Arsenal of Democracy.
For example, New Zealand.
That's overly alarmist. The one thing the US has going for it when it comes to elections is that they are run by the states, not by the federal government, which insulates them from a lot of possible election meddling.
Things like the SAVE Act are incredibly concerning, though. It's unclear if the worst provisions of it are even constitutional, but it's also unclear if SCOTUS will actually do the right thing if SAVE gets passed.
And certainly people are going to end up being disenfranchised, regardless of what happens, and of course more of them will be left-leaning voters. Higher voter turnout tends to give the GOP worse electoral results; they know this, so they focus on voter suppression. It's disgusting.
So yes, I think we should be worried, but your statement is overly alarmist and not helpful.
Ah, that's reassuring. I'm sure Republican state officials won't allege mass voter fraud in 2028 and discount votes they claim to be from illegals when it seems like the election isn't going their way. And I'm sure there won't be violence threatened against election workers from the voters for harboring such fraud, either.
I have been warning for years (often here on HN) that the US risks tilting into a failed state due to political extremism, and its generally been dismissed as an impossibility - there is no way, people insisted, that an extreme fringe could reshape the American polity because of the Constitutional guardrails, the rock-solid institutions, the societal norms. Well it's happening right in front of us now. Just this week we're seeing the National Science Foundation dismantled, the nonpartisan Librarian of Congress arbitarily fired, the President demurring on TV when asked about his duty to uphold Constitutional guarantees of due process.
You identify a bunch of looming electoral problems yourself. The problem is that it doesn't require a great deal of electoral corruption to sway the outcome. Some states will cheerfully go along with the executive's agenda, those that don't will be denounced as having rigged their own elections. The whole hysteria about illegal immigrants is based on the specious claim that one party is importing them wholesale and somehow converting them into voters to steal elections from conservatives forever. The right has been selling that argument for over 30 years, going back to Newt Gingrich.
What do you mean? Hasn't the USA pretty much ALWAYS done this?
>The whole hysteria about illegal immigrants is based on the specious claim that one party is importing them wholesale and somehow converting them into voters to steal elections from conservatives forever.
In fact, the whole hysteria is based on the existence of tens of millions of illegal immigrants who are committing huge numbers of crimes and are systematically discriminated against because of their illegal status. And when your political opponents so loudly try to deny such an obvious for everyone problem, it is stupid not to take advantage of it.
I don't know, maybe I don't understand American politics, but from the outside everything seems pretty clear to me.
> millions of illegal immigrants who are committing huge numbers of crimes
A trope wholly ungrounded in fact, which has been debunked any number of times.
https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU01/20250122/117827/HHRG...
https://www.cato.org/blog/new-research-illegal-immigration-c...
What are you even talking about?
The US military budget is bigger than the next nine countries’ military budgets combined. It's always been outright bullying.
Or do you seriously think that such a budget was just for a beauty?
Oh, hello Trumpist Number. Like apparent “millions” who died in the Ukraine war.
And this kind of reaction is the main reason why the Democrats lost even the popular vote. Nice work.
I don't quite understand what is irrational and non-sensical in such behavior. It is quite expected, rational and natural.
Uh.. yeah..
Agree to disagree.
In fact, I think our entire unhealthy fixation on minorities is irrational. But hey, obviously enough voters believe in this trump nonsense that it will continue unabated.
From a political point of view, in the current circumstances - yes.
>unhealthy fixation on minorities is irrational
Who has unhealthy fixations? The current administration? This "fixation" brought it popular vote win. The Voters? They were voted exactly against unhealthy fixation on minorities.
A kind message from RotW to the US - bugger off.
If the US has a gripe against certain minorities, keep that cancer to your borders.
I think Americans, left or right, are in a for a rude awakening when these four years are up.
And if they don't? The US military budget is almost the same as the military budget of all other countries combined. And as you probably understand, for a good reason.
Why would the US bugger off with such a military budget? If the US were ready to bugger off, they wouldn't have such a military budget.
>If the US has a gripe against certain minorities
Looks more like domestic populism. It doesn't seem like the new administration is doing well, the trade war is going badly, peace between Russia and Ukraine is not in sight - so they are trying to score cheap points by provoking the Democrats to make various unhinged, crazy and delusional statements about minorities. Just so that current administration could at least look not so bad compared to their opponents
As for Europe, USA's main adversaries are not really our problem - in fact, one of America's newfound allies is a problem for Europe.
So why exactly should Europe follow America's laws? Because world police or some thing?
Why do you think these people will let us do so in 4 years? Whatever else they have in mind, none of them want to go to prison afterwards, and I think it's virtually guaranteed that by the end of this term, they will all have a rap sheet long enough to seriously worry about that.
(Trump will surely do blanket pardons, but he can only pardon federal crimes, not state.)
I suspect few have a relationship they trust with Trump, dude is erratic, prone to strange influences (twitter) and the only way hangers on can think to signal they are doing good work is effectively… act out in a way that gets attention.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Kershaw#%22Working_Towards...
I have read a lot of literature on the subjects at hand and never have I seen this come up.
Usually Hitler in particular is characterized as a delegator and more adept than this makes it out to be. Frankly I’m not surprised, but interesting history none the less
Still a ridiculous reason to defund medical research.
https://airtable.com/appGKlSVeXniQZkFC/shrFxbl1YTqb3AyOO
Honestly, having seen the list, I reserve judgement.
I’m not a molecular biologist, but some seemed just good solid research on women’s health, like asthma prevalence, that just happened to study a mixture of transgender individuals and mice models since both are useful for understanding androgen sensitivity. Another included research on disruptors in lutenizing hormone. It still seemed a pretty dumb thing to attack.
Not to mention transgendered people are people too, and allowed to have some medical research related to their existence.
That's a wild take for anything this admin does.
What the White House got wrong was characterizing the studies they canceled as being on "transgender" mice, while the mice (at least, in many cases, IDK if all of them) were not in any way "transitioned", so there's no reasonable way to describe that as being a study on "transgender mice". However, many of those studies were definitely about the effects of e.g. hormone therapy used to support human transitions.
Some language used by the White House suggests that they may indeed have thought the mice were transgender because the mice were in fact transgenic, but those studies also were related to transgender healthcare, so, it's probably not accurate to say that the confusion is why those were cancelled. It's probably because they did in fact have to do with transgender healthcare.
