This is a coup and we are calmly debating budgets. Debating the % of budget and how useful organization x is and if y will still get grant money, and, and, and... All of this is ignoring the big elephant in the room that there is one single person deciding everything that happens in government as if they were a king. The right thing to be debating is how we can stop this from continuing and how we can hold those responsible accountable.
As an expat in the EU, I have a surreal sense of being a bystander at an ongoing emergency scene. I don’t want to be yet another gawker as this situation is unfolding but am struggling to come up with actions that are within my power to take as a form of protest, resistance, or solidarity.
What are some practical actions that we can take to resist these sweeping changes?
As far as I can tell, Trump is doing things he openly announced he would do for at least a year. So all of this is either a result of robust public support for his policies, or, (my preferred explanation) an even more robust public repudiation of the only alternative that was put forward by the other party, a candidate famous for dropping out before Iowa in 2020 but somehow was coronated the nominee without any voter input.
The thing about democracy is, every person is going to sometimes wildly disagree with what the elected officials do. Declaring it a 'coup' is as silly as when Trump lost in 2020 and declared it a 'rigged election.'
Now, you can make limited inroads to block executive actions with the courts, but even when SCOTUS was friendly to the anti-Trump cause, when that's done to advance an unpopular (majority-disapproved-of) agenda, it is usually a hollow and temporary victory. To get the policies you want, you need to win over voters. That's the part the DNC seems to be completely unaware of. You don't win by insulting, by dunking on the other guys on ~Twitter~ bluesky, or by protesting. You win in a democracy only by convincing the very reasonable middle that you share their values. The DNC has taken a position of "Everyone not already in our tent is evil, fascist, dastardly white supremacists," but to their chagrin, their current tent is under 50% of the voting public and it isn't growing.
not really a coup, its a default. US government is already using pension fund money to pay its bills since early January (aka special measures), the interest on their national debt is already more than they collect in taxes.
The left need to accept that they lost the election, that Trump won the presidency and the Republicans won control of congress.
As much as you personally disagree with these decisions, they are in line with the broad policy positions Trump et al communicated prior to the election, and can be considered the will of the people.
Challenging the mandate the public gave them, by hyperventilating over minor procedural hiccups, that will inevitably be resolved by congress in favour of Trump appears to most to be undemocratic.
So first the US isn't a monarchy last time I checked, Trump doesn't have the mandate to do what he's doing now, no matter how much you agree with his decisions or not.
And secondly no, Trump also publicly lied about his positions by saying he had nothing to do with Project 2025.
Seems like a good opportunity for other countries to recruit scientists.
I think its underappreciated how much of America's modern success comes down to attracting scientists and intellectuals from war torn europe in the 30s-50s.
I want to believe some will move for lifestyle reasons, but the problem is the post war IPO landscape (post 1980s really) across biotech and ICT has made one stark barrier: USA is a place where you can go from $100k to $100m vesting if you are lucky. That very few do achieve this isn't the point: you cannot do it, in almost any other economy.
You have to be socially smart enough to see that a $100k salary and lifestyle outcome for your remaining working career is enough, if not better than the prospect of uplift into mega-wealth, if your IPR pans out the right way.
For career scientists who were on the NSF grant train, they'd cracked a magic egg open. Beneficial to both them and us, society at large. Well, the other economies do fund research. They fund it badly compared to the NSF, the paperwork burden is less I am sure, but so is the size of the pot and the duration. You may well spend more time hassling next grant, than doing the grant funded work.
I've known US scientists who moved to my economy (OZ) and they say its a great place to live, but they keep ties to US funded research because its what made them attractive to the non-US university or corporate research environment. If that tie is going to be cut, they're competing against one quality only: skill. Sure, a more level playing field. But that, and english language competency aside, it will be a competition against scientists from the rest of the world, who also used to go to the USA and now are seeking jobs in other economies.
There's a lot of other benefits to the USA attracting high skill talent than just salary:
* English language school system so your kids (if you have them) will speak a world language.
* Racially and culturally diverse cultures, cuisines, and communities.
* Exposure to goods from most of the world, even if marked up.
* Availability of international franchises headquartered in other countries in major metros.
* A strong passport that offers visa-free travel to many locations and very favorable visa terms in many others.
and more.
My partner and I are (different) Asians and the higher-skilled members of our family who wanted to emigrate mostly rejected Europe because of non-English language instruction and honestly just feeling racially uncomfortable in most of Europe. I have some family in Germany (who like it there) so it's obviously not impossible, but European ethnostate thinking is just unattractive to a lot of non-Caucasian talent. Canada, UK, and Australia are not like this and have potentially a lot to gain if the US kneecaps its research bureaucracy.
Eh, that's not a unique set of strengths. In any European country I know about (at least a dozen) you can get all-English education from kindergarten to PhD. In some for free, in some that's paid, but probably not as expensive as in the US. Everything is really rather a matter of tradeoffs and bang-for-the buck rather than categorical differences. Some European passports offer more access, but without the downsides of the US one. The only matter in which I don't know how to compare is the racial issues, but I hear the US is not exactly free of those either.
This is almost laughable and completely delusional.
The USA passport is far from a strong passport. Plenty of better alternatives elsewhere.
Also, that implies getting citizenship, a 5 year ordeal.
The cuisine I'm not even addressing.
The education system is also subpar, otherwise why would they live off other scientists migrating there?
Before WWII the USA was a scientific backwater and it only escaped that with massive imports of human capital from Europe.
Since imports and immigrants are bad, they can try their luck alone.
I did meet one guy that did it for the passport. He was from Iran and apparently being refused a visa to Colombia was the straw that broke the camel's back.
> The USA passport is far from a strong passport. Plenty of better alternatives elsewhere. Also, that implies getting citizenship, a 5 year ordeal.
This depends on the metrics chosen to evaluate. My german passport offers significantly more visa free travel options, but the German government is notorious for not really giving a shit about citizens getting stuck in crisis abroad. For example when the Sudan civil war broke out, Americans were evacuated in a pretty crazy and expensive military operation, while Germans were told to buckle up and keep their heads close to the ground...
> Americans were evacuated in a pretty crazy and expensive military operation
Which is a great marketing stunt that most countries (Germany included) couldn't afford, but otherwise, how often does it actually happen? I doubt they're spooling up Black Hawks to evacuate tourists every time there's a crisis somewhere.
I don't know what to tell you, if you think the cuisine available in the US isn't great it's because you aren't looking. The "tossed salad" nature of the country comes out in full force to create a food scene that holds its own against anywhere in the world. Even if you restrict yourself to classic American cuisine the food is still world class.
One of my absolute favorite things to do any time a friend from overseas who only knows American food from our media portrayal comes to visit is to take them out to eat and watch their eyes light up. The best reaction I got was from a UK friend I met on WoW— "good lord I see why you're all so fat" said through a mouthful of cheeseburger. If there's one thing America can do it's cook.
It's possible that the… uh, 4? I think? Times I've spent a month in the USA, covering California, Nevada, Utah, NYC, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Massachusetts (and Connecticut, only on the way through, but had a pizza there) may have not been diverse enough to fully encompass your cuisine, but…
But the food I actually saw in the USA was mediocre.
I didn't have any interest in 20 varieties of Oreo or bars of chocolate with bits of pork in it (for the latter, I'm vegetarian); the stuff that Whole Foods sold had slightly less flavour and variety than European discount stores like Aldi, Trader Joe's might as well have been a corner shop; the fancy restaurants were merely OK, the only positive of the fast food joints was the low cost, the "oh, you gotta try this while you're in Manhattan!" cafes and diners were on par with the random UK town centre breakfast diners you try once to see what they're like and never go back to, all the pubs were somehow even worse than Wetherspoons (UK chain with a bad reputation), the "cheese sauce" on tortilla chips was on par among the absolute worst approximations of cheese I have ever encountered.
And why is half your yoghurt thickened with gelatine, anyway?
The best food I had in the country was at a place covered by an NDA; but even that, the best, was "4 stars out of 5" by European standards.
UK is also a place with amazing immigrant/ex-colonies cuisine (as in great places to eat), but if we were talking about the British cuisine itself, getting above it is far from a high standard.
Most scientists that I know aren't motivated by the prospect of going from $100k-$100m. As long as they have a good wage, they are far more motivated by having decent funding and facilities for their work so they don't have to spend half their time applying for grants.
I totally agree with you. Scientist originally from the UK who moved to the Bay Area. Salaries are much much better here
I will say that for myself, money is a means to an end for living a “good” life. I am starting to wonder personally where the line is for the trade off between salary and its ability to translate into a good life here in the US
I should say $100k was a terribly bad choice of salary, for either $USD or "$plausible other economy" -the key point came across I think. Your decision to move on would be made even harder by the IRS: you have a very long tail of consequence for your 401k/roth, property, and even just income: they want to know worldwide income for a long, long time. I almost took a gig in the US from Australia and realized I'd drop out of lifetime rating in the Australian private health insurance model, I'd lose payment to australian superannuation and the US versions I made would not be considered tax friendly income, unless I spent a lot of time and money with an accountant. I decided against the move for other reasons but financial complexity paid it's part.
Having said that, I got stung by 49c in the doller on my British USS Pension transfer in (I'm 63) for the lump sum. Sometimes, you just can't win.
> USA is a place where you can go from $100k to $100m vesting if you are lucky. That very few do achieve this isn't the point: you cannot do it, in almost any other economy.
That's a kind of lottery-mentality that Europe doesn't want to attract anyway.
That’s not lottery mentality and thinking that it’s equivalent is why Europe isn’t innovating.
If someone wins the lottery and gets rich, society isn’t better off. If someone starts a new company that made a cure for some disease and gets rich, society is much better off.
You absolutely want to attract people that want to make huge breakthroughs with unlikely odds of success.
Once you get past a few million, you quickly get into "can't possibly spend this money in several lifetimes" territory. And wealth divides like that come at the cost of massive societal wealth divides.
The US sustains that high number of people who strike $100 million+ through having a social safety net that barely exists, which results in far more people being seen as completely disposable. It also comes at the cost of worsening public education, worsening public health, crime rates beyond most first world countries, companies that constantly invent new evils like making all formerly paid-and-done services into monthly subscriptions. Few if any that hit 100 million are doing it ethically. They're doing it by milking the residents dry.
Some countries have national pride and resent the idea of stepping on their fellow countrymen. Some would kill half of them if they were promised a few % off their yearly taxes.
> You absolutely want to attract people that want to make huge breakthroughs with unlikely odds of success.
It's fine to want that and to attract those kind of people. What you don't want is to attract people who want to do that in order to make a lot of money.
I used to think that too, but realized it’s very naive later in life. At some point people are good at what they do, but get tired, start a family, want to settle down. Money helps quite a bit to have those folks motivated.
If you want innovators, motivate them with rewards. Money is a great reward since you can turn it into mostly anything you’d like. Want to buy a mansion? Fine. Want to travel around the world? Feel free. Want to give it away to charity? Great!
Maybe I should have been more explicit. There's a difference between "money" and "a lot of money". People are in this thread talking about the likelihood of getting $100 million. If someone does a thing because they want to start a family and settle down, great. You don't need $100 million to do that. You don't even need $10 million. What I'm saying is you don't want to attract people who are aiming at making vastly more than what is needed to handle the "settle down and live a comfortable life" situation that you described. But right now our society does incentivize and glamorize that, and I think we're worse off for it.
You get both, Facebook’s job is to be known about, so you know about it. There’s a ton of companies doing drug research basically silently… in the US. Most fail, it doesn’t matter as long as a few succeed.
It's worth pointing out that the biggest innovations (both scientifically, but likely also monetary) in the biomedical field in the last years happened in Europe not the US. So that seems to disprove the point that innovation happens in the US because of the chance of going from 100k to 100M.
I tend to agree, but having met some of the people who pursued this dream, they are very very inventive. They're smart. If that energy chasing a dream could be redirected, they'd be doing amazing things. Mostly, they wind up realizing that the goal is illusive, and re-pivot to a saner outcome but by that time they are fully vested in "america" as a plan.
The bounty here, is the people on the cusp of realizing its not going to pan out but who are both very smart, and smart enough to realize they need to pivot. It would be almost a given they are consciously walking away from IPO manna. I guess if you include it in the pre-sort on applicants, you get to winnow out the people still glued to money-is-the-prize.
BTW the EU would welcome more IPR inside the EU. Some amount of bonus may have to lie in the packaging, to get to where the EU wants to be on IPR. Novo Nordisk style.
>That's a kind of lottery-mentality that Europe doesn't want to attract anyway.
the problem with the European thinking you describe is not lottery vs sure-thing, it's the idea that everybody within a geography should should think the same way and not all mentalities "belong".
Not at all. It’s that we experienced several times, first-hand, that some mentalities and mindsets systematically drive our societies to discord, war and death.
And to those mentalities… yes we ought to remind they’re not welcome.
> That's a kind of lottery-mentality that Europe doesn't want to attract anyway.
It’s not lottery mentality, it’s risk taking. And it’s something that the EU should be fostering. The US encourages risk taking where failing isn’t even seen as a bad thing.
That is the thing though: with the increased safety nets of the richer European countries, you would think that taking risks would both be more encouraged and naturally less dangerous than the US. And I am a big proponent of said safety nets. But we don't see this "moderate-risk-taking" mentality in the EU...
...or don't we? I am not sure. We are definitely not seeing the runaway successes of US big tech, but is it because people are not taking measured risks, or do operations fumble at a later point in their development? I don't know. What I do know is that revenue sources in the EU come with extremely onerous strings attached, are orders of magnitude below US levels, or are only available to big corporations of the old guard.
You're the one incorrectly using the concept of gambling replying talking to someone taking about risk versus reward (investing).
It is hard for somebody who believes in gambling to win at investing.
The US has both monetary and social incentives to create new businesses. I live in NZ where founders are discouraged by financial incentives and by social incentives.
> That's a kind of lottery-mentality that Europe doesn't want to attract anyway.
Except that it’s the opposite of a lottery.
It’s almost entirely based on your skills and the decisions you make.
There are right-place right-time effects, but it’s still your decision to be in the right place for the current time.
Europe’s economy is badly lagging the US economy, and it’s because culturally they hold these types of incorrect, fatalistic, zero-sum views towards success and innovation.
Four Pillars of Social Mobility: To rank each state, we measured a series of indicators related to social mobility across four pillars: Entrepreneurship and Growth, Institutions and the Rule of Law, Education and Skills Development, and Social Capital. Scores for each pillar were combined and weighted equally to create a state’s overall social mobility score.
I would think a measure of social mobility would include income percentile vs parents' income percentile.
Here, this one uses the simplest metric possible; a poor child is much more likely to remain poor in the US than in the other rich western countries looked at.
Wouldn't this be a much worse metric? It would have to net out to zero change on average by the definition of percentiles. If we take abs change to look at both downward and upward mobility, the measure wouldn't tell us where most downward mobility happened, up and down could all happen within the bottom 25% and none in the top 75% and this metric would say we are highly social mobile if there was a lot of movement there.
The US is full of billionaires who came from underprivileged positions.
Infact, your advice is worse than wrong, it is actively harmful, because you're discouraging people from trying by (falsely) telling them that their efforts don't matter and they were destined to fail from birth.
No, this is apparently information that clashes strongly with your prior beliefs. The US is packed solid with underprivileged adults who came from underprivileged positions, and highly privileged adults who came from highly privileged positions - regardless of whether it has a dozen counterexamples.
You don't even need to look for the count of billionaires. My grandparents were poor-as-dirt farmers. My dad's education stopped at high school. He even went to a one-room schoolhouse until he was 14.
My brother and I are both college educated and, while not "rich", have a lifestyle and income my grandparents could have only dreamed about.
It is truly painful to watch people preach learned helplessness through failure and destitution as the only possible outcome.
The relevant metric is not “did your grandparents farm” but “where in the socioeconomic continuum were your parents, and where are you”. In the US, these two answers are more likely to match than in other rich Western countries.
> Who are these billionaires from underprivileged backgrounds ?
Larry Ellison, Oprah, François Pinault, Howard Schultz, Jan Koum, Kenneth Langone, Ralph Lauren, Sheldon Adelson, JK Rowling, George Soros, John Paul DeJoria… to name just a few.
The US has very low average/median social mobility (and it'll only get worse due to insane education policies and less standardized testing), but it has very high variance.
Going from $15k a year to $150k is a lot more common in Europe,, but doing from $150k to $150m is a lot more common in the US, and it's the latter that creates most of the value.
> USA is a place where you can go from $100k to $100m
"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires" - John Steinbeck
But how do you expect officials that are so bad at transitioning professionally enough, to be good at maintaining and fostering an economy that will support this financial attractiveness?
I’m a scientist currently on an NSF grant. I am certainly poking around other countries to see what’s out there, and I’m not the only one.
A lot of scientists (at least in my field, computational chemistry) have decent skills that are transferrable to other areas. So I expect quite a few to move on.
There’s not that many jobs going in academia in other countries, and you’ll be looking at a significant pay cut due to the strong US dollar.
Most likely, people who leave academia will be leaving for industry instead.
I do feel for those in the hard sciences, they have become collateral damage in what is mostly a battle between politicians and humanities departments.
I dunno man my salary is six figures and I’m an academic scientist living in the Netherlands. My life is much higher quality than the equivalent could buy me in anywhere worth living in the USA. Like I agree the salaries can be low but you simply don’t need to make 300k usd to have a nice life here. I have a flat in the middle of the city of Utrecht where I cycle to work and pop off to the pub after and the gym is two minutes walk and I have a 400m ice skating track twenty minutes bike away. And on the work side I have free compute on an 3000 cpu cluster with also an gpu cluster of h100s and lots of resources for travelling for conferences and other stuff like that. And a lot of my startup friends here are here specifically because they went to San Francisco and got investment offers around 1 millionish and then tried to hire around and all the engineers were expecting 250k+ and then came to Europe and found people just as good who work for 80-100k. That’s a completely different runway for them and they actually have time to develop a product because they don’t have to pay so much and their people are still happy with their lives. Like I do agree there aren’t that many jobs like mine and Europe needs to get their heads out of their asses and poach as many America based scientists and engineers right now as they can. But I think American based people have this idea of Europe that prevents them from seeing their options here. I do think Europe needs more resources and less bureaucracy surrounding big science projects but I’ll make that point when I have my own big science project haha.
I've been suspicious that the quality of life cut is distinct from the pay cut.
Living in a dense European city, you do not need a car, healthcare is free, and you are generally afforded more time off and a stricter wlb compromise compared to the US. One doesn't need to eat takeout as often if there is time to cook. Depending on the country, rent/housing costs are more or less under control.
On the other hand swiss/Netherlands food is expensive even by bay area standards.
To be competitive in academia in Europe, you’re not going to have as much free time as you expect.
You’re unlikely to be able to afford to live in the center of a dense Western European city on researcher wages, and most of the jobs aren’t in the city center either, so you’ll probably still need a car.
I think in the US people romanticise living and working in Europe to an unrealistic degree. There are good reasons why the net migration of skilled workers is towards the US rather than away from it.
I lived in both the US for a while (Bay Area), but I am now back in Europa. Quality of life in Europa is really high and you can certainly live quite well in most Western European cities from a typical wage for a researcher. Although many people would indeed not need to own a car (public transport is often very good, in many places you can also get around via bike or even by walking), most do and this easily possible with common salaries. There are places which are expensive, but many cities are quite reasonable. Universal healthcare, a stable society, low crime are among the many advantages.
the other important thing to keep in mind is that in the EU in general, there's no added taxes on the bill, and tips are less of a thing here, so there's not a magical 20%+ hidden charge to factor in on everything you order.
It's the hard sciences I feel for because they typically deliver good returns on taxpayer funded research expenditure, and are generally disciplined enough to keep their head down and focus on their work, rather than engage in culture wars.
In contrast, the humanities made their own bed. They became politically partisan, engaged in systematically discriminatory hiring practices, and routinely conduct research that the public perceive to hold little utility.
Ultimately academics need to keep in mind that they rely on the generosity of taxpayers to fund their research. If the public aren't happy that they are getting value for money they will defund these programs.
I hope that the blowback is contained to the humanities departments, but guilt by association is unfortunately a thing in politics.
I think very few people proactively decide to become partisan. Most liberal arts academics just want to work in their special field. Sometimes the things they study get politicized, but that’s mostly the doing of talking heads.
If somebody wanted to become a partisan hack, there are easier ways than getting tenure, right?
It's not so much that people want to become partisan, but rather the culture of the discipline.
The culture within the hard sciences is to challenge existing theories and narratives.
The culture within the social sciences is almost the polar opposite. It still superficially presents as a science, but in practice is a purity spiral with an orthodoxy of established conclusions which cannot be challenged without severe career consequences.
The hard sciences had their Galileo affair 400 years ago, the soft sciences are in the midst of theirs right now.
Depends on the kinds of positions. There's more to academia than tenure-track faculty (which isn't in my future at all anyway).
People around me tend to be in the RSE (Research Software Engineer) scene, which is growing in Europe. I, and many of my cohort, could fit in as research staff or faculty in many different disciplines.
Wouldn't get rich or famous, but certainly have a comfortable living working on interesting problems.
This, the US is the country most willing to make daring bets on innovation.
Europe will not spend even 0.1% of its pension/welfare fund on big research bets. The private investors their will only want real estate investments, not fancy wancy "VC".
Young talent will flow one way from other countries to the US, because they've already seen what the grass is like on their side.
If the sentiment upthread holds, and large numbers of US academics move overseas, then relatively shortly, Europe may shift towards being more willing to make big research bets.
The population shift introduces new ideas, new perspectives, new ways of operating research, new connections towards funding and money, new views on what big bets even means.
The influx of foreign scientists and academics into America over the last century caused significant shifts in how America operated and viewed the idea of research and academia. Post-war Europeans (Von Braun's crowd being an obvious example) caused a large shift in the way America funded "big bet" projects. Saturn V perhaps. Same may happen in Europe.
Those academics can use HN from the opposite side of the Atlantic. VC money especially has the possibility of being territorially bound, yet its often far less constrained by the those types of lines in the dirt than many funding opportunities.
This theory presumes there is shortage of talented researchers in other countries, which is not the case.
There aren't countries with unfilled academic positions awaiting people from the US. If anything, the landscape is even more competitive outside the US.
I think a lot of these guys and gals are fooling themselves with the whole, "find another country" thing. There is no other country that is A) doing research at these levels, B) Flush with cash, and C) needs you because they don't have a population that produces the necessary thinkers. That's basically only the US.
The European research budget is not insignificant. Horizon Europe 2021-2027 is the current vehicle that much of the funding is going through (European Research Council [ERC] being one of the most well known parts). It has a budget for the time-frame (all years) of EUR 96,899,000,000. [1] Of that, the ERC has EUR 16B [2], Digital, Industry and Space has ~EUR 15B, Climate, Energy and Mobility has ~EUR 15B, and several other sub-groups have smaller amounts.
Those then work with the country level organizations of Science Europe, and those together each spend about EUR 25B each year. [3] It's not insignificant. I tend to pay attention to space, and lately almost all there's been is European achievements in telescopes and astronomy.
I think GDP/economic output/labor productivity continues to rise briskly. The government accounts are in debt because people in the US refuse to consistently vote for [people advocating] high enough taxes. But we could tax more (still less than Europe) and get balanced budget.
Higher taxes do genuinely restrict economic growth, so it's not like raising taxes is a magic bullet.
Personally, I think there is plenty of grift and wasteful expenditure we could look at addressing first, especially within the healthcare and defense portfolios.
Not as much as having insufficient resources dedicated to the education of the young hurts economic growth (long term).
I agree not using the world proven efficient healthcare strategy of universal coverage is pretty stupid economically, as is spending a trillion USD per annum on the military. But we are so rich these mistakes can be absorbed for surprisingly long.
And importantly enjoys a privleged position in the world economy that enables them to run these types of long term deficits with minimal negative consequences.
Something which might shift over the coming decades.
I hold the idea that brain drain, i.e. emigration of skilled people, is one of only a small handful of real methods to hold fascism to account.
With that, as things start to get real bad it seems leaving is something of a moral duty for anyone who cares, has skills that hold real weight, and can still afford to do so.
Obviously where this "real bad" point is is hard to say, and there's important tradeoffs to consider. I also could be talked out of this position but from what I see it seems about accurate.
And really who would choose to stay in 1938 Germany if you could leave. Even if you are some rich upper class Herr Doktor Professor, life for the next 20 years in Germany wasn't that great compared to England or the US. Why risk having your children killed paratrooping into Greenland. The world is still quite beautiful and quite full of kind people.
Interestingly, Werner Heisenberg was decidedly non-Nazi (and was regularly attacked as a “white jew”), and even though he had ample opportunity to leave, he chose to stay to work on the German nuclear fission program.
I don’t think it tarnished his scientific legacy, but it definitely created some friction in the post-war years.
It's funny how the politicization of science in Nazi Germany led to things like "Aryan physics" to counter the "Jewish physics" of Einstein's relativity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik
Along with the flight/expulsion/imprisonment/murder of top scientists who weren't ideologically or racially "pure", it's no wonder their nuclear program was such a failure.
It works better when there is some viable alternative. Research job market is terrible in Europe right now because our governments are trying to make a US like system (project driven and without stability) but without putting the money. There isn't a lot of space in the world to accomodate US brain drain. A bit in Japan, a bit in Europe, most of it in China maybe.
> handful of real methods to hold fascism to account.
They care nothing about "brains" except blowing them out. Fascism is
anti-intellectual. While it glorifies the golden future time, really
it makes science a means not and end. I strongly advise that everyone
in silicon valley, and in US tech generally, should read about what
Stalin did to the bourgeois engineers.
The greatest threat to a technological regime is the people who built
it, understand it, and can unbuild it.
I've written about it here and there but won't insult you with my
swill and sweepings because there's loads of far more interesting
history and analysis out there [0]. Suffice it to see, being
unemployed in a technofascist regime may be the least of your worries.
This is the obvious conclusion. As the US trashes its own research ability other countries can offer good conditions to the scientists. I've never seen an own-goal so great.
Is he really? Where? I'm no Eric Bina but I ate from the same table and would be happy to remind him of the petulant brat reputation he left behind in the halls of NCSA.
I've heard several interviews about the decisions he made at that time and came from a neutral opinion to hating his guts.
It's like he was surrounded by knowledgeable people and decided to make wrong decision upon wrong decision just to spite them because he resented them being better than him.
I don’t think that is a fair characterisation of Andreessen.
He’s always been a Democrat, including supporting Obama and Clinton.
His recent support of Trump appears to be a tactical reaction to some of the misbehaviour during the Biden administration such as debanking political rivals and encouraging race-based hiring.
He wanted Romney to win the Republican primary, believing him to be more pro-tech than the other candidates, but he ultimately he supported and voted for Obama in that election.
He's pretty explicitly said it's because the Biden administration tried to do the smallest amount of regulation in the tech industry. When Obama and Clinton let the tech barons run wild, he was happy to be a Democrat.
Operation Chokepoint 2.0 is what you're looking for here. The FDIC is accused of violating the APA and some constitutional amendments during the Biden presidency for it.
China, for example, could set up a very European-style English-speaking institute in Hong Kong or Macau with high salaries to attract scientists. Singapore and South Korea too. One day Americans might well follow the money and the research freedom?
China's drowning in their own PhD's. The competition is fierce, and the pressure is enormous. The best and brightest over there are insanely capable men and women.
In all honesty, it's hard to see China wanting many of the PhD's that would be available from the US in a worst case scenario NSF/NIH funding collapse. There may be a place for the top 0.1%? But for 99.9% of PhD's, there are Chinese replacements that are, frankly, better and cheaper.
Hate to bring it back to money like that, but there it is.
I see Chinese nationals in US labs thinking a return to China is a more attractive now than it was a few weeks ago. Chinese institutions should absolutely capitalize on this.
It's been happening already for a few years. Many prominent award-winning faculty are leaving US institutions and setting up brand new labs in top Chinese universities.
Not happening. Getting significantly more than $100k is close to impossible in most careers in any other country and the dollar is the safest currency to get paid in. Not convinced the desperate folks who want to move despite these are good hires. Anecdotally the only people working any job at all outside of USA that I’ve met were doing that because of their non-US wives not liking it stateside. This isn’t a large group as you can imagine.
> Not happening. Getting significantly more than $100k is close to impossible in most careers in any other country
There are literally millions of people around the world who earn significantly more than US$100K and don’t work in the US.
e.g. in Australia, many medical specialists earn more than US$200k - it is common for experienced oncologists, cardiologists, paediatricians, gastroenterologists, etc, to earn more than US$200k.
'most careers' and Australia is a special snowflake, too, though yes, a valid example. on the other hand you have Eastern Europe, 6h drive to the 'West' from approximately anywhere and salaries in the shitter except for some professions in capitals (cardiologists would probably also qualify).
As a seventh generation American and 17 year Air Force veteran (long separated), I’m suggesting everybody the US who has any skills, talent, sociability or empathy to leave the United States as quickly as possible.
I think that that’s probably the best route for anybody who is currently in America and doesn’t want to deal with the next 20 to 50 years of total deprivation.
Unfortunately some of us can’t leave so the best most people can do is find some place safe to land.
