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Tesla also started without Musk.
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NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions
351–360 of 877 posts
Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions
#352The NSF budget is ~$10billion. That's about half of NASA's, 1.2% of the DoD's, 0.5% of the discretionary budget ($1.7 trillion). Why is this the focus of the admin? Science is one of the few things the US is doing well.
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Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions
#353Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
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This assumes only research that can be turned into a product should be pursued. Maximizing profit is not actually a virtue, no matter how hard the business types try to say it is.
False. Mass accumulations of capital allow exploratory research without a clear path to commercial benefit, but it's a cherry on top, a kind of motivator for researchers.
Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions
#355Earlier 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.
Defense is squarely a government responsibility and concern. Funding research less so, not that there aren't good arguments for doing it.
Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
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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That's an interesting counterfactual but it doesn't really mean much to reality. Fact is, what happened is that public research got the results where private industry did not, and everyone is better for it, including private industry. Progress doesn't wait for private industry to be certain of its profits; if it doesn't happen here, it'll happen elsewhere.
Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That's not any different than it has been. Good point. Exactly like when the Biden administration decided to cancel all grants to Harvard University because they didn't allow a government takeover of the university. Oh, wait, that didn't happen.
My dad is a university researcher. During the Biden administration he was forced to add completely unscientific DEI language to his grants if he wanted to get them funded. You just don't know about it because the media you watch doesn't report on that because they support it. So yeah, the whole Harvard thing is more of the same.
Having been awarded a grant from DMS for an undergrad training program – the "broader impacts statement" was more obnoxious, and forced.
There are other issues that affect our ability to do good science, and the "broadening participation" mandate was peanuts compared to the other indignities of grantwriting.
Politely speaking, I'm not sure what crowd you're speaking for.
Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions
#358Earlier 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…
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Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions
#359Last 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…
These are welcome changes, as the practice of DEI (not it's idealization) is actively discriminatory and intolerant of dissenting views. Let competence be the only metric.
Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions
#360Earlier 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.
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.
Every DEI program I've been involved in has had target quotas which put pressure on hiring managers to reach those quotas, but still "hire on merit". And then they hire a viz minority engineer who thinks translating a js file to python means renaming the file extension.