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The polar vortex is hitting the brakes

climate.gov

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Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes

#251

Post by dylan604 »

croes wrote: post #211
transcriptase wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair there have been a bunch of headlines about a great many things, like office closures without mentioning the minor detail that the offices haven’t been used in years, the workforce is remote, and there is no impact on service delivery or staffing. Doesn’t stop journalists from dancing around the implication if it makes the orange man and mars man look bad though.

Musk is suddenly a fan of remote work?

Musk is suddenly a fan of anything that directly benefits him even if it directly contradicts previously made comments. I thought this was pretty much self-evident at this point

Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes

#253

Post by mike_hearn »

jacobolus wrote: post #207
ericfr11 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US science will go down big time. Big Corp (oil, pharma,.. ) will get richer

"Big corp" will be massively harmed in the medium term, like everyone else. The NIH is critical for the pharma industry, and the USGS is critical for natural resource extraction industries (etc.). Blowing up federal agencies might juice profits for a quarter or two, but even that is pretty questionable/risky. If the whole economy goes into recession, many basic resources obtained from overseas get taxed, retaliatory…

Are you sure the NIH is critical for the pharma industry? Pharma companies generally conclude that replication rates of academic grant funded medical research are so low as to not be worth bothering with. From Amgen:

"Over the past decade, before pursuing a particular line of research, scientists (including C.G.B.) in the haematology and oncology department at the biotechnology firm Amgen in Thousand Oaks, California, tried to confirm published findings ... scientific findings were confirmed in only 6 (11%) cases. Even knowing the limitations of preclinical research, this was a shocking result." [1]

and from Bayer:

"To mitigate some of the risks of such investments ultimately being wasted, most pharmaceutical companies run in-house target validation programmes. However, validation projects that were started in our company based on exciting published data have often resulted in disillusionment when key data could not be reproduced.

only in ∼20–25% of the projects were the relevant published data completely in line with our in-house findings

Surprisingly, even publications in prestigious journals or from several independent groups did not ensure reproducibility

Our observations indicate that literature data on potential drug targets should be viewed with caution

If the stream of research that came out of NIH-grant funded work was genuinely useful, venture capitalists would be falling over themselves to commercialize it. In reality [3]

[Atlas Venture partner] Booth said that the “unspoken rule” among early stage VCs is that at least 50% of published studies, even those in top-tier academic journals, “can’t be repeated with the same conclusions by an industrial lab. Atlas now insists on external validation studies of a new company’s basic science as a precondition to further investment.”

He went on to say that the NIH should have higher standards and do more to vet the data. That never happened. He also said that due to the low quality of NIH output, "there’s such a scarcity of venture firms willing to take on early work, you rarely find yourself having to jump in quickly."

That was 15 years ago. There was no serious effort to improve, and VCs are still much more interested in computing startups than biotech.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/483531a

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd3439-c1

[3] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1038/scibx.2011.416#pre...

Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes

#254

Post by mistrial9 »

idiotsecant wrote: post #185
jMyles wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.gov sources being disreputable is not new. My generation grew up with the food pyramid. The silver lining is that understanding of this disrepute is nearing universality.

The food pyramid is notable because it was so wrong for so long, which is very unusual. Most gov agency science is actually quite good .

sorry - the US Federal Forest Science has been a dumpster fire in the Sierra and other areas.. arrogant, wealthy, immovable and it turns out, dangerously misguided plus very willing to enforce their worldview.

In another comment there are bitter words about the nature of Monarchy, but it appears that it does not require a Monarchy to get things badly, seriously wrong.

Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes

#255

Post by convolvatron »

mike_hearn wrote: post #253
jacobolus wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Big corp" will be massively harmed in the medium term, like everyone else. The NIH is critical for the pharma industry, and the USGS is critical for natural resource extraction industries (etc.). Blowing up federal agencies might juice profits for a quarter or two, but even that is pretty questionable/risky. If the whole economy goes into recession, many basic resources obtained from overseas get taxed, retaliatory…

Are you sure the NIH is critical for the pharma industry? Pharma companies generally conclude that replication rates of academic grant funded medical research are so low as to not be worth bothering with. From Amgen: "Over the past decade, before pursuing a particular line of research, scientists (including C.G.B.) in the haematology and oncology department at the biotechnology firm Amgen in Thousand Oaks, California…

I'm not well enough versed in the level of commercialization of NIH research. But even assuming it was all trash, currently that's where all of the commercial researchers come from - NIH funds research at universities, that funds grad students through their practicum, and provides a candidate pool for Pharma. whether or not the current system for producing researchers is optimal, there doesn't seem to be another candidate lying around.

Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes

#256

Post by mindslight »

hallway_monitor wrote: post #190
bruce511 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth noting that this "financial crisis" (which I disagree with) has been brought on by Republican governments. Bill Clinton left a budget surplus which is the easiest way to pay down the debt. Secondly, if I had to cut something, the obvious target is the military. (Oh boy, ring on the downvotes there...) But hear me out. Firstly, the adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq cost more than the current debt. With pre…

Thanks to you and GP for a reasoned response. Appropriately taxing the wealthy is 100% something we also need to do and yes, I am skeptical that the current administration will move in that direction. Ditto cuts to the monstrous military industrial complex. I think I’ll refrain from responding to the more inflammatory replies but what really sounded the financial alarm for me personally was this talk [1] given to the…

Talk of "financial alarm" for a government with monetary sovereignty is specious. It will mislead you into analyzing government finances as if they were household finances, whereas governments use newly created money rather than going bankrupt. And for our government, this really just means less newly created money going directly into private pockets.

It's only this martingale of the "Federal Reserve" neutering the government's own monetary sovereignty that has even allowed for this "debt" narrative. The part of government debt that is owed to private parties is essentially savings accounts for institutions and other countries who believe that USD will hold future value better than other assets. The other part of the government debt that is owed to a different branch of government (Federal Reserve) is nothing more than a sham accounting measure to support the political martingale.

The actual threat is the global demonetization of the US dollar because the US is no longer in a leadership position when all of our industrial, scientific, military, foreign outreach, law enforcement, etc institutions have been destroyed. It won't matter whether the "budget" is balanced if/when foreign countries are offloading US Treasuries. That's the real threat, and "our" "leadership" is now in the process of outright facilitating that destruction.

Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes

#257

Post by gosub100 »

downrightmike wrote: post #26

Ultimately the Earth will warm up, the ice caps melt, the coasts lose as the seas rise 10m

Not that it changes the outcome, but I swear I remember reading that the majority of sea-level rise actually comes from the thermal expansion of liquid water, not displacement from thawing of ice caps. Can anyone confirm/refute this?

Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes

#259

Post by graemep »

jacobolus wrote: post #207
ericfr11 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US science will go down big time. Big Corp (oil, pharma,.. ) will get richer

"Big corp" will be massively harmed in the medium term, like everyone else. The NIH is critical for the pharma industry, and the USGS is critical for natural resource extraction industries (etc.). Blowing up federal agencies might juice profits for a quarter or two, but even that is pretty questionable/risky. If the whole economy goes into recession, many basic resources obtained from overseas get taxed, retaliatory…

>"Big corp" will be massively harmed in the medium term

Most big corps are run for the short term. Management's biggest concern is how the market will react to results in the next few quarters.

Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes

#260

Post by adammarples »

k_roy wrote: post #210
NortySpock wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

30 is hot. 20 is nice. 10 is cold. 0 is ice. Not hard to remember for converting Celsius to how humans typically perceive temperature.

Okay. Or, hear me out. On a scale from 0-100, you have very cold and very hot. Or you’ve got from 0-45. Where 0 is “meh” cold and 45 is incredibly warm. So you’ve got a nice little 0-100 scale that all humans are going to experience just living that goes from very cold to very hot. Or you’ve got a useless 0-100 scale that the bottom just means freezing, and ignores every pain point of being really cold below that, an…

0 isn't the bottom of the celcius temperature scale, there are negative numbers
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