First off, there is no evidence the US will never fund science again.
Second, top scientific positions in the US are at academic labs, not at NIH (bare a few top people spending some time there). The top academic labs in the US get some funding from NIH, but the top ones get it from a ton of sources with NIH not being the bulk of it.
But does anyone take any science seriously anymore, if the conditions of the US funding would be that don't even mention the topics related to women or climate change?
> i think its underappreciated how much of America's modern success comes down to attracting scientists and intellectuals from war torn europe in the 30s-50s.
if you're going to boil down our "success", if you must call it that, to a root cause, it has a lot more to do with our insatiable greed and lack of respect for, well, anything. The talent is just a small detail in the narrative of America and that narrative is driven far more by capital than it is by interesting people.
The talent narrative makes for excellent propaganda, though, neatly whitewashing a violent and hateful culture.
I would think if you are a European national this situation would have a silver lining in perhaps incentivizing European scientific investment to remain at home and strengthen those nations' scientific research institutions and grant programs. If the U.S. sees fit to rework its institutions, that's its own business. If funding in the U.S. dries up, then doesn't it make sense to go your own way and seek funding in your home country?
So I think you're right. This could be a big opportunity for countries to poach some of these scientists or to repatriate those scientists who have left their home countries.
as an American I'd be sad to see science move out of my country at the same time I'd be happy and relieved that science continues to flourish and treated with the respect it deserves in other countries (hoping these would be democratic countries with a high regard for human rights such as those of Europe or elsewhere), decentralizing itself away from the US's chronic political issues that show no sign of abating likely for the next few decades at least.
The big thing is this isn't really about any real monetary savings. What we get out of these budgets is a bargain:
> The biggest single share of the NIH budget goes to the NCI ($7.8 billion in 2024), and the second-most to the NIAID ($6.5 billion) with the National Institute of Aging coming in third at $4.4 billion. (See the tables on numbered pages 11 and 46 of that link at the beginning of the paragraph for the details).
> And to put those into perspective, the largest single oulay for the Federal government is Social Security benefits ($1.4 trillion by themselves), with interest on the national debt coming in second at $949 billion, Medicare comes in third at $870 billion, and the Department of Defense fourth at $826 billion and Medicaid next at $618 billion.
Even quoting the NIH/NSF budgets (or their line items) misses the point of the current actions. Yes, they're smaller fractions of the USG budget, but they not immaterial.
This is not an attempt to 'save money' at the NSF and NIH (and USAID). A serious, rational effort to reduce their costs / increase their efficiency does not start with grep-ing manuscripts for 'underrepresented'. Part Five of TFA is on the money. This is an ideological attack on acronyms, and what they symbolize to the attackers. The actual agencies, their relative importance to the budget, etc. do not matter. The iconoclasts are here to smash the icons.
Everything is expendable if you kick in the door and fire everyone, like USAID. I think they're politically smart enough to not cut off the elderly voters, but who knows.
Social security yes, but it seems to me that reducing the cost of Medicare and Medicaid should be very much possible. We need to provide healthcare but it should be possible to make that less expensive
What leverage does the US government actually have?
Is "we just won't fund your drug, even though people will die and you're the only option on the market" actually something that could happen? Would that be politically palatable to anybody?
I guess there's patent invalidation and forced genericization, but that would kill innovation real quick.
I think a far better idea would be to impose very strict caps on admin / non-medical costs, potentially at the expense of paying a bit more to fraudsters, changing FDA regulations to minimize (death from side effects + death from no available drugs) instead of just the former, as well as becoming a lot more aggressive about expensive and unnecessary procedures that doctors perform to get rich quick.
The US pays much more for drugs than any other country. I guess one possibility is that no one has any leverage and big pharma is able to charge Americans more because they're richer. But the more popular theory is that countries can negotiate better prices than individuals can (yes, technically insurance companies can negotiate prices, but they seem unmotivated to drive any costs down). It seems the previous administration thought the government can negotiate lower prices: https://www.cms.gov/inflation-reduction-act-and-medicare/med....
Trump MO would be implement a 100% tax on pharma profits and unrealized capital gains next Monday, then reverse it once they agree. But only if Trump cares to die on that hill.
I don't think it's the case that there are many conditions with only single treatment option. "Lower the price or we let our people die" probably isn't right, but "Our cost benefit analysis shows, at this price point, therapy X is preferable. If you want us to use your drug your prices need to be lower."
Presumably the government also has the option to permit purchase of pharmaceuticals from other countries. "Oh, you've raised the cost of X? That's okay, we'll buy it from licensed suppliers in the EU for a tenth of the price."
> we'll buy it from licensed suppliers in the EU for a tenth of the price
Actually is that possible? Are the EU suppliers allowed to resell at the gov negotiated price? Or are the gov negotiated price only for internal market?
(I've been wondering since I don't understand why swiss drug price are so much higher given that EU suppliers are next door)
This is an uninformed take. A relatively small fraction of our healthcare dollars (~7%) are going to ‘providers’ i.e. doctors and nurse practitioners. I don’t have a source handy but this is easily searchable.
Most of the spiraling healthcare costs are attributable to administrative bloat, hospital profits, insurance companies and pharmaceutical profits. What you’re suggesting would just result in lower quality care in general and has effectively already been implemented with the rise of ‘supervised’ and unsupervised mid-level providers. I.e. NPs, PAs, CRNAs etc. It hasn’t resulted in any decrease in healthcare costs for the patient.
Let me give you some context for insight. If I see a patient in clinic for an intravitreal injection my fee will be $150-250 before overhead, the pharmaceutical company will be paid by medicare or private insurance around ~ $2000 for the drug that I inject. Double that for a bilateral injection.
If I operate at a hospital, my fee is $5-600. The hospital bills medicare a $4000 facilities fee plus additional fees for anesthesia, consumables etc. to the tune of over $10000 per eye.
If you want to lower healthcare costs a good start would be negotiating drug prices, repealing the clause in the ACA that bans physicians from owning hospitals, banning non-competes for healthcare professionals and getting rid of certificates of need that make it unnecessarily difficult to build outpatient surgery centers. In short, ideas that require a more nuanced understanding of our healthcare system.
Thank you for the reply. As in all things, I'm prepared to be wrong, if that 7% is indeed even ballpark accurate.
btw I appreciate being called uninformed (which I dont dispute and find no offence in) rather than stupid or pigheaded or whatever. The point of talking about things is to increase understanding, we cant get through to people by belittling them.
Look, the plausible version of this is spelled: "force the AMA to allow and the USG to fund more residency slots, so the supply of MDs can meaningfully grow, and the premium they demand be reduced. Also maybe let NPs and CRNAs and the like practice more independent".
But throwing medicine to the whims of the market is absurd. We're going to pick surgeons by reading reviews on Google?
I wanna say yes but to be fair, I cant prove it. I think without licencing we would get reduced length degrees & more people like nurses transitioning into primary care physicians - and I think that would be fine for a lot of conditions
I don't think licensure is really that much of a barrier, though. One of the huge trends going on is that nurses are increasingly replacing doctors in primary care. In my market it's unusual to have an actual doctor as a primary care provider. These nurses just go through some additional training for a PA or NP license and it's still a great deal cheaper than medical school.
This happens to me (my PCM is a nurse) but funnily enough my costs haven't gone down. Those nurses still work under a qualified doc, who will never look at your file until youre nearly dead, but theyre still getting a cut believe you me.
They’re not ‘getting a cut’ unless they directly own the clinic. What you’re seeing is a cost-cutting measure increasing the bottom line for whoever owns the clinic. Physicians are forced to agree to ‘supervise’ midlevels as a condition of their employment these days.
I replied to your other comment but wanted to reply here to say that this is also probably a fair point. I guess I dont really see doctors as employees taking orders (dont doctors mostly own their own practice?) since theyre so highly paid, but probably thats how being a software dev looks to others aswell.
Im curious if you think malpractice insurance is also a significant, unnecessary cost? What if we made it harder to sue doctors? On the flip side, malpractice is still a real problem - probably not one that will be fixed by removing medical licences :D just hoping you see this comment since I am genuinely interested in your answer
The financial incentives a specialist headache doc has whos spent the time and money to get to where they are would never tell a patient to eat less and radically adjust your diet for your ailment to go away, they wouldn't have patients coming back to them and they would go broke (that education was super long and expensive). I like the uncanny idea of getting rid of training requirements and let the free market handle it.
That kind of change though would leave someone with the bag and tends to never get voted or happen so we stay stuck in the over priced pharma, insurance, beating around the bush health game were in. Everyone is incentivezed to keep the bandaids rolling. Don't tell people their drug habits (I mean eating habits) are killing them.
Letting the free market handle it equals letting quacks handle it. I really doubt quacks will be any more incentivized (or qualified) to do right by their patients.
Also doctors can be compelled to sign enforceable, legally binding noncompetes. Unlike most of us, they have to move far away to change employers, thereby making competition in the health care space very difficult.
> The big thing is this isn't really about any real monetary savings.
Of course not. The big gain is for Trump and Musk to say they did something. Regardless of how someone voted, I can’t believe they are still falling for this shtick.
It seems like some new doctors have arrived and diagnosed the patient with terminal cancer. Being new, they have no experience of surgery so are hacking out the tumor with a blunt instrument, excising good tissue and bad. Some hope the surgeons will improve their skill over time. Some say the patient won’t survive. Some say the patient wouldn’t have survived if they did nothing. Some say the patient never had cancer in the first place.
The cynic in me thinks that the US is going to roll over and take this fascist shake down. The optimist in me thinks that the people will rise up with a resounding NO and do something about it. Right now I'm not sure which I believe.
I think the former is most likely. The people are largely unhappy with how things have been and it's unlikely to get materially worse for the majority of people in the near term, so I don't think there will be a fire lit under enough of the population to rise up.
If it gets bad enough that most people are starving, rather then just struggling, we'll see action, but I doubt it'll get there anytime soon.
The weird spanner in the works is that while people may be unhappy, they are unhappy because of things they believe that aren't true. Covid response in the US wasn't that bad; global warming really is causing the floods and fires and hurricanes and the EVs really are helping, as would methane emissions rules and so on; if people think the bi-coastal elites are looking down on them (and they are), like so what; that's not a serious problem. If the wealthy don't pay enough taxes, the middle class will be harmed. Making sure black folks and other historically disadvantaged groups do better will raise the quality of life for all of us; if we don't encourage the successful migration and acculturation of people from around the world, our population will decline and our economy will decline. If we don't invest in science, we will loose power and knowledge to those that do. The entitled white folks that teased all the kids that were good at math and science in the 1970s etc. might wish it weren't so, but it is so.
But they now believe that movie actors are drinking the blood of babies and that China somehow rigged up the increase in CO2 as a way to confound us. They think scientists are mostly lying.
It's not clear from an information theoretic perspective how to restore stability to the US system.
Maybe once they've killed a million immigrants, I'm sorry had excess mortality in the camps in the hot SW and in Cuba, and things all around them are worse for their own children and families, they will repent and embrace truth, justice and the American way. One can hope.
It's a third rail to touch but important: "wokism" has been weaponized by the right, and for low information voters (i.e., a majority of the population), voting is an emotional act. Hate and anger are powerful emotions.
Trump's son-in-law was put in charge of supply distribution, refused to invoke the defense production act, and when they finally did, Trump took ages to actually "order" ventilators. They refused to implement testing because they knew that tests would show how bad things were and justify measures that would hurt the stock market.
Trump largely didn't do anything at first because COVID-19 was most severely impacting the coastal blue states because of higher population densities.
Trump told states to get their own PPE (because blue states needed them more badly than red states, and he didn't want red states to have to pay for it), then the feds outbid state agencies for PPE. And when that didn't work, just outright had customs steal them:
Our state's orders for PPE was impounded at the port by the feds, who them claimed they had no idea what anyone was talking about. Our state got a bunch of PPE because the NFL football team owner sent his team's 737 to China to pick up masks and gowns (which turned out to have all sorts of problems, like being sized for children.)
Our governor stopped just shy of saying "yes" when asked if he'd sent state troopers into NYC to meet the plane and escort the truck.
Ugh it sucks to be reminded of all that bullshit. Though it's good not to forget.
But I think the earlier comment may have been referring to the restrictions in the US relative to other countries. Most other countries were much more severe for their lockdowns
> Speaking as a Japanese-Americann, equity initiatives like DEI and Affirmative Action have always left me a bad taste. They are racism, sexism, and all the other forms of discrimination. I 300% support Trump's mandate to judge everyone strictly based on merit, it's MLK's dream given new life.
Congrats on buying into the propaganda. Do you really believe that these initiatives push anyone to hire the unqualified?
When you have ten candidates who are all qualified, and your entire workforce is white, or asian, or black, or male, all that DEI asks is to maybe consider not just hiring more of your ethnic group/gender/etc. Maybe branch out a bit. What it does not say is that if you have 1 qualified candidate from the majority ethnic group and 9 who are unqualified minorities, you have to lower your standards. That's the lie that the reactionary groups are pushing, and it's received readily without the burden of even slight scrutiny.
The people pushing falsehoods about DEI are, shockingly, not enlightened progressives in any other regard. They are not the philosophical heirs of Dr. King.
> understands how tax brackets are structured should know this. Yes, tax avoidance/efficiency shenanigans abound, Trump himself has admitted to using them, but why not? Noone is going to leave money on the table. The law allows for them. The tax laws should be rewritten if it's a problem.
It IS a problem and they SHOULD be re-written, so why isn't it?? Saying "change tax laws if its a problem" when its structurally almost impossible to get through congress IS the problem people are talking about & its disengenuous to handwave that away.
Frankly I’m done with entertaining the concerns about coastal elites looking down on the common clay. I’ve talked a lot with people with this position. They look down on other people just as much, if not more. They will talk a lot about respecting their opinions and beliefs and then completely write off huge swathes of Americans because they are “not real Americans.” I think they should remove the log from their eye before complaining about the speck in others.
> Lockdowns were in violation of the right to free assembly
But we don't have a right to recklessly infect other people with a disease against their will either. Personally, as someone trying to keep elderly and immunocompromised friends and family alive through the pandemic, some of whom ended up dying from COVID, I am still angry at anyone who disobeyed or fought against those lockdowns: they were killing other people.
> equity initiatives like DEI and Affirmative Action have always left me a bad taste
Affirmative action is illegal in the USA, and nearly all DEI initiatives and efforts are based on making sure people are hired on merit instead of race, and that the workplace culture doesn't make it impossible for people from other backgrounds to participate and succeed, e.g. is inclusive. Trump's claims about meritocracy are a red herring. The core premise of the MAGA movement is the idea that only white people are qualified, and anyone else is a "DEI hire." If you’re a Japanese American you can bet these people think you are unqualified and should be replaced.
> The sheer amount of tax dollars being spent with wanton abandon is ridiculous science
US academic research is the 'engine' that drives industrial/tech dominance in the USA, and is practically a rounding error in federal spending. Go look up any successful engineering or science professor at a well known research institution and you will typically find a large number of companies that exist spun off just from the research of a single lab.
It was ruled illegal by the Supreme Court (for college admissions, at least) in 2023. Don't pretend like it didn't exist before that. It had to be exist before it was able to be challenged in court.
> Lockdowns were in violation of the right to free assembly,
No right in the constitution has ever been, and never will be, absolute - including the right to life. For example, your right to life ends the split second after you are a credible threat to someone else's right to life - which is why cops will shoot you if you point a gun at someone - or them.
Your right to leave your house ends when doing so means you could make other people seriously or life-threateningly sick. Hence why health departments have had the legal authority to order people confined for two centuries.
You want to participate in society? There are requirements. If you don't like them, go live in a country that doesn't have those laws - there a plenty of countries with little functioning government where you can live out your libertarian wet dreams.
> The wealthy pay more taxes, anyone who understands how tax brackets are structured should know this.
> If you don't like them, go live in a country that doesn't have those laws - there a plenty of countries with little functioning government where you can live out your libertarian wet dreams.
Or they could move to the total opposite, a notorious high government nanny state like Finland, where the mere suggestion of a curfew was immediately dismissed as unconstitutional as it should be.
Your entire post is untrue statements linked together.
> >Covid response in the US wasn't that bad
> Lockdowns were in violation of the right to free assembly, and more broadly the emergency powers used for protracted timeframes to enforce them were ruled illegal by various State courts.
Public health overrules free assembly, and it always has. And we didn't actually have lock-downs in the US, unlike China. I was able to take a walk every day, and in the end found that if the entire US had followed the California guidelines, a few more hundred thousand lives would have been saved.
> >global warming really is causing the floods and fires and hurricanes and the EVs really are helping, as would methane emissions rules and so on
> But screeching Global Warming or Climate Change against everything doesn't
> actually help. It certainly helps you feel warm and fluffy, though.
Don't take action to prevent harm to yourself because you feel bad about the message - a classic "don't act on what is true" strategy. I don't feel warm and fluffy, but I do use solar power to power my HVAC and cars, in the hope that our descendants will be able to enjoy the sandy beaches I grew up on.
> >if people think the bi-coastal elites are looking down on them (and they are), like so what
>"So what?" is how Trump got elected and then re-elected. Don't underestimate
>peoples' resentment to being talked down, especially over long periods of time
>for no justifiable reason. There's a reason Trump called his 2024 run the
>people's retribution.
For the US, for one state to look down on other states is the norm. No one criticizes South Carolina more than North Carolina. This self-superiority is not a problem in the way that dying of a preventable disease or getting flooded by a heavy rainstorm is. Asheville was perfectly happy not being DC; it didn't like getting flooded.
>>If the wealthy don't pay enough taxes, the middle class will be harmed.
>The wealthy pay more taxes, anyone who understands how tax brackets are
>structured should know this. Yes, tax avoidance/efficiency shenanigans abound,
>Trump himself has admitted to using them, but why not? Noone is going to leave
>money on the table. The law allows for them. The tax laws should be rewritten if
>it's a problem.
Compared to like when Nixon was President, the middle class is harmed and the wealthy pay much less (prima facie not enough given the issues with having good schools). I would love to let the Trump tax cuts expire.
>>Making sure black folks and other historically disadvantaged groups do better will raise the quality of life for all of us
>Speaking as a Japanese-Americann, equity initiatives like DEI and Affirmative
>Action have always left me a bad taste. They are racism, sexism, and all the
>other forms of discrimination. I 300% support Trump's mandate to judge everyone
>strictly based on merit, it's MLK's dream given new life.
Do you think Trump is actually hiring the best people for jobs? Do you think legacy admissions to elite schools is a good idea? Do you think that allowing people to continue to refuse to sell homes to Asians is good? I live in a city with only about 2% African Americans, so the discriminatees are mostly Asian and South Asian. What I have found is that a more egalitarian approach to cultural differences enriches the whole city. And I certainly supported reparations to the survivors of the Japanese internment camps, and would support a similar pay-back for the descendants of people impoverished by chattel slavery or red-lining, racist urban "redevelopment" or job discrimination.
>>if we don't encourage the successful migration and acculturation of people from around the world, our population will decline and our economy will decline.
>There is nothing successful about illegal aliens spamming the country en masse. >There is nothing prosperous about an economy propped up by illegal slave labor.
Not sure what you mean by illegal slave labor, but immigration to the United States is overwhelmingly an economic and cultural positive. Most (at least as of 4 Feb 25, things are changing rapidly) of the "illegal" immigrants Trump is referring to are legal refugees who very quickly become successful US residents and to whom we have treaty obligations to help (because of the problems before WWII).
>>If we don't invest in science, we will loose power and knowledge to those that do. The entitled white folks that teased all the kids that were good at math and science in the 1970s etc. might wish it weren't so, but it is so.
>The sheer amount of tax dollars being spent with wanton abandon is ridiculous science or otherwise, especially when we also have many pressing concerns that need to be on the budget.
Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Defense are roughly 10x that. It's very little spending for a lot of good benefits; even on a purely economic basis, pure research pays for itself. Again, your post seems to be a long series of falsehoods. I don't know if you believe them or not, but your post makes my point: Trump was elected by voters that believe things that are not so.
My (perhaps naive) take is that we all got “Trump immunity” from the first time around the rollercoaster and understand that a lot of it is ineffective bluster that never goes anywhere. Look at the tariffs that’s already been “delayed”.
In a normal administration, gutting the NSF would be the main story. If his statements on Gaza are indeed just bluster, they still succeed in focusing attention away from his current actual actions.
When their children are being drafted to go die in some war things will change rapidly. I'd give it a coin flip that's where we're headed right now.
EDIT: To be clear, that's predicated on assumption things are fundamentally different here and now from Germany in the 1930s. If not, we're already cooked.
With all these things, part of why it's so exhausting is having to deal with most of the statements being totally bullshit. They chuck around threats without restraint, but they only carry out some of them. So far.
Protesting for Gaza was squashed last time by basically everyone, and will be again.
The majority of americans aren't paying much attention and aren't going to notice things are off until things have really gone off the rails, but by then it'll be too late. There's also a lot of "It can't happen here" attitude (apparently because we're special or something) which is exactly the kind of conditions that make it more likely to happen.
Something small like in-person gatherings for several years in response to a pandemic? Like someone else in the thread claimed was a made-up problem that's only in peoples' heads?
It's really interesting seeing how widely varied peoples' definitions of these things are.
The pandemic was a national emergency. Covid was an extremely contagious disease without a lot of existing immunity. The right call was made for the safety of several hundred million Americans. Most other countries made the exact same one.
I wouldn't say most other countries made the exact same call, only because there are plenty of people who think we didn't go far enough. When the comment I was referring to said "Covid response in the US wasn't that bad," I actually wasn't sure whether they were saying the lockdowns weren't that bad or their effectiveness wasn't that bad. (I can kind of assume the former based on the rest of their messaging, but still, there's a range of opinions people had/have about it.)
I'm glad to have lived in a country where they had strict lock downs pre-vaccine. I imagine there are funerals I didn't have to go to as a result. But flip side people could claim I was under martial law etc. stripped of my freedoms.
People only care about the freedoms to do things they themselves enjoy. Nothing new about that. Much like people only care about authoritarian overreach when the opposition is in power. We should always care, because the power taken by one will remain for the next. Eventually if too much power accrues to any branch it will end the separation of powers. It may have already happened, and once it does, there are no parties, only that boot. Authoritarians are all the same party, they exist at the integer wrap of left vs right. It is why you see extremists from both ends swapping parties far more often than those towards the middle.
>The people are largely unhappy with how things have been
This is an understatement to say the least, and the fact it's been denied and even refused by the powers that be until today is why the pendulum has swung as hard as it has.
Americans wanted change, and they finally got it with ferocious retribution because it's been held back for so long.
I'm confused. Are you saying specifically that you think the experiences described in this article are for the good of the country? Or do you think they're an exaggeration/lie.
I don’t think that’s what the comment said at all. You’re extrapolating too much.
Explaining the pendulum swinging violently because folks didn’t feel heard is not the same thing as saying that it’s a good thing that the pendulum has swung so violently.
I'm a Trump voter (2016, 2020, and 2024) so I obviously find all this a good thing, just for transparency.
That said, that is tangential and irrelevant to explaining how and why the pendulum swung back as hard as it did.
Trump won his first term in 2016 because Americans were fed up with the Bush+Obama status quo of endless wars and waste. Drain the swamp, fuck the establishment! As the sentiment of the day went; remember Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party? Biden winning 2020 was a sharp rebuke by the powers that be; how dare the people demand change and elect an outsider, how dare the people demand peace and effective government. Biden and Harris's 2024 campaigns likewise were based strictly and ultimately on continuing the status quo; Harris "had no policy" in large part because the "policy" was the status quo.
Trump winning again in 2024 with a historic campaign is a sharp rebuke to that, he is the people's retribution for being denied and refused for so long time and time again. For voters like me and us, NASA and the like having their funding slashed and denied is merely collateral damage for a greater and long-awaited cause.
And no Trump supporter can actually spell out what that cause is besides "own dem libs" and religious faith in everything getting better for the common person despite every single piece of evidence pointing to the contrary. And I mean religious in the literal sense: a belief that some ill-defined paradise awaits the true believers and it will be worth it in the end even though it kind of hurts that their faces are being gnawed by the leopards (but at least the outgroup’s faces are being eaten too so it’s all right).
Or now Gaza. I guess they don’t count trade wars. Dalewyn could have his family deported and still think Trump is doing the right thing. I gave up responding.
As Trump said when an interviewer asked him about Ukraine: "I want people to stop dying." I think most Americans share that sentiment with regards to war, so no, trade wars don't count.
It's objective fact that Trump did not start a single war during his first term (he only inherited wars from his predecessors), his successor Biden immediately went back to starting wars. Americans will not tolerate declarations of war or otherwise military actions on Denmark/Greenland or Panama, we voted for him in large part because he is the first President in a long time who hates wars.
No. More. Wars. This is non-negotiable. Every single warmonger and the military industrial complex can go fuck themselves.
However, if we can get Greenland and the Panama Canal amicably through business/diplomacy then, as an American, why not?
>Dalewyn could have his family deported
If we're here illegally then fuck yeah Trump is doing the right thing; he's just enforcing the law as written. I thought we were all about rule of law?
> However, if we can get Greenland and the Panama Canal amicably through business/diplomacy then, as an American, why not?
was there anything amicable about his recent claims about greenland ?
How do you reconcile having a leader suggesting curing covid with bleach to know how to make government efficients ? Musk couldn't turn twitter back as far as we know either..
You seem to be very confused, among other things, about who started the Ukraine war and why. Gonna guess you probably think Obama started the Iraq war and probably the Civil War and WWII as well.
The sentiment I get in this regards is that people are angry and want to "burn it to the ground", without any thought of what might possibly take its place.
Exactly. Freeways and airports and fallow fields fully paid for. Cheap imports and complete and utter physical security. BLM land to hunt and graze and drill and fell. Rivers that don't catch on fire, not even a little bit. And it would be so much better without the got-damn'd feds.
The real U.S. In these people's minds, the federal government and its millions of employees are a parasite sucking the blood of the real U.S., not a part of it. I will leave analogies as an exercise to the reader.
More like Americans repeatedly vote for change, because the change they got four years earlier was too bad. It reminds me of Chile, which keeps oscillating between socialist and conservative presidents every four years.
Roughly half the voting population wants a king. It's not just rolling over, this is welcomed with open arms.
I try to understand how the "other side" is thinking about this. Disagreements on policy aside, why would "freedom loving Americans" want a king that can rule unilaterally?
Not trying to start a flame war or pose a gotcha question, I'm genuinely curious. What am I missing?
Not an American, but my 2c - a good chunk of people are actively trying to find a reason why their lives are worse than others, haven't gotten better in decades, and are seeing how life is fine across the pond despite not being the richest country in the world. They'll keep blaming everyone, and everything, and whatever comes into their sights. At the same time group of people will exploit it for their gains, as "fighting for a cause" is historically the best way to somewhat control people's emotions.
Every week a new target will be set, and no matter what will be done, people won't realize that the cause of their own problems are internal. Canada, Denmark, Mexico, Panama, you name it. At the same time there's a superpower (China) that is actively trying to unseat the leader. Superpower with more people, better manufacturing, more potential for the future income, more manpower, not cool with getting bullied and etc. That will also make the citizens unhappy, because "how dare China be better than us?!".
It also doesn't help that Americans aren't having children, which is objectively bad for the future of the leadership. The push for natalism, banning contraceptives, choice and etc. is points towards "you will have children no matter what and you will love it" scenario.
It's like a culmination of multiple problems that have been left rampant for the past couple of decades. Now they're trying to frantically swing the pendulum, but there's a chance that they'll end up pulling it a bit too hard so it will break.
I don't disagree with any of this and I can definitely see this in the election results. But this has been the case for a while now. The US has lagged other developed nations on many indicators for a long time. Income inequality, life expectancy, education, you name it. There was a lot of heated debates and intense feelings during the Obama era too.
But this time around something seems to have changed, where his supporters are ok with trump and team doing whatever. Be a forever president, rip up the constitution, rule by decree.
I think you're misrepresenting. His side won, and now they get to do what they want. It's always that way, no? Like, isn't that the point of an election?
You’re describing an autocracy, a dictatorship. Of course they aren’t allowed to do what they want, there’s supposed to be this thing called the rule of law, "checks and balances", separation of powers, any of that ring a bell? Plus a two-party system is a fundamentally malignant example of democracy, not to even mention the crazy amount of power the POTUS has compared to well-functioning democracies.
And this time, people don't seem to care about that anymore. Despite the right supposedly being the group that's all about the constitution and rule of law.
That's true in theory, but it's not what's happened in the recent past. A lot of the problems Trump faces are due to "rules" established by the civil service itself - often directly and unashamedly just to spite him, and stop him implementing the policies he campaigned and won on. There's no theory of government in which this is supposed to play a part.
For example, the civil service passed new rules in the dying days of the Biden administration intended to stop Trump implementing Schedule F. This didn't come from Congress or the courts. They just passed it themselves. Trump is the boss so can undo that rule with a new rule, but they passed it within a framework of yet more rules they made themselves to slow that down so - if followed - it will take months. This is purely self serving protectionism and has nothing to do with democracy or the Constitution.
