Insider leaks and “the fourth estate” are arguably part of checks and balances in modern democracy, but it’s clearly untenable for every employee of the government (or any large organization) to be empowered to speak on its behalf. AFAIK the rule for federal employees is they’re allowed to speak publicly and opine on political matters, but not to identify themselves as government employees while doing so.
This may be an interesting example of a “zombie” organization. Fermilab exists to push the boundaries of particle physics. We stopped wanting to do that, or at the very least outlay the capital to do that. We likewise don’t want people at fermilab doing other things with their time. Meaning that they don’t have much to do but go through the motions. We have a few of these in science, it would arguably be better in th…
Government organizations should be wound down more regularly. Nobody would argue that a business unit that has outlived its usefulness should be funded in perpetuity, yet there seems to be this "strictly increasing" mindset around organizations funded by the taxpayer.
They're also the CMS tier 1 site for US and possibly north america
I found this webpage[0] (and those it links to) to be a good bit of context on what this all means. (And then ran off to do a bunch more searching!) tl;dr: CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) is one of two major detectors of the Large Hadron collider. Fermilab was intimately involved in designing CMS. Fermilab is also a "tier 1" computation center for processing LHC data (possibly restricted to CMS data?). Per this factsheet…
Some categories shouldn't be privatized like medicine, military arms, basic science, road maintenance, and emergency rescue operations. Elon isn't going to work on particle physics without a direct commercial purpose.
Private does not mean for-profit. Funding and performance are two different things. Road construction is funded by government, but performed by private companies.
Typically huge profits are made when government contracts are managed by private companies. You see this in defense, space (SpaceX broke this) and big construction projects.
My Fermilab story: when I was designing my dissertation experiment it became clear that i would need ~$100k in silicon strip charged particle detectors, and that no company would ever microbond the thousands of connections for me due to the low volume. Fermilab gave me detectors that had been QC rejects from the outer barrel of the CMS detector at CERN for free, and bonded them to my boards for essentially materials…
Reminds me of this story: https://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-caltech-glassb... There are continuous technical workforce challenges in science because the methods keep advancing. If only there were money it. Instead we have engineers, scientists, and physicians driving Uber and we outsource and offshore the entire scientific supply chain.
Not driving Uber, but working for big tech and finance making money without advancing civilization.
Back in 2015 when I still thought I'd be a physicist, I was a summer intern at Fermilab on the MicroBooNE experiment. The sense of excitement and teamwork on the 10th floor was something I dearly missed when I went to CERN the year after. Every day at 3pm was "coffee and cookies", and my colleagues and I would join the line filled with physicists of all ages and from across the lab, to grab a cookie or maybe two. On…
When I last worked in person in IT, a few members of my team would get up at 2pm to get coffee and chat about work and life. Different people went in the mornings. It was really useful to team-build and feel decent about work. People who say "I don't have friends at work" with pride are completely foreign to me. I don't understand how people are supposed to have any joy at work, or get over comms barriers, when there…
I've lost too many friends to mass-layoffs over the years. I just can't do that shit anymore.
I’m not sure if it’s still there, but if you walked into the cafeteria the remote ops center for the CMS detector and the LHC was on your left hand side through a glass wall and door. My leadership chain was…interesting but it was incredibly cool in my mid 20s to lunch with high energy physicists and others in this space. https://cms.fnal.gov/remote-operations-center/ (worked on CMS data taking for a year in the mid…
I recall back in the 90s that Fermilab had a public telnet page one could connect at to get current beam line stats/info.
back in the 1990s, they used to hold open house tours.
When I last worked in person in IT, a few members of my team would get up at 2pm to get coffee and chat about work and life. Different people went in the mornings. It was really useful to team-build and feel decent about work. People who say "I don't have friends at work" with pride are completely foreign to me. I don't understand how people are supposed to have any joy at work, or get over comms barriers, when there…
I can have lunch and water cooler chat friends at work, but rarely do they turn into invite over to bbq on the weekend friends. There's a big difference. You can be friendly, but when something happens at work and one of you no longer works there...things get weird. Those weekend bbqs that you had with work friends no longer happen, or they keep going for a bit, but conversations are awkward since the still employed…
It all depends. Most of my coworkers are friendly, some are friends. We respect each other, etc, but it most cases any contacts end when someone leaves the company. The key marker is can I discuss any matters, including inappropriate, politically incorrect? In most cases not. But with true friend we can discuss anything without a fear of being reported. And we are still in contact many year after.