Are marriage-based green card applications still being processed at some pace when the petitioner's spouse is also a green card holder? I hear these days this category is ultra slow with no option to expedite.
This is the intention of tech transfer. To have private-sector entities commercialize the R&D.
What is the alternative? National labs and universities can't commercialize in the same way, including due to legal restrictions at the state and sometimes federal level.
As long as the process and tech transfer agreements are fair and transparent -- and not concentrated in say OpenAI or with underhanded kickbacks to government -- commercialization will benefit productive applications of AI. All the software we're using right now to communicate sits on top of previous, successful, federally-funded tech transfer efforts which were then commercialized. This is how the system works, how we got to this level.
> As long as the process and tech transfer agreements are fair and transparent
I think that's the crux of the guy you're responding to's point. He does not believe it will be done fairly and transparently, because these AI corporations will have broad control over the technology.
If so, yes indeed, fair point by him/her. It's up to ordinary folks like us to push against unfair tech transfer because yes, federal labs and research institutions would otherwise provide the incumbents an extreme advantage.
Having been in this world though, I didn't see a reluctance in federal labs to work with capable entrepreneurs with companies at any level of scale. From startup to OpenAI to defense primes, they're open to all. So part of the challenge here is simply engaging capable entrepreneurs to go license tech from federal labs, and go create competitors for the greedy VC-funded or defense prime incumbents.
> I didn't see a reluctance in federal labs to work with capable entrepreneurs
My reluctance is when we talk about fraud, waste, and corruptions in government, this is where it happens.
The DoD's budget isn't $1T because they are spending $900B on the troops. It's $1T because $900B of that ends up in the hands of the likes of Lockhead martin and Raytheon to build equipment we don't need.
I frankly do not trust "entrepreneurs" to not be greedy pigs willing to 100x the cost of anything and everything. There are nearly no checks in place to stop that from happening.
Not that it fully takes away from your argument but a lot of that high price tag is also due to requiring much better controls on material to prevent supply chain attacks ala getting beepers with explosives in the hands of all your leadership
Yet that's the exact opposite of what's been done with something like the F-35[1], with widely distributed production, typically among countries seen as US allies (at least prior to this year), but with key components still made in China.[2] And the problem is even worse in the larger defense industry.[3] Americans pay an immense premium for a military-industrial complex where the PR is largely divorced from reality; for example the USS Gerald R. Ford, commissioned in 2017 still isn't combat ready.[4]
All the more reason to bring such initiatives inhouse and not outsource them.
You can hope that a defense company is doing the right things in terms of supply chain attacks, but that's a pretty lucrative corner to cut. They'd not even need to cut it all the time to reap benefits.
The only other alternative is frequent audits of the defense company which is expensive and wouldn't necessarily solve the problem.
Reasonably there should be a two way exchange? It might be okay for companies to piggyback on research funds if that also means that more research insight enters public knowledge.
I’d be happy if they just paid their fair share of tax and stopped acting like they were self-made when they really just piggybacked on public funds and research.
There’s zero acknowledgment or appreciation of public infra and research.
What do you mean universities can't commercialize in the same way (I may have misunderstood what you meant)? Due to Bayh-Dole, Universities can patent and license the tech they develop under contract for the government- often helping professors start up companies with funding, while simultaneously charging those companies to license the tech. This is also true for National labs run by universities (Berkeley and a few others). the other labs run under contract by external for-profit companies.
If this were just about tech transfer, in which private firms commercialize public research, I agree. But that's not what Jason Pruet is saying. In the Q&A he notes:
> “Why don’t we just let private industry build these giant engines for progress and science, and we’ll all reap the benefits?” The problem is that if we’re not careful, it could lead us to a very different country than the one we’ve been in.
This isn't about commercialization, it's about control. When access to frontier models and SOTA compute is gated by private interests, academics (and the public) risk getting locked out. Not because of merit, but because their work doesn't align with corporate priorities.
Yes indeed, what a travesty. :) Or they may study misinformation, another affront to civilization itself, because of course we know exactly how it works in this ultra-fast AI era with several competing superpowers.
You are typing this with software built on top of an incredibly vast technology stack which simply would not exist without federal R&D funding. May be worth remembering this fact. In the next few hours, you will almost certainly use non-digital technology essential to life which simply did not originate from commercial R&D (such as it is).