There's an interesting document here [1] that goes into all the ways the civil service betrayed Trump in the first term. Betrayal is a correct and moderate term to use. They were doing things like forging documents, lying to appointees about non-existent laws, refusing to prosecute legally clear cut cases in order to propagate woke ideology (e.g. discrimination against Asian Americans), deliberately keeping their bosses in the dark, refusing direct orders to do work if it would run contra to woke ideology and many more things.
From the Trump team's perspective the rules are largely fake: when they align with what the left want they're followed to the letter, when they don't they're ignored or subverted without consequence. He played that game in his first term, and is apparently no longer willing to do so. It's hard to know what Congress will do but presumably they're aware of the fact that their own laws have created this situation to some extent (even if not the full extent). It wouldn't be surprising to see civil service reform bills appear soon.
> The cynic in me thinks that the US is going to roll over and take this fascist shake down. The optimist in me thinks that the people will rise up with a resounding NO and do something about it. Right now I'm not sure which I believe.
At this point, almost certainly the former.
1. Most Trump supporters do not think that there is a problem.
2. “Regular people” — that is, the folks who don’t track news — won’t notice any problems in their day-to-day lives until after said shakedown has been completed.
The only way large swathes of people will demand action is if they are hit hard in the wallets in an immediate and clear way (e.g., rapid price increases to one or more critical goods or services) or if a critical process (e.g., social security checks) gets disrupted. I’m not sure the current types of changes will reach that level.
Probably not news, but here are a few big ones that I remember from our conversations:
1. Family member lived in a rural area. They could see the train line that ran between two major cities. I can’t remember the exact order of events (e.g., construction), but at some point they noticed packed trains turning off the main tracks to go to a facility. Packed trains went in, and empty trains came out. At first they didn’t think anything of it… just resettlement stuff or war stuff or whatever. But then it continued. And continued. The rumors started. Everything was hush hush. Nobody dared to ask the authorities. Only later did they learn that it was a concentration camp and what actually happened there. That one kind of blew my mind… they had no idea about what was going on except vague rumors, most of which were wrong.
2. One family member had access to privileged information about the war (in the later stages of the war). One bit of info they knew was about causalities, and how certain assignments were less survivable than others. The propaganda machine made it seem like it was noble to go fight the war that would inevitably be won, but this person knew with a reasonable degree of mathematical estimation that some of the kids being sent off weren’t likely to come back. They said it was tough to look those parents, especially mothers, in the eyes when they made some comment about hoping their kid came home safely. My family member knew that these parents would likely never see their son again, and all for what was looking like a lost and/or questionable war effort that was still playing on nationalist sentiments.
3. This really isn’t that interesting, but… The propaganda late in the war made it seem like Germans in general and the troops specifically were eating well with an abundance of good food, while people who actually grew the food had to do things like use sawdust and straw as filler in their bread. They had a long list of accommodations that they told me that they made so that they didn’t feel hungry, and I don’t remember them all. The cool thing is that there were ways for the rural folks to get access to food beyond the rations. Sometimes they could sneak some extra food to the city-dwelling family members, but the folks in the cities seemed to have it tougher. They were sort of bitter about how the food situation got progressively worse as the war progressed as well as the total disconnect from reality that the propaganda was presenting.
Note that these were stories that were told to me decades ago about stuff that had happened many decades before then. I’m sure that some stories were embellished while others were muted. I’m also sure that some of the details were “lost in translation” — either via my mediocre German, their mediocre English, or the limits of language assistance that some of the bilingual folks provided.
I don’t really feel like I did these stories justice.
The old quote, "first they came for ..." was written by a Nazi sympathizer -- until he was in jail by them. It's rooted in truth how it played out to him.
"First they came for DEI and I didn't speak out, because I was not Black..."
And what of those who speak out against it because they find it belittling personally? What of those who do not want to be included as a token or talisman, but would rather participate based upon their qualifications and merits? Are we allowed to speak out and have differing opinions on DEI or will you compare us to National Socialism collaborators?
> What of those who do not want to be included as a token or talisman, but would rather participate based upon their qualifications and merits?
There were plenty of companies like Coinbase that ignored DEI initiatives and requested that employees leave "politics at the door" - and we all knew what kind of politics they meant. You could have voted with your feet.
I'm fully onboard with employees asking employees to be respectful to their colleagues regardless of gender, race, creed or color, that's just good for business.
Do white people feel like tokens because the merit of other people isn’t considered?
DEI makes sure that everyone is part of the merit process.
It’s like how white people feel like Babe Ruth is an all time great, but say Josh Gibson isn’t because he played in the all black league. But playing in the all white league doesn’t count against you at all. No one considers them any less.
> 1. Most Trump supporters do not think that there is a problem.
Talk to any conservative -- even people who are/were skeptical of Trump -- or browse any conservative-leaning social media. It's clear that the people who voted for Trump fully understood what they voted for: they wanted what's happening. Project 2025 is a good thing in the eyes of many. Maybe they think politicizing the whole executive branch is a little distasteful, but in the eyes of literally millions of Americans, it's a means to a well-justified and long-awaited end.
That's a great point as well. "They've been doing it to us for decades, what's happening now isn't any worse".
The Project 2025 document is really interesting along those lines as well. It's close to 1000 pages, but you can skim pretty much any section that isn't about the military and get the idea. Politicizing the executive branch is an explicitly stated goal, over and over. And furthermore, the push to disband the department of education is specifically an overly political, not because it's ineffective in its mission, but because it's "a one-stop shop for the woke education cartel" -- and yes that is a direct quote.
> Maybe they think politicizing the whole executive branch is a little distasteful, but in the eyes of literally millions of Americans, it's a means to a well-justified and long-awaited end.
This is a very tight and succinct summary of many conversations I’ve had with conservative family and acquaintances.
> I don't know why you're being downvoted.
The votes on my comment are going up and down like a yo-yo.
I’m pretty sure it’s because I used the term “regular people”, and I used it in quotes. I get the sense that some people are reading more into that phrase than I intended.
These "regular people" that you seem to condescendingly speak about absolutely notice it at the pump and at the grocery store. They aren't mindless robots.
If your engagement with politics, civics and public policy begins and ends with how much groceries and gas cost, then you are the perfect consumer, and something less than a thinking, rational human with agency and awareness. What is a human without curiosity or critical thinking, but a biological consuming robot? Which incidentally is what the new department of education will try to create a population of, by destroying public education.
Edit: Scratch that, they plan to abolish the department of education
> These "regular people" that you seem to condescendingly speak about
There was zero condescension in my tone or intent.
I put “regular people” in quotes simply because I think most people who do follow the news absolutely don’t realize that the vast majority of people don’t.
A simple litmus test for this is to ask random people you meet outside of your personal social and professional circles (e.g., the front desk person at the gym, a cashier at a grocery store, a rideshare driver… whatever) a simple question like “Who are our US senators?” or “What is the NIH?” I’ve done this, and the sentiment was largely “don’t know, don’t care”.
This isn’t a criticism. It’s just an observation that some issues that some folks on HN care about (e.g., details about how lesser known parts of the government function — for example, what’s happening at the NIH and NSF) just aren’t on the radar for large swathes of the population.
> absolutely notice it at the pump and at the grocery store. They aren't mindless robots.
I think we agree on this, right?
And my point is that price changes for most things won’t hit immediately.
1. There have been delays in most of the tariffs.
2. The impact of some tariffs will take longer to hit than others. Fresh food will be fast. Goods with longer shelf lives canned goods, alcohol, and prepared foods might take a while.
I just had a follow up conversation with a lady at work who had said she was voting for Trump because things like eggs were too expensive. Her comment about egg prices now was that she didn't understand why liberals were saddling Trump with egg prices, because the president can't control things like that. She literally did a complete 180 on the topic seemingly without any self awareness. I don't know how to reach people like that. I honestly don't.
Orwell wrote about this in 1984 (and also, incidentally, fought fascists on the ground during the Spanish Civil War):
"To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself -- that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink."
> How does a government become more fascist by spending less money and having less "employees"?
Fascism isn't a spending level (and because corporatism is an element of fascism and blurs the lines between public and private institutions supporting the governing ideology, the level of resources that are formally in government is particularly irrelevant to fascism.)
Also, employees are countable individual entities and not an undifferentiated mass, so fewer, not less.
The thing I find strange is that the other wealthy and powerful stand for the destruction of things that gave the US a huge competitive advantage. The average person isn't hit immediately by the destruction of science. But a far-sighted person with some power should by self-interest not want this.
And this, I think, points to the corruption of the entire political class in America with just being upshot.
They don’t need anything else though. Technological advancements helps society as a whole but if you have more money that you could ever spend who cares?
You can buy another countries tech if it benefits you or just move.
I believe that what we're not accounting for is the belief among many wealthy people that scientific research and all other intellectual labor will soon be automated by AI.
I believe that what those wealthy people aren't accounting for is the need for some class of humans to act as a translation layer between the expert AI systems and the rest of us in order to allow the discoveries and results to percolate through human institutions.
Or, rather, they may be underestimating the bottleneck that will be introduced by trying to hoard all of those results within their own circles of trust and influence.
More fucking morons. The gap with biomedical research isn't in the realm of language models, but in the amount of information that exists in biology that we don't know. I'm not sure what percentage of all the genetic data on Earth we've sequenced, but it's not much, and we still don't quite have a mechanical understand of a single cell, much less some complex multicellular organisms with proteins affecting gene expression, cell membrane receptors being reused in 50 different tissue types, molecular secretion and diffusion altering our minds functioning, and electrical currents synchronizing brain firing at a distance.
No LLM trained on PubMed will be able to suss this all out - more data is needed.
Even in pure mathematics, where I am currently a grad student and as needed a big fan of trying to get LLMs to explain stuff to me at 1 am, they just aren't that good. If it's a popular question where I could have tried math overflow, sure, it's probably just going to get some details weirdly wrong, but for subtle complex concepts, it's not making some golden age of truth and understanding.
And God help the LLMs trying to understand physics that are trained on all the BS on Youtube and the blogs.
You can see it just here - Paul Graham made money making a web store in the 1990s (which I can tell you wasn't that hard), then investing his money in a bunch of internet startup (a bit rarer, but I feel like a large percentage of the people that wanted to be rich and had 1 start-up success in the 1990s succeeded); he regards this as equivalent to inventing the standard model of particle physics or inventing the mRNA vaccines, rather than a reasonable capable person at a very lucky time to be good at programming.
Andreesson has the same blindness - he wrote the first web browsers (having not invented HTTP or the web or browsers) and parleyed that into a fortune by investing. I guess he's a skilled investor, a smart financial person, but there is no evidence that he has some special science expertise or extraordinary intelligence. From my observations, one can understand nothing about science or the physical world and do well with software and investing.
As far as "far-sighted," the history from 1980 onwards is the destruction of many things in society devoted to the long view in favor of short-term financialization.
The wealthy will just take their money and leave the country.
And for all you HN readers supporting these massive changes: you'd test changes beforehand and plan their deployment carefully if this were software. So why why do you support explicitly not doing those things when the livelihood of 300 million people depend on the economy being stable?!?
And before the inevitable derail or whatabout attempt: Don't play political games with people's lives.
And, again, everything is political, including every aspect of discussions on HN.
> So why why do you support explicitly not doing those things when the livelihood of 300 million people depend on the economy being stable?!?
Culture warriors only care about about their "side" winning. It's not an intellectual battle, but an emotional one. Rules be damned, their side is winning and dishing out retribution for, and rolling back decades of defeat on the battle for social values - civil rights, race mixing, gay marriage, LGBTQ rights, and the gall to elect a black president, BLM, #metoo, etc.
Trump said Palestinians have “no alternative” but to “permanently” leave Gaza due to the devastation left by Israel’s war on Hamas. He described Gaza as a “pure demolition site” and claimed Palestinians would “love to leave Gaza”. “I don’t know how they could want to stay,” he said.
Trump’s comments marked the first time he has publicly floated the permanent relocation of Palestinians from Gaza. The US president’s remarks in effect endorsed ethnic cleansing of the territory over the opposition of Palestinians and the neighbouring countries.
Trump is literally for completely ridding Gaza of the Palestinians so Israel can colonize it. An ACTUAL genocide.
The consensus ruling of the International Court of Justice is not hyperbole, it's a fact. Are you going to call the UN antisemitic like Benjamin Netanyahu did?
And actually, you in fact can argue that Trump has been better on the issue than Biden. Multiple news outlets have reported that it was Trump that forced the ceasefire:
Everything you find with regarding Trump is rhetoric while his actions have been much more peaceful than Biden's.
Which brings me back to my main point: it's absurd and hysterical to be claiming that Trump is uniquely fascist here. Whoever is freaking out now about him, and was not freaking out about Biden, is a fraud and should be called out as a fraud.
The US was in favor of a two state solution. The US is now saying that half of one state, by population, is no longer available. It's clear to anyone with two neurons to rub together that the other half is gone within the next four years.
> Trump is literally for completely ridding Gaza of the Palestinians so Israel can colonize it. An ACTUAL genocide.
This was the goal of the Biden administration. The difference now is that without Israel demolishing Gaza every day, the resistance has demonstrated they cannot be dislodged. Trump has no credibility. They simply cannot do it and both the U.S. and Israeli officials that enabled this are war criminals that should be prosecuted immediately.
If I were to be fair to cft the comment does really seem much different than ones which said they can't wait for people to rise up against Biden because he's a communist. I.e. just a short comment throwing charged political labels rather than discussion the actual meat under consideration.
I'm not all that big a fan of that style comment rising to the top threads like this myself, even though I likely lean very opposite of cft on political matters and what I think the impact of this will be like.
BTW, I have a written many (widely cited) papers supported by NSF grants during my PhD and postdoc. So it's not a political view, my practical opinion is that NSF needs to be cleaned up. A lot of big grant money goes to outright hopelessly useless stuff.
Remember that that is the goal. Acknowledge the data and deal with it as another obstacle.
Also, I'm wondering if multiple universities could band together to file a TRO and/or a class-action lawsuit against the government for something like estoppel.
It's also highly discriminatory and ideological. Decades of discrimination will lead people to want to come back and tear it down, you reap what you sow.
Name a specific instance where a specific American university faculty member, staff member, or student discriminated against you in an academic context.
Could you explain more about the "highly discriminatory and ideological" behavior you've seen? Is it across the board, in the sciences? For example, is a neurosurgery lab at UC Davis working on glioma research either discriminatory and ideologically driven?
I can speak to one instance of this (which was before COVID and the events surrounding George Floyd, so apply context as needed), but I took a class on networking implementations in low-budget and rural regions.
As part of the curriculum, there were distinct lessons (in this hard-science course) on feminist design, avoiding white-savior rollouts, and cultural relativism -- with much room to expound on their importance, and little room to critique.
I happened to agree with lots of the mindsets of these lessons a priori, but I was definitely acutely aware the whole course that there was an ideological bent, even in STEM.
The networking stack obviously had no viewpoint, but the course teaching it certainly did.
The fuck are you taking about? They can’t even fill the seats with the demographic bomb hitting. Dude, populations change. Therefore they have demand and supply they meet. I don’t care for the system for other reasons but discriminatory? Get fucking real.
US scientific research funding is largely driven by nepotism and favoritism. Insiders know but don't talk too much about it. They have a few options: a) just quietly stay in the system trying their best to do good work b) join the gravy train through social climbing c) quietly leave and move on with their careers.
This is pretty vague and gestural, I'd love specific examples to support your accusation. I work on NIH funded grants, and while I don't write the grants, I'm reasonably familiar with the process. I disagree with your assessment when it comes to any grant I've been involved with. I've never seen corruption like that. These grant proposals look a lot like private sector bids: here's what we want to do, and how it aligns with your mission, and here's how we plan to do it, and how much we're asking for. The process is competitive, and a committee decides on the outcome. Everything has oversight, and is very procedural. Before working on NIH grants, I worked in the private sector doing large contracts for 13 years, and the downside of the way the NIH does it is not corruption, if anything it's bureaucratic slowness and overcaution. The private sector was much shadier and prone to cronyism, and has nothing to teach the government on that count... believe it or not.
I used to work in academia and was involved in NSF and DOE grants. I’ve been in industry (IC then manager) since then.
My sense is that grant funding was less merit based than industry funding. I’m not saying it’s so corrupt that it should be completely torn down, but there’s just less accountability in academia - you can get a grant, fail to deliver on what you promised, and still get another grant after that and that can be your whole career if you know how to play the academic social game and are good at writing proposals.
If that's true, and you've offered no evidence to support that it is, canceling funding for anything tangentially associated with "DEI" doesn't seem like it actually solves any of those problems.
Please name a specific government grant that was given to a specific researcher based nepotism and favoritism.
The last time I checked when I worked at a Stanford biomedical university department that was substantially NIH-funded, there were 2 full time employee grant writers who had to supply the government grant process with a laundry list of specific data with each carefully-worded proposal because they were regularly competing with other universities to win a specific grant.
Even taking this as true, and also taking it as true that we need to build a new research funding system from a clean slate to fix it - that can still be done in parallel while leaving the existing system in place! So as usual the effort of trying to discern some higher purposes is unwarranted, and the goal of these people is to just straight up destroy our country.
Part of me thinks this is just incompetence. People put in charge to "change" things without knowing what the thing is or does and just randomly mashing buttons.
I contend that there existed too much incompetence across what the government has been funding. I’m looking forward to a ‘change’ for more competence, efficiency, innovation, accountability, etc
The process is the problem. There is no oversight and accountability for Musk and his "DOGE". That's pure poison to Democracy and to a functioning society.
Musk is neither competent nor efficient. He looks at line items and makes stuff up. He destroys a hundred useful things to destroy a bad one. Details don't matter to him. Its the same con man mentality that feeds off the works of his workforce. People who think he is a genius are gullible.
It's easy to dismiss eccentric people as conmen. But you have to consider, he has been at least partially instrumental in at least 2 impossible companies: electric cars and rockets.
Regardless of what you think of his intellectual capacity, he has a proven track record of organizing people to produce exceptional outcomes !
An inevitable characteristic of his algorithm is chaos: delete as many constraints and parts as possible. When things break, re-add those necessary parts.
- He claimed the US funded bio-weapons when they found payments for gain of function research.
- Calling payments to non-profit organizations fraudulent on a whim.
- The sweeping condemnation of what USAID was doing.
- His call for a blanket drop of regulations.
Either he knows better or he is totally lost in his sauce. Hard to say what's worse for where he is right now.
I believe, he does not care. He only cares about his conception of the world and how AI and Mars are more important than those tiny tiny human problems. Society has to serve him and his god complex. He was told to find his subsidies and tax cuts by himself. That's what he is doing.
> His manage-by-trolling technique is demonstrably effective in industry.
Or are his companies successful despite that? The impression I get is that his direct reports are exceptionally good managers and shield the companies from his dumbest moves. Except at Twitter--that's lost, what, 75% of its value? (still works as a political platform for him though)
So he fosters competence with his incompetence? Seems like it would work just as well without him except for marketing. I'm impressed with Tesla and SpaceX as a whole, but from what I've heard, he hasn't been heavily involved with day to day decisions for more than a decade. From my perspective, his role is to be a hype man that consistently over promises and under delivers.
Thank you for making an actually thoughtful comment with very reasonable points about the ways in which Musk et al are failing the taxpayers/citizens. I'd add on another one, from the article:
> On Sunday, CNN reported that DOGE personnel attempted to improperly access classified information and security systems at the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and that top USAID security officials who thwarted the attempt were subsequently put on leave.
Retaliation is very bad, especially when it comes to trying to protect national security information. As a semi-technical person running several large technical companies, even if he had zero experience with the DoD before, Musk should at the very least understand how important it is to guard your "IP".
Retaliation seems like the norm from the current administration. Calls to investigate and jail political opponents, agents that investigated the Jan 6 “protestors”, to deport the Bishop for calls for mercy.
Bullying, intimidation, arrogance. Traits that I would’ve hoped most would be against.
I feel more and more like a large portion of the American public exists at the weaponized intersection of the subbing Kruger effect and Chesterton fence. They hear so many vague platitudes about waste that it’s just taken as dicta without evidence. That somehow provides a global mandate to break anything.
If we survive this I hope that the government workforce starts to get more respect of the hard work they do on complicated problems to make fair processes and that they stop getting just blanket accused of incompetence for ideological gain.
I've worked for the government before and have personally witnessed a very large amount of waste. It's absolutely there, and it's disgusting.
Waste needs to be cut back - that is morally required to happen, because it's not waste of some private company's money, it's the waste of other peoples' money - the only problem is that you can't take the Office Space "What would you say you do here?" approach of randomly cutting people, but have to address the systemic issues that result in tens of billions of dollars lost yearly.
Some of these include:
- literal incentives to waste money in the form of "if you don't use your whole budget every year, we'll cut it next year" (which applies to large parts of the military and defense, which happen to be some of the biggest spenders)
- massive bureaucracy that takes processes that should take a day and turns them into multi-week-long nightmares
- terrible office cultures that encourage single-points-of-failure...and then gives those people lots of vacation time
- large policy sub-orgs that focus on evaluating requests against hundreds of thousands of pages of policy instead of trying to help the workers actually get things done
- terrible contracting processes that result in the government paying 2-10x more than private industry does for goods and services (which only a small increase in quality or reliability)
...and many, many more problems.
> I hope that the government workforce starts to get more respect of the hard work they do on complicated problems
You can simultaneously believe that the average government worker is competent and hard-working, and that the bureaucracy as a whole is extremely inefficient due to systemic issues.
Blanket defense of government (in)efficiency actively makes the problems worse. Focus your energy instead on adding nuance when discussing the problems and solutions.
I think this is part of the problem. There is merit in the stated goal. Most people think there is waste in government, so cleaning things up resonates.
The issue though is with the way it’s being done. Giving it the most charitable take, it’s at best reckless. No oversight, no transparency. We can only take him at his word that things are being improved. But given the various false and misleading statements that’s already come out, of the limited info being released, how can we trust him?
> The issue though is with the way it’s being done. Giving it the most charitable take, it’s at best reckless. No oversight, no transparency.
Yes, spot on, I think this is very accurate and truthful.
I'm just trying to differentiate between "the government is wasteful, and here's the careful and prudent way to make it better" and "the government isn't very wasteful and we should avoid even talking about the possibility".
I’m not sure there are many people arguing for the latter. The former yes, but more than that it’s the types of things that are being targeted.
Method aside, musk is trying to save a few million here and there on things that are “wasteful” but provide benefit to a lot of people, including Americans. Meanwhile, a multi trillion dollar tax cut that’s going mostly to the wealthy is fine and not wasteful for some reason. Jacked up prices from a handful of defense contractors is also fine.
Incompetence. Mixed in with a fair amount of malevolence. Mixed in with that rich guy thing of really hating smart people because why do they always keep telling me I'm wrong and embarrassing me in front of people if they were really so smart why aren't they rich like me huh?
Despite all the hyperbole in this thread I will try to speak plainly. It has become tiring to see how DEI has affected all aspects of academia. Hiring people based on race, awarding grants to work exclusively with members of a particular set of minorities, etc. I'm sure most people choose to close their eyes to such things and move on and focus on the actual important work but there must be unimaginable waste going on in addition to unethical race based preferences.
I'm not happy with what is going on, to be clear. But I am also not surprised that it is happening, and furthermore I don't believe there was any other alternative to this scorched earth war against DEI. If one had any reservations against DEI before, one would speak only in whispers. Now the backlash is here.
Of course there is an alternative. Through actual leadership.
It's not hard to effect change over time with a few memos (e.g. no more "pregnant people") and reviews. It may not be quick enough for certain items already in motion, but that really doesn't matter if the pipeline quickly empties out as the memos take effect.
The scorched earth policy is intended to sow fear.
Unfortunately I think the problem is much deeper than something that can be fixed with a few memos. I was just Googling for examples and found this "inclusive language guide" from University of Washington [1]:
> sanity check (why it is problematic): The phrase sanity check is ableist, and unnecessarily references mental health in code bases. It denotes that people with mental illnesses are inferior, wrong, or incorrect. Using an appropriate replacement will also clarify what is intended.
There are of course endless examples. Such sentiments are so absurd on their face, and yet they abound. The first thing "actual leadership" must do is speak the truth and acknowledge that there is a problem.
Yes. But what is happening now isn't speaking the truth, it's just causing chaos for chaos sake. Forget the DEI topic itself. From a managerial point of view, does this look like good management to you? Is this leadership you would want to work for with all the abrupt decisions that keep flip flopping? Does it instill confidence in you that they actually know how to manage anything?
University of Michigan DEI is 1100+ employees strong (!!) at a cost of over $30M/year (the equivalent of 1,800 students’ worth of tuition), and they are launching an even bigger DEI 2.0.
I am not a DJT fan at all, but stories like these are exactly what has people stark raving mad. I can’t really blame them.
While the stated goals are noble, the truth in many cases is that it is an excuse to exclude white males. And I expect downvotes, but you don’t have to look too far to see the truth.
But what’s missing is just a fundamental sense of scale. One can rightly think this is a bit ridiculous, while also understanding it’s not that big of a deal. Honestly, there are so many economic and social issues that have real importance on people’s lives, and half the country is wound up in a culture war over which words are considered polite or not.
Not just fear. Chaos, uncertainty, and cover for what I expect will be the biggest looting in history.
Even if someone thinks DEI had to go, they ought to be aware that their beliefs are being used as nothing but a smokescreen for unparalleled destruction and plunder.
Academics should keep in mind that they rely on the generosity of taxpayers to fund their research.
They don’t have an entitlement to other people’s money, and if they are perceived as wasting it or spending in discriminatorily then you should expect the public to become less willing to give it to you.
That's only true in a very myopic sense. You don't get the US economy (and all of the benefits that come from that) without science and technology and basic research funding.
~82% of all R&D funding in the US is non-Federal, and 75+% is industry. The total investment by companies on R&D is about the same as the US defense budget. Many people still think it is like the 1960s and 1970s, when US government funding of R&D was a large percentage of the total. Federal investment in R&D hasn't declined so much as industry massively increased their investment.
The Federal government found a niche in basic research for a few decades and funded the vast majority of that. Per NSF, today even basic research is <40% funded by the Federal government, again not due to a decline in Federal funding but due to vast increases in industry investment. This shift toward industry investment in basic research was not overnight, it has been a monotonic trend for decades. Over the last century, the areas where Federal research funding is critical have dwindled greatly in scope because industry spends more money and is willing to take more risks.
One of the more interesting stories here is why and how this change happened in the US, to the point where the vast majority of R&D is funded by industry even in areas historically dominated by Federal government funding.
It's worth distinguishing between R&D and science. In my experience in industry, R&D is very focused on product development. Sometimes on a little longer time horizon than engineering, but it's research to solve some problem that the company has. Sometimes that problem is also more broadly useful towards advancing human knowledge and understanding, but often it's not. At my last company, the R&D department focused entirely on 1) building algorithms for a specific product (nothing that advanced the state of the art, just applying well-established techniques to the company's particular hardware); and 2) helping market the company's products by letting them claim that they were clinically-proven. Would they ever publish anything that showed a result that wouldn't serve the company's interests? Of course not. Yes, I know there are some industrial labs that do more basic research, but I've never worked at one.
Also, industry isn't really doing that much to train the next generation of scientists.
We are at the tail end of a 50 year bull run powered by declining interest rates. Maybe ZIRP is the new normal and private industry R&D investment stays high, but I don't think we should gamble our status as an economic, scientific, and technological powerhouse on that and gut our government financed R&D programs.
Further more, my wife works in biotech so I have seen first hand the compromises one has to make to secure private funding. They care about things like market size and revenue potential when making these investments, which means you end up with most of the money flowing towards diseases that largely affect rich people and solutions that are either expensive or recurring. And lets also not forget that almost all of these companies are working off of or spinning out from research programs that were funded by the government. I have yet to meet a single company where that wasn't the case.
You are speaking on an intellectual level. The comment you replied to is speaking on a practical, political level. If voters do not like what is going on in universities, they will defund them. This is a political reality.
Voters are overwhelmingly in favor of funding US science. They are overwhelmingly in favor funding US international aid. The public thinks we spend way more on these than we do.
The idea that the blatantly illegal actions by the current administration reflect public will simply isn't based in any kind of reality- just calling it out as a lie.
This is simply a delusion detached from reality. I am a white man in STEM academia. I've never been discriminated against once. None of my white male colleagues have either. They are all successful in academia. And my colleagues who aren't white men are in no way inferior. Just let us vote and ask if we feel discriminated against or oppressed because of DEI. We'll vote no.
It's simply a delusion that DEI is some unmeritocratic disaster. The reality is academia has its pick of top talent regardless of race or gender. I don't know any scientists who buy into this delusion irl. Diversity is a small factor in hiring because the field is already predominantly white men and it's no harder to pick top star talent when you diversify.
Simply insane that you are promoting the destruction of US science, US foreign aid, and so much of the good stuff the US government does, all in the name of a deeply delusional witch hunt.
It's an ideological disaster. Viewing this through a white v/s black lens is itself too simplistic. Look at the Harvard affirmative action lawsuit. Asians are in fact and provably being discriminated against. This is also the case in immigration policy. DEI/affirmative action policies were created by the executive and are being undone by the executive.
