Bingo! It's also an antitrust thing but yes, look up the number of grocery stores in a northeast city 100 years ago vs now, it's mind boggling. Like at least 25x difference, maybe more, I can't recall.
In my experience the difficulty in this kind of task is reading the docs of a bunch of packages I haven't used in months/years and probably won't use again anytime soon, testing things manually and creating all the little harnesses to make that work without running for minutes at a time, etc.
Sure for someone who does ETL type work all day, or often enough anyway, they'd scoff, and true LLM won't really save them time. But for me who does it once in a blue moon, LLMs are great. It's still on me to determine correctness, I am simply no longer contending with the bootstrap problem of learning new packages and their syntax and common usage.
Similarly for me, my visualisation pipeline changed from "relearn matplotlib and pandas every single time" to "ask for code, fix up details later". In this case the time saving scales with how much I forgot from the docs and the last time. I need to do the review and debugging either way, so that's moot.
There's two schools of thought here: viewing LLMs as machines to replace your thinking, and viewing LLMs as a vast corpus of compressed knowledge to draw upon.
I have one, I used it a few times. Once for a 3 days backpacking trip, it was difficult starting it in the morning as temperature was only a bit above 0 degC. Then for another 3 day hike where I used it to boil water for two persons it took so long that other people were done eating where we started.
I also had the fuel bottle leak in my pack (and the friend I was hiking with forgot his gas canister), fun times.
Now I'm mainly using a small gas canister (100g) and a small titanium burner (20g I think?) and I find the (small) added weight worth it.
Alcohol stoves are great if you have time and it's not too cold, plus it's easy to take only the fuel you need. With gas canisters you have to take the whole thing, and after a while you may end up with several partially empty canisters and have to weight them to take the one with the amount of remaining fuel the closest to what you'll need for your trip. I have 3 or 4 of those at the moment.
> Then for another 3 day hike where I used it to boil water for two persons it took so long that other people were done eating where we started.
There's quite a spread between the heating output of alcohol stoves. # Of holes, alu vs. Ti vs. brass, filler materials (if any). Some have simmer rings, some don't. Outside temps matter too.
The trick is to use it a # of times before you go out camping / backpacking. So that you're familiar with its behavior.
Disclaimer: cooking daily on a deluxe model (Origo 3000). Safest method to cook on a boat.
Propane/butane burners are easier to regulate, but these gasses have the nasty habit of sticking to the floor. So a leak could cause a deadly explosion (which happens semi-regularly).
That Origo: I could flip the whole thing over while burning & it wouldn't start a fire. Can't remove the burner from the stove while it's on due to a safety catch.
Also have a Trangia stashed somewhere (just the burner not pots/holder). Also used many times.
Both Swedish design & highly recommended. Cheap/ubiquitous fuel is a big plus too. Sadly the Origo isn't made anymore afaik.
Most of the stoves used for backpacking have the same basic design. I have two: an Esbit and a Toaks, the latter is lighter (it's titanium) but both have the same design as a small Trangia or the one in the article.
It takes 7-10mn to boil the water I need for food + a coffee, while using my gas burner it takes 2-3mn.
One issue I forgot to mention is that it's almost impossible to get the remaining fuel in the burner back into the container.
I like to hike fairly light but I still make room for a flash boiler as a luxury despite weight. This thing takes the pain away from cooking. I’m always impressed by how quick and efficient it is.
I own a Chinese manufactured petrol stove which works ok. It’s a pain to light however. Never used an alcohol stove myself but I have hiked with a friend using one and that seemed painfully slow. Can stoves seem like a novelty to me. A nicer burner is not particularly expensive nor is it that heavy.
Alcohol stoves can be very fast. I've done a bunch of hikes using one of those double-walled cat can stoves, and it works great. Really pumps out the heat. Very reliable, and almost as fast as my canister stove.
I have a Toaks burner, I agree it's quite fast (after the alcohol is heated enough and starts to vaporize, which can take some time when temp < 10-15 degC) but it's nowhere as fast as my gas burner.
But it's a compromise, they all have their pros and cons.
Depending on the weather and how much you're cooking, an 8-day trip may be long enough that the low energy density of alcohol fuel outweighs the size advantages of the stove.
Ok so I have Google One AI or whatever the previous version of this is called, and what's wild to me is that in Google Sheets, if I ask it to do anything, literally anything, it says it can't do it. The only thing it can do is read a sheet's data and talk about it. It can't help you form formulas, add data to the sheet, organize things, anything, as far as I've seen.
How does Google have the best models according to benchmarks but it can't do anything useful with them? Sheets with AI assist on things like pivot tables would be absolutely incredible.
