331–340 of 886 posts
Reading this you would think the US is the only country in the world. Why can’t any other country - one that’s more politically or ideologically aligned - fund the PSF? It seems odd the gripes about the US government and its ideologies as if there’s no other options. (Not an American.)
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> The people in the present administration have been blowing white supremacist and pro-violence dog whistles for over a decade now. I think this is in itself a huge problem. You've been told this, repeatedly, for 10 years, which explains why so much of the political violence (and celebration thereof) is on the left in the US. Why do you still believe dogwhistles to be a bigger problem than actual violence?
I haven’t been told this, I have witnessed it as a primary source. I watched Trump tell cops that they should rough up suspects. I watched Trump tell the January 6 crowd that they need to fight like hell or they’ll lose this country. I watched Trumpers erect gallows for Mike Pence. I watched Trump tell the Proud Boys to stand back and stand by like they were his personal goon squad. I watched Trump say that second am…
> "do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws." How does the legalese parse here? Does "violation of Federal anti-descrimination laws" apply to the whole thing or just the "discriminatory equity ideology" portion of the statement? I ask, because being in vi…
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> Why would the grant agreement specifically highlight it? I would humbly suggest that it mentions this particular example because the NSF administrator serves under the pleasure of the Executive and they have been tasked to demonstrate that they are following the orders of the Executive branch. However, the inclusion of this specific example confers no higher priority than any other possible example. It has no weigh…
OK, I accept that as a possible reason why it might be written there even if it has no weight. But it still seems very likely that it's easier to terminate a grant - and harder for the PSF to argue against that - than to actually prosecute DEI work and prove in court that it's illegal.
Ok. Suppose that's true. The government can terminate grants that don't include that language equally as easily -- and, indeed, I just found that there are multiple current cases against the government for doing exactly that: health grants [1], solar grants [2], education grants [3].
Is your point is that the inclusion of this inoperative language makes it easier than it already is for the government to cancel grants and to defend against the subsequent lawsuits until the plaintiffs are pressured into compliance from lack of funding?
[1]https://coag.gov/press-releases/weiser-sues-hhs-kennedy-publ... [2]https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/state-c... [3]https://www.k12dive.com/news/state-lawsuit-Education-Departm...
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I'd be 100% okay with the government stating no grant money can be used for funding DEI, but the actual wording in the grant prevents organizations like the PSF from any DEI, whether or not it is funded by the government grant. That's overly broad and seems likely to be an infringement of the first amendment (though I'm not a lawyer, so this is my lay interpretation).
https://www.science.org/content/article/u-s-college-first-de...
But hey, some of the same people that celebrated the cancellation of Tim Peters are celebrating the "bold" and "audacious" step of the PSF now (I don't mean you, I mean others).
EDIT: The Python fascists can get this one down to -4 as well to distract from their incompetence.
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The requirement that grantees not violate existing laws is common in Federal grants. Taking umbrage with the DEI coloration on this entirely reasonable and standard requirement is absurd. There could be a long laundry list of such clauses that all have equally zero weight ("don't promote illegal drug trafficking", "don't promote illegal insider trading", ...).
If it has zero weight, why would the grant agreement specifically highlight it? I would guess it's much easier to enforce a particular interpretation of the law via a grant agreement than having to argue it in court.
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> I am going to add my own stronger language than yours: if you don’t feel positively about diversity, equity, and inclusion, then you are sending a message that you instead support homogeneity, inequity, and exclusion. This "if you're not for us you're against us" is a very broken way of thinking. It excludes the many, many more people just don't care about diversity and want the best people in a role regardless of…
The issue is more complex. If groups of people are disadvantaged from birth and then throughout their life, it's unlikely they will be the best at anything. But you could imagine that the person with the best potential was part of that group. In effect, an unjust society that doesn't allow fair equal opportunities from birth and throughout life is sub-optimal at yielding the best candidates for any given role, as it…
> In order to raise the average, you have to give everyone what they need to > max out their potential, even if one's potential is lower.
Wrong. There are limited resources and it is not feasible to give every person every opportunity. "Let's give everybody a chance to become an opera singer, an Olympic 100m winner or a lotto winner, to see how they will use that chance. Even if they won't be any good at this and waste money, at least they will raise their starting position, improve on their potential and raise the average!". This is just silly. No, it is mathematically impossible to give every opportunity to every person.
If anything, giving extra resources to worse people (with lower potential) is a waste of resources (money, human). It makes no sense to make a potentially brilliant mathematician an below-average kindergarten teacher, while forcing a good teacher-to-be, to become a 20-years-in-a-making-junior-vibe-programmer. This is a terrible idea for economy, society and individual people (including the ones that DEI are trying to promote). People have different preferences and different abilities (some have in many areas, many have in a few, some are terrible at everything). Maximizing potential should be based on an individual's merit. Fair and equal opportunities will naturally lead to different results, because people are different. You can't simultaneously have equity and equal opportunities, discrimination (racism, sexism, DEI) and inclusion, equity and efficiency.
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> I read it as an agreement to an interpretation that doing those things would violate the law. The Executive branch can make any claim it wants, but the Judiciary branch has the authority to decide what a reviewable claim means.
Does the DOJ or PSF have more money for lawyers? If the answer isn’t the latter, the PSF is quite reasonably concluding that regardless of how a fair court might rule it would be financially perilous to attempt to stick up for the law, especially when a Republican supreme court has a fair chance of inventing another pretext for denying victory or allowing maximal harm to be done before acknowledging the law.
> The PSF is a relatively small organization, operating with an annual budget of around $5 million per year, with a staff of just 14. This might be the bigger story. How many trillions of dollars depend on Python? Yes, I mean trillion. Those market caps didn't skyrocket on nothing. A lot of ML systems run on Python. A lot of ML systems are first implemented in Python. Even with more complicated backends a Python laye…
> A lot of ML systems run on Python. A lot of ML systems are first implemented in Python. > That by being open source it doesn't deserve money? I think this is a flaw we probably need to fix. Independent of how one feels about the current US administration, I do not think, as a non-American, that a particular government should foot the bill for it, but in reality I know that no company will do it in good will either.…
> I do not think, as a non-American, that a particular government should foot the bill for it
But my point is that a project like this is global. I want the US putting money in. We're the richest and benefiting the most. But I also want other countries putting money in. They should have a vested interest too.
I think an interesting mechanism might be to use agencies like the NSA. We know their red teams but what about the blue? I'd love for the blue teams to get more funding and have a goal to find and patch exploits, rather than capitalize on them. Obviously should have a firewall between the teams. But this should be true for any country. It might just be some starting point as it could be a better argument for the people that don't already understand the extreme importance of these types of open source projects.
> I think it's worth some kind of minimum 1:1 deductible of pre-tax programs
It's definitely not an easy problem. Like what do you do? Tax big companies (idk, an extra 0.1%?), audit to determine dependencies, distribute those taxes accordingly? In theory this should be simple and could even be automated, but I'm sure in the cat and mouse game the complexity would increase incredibly fast.
But hey, it shouldn't just be America. Different countries can try different ideas
> "do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws." How does the legalese parse here? Does "violation of Federal anti-descrimination laws" apply to the whole thing or just the "discriminatory equity ideology" portion of the statement? I ask, because being in vi…
It kind of doesn’t matter, parsing legalese is for when there’s an active rule of law. We are in a time when POTUS can watch an ad he didn’t like, and raise taxes on everyone in the country over night just because he’s pissed off. Do you think it really matters what the actual words say? They are there as a stand-in for the king’s intentions, which may change with some $$$. It’s not as a serious legal contract. PSF m…