The beginning is nearly always federal R&D funding. Much of it won't work, sure, and that's fine. It's not wasted, because when it works, it creates such a massive everlasting surplus and opportunity machine that it overcomes all past failures by orders of magnitude. Such as, computers, and all they enabled over the last 100-ish years.
The myth of the lone inventor in the garage should have been updated even in the pre-WW2 era.
When it's VCs investing private money, on a high risk, high return (to private individuals) that's celebrated. The recipients (aka founders) will mostly lose that "grant" money, and end up with nothing to show for it. Of course the winners produce massive economic gains to the general public.
Alas when the govt follows the exact same model, taking high risk, high reward bets, then it's seen as "wasteful spending". Despite the staggering value of the wins, it becomes better to "spend nothing" than waste a penny on research that goes nowhere.
The levels of cognitive dissonance, not to mention hypocrisy, are truly incredible.
And the charge is being lead by someone who literally made his wealth from this model.
DoD Office of Strategic Capital is high risk, the kind of risk no investors would fund.
Investors scrutinize pitch decks and then do hard company due diligence which frequently falls through. And conversations die-off with no obligation to provide feedback, unlike in government. And investors will not fund true R&D. They fund scale.
None of these agencies fund high-risk grants. I don't think there is such a thing. What you're talking about is the difficult-to-quantify relationship between a define advance in knowledge, and possible commercial applications.
"In the new structure, even if a revised proposal gets the green light from a division director, a new body whose membership has not been determined will take a fresh look to ensure it conforms to the agency’s new standard for making awards."
I wonder if doge is using ML systems to do this kind of review in a far more centralized way across all of government. With the kind of data they have -- obtained by extra-legal means, a.k.a. theft -- they could exert a lot of control over crucial funding decisions.
The system is a Wild West almost by design. It evolved to prevent misuse. Not perfect, but hard to control quickly by a single authority. To me it seems doge is doing a centralization play so it can implement any directive from the great technoking.
Absolutely. One of the points of Trump's consolidation of power is to make people reliant on his office to succeed. Funding will only come after loyalty is demonstrated. We've seen this already with cabinet appointments, the trade war, etc.
Sounds like a bribe machine / patronage machine, you gotta grease the wheels across a whole range of people.
And the odds they have some actual expertise? I'm not holding my breath, there's no indication that domain knowledge or such is relevant to Trump team members jobs... quite the opposite.
After "attention", definitely. :) In broad strokes, the US excels in looking to the future, but compared to e.g. Europe, it's harder for folks to get interested in history.
Not sure why you're being downvoted because your points are accurate. Ultra nationalist propaganda wouldn't sell well internationally compared to e.g. Star Wars.
And the current administration does at least purport to follow free market principles. It's just all principles can go out the window for them because <insert word salad>, for whatever advances their own power.
And yet we should build and struggle toward the conditions which would allow a massive reduction of the nucelar arsenal.
This would require a level of strategy and clear-mindedness as well as strengthening the US Alliance system so we can push against the autocracy superpowers in a united front, by nonviolent means.
Instead we get high school age kids with flash drives stealing the most sensitive federal government data and potentially injecting unknown code.
So the best bet is this $946B will flow down to other innovations and market translation through the small business set-aside laws. One can always hope.
There's 'x' number that is effective and practical. You have to have x1 number of submarines deployed at any time, x2 in ICBM silos, x3 on carriers, x4 on destroyers, x5 stationed at air bases. Of that pool, probably 50% have to be rotated off for maintenance, etc.
Whatever that number is, the 31,000+ we used to have was stupid. 3,500 in a historical context is a relief.
The real conundrum these days is that you can't test more. You want to be 100% certain it goes off when needed, but it's pretty hard to test that theory without... testing one.
If all that could be done with 1,500 I'm all in. Just a lot of 'practical' considerations that go into whatever 'x' number is.
I wonder to what extent simulation can reliably test the mechanical and detonation aspects? I always imagined simulation assumed you have an explosion and you want to see the effect.
If you can’t run physical experiments to adjust your models, you are limited with what you can do in terms of new designs. I would assume manufacturing and maintenance of nuclear warheads is very conservative with their designs.
That's where the NIF comes into play, the National Ignition Facility. They use lasers to generate conditions similar to a nuclear explosion for testing purposes.
