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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

#291

Post by sneak »

AdamN wrote: post #284
ddahlen wrote: post #38

I have been in and out of the academic world my entire career. I have worked as a programmer/engineer for two universities and a national lab, and worked at a startup founded by some professors. There is huge uncertainty with the people whom I have worked with, nobody seems to be sure what is going to happen, but it feels like it wont be good. Hiring freezes, international graduate students receiving emails to self d…

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True libertarians are disgusted by authoritarians.

A reduction in the size of the US federal government (and its budget) is long overdue.

Both of these things can be true.

It isn’t anti-intellectual to say that most of what the US federal government does would be better performed by private industry.

If understanding is your goal, it may be a useful intellectual exercise to internally steelman the counterargument to your own position.

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

#292

Post by throwanem »

dekhn wrote: post #245
throwanem wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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He means Andreesen, obviously.

Or he could mean Marc Andreesen.

In my defense, I haven't been taking that guy seriously for a long time now. Some of his friends, yes. But an embarrassing omission all the same.

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

#293

Post by CGMthrowaway »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #241
coliveira wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're going with the great conspiracy of GOP as Russian assets, you should also add Elon Musk and the other tech robber barons as Russian assets as well.

Whether or not Musk is a Russian asset, it seems like the more immediate issue with him are the many conflicts of interest.

Agreed. We should examine all government contracts for conflicts of interest

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

#294

Post by josephcsible »

matwood wrote: post #264
josephcsible wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money. More seriously, the NSF isn't the focus of the admin. They're going through every federal agency making cuts, not singling out this one in particular.

> They're going through every federal agency making cuts, not singling out this one in particular. That's BS. They are already bragging about raising defense spending.

> They are already bragging about raising defense spending.

Sure, but that's the exception. The cuts to the NSF are the norm.

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

#295

Post by zhivota »

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 were building UAVs in a garage and I was writing code derived from research papers).

Seeing all the programs that launched my career get dismantled like this is really saddening. There are/were thousands and thousands of college students getting exposed to cutting edge research via these humble programs, and I assume that is all now over. It didn't even cost much money. I got paid a pretty low stipend, which was nonetheless plenty to sustain my 20 year old self just fine. I think the whole program may have cost the government maybe $10k total.

$10k to build knowledge of cutting edge science that filters into industry. $10k to help give needed manpower to research projects that need it. $10k to give people who otherwise didn't have a road into science, exactly what they need to get their foot in the door.

I don't know how to describe what's happening here, but it's really, really stupid.

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

#296

Post by alabastervlog »

bpodgursky wrote: post #285
alabastervlog wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This post is nonsensical. > The SS Trust Fund is numbers on a spreadsheet. It doesn't matter. "Numbers on a spreadsheet" is meaningless, you just described functionally all of accounting for the entire economy , and if that's a reason it "doesn't matter" then the debt also "doesn't matter" because it's also just numbers on a spreadsheet. What do you think nearly all money is? > It's gone and spent. Simply, factually…

I will expand, if you need. The SS trust fund produced a surplus. Boomers then spent the entire surplus on their own deficit spending . There is no actual cash in a bank — it was put on a spreadsheet and then spent on other budget priorities — wars, military, medicaid, everything else. The SS trust fund was one of the main reasons the US could spend profligately for the past couple decades! The SS Trust Fund is NOT A…

You have fallen for propaganda aimed at getting people to not give a shit when republicans try to end Social Security.

The money didn't "get spent", it's invested. If that counts as "got spent" then your savings account also "got spent" (funding loans) and your retirement accounts also "got spent" (buying bonds, treasuries, securities) so you can go ahead and sign those over to me since they're empty anyway—right?

If the money had been spent then it would have reduced deficit spending by that much, but it didn't, because that spending was funded by debt (some of which the SS trust fund owns). If that isn't "real" then the entire debt isn't real so who cares if anything contributes to it?

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

#297

Post by fma »

matwood wrote: post #264
josephcsible wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money. More seriously, the NSF isn't the focus of the admin. They're going through every federal agency making cuts, not singling out this one in particular.

> They're going through every federal agency making cuts, not singling out this one in particular. That's BS. They are already bragging about raising defense spending.

An agency that fails its audit 7 years in a row gets more money.

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

#298

Post by beej71 »

762236 wrote: post #172
ourmandave wrote: post #35

Last week, staff were briefed on a new process for vetting grant proposals that are found to be out of step with a presidential directive on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI),... In the new structure, even if a revised proposal gets the green light from a division director, a new body whose membership has not been determined will take a fresh look to ensure it conforms to the agency’s new standard for making awa…

DEI in practice is illegal (we don't get to make decisions based on race, or other protected categories of a person's identity). I get trained on this once a year at work. What we do instead is improve the probability that underrepresented people can enter the hiring pipeline, e.g., by investing in schools.

Every DEI program I've ever been involved in has been 100% about selecting people _purely_ on merit. Not race, not gender, not whether or not they're trans. The DEI trainings are about completely ignoring those factors when hiring. I'm curious what they call your trainings on the matter.

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

#299

Post by _djo_ »

timschmidt wrote: post #270
_djo_ wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't a right or left issue, and I'm not even an American. I have no political affiliation here except seeing a country I've long admired facing a profound challenge. This is about significant portions of American voters turning away from established institutions—the scientific community, professional civil service, and constitutional checks and balances that have been foundational to American strength. I could…

I am American. Most of the people I know are also American. I'm trying to tell you why lots of my fellow Americans voted this way. aaronbaugher's comment in this thread is also insightful.

I understand why many Americans voted that way, I’m just saying that they are responsible for the inevitable consequences.

Regardless of motivation, electoral choices have consequences that voters collectively own.

Again, it’s not like we haven’t seen this before in other countries that have voted in populists. It’s always the same cycle: Widespread dissatisfaction promotes populists who correctly identify legitimate problems but offer implausibly simple solutions to solve them. Voters choose the populists out of anger & frustration, only to find that they can’t solve the problems but create the kind of institutional damage that reduces the ability of any successors to solve those problems.

Trump is a populist and we’re already seeing that institutional damage merely 100 days in. There’s no indication that the outcome will be any better than all the other historical parallels.

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

#300

Post by jjtheblunt »

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…

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