201–210 of 299 posts
This happens when a country is preparing to go to war. It's what happened with nuclear research around the start of the Manhattan project.
So, medical research (NIH grants) is in preparation for going to war? Is the US planning on using biological agents?
It tells Usa based org got grant to research Coronaviruses. And outsourced research to China Wuhan.
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This is a very common thing for corrupt governments. No rules are clear, so that those at the top can dictate whatever they want whenever they want. Which means that the only safe route is to always be on very very good terms with leadership. Very sad to see the US fall away from the rule of law, into kleptocracy. See also the way that grants are now being distributed at NCI and NSF. Only very large grants for many m…
The US is trending towards a Russian style oligarchy and these latest moves are just one of a wider pattern of trying to suppress academia, freedom of speech, personal freedoms.
There's a step after that. There's an article in the current Economist about how the Russian oligarchs are being crushed by Putin's cronies and losing their assets.
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The article mentions, oddly enough at literally the very bottom, that one of the main laws being used is the 'Wolf Amendment' [1], passed in 2011. It's what prevented Chinese from working on the ISS and arguably is why China now has its own space station. It's an extremely dumb law that's been passed and reauthorized repeatedly by every single administration and Congress since Obama who it was passed under. Just quot…
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As a Russian national: no, the USA is not yet at nearly the same level of corruption. The main bulwark against Russianification is not the Congress or the SCOTUS, it's the true federative nature of the US. States have a lot of very real autonomy and they limit the amount of corrupt overreach.
States have autonomy on paper. In practice, it turns out otherwise.
E.g. Trump sent ICE goons to MN and now he's embroiled in dozens of lawsuits because of that. Yes, he probably will win most of them eventually, but they all take time and energy. With a lot of negative PR along the way.
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> > allowing poisonous chemicals in your food supply or drinking water is insane. > humans somehow managed to obtain food and water that didn't have those things for thousands of years You really can't compare pre and post industrial revolution like that. Large scale synthesis of toxic chemicals as a byproduct of some unrelated industry just wasn't a thing previously. > In a free market, such an aircraft manufacturer…
> I don't think the free market would have selected for the current cost vs safety balance on its own. Possibly not. Possibly in a free market people still would fly on an aircraft type that was known to have had two recent crashes that killed everyone on board. I wouldn't, but perhaps I'm an outlier. But if people would be willing to fly on such an aircraft in a free market (which means that the value of flying on i…
(also, without the safety reporting infrastructure and mandatory disclosures the average person would have absolutely no ability to learn whether the crashes said anything about the safety of the aircraft as a whole. You'd have never known about the 737 Max crashes otherwise, just like if you've ever flown before you evidently didn't know about the last couple of crashes that aircraft type had that killed everyone on board...)
President after President, it goes from bad to worse.
A potato would know to never mess up with researches, the more you limit, the less access and knowledge you have access to.
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> Where do you imagine the power goes when you've taken it away from "the administrative state"? Congress. The courts have clumsily dismantled the administrative state. But there are more options than an unchecked executive and unaccountable unelecteds.
Congress still has all the power granted to it by the constitution. They chose not to use those powers, because the republicans support the orange turd.
This could be understandable if some rationale was provided, but it's worse than that: > Neither agency has publicly issued new formal guidance describing these requirements. Instead, officials are informing grantees individually, leaving researchers confused and concerned. They've not even made it official. They're just randomly flagging.
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It's still not remotely true that (sigh) "Obummer" was using the law to threaten grants and censor research. Trump did that. Only Trump did that. And that's a whole lot worse than wasted effort on a dumb space station.
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The space station thing is a side quest that has nothing to do with the linked article. I'll happily concede the point, even though it seems pretty questionable to me. It's still not remotely true that (sigh) "Obummer" was using the law to threaten grants and censor research. Trump did that. Only Trump did that. And that's a whole lot worse than wasted effort on a dumb space station.
Which, in itself, is interesting, and is something that I wasn't aware of. Think it's just an innocuous tangent in this case.