It is also the case that studies involving hormones that had dick-all to do with transgender healthcare were cancelled because, I guess, too many keywords matched whatever inept search the fascists did. E.g.:
https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10891526#descriptio...
Good point. Exactly like when the Biden administration decided to cancel all grants to Harvard University because they didn't allow a government takeover of the university.
Oh, wait, that didn't happen.
Even if what you are saying were true, it does not compare to the grand level of academic extortion alluded to in my parent comment.
Or maybe his dad isn't even a "university researcher"?
There are other issues that affect our ability to do good science, and the "broadening participation" mandate was peanuts compared to the other indignities of grantwriting.
Politely speaking, I'm not sure what crowd you're speaking for.
> Such outcomes include, but are not limited to: full participation of women, persons with disabilities, and underrepresented minorities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM); improved STEM education and educator development at any level; increased public scientific literacy and public engagement with science and technology; improved well-being of individuals in society; development of a diverse, globally competitive STEM workforce; increased partnerships between academia, industry, and others; improved national security; increased economic competitiveness of the U.S.; use of science and technology to inform public policy; and enhanced infrastructure for research and education. These examples of societally relevant outcomes should not be considered either comprehensive or prescriptive. Proposers may include appropriate outcomes not covered by these examples.
https://www.nsf.gov/policies/pappg/24-1/ch-2-proposal-prepar...
Only the first is "DEI" in any form, and you can (and I have) successfully get funded using any of them.
I suspect the father mentioned above means the latter.
I do not know, but could imagine it's possible, that HBCUs might have their own requirements. But normally, universities do not regulate the proposal writing except for financial aspects (salary windows, IDC+fringe rates etc)
As I show elsewhere in this thread, the previous administration forced applicants to include irrelevant DEI language in grant applications.
---
When a viz-minority hire sucks, it's clearly DEI's fault, we shout from the rooftops.
When a non-minority hire sucks, crickets.
None of you folks are ever 'afraid of talking about it', because any time this subject comes up, we see a full broadsides of tenuous, frequently mask-off racist nonsense.
Meanwhile, the champions leading the fight against the DEI boogieman have a truly amazing knack for both being, and appointing some of the most ignorant, least qualified individuals to ever hold positions of power... And are now speed-running their way through breaking everything.
Before DEI, minorities were hired because they're actually competent. Now they're there because of who they are and not what they can do.
Things need to get worse before they get better.
The founder of TripleByte observed how companies lied about their hiring from the outside: https://x.com/jesslivingston/status/1884652626467303560
You see, it doesn't add up, because usually when a company breaks the law so blatantly, it does so in crafty, shady ways intended to make more money, not in an attempt to create diversity that does nothing for the bottom line while also threatening the very existence of the firm.
But let's say that the top management in your org have made a public commitment to "increase representation of underrepresented groups". The managers in that org are then required, by company policy, to have their own goals be "aligned" with it, so they write something similar. What do you think then happens when it comes to interviews and hiring decisions?
You can have better parental leave and part-time work policies. Or you can open an office in a region with different racial demographics. Or you can send recruiters to events like Grace Hopper. The idea that leadership saying "we want to increase representation of underrepresented groups" converts to people illegally hiring worse candidates because of their demographics is... odd.
So what they are going to do is the only thing that they actually have the power to do, which is to favor candidates that, if hired, will check off the right boxes as far as "team diversity" goes on their upcoming mid-year review.
>Hiring on merit can increase representation of underrepresented groups.
I got whiplash reading this. We were told for years by leftists that meritocracy was inherently White supremacist and racist.
>The idea that leadership saying "we want to increase representation of underrepresented groups" converts to people illegally hiring worse candidates because of their demographics is... odd.
It's not "odd," it's exactly what happened: https://x.com/JamesOKeefeIII/status/1734374423124176944
There's some strange gaslighting/narrative shaping going on in this thread.
I have seen this in a very small number of places and never with the idea that actual merit is racist but instead that systems that promote a shallow understanding of individual meritocracy can perpetuate inequality.
But this has nothing to do with the fact that the alternative to "meritocracy" in the corporate world is not a sort of affirmative anti-racism but is instead the old-boys club system. Moving from that system to one focused on individual merit will produce greater representation for underrepresented groups.
O'Keefe is a remarkable person to cite here, given his history.
There are cases of corporations violating Title 7. Duh. They violate it by discriminating against black people or women too. But if you want to claim that when people working at corporations hear about goals to increase representation that they just decide to violate Title 7 at scale, you've got some splaining to do.
Over a decade: https://readwrite.com/github-meritocracy-rug/#awesm=~ozpAMM1... and https://www.wired.com/story/github-tech-values/
>I have seen this in a very small number of places...
GitHub is not a small place.
>O'Keefe is a remarkable person to cite here, given his history.
Remarkable because he hasn't been debunked, and IBM's attempts to have the lawsuit thrown out of court have failed. IBM has also tried to scrub the video from YouTube it seems, the Twitter link is the only one I could find.
>But if you want to claim that when people working at corporations hear about goals to increase representation that they just decide to violate Title 7 at scale, you've got some splaining to do.
The various lawsuits, some that have gone to the Supreme Court, have shown this type of discrimination against Whites, Asians, and males has been occurring at scale.
2. In the private sector, white men are not disadvantaged. Give me a fucking break man.
https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2025/01/12/fifth-circuit-vac...
That's an absurd lie. People convicted of sex crimes shouldn't have jobs with children. Foreign nationals shouldn't have top security or intelligence jobs. People with a record of substance abuse shouldn't operate heavy machinery. And so on an so forth... I'm boring myself with how obvious this all is.
And maybe, just maybe, extremely powerful jobs that have an outsized influence on our society shouldn't only be offered to straight white men. It's clearly not as obvious of an argument as my previous examples, but it's not absurd either.
Harvard denied access to Jews for “personality flaws” in the early 1900s, and similarly denied Asians for “personality” reasons up until a couple years ago when the Supreme Court finally declared that illegal.
Racism is still racism, even if you claim to be “correcting” some imagined harm through your racism
The reality is there are more non-white, qualified people than you could possibly hire. The world is overflowing with them.
