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NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

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Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#521

Post by standardUser »

asdsadasdasd123 wrote: post #482
standardUser wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are either lying about hard-number racial/gender quotas or you were working for companies that were flagrantly breaking the law. Did you whistle blow? You see, it doesn't add up, because usually when a company breaks the law so blatantly, it does so in crafty, shady ways intended to make more money, not in an attempt to create diversity that does nothing for the bottom line while also threatening the very existen…

Ah yes, I'm going to whistle blow and ruin my career over something "illegal" that every university has been doing for the past 50 years. Im perplexed that you find this surprising at all. This stuff happened openly in all hands with pie charts of the existing gender and racial makeup, and the target makeup with struggle session-like questions of why our engineering department doesn't have 50% woman. None of this is…

University admittance and workplace hiring are different issues under the law. It sounds like you are purposefully conflating the issue to avoid acknowledging the logical flaws in your original claims.

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#522

Post by anigbrowl »

Supermancho wrote: post #100
baconmania wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’ve offered no evidence of “DEI in maths” or any of your other confidently unsubstantiated arguments. You’re just parroting talking points. Unserious takes deserve unserious responses.

> You’ve offered no evidence of “DEI in maths” Compelling or not, they offered some. Now it's on you to move the goalpost or concede the challenge which you issued .

No they didn't. The grant application to study laplacian equations mentioned that they would use some of the funding to broaden the range of scholars who could participate.

You can't have DEI in math itself because it's fundamentally abstract. One might as well demand to know why there's any funding larger than that required to run a stationary cupboard because mathematicians famously only need pencil and paper (unlike disciplines such as physics which also require wastebaskets).

Math doesn't require complex equipment, exotic materials, or long0running experiments. The biggest resource need you could point to is compute power, but it's basically a people discipline, where math nerds need think time and the ability to lay out their ideas with other math nerds in faculties and conferences. And such people may be found anywhere, there's no guarantee that they're going to bubble up naturally through the academic selection system. Ramanujan is he canonical example.

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#524

Post by cmurf »

bilbo0s wrote: post #161
boxed wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They sent one to the municipality of Stockholm. The majority leader in Stockholm responded by suggesting they could just turn off the water and sewer system for the embassy :P

I thought HN User burnte was being hyperbolic in the assertions that post put forth. Then I read a few articles. sigh. I mean, I guess we'll try to find competent and sane leaders again in 4 years. I don't know? There's not much else we can do at this point if this is the level of irrationality you're dealing with. I'll add in way of explanation to non-US citizens that in the US, we've always had a fixation on certai…

I think do nothing except vote is a trap. It shows how weak our political immune system is that people think it's only about elections.

Call or write your Congresscritter. Concisely express your concerns. Seriously short. Someone listens/reads the message, ticks a box that summarizes your concern, tallies the checked boxes. It isn't personalized like some might wish but your opinion is counted.

If the actual response exceeds the expected, then some feel good pandering might occur. But in large numbers of complaints, it can move the needle.

If everyone did it, there'd be more responsive government than merely voting. Of course not everyone does it. But in aggregate your call/email has an effect when you do it regularly and tell others they should.

What if even 1/10th of the complaints on social media went to Congresscritters? They'd respond differently.

Join a peaceful assembly. Join two.

If we do nothing that is permission. What comes next is election shenanigans because why not? What stops that if the people have already shown they don't care?

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#525

Post by SpaceNoodled »

zhivota wrote: post #295

I worked at two National Laboratories, Argonne and Idaho, on NSF funded internship grants. The second one turned into a full time job, again on an NSF grant. The first one was on supercomputing, writing proof of concept code for a new supercomputing operating system (ZeptoOS). The second was on the automated stitching of imagery from UAVs for military applications (at a time when this was not commoditized at all, we…

> it's really, really stupid.

That's it, you've described it.

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#526

Post by gitremote »

skyyler wrote: post #469
inverted_flag wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mean, I guess we'll try to find competent and sane leaders again in 4 years. I don't know? There's not much else we can do at this point if this is the level of irrationality you're dealing with. There are absolutely not going to be free and fair elections 4 years from now. People really need to start preparing for this reality.

If I'm a working class person without much in the way of assets, what does preparing even mean here?

Oppose government actions that restrict free speech and free press. Do not assume that free elections are an independent variable that don't depend free speech and a free press.

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#527

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

The NSF is a big part of the startup community in the US: sponsoring pitch competitions; partnering with universities; educating scientists on entrepreneurship, business, and commercialization.

It's sad to see this administration attacking startups and entrepreneurship in the US. Startup community volunteers will have to work that much harder at a time when traditional employment is less and less palatable.

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#528

Post by anigbrowl »

FraaJad wrote: post #14

> A spokesperson for NSF says the rationale for abolishing the divisions and removing their leaders is “to reduce the number of SES [senior executive service] positions in the agency and create new non-executive positions to better align with the needs of the agency.” Reducing bureaucracy is not the same as cutting science funding.

Switching executive for non-executive positions is essentially saying they want to concentrate power in a much smaller number number of personnel.

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#530

Post by erxam »

damnitbuilds wrote: post #111
alabastervlog wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And Trump 3 will follow unless the Dems move back to the sane center. Great way to lose again. The "sane center" is 3rd-way '90s dems, and their shit only worked because Republicans agreed with them on unpopular neoliberal economic policy, so there was no way for voters to avoid it.

Nevertheless, the sane center, not DEI, not MAGA, is where the Dems have to go to get votes.

The "sane center" is a dying fantasy only kept on life support by the DNC to justify the same old mummies holding on to their last vestiges of power as everything burns down around them.

There is no compromise that can be made here. The Democrats spent this past election cycle trying to appeal to 'undecided' 'independent' voters by shitting all over their actual base and presenting policies that appealed to about exactly zero people.

Take immigration, for example. There is no way in hell the Democrats could have ever beaten the Regime on this issue. So what did they do? They still tried to compete by hardening their views to appeal to 'undecided' 'independent' voters who then all promptly headed to cast off their votes for the Messiah. All they managed to achieve was to piss off their base and anybody who'd considered voting for them.

What 'moderate' (which is really just an euphemism for cowardly) Democrats don't understand is that you are in the opening stages of a war, and the last thing you ever want to do is purposefully disarm yourself because of 'decorum' and 'acceptability' and other such nonsense.

You can never make compromises with those who want you dead no matter what. Hopefully the Democrats learn that before everyone in the world has to pay the price.

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