>Just let us vote and ask if we feel discriminated against or oppressed because of DEI.
A majority of the electorate did vote for ending this.
Unethical race-based preferences is what those policies have been trying to fix. Not sure you’re aware of this, but academia used to be basically off-limits to anyone not white and male.
My guy you aren't getting it. You were lied to. You bought it. You are just plain wrong and openly propagating a lie as fact and you seem to be doubling down.
From psychology department at University of Washington [1]:
> I advise deleting the statement below as it shows that URM [underrepresented minority] applications were singled out and evaluated differently than non-URM applications (which is not allowed as [redacted] noted)
> At a faculty meeting, someone whose name is redacted “informed faculty that the Hiring Committee had three outstanding candidates and so they used DEI to distinguish and select a first offer"
Nobody is saying it's not happening but the notion that it's systemic -- as the opposite is -- is categorically a lie and, again, as you've been told a few times in this thread, DEI's goal is to prevent even this scenario from happening as its intended goal is to foster merit-only hiring.
My most charitable reading of your comment is that the DEI policies were simply grossly misunderstood by the department in this case. Therefore, it would seem that an unintended consequence of DEI policies has been to foster the scenarios it was designed to prevent.
It did, but how long ago was that the case? I'm not aware that academia was off-limits to anyone non-white and male right before DEI training became the norm.
"A 2021 American Enterprise Institute survey of academic job postings found that 19% required DEI statements, and elite institutions were more likely to require them."
"Speech First, a group advocating for First Amendment rights on US campuses, released an investigation on Thursday that found 165 of 248 selected institutions — from American University to Williams College — mandate DEI-related classes to meet general education requirements."
DEI is a good idea that has led to a catastrophic backlash.
Imagine a world where us intellectual types hadn’t given the right this kind of talking point on a silver platter. Election might have gone differently.
I like to imagine a world where the institutions that were supposed to protect us had done their jobs, and enforced the gentleman’s agreement we had, that worked so well these past 50 years.
I largely agree but I doubt other issues would be such massive free wins for Republicans. The Republican base has become rabid over DEI and trans issues and it has been really obvious for a while now that it was going to be a massive problem for Democrats. Sadly these issues have become more divisive than even gun control.
Should one be required to submit a statement proving their past support of DEI as part of the hiring process in academia? What should people who disagree with such efforts put in this statement?
> ...Faculty Diversity Action Plan, a special funding program for diversity-focused faculty hiring, which ran until 2023, when it was restructured and renamed. Created in 2020, the program played a significant role in dictating whom the university hired. In a 2022 faculty meeting, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences was asked how many professors were hired through the program since it began. He estimated that around 90% were either hired through the program or were spousal hires.
I have written a version of this twice and deleted but just can't let this statement stand unopposed. This is, almost inherently at this point, a rant and my last contribution to this thread.
This simply is not the case, I know it is something that you and many others believe is that case but you are being lied to by actual racists. I say that as a white man working in STEM academia. Academia had a long history and tradition of NOT doing meritocracy, but of claiming meritocracy and using bad markers of meritocracy to prove it. The 'DEI work' that people are so concerned about is about trying to make merit based decision making actually merit based. You think that is based on giving some preference, but it isn't - its based on acknowledging and working to eliminate actual prejudice. Its about hiring the best people instead of the person who's advisor is friends with our search chair.
I'll give a concrete example: I ran a hiring search for three faculty members. We did a blind search. The hiring committee did not know the gender, race, ethnicity, or even institutional affiliation of any candidate. The candidates were ranked, the top invited for phone interviews, and then ranked again during the interviews with everyone blind to the first set of rankings. We repeated this for a smalled group of in person interviews The order of the rankings at all three phases matched. More relevant, we interviewed and hired the most diverse crop of faculty we have ever hired. Simply because of the appearance who we hired, two different candidates who were did not received interviews emailed me and my department chair to decry that we had used 'DEI' in our BLIND hiring process. One threatened a lawsuit. We blinded it to race, to gender, to all markers of 'diversity', but the gender and race of who we hired was all the proof that person needed they were less qualified than him.
In other cases, this 'stuff' protects against asshole colleagues and bad science. (1) Diversity statements help us avoid getting sued by students and employees. The statements that wax philosophic about inclusion, that quote MLK, the ones people use to label this as some ideological test, SUCK to read and get applications ignored because they lack serious thought about being a colleague. The good ones, which get noticed, are about how people work effectively with other people, and how they make an effort to understand people as part of working with them. The context, whether its about being Green, Left-handed, or Neurodivergent tell us whether this person has thought about being a mentor to people unlike them, has a capacity to empathize with a student, or is going to be a self-righteous asshole that is going to make us hate faculty meetings even more. They help us know if their grad students are going to be in tears in the chairs office or the parents of an undergrad are calling the dean. (2) They actually tell us a lot about doing good science and getting grants. Theres a long history in medicine of fucking up because of who is in our participant pool. NIH now makes you articulate about how you will not do bad science through lazy recruitment[2]. We've asked questions about this requirement of candidates during interviews. The answers are fun and telling - using coded language to say you won't recruit Black people because they are 'less reliable' is just evidence you don't get it, not that you are some purist doing important work.
That is the DEI you are being propagandized to be against - what it actually is not what you are told it is. It is not hyperbole and you are tired by design - because you are a victim of propaganda. The nonsense narrative that is being pushed is, without concern for the truth, entirely grounded in the assertion that certain groups are unqualified to do intellectual work (c.f.[3]). It is (by design) meant to establish that the mere appearance of a Black Women or a gay person on a faculty is only because they are unqualified. It is meant to exclude people who have always been excluded. It is not about pushing back on (nonexistant) out of control efforts to include them. What is changing is efforts to counteract the actual, long established, clearly evidenced, bias in favor of certain groups of candidates. That is not some ideological project to eliminate people like me because I'm not a minority, that is the thing you want.
Thank you for writing this- it aligns perfectly with what my own experience, as a white male in academia, has been with these issues.
When I talk to people outside academia about “DEI”, it’s clear to me that whatever they think that term means, it has no relationship to anything I’ve ever seen in my career (involving faculty searches, recruitment of students and staff, education, involvement in clinical trial design and recruitment, etc.).
> You think that [it] is based on giving some preference, but it isn't - its based on acknowledging and working to eliminate actual prejudice.
I would like to understand your point here. I agree with you that the stated justification for DEI policies is based on "acknowledging and working to eliminate actual prejudice". I also believe that they explicitly give preference to certain groups of people over others. So what is the point here? Because they are based on a noble goal, we should accept them? And if, instead, they were based on another nefarious purpose, they would not be acceptable?
A policy may arise from various motivations, but eventually it must be evaluated on its own merits. Of course, the same policy may be implemented in various ways, toward a nefarious purpose or to a noble purpose. You sound like you genuinely care about this issue and I appreciate that when you hire people you consider they may contribute to the community in your department, how well they will mentor students, and so on. Those are all important things and I am happy you interpret DEI that way, but unfortunately that is not how they are often interpreted.
From the journalism department at UC [1]:
> Our commitment, should we be successful with this application, is to hire someone from the BIPOC community
From the geography department at UC [1]:
> Our aim is specifically to hire a Black, Indigenous, or Latinx faculty member
From ethnic studies at UC [1]:
> We have an urgent and qualified need for BIPOC femme/women of color faculty in an Africana Studies focus who will contribute to the social science division thematic cluster hire in racism and racial inequality.
From psychology dept. at U Washington [2]:
> I advise deleting the statement below as it shows that URM [underrepresented minority] applications were singled out and evaluated differently than non-URM applications (which is not allowed as [redacted] noted)
> At a faculty meeting, someone whose name is redacted “informed faculty that the Hiring Committee had three outstanding candidates and so they used DEI to distinguish and select a first offer"
> Before finalists were narrowed to three, five finalists were invited to virtual visits, with the schedules including meetings with the Women Faculty and Faculty of Color groups. But a member of the latter group expressed opposition to meeting the white candidates. “As a person who has been on both sides of the table for these meetings, I have really appreciated them,” the unnamed person wrote in an email. “Buuut, when the candidate is White, it is just awkward. The last meeting was uncomfortable, and I would go as far as burdensome for me. Can we change the policy to not do these going forward with White faculty?”
If you believe that the sentiments expressed above are acceptable in a professional, academic setting, then we have totally different ethical values.
> I also believe that they explicitly give preference to certain groups of people over others. So what is the point here?
You give the example of the journalism, geography, and ethnic studies departments specifically seeking minority viewpoints.
FWiW I don't think the DEI corporate and other programs in the USofA have been particularly well executed, they appear (from afar) to be more performative than substantive, however ...
The three examples you gave should more or less answer your own question for you.
Journalism, good reporting, brings deep informed insights from the ground. That's not going to happen when reporting on foreign countries and disadvantaged communities if all the reporters are (say) from a WASP background and perspective.
Geography isn't just maps, there are strong elements of people's relations with land that are part of that domain .. again a breadth of viewpoints gives richer coverage.
Ethnic studies. .. I mean does this really need a comment as to why diverse viewpoints deliver broader outcomes?
If the sentiments expressed in those internal deliberations seem perfectly normal to you, we really do have irreconcilable moral and ethical viewpoints.
> breadth of viewpoints gives richer coverage
Breadth of viewpoint has nothing intrinsically to do with the color of one's skin.
> Journalism, good reporting, brings deep informed insights from the ground. That's not going to happen when reporting on foreign countries and disadvantaged communities if all the reporters are (say) from a WASP background and perspective.
Again, the quality of a reporter and their work has nothing to do intrinsically with the color of their skin.
> If the sentiments expressed in those internal deliberations seem perfectly normal to you
I didn't say that. Perhaps you might like to re-read. We may have different backgrounds in parsing English.
> Breadth of viewpoint has nothing intrinsically to do with the color of one's skin.
Again, I didn't say that.
The point of these fat fingered US attempts to fix a problem is to ... fix a problem.
The problem is that the starting point in reporting, ethinic studies, and geography was that the fields were dominated by an unrepresentative minority; white faces with vanilla backgrounds being the voices of authority on subjects they had no experience of.
You mixed up UC with CU. Also, the hiring practices described in these op-eds are illegal, whether DEI exists or not. If the allegations are true, the correct action would be to file a lawsuit, not to do the stupidity we're now seeing.
> The nonsense narrative that is being pushed is, without concern for the truth, entirely grounded in the assertion that certain groups are unqualified to do intellectual work (c.f.[3]).
Also, I would like to say, I agree with you! Such a sentiment is deplorable and must be condemned. However, it does not follow that academic departments should use race or sexuality or gender as a factor when hiring professors.
In fact, when you are hiring professors on the tenure track, I am sure the first ten or even twenty professors (at least!) are all eminently qualified. Of course, there is a degree of randomness in any selection process. But as the sources in my sibling comment suggest, DEI factors are being used explicitly to distinguish and rank people. That I believe is unacceptable.
Watching the tech community waltz into DC and pretend that they know how all the levers of government work is pathetic. Are there inefficiencies? Sure. Are there places to improve? Of course. But pretending that they can understand the intricacies of literally decades of institutional knowledge and deep connections across the globe in the course of a single weekend is asinine.
We need to do better. The US government isn't Twitter. Breaking things simply because you have the power is the opposite of leadership, it's nihilism.
Note this isn't representative of the tech industry in general.
When I worked for Google I visited NIH, sat on study groups, and helped advise program managers how to move more compute to the cloud. Like many other techies in SV I have a PhD in a quantitative science and understand how NIH works. My efforts were entirely designed to help update the establishment, not tear it down, and that's true for the wide swath of my coworkers I encountered.
The folks who are doing this are a subset of the tech community, who do not represent the larger community.
There is a real schism in the SV elite community between the "tech right" and Google. You could argue that OpenAI was founded by Sam Altman and Elon Musk to deny Google exclusive access to the GenAI.
"Been thinking a lot about whether it's possible to stop humanity from developing AI. I think the answer is almost definitely not. If it's going to happen anyway, it seems like it would be good for someone other than Google to do it first."
"OpenAI is on a path of certain failure relative to Google. There obviously needs to be immediate and dramatic action or everyone except for Google will be consigned to irrelevance."
Google has always been the company that looms over whatever next-gen hyped things the VC crowd can invest in (or whatever field Elon can pretend to be far ahead in). I even think it being perceived as so liberal has moved these people to the right instead of "libertarian" as they used to claim so they can hit it politically
> Note this isn't representative of the tech industry in general.
I'm not convinced. In the past half decade or so this industry has veered hard toward outright fraud and grift. I see this trend all over--adtech, cryptocoins, "AI", security... These days I assume technologists are frauds until they prove otherwise. It's a blunt instrument, but it often works well.
I'm sorry, but your defense for the "not all techies" argument is that you flew to NIH and told them how to stop investing in their own infrastructure and funnel tax dollars to private hosting rentals instead? I cannot wrap my head around this as a defense of anything. Seems like the current crew is just cutting out the middleman.
Yeah it's a more involved discussion than we could really have in a form like this but I truly believe that the cloud is a better solution than self-investment and infrastructure when it comes to universities. I spent plenty of time working with closet clusters and grad students is admins when I was at the University and I just don't think it's a good investment of time or money.
When I advise the NIH to do was to do a large bulk group buy on behalf of many thousands of scientists that use the scale of the NIH to negotiate in extremely large concession. My experience with Amazon is that you can basically get them down about 50% just by asking.
I work for a well-funded company now and we use the cloud and we have on-prem infrastructure. The on-prem infrastructure is extremely hard to change sometimes just asking for a GPU will take 6 months or more. Storage is always highly limited and slow. Let the cloud hyperscalers do what they're good at and focus on doing the science
It may be a bad assumption to think HN comments reflect the broader tech community's opinion on what is happening in the US government right now. That being said, there are far too many commenters that seem to be okay with what's happening, especially when it comes to DoE and Musk taking over the treasury.
There just seems to be an overall lack of respect for how government works, the broader machine and bureaucracy that is supposed to protect from unilateral decisions made by a single entity. Government is not, and should not, be run like a tech startup. Going fast and breaking things isn't a recipe for stability or reliability in both government and software. History has tried kings and dictators and, well, they never turn out great for the general population. Democracy is slow and sucks sometimes, but it also has a ton of perks that we seem all too quick to dismiss and throw away.
Stop playing along with this farce. Their goal is not to improve anything or reduce waste, it's to destroy the apparatus of governance entirely, privatize everything, and rule over a destitute, terrified populace as unto gilded age kings lording over fiefdoms.
In that respect it is astonishingly successful by every measure. Musk got his global political shift and becoming co-president of the US for a causal $40 billion.
What's the name for that principle/rule where someone blithely removes rules or regulations without any context for them being there in the first place? It's on the tip of my tounge. I feel like we're seeing that a lot in the US Federal govt at the moment.
Technologists and engineers can be so damn arrogant. Learn some humility. You probably aren't that smart or valuable and people like you aren't the only people adding value to society.
Small nit, but these folks 100% can not be described as the "tech community". They're owners of big tech monopolies, their VC backers, and our new oligarchs. Tech community, however, they are not.
> In March 2014, Tunney petitioned the US government on We the People to hold a referendum asking for support to retire all government employees with full pensions, transfer administrative authority to the technology industry, and appoint the executive chairman of Google Eric Schmidt as CEO of America.
DOGE is staffed precisely by the tech elite. Like 20 year old grads who are elite programmers winning competitions, that type.
Are they not part of the tech community now? You highly overestimate the political homogeneity of the tech community, because opposing voices were previously so shut down. You would be surprised by what your co-workers are thinking deep down.
That feels like a No True Scotsman argument after decades of chasing VC approval, prestigious jobs at those huge companies, and adopting their practices and software. I don’t like the oligarchy either but it’s a huge part of the tech world under any definition I can come up with. We’re having this conversation on a board run by one of the VC firms with partners who are openly supportive of what’s going on, after all - is this not part of the tech community?
Honestly fair enough. Pay package over principles does pretty well describe the policy of far too many of the colleagues I've worked with over the years.
Sure, but there’s a lot of shared culture even though they have distinct subgroups. I don’t think the guys in the news wouldn’t be welcomed at most startups.
Honestly, this is exactly how Silicon Valley operates. Uber broke the laws until they could fix the laws (in their favor). AirBnB did the exact same thing. Meta knew their platform was causing damage to children and teenagers, and they gave zero fucks.
Turncoat Zuck's Meta had posters on the wall in every building: a picture of a rocking horse with the caption: "Not all motion is progress."
The fourth estates' and the masses' blind faith in and compliance to self-righteous, egotistical billionaires, one of whom may be a Nazi, is what is both disappointing and frightening.
As Sir Ian Jacob said, the Allies won World War II because "our German scientists were better than their German scientists." Brain drain is a real problem for fascist countries.
Yep. Destruction of systems (orgs, ...) that take care of us.
Meanwhile, TikTok (et al) tells us to talk about ourselves ... the current focus of attention of the Fifth most popular social network of the citizens of the United States. [1] [2]
Q: how could we have avoided this pathetic crawl into encouraging stupidity?
(Feeling sad, thinking, 'Look at our Works, and cry.')
So many brilliant researchers in the US are funded by NSF grants. Even beyond public research, just the private sector benefits just from the training (and associated freedom from not having to chase money and TA) that NSF fellows get is immense.
Injecting dumb politics and refusing grants just because people put the words "biases" in their application is a great way to appeal to Republicans's undereducated voters (see https://www.commerce.senate.gov/services/files/4BD2D522-2092... for an example of their idiotic rhetoric) but also a crazy gamble on the US's ability to be a superpower in two decades.
Just look at what happened in France when right-wing governments started defunding research: a slow but massive brain drain of the best minds. What does the current administration think will happen to our economy when they start burning future brains when they're at the seed stage?
No matter what happens in the next few years, the damage is done. It is now known that the next administration could kill your apolitical career with the stroke of the pen if your ideas vaguely support the wrong team.
If you have talent, why deal with the (frequently) middling pay and the existential risk that could follow every election?
So you don't think being forced to include a statement on diversity in every single grant request reviewed by the NIH was "injecting dumb politics" but you do think that being forced to NOT include a statement on diversity in every single grant request is?
You call it "injecting dumb politics," but I call it "explaining why I shouldn't believe you'll just hire your buddies." It's an attempt to prevent the grift everyone claims is in research, but it's been politicized by bad-faith non-participants.
It's very clear once you realize the people perpetrating this don't care one whit for the "economy" writ large, only their personal wealth and that of their cronies. The dumber, meaner and more desperate the population is, the easier the time they think they'll have ruling over them, as unto kings in this new gilded age.
Of course, they forget what came after the gilded age. It's raining stockbrokers - err, oligarchs!
Ok, so all payments are paused while funding is reviewed? Allowance for emergency payments to keep the lights on?
This is taxpayers money and these agencies report to the President under the executive power. A shocker that government agencies might need account for spending.
And I’m sorry “its not a lot of money” doesn’t fly when all the “its not a lot of money” is $8 trillion dollars. The federal deficit will never get smaller if nobody looks at the “its not a lot of money” line items.
> Ok, so all payments are paused while funding is reviewed? ... This is taxpayers money ... A shocker that government agencies might need account for spending.
Reviewed for what?
Reviewed for whether the spending was authorized by Congress? If Musk finds that money is being spent in ways that are not authorized by Congress, and cuts that spending, great.
Reviewed for whether the money is being used efficiently to accomplish the goals set by Congress? Again, if Musk finds ways to stretch the same amount of money to accomplish more, that's great. For example, if Musk makes USAID more efficient so it delivers more aid for the same amount of money, that would be wonderful.
Or "reviewed" for whether Trump/Musk agree with them? It's illegal for the President to unilaterally cut programs just because he doesn't like them.
The idea that the President, the head of the Executive branch, has zero power over Executive branch spending down to the agency level, because Congress said X must be spent and dammit they must spend it, makes no sense.
By that logic and taken to an extreme, Congress could pass a budget law (overriding the executive’s veto) to set executive spending for specific agencies to only be spent on computers, say the FBI, and the executive is powerless to Congresses control over the executive function to carry out the laws that the Congress has passed?
So clearly the intention is one of checks and balances, for example the President can’t spend money Congress does appropriate but also has some power over how that money is spent as such to exercise the power of the Executive.
So let’s see what the Constituion says as per Congress.gov!
“The constitutional dimensions of impoundment disputes have been confined to the political branches. The Supreme Court has not directly considered the extent of the President’s constitutional authority, if any, to impound funds.16 However, a case decided in 1838, United States v. Kendall,17 has been cited as standing for the proposition that the President may not direct the withholding of certain appropriations that, by their terms, mandate spending.18”
Congress quite literally has the power to pass laws. According to the Constitution, the President "shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed"; the President's oath of office requires that he execute the laws set by Congress. So for example, if Congress were to pass a silly law saying "the FBI shall spend exactly $X on computers, down to the cent", then the President would be required to make sure the FBI spent exactly $X on computers, down to the cent. The President has many powers, but "deciding not to execute the laws passed by Congress" is not one of them.
Quoting from the page you linked:
> Impoundments usually proceeded on the view that an appropriation sets a ceiling on spending for a particular purpose but typically did not mandate that all such sums be spent. According to this view, if that purpose could be accomplished by spending less than the appropriation’s total amount, there would be no impediment in law to realizing savings. Impoundments were also justified on the ground that a statute, other than the appropriation itself, authorized the withholding.
In other words, if Congress appropriates $X for the FBI to buy computers, then Congress didn't necessarily mean "the FBI shall spend exactly $X on computers, down to the cent". It could be interpreted to mean "the FBI may spend up to $X on computers". But Congress has clarified this ambiguity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Budget_and_Impou...
> the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 specifies that the president may request that Congress rescind appropriated funds. If both the Senate and the House of Representatives have not approved a rescission proposal (by passing legislation) within forty-five days of continuous session, any funds being withheld must be made available for obligation.
In other words, if Congress appropriates $X for the FBI to buy computers, but the President thinks $X is excessive, then the President may ask Congress for permission to spend less than $X. If Congress doesn't grant the permission within 45 days, then the President must go ahead and spend the full $X. Again, Congress literally has the power to set the laws, and the President is required by his oath of office to execute those laws.
> President Richard Nixon was of the view that the administration was not obligated to disburse all funds allocated by Congress to states seeking federal monetary assistance under the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972 and ordered the impoundment of substantial amounts of environmental protection funds for a program he vetoed, and which had been overridden by Congress.
That case seems directly analogous to what Musk is currently trying to do. Nixon lost that case in the Supreme Court.
Even if the Supreme Court did rule that the President had impoundment powers, it would probably be on the condition that "[the purpose of the law] could be accomplished by spending less than the appropriation’s total amount" (quoting from the page you linked). For example, the President would still be required to buy sufficient computers for the FBI, even if he spent less than $X on them. The President still wouldn't be able to just unilaterally decide "no, the FBI doesn't need computers, this is a waste of money".
So, I think it's already quite clear that Trump/Musk do not have the constitutional authority to just start cutting government programs. Do you agree? If not, which part do you want further clarity on?
No, it’s not “quite clear” as the link provided described.
Any impoundment authority and how it has been curtailed is purely a political solution, not a constitutional one.
If the Democrats think they are right they can go to the Supreme Court to force him to spend money with no say in the matter.
And while the President is mandated to execute the law you’re forgetting how much of the government is not described in law. USAID “to further the mission of the US in foreign countries” would give the President a lot of latitude in how that money is spent. A lot.
Then layer on the immense agency structure written all through “interpretation” of the law that the agencies no longer can rely on Chevron to defend and things get really interesting.
And while the Supreme Court did rule on Empoundment law curtailing Nixon, it did not rule specifically on the constitutionality of it and a lot has changed on the Supreme Court since Nixon.
So please don’t respond with “doesnt have the constitutional authority” when that is most definitely not the case.
Do you hear that sucking sound? It's biggest brain drain you've ever seen. It already been happening, I know several great scientists who've already left, this BS just kicked it into high gear.
Some ham-fisted troglodytes didn't know what they're doing or the side-effects of their actions (like people dying or intellectual property leaving), but they want credit and approval for "owning the libs" and "efficiency" by smashing things they don't understand and calling it "progress".
There seems to be a lot of negativity from the HN crowd about this. But, the reality is that your fellow Americans voted for this. If you don'y like it, you're going to have to convince people that it's a bad idea. Getting worked up about Trump or Musk or SV bros isn't getting us anywhere.
> If you don'y like it, you're going to have to convince people that it's a bad idea.
You can't convince people whose attention bandwidth is entirely consumed by the social media engagement algorithms controlled by the very people doing this.
I'm afraid this might be a fait accompli for democratic institutions. The chance to stop this was 10 years ago, by breaking up concentrated media ownership and regulating social media. We didn't, and it's too late.
Hard to say what people voted for. Any winning candidate's coalition is going to be not unified on lots of issues, but Trump's especially. Project 2025 and many of its specific policies pulled out separately all polled like total garbage, so Trump simply lied and said he'd never heard of it and wasn't doing it, and the media dutifully reported the denial. So what did the people who voted for him vote for?
His dizzying array of contradictory statements, lies, and flip-flops have always made him someone where people, his supporters in particular, see the Trump they want to see. Isolationist or imperialist, the man who would ban TikTok or its savior, pro/anti vaccine, really pick just about anything.
There was a popular sentiment in his first term that Trump seemed to believe whoever had talked to him last on any issue, but he manages to have that same effect on other people, too.
Going back to the concept of the will of the voters, Trump won Muslim-heavy Dearborn, MI on the back of people voting to protest Biden/Harris's approach to Gaza. He just announced side-by-side with Netanyahu that he wants to totally depopulate Gaza and have the US take it over and rebuild it as a resort, and throw in the West Bank too while you're at it. Is that what those people voted for?
First, Trump voters didn't exactly vote for this, at least not many. Identify politics and owning the libs, sure, but I'd say that a minority of his voters wanted to totally dismantle the administrative state - or if they thought that sounded good, they may not have been aware the repercussions of that on their lives.
Second, we all have a right to bitch about what seems like a new America being formed. If things go as badly as many of us seem to think, well it doesn't really matter if we convince trump voters they were wrong, because democracy will be have evaporated anyway. Our society has been almost molded for this moment: Americans are more isolated and alienated from each other than ever. The internet today is a fundamentally difficult place to organize any sort of coherent protest when the places people post are algorithmically controlled, manipulated by bots, and moderated.
We are broken as a society. What a waste was all that 20th century plundering and bloodshed and brilliance and effort. I would imagine that even for someone looking at the teetering American Empire with satisfaction, there is a bit of emptiness in just how stupid and pathetic this all is.
Well voters have two-four years to vote this out of office if they don't like the results. History says the Republicans will likely fail to keep power, and it will be the Democrats turn again to set the ship right, or whatever.
US loss, Europe's win. Same thing with the trade wars and other Trumpian policies. Short term gains to look strong but long term just degrades US soft power and decades of ally building.
US screws up and Europe gains some points is a best case scenario. I don't mean to sound like a patriot, but the US is a big deal and it's currently administered by unsound forces.
The idea is to destroy every part of the American federal government so that techno fiefdoms can be ruled by oligarchs. It's pretty obvious. Not sure if we can stop it!
In this particular case, the goal is to privatize science entirely.
What i've learned in the last week is that if an unelected bureaucrat thinks it will hurt the Trump administration to follow their order through a manner of malicious compliance, then they will. But if they don't, then they'll ignore the order and pretend they're defending the constitution.
a serious audit of the endless money printing of the federal government is well overdue
You don't need some genius brain auditing to know that 99% of the money goes to social security, defense spending, medicare, medicaid, and interest on debt.
The stuff DOGE is playing with is such a tiny percentage it won't move the needle.
Isn't the elephant in the room here the massive overspending on the US military which Trump and Elon and Satya and Bezos and Altman don't seem to care about?
His voters would be very upset if a single dollar was cut from the military budget. It's the same crowd and mindset that was all in on the Iraq War. The second amendment is the only amendment and anything seen as weakening the country in terms of actual strength would result in windows being smashed again.
But cutting money from weak nerds? Destroying education? That's fine. Nobody needs it.
I got to hand it to Elon Musk, I was in the “nothing ever happens” camp and he completely, absolutely proved me wrong. The Great men theory of history posits that a lot of History happens due to the action of a few great men. Great has a baggage of positive connotation, I prefer calling it the “Important People of History” theory (to also be gender neutral). It posits that if Hitler didn’t exist, Germany wouldn’t go down the path it did, if Gandhi didn’t exist, India wouldn’t go down the path it did. It is an alternative to the more modern view, that tries to find sociological, economic and environmental reasons for Historic Change. I leaned towards the Great Men View but was not fully convinced by it. Looking at Elon Musk, leads me to believe that this theory is true.
If Elon did not exist/ tie himself to Trump, I don’t think Trump could have done even 10% of the dismantling of the Administrative State that Elon has done. Elon has a certain will to power, flagrantly breaks all norms but advertises it on Twitter for his Twitter supporters, an insane sense of urgency to move fast, an ability to attract talented 20 yr olds to join him for “low pay”, and “100 hr weeks” that gets stuff done. The Trump ecosystem was mostly professional grifter (and crypto scammers), polemicists who only talked the talk, and a small set of true believers who never had a private sector job in their life. If it was just them, I might have been right in the “Nothing Ever Happens” camp. Elon and his ecosystem has given them fangs. They still probably can direct Elon, to a limit, at some things like H1b immigration they will probably concede to Elon but in return they will actually remake the government in their image. Elon is turning out to be one of the “Important People in History”.