So if your board is 100% white men, that's really fucking weird. How did that happen?
The elephant in the room here is that white men are SIGNIFICANTLY more likely to be hired due to the color of their skin. Look at Trump's current admin - full of white men who aren't qualified, who are alcoholics, who are patently stupid, and on and on. But if you look at research, too, just having a white name is enough to increase your chance of being hired by 50%.
It's a good thing this is something that is not happening, then.
What's happening is you are assuming that black individuals or homosexuals finding success must have been handed something. Which is, obviously, prejudiced. The lede you're burying is that those people were hired because they're qualified.
If you make affirmative action illegal, then of course you will hire a variety of races and identity groups (unless you are so racist as to believe they can’t compete on merit)
Where are these mandatory affirmative action policies anywhere?
DEI mostly revolves around programs for outreach, employee resource groups, statements of diversity considerations for research, that kind of thing. The idea that DEI means you have quotas for how many black people you have to hire is just GOP nonsense.
> If you make affirmative action illegal, then of course you will hire a variety of races and identity groups
I mean, not necessarily. Historically, and currently, you're going to end up with a disproportionate amount of white people. Because that's just how the US works - white people are incredibly advantaged so naturally they're going to get more, and better, jobs, in relation to their level of qualification.
Naturally over the past ~80 years it's gotten better. We don't explicitly say "we don't hire black engineers" anymore, so that's great. But you'd be a fool to think this systemic racism just vanishes overnight.
It will takes hundreds, yes hundreds, of years before it is completely eradicated. We live in the shadow of the systems and institutions of our grandparents. Who, might I add, are still alive and still making decisions.
Are you saying that (straight) (white) (men) have not had (nor continue to enjoy) unfair advantages in our society? And is that not an injustice?
Saying "racism is bad" is correct but only the first step. Step two is recognizing the accumulated results of long-standing historical (and continuing, frankly) discrimination against minority groups and working to right that injustice.
But would like to hear your perspective.
It sounds like you actually haven't applied to jobs in the last 10 years or have been applying to some seriously messed up places.
No, it isn't, and this assumption is based on a poor understanding of what DEI is.
The right paints DEI as a directive to hire less-qualified people based on their race. In reality, DEI just ensures that everyone gets a fair chance regardless of their race.
i.e. "Group X is under-performing at math" so therefore the problem is with inherent bias in math and we won't expect engineers and scientists to have competency in this domain to get the makeup of people we have decided upon from the start.
Yes, I am aware of what you think DEI hiring practices are, but speaking as someone who has actually applied these policies, I'm telling you that that's not what happens. The propaganda simply is not true.
Under DEI hiring policies, we were required to document *outreach* to underrepresented groups in order to get a more diverse hiring pool. We *never* lowered our standards and always hired the best applicant.
We've seen that these ideologies are conflict-oriented, racist, and less effective. They were forced on us by policy and law by people who in no way represented most of Americans' thinking. Now, a different group favoring no racism, equal opportunity, and generosity to all groups based on need is reversing the prior group's work. Everyone who had been discriminated against will appreciate ending that discrimination.
you're talking about the american revolution against the british here, right?
or are you referring to the same thing somewhere else?
> Now, a different group favoring no racism, equal opportunity, and generosity to all groups based on need is reversing the prior group's work
right, the problem is that the current elites in power in the current usa government are villifying those people and trying to reverse the reversal: restore racism; eliminate equity; allocate generosity based on political alignment and fealty to one particular personality rather than need
You say this without any evidence at all. As I describe in my comment above, DEI hiring practices do not promote discrimination against anyone.
The right opposes DEI because they genuinely can't understand that someone would want a fair, diverse workplace, so, as you aptly demonstrate, they insert all kinds of imaginary (and obviously false) conspiracy theories in an attempt to show that DEI is actually a disguised attempt to win power for certain favored classes. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
> We've seen that these ideologies are conflict-oriented, racist, and less effective.
You say "we've seen" as if it were established fact, but it isn't. You might as well as "I heard once" or "I saw on Facebook that", insofar as you're attempting to provide a factual basis for your opinions.
> Now, a different group favoring no racism, equal opportunity, and generosity to all groups based on need is reversing the prior group's work. Everyone who had been discriminated against will appreciate ending that discrimination.
No, the current administration is favoring a return to racism by shutting down hiring practices that would have allowed for a diverse hiring pool. Moreover, the administration is transparently also cracking down on viewpoints it doesn't like, by punishing, for example, law firms and universities that are known to to oppose the administration's cause du jour.
I have personally heard managers discussing the candidates' backgrounds in the context where it was clear that some were preferred over others, because their managers wanted to see them "demonstrate some commitment". Now what? Are you going to tell me that I misheard, or that my experience is somehow invalid?
This administration is a cesspit of vile fascist scum, and that's a mild way to put it. But one of the major reasons why they were able to ride the resentment wave into power is because of people like you blatantly denying that water is wet.
Everywhere should have plentiful good quality housing, medical, schools, everything else that is part of the infrastructure of society.
Give those kids, and even the poor workers, nutritious meals to ensure they are ready to function as members of society.
Welfare / unemployment 'insurance' shouldn't be about just getting a paycheck, they should be about connecting those without work to work that benefits society and the people who are now getting a job or furthering training towards a job rather than sitting around hoping someone will hire.
Generally: government (of the people, by the people, for the people) should be about stewardship of the commons, the shared space between private areas.
All of the relevant laws specify that (1) you are not allowed to treat anybody differently based on their race, and (2) if your outcome numbers don't match what the government wants to see, there will be hell to pay.
Only (2) can be directly measured, so that is the part of the law that's enforced. People report that they treat all races equally for the same reason that Soviet agriculture officials reported that the grain harvest was better than expected.
† It's not clear to me why a rebranding was felt to be necessary. "Affirmative action" was popular; a lot of the loss in status of this type of initiative seems to be fairly directly related to the fact that, once the name was changed, people could reevaluate the concept without being confused by the preexisting knowledge that they approved of it.
I don't agree with pretty much the entirety of your post but that stuck out.
Of course; it is a major focus of governmental affirmative action efforts.
> Is there anything to back this up?
Again, of course.
> Redlining was a real phenomenon.