There are probably economies of scale associated with maintaining nuclear weapons. Whether you have 1500 or 3500, you need a “large scale nukes” program. You’re not going to cut costs in half by cutting nukes in half.
You also have to consider that nukes have to be distributed around the world, so that you can target enemies throughout the world, so that enemies don’t know where to target their missile defense systems, and so that you still have adequate threat if sites are attacked.
This was true before missile defense systems started becoming a factor. If 1500 is an effective deterrent, you need 1500 multipled by the inverse of whatever percentage of those bombs your adversary can plausibly stop.
I can just see, shaking with horror, the image of missiles and anti missiles smashing into each other, raining immense radiation into the oceans poisining everything. And thats the best case, where the earheads are intercepted successfully.
That is like 5E6 bananas, that is like 3E3 tones of bananas.
Assuming 3500 warheads on each side, thats line 2E7 tones of bananas.
The anual production of bananas is 8E7 tones of bananas per year. So dropping all the warheads in the see is like dropping 3 months of the banana production.
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Anyway, most of the radioactivity of bananas is due to potasium, that is very soluble so it goes to the pee that goes to the river that goes to the sea. So it's not necesary to sink the ships, just eat the bananas and wait.
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Anyway, potasium is very soluble and does not accumulate too much in animals and plants. I'm bot sure about plutonium.
You can also think of the warheads detonating before it reaches the target but before it’s intercepted. A high atmosphere EMP is much better for the attacker than a couple kilograms of enriched fissiles being distributed over your target.
Not if ABM programs such as Golden Shield (I’m inclined to call it Phantom Menace, because it’s a crappy sequel to Star Wars) succeed. If you launch all your 1500 warheads and only 15 reach their targets, you’ll need a lot more warheads.
It's complex, for sure. I look back to the JFK era and how those folks handled far larger nuclear arsenals -- and then created the space program as we know it today. Peaceful exploration of space during the Cold War, with much of the same technology as ICBMs.
We're a far cry from that at the moment. In my view, US democracy is being contested (to say it with understatement), and US and Allied security also -- both more than probably any time in the Cold War. Worse than this is the threat to the alliance system.
The difference is now, China is ramping up its nuclear arsenal and has the economic backing to make it happen. The Russians can't be ignored either as their systems are very advanced and quite numerous. So I think to get past our internal problems in the Western world, we need a time margin of maybe 20 years.
Seen in this light, $956B over 10 years is not extreme, assuming it will indeed produce many other economic effects and technological breakthroughs (not just more graft for the billionaires). It's just I'd rather also see a massive increase in NASA funding with clear programmatic goals (instead of 'worship SpaceX'), international cooperation, and tie it to restoration of funding at the civilian agencies. We're far from that being viable at this point, however.
It’s kind of a running joke that in order for your propulsion research to get funding it needs military applications. So, unless you can make the case to put a nuke in front of your highly efficient electric thruster, you are fighting for scraps.
Given the Palestinians attacked Israel completely unprovoked with no regard to the hell that would rain down on themselves in retaliation I am horrified by the thought of them armed with nukes.
Are you aware that gaza has been under siege for decades? When Egypt refused to allow israeli ships throught the canal, Isreal invaded. According to israel, a blockade is cause enought for war.
Also why do you think gaza is so small? When did they lose access to the rest of the land around it? Why are there so many settlements?
You can really only say it's unprovoked if you ignore all of history before october 7th.
Oh and indiscriminately killing civilians is bad. Shame only one side of this 'debate' agrees.
Egypt's naval blockade was secondary. Israel struck preemptively mainly because it was clear that Egypt intended to invade, between the 100,000 troops they amassed near Israel's border, and Nasser's statements which left no doubt about his plans. The only debate is about how immanent those plans were.
It also seems misleading to talk about Israel's blockade of Gaza with no mention of all the rocket attacks that prompted it. A blockade might be an act of war, but it's sort of moot when it's preceded by acts of war from the other side.
You'd think so too if your supplies and trade with the world were disrupted while your neighbours are waiting for you to blink before destroying your entire society.
> your neighbours are waiting for you to blink before destroying your entire society.
The entire way the State was established was an unfortunate choice. Neglecting local politics and disrespecting the rights of the people already occupying the land was obviously going to lead to conflict and long term instability. While it’s impossible to undo the sins of the past, we can at least think of solutions to move forward without causing more harm.
