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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

#471

Post by MyOutfitIsVague »

cancerhacker wrote: post #353
MyOutfitIsVague wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this slash and burn approach is legitimately good in many circumstances. You cut through cruft, break down old unneeded processes, and things that are needed but were undocumented become quickly documented and maybe refurbished. Things that break are quickly noticed and reinstated. It really doesn't work for huge complex systems where the breakages aren't felt fully for many years, and building the systems back…

When you’re refactoring a system (which is really what he’s claiming to want to do) you don’t just delete the repository and start with main(). You figure out where the edges are, how they fit together, where are the Chesterton Fences and how can we protect them until they’re understood. A/B unit testing. This takes a non-zero amount of time and it takes careful consideration by subject experts. I can’t really speak…

I generally agree with you, but I have worked with many balls of mud that actually can not be understood even with experts and research without an unreasonable amount of time. Things like a program that runs in a database that was bought from a vendor that has since gone out of business, and the program ostensibly formats some rows and puts them into another table, but we don't know and can't know if anything else is actually using it because observability is not a part of this product, and we can't reach anybody who actually was involved in making it or setting it up. In these cases, a scream test is easier, faster, and more effective than "proper" research. And nearly the entire system is built on these inscrutable processes that nobody understands.

Sometimes it involves people, too. I did consulting work at a company that maintained an entire department of dozens of people who did nothing but mechanically opened spreadsheets that were dropped into a share, copied a specific set of rows from them into another spreadsheet, and then copied that spreadsheet into another share. It turned out the entire process was redundant, because what it was built to temporarily fix had already been permanently fixed elsewhere, and they still kept growing this useless department for years. Happily, the majority of these people were reassigned rather than fired.

For a collection agency, breaking these things is temporary pain. For a government, it can be deadly for constituents.

> I can’t really speak to your hopefulness of good intentions - as a parent that relies on government agencies to help my special needs child with the tools she needs, I see no hope here.

I am really sorry to hear that. It's not a good position to be in. I have a trans child myself, and I am also worried about being able to care for them in an environment that is increasingly hostile. I've spent weeks of this past month depressed and panicked over the current "governance". I'm just trying to cope, and sometimes that involves a bit of denial.

> What does success look like?

Don't get me wrong here. No success is possible. If their intentions are good, they're still destroying things that will kill people and take decades to repair. There will likely be no remuneration. I'm just hoping for the outcome that is least bad. I have zero hope of anything good resulting.

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

#472

Post by _heimdall »

tsimionescu wrote: post #449
_heimdall wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be very curious where in our laws it is written that congressional budgets must be spent in their entirety every year. I could just be wrong here, happy to learn something new. > Laws shouldn't need to go into details on exactly how every last dollar is to be spent. Laws should go into every detail that matters to those writing it. If all they care about is that the money is spent and that there's an agency with…

> I'd be very curious where in our laws it is written that congressional budgets must be spent in their entirety every year It's included in the "CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET AND IMPOUNDMENT CONTROL ACT OF 1974"[0], Title X, at least as a base assumption. It's also part of the text of the annual appropriations bill(s), on most subjects. [0] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/COMPS-10356/uslm/COMPS-1...

The Impoundment Control Act isn't as simple as "every dollar appropriated must be spent."

It defines how a President must notify congress to request a reduction in appropriated budget. That request is expected to contain a full accounting if expected financial impacts and reasons for the changes requested. Congress then has 45 days to respond, without congressional approval the request is considered denied.

What they are doing today could fall into a discovery period in which they're still collecting information to make a proper impoundment request. Whether they're actually acting in good faith there is yet to be seen, but they woould have to be allowed to look into and audit departments before being able to clearly lay out how much of the budget is waste and precisely why the reduction wouldn't impeded the departments from meeting their legal obligations.

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

#473

Post by dylan604 »

kelnos wrote: post #408
dylan604 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're only one skipped election away from democratic death.

How would you "skip" an election, though? Every single blue state and swing state will hold elections in 2026 and 2028. The federal government has no say in that. If the red states don't feel like having elections, then I guess their legislatures will be directly appointing electors to send to the electoral college. Outcome will be the same, more or less, as if they held elections.

Don’t care about state elections as that’s not the point. If someone that was currently in the last term of their Constitutionally limited position decided some sort of martial law that delayed/postponed/canceled an election that would replace them using their SCOTUS provided blanket immunity for official acts while the congressional branch refuse to impeach/convict, then there would not be an election. Anything the states did wouldn’t matter as the complicit congress would just choose to not recognize anything the states did.

It might seem like a bizarre thing to say about the USofA, but we were not far from not certifying the previous election with an opposition led congress.

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

#474

Post by watwut »

_heimdall wrote: post #467
watwut wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has zero to do with rooting put fraud, this is literally making goverment more corrupt. And the whole "democrats are Marxists" talking point is ridiculous. There are no paralels here, just a authoritarian and anti democratic movement successfully demonizing other side regardless of truth.

