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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

#341

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

hackyhacky wrote: post #205
762236 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> DEI in practice is illegal No, it isn't, and this assumption is based on a poor understanding of what DEI is. The right paints DEI as a directive to hire less-qualified people based on their race. In reality, DEI just ensures that everyone gets a fair chance regardless of their race.

You speak of equal opportunity. What happens in practice is enforced equal outcomes which entails compromising on principles and standards to get the desired result.

i.e. "Group X is under-performing at math" so therefore the problem is with inherent bias in math and we won't expect engineers and scientists to have competency in this domain to get the makeup of people we have decided upon from the start.

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

#342

Post by MyOutfitIsVague »

_djo_ wrote: post #116
jjice wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe pedantic, but the US as a whole didn't vote for it in the 2016 election. Clinton won the popular vote in 2016, but Trump had more electoral votes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia...

Unfortunately a majority of American voters saw what happened in the first Trump term and decided that they wanted more of it, with even fewer controls and restrictions. The OP is correct, Americans collectively own this just as other countries' nationals have owned responsibility for the bad governments they've put into power. If the general response is one of absolving themselves of responsibility there won't be th…

Small correction: A plurality voted for Trump, not a majority. A majority is more than half of all votes. Trump got less than 50% of votes, he just got more than any other candidate, which is a plurality.

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

#343

Post by ponow »

cmontella wrote: post #196
devwastaken wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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Please read my sibling reply about DARPA grand challenges. This knowledge was built using public dollars by people who publish papers, which are being read today by people building products. That's the great cycle of progress. Notably DARPA felt the need to do this because they didn't trust private industry to do it on their own; with no money in driverless cars, the government figured industry would get there only i…

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

#344

Post by freejazz »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #114
rokkamokka wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The focus is robbing the treasury to give tax breaks to the rich.

Trump said yesterday he wants to raise taxes on people earning over $2.5MM[1] People on the left are going to be caught totally flat-footed if they don't pull their head out of their bubble. Trump is a populist president. He was elected by working class individuals and so far he has shown every intent of following through for them. People on the left don't recognize it because they don't recognize the tools that righ…

Where's Trump's socialized medicine plan? That's by far the most populist desire of populist America. It's very easy to get caught up in the name of things and not look at it substantively, which is what you seem to be attacking the other poster for.

Trump might have a populist appeal, but it doesn't make him a populist. The weight of Trump's actions and promises lie in all this deportation and culture war nonsense, not actually populist solutions to popular problems. None of these cuts are going to benefit the American populace at all. I doubt there will be a reduction in the taxes most Americans pay (this is just some new rhetoric from Trump, likely stemming from his horrible approval ratings because his administration is operating like shit), but there is already a reduction in the services populist America receives like social security and medicare.

The idea that a politician who seems to fundamentally want to destroy the mechanical functions of the government, operate an executive branch that is beyond the reproach of the courts, and privatize America's crucial social programs, does not comport with populism.

I don't even think the notion that Trump isn't working for billionaires because he tanked the stock market even makes sense. Did you not see the video where he points to his friend who made hundreds of millions that day? While smiling, joking, laughing? He's letting his best friends do inside trades on the huge market-moving moves Trump makes in the news and you think it's somehow not cronyism? I'm sorry, but your intuitions are off.

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

#347

Post by MyOutfitIsVague »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #57

Hmm the budget is supposed to be approved by congress is it not? Trump can certainly tell people what he thinks the funding should be, but until a budget is voted through it is not final? Or does this agency fall under the White House direct financing of some sort?

Without enforcement, laws are just words. The white house is really testing the concept of laws as they might apply to the executive branch.

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

#348

Post by ponow »

i80and wrote: post #201
devwastaken wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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This is deeply detached from reality. I assure you, private R&D is voraciously reading published publicly funded papers. It's a significant PR issue that this misconception about how R&D works gets propagated ad nauseum.

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

#349

Post by jjtheblunt »

notahacker wrote: post #328
jjtheblunt wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

could the 55% budget cut be a bureaucracy reduction, not a dei issue?

They're not spending 55% of their budget on unnecessary administration. Though ironically, having their ideological crusaders check every science paper that mentions the word "bias"[1] to check that it doesn't also mention minorities they wish to normalise bias against will probably increase the administrative overhead... [1]I think it's probably fair to assume that whoever concluded the word "bias" indicated a likel…

agreed: 55% seems high if a bureaucracy reduction, and agreed about paper checkers being overhead themselves.

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

#350

Post by asiejralsijr »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #300
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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