The Dow is at 50,000! Why can't we all just be happy about that?! /s
U.S. science is in chaos
391–400 of 1001 posts
Re: U.S. science is in chaos
#392Am scientist. We needed change. This seems like a stupid way to get change, but it's better than nothing. Academia was not doing well pre-Trump. The DEI infection ran deep - and it still does. Complete nonsense was getting funded in the social sciences and cognitive science / psychology. It was really tragic. And now all these institutions are saddled with personnel debt. The morons they hired during the DEI moral pa…
> Complete nonsense was getting funded in the social sciences and cognitive science / psychology
Man, if you think it was bad now, wait until you learn about lobotomies!
Re: U.S. science is in chaos
#393> But arbitrary cancellations and delayed disbursements are unprecedented. And justifying them on the basis of politics—prohibiting, for instance, grants that include language referencing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)—was unheard of until now. It is odd how removal of DEI is framed as being political, when it is the other way round. DEI schemes were deeply political, and depended on who can claim to be the bi…
I don't think requiring prospective hires to write a DEI statement is equally as political as illegally cancelling already funded and approved research into e.g. racial disparities in maternal mortality, or health equity gaps for rural Americans (yes, it's DEI even if it's for predominantly white people).
Re: U.S. science is in chaos
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
China is undergoing a 2008 style financial crisis due to real estate speculation and deflation due to very weak domestic spending. They have drowned their municipalities in debt cumulatively equivalent to the US federal and state debt as a percentage of GDP. Localities aren’t allowed to tax but are responsible for local services and industry. Local governments borrowed heavily to hit GDP growth targets and compete wi…
Refusing to bail out real estate speculators was bold and painful, but I'm not sure it was wrong.
Not at all what’s happening. China’s government privatized real estate and was the engine of the bubble by disallowing localities from taxing and only allowing revenues via land sales. See above how central planning in the CCP has forced massive debt upon localities.
State banks backed Evergrande’s with cheap credit and govt guarantees.
Local officials were promoted for hitting GDP growth targets - see above how they put localities deep in debt by speculating on real estate.
The CCP gave households social credit for moving to cities and buying real estate.
The CCP is not protecting consumers in the aftermath. They won’t let consumers out of mortgages for unfinished condos because they don’t want the crisis to worsen - effectively bailing out developers.
Not sure where you came up with the idea that China is acting in the interest of its citizens rather than the state. That’s not a fundamental characteristic of an autocratic socialist state.
Re: U.S. science is in chaos
#395The government can't fund everything. Too much of the budget is tied up in transfer and interest payments squeezing out other more viable research. The federal government doesn't have unlimited funds. Something has to give.
Re: U.S. science is in chaos
#396My friends from grad school who went on to become professors tell me that not only did their grant funding dry up, but they were unable to follow through on hiring many of the grad students they had planned to hire, since the students came from foreign countries and faced new visa restrictions. So the money for science is gone, the people to do to the science are gone, and the institutions continue to not support the…
Americans voted to bring the country back to the 1950's and the plan is working perfectly
The institutions that built US science dominance were built in the 1950s. A fraction of Americans voted to bring America back to a cartoonish pastiche of images of the olden times (from 1950s, 1920s and 1800s) that they didn't know never existed and they didn't know that partly 'cause of education cuts starting in the 1970s-1980s.
Re: U.S. science is in chaos
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed. File under "bitter pills to swallow." It's so easy to sit in an air-conditioned house, with our 2-day delivered Amazon stuff, and just make pronouncements like degrowth, etc. Meanwhile about 99% of the humans who live in places that haven't fully industrialized are either working feverishly to industrialize like us, or are trying to find a way to move to an industrialized country because of how incredibly har…
That's a straw man argument. Voluntarily opting out of a high-CO2 lifestyle will do exactly nothing. Demanding that anyone recognizing the threat of climate change and demanding a different approach "first change their lifestyles" or using their lifestyles as an indicator of commitment is ludicrous. This is a global systemic issue that cannot be fixed by individual action. Game theory tells you why. Besides that; all…
> This is a global systemic issue that cannot be fixed by individual action. Game theory tells you why.
Nothing will change (and nothing has fundamentally changed since the climate scaremongering started), because people in the West do not want to change their lifestyles, and people elsewhere aspire to a Western lifestyle. There is nothing you can do about this. I am not not going to eat less meat or drive my car less than I find convenient to please some leftist eco-warrior.
Re: U.S. science is in chaos
#398Earlier quoted context omitted.
And the real partisan question is ”should the US fund studying the black holes”, not the actual science question
Which really tells you more about the state of mind of people asking that question. What kind of person isn't curious about the puzzle of their own existence, or the nature of the physical reality they live in (and yes, by "being curious" I mean "being willing to put a tax dollar amount to them")?
That's foolish. There is certainly an amount of money on funding research that is unreasonable! Determining where that line should rest is an inherently political question. Determining who should get funding for that is also a political question. The latter question was able to be papered over for many years because the scientific community generally contained roughly equal members of both parties. Since that isn't true any longer now "science" is getting treated like interest group just like all the other groups within the country. It's definitely going to hurt the country in the long run, but acting like this wasn't going to happen eventually when the university system purged itself of moderates and conservatives is foolish and obscures the part of the problem that came from the universities themselves.
Re: U.S. science is in chaos
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
First of all, NASA is the main client of SpaceX. They pay SpaceX money. Sabotaging NASA is sabotaging SpaceX. If NASA can (or want to) compete against SpaceX directly it probably wouldn't have fund half the R&D cost of Falcon 9. The rest of your comment is just nice fiction.
To be clear, DOGE's strategy is not actually for America. The bigger issue is that NIH, NSF, NASA, and public health agencies are no longer perceived by the US right as neutral expert institutions. They see these institutions as strongholds of left wing elites. So this is less about fiscal policy and more about cultural policy retribution. That's why from the perspective of an outsider like me, it looks like 'they ar…
> The bigger issue is that NIH, NSF, NASA, and public health agencies are no longer perceived by the US right as neutral expert institutions. They see these institutions as strongholds of left wing elites. So this is less about fiscal policy and more about cultural policy retribution.
It's genuinely amazing(ly depressing) how quickly and effectively "certain groups" can create enemies and whip up public sentiment to attack them and gain power because of it.
Re: U.S. science is in chaos
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
Americans voted to bring the country back to the 1950's and the plan is working perfectly
The retrogression perception is correct; but the specific timeframe is so incorrect that the back of my head blew out like a pinata. The goal is - and I am not picking on the reactionary wing alone, this impulse has broad support across our ideologies - de-industrialization . The complexity of post-Enlightenment civilization is being rejected, in favor of some hypothetical state. This puts the past timeframe as far b…
Trump is a populist doing populist things, including attacking the intellectuals.
Conservatives have been basically purged from academia over the last 30 years, which frankly was a pretty dumb "victory" to celebrate, because now they voted in a dumb gorilla that is just smashing things as revenge.