Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone

discuss.systems

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 587 posts

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

#481

Post by rayiner »

kergonath wrote: post #336
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?”

The thing is, the current situation is "more control by credentialed elites". Way more than at any point since at least WWII. It’s just that the elites are oligarchs who kneeled before Trump. He is the only one giving credentials.

Musk isn’t a credentialed elite—someone who holds power by virtue of attaining credentials to run an organization or institution with regulatory power. Musk holds power by virtue of having a populist cult of personality.

The credentialed elites are the Ivy League graduates who go work for government and do things like have the SBA make loans to minorities that white people aren’t eligible for: https://www.foxbusiness.com/media/court-rules-biden-admin-di.... They’re the ones who see, for example, immigration and affirmative action as moral causes—even though most voters oppose both—and have injected those ideas into all our government programs, corporate HR, etc.

What happened is that a plurality of voters decided that they’d rather have billionaire industrialists in charge than the Ivy League pencil pushers.

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

#482

Post by graemep »

acdha wrote: post #452
graemep wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> until Brexit actually happened, and then suddenly they all remembered they'd never wanted anything to do with such a stupid plan Why is Brexit perceived so badly in the EU? Economically the UK has done about as well or better than the other big European economies.

What makes you think the UK is doing better? Most reports have found the opposite, with costs in the hundreds of billions range versus where the economy would otherwise have been: https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/01/12/brexit-here-is-... https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/london-mayor-says-brexit-ha... https://news.sky.com/story/brexit-new-report-suggests-uk-311... One potential confound is that the UK was starti…

Look at raw data, not media reports. I posted a link already. The UK's economic growth is very similar to comparable EU economies.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?...

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

#483

Post by freejazz »

gwd wrote: post #417
esalman wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a good thing you are "starting to settle" 2025. I mean before 2020 they disbanded federal bodies for pandemic prep and look what happened.

But was that malice, or stupidity? Do you think they disbanded pandemic prep because they wanted people to die in a pandemic? It seems much more likely that they were too stupid to realize that being unprepared for a pandemic is way more costly than being prepared for one. There's certainly a lot of malice: asking for names of FBI agents who worked on Jan 6 cases, and in putting Tulsi Gabbard over the CIA, refusing t…

It doesn't really matter what their intent is when the result is the same.

Also...

> Do you think they disbanded pandemic prep because they wanted people to die in a pandemic

Are you familiar with the term reckless?

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

#484

Post by acdha »

graemep wrote: post #482
acdha wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think the UK is doing better? Most reports have found the opposite, with costs in the hundreds of billions range versus where the economy would otherwise have been: https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/01/12/brexit-here-is-... https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/london-mayor-says-brexit-ha... https://news.sky.com/story/brexit-new-report-suggests-uk-311... One potential confound is that the UK was starti…

Look at raw data, not media reports. I posted a link already. The UK's economic growth is very similar to comparable EU economies. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?...

That’s one metric but it’s not enough to answer the question and misleading in key ways. Average GDP is not the same as the average person’s income, and you can’t say whether that’s good or bad without also looking at the cost of living. If your income is not going up at the same rate as your expenses that positive trend turns out to be a mirage and that’s where much of the reported pain for Brexit has been since introducing trade barriers makes goods and services more expensive.

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

#485

Post by exe34 »

try_the_bass wrote: post #454
exe34 wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but weren't Does that imply unaccountable, or does it mean Congress thought they were doing a good job?

Again, if these agencies are never actually held accountable, this is functionally identical to "unaccountable". I mean, what if Congress created them to be unaccountable? Then both things would be true!

Are you claiming the fbi has never been called to testify before Congress? or are you claiming that it didn't happen enough? or that it didn't happen for the things you personally wanted it to happen over?

these are very different situations, and it appears you wish to defend the motte and get the bailey for free?

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

#486

Post by [deleted] »

exe34 wrote: post #485
try_the_bass wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, if these agencies are never actually held accountable, this is functionally identical to "unaccountable". I mean, what if Congress created them to be unaccountable? Then both things would be true!