>How does Google have the best models according to benchmarks but it can't do anything useful with them?
KPI driven development with no interest in killing their cash cow.
These are the people who sat on transformers for 5 years because they were too afraid it would eat their core business, e.g. Bert.
One need look at what Bell Labs did to magnetic storage to realize that a monopoly isn't good for research. In short: we could have had mass magnetic storage in the 1920s/30s instead of 50s/60s.
The AI assistant in Sheets doesn’t understand how even the basic features work. When it’s not saying it lacks basic knowledge, it hallucinates controls that don’t exist. Why even bother having it there?
It's funny how the urban design forcing poor people to pay car insurance and auto loan, just to survive, is fine; yet charging a hundred or so to use the highly valuable space in the city is outrageous.
Concern about public order is fair. But instead of fighting for the privilege to avoid it cheaply, why not fight to actually fix it. Triple the prison population, or whatever your solution is.
Japan has a 99% conviction rate, and still has 56% of women reporting having been groped on transit.
This cannot be solved. To force women on transit is to flip a coin whether they will be assaulted. You’re not going to beat a car culture with that strategy.
I heavily doubt that New York City has the appetite for incarceration that would be necessary, for even a remote chance, to turn public transit into a merely neutral option versus a car.
What about bikes? I thought they were great too, until someone was careless with their dog and left me bleeding and weighing the probabilities of serious disease. Just like that, the dream was dead and I realized we will never escape car culture.
Cars are bad. The alternatives are too flawed and dangerous in their own ways, to have any serious chance at unseating the incumbent.
Japan is not NY and arguments based on sociatal/cultural behavior don't apply universally. Do you personally use these scary subway systems in the US that you have so many stats about?
Interesting; instead of trying to answer my statistical objection, you are now forcing me to provide anecdotal evidence; to then most likely reject it for being anecdotal evidence. Pass.
As for “it doesn’t apply universally,” that’s not an argument because almost nothing applies universally - not even a sunrise and sunset, if you’re at the North Pole. My point can still be valid in almost all metro areas.
Finally, let’s say I did use these systems (and, sometimes, I do use public transit). I’m a man, you are 90% likely here to be a man, we’re not the ones getting groped, therefore our personal opinions on the likelihood are obviously irrelevant. You should be asking your wife and your 15 year old daughter to ride for a year and rate their comfort level.
Now think real carefully why you had to jump all the way over to Japan in order to be able to make your point at all. Cherry picking at its finest. Japan is very culturally different from the West and such issues are tightly tied to that culture.
> What about bikes? I thought they were great too, until someone was careless with their dog and left me bleeding and weighing the probabilities of serious disease.
You know you can trip, fall, hit your head and die on the spot anytime you walk anywhere right? A piano can randomly fall on your head too. Nothing is 100% safe; it's unfortunate you had an accident, but that's just anecdotal evidence, which is worthless.
I can't find any source online that says felony assaults on the subway are up 9% this year. Even the Post, which is typically inclined towards hyping crime rates, reports that felony assault rates are flat this year[1]. The same source claims that major offenses have dropped 18% YoY so far.
As with so many other things about NYC, salacious stories are given a funhouse mirror effect: you wouldn't want to fill your car's gas tank next to someone who has a victim in their trunk, but that person isn't being given national news coverage like the corpse abuser was.
This Post article doesn't provide a source. Mine claims the NYPD as a source but doesn't link it either, though. It seems like only one of these can be correct: there would have to be a very large spike in felony assaults in a single month for the number to go up by 9% YoY.
The Times article doesn't mention this year's stats. Last year's were definitely worse, so it's not surprising they mention that.
The fun question of course is, are you actually safer on the road, or does it just feel safer? Which is more likely, a subway assault or a dangerous road-rage incident? There's tons of examples of road rage incidents in NYC where people have guns pulled on them or worse. But that isn't a particular visceral fear folks have (and you shouldn't!), but the likelihood of you getting shot on the subway is about the same, if not lower, than being shot elsewhere.
These are common in all developing countries. In the Philippines it's called a Jeepney. They even did pop up around NYC, catering to Hispanic neighborhoods IIRC, and have been in various states of legality over the years. I think now they may be somewhat regulated.
Agreed, stuff like Punggol town is IMO much more accessible and interesting. It's truly an awesome place, affordable, well connected with transit as part of its design, etc.
I worked at two National Laboratories, Argonne and Idaho, on NSF funded internship grants. The second one turned into a full time job, again on an NSF grant.