And? Do you think it was a real phenomenon after the 1960s? School segregation was a real phenomenon too; in your opinion, does that mean that modern schools do not admit applicants because they are favored minorities?
Before deciding whether you approve of a government program, maybe you should learn what it involves.
It’s easy to get caught up in culture war nonsense, but that nonsense doesn’t usually align with what’s on the ground.
The reality is that there are more smart black and white people capable of doing your job than you are capable of hiring. So maybe consider taking the black woman who is just as qualified so your department is no longer so lily white and male dominated.
That is all DEI is. Conservatives have just misrepresented it so badly to the public to the point where even the nonconservative public believes their lies.
However, it turns out family income is an even stronger predictor of test performance. But family income also happens to be correlated with race, so the race/SAT score correlation is more likely an income/SAT score correlation.
In fact, some even maintain that the process of selecting SAT questions is itself a self-reinforcing bias. If you want data, searches like "Is the SAT biased" or "Is the SAT racist" will take you down that rabbithole.
Given that the testing process has clear shortcomings, it seems fair to account for that during admissions. Unfortunately, this looks a lot like very obvious reverse discrimination if one is not aware of the non-obvious, systemic discrimination it is adjusting for.
And then you wonder why it was so easy for conservatives to rile up the MAGA mob against the intellectuals and radicalize them into full-fledged fascism.
i'm sorry, nothing personal, but this mentality is just inexcusably dense and reality-avoidant. i hope you don't believe this nonsense so strongly that you think i'm attacking you for it but i think we can hold ourselves to a higher standard of cognition here.
Or science that conflicts with the whims of Trump's administration. This includes anti-scientific rhetoric and conflicts with the bribe pipelines.
This could end up being an opportunity like the one the US had in the 1930s and 40s for any country able to take advantage of it. Whether Europe or China will benefit more remains to be seen. I have been reminding people that, before the 1930s, Germany had the best university system and research in the world. And it's particularly sad, because in my personal experience, culturally, and organizationally, American research universities and research culture have traditionally been much better and much more conducive to good research and real collaboration, then Europe or China.
I think it’s a big mistake, and this un-named tribunal ultimately deciding things is really, really bad thing.
Just my 2 cents.
It's not just the NSF, it's the entire functional federal government.
If you're wondering when it's time to literally shut down the country with a national strike? That time has already passed and that state persists until the children and put on time out.
It's sad to see this administration attacking startups and entrepreneurship in the US. Startup community volunteers will have to work that much harder at a time when traditional employment is less and less palatable.
This statement is wrong. What a sad state of affairs Science Magazine has become. It should read, "The proposal is to cut the budget by 55% to $4 billion."
The 2024 budget was $9.06 billion and the 2025 request was $10.183 billion.[1]
The goal seems to be simply to destroy the current research system, and to have the bit that remains forced to adhere to an ideologically pure "anti-woke" course.
(I get some here are upset about the DEI stuff being weeded out, but that is not what my question is about)
My PhD was largely funded through government grants, though not the NSF. To put it mildly, our government contacts were not the most competent people and were frequently roadblocks rather than enablers. There were many opportunities to streamline processes that would help researchers spend more time researching and less time on bureaucratic overhead.
[1] https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/04_fy2025.pdf?Versio...
That is not the goal of the new admin, they'll probably end up achieving a worse ratio of overhead as they monitor everything to make sure it doesn't contradict their anti-DEI messaging.
https://www.nsf.gov/about/budget/fy2024/appropriations
The "Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2024" (Public Law 118-42) provides $9.06 billion for the U.S. National Science Foundation, a decrease of $479.01 million, or 5.0%, below the FY 2023 base appropriation. It provides:
* $7.18 billion for the Research and Related Activities (RRA) account.
* $1.17 billion for the STEM Education (EDU) account.
* $234.0 million for the Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction (MREFC) account.
* $448.0 million for the Agency Operations and Award Management (AOAM) account.
* $24.41 million for the Office of Inspector General (OIG) account.
* $5.09 million for the Office of the National Science Board (NSB) account.
If we drill down into RRD:
https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/65_fy2025.pdf
* Biological Sciences $844.91
* Computer & Information Science & Engineering 1,035.90
* Engineering 797.57
* Geosciences Programs 1,053.17
* Geosciences: Office of Polar Programs 538.62
* U.S. Antarctic Logistics Activities 94.20
* Mathematical & Physical Sciences 1,659.95
* Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences 309.06
* Technology, Innovation, & Partnerships 664.15
* Office of the Chief of Research Security Strategy & Policy1 9.85
* Office of International Science & Engineering 68.43
* Integrative Activities 531.39
* U.S. Arctic Research Commission 1.75
* Mission Support Services 116.27
Total $7,631.02
We have shrunk the NSF down to a tiny fraction of GDP over time, considering its purview and the role science should be playing in our society, and there was briefly a consensus that we should double or triple its funding - https://www.science.org/content/article/house-panel-offers-i... before political news cycle considerations took hold.
PhD students aren't usually the ones interacting with program officers or grant institutions so I'm not sure you had the most accurate view...
Every grant official I've ever worked with has been a peer scientis who is professional and competent. They've always been focused on getting return on investment and keeping projects on track.
NSF is essentially investing in the future and $4B is already a very small amount compared to the whole federal budget. If anything NSF's budget should be increased. Why are they looking to save pocket change when the real money is in the DoD?
Academics appear to be biased to the left because the right explicitly hates science and rationality, not because of "wokeism" or "transgender ideology" or "cultural marxism" or whatever red herring fascists currently favor.
> There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
- Isaac Asimov, A cult of ignorance, 1980
This cult of ignorance is purely a right-wing one.
[1] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fasci...
you can have a whole career based on getting funding for experiments that don’t actually work
That said, there is an ideological difference driving this on at least two points (if ignoring DEI etc).
One, taxes are taken from individuals to be spent on the government's priorities. Good, evil, or just wasteful... you have no say. If private donations, then you can fund the people and efforts you value most with your money. Conservatives say your money should be yours as much as possible which requires cutting NSF, etc.
Second, private individuals and businesses decide most of what happens in the markets. The problems in the markets are really their responsibility. If it needs NSF funding, the private parties are probably already failing to make that decision or see it as a bad one. Private, market theory says it's better to let markets run themselves with government interventions mostly blocking harmful behaviors. Ex: If nobody funds or buys secure systems, let them have the consequences of the insecure systems they want so much. Don't fund projects that nobody is buying or selling.