The proper response to scientific criticism is to archive what came before. This is a heavy handed attempt to remove from view science they don't agree with. This is not a 'removal of DEI from government' this is the attempted censorship they've said themselves they're doing away with.
Are you asking about the Nazis in Germany? The first major book burning was in Berlin at the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Research) where they burned thousands of books containing information about, among other things, LGBT people.
Or are you asking about the current situation? They’re trying to burn all of it —- any research papers funded by the NSF or NIH.
> I'm okay with the CDC being torn down. They lied and lost all trust.
Unfortunately, advanced technological based civilization is not "ok" with destroying the collective and knowledge based activities of scientific research. One can't advance far if you stop science when it makes mistakes - the advantage of science is it finds and fixes the mistakes. This, and the federal funding of research, is why the collective knowledge of humanity is doubling ever decade or so.
The only collective and knowledge based activities of scientific research that the people have access to is sci-hub, who have done more to advance scientific understanding for humanity than most government institutions have in decades
Except for people that live near research libraries, which is a lot of people. I use sci-hub and don't like Springer, but it's hard to see how most government [research] institutions haven't advanced our knowledge in decades. That just seems like another statement which is not so. (BTW, when you go to math conventions, at least, there are multiple open access tables in the exhibit hall, to reduce the cost of the free sharing of knowledge that is so essential).
Oh, so you're the guy who thinks ivermectin is just horse paste, huh? Let me guess, you also believe hypochlorous acid is just for swimming pools. Newsflash, champ: hypochlorous acid is used in wound care, and ivermectin? Oh, that's just a Nobel Prize-winning medicine for humans. But hey, keep mocking people for exploring off-label treatments while you're over here suggesting we study injecting bleach. Next thing you know, you'll be nominated for a Darwin Award. Stay classy, and maybe stick to your day job—clearly, medical research isn't your forte.
This is an extremely odd question. Are you not familiar with the NSF or NIH?
> I'm okay with the CDC being torn down. They lied and lost all trust.
You are a danger to public health.
> As for grants they are paused. Those organizations didn't earn it.
Did USAID also not earn the right to get funding to provide lifesaving drugs so that babies don’t contract HIV? Who decided that they didn’t “earn it”?
> I also understand there's a 8 month severance for voluntary vacating. This is very generous even for a tyrant.
You don’t understand correctly — the offer was for 8 months of work, from home. Then they would be separated in September. It’s also not actually clear that OPM has the legal authority to make this offer, so anyone accepting it may not actually get what they signed up for.
You have no evidence to back any of this up. You're just trying to flood the zone with bullshit in order to smoke screen the destruction of our liberal society. And I mean liberal in the classic sense of holding the truth paramount in science, law and society.
They didn't forget about COVID. They just want to cover their ears and pretend there's nothing to see there but it was absolutely insane and there has been no justice with the damage against humanity perpetrated by governments, media and many institutions including the NIH.
The more that surfaces and the more people who "just obeyed orders for the COVID/lockdown anti constitutional regime" the better.
1. I don't think allocating funds to reproduce research would be worth the cost of displacing other new research. The current way of discovering that research is wrong by trying to build on it isn't perfect either, but it is still more efficient than systematically reproducing a lot of research. In my experience, scientific reproducibility has gotten substantially better in recent years- the standard of evidence, and the quality and correctness of statistical analyses are both much higher than they used to be.
2. Experts don't consider that human research contributed to COVID because it is completely implausible to anyone that understands virology research. Moreover, current safety standards for doing research on infectious human diseases in BSL level 3 and 4 labs are incredibly rigorous- and although they carry non-zero risk, what we learn from this research more than outweighs it by improving our ability to treat and prevent disease.
"Turns out that when you taint good programs like disease monitoring by putting them in a bag with all the color revolution funding and censorship and shaking it really hard, people want to burn the shit bag instead of picking out the good bits."
- https://x.com/MrKapitalist/status/1886670873618473325
Everything's a conspiracy when you don't know how anything works. The MCC was a extremely well publicized program to build a HVDC line from the hydro dams in Nepal to the Indian border..
Yes, many people are impulsive and foolish, we shouldn't encourage that. Nor should we cheer on the attempt to create an all-powerful executive that can do whatever it wants with no checks from existing legislation, the courts, or Congress. Trump's goal seems to be an elective dictatorship, and we'll see how long the elective part lasts.
There are supposed to be, we'll see if they work. Right now, as the article says, the courts are issuing injunctions to stop these changes while the various lawsuits play out. I strongly suspect Trump and Musk will ignore them, and then we will be in a full on constitutional crisis.
what in Elon Musk's track record makes you "strongly suspect" he is there to cause a constitutional crisis? Is it possible that instead he is working in good faith?
The problem with America is we let the autistic run things. First it was tech, then medicine, now government. Notice a pattern here? Notice how those things are being run less efficiently ultimately, because it doesn’t seem like any part ever knows what the other is doing…do to completely autistic designs and thinking. Highly specialized people can’t see the whole. Good lord just look at medicine. I can’t wait for those efficiencies in government too!! Seriously fuck you if you work in Silicon Valley over all. Eat shit. You did this.
The financial position of the US is precarious, at best. I seriously doubt there is any painless way to correct course, as Congress seems to have lost the ability to compromise. Looking into the future, the US will go the way of the former Soviet Union if it does not take corrective action.
Is the current situation the only way, the best way, or even a good way to address the country's economic position? That is a matter of perspective. As is always the case, people will take sides. The unreasonable people (on any side) will refuse to compromise and spew inflammatory rhetoric, most often in defense of their own self interests and at the expense of others' interests.
I believe that the most sensible approach is for all parties to adhere to a metered diligence, always being mindful that the country is a collective of disparate interests. The whole point of a democracy is that through all the ups and downs, things work themselves out eventually. Sometimes there are setbacks and other times there is progress.
How do you reconcile these deeply basic facts with your point of view?
1. The US economy was the best in the world in 2024.
2. The NIH, USAID, and NSF budgets make up just a percentage point or two of US spending.
3. These programs consistently generate ROI >>1.
In light of these painfully obvious facts, isn't it clear that the priorities of this administration have nothing to do with government finances? And that even trying to frame the discussion that way is blatantly irresponsible?
the problems that led to these frauds are structural--no amount of patching the system will fix this.
maybe we should consider the possibility that we are due for a refactor, which is often painful, but especially painful for people (or code) with an entrenched incentive to continue existing.
i dont mean to defend what the administration is doing but I'm warning that everyone crying doom and gloom and threatening to move abroad, etc. might be eating crow. ironically, the very people most likely to move abroad (in it for the career, not for the principle) are biased to be the types bringing down our system of science. bad science is the science equivalent of a zirp.
> maybe we should consider the possibility that we are due for a refactor
People in tech need to stop with those analogies. A government is not a codebase. You can not apply the principles of "refactoring" and "patching" in the same way. It just doesn't work like that. But the problem is we have a bunch of people (some malicious, some clueless) trying to do exactly that.
Precisely. There’s no wisdom in the approach. “I’ll try refactoring - that’s a good trick!” is a poor approach.
You can try it, but the consequences of a poor refactoring? Look to the planned economies and five year plans.
The government is not a codebase; that mistakes its artifacts for its process. And the importance of process - in politics, in government - cannot be overstated.
Government is exactly a codebase. Government bureaucracies is essentially constricting human judgement to more robotic code-like behavior, that's the only way to build large systems.
You say government is not like code, then what exactly is it? Can you describe it in an effective way? Or are you just going to raise your hand up and say there's nothing we can do about it, nothing we can do about the $2 trillion/year titanic deficit?
Historical governments often needed little beyond an army and a tax collection system. And tax collection system was primarily data gathering and analysis, since if you knew how much property someone owned, you can easily tax them for an appropiate amount.
The tech way of thinking has proven extremely successful in many industries already. That's why tech companies (and tech adjacent ones, like say quant trading, or even index fund trading) have been so economically dominant, and utterly kicked out the traditional MBAs from their pedestals.
Stop being a self hating programmer who despises the mentality of tech.
Government has a massive policymaking function, which is not "robotic code-like behavior". It's about solving nuanced, challenging problems. Government has a huge research function.
And tech has created some great things, but it's also created some really terrible things, mostly because of this "move fast and break things" mentality that doesn't consider the consequences of its actions.
>You say government is not like code, then what exactly is it?
Government is mostly individuals deciding goals and attempting to convince others. Then rules are added to prevent harm to others or using corrupt methods of convincing. That "code" part is more like a moderated forum: necessary for the huge task, but it's just the framework for the actual content.
>Historical governments often needed little beyond an army and a tax collection system.
And historical computers used vacuum tubes. What's your point?
>The tech way of thinking has proven extremely successful in many industries already.
Even in tech companies, the richest people are almost always the smooth talkers. Because the best, and really only, way to get money is convincing somebody else to give it to you. You can do it by offering a better product or charming them.
Most government goals aren't technically difficult and certainly don't require advanced algorithms or fast computers. The real work is aligning people.
I hate to break it to you, but 2 million people engaged in an endless list of activities that encompasses repairing tanks, making grants, building bridges, supporting citizens abroad, distributing pension checks, performing surgery, making sure airplanes don’t crash and conserving forests is not the same kind of thing as a codebase and requires a different skill set to effect change in.
we're already past that. the NIH funded EcoHealth alliance which partnered with WIV, and advocated for GOF research, so, the NIH is (if indirectly) responsible for millions of COVID deaths. That's like two holocausts. ok, lets discount it by 50% since it was indirect. the NIH is responsible for one Holocaust.
- Part of government is the legal system which a Judge's whole thing is being endless nuanced in understanding and applying what the law means; I would not considered this constricted robot like behavior even though the law is literally a bunch of written down rules.
- Part of government is funding research that involves people doing real experiments collecting real data? Are novel experiments those of constricted robots or LLMs?
- Part of government are the dedicated every day folks who are doing the best they can despite being overworked and under resourced who have to make life and death decisions in the moment every day (air traffic controllers), who monitor and coordinate relief and management of disasters big and small in a very interconnected world (we just had a global pandemic, are culling record numbers of chickens, had a bad hurricane season, and large wildfires) these are not people behaving like robots they are just people following laws and regulations primarily passed via efforts of lobbyists, or else are those that are written in blood.
Don't like the way a part of government works? Reform it. Don't try to burn the whole thing to the ground by doing shit like emailing the people responsible for keeping planes from crashing into each other that if they want to they can fuck off for the next 8 months on the tax-payers dime and then find a new low-stress job. Don't like certain regulations or the ways laws are weaponized against everyone but corporations and the wealthy? I get it, me neither I'd like to see affordable housing too. Unfortunately, congress has the responsibility to fix that, not Donald Trump, not Elon Musk, nor any of his former SpaceX interns. If they want to make those changes they should get elected to congress or hell maybe for shits and giggles use some of that lobbying money for the common good they claim to care so much about.
> Don't like the way a part of government works? Reform it.
at what point does that become disingenuous? how many years have people bern trying to do it incrementally? just tell the reformer: oh try harder, knowing every feature of the bureaucracy is stacked against them and they wont succeed. in the meantime people are hurt, dollars are wasted.
> Unfortunately, congress has the responsibility to fix that,
that's not correct. congress has ceded execution of these things to the executive in many cases with broad leeway to do or not do (thats why it's called discretionary spending, any spending that is by law congress' responsibility is statutory spending)
I'm very pro some systematic auditing/cleaning of out sclerotic waste, but I don't see how anyone can look at the way this is being handled and not be incredibly worried
I think it's the second-order stuff here. Even assuming Musk were to do a fantastic job at just clearing out inefficiency in a smart way (which seems unlikely given the actions he's taken/leaks around cutting funding based on key-word matching etc.), the higher-order point that someone can just buy their way into the President's inner-circle and have complete free-reign to seize government operations and make changes with 0 transparency/accountability seems like it does just stupid amounts of harm to the integrity of the system
> make changes with 0 transparency/accountability seems like it does just stupid amounts of harm to the integrity of the system
pray tell who was accountable for the grant issuance in the first place? was congress approving every disbursal? could the citizenry vote up/down on every RO1 or SBIR that went past the NIH desk?
> ironically, the very people most likely to move abroad (in it for the career, not for the principle) are biased to be the types bringing down our system of science.
What the hell are you talking about? I chose to get into science for the benefit of the masses, rather than, for instance, helping some corporation abuse human psychology to sell more ads. If there is no money to do the science, I have no choice but to emigrate.
edit: And to give you an example of the science being targeted by these early moves: pulse oximeters have a racial bias leading them to overestimate the oxygen saturation of minorities, which led to deaths during the pandemic. All the work toward addressing that issue at the FDA has now been terminated, because it's related to DEI.
> I chose to get into science for the benefit of the masses
why do you suppose most science benefits the masses?
a stunning amount of science is negative. homme hellinga cheating and claiming a triosephosphate isomerase, for example. stripey nanoparticles, as another. Thousands of western blots that were cleverly edited by unscrupulous postdocs. everything by diderik stapel. anil potti.
those are the ones that got caught. so many more got away with it.
and yes, if you can't tell, i know what the fuck I'm talking about.
> And to give you an example
why dont i give you an example. NIH is responsible for 80% of the budget of an NGO that collaborated with WIV and advocated for GOF research. on the grounds of likely being responsible in part for the deaths of millions worldwide maybe we should suspend funding to the NIH until all of its policies can be reviewed
But the scientific community identified this failure. They published the evidence against it. And shed light here.
And heck, they did a lot of unrelated great science at the same time.
Science is a process that will have failures, mistakes, errors, and these are subject to natural selection. We can work to make that process sharper, more rigorous, but that's obviously not what the administration is doing. They're attacking science with the full intent of replacing it with a system where lies and fraud reign supreme. In the world of RFK and Donald Trump, lies are just what people do every day for breakfast.
RFK Jr. gets a dozen things wrong on science and tells a dozen lies and funds and pals around with major fraudsters and charlatans every week.
they did not. in the case of tessier-levigne, who was responsible for getting him out of there? not the NIH. it was a fucking Stanford undergrad journalism student.
let that sink in. a heroically persistent undergrad had to do the job that the NIH was morally and legally obligated to do.
this "science is self correcting" trope needs to stop being propagated right now. and you can claim eventual self consistency if it resolves a hundred years from now, which would obviously be too little too late. how many people were hurt, how much research dollars were wasted in the meantime. "well, Eventually" is not good enough, and the self correcting slogan is just running cover for entreched interests in the face of their misdeeds.
Refactor. Ha. This is just randomly and mindlessly deleting large chunks of code because you think it's woke.
Not a single personal alive thinks these institutions are perfect. But only morons think haphazardly defunding shit without understanding what you're breaking or what the real-world ramifications might be is a way to fix problems.
The past couple of weeks have historically stupid.
no not because it's woke. because it's broken. this is literally the system that let a person become the President of Stanford a federally granted research professor with years of fabricated data that absolutely fucked some people that i personally know. lets say, negative man-decades of research just among people in my limited circle. i guarantee you this was not an isolated incident
the sooner we cut this shit out, realize consequences, and start over, the better.
I support scientific research of course but to play devils advocate, how can the USA afford this? They run a deficit and have an enormous debt. I dont understand how this can continously be ignored. Of course nobody wants cuts but how can it go on? Same with the foreign aid, isnt that something a country running a surplus should be worried about?
Go read the article. All of this is a few drops in the bucket. There are some absolutely enormous line items that, by themselves, put us well into deficit territory.
On top of that, these things make the US money. We have, by far, the strongest pharmaceutical and medical technology industry anywhere. Those companies pay taxes.
(Those companies also screw us and the government over in myriad ways, and that should be addressed, but cutting off the research system that supports the entire industry in like throwing out the baby without even draining the bathwater.)
the "drops in the bucket" mindset is the problem, the federal government absurdly overspends and we've not had any serious politicians to address the issue. the interest on our debt is going to bankrupt us and there will be nothing left afterwards if these things aren't reeled in and examined.
political opponents of the newly elected administration are obviously going to go fully hysterical over any change, they already did last time. the science industries in the US aren't going anywhere, neither is research at the universities.
the ideological discrimination and money laundering coming out of these departments are going to end. and did we all forget about COVID? The fact that the NIH funded the research that happened in china ILLEGALLY, because this was a really stupid idea and we found that out the hard way, and it was covered up, and we were lied to, it killed millions, destroyed economies on a global scale.... do we really not want to see this agency dissected under a microscope? They need to be investigated.
I feel like were on the same side but youre gonna need a (credible!) source that US govt money was funding virus research in China, that doesnt seem to pass the sniff test
No its not sarcasm, thanks for the reference. However since you were rude Im gonna ignore this evidence (this attitude can work for or against Republicans I guess)
I'll be less rude: the US funded virus research in China. Some people argue this was wise because it gave us insight into China's bioweapons plans, or be prepared for world disasters, or whatever. It's still not entirely clear why NIH leadership thought this was a good idea, given our understanding of China's relative immaturity in working with dangerous viruses, as well as preventing that funding from going to US researchers.
I had sorta thought this was a right wing conspiracy, as it seemed so unlikely to be true. I can very clearly understand why the new administration is being ruthless with them now, especially given Trumps experience with Covid (a more enlightened leader might say the buck stopped with him instead of blaming underlings, but I digress). Thanks for replying.
> the "drops in the bucket" mindset is the problem, the federal government absurdly overspends
The federal government almost certainly does absurdly overspend, but you’re missing the point: all of these drops in the bucket add up to far less than the deficit.
Also, for better or for worse, operating departments efficiently may well be the executive branch’s job, but setting all these budgets is Congress’s job, not the executive branch’s. In fact, Congress tried, not all that long ago, to allow the President to veto specific line items, and the Supreme Court struck it down:
?? healthy people stay alive, sick people will die. Of course this is terrible but "we will all die without publically funded research" doesnt hold water. Again Im not in favour of the cuts I just cant understand how the USA continues to borrow/print money and it doesnt all come crashing down. I dont think even Trump is anti-medicine, just pro fiscal responsibility.
"healthy people stay alive, sick people will die" that's a tautology. I do not know you, but I am willing to bet that there are some people who you know who'd have a far worse life if it was not for modern publicly funded research
I dont dispute this at all - I want the research, I would pay higher taxes to support it, but it baffles me how the government can continually lose money and people handwave away the entire issue
I can't tell if you're intentionally misunderstanding, or not. So I'll spell it out: public non-biased research is a public good.
Oil companies weren't going to publish research saying leaded gas was bad. Tobacco companies weren't going to publish research saying cigarettes were bad. Have fun being healthy when you inhale leaded gasoline every day.
Forget about things like, you know, the internet. Or any medicine.
BTW, private companies are not paying for basic biological research. Good luck making a drug when no one knows what target to drug. VC firms will park their money in the bank instead. The value from biotechs is already marginal - investment basically vanished when interest rates went above 4.
I feel the same way back haha, are you intentionally misunderstanding me? Nobody is claiming research is bad! I dont want to see it cut either. I want the government to be running a surplus though. You can argue we should cut other places like military or whatever, I agree thats probably wiser, but what Im asking is, surely we can only prioritise what to spend once we are back to surplus
Ive also been told in the past that its somehow ok that the government never breaks even, I can handle that maybe Im too stupid/uneducated to get it... but nobody ever even tries. Use little words, Im sure we will make progress. How can the government continue to exist and not go broke if it continually spends more than it brings in?
I'm trying to say that having a society of people breathing in leaded gas would be insanely expensive. Both in terms of lost productivity from stunted brain development, and actual acute symptoms. Public money was crucial to unbiased understanding of that, and lead to prevention. How much money do you think that saved/grew the economy? For like 0.5% of the Federal budget.
That's just one (big and easy to recall) example. There are countless.
Spending public money on public research grows the economy. Cutting it is penny wise and pound foolish.
I work at a biotech. We have $150 million in private funding. My biotech wouldn't exist, and I wouldn't have a job if it weren't for decades of public research doing the foundational work that allows us to target a protein to make a drug to help people. None of that would exist if not for NIH, NSF etc
This was a good reply, thanks for taking the time. I could be convinced that this is a money making investment and therefore foolish to cut. If you have no money though, you cant afford to make any kind of investment, and from the outside looking in (to govt I mean, I live in the USA) it seems the US is going broke. Like I said though, I hve come around and maybe it really is super dumb to cut this - if you want to see it continue for the next 50 years, I would urge you consider how thats possible if the USA continues to lose money though.
While the Unabomber, Luigi Mangione, and Communism may have correctly diagnosed socioeconomic pathologies their prescriptions were largely counterproductive. It is magical or superficial thinking to believe that aggressive chaos is somehow curative or better than following a more consultative and cooperative process like first assessing and auditing an organization thoroughly by eliciting input from all parties at all levels and gathering data before proposing recommendations, implementing those recommendations, and following up to adjust them.
Sorry do you really think Musk and Trump are eliciting input from all parties and carefully gathering data before giving recommendations? Because given how frequently they talk about the “radical left” and “marxists” I really don’t think they are considering dissenting opinions in good faith. They invariably insult people who have the slightest disagreements with them, even when those people have facts and data on their side.
And Musk has stumbled into several known right-wing conspiracy theories based on knee-jerk reactions, so I find it far more likely that he’s just fishing to validate his pre-held knee-jerk opinions rather than doing a careful investigation.
Approximately what proportion of the US federal budget is spent on scientific research? What proportion is spent on foreign aid? Looking up these values is a useful exercise.
A billion here, a billion there, before you know it you're talking about some real money.
If I were president I would probably cut from military spending - but at some point that becomes painful to cut aswell.
A lot of people have misunderstood me in this thread, at no point do I want to see public research cut. Its just that the same people who are worried about what climate change will bring over next 50 years (and I am too!) dont seen to feel any sense of alarm at the federal government living outside its means for the next 50 years, and I can not understand why
Because the federal government is not in any sense living outside its means.
I’m not sure how to explain this to you, really - you’re fundamentally stuck, I think, on the idea that the gov is like a business or a household, and needs to budget the same way. It really doesn’t.
Maybe think of it this way, to start to get your head around it: current debt is just over 100% of GDP - so in some sense the US has borrowed about a years worth of production. 100% sounds scary, but does 12 months sound so scary? Would you consider yourself in catastrophic debt if you owed a year of your salary?
Personally I wish my mortgage was only a year of my salary!
You can call it stuck if you want, I guess I am - how can this not be a bad thing? It feels like its not a bad thing until suddenly it is. Countries can & do go broke. You can sell your house and break even, thr govt cant sell the NIH
Consider the idea that without decades of money printing, your house might only cost 1 year of salary in the first place
Or maybe let me ask it a other way - if the govt really doesnt need to balance the budget, why dont we have 50 aircraft carriers and free healthcare for all? Such huge sums of money go beyond merely number balancing, at some piint theyre forcefully managing the real resources of the nation
Debt can’t increase to infinity, true - but that does not mean it can’t be a finite number indefinitely.
And the current finite number is nowhere close to causing a crisis for the US (Japan had two and a half times GDP in debt and did not collapse into hyperinflation or some other catastrophic fate, for example).
How can we afford it? because scientific discovery turbocharges our economy. Why do we have such a huge biotech industry? Why was the internet mostly built in the US? Why are we the only country that has placed somebody on the moon, and have huge launch capacities?
Because we invested in those technologies and they paid off handsomely. What you are seeing is the result of "profit externalization"- laws like Bayh Dole allow universities to profit from the research they carry out under contract with the government.
Everything we did, we did because the alternatives were worse.
The US could pay its debt tomorrow, in full. We'd like to avoid that shock, if possible, but there's nothing uncreditworthy about running a fiscal deficit.
USG revenue/spending should be reasoned about in terms of the resources it directs, and the resulting effects on US and world GDP. Everything else is just accounting.
What are some practical actions that we can take to resist these sweeping changes?
The thing about democracy is, every person is going to sometimes wildly disagree with what the elected officials do. Declaring it a 'coup' is as silly as when Trump lost in 2020 and declared it a 'rigged election.'
Now, you can make limited inroads to block executive actions with the courts, but even when SCOTUS was friendly to the anti-Trump cause, when that's done to advance an unpopular (majority-disapproved-of) agenda, it is usually a hollow and temporary victory. To get the policies you want, you need to win over voters. That's the part the DNC seems to be completely unaware of. You don't win by insulting, by dunking on the other guys on ~Twitter~ bluesky, or by protesting. You win in a democracy only by convincing the very reasonable middle that you share their values. The DNC has taken a position of "Everyone not already in our tent is evil, fascist, dastardly white supremacists," but to their chagrin, their current tent is under 50% of the voting public and it isn't growing.
Trump is passing as much stuff as quickly as he can to bypass the separation of powers.
As much as you personally disagree with these decisions, they are in line with the broad policy positions Trump et al communicated prior to the election, and can be considered the will of the people.
Challenging the mandate the public gave them, by hyperventilating over minor procedural hiccups, that will inevitably be resolved by congress in favour of Trump appears to most to be undemocratic.
And secondly no, Trump also publicly lied about his positions by saying he had nothing to do with Project 2025.
I think its underappreciated how much of America's modern success comes down to attracting scientists and intellectuals from war torn europe in the 30s-50s.
You have to be socially smart enough to see that a $100k salary and lifestyle outcome for your remaining working career is enough, if not better than the prospect of uplift into mega-wealth, if your IPR pans out the right way.
For career scientists who were on the NSF grant train, they'd cracked a magic egg open. Beneficial to both them and us, society at large. Well, the other economies do fund research. They fund it badly compared to the NSF, the paperwork burden is less I am sure, but so is the size of the pot and the duration. You may well spend more time hassling next grant, than doing the grant funded work.
I've known US scientists who moved to my economy (OZ) and they say its a great place to live, but they keep ties to US funded research because its what made them attractive to the non-US university or corporate research environment. If that tie is going to be cut, they're competing against one quality only: skill. Sure, a more level playing field. But that, and english language competency aside, it will be a competition against scientists from the rest of the world, who also used to go to the USA and now are seeking jobs in other economies.
* English language school system so your kids (if you have them) will speak a world language.
* Racially and culturally diverse cultures, cuisines, and communities.
* Exposure to goods from most of the world, even if marked up.
* Availability of international franchises headquartered in other countries in major metros.
* A strong passport that offers visa-free travel to many locations and very favorable visa terms in many others.
and more.
My partner and I are (different) Asians and the higher-skilled members of our family who wanted to emigrate mostly rejected Europe because of non-English language instruction and honestly just feeling racially uncomfortable in most of Europe. I have some family in Germany (who like it there) so it's obviously not impossible, but European ethnostate thinking is just unattractive to a lot of non-Caucasian talent. Canada, UK, and Australia are not like this and have potentially a lot to gain if the US kneecaps its research bureaucracy.
The USA passport is far from a strong passport. Plenty of better alternatives elsewhere. Also, that implies getting citizenship, a 5 year ordeal.
The cuisine I'm not even addressing.
The education system is also subpar, otherwise why would they live off other scientists migrating there?
Before WWII the USA was a scientific backwater and it only escaped that with massive imports of human capital from Europe.
Since imports and immigrants are bad, they can try their luck alone.
I did meet one guy that did it for the passport. He was from Iran and apparently being refused a visa to Colombia was the straw that broke the camel's back.
This depends on the metrics chosen to evaluate. My german passport offers significantly more visa free travel options, but the German government is notorious for not really giving a shit about citizens getting stuck in crisis abroad. For example when the Sudan civil war broke out, Americans were evacuated in a pretty crazy and expensive military operation, while Germans were told to buckle up and keep their heads close to the ground...
Which is a great marketing stunt that most countries (Germany included) couldn't afford, but otherwise, how often does it actually happen? I doubt they're spooling up Black Hawks to evacuate tourists every time there's a crisis somewhere.
One of my absolute favorite things to do any time a friend from overseas who only knows American food from our media portrayal comes to visit is to take them out to eat and watch their eyes light up. The best reaction I got was from a UK friend I met on WoW— "good lord I see why you're all so fat" said through a mouthful of cheeseburger. If there's one thing America can do it's cook.
But the food I actually saw in the USA was mediocre.
I didn't have any interest in 20 varieties of Oreo or bars of chocolate with bits of pork in it (for the latter, I'm vegetarian); the stuff that Whole Foods sold had slightly less flavour and variety than European discount stores like Aldi, Trader Joe's might as well have been a corner shop; the fancy restaurants were merely OK, the only positive of the fast food joints was the low cost, the "oh, you gotta try this while you're in Manhattan!" cafes and diners were on par with the random UK town centre breakfast diners you try once to see what they're like and never go back to, all the pubs were somehow even worse than Wetherspoons (UK chain with a bad reputation), the "cheese sauce" on tortilla chips was on par among the absolute worst approximations of cheese I have ever encountered.
And why is half your yoghurt thickened with gelatine, anyway?