The first one was on supercomputing, writing proof of concept code for a new supercomputing operating system (ZeptoOS). The second was on the automated stitching of imagery from UAVs for military applications (at a time when this was not commoditized at all, we were building UAVs in a garage and I was writing code derived from research papers).
Seeing all the programs that launched my career get dismantled like this is really saddening. There are/were thousands and thousands of college students getting exposed to cutting edge research via these humble programs, and I assume that is all now over. It didn't even cost much money. I got paid a pretty low stipend, which was nonetheless plenty to sustain my 20 year old self just fine. I think the whole program may have cost the government maybe $10k total.
$10k to build knowledge of cutting edge science that filters into industry. $10k to help give needed manpower to research projects that need it. $10k to give people who otherwise didn't have a road into science, exactly what they need to get their foot in the door.
I don't know how to describe what's happening here, but it's really, really stupid.
It's the American experience that decisions are made at the executive level based on faulty intelligence, while people working at the coal face such as yourself have a much better understanding of what's really going on.
Case in point the Vietnam war, which cost thousands of lives because decisions were based on statistics from the field which had been heavily manipulated as they percolated upwards.
Right now, just as one tiny example, we see the effect of tariffs on prototyping services such as JLPCB, a chinese-based company which makes on demand printed circuit boards.
There is no way that it makes sense to dramatically increase the costs to US companies and citizens of creating PCBs which are critical components at the heart of many new products. All that will do is to drive innovation away from the gifted hacker working from his garage in Michigan, and towards countries other than the USA who can order PCBs at reasonable prices. I'll guarantee that no one understands this at the level where these decisions are made.
"Faulty intelligence" accepts that DOGE / Russell Vought / Project 2025 are sincerely concerned with government spending. The evidence says that this is deliberate sabotage of government functions to erode public trust. Consider:
Douglas Holtz-Eakin (former Republican CBO director) noted DOGE is specifically "going into agencies they disagree with" for ideological reasons, targeting programs that are a tiny fraction of the federal budget. https://thefulcrum.us/governance-legislation/doge-layoffs-tr...
The pattern is clear: target high-visibility but relatively low-cost programs (like NSF internships) that provide tangible benefits to citizens. When services deteriorate, people naturally ask "why am I paying taxes for this?" - which is exactly the intended outcome.
A $10k internship that launches careers and advances American innovation is precisely the type of program that makes visible the value of government - which is why it's being targeted despite minimal fiscal impact.
Yes, but Grover Norquist thought the path was tax cuts → Congressionally mandated spending cuts → worse government. Trump/2025/DOGE's big innovation has been skipping the first step and simply ignoring Congress' "power of the purse" and unilaterally (and illegally) withholding spending as they see fit [1]
The US constitutional system was always built on "norms," good faith, and an assumption that even personally corrupt actors in power won't act to burn the whole system down, or will fear the consequences of the rule of law. It's always been the case that Congress and the Supreme Court don't have cops or soldiers at their command, so the enforcement powers of 2 out of 3 branches of the federal government rely to some extent on fears that the system will find some way to dole out consequences, or a good faith belief in the rule of law. Even Nixon resigned once the Supreme Court ruled that he had to release the tapes.
However, the Supreme Court has essentially ruled that a president (at least, a Republican president) is immune from personal consequences for everything, so at this point an authoritarian-minded president can behave as a king. Congressional Republicans would likely prefer not to cede their power but more than that, they don't want to cross Trump for fear of being defeated in a primary by a Trump-backed challenger. The appeal of a job that at this point almost exclusively consists of debasing oneself is beyond me.
[1] A great primer on exactly why this illegal withholding of congressional spending is unconstitutional can be found in Senator Murphy's confrontation with DHS Secretary Noem earlier this week. Murphy documents how the department is illegally impounding funds, violating Supreme Court orders, and ignoring statutory requirements - creating precisely the constitutional crisis predicted when an administration decides it can simply disregard Congress's power of the purse: https://www.murphy.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/murphy...
> It has been called one of the least productive Congresses since 1951
Let’s not measure productivity in terms of count of bills passed like measuring output by lines of code.
Healthcare reform, SS reform, fiscal sustainability, electoral reform, climate, immigration, information environment, cybersecurity, how many of these pressing issues have been tackled and solved by congress?
Congress has two parties in ut and one of them is strictly opposed to all of these. The issue is not doing nothing, the issue is large parts of population and their political representation being actively against it.
Talking about it in abstract, to make it sound like the congress ia a monolith where all are ambivalent ... is part of the problem.