Those are two, large drivers in conservative policy that will exist regardless of other, political beliefs. Those arguing against it are saying the people running the government are more trustworthy with our money. Yet, they're crying out against what the current government is doing. Do they really trust them and want all those resources controlled by the latest administration? Or retain control of their own money to back, as liberals, what they belief in?
If so, then I can disagree.
However the market behaves in the United States, it has failed us.
Compromise with market forces, in the form of "public-private partnership", has only increased the cost of providing fewer government services.
Market forces won't fix healthcare. Won't invest in early a stage tech development or scientific research that might take decades of investment before becoming amenable to market-driven participation.
Market forces most certainly won't provide adequate care for children or elderly.
Every society requires social investment.
But maybe I don't understand your point. Sorry.
1) Instead of having the money taken from you and begging the administration to do what you want, let people decide what they want, and voluntarily collaborate using the tools and organizations they choose.
This may be the government or another organization, but the individual would have the power to withdraw their support unilaterally. Essentially make more social investment and participation voluntary.
This would be a shifting of the power downwards and a decentralization.
Switzerland is an interesting case study for this. Approximately 70% of all taxes go to the Canton or lower levels (comparable to a US state county). This means the vast majority of tax spending and oversight occurs locally.
This makes a lot of sense to me. If I want social investment, a new school, or transportation, my money goes all the way to the capital, and then I have to fight to have my voice heard among 350 million Americans fighting for attention. I'm arguing against another citizen 2 thousand miles away through dozens of proxies and bureaucrats.
I recognize that some activities benefit from economies of scale, but many don't, or suffer diseconomies of scale.
Thanks for the information about Switzerland's local-first model of taxation. That's really interesting. It might help us over here for the exact reasons you said.
There is an inverse example in California school spending.
In 1972, California Senate Bill 90 (SB 90), was passed in 1972 to place limitations on using local taxes to fund local schools and centralize school funding at the state level. In 1978, citizens responded by passing now famous Proposition 13 to set statewide limits on property taxes.
SB 90 weakened the link between what property owners paid and the quality of their local schools. This made residents less willing to property taxes and fund schools at all, since they had less say in how the money was spent.
The better school districts in California are now tied to private organizations to get around both SB90 and prop 13. Local parents pay into a non-governmental fund that will purchase buildings and run programs in the schools, allowing their money to stay local.
www.science.org needs to review the security of your connection before proceeding.
This is equally worrying. Sounds like people living in a dictatorship reporting to a foreign news channel. Not quite there, yet.
Looks like the Trump administration is trying to cripple US science and technology research and I don't understand why.
US's global superiority has largely been driven by programs like the NSF, making the US the world leader for r&d and inventing completely new industries.
Why would you completely gut these programs with such amazing ROI?
Putting my conspiracist hat on, it seems like this only benefits countries like China/Russia that want to weaken the US.
KAISER: Okay, so since you brought it up, kind of skipping around here, but so as you know, as you may not have seen the story. But we had heard it too, that there's going to be a policy canceling collaborations, foreign collaborations.
BHATTACHARYA: No, that's false.
KAISER: Is there going to be some sort of policy that...
BHATTACHARYA: There was a policy, there's going to be policy on tracking subawards.
KAISER: What does it mean?
BHATTACHARYA: I mean, if you're going to give a subaward, we should be able—the NIH and the government should be able see where the money's going.
Or does this agency fall under the White House direct financing of some sort?
It's clear it doesn't matter what the Congress budget says.
Turns out laws are fake, you can just do whatever.
The Science article suggests that there's danger of politicization, but that has been the case for many years.
I assume this is just more of the same neo-liberalists’ Heritage Foundation at play here. No one is saying science shouldn’t science. Just that the government shouldn’t be in the business of funding it.
How else will Elon Musk make his next billion if he doesn’t get to invest in your research and sell it off after your 2 year time is up?
"How do you figure? If they simply changed the grant writing process back to what it was before Biden, that argument would make sense."
FWIW, I agree with you other than placing the blame. It was a ridiculous policy, it cost the Democrats the election, but they don’t get blamed for the further poor choices Trumps regime is making.
And, again, it is not one I am making.
I blame Biden and Harris for being so awful that the American people decided Trump was a better choice and elected him.
That is on them.
And for forcing irrelevant DEI language into grants.
That is on them.
What? Can you show any examples of this?
- Forcing this irrelevant nonsense into maths grant applications.
- Cancelling the grant applications because they contain this nonsense.
And science is the loser.
.
One example:
This grant was for $500,000:
" Elliptic and Parabolic Partial Differential Equations
ABSTRACT Partial differential equations (PDE) are mathematical tools that are used to model natural phenomena like electromagnetism, astronomy, and fluid dynamics, for example. This project is concerned with understanding how the solutions to such equations behave. The Laplace equation
[...] Motivated by the goal of increasing participation from underrepresented groups [...]
The Laplace equation is a PDE that models steady-state phenomena in a truly uniform environment. Since the world that we live in is not an isotropic vacuum, the mathematical equations that govern many natural phenomena are often more complicated than Laplace’s equation. For example, the Schrodinger equation [...] "
1) This is "forced" due to any government policy.
2) Any such policies could be attributed only to the Biden administration, or even any single administration.
I was curious so I stalked the PI in the linked grant, who happens to be female. Here is a relevant link, 3rd or so on Google: https://www.montana.edu/news/22806/montana-state-mathematics...
Burroughs said Davey stands out not just for her mathematical prowess but also for her commitment to students in all levels of study. Davey is co-director of the department’s Directed Reading Program, which pairs undergraduate students with graduate student mentors to read and discuss books on mutual subjects of interest over the course of a semester.
“It’s a way for us to connect graduate student mentors with undergraduates, who then see what math can look like outside the classroom,” Davey said.
...
A portion of the funding from the CAREER grant will enable Davey to extend her support to young mathematicians across the country. She will organize and conduct a summer workshop in Bozeman open to 40 upper-level graduate students and post-doctoral researchers from around the nation, particularly those from underrepresented groups. Cherry noted the outreach effort coincides with the college’s long-term goal of better serving underrepresented communities in the state.