You're being too black and white here in my opinion. From what I've seen we don't yet have a clear vision of what their end goals really are. They've talked about waste and fraud, and what they've done so far could be to that end. Going out a layer and you find people around them, and Project 2025, that seem to talk much more towards privatizing the government. I haven't seen enough to know which way it will go, but…

1.) If you did not seem enough, it is because you was avoiding it. Project 2024 also literally describes much more then just privatization.

The goals of conservative movements were always visible and open, alteought enablers preferred to demand everyone uses euphemisms.

2 ) You did used those words. You knew it was exaggeration and even now you are exaggerating. Plus even milder claim is purely false. You got what you wanted politically, so this strategy of false equivalencies, of blaming democrats of what conservatives do and plan to do is getting really hollow.

Bo sides were not the same, you just create such impression by using euphemisms for one side and exaggerations for another one.

3.) No one on the right has any business to use the word meritocracy. They never wanted ine, occasionally using that word to manipulate. Right now, qualified woman amd black man were removed from leadership position amd replaced by mediocre unqualified man.

Right now, qualified people are replaced by unqualified loyalists.

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

#475

Post by teleforce »

peterlada wrote: post #367
polairscience wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

China is not losing this decade, the scientific gap will add to the growing chasm of future outcomes between the two superpowers.

This reminds me the so called dark ages where western people just conveniently skipped through 1000 years of very productive knowledge of development and contributions from the Arab and Muslim world centered around Toledo, Spain and Baghdad, Iraq as it never happened [1].

The false narative is that it's straight from Greek and Roman era to the Renaissance era as if mathematicians and scientists were just fall asleep in the entire world where in actual fact in the Arab and Muslim world many thousands of books from Greece/Rome/India/China were painstakenly translated (no Google translate, no printing press) and many more new books were written.

[1] Toledan Tables:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toledan_Tables

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

#476

Post by rayiner »

clcaev wrote: post #443
rayiner wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“The executive power” means “all the executive power,” in the same way “the judicial power” in Article III means “all the judicial power.” Or do you think the other branches can properly exercise some judicial power? Advice-and-consent isn’t an exercise of executive power, it’s a check on executive power, just like impeachment. Sure, Congress can change or clarify the mandate of an agency, and the President must go a…

Congress often specifies the criteria by which grants are made, qualifications and funding priorities. Sometimes these can be very specific, eg "earmarks".

Sometimes they do. But often they do not. Look at the appropriations bill for USAID: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/8771....

> UNITED STATES AGENCY FOR INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT > Funds Appropriated To The President

> For necessary expenses to carry out the provisions of section 667 of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, $1,214,808,000 (increased by $5,000,000) (reduced by $5,000,000), of which up to $182,221,000 may remain available until September 30, 2026

Section 667 of the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act just says the money is for “operating expenses” for administering the Act. Who decides how to spend that $1.2 billion?

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

#477

Post by rayiner »

aragilar wrote: post #338
rayiner wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you propose rewriting it that wouldn’t just mean “less democracy” and “more control by credentialed elites?”

Some suggestions: * Drop the electoral collage * Proportional and/or preferential voting * Term limits/retirement ages * An independent electoral organisation with real teeth to prevent gerrymandering (and verify the election) * Free and easy voter IDs (if ID are ever required) * All election days are public holidays, with requirements to allow workers on the day to vote * Compulsory voting (works in AU) * Minimum nu…

Agree with many of these. But changing to a parliamentary system would make the GOP even stronger: they won the House popular vote in 8 of the last 13 elections, including comfortably both in 2000 and 2016.

But there is no such thing as an “independent electoral organization.” The Framers never credited the idea of an “independent” body that could be trusted to be somehow “above politics.” That’s why the constitutional government is like a game of rock paper scissors. Everything can be checked by everything else.

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

#478

Post by rayiner »

Braxton1980 wrote: post #323
rayiner wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you propose rewriting it that wouldn’t just mean “less democracy” and “more control by credentialed elites?”

Are you sure that any change to address the recent issues would always result in those two outcomes? Also, Elon Musk is the richest elite in the world so it seems we already are at the bottom of the problem.

But the power Musk holds isn’t the result of him being rich, it’s because he has a populist cult of personality. The candidate who spent twice the money lost the election. Musk has power because he got on stage with Trump in Pennsylvania promising to fire all the federal workers.

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

#479

Post by kergonath »

malfist wrote: post #128
devmunchies wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why do you think the vacuum won't be filled by other countries willing to fund their scientists? This is after all the same reasoning used to give tax breaks to get a factory to setup in town

It is not a zero-sum game. Less spending in the US does not magically becomes more spending elsewhere. It’s actually likely to become less spending in several countries, as military spending increases because of geopolitical instability.

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

#480

Post by graemep »

rob74 wrote: post #465
graemep wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There you are: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?... Only Italy has done substantially better, but that is recovery from the aftermath of the 2008 collapse.

Er... that chart shows the UK GDP per capita about on par with France's (even slightly higher) until 2018, and from then on it has been consistently below France - not by a lot, but still noticeable...

A tiny difference and the big difference was that the UK fell back more during covid in 2020. the difference fluctuates from year to year it was only $300 (a 0.5% difference) in 2022.
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