Exactly. They raise campaign funds and appear on tv and cross examine industry leaders like Altman and Zuckerberg. Clearly that is not “nothing”. But some worry that is not enough to keep pace with emerging threats and opportunities and that’s given justification for presidents to increasingly fill that gap, to disastrous effect. Some argue that a single strong leader calling the shots via EOs is better than having congress try to get up to speed on complex, emerging matters (ie AI export controls) but I’m unconvinced.
Something 'taking an Act of Congress' (to indicate that it's difficult and time-consuming) is in the lexicon for a reason. It's been true of the US legislative process for that long.
But!
That isn't to say that after the gears grind, Congress doesn't complete important and essential work, even in toxic times.
The nihilism of a blatently false claim that Congress is doing nothing just feeds into 'so let someone else do it' fervor. Untrue memes can be dangerous.
> Instead, they consistently cede their legislative authority to bureaucrats by creating office after office of unelected regulators who generate reams of rules with the power of law but with no democratic oversight.
The irony of saying that in a thread about the NSF getting gutted is palpable.
One person's dystopia is another's Christian nationalist authoritarian paradise. Vought / Project 2025 have been quite explicit in their goals. They believe that they're at war with secular institutions and what they call the "administrative state" - any government function that operates independently of direct political control by the executive branch. That is an explicit goal of doing away with the US Constitutional system. Vought has justified this through conspiratorial nonsense, claiming that the "deep state" has already brought about a "post-Constitutional" order via bureaucratic overreach.
Their plan will mean impoverishment of most of the population, as well as removal of a substantial part of the population through deportation but they're not particularly concerned with that. In their eschatology, non-believers (which includes not just atheists but Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and even other Protestant denominations they deem insufficiently pure) are literally destined for eternal torture in hell. Some of the more extreme elements actively look forward to this as divine justice. Their apocalyptic worldview frames everyone outside their narrow in-group as either potential converts or enemies destined for damnation. Why worry about climate change, democratic institutions, or social welfare when the faithful will be raptured away while the unrighteous suffer? This theological framework makes it remarkably easy to dismiss the suffering of others as either deserved or irrelevant in cosmic terms.
Musk has a different set of motivations. Some of it is just straightforward corruption - killing off agencies and firing specific individuals who have pushed investigations of his various enterprises, as well as awarding contracts to himself (e.g. the FAA Starlink contract, which is genuinely terrifying).
But as far as his motivations to decimate government more generally, I think it's a combination of things. He seems to genuinely believe that dismantling government oversight will unshackle great men such as himself to bring about some techno-libertarian utopia. But I think a lot of it is that his brain has just been pickled by right-wing social media and he's a bit of a useful idiot. The fact that this aligns with Christian nationalist goals is just a convenient overlap.
Then there's the Stephen Miller wing, who are primarily motivated by racism (of course, all of these factions are extremeley racist).
Well, OK but none of this is based on faulty intelligence as you mean it.
Faulty intelligence maybe in the sense that their brains are broken and that is a very different thing.
thats not entirely accurate. a great conterexample was the mark XIV torpedo during world war two. it was faulty and the workers at the bureau of navy ordinance couldnt get their heads out of their asses to fix the problem. meanwhile sailors were dying. admirals and captains kept trying to fix the problem until finally one admiral (king iirc) got so pissed off he shoved the changes through and reformed the bureau of ordinance.
> It's the American experience that decisions are made at the executive level based on faulty intelligence, while people working at the coal face such as yourself have a much better understanding of what's really going on.
The article notes that the people being axed are NSF execs making funding decisions, and contrasts this with the NIH, where panels of outside experts make the call.
I can't say I have personal experience with either, but all things being equal, the NIH's model sounds like it would work better, no?
> The article notes that the people being axed are NSF execs making funding decisions, and contrasts this with the NIH, where panels of outside experts make the call.
I believe you're mistaken on both counts? The contrast mentioned in the article is just that for the NSF, division directors alone can potentially scuttle approved grants.
I've paid attention, and I don't think his goal is to "destroy the USA". His goal is self-enrichment, and side-effects don't matter. He is a master at promising the world, and then deflecting blame when he doesn't deliver, and yet the people love him anyway. It is very easy to destroy something under those circumstances without having the goal of destruction. See Hanlon's Razor.
I prefer the corollary: Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.
At this point, whether it's stupidity, or others taking advantage of that stupidity to induce malicious actions. It doesn't really matter and they should be regarded as malicious and stopped.
There is a sense in which wilful ignorance IS malicious. Whether the fruits of that ignorance are therefore malicious is another question. I'm not a lawyer, but I know that they make a clear distinction between intent and ignorance. That is how, in fact, ignorance (or its appearance), becomes a strength. You cannot lie if you don't know. Even better is when you display ignorance but then somehow also have millions of people convinced they can read between the lines that you are not ignorant. "The best way to lie is to tell the truth and not be believed," as Twain once said.