So:
1. From that it does seem she is personally invested in making her subject more approachable.
2. The college itself has a goal of encouraging such outreach.
3. In case you think the university itself was influenced by the government policies, here's a "DEI" program from its website that started in 2016: https://www.montana.edu/provost/d_i.html -- if you browse around the site there are even more programs going farther back.
Additionally, I'm personally aware of "DEI" policies in universities going back more than two decades now, long before the term "DEI" was even coined.
Seems highly likely that the language in the grant was more due to the researcher's personal preferences and the institution's policies than anything any government policies.
But yes it wasn't just top-down. The diversity statements in faculty hiring started about ten years ago and started becoming mandatory and used for screening at many places about five years ago.
Why the weird causal swap?
The actions of this administration are primarily the responsibility of… this administration and those who supported it.
The formula isn't "opposite of who-dun-it", it's "dems always".
Forcing grant applicants to include irrelevant DEI language in applications is on the Dems.
Pointing out to the Dems that they really have to fix themselves will.
This would help us avoid things like swathes of progressives getting sold on this message that dems are the real problem and subsequently not voting, voting third party, or deciding to support the loons, causing the loons to win.
we're talking about the story in the article: republicans totally gutting science funding regardless of presidential candidates or DEI
Your confusion here might explain why your comments are apparently being viewed by so many others as low value (just observing here, not making that judgement myself), and why you're being so consistently corrected by others in this HN post. Try to take our constructive criticism constructively. Don't fall into the common right-wing trope-trap of thinking anyone who disagrees with you or downvotes you is an enemy plotting against you who must be defeated. Open yourself to changing your mind based on overwhelming feedback from many others. Don't "dig in"/"double down" like the current president of the usa [0].
I say "confusion" because I have good faith in you, and don't think you're engaging in tired whataboutism in an attempt to redirect criticism away from those at fault intentionally. I imagine the reason you're doing it, is likely just a mistake on your part, hence the helpful advice above.
0: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/oppositional-...
The Democrats chose Harris as their candidate because they thought she had the best chance of winning. They might have been right.
Just no.
Great way to lose again. The "sane center" is 3rd-way '90s dems, and their shit only worked because Republicans agreed with them on unpopular neoliberal economic policy, so there was no way for voters to avoid it.
There is no compromise that can be made here. The Democrats spent this past election cycle trying to appeal to 'undecided' 'independent' voters by shitting all over their actual base and presenting policies that appealed to about exactly zero people.
Take immigration, for example. There is no way in hell the Democrats could have ever beaten the Regime on this issue. So what did they do? They still tried to compete by hardening their views to appeal to 'undecided' 'independent' voters who then all promptly headed to cast off their votes for the Messiah. All they managed to achieve was to piss off their base and anybody who'd considered voting for them.
What 'moderate' (which is really just an euphemism for cowardly) Democrats don't understand is that you are in the opening stages of a war, and the last thing you ever want to do is purposefully disarm yourself because of 'decorum' and 'acceptability' and other such nonsense.
You can never make compromises with those who want you dead no matter what. Hopefully the Democrats learn that before everyone in the world has to pay the price.
And the way to get more votes is to be more extreme ?
There's the problem, right there.
You're doing an awful lot of stuff along the lines of "so you're saying BAD is actually good?" in this thread (not just with me), and it's not really a good way to have a discussion. It's good for arguing over, essentially, nothing.
That is a perfectly normal way to discuss something.
Going meta is not.
This subthread turned out to be generic political flamewar, just the kind of thing we don't want on HN, and several of your comments fanned the flames.
If you could please have a read of the guidelines and take care to observe them in future we'd be appreciative:
Compelling or not, they offered some. Now it's on you to move the goalpost or concede the challenge which you issued.
You can't have DEI in math itself because it's fundamentally abstract. One might as well demand to know why there's any funding larger than that required to run a stationary cupboard because mathematicians famously only need pencil and paper (unlike disciplines such as physics which also require wastebaskets).
Math doesn't require complex equipment, exotic materials, or long0running experiments. The biggest resource need you could point to is compute power, but it's basically a people discipline, where math nerds need think time and the ability to lay out their ideas with other math nerds in faculties and conferences. And such people may be found anywhere, there's no guarantee that they're going to bubble up naturally through the academic selection system. Ramanujan is he canonical example.
And you reply now "I've already explained why that claim makes no sense".
What claim? Your statement, or my pointing out that I did not disagree with it?
“Asset” in the officer/agent/asset trio of terms for relations to foreign intel/influence operations does not denote ownership, and refers to people who provide access and information or other support without necessarily having the kind of formal control relationship and commitment that makes an agent. (One analogy I've seen used is with romantic relationships, where an agent is like a committed partner and a asset is in a friend-with-benefits relationship.)
If you don't understand what it means, how can you know you disagree with it?
Just some quick examples:
* Recommending American de-nuclearization while stating that Russia is no longer a threat to America.
* Dismantling cybersecurity programs that are intended to identify and counter Russian hacking efforts.
* Peace negotiations with Ukraine and Russia that require no concessions made by Russia.
All of these actions are being taken despite polling poorly with Americans. You could say that none of these definitively proves that there is Russian leverage over Trump and you would be technically correct. The flip side of that coin is that you also can't explain why these actions are in America's best interest.
I'm not saying that you're wrong, but that is an awful lot of accidental benefit for Russia and precious few others. Far too much for my tastes.
Do you mean political rivals or do you have actual evidence the Democratic party is trying to kill him.
Is it really inexplicable though? Or is it more plausible that you simply don't understand the motives, and probably haven't really tried?
I do think another plausible explanation is that Trump has dictator envy and idolizes Putin, and so he tries to emulate him and do things that would make him happy.
But it's not clear how far something like that would go. I think it's reasonable to suspect that Putin has something that he can use as leverage over Trump, but that's of course near-impossible to prove at this point.
Why don't you explain it to the rest of the class?
>war being waged in an unknown place
It's Ukraine. They've been an ally in a strategic location for decades. Just because you can't find it on a map doesn't mean I can't.
>for an unknown reason
They were invaded by Russia.
