231–240 of 587 posts
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The federal govt can’t be the majority of technological innovation. If we’re lucky this vacuum will be filled by an even larger private sector innovation hub like Xerox park and bell labs.
You do realize PARC and Bell Labs are long gone, right?
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Trump is continuing a trend that has been going on since at least Bush Jr. Presidents for a couple decades now have been moving more power into the executive branch. Obama and Biden both talked about undoing this, but neither did. The Patriot Act still exists, three letter agencies still have authority to spy on American citizens, and immigration laws still defy what's written on the Statue of Liberty (I think most h…
Since Woodrow Wilson.
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The US is a strong federative country. Individual states are almost literally _states_ (as in "country") and have a lot of power. They can impose their own carbon taxes, net neutrality rules, fund research, etc. And more importantly, their local democracy is going strong.
> And more importantly, their local democracy is going strong. I guess you never heard of gerrymandering.
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…
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…
And the worst thing is that they may have misunderstood what "probationary employees" were. In federal speak, they are new employees, but the new regime may have thought they were "bad" employees, based on the idea of "probation" in the criminal justice sense.
Watching a historic empire destroy itself is beyond words. I will miss Pax Americana.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_international_order
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…
> Science in the US will be chaotically torn apart by this and a host of other decisions. Seems unnecessarily alarmist speculation to me. :shrug: I'd rather see how this plays out, since no one can possibly know at this point.
When was the last time real science came out of Russia?
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I doubt Trump is trying to balance the budget. He’s not a traditional economic conservative, definitely wasn’t in his first term. I think they are just trying to find waste and redirect it to other things. Such as their idea to give $5k cheques to every American with the savings which would cost $1 trillion (+ $1T to pay off debt). https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/20/trump-doge-c...
Why don't you care about nuclear safety, dmix? Is that the waste you're talking about?
But yes I do think it is very wasteful, as the article says it can cause serious inflation issues to dump $1T into the economy like that. Not at all economically conservative nor a useful behaviour of an agency claiming to want to save money, similar to the federal firings I critiqued as non-productive in the other thread you followed me from.
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I wouldn't do this if there were lives at stake. e.g. turning off circuits in a hospital to see which ones are really necessary. It's a very strong claim to say no lives depend on any federal funding.
All of the important programs have temporary restraining orders. That's actually the standard the judge applies, "is there a possibility of irreparable harm?" (e.g. lives lost). It's not perfect but no system is.
It’s gone. People are dying because it’s gone.