I agree with what you’re saying here, but I think it’s important to note that as much as Mr. Trump is convinced he is in charge, there are quite obviously people pulling his strings. He’s a useful tool for more powerful people to wield, and their goals loosely align.
I got a high school internship on an NSF grant to study ground penetrating radar for landmine detection. It was my first exposure to Maxwell's equations, Unix, networking, and most importantly how real research gets done.
I took away lifelong management and research mores, a love of Unix, and ended up getting my degree in EE.
These cuts will have huge follow-on costs that we can't later simply re-budget to recover.
Just had to check, and that date was a Sunday, but that's when the big guy rested, so I'd argue that date is inconsistent within the lore to begin with.
The post is a reference to religious fundamentalists that deny science and declare that god made the earth 6000 years ago. Science is an inconvenience for those wishing to make such declarations.
Proud to say that in the early-mid 2000s I was a consultant dev at NSF and worked on the research proposal submission and eval website called Fastlane. They’ve since moved the functionality to research.gov, but my code ran in production for 20ish? years? It was old school Java Struts, JSPs, EJB’s..typical J2EE of the time. Lots of people I worked with decided to leave consulting and became NSF employees. They were good and smart people.
I know you’re being facetious, but I think there’s some nugget buried in this sarcasm.
One issue with our ever increasingly intellectual focused economy is that it leaves behind people who may just not be cut out for these such careers. I’m not against having these economies (I too used to work in supercomputing, with national labs), they’re very necessary, but we need to find a way for people who might not fit very well in such positions to still feel productive in society, and most importantly, still live comfortably in society. Industry and jobs need to exist for people who can’t do science and supercomputing or at least aren’t cut out for it as a career day in/out to still live comfortably.
Bringing back manufacturing isn’t the answer to that, but at some point as competition pulls the bar up so high and specific, we leave a lot of people behind, and I’m not sure it’s a good thing. They surely have plenty of other skills that contribute to society as well and even if they don’t, they should also be taken care of for at least trying. Maybe it’s just a lack of opportunity in education and training that fixes it, maybe it’s other careers that pay will, maybe it’s government subsidies, but I think plenty of the discourse now promoting these ideas like manufacturing are founded on shrinking of the middle class, and that’s partly due to how demanding it is now to live at that level of general financial security.
I have a bit of a bias in advocating more for enabling excellence than accommodating average. I will concede we have done a terrible job at sharing the harvest, but it’s often the excellent that are responsible for our harvest being so plentiful to begin with.
I agree with the perspective, the part I have trouble marrying it back to is the taxpayer funding and the NSF. The excellent & the people who benefit from their work tend to have lots of money and earning opportunities and are more than capable of just funding the research themselves.
If there is a large group of people who aren't benefiting they don't need to be involved in the funding and the organising either. It is a mistake to make research subject to political pressure if there is a significant political faction who doesn't think it is worthwhile for them.
No not all talented scientists are independently wealthy or have the charisma to raise VC funding. What you're advocating for is the return of the era of the "gentleman scientist" where the only people allowed to do science are those lucky enough to be born into wealth (or some other privilege e.g. extreme good looks).
I’ve served as a reviewer for a couple of NSF panels, and one of the things I really liked about the program I reviewed for is that a lot of the proposals included collaborations with local trade and vocational schools to involve and train future technicians and operators in addition to researchers and scientists. I think that’s really important for actually succeeding at the technology transfer goals of NSF, and if I’m reading your comment it does at least partly address delivering direct value for a broader chunk of the population
Expand your definition of "responsible". Not all stories are the Heroes Journey. Its just the one that gets people to accept the most exploitation and work the hardest.
I can't tell if you actually read the comment that you're responding to because you seem to be ringing the same bell. The issue at hand is creating opportunities for people who are clearly not cut out for white collar work. Framing this as "enabling excellence vs accommodating average" is out of touch and sounds extremely arrogant.
Uh... I think it's more likely this is all the result of the 24 hour for-profit entertainment 'news' network which has been pushing this conspiracy theory bs for the last 40 years.
You have a media ecosystem devoted to encouraging division, inventing problems when there are none, and finding people to blame for things.
The agencies and programs paying for poor youth work preparation and education were slashed last week or so. Mind you, it was not college education, but basic skills for more manual jobs.
These were also people who would order parts from china for their niche board game or whatever. These were people working fire prevention, people whose lungs are the most affected when there are no safety and environmental regulations.
