71–80 of 587 posts
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There is a “show more” button
""" I have been informed that everyone at NSF who was overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation (PAWR)[1] project is gone. This program has been providing testbed environments to help drive forward wireless networking, including mobile/cellular networks at locations in Harlem NY, Salt Lake City Utah, Ames Iowa, and Cary North Carolina. One of the explicit goals of the program is to keep the US competitive…
Consent matters. There is no worse tyranny than to force someone to pay for something they do not want to buy, simply because you think it would be good for them. I am vehemently pro-research and pro-education, but these tax-funded programs are not it. There must be some meaningful connection to the delivery of value, otherwise this stuff is just public-private wealth transfer. This seems obvious to me. Why should th…
Government subsidies should exist in general because fundamentally, humans are very bad at making long-term decisions. Institutions, taxes and transfers are how we make sure that society is oriented away from people's short-term preferences and towards long-term benefit to all.
“People are bad, therefore let’s throw organizations of even more people at the problem” doesn’t even pass the laugh test.
In fact, not only does this “solution” not solve the problem, it creates a whole host of new ones: corruption, graft, human rights abuses, and perpetuation of the status quo due to codification.
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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…
Non-probationary employees can't be fired (and even voluntary resignations are rate-limited by the Iron Mountain mine shaft elevator). So every day that process takes lowers the number of employees that can even be fired. Once it gets to a year (very easily) they would all have come off probation so nothing could be done. Everyone saying "oh something should be done but just do it slower" is actually saying do nothin…
Your reasons aren’t a good justification for what they did, because they’re breaking the rules anyway.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Non-probationary employees can't be fired (and even voluntary resignations are rate-limited by the Iron Mountain mine shaft elevator). So every day that process takes lowers the number of employees that can even be fired. Once it gets to a year (very easily) they would all have come off probation so nothing could be done. Everyone saying "oh something should be done but just do it slower" is actually saying do nothin…
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…
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.
As Technology Connections recently said, it's worrying that people have had hostile bubbles built around them and not noticed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Government subsidies should exist in general because fundamentally, humans are very bad at making long-term decisions. Institutions, taxes and transfers are how we make sure that society is oriented away from people's short-term preferences and towards long-term benefit to all.
If people are very bad at making long term decisions, then how would a government (made of people) somehow mitigate this? Governments also have demonstrated their fundamental inability to outperform in making long-term decisions. “People are bad, therefore let’s throw organizations of even more people at the problem” doesn’t even pass the laugh test. In fact, not only does this “solution” not solve the problem, it cr…
Using taxes to fund basic research is one of many ways our institutions have a countervailing effect towards long-term thinking. In fact we should be taxing much more and doing much, much more of it.
This is explicitly anti-majoritarian, yes.
Corruption is indeed a potential issue, and we should focus on ways to e.g. root out peer review rings. But the numbers we're talking about are tiny.
Consent matters. There is no worse tyranny than to force someone to pay for something they do not want to buy, simply because you think it would be good for them. I am vehemently pro-research and pro-education, but these tax-funded programs are not it. There must be some meaningful connection to the delivery of value, otherwise this stuff is just public-private wealth transfer. This seems obvious to me. Why should th…
The outcome of this is not going to be a smaller government that achieves 80% of its previous goals with 70% of the spending. The outcome of this is going to be massively chaotic organizations and less efficiency because of the huge fucking wrecking balls slammed into everything by people that have publicly spoken about their goal to destroy the post-new-deal society and replace it with CEO-kings running fiefdoms.
Why shouldn't the three monopoly cellular players in the US do this work themselves? Is there some reason the NSF is doing industry research for them? Are we /honestly/ afraid of "falling behind" in cellular technology if the government doesn't do basic research?
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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…
If you've read the three-body problem series (or the tv show) [spoiler incoming] - - - - the way to stop humanity from being able to fight back (against alien invasion) is not via weapons, but via disabling science. It's a long term strategy. So the conspiracy theory that trump is a russian asset (or is influenced by them at the least), seems plausible, if you imagine that such removal of science and research funding…
Discrediting scientist is a standard step for most dictators. They only keep the bare minimum they need for the military and surveillance.