The best food I had in the country was at a place covered by an NDA; but even that, the best, was "4 stars out of 5" by European standards.
Not realizing this is typically American.
> [...] said through a mouthful of cheeseburger
> If there's one thing America can do it's cook
FWIW, a variety of other opinions exist :)
I don't blame him.
UK is also a place with amazing immigrant/ex-colonies cuisine (as in great places to eat), but if we were talking about the British cuisine itself, getting above it is far from a high standard.
Walk into a restaurant in Paris, Milan, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Tel Aviv, Seoul, Tokyo, Lisbon, the food is going to be much better.
Maybe at the top, the very best restaurants, the US holds its own. But the standard for the average restaurant is low.
I will say that for myself, money is a means to an end for living a “good” life. I am starting to wonder personally where the line is for the trade off between salary and its ability to translate into a good life here in the US
Having said that, I got stung by 49c in the doller on my British USS Pension transfer in (I'm 63) for the lump sum. Sometimes, you just can't win.
That's a kind of lottery-mentality that Europe doesn't want to attract anyway.
If someone wins the lottery and gets rich, society isn’t better off. If someone starts a new company that made a cure for some disease and gets rich, society is much better off.
You absolutely want to attract people that want to make huge breakthroughs with unlikely odds of success.
The US sustains that high number of people who strike $100 million+ through having a social safety net that barely exists, which results in far more people being seen as completely disposable. It also comes at the cost of worsening public education, worsening public health, crime rates beyond most first world countries, companies that constantly invent new evils like making all formerly paid-and-done services into monthly subscriptions. Few if any that hit 100 million are doing it ethically. They're doing it by milking the residents dry.
Some countries have national pride and resent the idea of stepping on their fellow countrymen. Some would kill half of them if they were promised a few % off their yearly taxes.
It's fine to want that and to attract those kind of people. What you don't want is to attract people who want to do that in order to make a lot of money.
If you want innovators, motivate them with rewards. Money is a great reward since you can turn it into mostly anything you’d like. Want to buy a mansion? Fine. Want to travel around the world? Feel free. Want to give it away to charity? Great!
The reality is that you get crap like Facebook, Instagram, Xwitter.
The bounty here, is the people on the cusp of realizing its not going to pan out but who are both very smart, and smart enough to realize they need to pivot. It would be almost a given they are consciously walking away from IPO manna. I guess if you include it in the pre-sort on applicants, you get to winnow out the people still glued to money-is-the-prize.
BTW the EU would welcome more IPR inside the EU. Some amount of bonus may have to lie in the packaging, to get to where the EU wants to be on IPR. Novo Nordisk style.
the problem with the European thinking you describe is not lottery vs sure-thing, it's the idea that everybody within a geography should should think the same way and not all mentalities "belong".
And to those mentalities… yes we ought to remind they’re not welcome.
It’s not lottery mentality, it’s risk taking. And it’s something that the EU should be fostering. The US encourages risk taking where failing isn’t even seen as a bad thing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31524645
...or don't we? I am not sure. We are definitely not seeing the runaway successes of US big tech, but is it because people are not taking measured risks, or do operations fumble at a later point in their development? I don't know. What I do know is that revenue sources in the EU come with extremely onerous strings attached, are orders of magnitude below US levels, or are only available to big corporations of the old guard.
You're the one incorrectly using the concept of gambling replying talking to someone taking about risk versus reward (investing).
It is hard for somebody who believes in gambling to win at investing.
The US has both monetary and social incentives to create new businesses. I live in NZ where founders are discouraged by financial incentives and by social incentives.
Except that it’s the opposite of a lottery.
It’s almost entirely based on your skills and the decisions you make.
There are right-place right-time effects, but it’s still your decision to be in the right place for the current time.
Europe’s economy is badly lagging the US economy, and it’s because culturally they hold these types of incorrect, fatalistic, zero-sum views towards success and innovation.
You're just not going to get past the first few rounds of the entrepreneur game if you're not a certain kind of person.
The US has terrible social mobility. Objectively, by any measure. This isn't up for debate.
Guess which state is #1 for social mobility?
Wrong. It's Utah, which is a low bar because it's 28th by GDP.
How about CA? 38th for mobility. TX? 45th.
It's a mythology of meritocracy excusing inherited privilege.
https://www.archbridgeinstitute.org/social-mobility-in-the-5...
Four Pillars of Social Mobility: To rank each state, we measured a series of indicators related to social mobility across four pillars: Entrepreneurship and Growth, Institutions and the Rule of Law, Education and Skills Development, and Social Capital. Scores for each pillar were combined and weighted equally to create a state’s overall social mobility score.
I would think a measure of social mobility would include income percentile vs parents' income percentile.
https://www.businessinsider.com/american-dream-social-econom...
https://osf.io/preprints/osf/tb3qz_v1
Wouldn't this be a much worse metric? It would have to net out to zero change on average by the definition of percentiles. If we take abs change to look at both downward and upward mobility, the measure wouldn't tell us where most downward mobility happened, up and down could all happen within the bottom 25% and none in the top 75% and this metric would say we are highly social mobile if there was a lot of movement there.
The US is full of billionaires who came from underprivileged positions.
Infact, your advice is worse than wrong, it is actively harmful, because you're discouraging people from trying by (falsely) telling them that their efforts don't matter and they were destined to fail from birth.
https://osf.io/preprints/osf/tb3qz_v1
My brother and I are both college educated and, while not "rich", have a lifestyle and income my grandparents could have only dreamed about.
It is truly painful to watch people preach learned helplessness through failure and destitution as the only possible outcome.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index
Larry Ellison, Oprah, François Pinault, Howard Schultz, Jan Koum, Kenneth Langone, Ralph Lauren, Sheldon Adelson, JK Rowling, George Soros, John Paul DeJoria… to name just a few.
Going from $15k a year to $150k is a lot more common in Europe,, but doing from $150k to $150m is a lot more common in the US, and it's the latter that creates most of the value.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/comment/sweden-b...
"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires" - John Steinbeck
A lot of scientists (at least in my field, computational chemistry) have decent skills that are transferrable to other areas. So I expect quite a few to move on.
Most likely, people who leave academia will be leaving for industry instead.
I do feel for those in the hard sciences, they have become collateral damage in what is mostly a battle between politicians and humanities departments.
Living in a dense European city, you do not need a car, healthcare is free, and you are generally afforded more time off and a stricter wlb compromise compared to the US. One doesn't need to eat takeout as often if there is time to cook. Depending on the country, rent/housing costs are more or less under control.
On the other hand swiss/Netherlands food is expensive even by bay area standards.
You’re unlikely to be able to afford to live in the center of a dense Western European city on researcher wages, and most of the jobs aren’t in the city center either, so you’ll probably still need a car.
I think in the US people romanticise living and working in Europe to an unrealistic degree. There are good reasons why the net migration of skilled workers is towards the US rather than away from it.
Perhaps Amsterdam airport pricing is extensively marked up compared to local pricing (understandable). Geneva was just plain expensive.
the other important thing to keep in mind is that in the EU in general, there's no added taxes on the bill, and tips are less of a thing here, so there's not a magical 20%+ hidden charge to factor in on everything you order.
Those in the liberal arts probably have it even worse, as their experience usually doesn't translate to industry at all.
No idea if that kind of "research" is funded the same way as hard sciences in the US though, it definitely is there.
In contrast, the humanities made their own bed. They became politically partisan, engaged in systematically discriminatory hiring practices, and routinely conduct research that the public perceive to hold little utility.
Ultimately academics need to keep in mind that they rely on the generosity of taxpayers to fund their research. If the public aren't happy that they are getting value for money they will defund these programs.
I hope that the blowback is contained to the humanities departments, but guilt by association is unfortunately a thing in politics.
If somebody wanted to become a partisan hack, there are easier ways than getting tenure, right?
The culture within the hard sciences is to challenge existing theories and narratives.
The culture within the social sciences is almost the polar opposite. It still superficially presents as a science, but in practice is a purity spiral with an orthodoxy of established conclusions which cannot be challenged without severe career consequences.
The hard sciences had their Galileo affair 400 years ago, the soft sciences are in the midst of theirs right now.
Yeah the dollar is stronger which is great to buy imports.
But you cannot import housing, most healthcare, most services like cooks, cleaners and bartenders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
See Agatha Christie's quote about how she couldn't have imagined affording a car before WW1, and couldn't have imagined affording servants afterward.
People around me tend to be in the RSE (Research Software Engineer) scene, which is growing in Europe. I, and many of my cohort, could fit in as research staff or faculty in many different disciplines.
Wouldn't get rich or famous, but certainly have a comfortable living working on interesting problems.
Europe will not spend even 0.1% of its pension/welfare fund on big research bets. The private investors their will only want real estate investments, not fancy wancy "VC".
Young talent will flow one way from other countries to the US, because they've already seen what the grass is like on their side.
The population shift introduces new ideas, new perspectives, new ways of operating research, new connections towards funding and money, new views on what big bets even means.
The influx of foreign scientists and academics into America over the last century caused significant shifts in how America operated and viewed the idea of research and academia. Post-war Europeans (Von Braun's crowd being an obvious example) caused a large shift in the way America funded "big bet" projects. Saturn V perhaps. Same may happen in Europe.
Those academics can use HN from the opposite side of the Atlantic. VC money especially has the possibility of being territorially bound, yet its often far less constrained by the those types of lines in the dirt than many funding opportunities.
There aren't countries with unfilled academic positions awaiting people from the US. If anything, the landscape is even more competitive outside the US.
… a critical tool of which we’re currently dismantling…
I think a lot of these guys and gals are fooling themselves with the whole, "find another country" thing. There is no other country that is A) doing research at these levels, B) Flush with cash, and C) needs you because they don't have a population that produces the necessary thinkers. That's basically only the US.
Those then work with the country level organizations of Science Europe, and those together each spend about EUR 25B each year. [3] It's not insignificant. I tend to pay attention to space, and lately almost all there's been is European achievements in telescopes and astronomy.
[1] Horizon Europe, https://www.ffg.at/sites/default/files/downloads/HorizonEuro...
[2] ERC, https://erc.europa.eu/about-erc/erc-glance
[3] Science Europe RFOs, https://www.scienceeurope.org/about-us/members/?type=Researc...
For comparison, the NSF budget is about $8 billion. DOE Office of Science is about the same. NIH is $45 billion
(Also, compare that with the profit of large tech companies)
Personally, I think there is plenty of grift and wasteful expenditure we could look at addressing first, especially within the healthcare and defense portfolios.
I agree not using the world proven efficient healthcare strategy of universal coverage is pretty stupid economically, as is spending a trillion USD per annum on the military. But we are so rich these mistakes can be absorbed for surprisingly long.
Something which might shift over the coming decades.
With that, as things start to get real bad it seems leaving is something of a moral duty for anyone who cares, has skills that hold real weight, and can still afford to do so.
Obviously where this "real bad" point is is hard to say, and there's important tradeoffs to consider. I also could be talked out of this position but from what I see it seems about accurate.
I don’t think it tarnished his scientific legacy, but it definitely created some friction in the post-war years.
Along with the flight/expulsion/imprisonment/murder of top scientists who weren't ideologically or racially "pure", it's no wonder their nuclear program was such a failure.
They care nothing about "brains" except blowing them out. Fascism is anti-intellectual. While it glorifies the golden future time, really it makes science a means not and end. I strongly advise that everyone in silicon valley, and in US tech generally, should read about what Stalin did to the bourgeois engineers.
The greatest threat to a technological regime is the people who built it, understand it, and can unbuild it.
I've written about it here and there but won't insult you with my swill and sweepings because there's loads of far more interesting history and analysis out there [0]. Suffice it to see, being unemployed in a technofascist regime may be the least of your worries.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1850331
You can't run a modern economy by being anti-science and anti-education. Believing otherwise is a self-harming absurdity.
There will absolutely be a brain drain, and the EU is already thinking about how to take advantage of it.
Now it's the EU's turn. Computer science is already becoming very, very French. See you guys in Grenoble.
would be if any other country actually put money in research... Well there is China, but in Europe we already have more PhD than research position.
It's like he was surrounded by knowledgeable people and decided to make wrong decision upon wrong decision just to spite them because he resented them being better than him.
He’s always been a Democrat, including supporting Obama and Clinton.
His recent support of Trump appears to be a tactical reaction to some of the misbehaviour during the Biden administration such as debanking political rivals and encouraging race-based hiring.
https://www.businessinsider.com/surprise-silicon-valleys-her...
People are just so surprised to find out he's a Republican that whenever it happens they assume he's a recent convert.
He wanted Romney to win the Republican primary, believing him to be more pro-tech than the other candidates, but he ultimately he supported and voted for Obama in that election.
"Both Sides" Citation, please. Really interested in learning more (but no paywalls if possible).
In all honesty, it's hard to see China wanting many of the PhD's that would be available from the US in a worst case scenario NSF/NIH funding collapse. There may be a place for the top 0.1%? But for 99.9% of PhD's, there are Chinese replacements that are, frankly, better and cheaper.
Hate to bring it back to money like that, but there it is.
As for PhD from developed countries, it’s gonna be hard as you said.
There are literally millions of people around the world who earn significantly more than US$100K and don’t work in the US.
e.g. in Australia, many medical specialists earn more than US$200k - it is common for experienced oncologists, cardiologists, paediatricians, gastroenterologists, etc, to earn more than US$200k.
https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/online/5299/The-scientific...
I think that that’s probably the best route for anybody who is currently in America and doesn’t want to deal with the next 20 to 50 years of total deprivation.
Unfortunately some of us can’t leave so the best most people can do is find some place safe to land.
First off, there is no evidence the US will never fund science again.
Second, top scientific positions in the US are at academic labs, not at NIH (bare a few top people spending some time there). The top academic labs in the US get some funding from NIH, but the top ones get it from a ton of sources with NIH not being the bulk of it.
if you're going to boil down our "success", if you must call it that, to a root cause, it has a lot more to do with our insatiable greed and lack of respect for, well, anything. The talent is just a small detail in the narrative of America and that narrative is driven far more by capital than it is by interesting people.
The talent narrative makes for excellent propaganda, though, neatly whitewashing a violent and hateful culture.
So I think you're right. This could be a big opportunity for countries to poach some of these scientists or to repatriate those scientists who have left their home countries.
> The biggest single share of the NIH budget goes to the NCI ($7.8 billion in 2024), and the second-most to the NIAID ($6.5 billion) with the National Institute of Aging coming in third at $4.4 billion. (See the tables on numbered pages 11 and 46 of that link at the beginning of the paragraph for the details).
> And to put those into perspective, the largest single oulay for the Federal government is Social Security benefits ($1.4 trillion by themselves), with interest on the national debt coming in second at $949 billion, Medicare comes in third at $870 billion, and the Department of Defense fourth at $826 billion and Medicaid next at $618 billion.
This is not an attempt to 'save money' at the NSF and NIH (and USAID). A serious, rational effort to reduce their costs / increase their efficiency does not start with grep-ing manuscripts for 'underrepresented'. Part Five of TFA is on the money. This is an ideological attack on acronyms, and what they symbolize to the attackers. The actual agencies, their relative importance to the budget, etc. do not matter. The iconoclasts are here to smash the icons.
https://xcancel.com/paulg/status/1886741943050211408
Is "we just won't fund your drug, even though people will die and you're the only option on the market" actually something that could happen? Would that be politically palatable to anybody?
I guess there's patent invalidation and forced genericization, but that would kill innovation real quick.
I think a far better idea would be to impose very strict caps on admin / non-medical costs, potentially at the expense of paying a bit more to fraudsters, changing FDA regulations to minimize (death from side effects + death from no available drugs) instead of just the former, as well as becoming a lot more aggressive about expensive and unnecessary procedures that doctors perform to get rich quick.
Presumably the government also has the option to permit purchase of pharmaceuticals from other countries. "Oh, you've raised the cost of X? That's okay, we'll buy it from licensed suppliers in the EU for a tenth of the price."
Actually is that possible? Are the EU suppliers allowed to resell at the gov negotiated price? Or are the gov negotiated price only for internal market?
(I've been wondering since I don't understand why swiss drug price are so much higher given that EU suppliers are next door)
[1] https://www.cms.gov/inflation-reduction-act-and-medicare/med...
Most of the spiraling healthcare costs are attributable to administrative bloat, hospital profits, insurance companies and pharmaceutical profits. What you’re suggesting would just result in lower quality care in general and has effectively already been implemented with the rise of ‘supervised’ and unsupervised mid-level providers. I.e. NPs, PAs, CRNAs etc. It hasn’t resulted in any decrease in healthcare costs for the patient.
Let me give you some context for insight. If I see a patient in clinic for an intravitreal injection my fee will be $150-250 before overhead, the pharmaceutical company will be paid by medicare or private insurance around ~ $2000 for the drug that I inject. Double that for a bilateral injection.
If I operate at a hospital, my fee is $5-600. The hospital bills medicare a $4000 facilities fee plus additional fees for anesthesia, consumables etc. to the tune of over $10000 per eye.
If you want to lower healthcare costs a good start would be negotiating drug prices, repealing the clause in the ACA that bans physicians from owning hospitals, banning non-competes for healthcare professionals and getting rid of certificates of need that make it unnecessarily difficult to build outpatient surgery centers. In short, ideas that require a more nuanced understanding of our healthcare system.
btw I appreciate being called uninformed (which I dont dispute and find no offence in) rather than stupid or pigheaded or whatever. The point of talking about things is to increase understanding, we cant get through to people by belittling them.
But throwing medicine to the whims of the market is absurd. We're going to pick surgeons by reading reviews on Google?
Im curious if you think malpractice insurance is also a significant, unnecessary cost? What if we made it harder to sue doctors? On the flip side, malpractice is still a real problem - probably not one that will be fixed by removing medical licences :D just hoping you see this comment since I am genuinely interested in your answer
That kind of change though would leave someone with the bag and tends to never get voted or happen so we stay stuck in the over priced pharma, insurance, beating around the bush health game were in. Everyone is incentivezed to keep the bandaids rolling. Don't tell people their drug habits (I mean eating habits) are killing them.
Ohh wait, we got a new pgp blocker for you!
How about just skip breakfast.....
Of course not. The big gain is for Trump and Musk to say they did something. Regardless of how someone voted, I can’t believe they are still falling for this shtick.
If it gets bad enough that most people are starving, rather then just struggling, we'll see action, but I doubt it'll get there anytime soon.
But they now believe that movie actors are drinking the blood of babies and that China somehow rigged up the increase in CO2 as a way to confound us. They think scientists are mostly lying.
It's not clear from an information theoretic perspective how to restore stability to the US system.
Maybe once they've killed a million immigrants, I'm sorry had excess mortality in the camps in the hot SW and in Cuba, and things all around them are worse for their own children and families, they will repent and embrace truth, justice and the American way. One can hope.
...what?
Trump's son-in-law was put in charge of supply distribution, refused to invoke the defense production act, and when they finally did, Trump took ages to actually "order" ventilators. They refused to implement testing because they knew that tests would show how bad things were and justify measures that would hurt the stock market.
Trump largely didn't do anything at first because COVID-19 was most severely impacting the coastal blue states because of higher population densities.
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/did-trump-kushner-igno...
and https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/09/jared-kushner-let-th...
They routed supplies away from blue states to red states. He sent ventilators to Russia, FFS:
https://ru.usembassy.gov/delivery-of-u-s-ventilators-to-russ...
Trump told states to get their own PPE (because blue states needed them more badly than red states, and he didn't want red states to have to pay for it), then the feds outbid state agencies for PPE. And when that didn't work, just outright had customs steal them:
https://www.warren.senate.gov/oversight/letters/warren-deman...
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/how-the-federal-gove...
Our state's orders for PPE was impounded at the port by the feds, who them claimed they had no idea what anyone was talking about. Our state got a bunch of PPE because the NFL football team owner sent his team's 737 to China to pick up masks and gowns (which turned out to have all sorts of problems, like being sized for children.)
Our governor stopped just shy of saying "yes" when asked if he'd sent state troopers into NYC to meet the plane and escort the truck.
https://www.wbur.org/news/2020/04/14/baker-mum-on-whether-st...
> If the wealthy don't pay enough taxes, the middle class will be harmed.
"Will be"? It's been going on for decades. Bush and Trump tax cuts made it even worse and skyrocketed the deficit to boot.
But I think the earlier comment may have been referring to the restrictions in the US relative to other countries. Most other countries were much more severe for their lockdowns
Congrats on buying into the propaganda. Do you really believe that these initiatives push anyone to hire the unqualified?
When you have ten candidates who are all qualified, and your entire workforce is white, or asian, or black, or male, all that DEI asks is to maybe consider not just hiring more of your ethnic group/gender/etc. Maybe branch out a bit. What it does not say is that if you have 1 qualified candidate from the majority ethnic group and 9 who are unqualified minorities, you have to lower your standards. That's the lie that the reactionary groups are pushing, and it's received readily without the burden of even slight scrutiny.
The people pushing falsehoods about DEI are, shockingly, not enlightened progressives in any other regard. They are not the philosophical heirs of Dr. King.
It IS a problem and they SHOULD be re-written, so why isn't it?? Saying "change tax laws if its a problem" when its structurally almost impossible to get through congress IS the problem people are talking about & its disengenuous to handwave that away.
But we don't have a right to recklessly infect other people with a disease against their will either. Personally, as someone trying to keep elderly and immunocompromised friends and family alive through the pandemic, some of whom ended up dying from COVID, I am still angry at anyone who disobeyed or fought against those lockdowns: they were killing other people.
> equity initiatives like DEI and Affirmative Action have always left me a bad taste
Affirmative action is illegal in the USA, and nearly all DEI initiatives and efforts are based on making sure people are hired on merit instead of race, and that the workplace culture doesn't make it impossible for people from other backgrounds to participate and succeed, e.g. is inclusive. Trump's claims about meritocracy are a red herring. The core premise of the MAGA movement is the idea that only white people are qualified, and anyone else is a "DEI hire." If you’re a Japanese American you can bet these people think you are unqualified and should be replaced.
> The sheer amount of tax dollars being spent with wanton abandon is ridiculous science
US academic research is the 'engine' that drives industrial/tech dominance in the USA, and is practically a rounding error in federal spending. Go look up any successful engineering or science professor at a well known research institution and you will typically find a large number of companies that exist spun off just from the research of a single lab.
It was ruled illegal by the Supreme Court (for college admissions, at least) in 2023. Don't pretend like it didn't exist before that. It had to be exist before it was able to be challenged in court.
No right in the constitution has ever been, and never will be, absolute - including the right to life. For example, your right to life ends the split second after you are a credible threat to someone else's right to life - which is why cops will shoot you if you point a gun at someone - or them.
Your right to leave your house ends when doing so means you could make other people seriously or life-threateningly sick. Hence why health departments have had the legal authority to order people confined for two centuries.
You want to participate in society? There are requirements. If you don't like them, go live in a country that doesn't have those laws - there a plenty of countries with little functioning government where you can live out your libertarian wet dreams.
> The wealthy pay more taxes, anyone who understands how tax brackets are structured should know this.
In 1960, billionaires paid a 56% tax. Today they pay a 23% tax: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/05/03/opinion/globa...
In 2018 billionaires paid less tax than the poorest half of the population:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/10/08/first-tim...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/06/opinion/incom...
Or they could move to the total opposite, a notorious high government nanny state like Finland, where the mere suggestion of a curfew was immediately dismissed as unconstitutional as it should be.
> >Covid response in the US wasn't that bad > Lockdowns were in violation of the right to free assembly, and more broadly the emergency powers used for protracted timeframes to enforce them were ruled illegal by various State courts.
Public health overrules free assembly, and it always has. And we didn't actually have lock-downs in the US, unlike China. I was able to take a walk every day, and in the end found that if the entire US had followed the California guidelines, a few more hundred thousand lives would have been saved.
> >global warming really is causing the floods and fires and hurricanes and the EVs really are helping, as would methane emissions rules and so on > But screeching Global Warming or Climate Change against everything doesn't > actually help. It certainly helps you feel warm and fluffy, though.
Don't take action to prevent harm to yourself because you feel bad about the message - a classic "don't act on what is true" strategy. I don't feel warm and fluffy, but I do use solar power to power my HVAC and cars, in the hope that our descendants will be able to enjoy the sandy beaches I grew up on.
> >if people think the bi-coastal elites are looking down on them (and they are), like so what >"So what?" is how Trump got elected and then re-elected. Don't underestimate >peoples' resentment to being talked down, especially over long periods of time >for no justifiable reason. There's a reason Trump called his 2024 run the >people's retribution.
For the US, for one state to look down on other states is the norm. No one criticizes South Carolina more than North Carolina. This self-superiority is not a problem in the way that dying of a preventable disease or getting flooded by a heavy rainstorm is. Asheville was perfectly happy not being DC; it didn't like getting flooded.
>>If the wealthy don't pay enough taxes, the middle class will be harmed.
>The wealthy pay more taxes, anyone who understands how tax brackets are >structured should know this. Yes, tax avoidance/efficiency shenanigans abound, >Trump himself has admitted to using them, but why not? Noone is going to leave >money on the table. The law allows for them. The tax laws should be rewritten if >it's a problem.
Compared to like when Nixon was President, the middle class is harmed and the wealthy pay much less (prima facie not enough given the issues with having good schools). I would love to let the Trump tax cuts expire.
>>Making sure black folks and other historically disadvantaged groups do better will raise the quality of life for all of us
>Speaking as a Japanese-Americann, equity initiatives like DEI and Affirmative >Action have always left me a bad taste. They are racism, sexism, and all the >other forms of discrimination. I 300% support Trump's mandate to judge everyone >strictly based on merit, it's MLK's dream given new life.
Do you think Trump is actually hiring the best people for jobs? Do you think legacy admissions to elite schools is a good idea? Do you think that allowing people to continue to refuse to sell homes to Asians is good? I live in a city with only about 2% African Americans, so the discriminatees are mostly Asian and South Asian. What I have found is that a more egalitarian approach to cultural differences enriches the whole city. And I certainly supported reparations to the survivors of the Japanese internment camps, and would support a similar pay-back for the descendants of people impoverished by chattel slavery or red-lining, racist urban "redevelopment" or job discrimination.
>>if we don't encourage the successful migration and acculturation of people from around the world, our population will decline and our economy will decline.
>There is nothing successful about illegal aliens spamming the country en masse. >There is nothing prosperous about an economy propped up by illegal slave labor.
Not sure what you mean by illegal slave labor, but immigration to the United States is overwhelmingly an economic and cultural positive. Most (at least as of 4 Feb 25, things are changing rapidly) of the "illegal" immigrants Trump is referring to are legal refugees who very quickly become successful US residents and to whom we have treaty obligations to help (because of the problems before WWII).
>>If we don't invest in science, we will loose power and knowledge to those that do. The entitled white folks that teased all the kids that were good at math and science in the 1970s etc. might wish it weren't so, but it is so.
>The sheer amount of tax dollars being spent with wanton abandon is ridiculous science or otherwise, especially when we also have many pressing concerns that need to be on the budget.
US gov't spends about $73B in 2022 according to https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20246
Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Defense are roughly 10x that. It's very little spending for a lot of good benefits; even on a purely economic basis, pure research pays for itself. Again, your post seems to be a long series of falsehoods. I don't know if you believe them or not, but your post makes my point: Trump was elected by voters that believe things that are not so.
And that passed without much more than an exasperated sigh.
No, I think the populace will go along with whatever these folks deem acceptable. It’s like a bad movie.
EDIT: To be clear, that's predicated on assumption things are fundamentally different here and now from Germany in the 1930s. If not, we're already cooked.
Protesting for Gaza was squashed last time by basically everyone, and will be again.
That’s pretty optimistic…
It's really interesting seeing how widely varied peoples' definitions of these things are.
I thank NZ for leading the way.
It's mostly too late to do anything at that point. People won't even have money for ammo.
bringing down the system?
Win or lose, I'm thinking money is flowing up to the same people.
This is an understatement to say the least, and the fact it's been denied and even refused by the powers that be until today is why the pendulum has swung as hard as it has.
Americans wanted change, and they finally got it with ferocious retribution because it's been held back for so long.
`Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.`
Explaining the pendulum swinging violently because folks didn’t feel heard is not the same thing as saying that it’s a good thing that the pendulum has swung so violently.
That said, that is tangential and irrelevant to explaining how and why the pendulum swung back as hard as it did.
Trump won his first term in 2016 because Americans were fed up with the Bush+Obama status quo of endless wars and waste. Drain the swamp, fuck the establishment! As the sentiment of the day went; remember Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party? Biden winning 2020 was a sharp rebuke by the powers that be; how dare the people demand change and elect an outsider, how dare the people demand peace and effective government. Biden and Harris's 2024 campaigns likewise were based strictly and ultimately on continuing the status quo; Harris "had no policy" in large part because the "policy" was the status quo.
Trump winning again in 2024 with a historic campaign is a sharp rebuke to that, he is the people's retribution for being denied and refused for so long time and time again. For voters like me and us, NASA and the like having their funding slashed and denied is merely collateral damage for a greater and long-awaited cause.
Does this include threatening Greenland with military action or does it not count as war if there is little resistance to be expected?