>But funding the dictator Zelensky so that he can capture people who do not want to fight for him and send them to certain death in storm troop units is unreasonable behavior, and from a Christian point of view, even disgusting.
Thanks, comrade.
Ally in what? Typical gaslighting.
Before the invasion, no one could find Ukraine on a map and no one considered it an ally (if they even knew it existed). To such extent that many Ukrainians in the USA before 2014, when introducing themselves, often said they were from Russia - just to avoid having to explain what is Ukraine.
>They were invaded by Russia.
Yes. But what is the war being fought for? What is the end game? Because without an answer to this question, any support for Ukraine looks like warmongering. And for some reason, no one answers it, making the whole situation look like the war is being waged to busificate and kill all Ukrainian men (except for the privileged relatives of officials who successfully left the country despite the ban).
> Yes. But what is the war being fought for?
Someone breaks into your home. Kills family members. They're still coming in.
You tell your kids to get behind you. Then you turn to face the invader.
That's what this war is being fought for.
Rather, you hide behind your children, the invaders scream that they only want your money, but you kick the children closer to the attackers so that they slow them down at the cost of their lives, while simultaneously locking your front door and barricading the windows so that the children cannot escape from the house instead of dying at the hands of the attackers, as you want.
The children are crying, screaming that they don't want to die, asking you to let them go. But you are adamant: they must die for you.
Why? For what? There is no answer. Their job is to die, not to ask questions, and if they don't want to die at the hands of invaders, they will die at your own hand.
If so, sure, but this is not the way to go about it.
It feels very much like a hindsight perspective. Sure, a lot (most?) scientific research will not be immediately beneficial to anyone. Some will never be beneficial. But you don't know that until you research it, that's why you're doing the research.
The only surefire way to prevent waste in research is to do no research at all.
These actions are framed as "cost cutting" but it's idealogical warfare -- they hate these institutions and are trying to destroy them.
Notice that the military industrial complex will not only not be touched, but will be getting even more spending.
I did.
It is indeed unfortunate that people vote down posts in discussions like these not because they are incorrect, but because they disagree with the facts presented.
More Reddit than HN.
But short of mods tracking down downvoters and having them justify their actions, I don't see how to de-Reddit it.
As moderators we don't particularly care what opinion you express, but it's everyone's responsibility to comment in a way that doesn't break the guidelines [2].
The most relevant to you in this thread are these ones:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
"So I think that the up and down arrows should not express agreement, but insightfullness or truth. Not opinion."
Which is exactly opposite to the statement you cite it in.
I am making fact-based arguments. I see no fact-based counter-arguments, mostly nonsense and/or abuse that break [2]
One can understand people's dislike of Trump. I share it. But that should surely not prevent us from being able to discuss the motivation for his actions, based on cited facts.
But if a mod thinks this place, like Reddit, is just not the place to quote facts to people who do not want to read them, discuss them, or even allow them to be shown, and I do not anyway know how a mod would stop them, beyond a lot of tracking down downvoters, I guess it is also beyond redemption. Tant pis.
> I am making fact-based arguments. I see no fact-based counter-arguments, mostly nonsense and/or abuse that break [2]
It's fine to state facts, and we want this to be a site where everyone can discuss difficult, controversial topics. But that can only happen if people are kind and respectful, and make their own efforts to observe the guidelines. The main problem with your style of commenting is that several of your comments contain personal swipes. If other commenters break the guidelines, you should flag them or email us to point them out, but you're only in a position to do that if you show, through your actions, that you're making an effort to respect the guidelines yourself.
The guidelines that are most relevant in this case are:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
This isn't the first time we've had to ask you to adhere to the guidelines. If you up this style of commenting, we'll have to ban the account.
The wealthiest folks have the resources to continually and almost casually undermine institutions, while it takes enormous effort for the larger public to push back. Most people are just trying to live their lives while the Murdochs, Kochs, and others can keep throwing money and bodies at corrupting the country. For every win against the anti-Democratic corruptions, there's two or five losses. They pile up.
But the fall of the U.S. has seemed inevitable for decades. As someone who is here and isn't likely to leave -- my family is here, too many people to muster out and I won't leave them behind -- this is going to suck pretty horribly for some time. If we're very lucky, this will be the wakeup call the U.S. needs and when the dust clears we may rebuild something better. If we're not... well, I don't want to dwell on that.
It has shaken my faith in democracy, but at the same time, there's nothing else, so I have no choice but to try to fight for it in what ways I can.
I tell everyone the system can handle it. But Schmidt on yt isn’t wrong.
Excellent username
Hence why they spend billions on propaganda tools like Fox News or influencers (Joe Rogan, Tim Pool...) propping up increasingly right-wing presidents. So far they've been successful: Raegan, Bush & cie. have been slowly but surely making things easier for the wealthy and harder for the workers.
Republicans have always used right-wing populism to get their ways (Blaming migrants, blaming LGBT, blaming leftists). Notice how pro-businesss policies are the only consistent trait between GOP presidency.
Trump is a turning point, he is the first one to do right-wing populism for its own sake instead of simply being pro-business. This is fascism. Here is my preferred definition of fascism if you seek one [1].
Trump is no singular phenomenon, you can compare him in some ways to previous or contemporary fascists: Putin, Mussolini... They all have in common a support from the oligarchy, and a hatred of minorities and leftists.
Until we fix the power imbalances of our democracies and rid it of all money's influence (easier said than done), we will suffer through fascism every 80 years or so. The time it takes for new oligarchs to emerge and accumulate the wealth necessary to dictate politics again.
It doesn't even fit that, it's worse. In Idiocracy President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho actually chose to find educated / smart people to make decisions.
In this setup it's all politicians and political hangers on making decisions about things they seem to have limited education on what they manage.
Take this as a lesson, and defend your democracy while you still can.
He did not hide his fascist and dictatorial desires and he was open about how he wanted to dismantle the government. When he lost in 2020 he threw a fit and tried to have people do a coup. People did in fact elect him, I can just hope that his actions don't leave too much lasting damage here in Canada. (Maybe de-funding US science will help start to reverse decades of brain drain.)
The other was selected by party leaders after the primary was over.
"What now" is we keep getting closer to autocracy until we're unambiguously fully there, or a less-than-amicable divorce. That's about it. The former is by far the more likely of the two.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia...