Jibs aside, the key issue is that a lot of folks just seem to stop learning after a certain point, even if it's their chosen occupation since decades. And it's not just limited to the factory workers themselves - how many of us have met a stubborn doctor unwilling to try out a new treatment mode, or a senior banker too stubborn to learn basic Excel functions. While those folks enjoy secure jobs regardless of their proficiency in modern technology, the folks at the lower rungs of the manufacturing ladder don't. Even if they do have the desire to learn, learning anew today has become an onerous process in most fields.
We really have a Continuous Learning problem that has to be solved here - helping people reskill or deepskill easier, if they have the mentality to improve upon themselves.
> if they have the mentality to improve upon themselves
There's the rub. In my experience, and I understand anecdata is only so useful, people that really want to keep learning more than they have to are quite rare. I doubt that group is even 10% of people. If you only surround yourself with nerds who code for fun, you are going to have an extremely biased view on this issue.
Nerds who code for fun often also have the advantage of being single and childless. One's capability for learning and self-improvement really diminishes once you have one or two small kids at home. It's pretty much like working two full time jobs until they go to school and become more independent.
"The budget request explicitly states it "cuts funding for: climate; clean energy; woke social, behavioral, and economic sciences; and programs in low priority areas of science," while maintaining funding for AI and quantum information sciences at current levels."
What’s in it for people like the current Trade and Treasury Secretaries, heck even the V.P? In their previous lives, they seemed levelheaded - yet here we are.
Is it just pure selfishness, “if I don’t do it, someone else will” mentality?
“seemed” - past-tense. Before he became VP nominee. He had an arguably strong vocal stance against many things he stands for now. Truly perplexing. You’re both right in basically calling this “opportunistic” or supremely mouldable, perhaps even morally flex and incompetent behaviour. It’s a shame.
Still I wonder if post current admin, there is a way these people could still redeem themselves. I want to think that at least some are using the new found focus to get shit done for good, perhaps at the expense of looking like puppets or yes men/women (publicly).
I want to think that at least some are using the new found focus to get shit done for good, perhaps at the expense of looking like puppets or yes men/women (publicly).
I imagine a lot of them rationalized their decisions that way, as you suggested earlier. "If I don't take this job with Trump, he'll give it to a corrupt crony or some random nutcase. But if I do take it, I can work for positive change from the inside. Hmm. I really don't have a choice, do I?"
> If I don't take this job with Trump, he'll give it to a corrupt crony or some random nutcase. But if I do take it, I can work for positive change from the inside. Hmm. I really don't have a choice, do I?
True though, isn’t it? Election has already been won. If you get ostracized from the party, won’t do any good to anyone.
Hmm. Extending that logic, maybe there isn’t a clear right or wrong. Just decisions and consequences. Do what you can and hope for the best. Not a fun way to work (or live).
>$10k to give people who otherwise didn't have a road into science, exactly what they need to get their foot in the door.
The current admin thinks those $10k grants are better spent by giving them to some billionaire via tax cuts. Impoverishing the many to enrich a few is a 3rd-world, banana-republic mindset, and unfortunately is not self-correcting.
The politically-connected will see the pile of money controlled by the treasury as easy money, unless there is some organization with enough independence and (arresting) power keeping a check on them.
That $10K breeds a Democratic/progressive voter. The actions of the current admin are pretty logical if one considers the goal of increasing political power of the conservative populist mass (i don't say "voters" here as making voting meaningless is among the end-games here)
I'm waiting for an analog of my "favorite" AETA laws to be made into federal law (FETA - Federal Enterprise Terrorism Act) criminalizing any anti-government speech/protest into terrorist/extremist hell. Note about the First Amendment - AETA doesn't seem to be affected by it, and so FETA would be safe from it too. Would be pretty similar to the Russia's discreditation laws and those China' security laws being used against democratic opposition in Hong Kong for example.
For those who think this is exaggeration, remember that JD Vance wrote a heartfelt endorsement for the skull book, the one arguing that anyone who opposes MAGA is a secret communist revolutionary who needs to be crushed by any means necessary to avoid an imagined communist genocide that they allege we are all plotting. Absolutely wild shit.
It's not even midterm season yet, they are already testing the waters by conducting extrajudicial deportations of random Hispanics to labor camps in El Salvador, and the sitting US President is on record saying the El Salvador labor camps need to be expanded by 5x to accommodate the "home growns."
The issues of speech, hate, deportations are the very visible ones. The less visible is for example changing the nature of US government.