It's objective fact that Trump did not start a single war during his first term (he only inherited wars from his predecessors), his successor Biden immediately went back to starting wars. Americans will not tolerate declarations of war or otherwise military actions on Denmark/Greenland or Panama, we voted for him in large part because he is the first President in a long time who hates wars.
No. More. Wars. This is non-negotiable. Every single warmonger and the military industrial complex can go fuck themselves.
However, if we can get Greenland and the Panama Canal amicably through business/diplomacy then, as an American, why not?
>Dalewyn could have his family deported
If we're here illegally then fuck yeah Trump is doing the right thing; he's just enforcing the law as written. I thought we were all about rule of law?
was there anything amicable about his recent claims about greenland ?
How do you reconcile having a leader suggesting curing covid with bleach to know how to make government efficients ? Musk couldn't turn twitter back as far as we know either..
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
― George Carlin
I try to understand how the "other side" is thinking about this. Disagreements on policy aside, why would "freedom loving Americans" want a king that can rule unilaterally?
Not trying to start a flame war or pose a gotcha question, I'm genuinely curious. What am I missing?
Every week a new target will be set, and no matter what will be done, people won't realize that the cause of their own problems are internal. Canada, Denmark, Mexico, Panama, you name it. At the same time there's a superpower (China) that is actively trying to unseat the leader. Superpower with more people, better manufacturing, more potential for the future income, more manpower, not cool with getting bullied and etc. That will also make the citizens unhappy, because "how dare China be better than us?!".
It also doesn't help that Americans aren't having children, which is objectively bad for the future of the leadership. The push for natalism, banning contraceptives, choice and etc. is points towards "you will have children no matter what and you will love it" scenario.
It's like a culmination of multiple problems that have been left rampant for the past couple of decades. Now they're trying to frantically swing the pendulum, but there's a chance that they'll end up pulling it a bit too hard so it will break.
But this time around something seems to have changed, where his supporters are ok with trump and team doing whatever. Be a forever president, rip up the constitution, rule by decree.
For example, the civil service passed new rules in the dying days of the Biden administration intended to stop Trump implementing Schedule F. This didn't come from Congress or the courts. They just passed it themselves. Trump is the boss so can undo that rule with a new rule, but they passed it within a framework of yet more rules they made themselves to slow that down so - if followed - it will take months. This is purely self serving protectionism and has nothing to do with democracy or the Constitution.
There's an interesting document here [1] that goes into all the ways the civil service betrayed Trump in the first term. Betrayal is a correct and moderate term to use. They were doing things like forging documents, lying to appointees about non-existent laws, refusing to prosecute legally clear cut cases in order to propagate woke ideology (e.g. discrimination against Asian Americans), deliberately keeping their bosses in the dark, refusing direct orders to do work if it would run contra to woke ideology and many more things.
From the Trump team's perspective the rules are largely fake: when they align with what the left want they're followed to the letter, when they don't they're ignored or subverted without consequence. He played that game in his first term, and is apparently no longer willing to do so. It's hard to know what Congress will do but presumably they're aware of the fact that their own laws have created this situation to some extent (even if not the full extent). It wouldn't be surprising to see civil service reform bills appear soon.
[1] https://americafirstpolicy.com/assets/uploads/files/Tales_fr...
There was a successful coup and the USA as such has fallen, now presumably on the route to failing.
The former is 100% how it will go. The only question is: how bad will it get?
A poster down thread mentions a million dead immigrants. I personally think it will just be in the low 6 figures. Maybe high 5 figures.
The doom and gloom in these comments is truly funny. I remember the exact same when Trump won the first time.
It’s like HN has no memory.
At this point, almost certainly the former.
1. Most Trump supporters do not think that there is a problem.
2. “Regular people” — that is, the folks who don’t track news — won’t notice any problems in their day-to-day lives until after said shakedown has been completed.
The only way large swathes of people will demand action is if they are hit hard in the wallets in an immediate and clear way (e.g., rapid price increases to one or more critical goods or services) or if a critical process (e.g., social security checks) gets disrupted. I’m not sure the current types of changes will reach that level.
This was a very weird realization and one that left me pretty sad.
Edit to clarify: I also mean no condescension toward "regular people".
Correct.
I’ve heard some harrowing stories about the moment of realization straight from the mouths of some of these people.
Edit: To be clear, I’m referring to my family and their friends who lived through it.
I’d love to know more.
Probably not news, but here are a few big ones that I remember from our conversations:
1. Family member lived in a rural area. They could see the train line that ran between two major cities. I can’t remember the exact order of events (e.g., construction), but at some point they noticed packed trains turning off the main tracks to go to a facility. Packed trains went in, and empty trains came out. At first they didn’t think anything of it… just resettlement stuff or war stuff or whatever. But then it continued. And continued. The rumors started. Everything was hush hush. Nobody dared to ask the authorities. Only later did they learn that it was a concentration camp and what actually happened there. That one kind of blew my mind… they had no idea about what was going on except vague rumors, most of which were wrong.
2. One family member had access to privileged information about the war (in the later stages of the war). One bit of info they knew was about causalities, and how certain assignments were less survivable than others. The propaganda machine made it seem like it was noble to go fight the war that would inevitably be won, but this person knew with a reasonable degree of mathematical estimation that some of the kids being sent off weren’t likely to come back. They said it was tough to look those parents, especially mothers, in the eyes when they made some comment about hoping their kid came home safely. My family member knew that these parents would likely never see their son again, and all for what was looking like a lost and/or questionable war effort that was still playing on nationalist sentiments.
3. This really isn’t that interesting, but… The propaganda late in the war made it seem like Germans in general and the troops specifically were eating well with an abundance of good food, while people who actually grew the food had to do things like use sawdust and straw as filler in their bread. They had a long list of accommodations that they told me that they made so that they didn’t feel hungry, and I don’t remember them all. The cool thing is that there were ways for the rural folks to get access to food beyond the rations. Sometimes they could sneak some extra food to the city-dwelling family members, but the folks in the cities seemed to have it tougher. They were sort of bitter about how the food situation got progressively worse as the war progressed as well as the total disconnect from reality that the propaganda was presenting.
Note that these were stories that were told to me decades ago about stuff that had happened many decades before then. I’m sure that some stories were embellished while others were muted. I’m also sure that some of the details were “lost in translation” — either via my mediocre German, their mediocre English, or the limits of language assistance that some of the bilingual folks provided.
I don’t really feel like I did these stories justice.
"First they came for DEI and I didn't speak out, because I was not Black..."
There were plenty of companies like Coinbase that ignored DEI initiatives and requested that employees leave "politics at the door" - and we all knew what kind of politics they meant. You could have voted with your feet.
I'm fully onboard with employees asking employees to be respectful to their colleagues regardless of gender, race, creed or color, that's just good for business.
I have voted with my feet by avoiding the self-announced inclusive. My objection is specific to reducto-ad-hitlerum.
DEI makes sure that everyone is part of the merit process.
It’s like how white people feel like Babe Ruth is an all time great, but say Josh Gibson isn’t because he played in the all black league. But playing in the all white league doesn’t count against you at all. No one considers them any less.
> 1. Most Trump supporters do not think that there is a problem.
Talk to any conservative -- even people who are/were skeptical of Trump -- or browse any conservative-leaning social media. It's clear that the people who voted for Trump fully understood what they voted for: they wanted what's happening. Project 2025 is a good thing in the eyes of many. Maybe they think politicizing the whole executive branch is a little distasteful, but in the eyes of literally millions of Americans, it's a means to a well-justified and long-awaited end.
They believe it has already been politicized by people who hate them.
The Project 2025 document is really interesting along those lines as well. It's close to 1000 pages, but you can skim pretty much any section that isn't about the military and get the idea. Politicizing the executive branch is an explicitly stated goal, over and over. And furthermore, the push to disband the department of education is specifically an overly political, not because it's ineffective in its mission, but because it's "a one-stop shop for the woke education cartel" -- and yes that is a direct quote.
This is a very tight and succinct summary of many conversations I’ve had with conservative family and acquaintances.
> I don't know why you're being downvoted.
The votes on my comment are going up and down like a yo-yo.
I’m pretty sure it’s because I used the term “regular people”, and I used it in quotes. I get the sense that some people are reading more into that phrase than I intended.
Edit: Scratch that, they plan to abolish the department of education
There was zero condescension in my tone or intent.
I put “regular people” in quotes simply because I think most people who do follow the news absolutely don’t realize that the vast majority of people don’t.
A simple litmus test for this is to ask random people you meet outside of your personal social and professional circles (e.g., the front desk person at the gym, a cashier at a grocery store, a rideshare driver… whatever) a simple question like “Who are our US senators?” or “What is the NIH?” I’ve done this, and the sentiment was largely “don’t know, don’t care”.
This isn’t a criticism. It’s just an observation that some issues that some folks on HN care about (e.g., details about how lesser known parts of the government function — for example, what’s happening at the NIH and NSF) just aren’t on the radar for large swathes of the population.
> absolutely notice it at the pump and at the grocery store. They aren't mindless robots.
I think we agree on this, right?
And my point is that price changes for most things won’t hit immediately.
1. There have been delays in most of the tariffs.
2. The impact of some tariffs will take longer to hit than others. Fresh food will be fast. Goods with longer shelf lives canned goods, alcohol, and prepared foods might take a while.
Price of eggs dropped yet?
Orwell wrote about this in 1984 (and also, incidentally, fought fascists on the ground during the Spanish Civil War):
"To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself -- that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink."
Never know, if enough people divest , people might give a shit.
But I'm not holding my breath.
Fascism isn't a spending level (and because corporatism is an element of fascism and blurs the lines between public and private institutions supporting the governing ideology, the level of resources that are formally in government is particularly irrelevant to fascism.)
Also, employees are countable individual entities and not an undifferentiated mass, so fewer, not less.
And this, I think, points to the corruption of the entire political class in America with just being upshot.
You can buy another countries tech if it benefits you or just move.
I believe that what those wealthy people aren't accounting for is the need for some class of humans to act as a translation layer between the expert AI systems and the rest of us in order to allow the discoveries and results to percolate through human institutions.
Or, rather, they may be underestimating the bottleneck that will be introduced by trying to hoard all of those results within their own circles of trust and influence.
No LLM trained on PubMed will be able to suss this all out - more data is needed.
Even in pure mathematics, where I am currently a grad student and as needed a big fan of trying to get LLMs to explain stuff to me at 1 am, they just aren't that good. If it's a popular question where I could have tried math overflow, sure, it's probably just going to get some details weirdly wrong, but for subtle complex concepts, it's not making some golden age of truth and understanding.
And God help the LLMs trying to understand physics that are trained on all the BS on Youtube and the blogs.
Andreesson has the same blindness - he wrote the first web browsers (having not invented HTTP or the web or browsers) and parleyed that into a fortune by investing. I guess he's a skilled investor, a smart financial person, but there is no evidence that he has some special science expertise or extraordinary intelligence. From my observations, one can understand nothing about science or the physical world and do well with software and investing.
As far as "far-sighted," the history from 1980 onwards is the destruction of many things in society devoted to the long view in favor of short-term financialization.
And for all you HN readers supporting these massive changes: you'd test changes beforehand and plan their deployment carefully if this were software. So why why do you support explicitly not doing those things when the livelihood of 300 million people depend on the economy being stable?!?
And before the inevitable derail or whatabout attempt: Don't play political games with people's lives.
And, again, everything is political, including every aspect of discussions on HN.
Culture warriors only care about about their "side" winning. It's not an intellectual battle, but an emotional one. Rules be damned, their side is winning and dishing out retribution for, and rolling back decades of defeat on the battle for social values - civil rights, race mixing, gay marriage, LGBTQ rights, and the gall to elect a black president, BLM, #metoo, etc.
We're at the final stage of the cycle—ochlocracy. (Mob rule)
I don't think Trump will be king, to be blunt he's too old and not skilled enough.
I'm worried about the next guy or the one after that.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/feb/04/benjamin-...
Trump said Palestinians have “no alternative” but to “permanently” leave Gaza due to the devastation left by Israel’s war on Hamas. He described Gaza as a “pure demolition site” and claimed Palestinians would “love to leave Gaza”. “I don’t know how they could want to stay,” he said.
Trump’s comments marked the first time he has publicly floated the permanent relocation of Palestinians from Gaza. The US president’s remarks in effect endorsed ethnic cleansing of the territory over the opposition of Palestinians and the neighbouring countries.
Trump is literally for completely ridding Gaza of the Palestinians so Israel can colonize it. An ACTUAL genocide.
And actually, you in fact can argue that Trump has been better on the issue than Biden. Multiple news outlets have reported that it was Trump that forced the ceasefire:
- https://www.wsj.com/opinion/trump-forced-netanyahu-to-make-a...
- https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=64825
- https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-01-13/ty-article/.p...
- https://www.timesofisrael.com/arab-official-trump-envoy-sway...
Everything you find with regarding Trump is rhetoric while his actions have been much more peaceful than Biden's.
Which brings me back to my main point: it's absurd and hysterical to be claiming that Trump is uniquely fascist here. Whoever is freaking out now about him, and was not freaking out about Biden, is a fraud and should be called out as a fraud.
The US was in favor of a two state solution. The US is now saying that half of one state, by population, is no longer available. It's clear to anyone with two neurons to rub together that the other half is gone within the next four years.
This was the goal of the Biden administration. The difference now is that without Israel demolishing Gaza every day, the resistance has demonstrated they cannot be dislodged. Trump has no credibility. They simply cannot do it and both the U.S. and Israeli officials that enabled this are war criminals that should be prosecuted immediately.
I'm not all that big a fan of that style comment rising to the top threads like this myself, even though I likely lean very opposite of cft on political matters and what I think the impact of this will be like.
Also, I'm wondering if multiple universities could band together to file a TRO and/or a class-action lawsuit against the government for something like estoppel.
As part of the curriculum, there were distinct lessons (in this hard-science course) on feminist design, avoiding white-savior rollouts, and cultural relativism -- with much room to expound on their importance, and little room to critique.
I happened to agree with lots of the mindsets of these lessons a priori, but I was definitely acutely aware the whole course that there was an ideological bent, even in STEM.
The networking stack obviously had no viewpoint, but the course teaching it certainly did.
I used to work in academia and was involved in NSF and DOE grants. I’ve been in industry (IC then manager) since then.
My sense is that grant funding was less merit based than industry funding. I’m not saying it’s so corrupt that it should be completely torn down, but there’s just less accountability in academia - you can get a grant, fail to deliver on what you promised, and still get another grant after that and that can be your whole career if you know how to play the academic social game and are good at writing proposals.
The last time I checked when I worked at a Stanford biomedical university department that was substantially NIH-funded, there were 2 full time employee grant writers who had to supply the government grant process with a laundry list of specific data with each carefully-worded proposal because they were regularly competing with other universities to win a specific grant.
Musk is neither competent nor efficient. He looks at line items and makes stuff up. He destroys a hundred useful things to destroy a bad one. Details don't matter to him. Its the same con man mentality that feeds off the works of his workforce. People who think he is a genius are gullible.
Regardless of what you think of his intellectual capacity, he has a proven track record of organizing people to produce exceptional outcomes !
An inevitable characteristic of his algorithm is chaos: delete as many constraints and parts as possible. When things break, re-add those necessary parts.
- Calling payments to non-profit organizations fraudulent on a whim.
- The sweeping condemnation of what USAID was doing.
- His call for a blanket drop of regulations.
Either he knows better or he is totally lost in his sauce. Hard to say what's worse for where he is right now.
I believe, he does not care. He only cares about his conception of the world and how AI and Mars are more important than those tiny tiny human problems. Society has to serve him and his god complex. He was told to find his subsidies and tax cuts by himself. That's what he is doing.
It’s just that government isn’t that.
Or are his companies successful despite that? The impression I get is that his direct reports are exceptionally good managers and shield the companies from his dumbest moves. Except at Twitter--that's lost, what, 75% of its value? (still works as a political platform for him though)
I don’t condone manage by trolling; it’s not how I want to manage or be managed. But it seems to have worked out for his industrial complex.
There is no accountability or efficiency in unelected technocrats blowing up what was working without a plan or subject matter expertise.
- Audit spending (at USAID or wherever else)
- Come up with details of where there is waste, being transparent about it for the public to see and review
- Use that to recommend change to congress / the president, again in full public view
Then I'd have no issues. The problem is, what's actually happening is:
- Musk and team are in there with no accountability and no transparency. We don't know what he has access to, what was done
- Unilaterally making changes without public review or oversight. It's a "trust me bro" stance.
- From the few things that has been published, many seem to be outright lies (50m on condoms) or extremely biased conclusions (IRS direct filing)
> On Sunday, CNN reported that DOGE personnel attempted to improperly access classified information and security systems at the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and that top USAID security officials who thwarted the attempt were subsequently put on leave.
Retaliation is very bad, especially when it comes to trying to protect national security information. As a semi-technical person running several large technical companies, even if he had zero experience with the DoD before, Musk should at the very least understand how important it is to guard your "IP".
Bullying, intimidation, arrogance. Traits that I would’ve hoped most would be against.
I feel more and more like a large portion of the American public exists at the weaponized intersection of the subbing Kruger effect and Chesterton fence. They hear so many vague platitudes about waste that it’s just taken as dicta without evidence. That somehow provides a global mandate to break anything.
If we survive this I hope that the government workforce starts to get more respect of the hard work they do on complicated problems to make fair processes and that they stop getting just blanket accused of incompetence for ideological gain.
Waste needs to be cut back - that is morally required to happen, because it's not waste of some private company's money, it's the waste of other peoples' money - the only problem is that you can't take the Office Space "What would you say you do here?" approach of randomly cutting people, but have to address the systemic issues that result in tens of billions of dollars lost yearly.
Some of these include:
- literal incentives to waste money in the form of "if you don't use your whole budget every year, we'll cut it next year" (which applies to large parts of the military and defense, which happen to be some of the biggest spenders)
- massive bureaucracy that takes processes that should take a day and turns them into multi-week-long nightmares
- terrible office cultures that encourage single-points-of-failure...and then gives those people lots of vacation time
- large policy sub-orgs that focus on evaluating requests against hundreds of thousands of pages of policy instead of trying to help the workers actually get things done
- terrible contracting processes that result in the government paying 2-10x more than private industry does for goods and services (which only a small increase in quality or reliability)
...and many, many more problems.
> I hope that the government workforce starts to get more respect of the hard work they do on complicated problems
You can simultaneously believe that the average government worker is competent and hard-working, and that the bureaucracy as a whole is extremely inefficient due to systemic issues.
Blanket defense of government (in)efficiency actively makes the problems worse. Focus your energy instead on adding nuance when discussing the problems and solutions.
The issue though is with the way it’s being done. Giving it the most charitable take, it’s at best reckless. No oversight, no transparency. We can only take him at his word that things are being improved. But given the various false and misleading statements that’s already come out, of the limited info being released, how can we trust him?
Yes, spot on, I think this is very accurate and truthful.
I'm just trying to differentiate between "the government is wasteful, and here's the careful and prudent way to make it better" and "the government isn't very wasteful and we should avoid even talking about the possibility".
Method aside, musk is trying to save a few million here and there on things that are “wasteful” but provide benefit to a lot of people, including Americans. Meanwhile, a multi trillion dollar tax cut that’s going mostly to the wealthy is fine and not wasteful for some reason. Jacked up prices from a handful of defense contractors is also fine.
It's not hard to effect change over time with a few memos (e.g. no more "pregnant people") and reviews. It may not be quick enough for certain items already in motion, but that really doesn't matter if the pipeline quickly empties out as the memos take effect.
The scorched earth policy is intended to sow fear.
> sanity check (why it is problematic): The phrase sanity check is ableist, and unnecessarily references mental health in code bases. It denotes that people with mental illnesses are inferior, wrong, or incorrect. Using an appropriate replacement will also clarify what is intended.
There are of course endless examples. Such sentiments are so absurd on their face, and yet they abound. The first thing "actual leadership" must do is speak the truth and acknowledge that there is a problem.
[1] https://it.uw.edu/guides/identity-diversity-inclusion/inclus...
University of Michigan DEI is 1100+ employees strong (!!) at a cost of over $30M/year (the equivalent of 1,800 students’ worth of tuition), and they are launching an even bigger DEI 2.0.
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/2025/02/02/kabbany...
I am not a DJT fan at all, but stories like these are exactly what has people stark raving mad. I can’t really blame them.
While the stated goals are noble, the truth in many cases is that it is an excuse to exclude white males. And I expect downvotes, but you don’t have to look too far to see the truth.
Even if someone thinks DEI had to go, they ought to be aware that their beliefs are being used as nothing but a smokescreen for unparalleled destruction and plunder.
They don’t have an entitlement to other people’s money, and if they are perceived as wasting it or spending in discriminatorily then you should expect the public to become less willing to give it to you.
The Federal government found a niche in basic research for a few decades and funded the vast majority of that. Per NSF, today even basic research is <40% funded by the Federal government, again not due to a decline in Federal funding but due to vast increases in industry investment. This shift toward industry investment in basic research was not overnight, it has been a monotonic trend for decades. Over the last century, the areas where Federal research funding is critical have dwindled greatly in scope because industry spends more money and is willing to take more risks.
One of the more interesting stories here is why and how this change happened in the US, to the point where the vast majority of R&D is funded by industry even in areas historically dominated by Federal government funding.
Also, industry isn't really doing that much to train the next generation of scientists.
Further more, my wife works in biotech so I have seen first hand the compromises one has to make to secure private funding. They care about things like market size and revenue potential when making these investments, which means you end up with most of the money flowing towards diseases that largely affect rich people and solutions that are either expensive or recurring. And lets also not forget that almost all of these companies are working off of or spinning out from research programs that were funded by the government. I have yet to meet a single company where that wasn't the case.
The idea that the blatantly illegal actions by the current administration reflect public will simply isn't based in any kind of reality- just calling it out as a lie.
For example, I suspect the public strongly supports taxpayer funding of medical research, but strongly opposes taxpayer funding for social sciences.
It's simply a delusion that DEI is some unmeritocratic disaster. The reality is academia has its pick of top talent regardless of race or gender. I don't know any scientists who buy into this delusion irl. Diversity is a small factor in hiring because the field is already predominantly white men and it's no harder to pick top star talent when you diversify.
Simply insane that you are promoting the destruction of US science, US foreign aid, and so much of the good stuff the US government does, all in the name of a deeply delusional witch hunt.
>Just let us vote and ask if we feel discriminated against or oppressed because of DEI.
A majority of the electorate did vote for ending this.
I understand that that is the stated intention. I also believe they are racist and discriminatory.
> Not sure you’re aware of this, but academia used to be basically off-limits to anyone not white and male.
I also understand this. And now it is not. What is the point here?
From psychology department at University of Washington [1]:
> I advise deleting the statement below as it shows that URM [underrepresented minority] applications were singled out and evaluated differently than non-URM applications (which is not allowed as [redacted] noted)
> At a faculty meeting, someone whose name is redacted “informed faculty that the Hiring Committee had three outstanding candidates and so they used DEI to distinguish and select a first offer"
[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/diversity...
https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/fire-statement-use-di...
"Speech First, a group advocating for First Amendment rights on US campuses, released an investigation on Thursday that found 165 of 248 selected institutions — from American University to Williams College — mandate DEI-related classes to meet general education requirements."
https://nypost.com/2024/04/11/us-news/two-thirds-of-us-colle...
Imagine a world where us intellectual types hadn’t given the right this kind of talking point on a silver platter. Election might have gone differently.
I mean that genuinely. It's unclear reality matters at all. People just make up things to be mad about now.
I largely agree but I doubt other issues would be such massive free wins for Republicans. The Republican base has become rabid over DEI and trans issues and it has been really obvious for a while now that it was going to be a massive problem for Democrats. Sadly these issues have become more divisive than even gun control.
Outside of academia you have things like the FAA hiring scandal coming to light: https://substack.com/home/post/p-156166190
The list goes on and on.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/opinion/how-dei-conquered-the-university...
This simply is not the case, I know it is something that you and many others believe is that case but you are being lied to by actual racists. I say that as a white man working in STEM academia. Academia had a long history and tradition of NOT doing meritocracy, but of claiming meritocracy and using bad markers of meritocracy to prove it. The 'DEI work' that people are so concerned about is about trying to make merit based decision making actually merit based. You think that is based on giving some preference, but it isn't - its based on acknowledging and working to eliminate actual prejudice. Its about hiring the best people instead of the person who's advisor is friends with our search chair.
I'll give a concrete example: I ran a hiring search for three faculty members. We did a blind search. The hiring committee did not know the gender, race, ethnicity, or even institutional affiliation of any candidate. The candidates were ranked, the top invited for phone interviews, and then ranked again during the interviews with everyone blind to the first set of rankings. We repeated this for a smalled group of in person interviews The order of the rankings at all three phases matched. More relevant, we interviewed and hired the most diverse crop of faculty we have ever hired. Simply because of the appearance who we hired, two different candidates who were did not received interviews emailed me and my department chair to decry that we had used 'DEI' in our BLIND hiring process. One threatened a lawsuit. We blinded it to race, to gender, to all markers of 'diversity', but the gender and race of who we hired was all the proof that person needed they were less qualified than him.
In other cases, this 'stuff' protects against asshole colleagues and bad science. (1) Diversity statements help us avoid getting sued by students and employees. The statements that wax philosophic about inclusion, that quote MLK, the ones people use to label this as some ideological test, SUCK to read and get applications ignored because they lack serious thought about being a colleague. The good ones, which get noticed, are about how people work effectively with other people, and how they make an effort to understand people as part of working with them. The context, whether its about being Green, Left-handed, or Neurodivergent tell us whether this person has thought about being a mentor to people unlike them, has a capacity to empathize with a student, or is going to be a self-righteous asshole that is going to make us hate faculty meetings even more. They help us know if their grad students are going to be in tears in the chairs office or the parents of an undergrad are calling the dean. (2) They actually tell us a lot about doing good science and getting grants. Theres a long history in medicine of fucking up because of who is in our participant pool. NIH now makes you articulate about how you will not do bad science through lazy recruitment[2]. We've asked questions about this requirement of candidates during interviews. The answers are fun and telling - using coded language to say you won't recruit Black people because they are 'less reliable' is just evidence you don't get it, not that you are some purist doing important work.
That is the DEI you are being propagandized to be against - what it actually is not what you are told it is. It is not hyperbole and you are tired by design - because you are a victim of propaganda. The nonsense narrative that is being pushed is, without concern for the truth, entirely grounded in the assertion that certain groups are unqualified to do intellectual work (c.f.[3]). It is (by design) meant to establish that the mere appearance of a Black Women or a gay person on a faculty is only because they are unqualified. It is meant to exclude people who have always been excluded. It is not about pushing back on (nonexistant) out of control efforts to include them. What is changing is efforts to counteract the actual, long established, clearly evidenced, bias in favor of certain groups of candidates. That is not some ideological project to eliminate people like me because I'm not a minority, that is the thing you want.
[1] https://mbb.yale.edu/news/mbb-radically-changing-how-we-sear... [2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6053906/ [3] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/darren-b...
When I talk to people outside academia about “DEI”, it’s clear to me that whatever they think that term means, it has no relationship to anything I’ve ever seen in my career (involving faculty searches, recruitment of students and staff, education, involvement in clinical trial design and recruitment, etc.).
I would like to understand your point here. I agree with you that the stated justification for DEI policies is based on "acknowledging and working to eliminate actual prejudice". I also believe that they explicitly give preference to certain groups of people over others. So what is the point here? Because they are based on a noble goal, we should accept them? And if, instead, they were based on another nefarious purpose, they would not be acceptable?
A policy may arise from various motivations, but eventually it must be evaluated on its own merits. Of course, the same policy may be implemented in various ways, toward a nefarious purpose or to a noble purpose. You sound like you genuinely care about this issue and I appreciate that when you hire people you consider they may contribute to the community in your department, how well they will mentor students, and so on. Those are all important things and I am happy you interpret DEI that way, but unfortunately that is not how they are often interpreted.
From the journalism department at UC [1]:
> Our commitment, should we be successful with this application, is to hire someone from the BIPOC community
From the geography department at UC [1]:
> Our aim is specifically to hire a Black, Indigenous, or Latinx faculty member
From ethnic studies at UC [1]:
> We have an urgent and qualified need for BIPOC femme/women of color faculty in an Africana Studies focus who will contribute to the social science division thematic cluster hire in racism and racial inequality.
From psychology dept. at U Washington [2]:
> I advise deleting the statement below as it shows that URM [underrepresented minority] applications were singled out and evaluated differently than non-URM applications (which is not allowed as [redacted] noted)
> At a faculty meeting, someone whose name is redacted “informed faculty that the Hiring Committee had three outstanding candidates and so they used DEI to distinguish and select a first offer"
> Before finalists were narrowed to three, five finalists were invited to virtual visits, with the schedules including meetings with the Women Faculty and Faculty of Color groups. But a member of the latter group expressed opposition to meeting the white candidates. “As a person who has been on both sides of the table for these meetings, I have really appreciated them,” the unnamed person wrote in an email. “Buuut, when the candidate is White, it is just awkward. The last meeting was uncomfortable, and I would go as far as burdensome for me. Can we change the policy to not do these going forward with White faculty?”