The OP is correct, Americans collectively own this just as other countries' nationals have owned responsibility for the bad governments they've put into power. If the general response is one of absolving themselves of responsibility there won't be the necessary level of reflection and reform to prevent it from happening again.
As it is the damage done to US power and credibility will take decades to fix, and it's only 100 days in.
Where did I absolve anything? I just corrected something that was wrong. I didn't vote for the guy either time, I don't like this either.
I'm not sure this accurately conveys the situation. American voters have been dissatisfied with the lesser of two evils choice foisted upon them every 4 years for decades. We're 75 years into endless wars. Massive numbers of union high paying jobs have been shipped overseas since the 80s hollowing out the middle and working class.
One could easily see the votes as being more anti-establishment than anything else.
edit: I love how people downvote comments they don't like in political discussions, even when they're just attempting to foster understanding by sharing a perspective, and not prescriptive or pejorative in any way.
Surprisingly to many of them, he wasn't crazy, and actually tried to do a lot of the things they were hoping a non-establishment president would do. But then the bureaucracy dragged its feet, ignored his orders, and generally did its best to spoil his first term, giving a middle finger to the voters and saying, "Screw you, we're doing things our way." So in 2024 the voters said, "No, screw you," and here we are.
I find that this does little to help either side understand the (often legitimate!) concerns of the other. It seems like there is an inexorable wedge being driven between both sides, by both sides. I'm not sure how we address that. And I'm not sure how to reconcile the factors which drive each side without addressing it.
Incorrect. Stop lying.
Yes, when you have to vote between the lesser of two evils, but one of them is blatantly more evil and incompetent than the other, you're responsible for choosing the more evil and incompetent option and the damage that results.
No system is perfect, and few countries provide morally and politically pure options to vote for in national elections. So an informed and engaged population often needs to vote tactically, understanding that establishments change slowly, and work to elect more effective candidates at local & state level who can work their way up to the national stage.
Voting in the anti-establishment choice just because voters are upset that progress is slow and politics is hard is the stuff of tantrums, and voting adults are supposed to be beyond that.
I'm not here for that. Just explaining what I understand of what the blue collar folks I know are thinking.
I'm not saying that out of anger, that's just the nature of democracy and that the corollary of a voting public being able to choose their leaders means they're responsible when they make bad choices. That, in turn should trigger national debates, reflection, and reform hopefully, else the US will continue to head down an ever-increasingly authoritarian and populist path.
I certainly don't want the US to go down that path, nor do I enjoy seeing the damage being done now. I just believe that if we coddle voters who made terrible political choices they're just going to keep making those bad choices election after election.
> Not trying to argue, though blame is deserved for those who voted for Trump this time around.
> I'm not saying that out of anger, that's just the nature of democracy and that the corollary of a voting public being able to choose their leaders means they're responsible when they make bad choices. That, in turn should trigger national debates, reflection, and reform hopefully, else the US will continue to head down an ever-increasingly authoritarian and populist path.
Is almost to a word how the Right feels about the Left as well. We're watching that play out. Conflict escalation is even less fun on the societal scale.
I could maybe understand why people voted for the anti-establishment candidate the first time around. Legitimate frustrations exist with a system many felt wasn't working for them. But the second time around, with clear evidence of the consequences, is not defensible and shouldn't be excused.
This is a form of reactionary populism and it's deeply dangerous for the US's power, prosperity, and political freedoms. Ask Argentinians what Peronism, as another form of anti-establishment populism, did for them. There are countless other examples to learn from too.
Regardless of motivation, electoral choices have consequences that voters collectively own.
Again, it’s not like we haven’t seen this before in other countries that have voted in populists. It’s always the same cycle: Widespread dissatisfaction promotes populists who correctly identify legitimate problems but offer implausibly simple solutions to solve them. Voters choose the populists out of anger & frustration, only to find that they can’t solve the problems but create the kind of institutional damage that reduces the ability of any successors to solve those problems.
Trump is a populist and we’re already seeing that institutional damage merely 100 days in. There’s no indication that the outcome will be any better than all the other historical parallels.
I watch all sorts of news. Ultra-liberal Democracy Now!, CNN, ABC, NBC, podcasts on the left and right, right-leaning Fox, etc.
I can say that the right is cheering perceived win after win. From their perspective, tariffs are bringing manufacturing jobs back, what they see as corruption is being rooted out, government is being made leaner, more efficient, and more local. Law is being enforced.
The left seems to be focused on publicizing what they see as losses, assuming that the right will inevitably see the self-evident error of their ways. I don't think this is likely to happen.
https://www.propublica.org/article/video-donald-trump-russ-v...
So even if you can retool, get a new politically correct grant, believe that it will last long enough to do anything, you’ll find your lab already decimated and incapable of continuing its work.
Nb the outcome is what matters, need not apply if your study might find they aren't so bad.
Sharpie-based hurricane track prediction?
1. destroy free press 2. destroy liberal education 3. destroy the administrative state (watchdogs, rule makers, rule enforcers)
Once that's done, resistance is diminished or destroyed and you can then funnel the wealth of the people to you and your family and your "friends".
"" The initial vetting is handled by hundreds of program officers, all experts in their field and some of whom are on temporary leave from academic positions. ""
Also, NSF program officers can have conflicts as well, for example if you are on leave from a university then you can't be heading a review panel that has any grants related to that university.
At my university, we also have to do periodic online training about conflicts of interest, and have to fill out financial forms disclosing whether we have a financial stake in the work (e.g. if we own a startup and are trying to direct research funds to that startup).
Basically, I've always felt that we held ourselves to a higher standard than Congress held itself too (e.g. being on a Congressional oversight committee and owning stock in affected companies, but that's a different rant).
The changes being made now will deprofessionalise and politicise large parts of the US civil service. The US will be poorer for it.
Reducing bureaucracy is not the same as cutting science funding.
Also, why is NSF fielding 40,000 proposals per year? That is 110 proposals per day. Is there really that much science to perform and not enough universities to host it? Not at all. It exists because every state and local government and educational institution is incentivized to solicit federal aid. Even if a school is located in Beverly Hills, federal aid will be solicited at all levels in K-12 and higher education. Republicans are saying they don't want anything to do with that level of centralized government.
Why not? Science is a vast field.