Are you claiming the fbi has never been called to testify before Congress? or are you claiming that it didn't happen enough? or that it didn't happen for the things you personally wanted it to happen over? these are very different situations, and it appears you wish to defend the motte and get the bailey for free?

[deleted]

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

#487

Post by rayiner »

_heimdall wrote: post #468
rayiner wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To the contrary, in a modern, diverse country, it’s not tenable for the same people to keep running the government in the same way regardless of who wins elections. That was okay when we had a more homogenous, slower-changing country with widely shared values. That’s untenable today.

There's a good argument to be made that the role of bureaucracy in our government is to intentionally slow down change and even out the peaks and valleys as administrations change. I'd be worried about the Chesterton's Fence problem when removing bureaucracy simply because we don't like that it gets in our way.

That’s not a role the framers ever envisioned, and it’s a bad thing to have in a democratic system. The government should be responsive—voting should result in visible changes to the government. A lot of the current polarization is due to the fact that people have been voting against globalization since 2008 and somehow we keep getting more of it. It’s dangerous in a democracy for voters to perceive that elections are just a suggestion to the bureaucracy that actually runs the country.

It’s also incorrect to assume that the bureaucracy averages out to the same place as the public. Public support for increasing immigration, for example, peaked at 35%. It’s never been popular. But we have been getting more of it for decades: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi...

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

#488

Post by rayiner »

DFHippie wrote: post #436
rayiner wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To the contrary, in a modern, diverse country, it’s not tenable for the same people to keep running the government in the same way regardless of who wins elections. That was okay when we had a more homogenous, slower-changing country with widely shared values. That’s untenable today.

Engineering, statistics, science: these things do not change every four years. How to dig a trench or survey a boundary does not change. How to conduct clinical trials, combat disease, deliver mail: these things do not change. What is not tenable today, or ever, is firing the people with these skills every four years and re-hiring replacements, to the extent that this happens at all, based on ideological tests.

That was a fine notion before it became apparent that skilled professionals are unable to separate their work from their political ideology: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/04/public-hea...

This was a huge problem in the first Trump administration: https://americafirstpolicy.com/issues/20222702-federal-burea.... Do you really think that, for example, DOJ lawyers who defended Biden’s mass immigration policies are going to flip and use 100% of their talents to figure out how to do mass deportations now? If that’s genuinely the case, then there’s a place for the idea of a neutral civil service. But I don’t believe that’s the case, and that’s an unacceptable state of affairs.

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

#489

Post by turtlesdown11 »

rayiner wrote: post #478
Braxton1980 wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Absolutely incorrect. Musk holds power because he spent $290m on the election boosting the winning candidate.

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

#490

Post by _heimdall »

watwut wrote: post #474
_heimdall wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

You're still being too black and white here.

I live in a mostly red/republican state. I don't know anyone who had actually read Project 2025 or could tell me what's in it. For sure it shows the intentions of those who wrote it, but you are generalizing far too much by saying it makes clear the motivations of a broader conservative movement.

> Similarly though, I rarely heard the other side of the aisle acknowledging whether the other path was intentionally leading to Marxism - a similar number of parallels existed there as well and in either case the outcome is authoritarianism and massive federal powers.

This is an exact quote from my earlier comment so we aren't out of context here. I did not use the words "democrats are Marxists." I do raise the potential that some Democratic policies lead towards a Marxist end, but in no way does that say they are Marxist or prescribe an opinion of the entire party or voting block.

What euphemisms are you claiming I made earlier? Some context there would help, I was trying to give clear examples and make direct statements but maybe I didn't do that well

> No one on the right has any business to use the word meritocracy.

Well I'm not on the right or claiming what the right (or Republicans if that's what you mean) can or can't say. I agree that at a minimum the Republican platform right now is pretty contradictory with regards to merit and that's a problem. That again wasn't my point though - I was making the claim that some Democratic voters and politicians support are opposed to meritocracy and that view aligns with Marxist writings. Are you disagreeing with me there, or just wanting to deflect to what the Republicans are doing?

Post reply on HN