If you believe that the sentiments expressed above are acceptable in a professional, academic setting, then we have totally different ethical values.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/opinion/how-dei-conquered-the-university...
[2] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/diversity...
> I also believe that they explicitly give preference to certain groups of people over others. So what is the point here?
You give the example of the journalism, geography, and ethnic studies departments specifically seeking minority viewpoints.
FWiW I don't think the DEI corporate and other programs in the USofA have been particularly well executed, they appear (from afar) to be more performative than substantive, however ...
The three examples you gave should more or less answer your own question for you.
Journalism, good reporting, brings deep informed insights from the ground. That's not going to happen when reporting on foreign countries and disadvantaged communities if all the reporters are (say) from a WASP background and perspective.
Geography isn't just maps, there are strong elements of people's relations with land that are part of that domain .. again a breadth of viewpoints gives richer coverage.
Ethnic studies. .. I mean does this really need a comment as to why diverse viewpoints deliver broader outcomes?
> breadth of viewpoints gives richer coverage
Breadth of viewpoint has nothing intrinsically to do with the color of one's skin.
> Journalism, good reporting, brings deep informed insights from the ground. That's not going to happen when reporting on foreign countries and disadvantaged communities if all the reporters are (say) from a WASP background and perspective.
Again, the quality of a reporter and their work has nothing to do intrinsically with the color of their skin.
I didn't say that. Perhaps you might like to re-read. We may have different backgrounds in parsing English.
> Breadth of viewpoint has nothing intrinsically to do with the color of one's skin.
Again, I didn't say that.
The point of these fat fingered US attempts to fix a problem is to ... fix a problem.
The problem is that the starting point in reporting, ethinic studies, and geography was that the fields were dominated by an unrepresentative minority; white faces with vanilla backgrounds being the voices of authority on subjects they had no experience of.
That was the problem. These fixes aren't great.
Also, I would like to say, I agree with you! Such a sentiment is deplorable and must be condemned. However, it does not follow that academic departments should use race or sexuality or gender as a factor when hiring professors.
In fact, when you are hiring professors on the tenure track, I am sure the first ten or even twenty professors (at least!) are all eminently qualified. Of course, there is a degree of randomness in any selection process. But as the sources in my sibling comment suggest, DEI factors are being used explicitly to distinguish and rank people. That I believe is unacceptable.
We need to do better. The US government isn't Twitter. Breaking things simply because you have the power is the opposite of leadership, it's nihilism.
When I worked for Google I visited NIH, sat on study groups, and helped advise program managers how to move more compute to the cloud. Like many other techies in SV I have a PhD in a quantitative science and understand how NIH works. My efforts were entirely designed to help update the establishment, not tear it down, and that's true for the wide swath of my coworkers I encountered.
The folks who are doing this are a subset of the tech community, who do not represent the larger community.
"Been thinking a lot about whether it's possible to stop humanity from developing AI. I think the answer is almost definitely not. If it's going to happen anyway, it seems like it would be good for someone other than Google to do it first."
- Altman to Musk, immediately before proposing what became OpenAI ( https://www.techemails.com/p/elon-musk-and-openai )
"OpenAI is on a path of certain failure relative to Google. There obviously needs to be immediate and dramatic action or everyone except for Google will be consigned to irrelevance."
- Musk to Altman, later ( https://www.techemails.com/p/elon-musk-openai-path-of-certai... )
I'm not convinced. In the past half decade or so this industry has veered hard toward outright fraud and grift. I see this trend all over--adtech, cryptocoins, "AI", security... These days I assume technologists are frauds until they prove otherwise. It's a blunt instrument, but it often works well.
When I advise the NIH to do was to do a large bulk group buy on behalf of many thousands of scientists that use the scale of the NIH to negotiate in extremely large concession. My experience with Amazon is that you can basically get them down about 50% just by asking.
I work for a well-funded company now and we use the cloud and we have on-prem infrastructure. The on-prem infrastructure is extremely hard to change sometimes just asking for a GPU will take 6 months or more. Storage is always highly limited and slow. Let the cloud hyperscalers do what they're good at and focus on doing the science
There just seems to be an overall lack of respect for how government works, the broader machine and bureaucracy that is supposed to protect from unilateral decisions made by a single entity. Government is not, and should not, be run like a tech startup. Going fast and breaking things isn't a recipe for stability or reliability in both government and software. History has tried kings and dictators and, well, they never turn out great for the general population. Democracy is slow and sucks sometimes, but it also has a ton of perks that we seem all too quick to dismiss and throw away.
What came after the gilded age, again?
No reason to think it will be better when applied to the federal government.
"These folks" can absolutely be described as the tech community:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justine_Tunney
> In March 2014, Tunney petitioned the US government on We the People to hold a referendum asking for support to retire all government employees with full pensions, transfer administrative authority to the technology industry, and appoint the executive chairman of Google Eric Schmidt as CEO of America.
Are they not part of the tech community now? You highly overestimate the political homogeneity of the tech community, because opposing voices were previously so shut down. You would be surprised by what your co-workers are thinking deep down.
People who love working at Big Tech love it for everything people who go for the Startup World hate, and vice versa.
Move fast and break things...
The fourth estates' and the masses' blind faith in and compliance to self-righteous, egotistical billionaires, one of whom may be a Nazi, is what is both disappointing and frightening.
Places with solid research institutions and less-dysfunctional governments.
There is conservative... then there is Trump.
Meanwhile, TikTok (et al) tells us to talk about ourselves ... the current focus of attention of the Fifth most popular social network of the citizens of the United States. [1] [2]
Q: how could we have avoided this pathetic crawl into encouraging stupidity?
(Feeling sad, thinking, 'Look at our Works, and cry.')
[1] https://later.com/blog/tiktok-trends/
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...
Injecting dumb politics and refusing grants just because people put the words "biases" in their application is a great way to appeal to Republicans's undereducated voters (see https://www.commerce.senate.gov/services/files/4BD2D522-2092... for an example of their idiotic rhetoric) but also a crazy gamble on the US's ability to be a superpower in two decades.
Just look at what happened in France when right-wing governments started defunding research: a slow but massive brain drain of the best minds. What does the current administration think will happen to our economy when they start burning future brains when they're at the seed stage?
If you have talent, why deal with the (frequently) middling pay and the existential risk that could follow every election?
== "not being allowed to include"
i.e. a restriction on free speech with more worrying implications than "injecting dumb politics"
Even in day to day interaction, forcing someone to be silent, is far more of a gentler 'social action' than forcing someone to speak.
Of course, they forget what came after the gilded age. It's raining stockbrokers - err, oligarchs!
I thought they'd care because if they are working so hard to sieze control, you'd think they'd want to hold on to it.
My how we’ve fallen. Trump could says he’s bigger than Jesus and sell a bible with the quote
This is taxpayers money and these agencies report to the President under the executive power. A shocker that government agencies might need account for spending.
And I’m sorry “its not a lot of money” doesn’t fly when all the “its not a lot of money” is $8 trillion dollars. The federal deficit will never get smaller if nobody looks at the “its not a lot of money” line items.
> Ok, so all payments are paused while funding is reviewed? ... This is taxpayers money ... A shocker that government agencies might need account for spending.
Reviewed for what?
Reviewed for whether the spending was authorized by Congress? If Musk finds that money is being spent in ways that are not authorized by Congress, and cuts that spending, great.
Reviewed for whether the money is being used efficiently to accomplish the goals set by Congress? Again, if Musk finds ways to stretch the same amount of money to accomplish more, that's great. For example, if Musk makes USAID more efficient so it delivers more aid for the same amount of money, that would be wonderful.
Or "reviewed" for whether Trump/Musk agree with them? It's illegal for the President to unilaterally cut programs just because he doesn't like them.
By that logic and taken to an extreme, Congress could pass a budget law (overriding the executive’s veto) to set executive spending for specific agencies to only be spent on computers, say the FBI, and the executive is powerless to Congresses control over the executive function to carry out the laws that the Congress has passed?
So clearly the intention is one of checks and balances, for example the President can’t spend money Congress does appropriate but also has some power over how that money is spent as such to exercise the power of the Executive.
So let’s see what the Constituion says as per Congress.gov!
“The constitutional dimensions of impoundment disputes have been confined to the political branches. The Supreme Court has not directly considered the extent of the President’s constitutional authority, if any, to impound funds.16 However, a case decided in 1838, United States v. Kendall,17 has been cited as standing for the proposition that the President may not direct the withholding of certain appropriations that, by their terms, mandate spending.18”
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artII-S3-3-7/...
Very interesting! Sounds like something he may want the Supreme Court to rule on!
I for one look forward to getting some clarity on this issue.
Quoting from the page you linked:
> Impoundments usually proceeded on the view that an appropriation sets a ceiling on spending for a particular purpose but typically did not mandate that all such sums be spent. According to this view, if that purpose could be accomplished by spending less than the appropriation’s total amount, there would be no impediment in law to realizing savings. Impoundments were also justified on the ground that a statute, other than the appropriation itself, authorized the withholding.
In other words, if Congress appropriates $X for the FBI to buy computers, then Congress didn't necessarily mean "the FBI shall spend exactly $X on computers, down to the cent". It could be interpreted to mean "the FBI may spend up to $X on computers". But Congress has clarified this ambiguity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Budget_and_Impou...
> the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 specifies that the president may request that Congress rescind appropriated funds. If both the Senate and the House of Representatives have not approved a rescission proposal (by passing legislation) within forty-five days of continuous session, any funds being withheld must be made available for obligation.
In other words, if Congress appropriates $X for the FBI to buy computers, but the President thinks $X is excessive, then the President may ask Congress for permission to spend less than $X. If Congress doesn't grant the permission within 45 days, then the President must go ahead and spend the full $X. Again, Congress literally has the power to set the laws, and the President is required by his oath of office to execute those laws.
Furthermore, the Supreme Court already ruled on this exact question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_v._City_of_New_York
> President Richard Nixon was of the view that the administration was not obligated to disburse all funds allocated by Congress to states seeking federal monetary assistance under the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972 and ordered the impoundment of substantial amounts of environmental protection funds for a program he vetoed, and which had been overridden by Congress.
That case seems directly analogous to what Musk is currently trying to do. Nixon lost that case in the Supreme Court.
Even if the Supreme Court did rule that the President had impoundment powers, it would probably be on the condition that "[the purpose of the law] could be accomplished by spending less than the appropriation’s total amount" (quoting from the page you linked). For example, the President would still be required to buy sufficient computers for the FBI, even if he spent less than $X on them. The President still wouldn't be able to just unilaterally decide "no, the FBI doesn't need computers, this is a waste of money".
So, I think it's already quite clear that Trump/Musk do not have the constitutional authority to just start cutting government programs. Do you agree? If not, which part do you want further clarity on?
Any impoundment authority and how it has been curtailed is purely a political solution, not a constitutional one.
If the Democrats think they are right they can go to the Supreme Court to force him to spend money with no say in the matter.
And while the President is mandated to execute the law you’re forgetting how much of the government is not described in law. USAID “to further the mission of the US in foreign countries” would give the President a lot of latitude in how that money is spent. A lot.
Then layer on the immense agency structure written all through “interpretation” of the law that the agencies no longer can rely on Chevron to defend and things get really interesting.
And while the Supreme Court did rule on Empoundment law curtailing Nixon, it did not rule specifically on the constitutionality of it and a lot has changed on the Supreme Court since Nixon.
So please don’t respond with “doesnt have the constitutional authority” when that is most definitely not the case.
How much do you think he will raise it by during this term?
You can't convince people whose attention bandwidth is entirely consumed by the social media engagement algorithms controlled by the very people doing this.
I'm afraid this might be a fait accompli for democratic institutions. The chance to stop this was 10 years ago, by breaking up concentrated media ownership and regulating social media. We didn't, and it's too late.
His dizzying array of contradictory statements, lies, and flip-flops have always made him someone where people, his supporters in particular, see the Trump they want to see. Isolationist or imperialist, the man who would ban TikTok or its savior, pro/anti vaccine, really pick just about anything.
There was a popular sentiment in his first term that Trump seemed to believe whoever had talked to him last on any issue, but he manages to have that same effect on other people, too.
Going back to the concept of the will of the voters, Trump won Muslim-heavy Dearborn, MI on the back of people voting to protest Biden/Harris's approach to Gaza. He just announced side-by-side with Netanyahu that he wants to totally depopulate Gaza and have the US take it over and rebuild it as a resort, and throw in the West Bank too while you're at it. Is that what those people voted for?
Second, we all have a right to bitch about what seems like a new America being formed. If things go as badly as many of us seem to think, well it doesn't really matter if we convince trump voters they were wrong, because democracy will be have evaporated anyway. Our society has been almost molded for this moment: Americans are more isolated and alienated from each other than ever. The internet today is a fundamentally difficult place to organize any sort of coherent protest when the places people post are algorithmically controlled, manipulated by bots, and moderated.
We are broken as a society. What a waste was all that 20th century plundering and bloodshed and brilliance and effort. I would imagine that even for someone looking at the teetering American Empire with satisfaction, there is a bit of emptiness in just how stupid and pathetic this all is.
Part Eight: Hostile takeover by Musk & co.
In this particular case, the goal is to privatize science entirely.
Video with similar content, shows them actually talking about their ideas and plans: https://youtu.be/5RpPTRcz1no
a serious audit of the endless money printing of the federal government is well overdue
The stuff DOGE is playing with is such a tiny percentage it won't move the needle.
But cutting money from weak nerds? Destroying education? That's fine. Nobody needs it.
If Elon did not exist/ tie himself to Trump, I don’t think Trump could have done even 10% of the dismantling of the Administrative State that Elon has done. Elon has a certain will to power, flagrantly breaks all norms but advertises it on Twitter for his Twitter supporters, an insane sense of urgency to move fast, an ability to attract talented 20 yr olds to join him for “low pay”, and “100 hr weeks” that gets stuff done. The Trump ecosystem was mostly professional grifter (and crypto scammers), polemicists who only talked the talk, and a small set of true believers who never had a private sector job in their life. If it was just them, I might have been right in the “Nothing Ever Happens” camp. Elon and his ecosystem has given them fangs. They still probably can direct Elon, to a limit, at some things like H1b immigration they will probably concede to Elon but in return they will actually remake the government in their image. Elon is turning out to be one of the “Important People in History”.
Every accusation is a confession.
Or are you asking about the current situation? They’re trying to burn all of it —- any research papers funded by the NSF or NIH.
Unfortunately, advanced technological based civilization is not "ok" with destroying the collective and knowledge based activities of scientific research. One can't advance far if you stop science when it makes mistakes - the advantage of science is it finds and fixes the mistakes. This, and the federal funding of research, is why the collective knowledge of humanity is doubling ever decade or so.
Yeah, I remember when the CDC told you that horse paste cures COVID, and proposed grants to study the potential benefits of injecting bleach.
Oh, wait, that wasn't the CDC, was it? That was somebody else. Do you still trust them?
This is an extremely odd question. Are you not familiar with the NSF or NIH?
> I'm okay with the CDC being torn down. They lied and lost all trust.
You are a danger to public health.
> As for grants they are paused. Those organizations didn't earn it.
Did USAID also not earn the right to get funding to provide lifesaving drugs so that babies don’t contract HIV? Who decided that they didn’t “earn it”?
> I also understand there's a 8 month severance for voluntary vacating. This is very generous even for a tyrant.
You don’t understand correctly — the offer was for 8 months of work, from home. Then they would be separated in September. It’s also not actually clear that OPM has the legal authority to make this offer, so anyone accepting it may not actually get what they signed up for.
The more that surfaces and the more people who "just obeyed orders for the COVID/lockdown anti constitutional regime" the better.
2. Experts don't consider that human research contributed to COVID because it is completely implausible to anyone that understands virology research. Moreover, current safety standards for doing research on infectious human diseases in BSL level 3 and 4 labs are incredibly rigorous- and although they carry non-zero risk, what we learn from this research more than outweighs it by improving our ability to treat and prevent disease.
See here for a discussion of what virologists think about the lab leak theory: https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-special-how-the-pandemic-be...
Check this $459 million opaque grant to [Redacted] in Nepal: https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_LOGNPL001COM_9543...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_Corporati...
USAID is the American equivalent of China's belt and road initiative and a bunch of incurious dilettantes are tearing it all down.
Similarly how are you going to reproduce studies by not funding anything?
>just run every paper through an LLM and check for errors as part of the peer review process
Oh, I see. Well, that at least explains the rest of your post.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42910829
Is the current situation the only way, the best way, or even a good way to address the country's economic position? That is a matter of perspective. As is always the case, people will take sides. The unreasonable people (on any side) will refuse to compromise and spew inflammatory rhetoric, most often in defense of their own self interests and at the expense of others' interests.
I believe that the most sensible approach is for all parties to adhere to a metered diligence, always being mindful that the country is a collective of disparate interests. The whole point of a democracy is that through all the ups and downs, things work themselves out eventually. Sometimes there are setbacks and other times there is progress.
Things may seem chaotic, but this too shall pass.
1. The US economy was the best in the world in 2024.
2. The NIH, USAID, and NSF budgets make up just a percentage point or two of US spending.
3. These programs consistently generate ROI >>1.
In light of these painfully obvious facts, isn't it clear that the priorities of this administration have nothing to do with government finances? And that even trying to frame the discussion that way is blatantly irresponsible?
whenever any team comes up with anything worthwhile then they get the money
nevermind the fact they need the money to do anything at all, oops
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42910829
the problems that led to these frauds are structural--no amount of patching the system will fix this.
maybe we should consider the possibility that we are due for a refactor, which is often painful, but especially painful for people (or code) with an entrenched incentive to continue existing.
i dont mean to defend what the administration is doing but I'm warning that everyone crying doom and gloom and threatening to move abroad, etc. might be eating crow. ironically, the very people most likely to move abroad (in it for the career, not for the principle) are biased to be the types bringing down our system of science. bad science is the science equivalent of a zirp.
> maybe we should consider the possibility that we are due for a refactor
People in tech need to stop with those analogies. A government is not a codebase. You can not apply the principles of "refactoring" and "patching" in the same way. It just doesn't work like that. But the problem is we have a bunch of people (some malicious, some clueless) trying to do exactly that.
You can try it, but the consequences of a poor refactoring? Look to the planned economies and five year plans.
The government is not a codebase; that mistakes its artifacts for its process. And the importance of process - in politics, in government - cannot be overstated.
not only does it NEED to be done, people VOTED for it :)
You say government is not like code, then what exactly is it? Can you describe it in an effective way? Or are you just going to raise your hand up and say there's nothing we can do about it, nothing we can do about the $2 trillion/year titanic deficit?
Historical governments often needed little beyond an army and a tax collection system. And tax collection system was primarily data gathering and analysis, since if you knew how much property someone owned, you can easily tax them for an appropiate amount.
The tech way of thinking has proven extremely successful in many industries already. That's why tech companies (and tech adjacent ones, like say quant trading, or even index fund trading) have been so economically dominant, and utterly kicked out the traditional MBAs from their pedestals.
Stop being a self hating programmer who despises the mentality of tech.
Not all of government is the DMV.
Government has a massive policymaking function, which is not "robotic code-like behavior". It's about solving nuanced, challenging problems. Government has a huge research function.
And tech has created some great things, but it's also created some really terrible things, mostly because of this "move fast and break things" mentality that doesn't consider the consequences of its actions.
Government is mostly individuals deciding goals and attempting to convince others. Then rules are added to prevent harm to others or using corrupt methods of convincing. That "code" part is more like a moderated forum: necessary for the huge task, but it's just the framework for the actual content.
>Historical governments often needed little beyond an army and a tax collection system.
And historical computers used vacuum tubes. What's your point?
>The tech way of thinking has proven extremely successful in many industries already.
Even in tech companies, the richest people are almost always the smooth talkers. Because the best, and really only, way to get money is convincing somebody else to give it to you. You can do it by offering a better product or charming them.
Most government goals aren't technically difficult and certainly don't require advanced algorithms or fast computers. The real work is aligning people.
If you cannot make the distinction between computer code and law/regulation, that get applied by humans in humans time and humans circles…?
« Refactoring » an org or a government like you project to, like Elon and his boys is doing, it is going to cost actual lives. People killed.
we're already past that. the NIH funded EcoHealth alliance which partnered with WIV, and advocated for GOF research, so, the NIH is (if indirectly) responsible for millions of COVID deaths. That's like two holocausts. ok, lets discount it by 50% since it was indirect. the NIH is responsible for one Holocaust.
- Part of government is funding research that involves people doing real experiments collecting real data? Are novel experiments those of constricted robots or LLMs?
- Part of government are the dedicated every day folks who are doing the best they can despite being overworked and under resourced who have to make life and death decisions in the moment every day (air traffic controllers), who monitor and coordinate relief and management of disasters big and small in a very interconnected world (we just had a global pandemic, are culling record numbers of chickens, had a bad hurricane season, and large wildfires) these are not people behaving like robots they are just people following laws and regulations primarily passed via efforts of lobbyists, or else are those that are written in blood.
Don't like the way a part of government works? Reform it. Don't try to burn the whole thing to the ground by doing shit like emailing the people responsible for keeping planes from crashing into each other that if they want to they can fuck off for the next 8 months on the tax-payers dime and then find a new low-stress job. Don't like certain regulations or the ways laws are weaponized against everyone but corporations and the wealthy? I get it, me neither I'd like to see affordable housing too. Unfortunately, congress has the responsibility to fix that, not Donald Trump, not Elon Musk, nor any of his former SpaceX interns. If they want to make those changes they should get elected to congress or hell maybe for shits and giggles use some of that lobbying money for the common good they claim to care so much about.
at what point does that become disingenuous? how many years have people bern trying to do it incrementally? just tell the reformer: oh try harder, knowing every feature of the bureaucracy is stacked against them and they wont succeed. in the meantime people are hurt, dollars are wasted.
> Unfortunately, congress has the responsibility to fix that,
that's not correct. congress has ceded execution of these things to the executive in many cases with broad leeway to do or not do (thats why it's called discretionary spending, any spending that is by law congress' responsibility is statutory spending)
I think it's the second-order stuff here. Even assuming Musk were to do a fantastic job at just clearing out inefficiency in a smart way (which seems unlikely given the actions he's taken/leaks around cutting funding based on key-word matching etc.), the higher-order point that someone can just buy their way into the President's inner-circle and have complete free-reign to seize government operations and make changes with 0 transparency/accountability seems like it does just stupid amounts of harm to the integrity of the system
pray tell who was accountable for the grant issuance in the first place? was congress approving every disbursal? could the citizenry vote up/down on every RO1 or SBIR that went past the NIH desk?
What the hell are you talking about? I chose to get into science for the benefit of the masses, rather than, for instance, helping some corporation abuse human psychology to sell more ads. If there is no money to do the science, I have no choice but to emigrate.
edit: And to give you an example of the science being targeted by these early moves: pulse oximeters have a racial bias leading them to overestimate the oxygen saturation of minorities, which led to deaths during the pandemic. All the work toward addressing that issue at the FDA has now been terminated, because it's related to DEI.
why do you suppose most science benefits the masses?
a stunning amount of science is negative. homme hellinga cheating and claiming a triosephosphate isomerase, for example. stripey nanoparticles, as another. Thousands of western blots that were cleverly edited by unscrupulous postdocs. everything by diderik stapel. anil potti.
those are the ones that got caught. so many more got away with it.
and yes, if you can't tell, i know what the fuck I'm talking about.
> And to give you an example
why dont i give you an example. NIH is responsible for 80% of the budget of an NGO that collaborated with WIV and advocated for GOF research. on the grounds of likely being responsible in part for the deaths of millions worldwide maybe we should suspend funding to the NIH until all of its policies can be reviewed
And heck, they did a lot of unrelated great science at the same time.
Science is a process that will have failures, mistakes, errors, and these are subject to natural selection. We can work to make that process sharper, more rigorous, but that's obviously not what the administration is doing. They're attacking science with the full intent of replacing it with a system where lies and fraud reign supreme. In the world of RFK and Donald Trump, lies are just what people do every day for breakfast.
RFK Jr. gets a dozen things wrong on science and tells a dozen lies and funds and pals around with major fraudsters and charlatans every week.
they did not. in the case of tessier-levigne, who was responsible for getting him out of there? not the NIH. it was a fucking Stanford undergrad journalism student.
let that sink in. a heroically persistent undergrad had to do the job that the NIH was morally and legally obligated to do.
this "science is self correcting" trope needs to stop being propagated right now. and you can claim eventual self consistency if it resolves a hundred years from now, which would obviously be too little too late. how many people were hurt, how much research dollars were wasted in the meantime. "well, Eventually" is not good enough, and the self correcting slogan is just running cover for entreched interests in the face of their misdeeds.
Not a single personal alive thinks these institutions are perfect. But only morons think haphazardly defunding shit without understanding what you're breaking or what the real-world ramifications might be is a way to fix problems.
The past couple of weeks have historically stupid.
the sooner we cut this shit out, realize consequences, and start over, the better.
On top of that, these things make the US money. We have, by far, the strongest pharmaceutical and medical technology industry anywhere. Those companies pay taxes.
(Those companies also screw us and the government over in myriad ways, and that should be addressed, but cutting off the research system that supports the entire industry in like throwing out the baby without even draining the bathwater.)
political opponents of the newly elected administration are obviously going to go fully hysterical over any change, they already did last time. the science industries in the US aren't going anywhere, neither is research at the universities.
the ideological discrimination and money laundering coming out of these departments are going to end. and did we all forget about COVID? The fact that the NIH funded the research that happened in china ILLEGALLY, because this was a really stupid idea and we found that out the hard way, and it was covered up, and we were lied to, it killed millions, destroyed economies on a global scale.... do we really not want to see this agency dissected under a microscope? They need to be investigated.
this is the grant, but this was public info for years https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Year-...
The federal government almost certainly does absurdly overspend, but you’re missing the point: all of these drops in the bucket add up to far less than the deficit.
Also, for better or for worse, operating departments efficiently may well be the executive branch’s job, but setting all these budgets is Congress’s job, not the executive branch’s. In fact, Congress tried, not all that long ago, to allow the President to veto specific line items, and the Supreme Court struck it down:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_v._City_of_New_York
I'll shortcut it real quick - we're all dead from lung cancer and leaded gasoline, so there's no one to do the calculation.
Oil companies weren't going to publish research saying leaded gas was bad. Tobacco companies weren't going to publish research saying cigarettes were bad. Have fun being healthy when you inhale leaded gasoline every day.
Forget about things like, you know, the internet. Or any medicine.
BTW, private companies are not paying for basic biological research. Good luck making a drug when no one knows what target to drug. VC firms will park their money in the bank instead. The value from biotechs is already marginal - investment basically vanished when interest rates went above 4.
Ive also been told in the past that its somehow ok that the government never breaks even, I can handle that maybe Im too stupid/uneducated to get it... but nobody ever even tries. Use little words, Im sure we will make progress. How can the government continue to exist and not go broke if it continually spends more than it brings in?
That's just one (big and easy to recall) example. There are countless.
Spending public money on public research grows the economy. Cutting it is penny wise and pound foolish.
I work at a biotech. We have $150 million in private funding. My biotech wouldn't exist, and I wouldn't have a job if it weren't for decades of public research doing the foundational work that allows us to target a protein to make a drug to help people. None of that would exist if not for NIH, NSF etc
And Musk has stumbled into several known right-wing conspiracy theories based on knee-jerk reactions, so I find it far more likely that he’s just fishing to validate his pre-held knee-jerk opinions rather than doing a careful investigation.
If I were president I would probably cut from military spending - but at some point that becomes painful to cut aswell.
A lot of people have misunderstood me in this thread, at no point do I want to see public research cut. Its just that the same people who are worried about what climate change will bring over next 50 years (and I am too!) dont seen to feel any sense of alarm at the federal government living outside its means for the next 50 years, and I can not understand why
I’m not sure how to explain this to you, really - you’re fundamentally stuck, I think, on the idea that the gov is like a business or a household, and needs to budget the same way. It really doesn’t.
Maybe think of it this way, to start to get your head around it: current debt is just over 100% of GDP - so in some sense the US has borrowed about a years worth of production. 100% sounds scary, but does 12 months sound so scary? Would you consider yourself in catastrophic debt if you owed a year of your salary?
Personally I wish my mortgage was only a year of my salary!
Consider the idea that without decades of money printing, your house might only cost 1 year of salary in the first place
Or maybe let me ask it a other way - if the govt really doesnt need to balance the budget, why dont we have 50 aircraft carriers and free healthcare for all? Such huge sums of money go beyond merely number balancing, at some piint theyre forcefully managing the real resources of the nation
And the current finite number is nowhere close to causing a crisis for the US (Japan had two and a half times GDP in debt and did not collapse into hyperinflation or some other catastrophic fate, for example).
Because we invested in those technologies and they paid off handsomely. What you are seeing is the result of "profit externalization"- laws like Bayh Dole allow universities to profit from the research they carry out under contract with the government.
Everything we did, we did because the alternatives were worse.
USG revenue/spending should be reasoned about in terms of the resources it directs, and the resulting effects on US and world GDP. Everything else is just accounting.
Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, and defense are larger.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...