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Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone

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Re: Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone

#31

Post by abirch »

polairscience wrote: post #28

This is true for many programs for reasons that will be hard to understand if you aren't a scientist. The NSF program managers are often pulled out of academia for brief periods of their career to do various tasks as experts. This means they are often probationary. This is the only way to hire people with deep expertise on the topic-du-jour. The trump administration fired in wide swaths many probationary employees at…

In addition to these scientists, I heard from my friends in academia that they will be taking fewer PhD students because they're unsure of the funding.

We may be looking at a lost decade.

Re: Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone

#32

Post by Kindra »

Notwithstanding the other awful aspects of all of this, there’s a certain vibe of, “people who don’t understand how a system works attempting to act like they know how the system works and are too cowardly to admit they are breaking everything.”

This just reads like “Character Limit” except replace Twitter with the federal government.

Re: Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone

#33

Post by ryandrake »

epistasis wrote: post #13
apsec112 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of federal spending goes to the military (including Veterans Affairs), Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and debt interest. Everything else doesn't matter much. This is especially true given that Republicans will probably increase the deficit; any money saved will go to tax cuts for the rich, and then some.

For example: > The Senate on Friday forged ahead with plans to give the military an additional $150 billion in spending even as the Pentagon seeks to make sweeping changes and reductions in its budget. Senators voted 52-48 in favor of a budget resolution that will unlock $340 billion in spending for U.S.-Mexico border security, energy independence, Coast Guard modernization and military investments while mandating cu…

The cuts are not about making a dent in spending or waste. As you say, if that was the goal, they'd be going after the billion dollar departments. It's becoming obvious that the purpose of all this chaos is to grief federal employees, kill their morale, and make them miserable/frightened. We shouldn't try to read too much into the actions of this administration. It's not some advanced 4D chess. It's just about cruelty to perceived opponents.

Re: Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone

#35

Post by tabony »

epistasis wrote: post #14
forgotoldacc wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real question is, what negatively changed when the debt went from 600k to 666k? What about 500k to 600k? What will negatively change if it goes from 666k to 700k? I hear a lot about the debt going up. Not once have I ever heard what the consequences of this debt are to the regular tax payer. None of these cuts are going to give normal people significant tax cuts, and cutting all these programs certainly doesn't s…

The consequences are inflation. However, as long as there isn't inflation, it's just fine. And there are other sources of inflation, like energy crises, outside of spending based inflation.

Actually it goes the other way. Inflation erodes public debt [1][2]. It is, however, not necessarily good[3].

But at the end of the day, the causes of inflation are not cause and effect. You can print money to save an economy without causing inflation as we did during the 2008 financial crisis[4] or you can print money and cause hyperinflation as in the case of Argentina[5] or Zimbabwe. It’s more about how you do it instead of what you do.

[1] https://www.oxfordeconomics.com/resource/how-inflation-erode...

[2] https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/using-inflation-erode-us-publ...

[3] https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2022/aug/inflation...

[4] https://econofact.org/rising-inflation

[5] https://mises.org/mises-wire/how-money-printing-destroyed-ar...

Re: Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone

#36

Post by jazzyjackson »

spelunker wrote: post #27
klardotsh wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is because a bunch of us use the Fediverse (Mastodon, etc.) as a general purpose social media network and really don't care to have the entire timeline be doom and gloom about how bad the world currently is, but want to read the other things folks have to say. So a bit of etiquette has built up over the years to stash those things under a CW (think of it like a subject line) so you can read it when and if you ha…

Have the spoons to do so...?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_theory

Re: Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone

#37

Post by mh- »

klardotsh wrote: post #10
mh- wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a strange UI/UX.

This is because a bunch of us use the Fediverse (Mastodon, etc.) as a general purpose social media network and really don't care to have the entire timeline be doom and gloom about how bad the world currently is, but want to read the other things folks have to say. So a bit of etiquette has built up over the years to stash those things under a CW (think of it like a subject line) so you can read it when and if you ha…

Ok, that's actually very cool. And I deeply share this sentiment:

> don't care to have the entire timeline be doom and gloom about how bad the world currently is

..

> In a more elegant world [..] the concept of topics, and I'd be able to follow [..]

One can dream. I used to regard the idea of filter bubbles as a negative thing, but I'd be perfectly content with being able to craft my own right about now.

Re: Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone

#38

Post by thrfedsci022425 »

knowknow wrote: post #11

Sad to say but this will be the norm for the next 4 years, don’t expect any federal organization to come out intact. I’ve basically ruled out working as a federal employee as there’s no assurances about anything.

Federal scientist here. The situation is dire, and this is only the beginning. We've lost all employees with < 1 year of service, which has halted the new projects they were hired to work on. Leaders of 100 employee offices were booted since they had less than 1 year of federal service--back to another interim director. Those of us left are hamstrung since all travel has been canceled, and our credit cards will have $1 limits starting tomorrow. Who cares if you had a recurring charge on it that was maintaining the cell service on an instrument monitoring a volcano. We waste time in hastily scheduled team meetings trying to figure out how respond to DOGE's latest demands, only to learn as more info comes down from above that, no, we're no longer required to address their ultimatum messages. Make no mistake—their objective is to dismantle and destroy government functionality.

Re: Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone

#39

Post by polairscience »

abirch wrote: post #31
polairscience wrote: post #28

This is true for many programs for reasons that will be hard to understand if you aren't a scientist. The NSF program managers are often pulled out of academia for brief periods of their career to do various tasks as experts. This means they are often probationary. This is the only way to hire people with deep expertise on the topic-du-jour. The trump administration fired in wide swaths many probationary employees at…

In addition to these scientists, I heard from my friends in academia that they will be taking fewer PhD students because they're unsure of the funding. We may be looking at a lost decade.

We'll be very lucky if it's a lost decade. One of the many factors that made the US a technical powerhouse were the long threads across disciplines where people could do focused research. you had to reapply for grants but generally could be sure that important programs would stay in place. This breaks all of that. It seems poised to break research as we know it.

As one of the many researchers that will likely lose their career to this, I will be forced to choose between stopping work that benefits both the public and industry or moving abroad to one of the many nations that do appreciate such effort. We are about to not only lose our future efforts but also hemorrhage current talent.

I'm surely not the only person who's inbox\phone exploded with messages after the news broke with collaborators abroad offering to help me start a lab at their institute. Europe will gladly do take backsies on their WWII brain drain.

Re: Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone

#40

Post by mikeyouse »

robomartin wrote: post #25

[flagged]

The thing is, the team that fired all these researchers doesn’t have that data either. So it’s extremely easy to be critical of their haphazard cuts since they’re made completely arbitrarily with the only consideration so far being the ease of firing them based on their probationary status.

The process and detail you’re asking for would be the responsible way to shrink the government and is the polar opposite of what’s happening.

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