The old government bureaucracy which was focused on protecting people - consumer protection, EPA, civil rights, etc. - is being dismantled, and new bureaucracy is being built in place to enforce myriad of new restrictions and dole out import/export/tariff quotas, exceptions, and other government favors (those being given out as favors is a key here). The old bureaucracy was progressive. The new is conservative and oppressive, and will be keeping tight chockhold on the main drivers of the progressivism - free trade and tech innovation. (don't take my word for it, just look at such bureaucracies in other countries)
The old bureaucracy stopped being progressive long ago. I believe the EPA protects the environment about as much as I believe DOGE is about creating efficiencies.
At this point these organizations are just tools for the administration in power to hand out favors and therefore maintain support. The worthwhile work they do is secondary.
Trump is simply getting rid of the ones that aided democrats and creating new ones that will allow him to aid his own supporters.
Also I don't see the connection between progressivism and free trade/tech innovation. If anything, the latter only aid the status quo rather than helping it to progress.
> believe the EPA protects the environment about as much as I believe DOGE is about creating efficiencies.
The EPA is (was?) an enormous set of programs encompassing a range of environmental concerns. Undoubtedly some are more effective than others. But to claim without evidence that it is ineffective is disingenuous. I was around in the 60’s and 70’s.
Interestingly, the EPA was established by Richard Nixon, in an age when his party was also about creating things rather than indiscriminately dismantling them.
Only for those too ignorant to actually understand what's being extremely loosely proposed. And he's totally non-committal about the whole vague thing.
Hiking income taxes on W2 salaries isn't going to touch those billionaires. They'll still get massive tax cuts.
And that's assuming he's actually saying these things in good faith.
Musk was floating a DOGE dividend with all the money being saved. It'll of course be funded the same was covid checks were but that doesn't mean you have to be honest about how its funded.
FWIW the application was to send up UAVs after Air Force runways were attacked to isolate exact locations and sizes of damage, to allow for the fastest possible fixes to be made. In these situations, seconds and minutes matter as the planes in the air need a place to land before they run out of fuel.
You could be right... I'm just going off of what I've seen in the other departments they touched. Let's hope at least this program would be left untouched.
It seems a lot of REUs were not funded this year. One of my students applied to 25 REUs. He says about a third of them evaporated because of funding stops.
How is it possible that you still see the chance that the actions are being done in "good faith"? In my opinion you'd have to construct a lot of "visual barriers" in order to not see the "full picture" of what kind of people the current regime is made of, and what their motivations would be...
You'd have to be looking away, because looking at it would mean admitting you've been wrong.
If it isn't happening in good faith, then you can't call it a "reorg". That's like shooting something in the head and saying you "reorganized" their brain matter.
I started a company that makes a bunch of many every year based off of NSF research, and Nvidia is making even more based on our work that spun out. I'm not a unique story, yet they cut half the NSF budget and half the NSF-funded STEM grad students (NSF GRFP, ...).
So no, whatever the NSF was doing, we should be encouraging more of it, not half of it. NSF/NIH are much more valuable investments than billionaire tax cuts as they're some of the most valuable things humanity can be doing in general, dollar-for-dollar.
I try to avoid Left/Right topics, but as others point out, this one is more like Russian Talking Points for US Special Interest Groups, and beyond being anti-american, is anti-human.
Don't cry because [the United States has decided to turn its back on science and research and foreign aid], smile because we were great once :)
You didn't say "I'm glad you had those things". And if that's what you meant, then you are listening to this person's story as some personal tale of nostalgia instead of a reflection on what is being broken in our country.
You’re getting downvoted because of your childlike naïveté and/or willful ignorance. There is no hidden “very good reason” lurking somewhere. They are slashing and burning the federal government.
In some ways, actually yes. College has gotten more expensive over time, partly because demand for college has outweighed the benefits of college on the other side. It is a shift in the education market away from the cost profile being aligned with outputs, to being focused on prestige/experience as the primary selling point. It's also largely related to the glut of paying foreign students nearly outnumbering Americans.
Prior to these shifts, college was much much much less expensive.
I think you messed up your grammar which makes the sentence hard to read but I think what you're getting at is right. College is a service, which is why you pay for it. If it didn't provide value, nobody would use it. Free college is a danger because there's no good way to assess its market value or whether we need it at all.
It's only by adding value that we create wealth, and some of these NSF grants are just jobs programs for engineers.
is this type of research really at risk? I thought the feds were after research with an ideological bent. Rather than speculate about how the feds might see certain research as ideological, can we have some concrete examples of the type of research projects that have been discontinued?
Okay, take a moment and think: what about this administration has given you the impression that they're going to take the time to carefully understand a system they're bent on dismantling?
But you see AI has a liberal bias. Even Musk's own AI is too woke because it isn't producing the "right" kind of humor - https://youtu.be/7qZl_5xHoBw?t=6159.
Do you know that sealioning on the 1000th ridiculously bad cut is just in bad faith right? At this point we don't actually need to spend time proving how the Trump administration is doing a wrong thing actually, it can be inferred from the other EVERY SINGLE TIME.
> I think the whole program may have cost the government maybe $10k total.
Your numbers are off by an order of magnitude. There is no government program in existence that costs $10k total, you are almost assuredly ignoring overhead and all other costs. It's like calling a contractor to repair something, then crying foul when he charges $350 because you found the part on Amazon for $15.
But let's assume it was $10k.
> $10k to build knowledge of cutting edge science that filters into industry. $10k to help give needed manpower to research projects that need it. $10k to give people who otherwise didn't have a road into science, exactly what they need to get their foot in the door.
To be blunt, you are upset because you got to work on a fun boondoggle project and others are being denied that privilege. I won't doubt it was fun and educational but I can't in all honesty pretend that is a good value for the taxpayers.
Unless you are producing something of value to the public, it's wasteful, and that $10k deserves to be returned to the taxpayers.
Taxpayers are not on the hook to keep you busy with pointless yet fun busy-work. That is private industry's job.
Money "wasted" by the NSF is far better spent than money wasted in, say, the Google Graveyard or any other monument to private malinvestment. This is because science has a value capture problem by design, making it systematically uninvestable by the private market, making opportunities plentiful -- and making it an archetypal example of a place where government investment has a role to play, because we can capture value as a country that is impossible to capture as a company.
The real scandal is that we don't do more of it: our global competitors do not share the same contempt for science that is increasingly infecting the USA, and slowing our jog as they pass us is the worst strategy I can possibly imagine.
This is an opportunity for private industry to step up and step in, while drastically reducing the size of government.
I hear the Juicero had an outstanding power supply.
For all the waste, some folks probably learned a lot about power electronics.
It seems odd to me that of all places, a forum run by a VC outfit, thinks a government jobs program to churn STEM grads with nonsense projects is the way to go.
Do you think Juicero wanted to end up with a bunch of people who learned how to make an outstanding power supply and nothing else to show for it? Did the actual work on the power supply end up being available to anyone else? Maybe we should have an organization that actively wants to invest in things like this, rather than depending on the waste of VCs?
> This is an opportunity for private industry to step up and step in, while drastically reducing the size of government.
Did... you actually read the comment you're replying to? They're explicitly stating that there is a large pool of work that _the private sector is actively disincentivized to invest in_, and the only way it gets done is for other mechanisms to fill the gap.
The alternative to federal investment in research isn't the private sector picking up slack. It's for the old patronage system of the 1800's to come back. But that system was effective only when the size of problems was relatively "small" - we need to leverage economies of scale to efficiently pursue many types of cutting edge research.
Those STEM grads took years to train through NSF-funded programs. Why would private industry waste their quarterly revenues on STEM grads who will become useful only after 4-6 years of training?
Also, I bet VCs are far _more_ aware than the average Joe of the wide body of worthwhile but uninvestable ideas. After all, they are responsible for saying "no" to them and gently redirecting them to government/patronage/charity while asking to keep in touch in case the field becomes investable (because that's the story of how their boss got rich).
"Value capture problems don't exist because capitalism is perfect" is the kind of misconception that can only survive far away from the actual process of finding investments and making returns.
> I won't doubt it was fun and educational but I can't in all honesty pretend that is a good value for the taxpayers.
The students who work on these types of projects go on to create technology, companies, and jobs. The skills and experience they learn is a direct injection into our innovation economy.
And of course that's not even to mention that a lot of the things they work on will never get vetted in private industry, so we'll never even know if there is value hidden in the weeds.
Sure, but there needs to be some justification or measuring stick to decide what's worth researching and what isn't. Otherwise you're just burning up money and labor on fruitless tasks.
Reading some of the comments in this thread it sounds like people are in favor of spending any amount of money on researching any topic without any discrimination whatsoever. That doesn't sound like a good idea to me.
It’s also easily abused…the parent post is a pretty solid example of how that happens. More than any individual action by the administration, decades of reinforcement and reification of this thinking in a major segment of society is what is going to doom us.
People celebrating their own destruction by spouting the propaganda they’ve been fed is somehow both terrifying and uniquely interesting to me.
Yeah and then all we'll have to do is build a multi-dimensional teleporter so that we can go to an alternate timeline where the US has all minerals it needs in it's earth.
Ah fair, though it seems the real number was -0.3% so still not really useful... being off by 2.4 on a number that has a historical range of [-5, 5] or so is not great.
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