371–380 of 877 posts
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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I think the problem here is that there isn't just one way in which Donald Trump is unduly influenced by Russia in ways that are difficult to explain. I can understand being skeptical, but there's several independent actions Trump has taken that are all inexplicably sympathetic to Russian interests. Just some quick examples: * Recommending American de-nuclearization while stating that Russia is no longer a threat to A…
You forget that Trump's enemies are all married to this narrative of Trump as Russian asset. So I'm very clear that he will try to destroy as many as these people as possible during his second term. This includes all the people pushing support for Ukraine, which is seen as a Biden project. It has nothing to do with helping Russia and more with his personal preservation in power.
Do you mean political rivals or do you have actual evidence the Democratic party is trying to kill him.
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> 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.
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The NSF funded my graduate research. It feels like someone is going through my past and burning all of the ladders that helped me grow and succeed.
And that was like 15 years ago, I hear things have only gotten more extreme since then. Well, at least until very recently...
As the article mentions, this is part of a 55% cut in budget. So this is not a reorganization but a cut to research funding of at least half. It's potentially an even harsher cut as grants are only part of the budget and they might have to cut even more grants to still finance other obligations from less than half the budget. The goal seems to be simply to destroy the current research system, and to have the bit that…
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So after the first simple question, we're already at less than half the original claimed figure of 55% (a bad sign for its credibility, if you're a Bayesian!). But more importantly, I'm familiar with the linked document, and it's garbage. It was thrown together practically overnight to justify a political decision that had already been made, and in its incompetent haste, flagged proposals that had phrases like "diver…
I'm not the one that made the original claim. The 25% is the government's figure. Whether some of it was classified incorrectly is up for debate. I haven't personally double checked every claim, but it is not hard to believe that money is being siphoned via those grants into DEI programs, and it is the government's position to not fund these programs anymore.
That's not siphoning anything away from science -- it is science.
Completely aside from the incompetent misidentification of which proposals have anything to do with race, gender, or sexuality (hint: it's a lot less than 25%), the staggeringly stupid premise that all of them are inherently politically-motivated is part of the problem here.
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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.
For decades now the main difference between the US and the other economies is the amount of highly qualified labor across the board, this move to destroy academia and elevate the stupid and unqualified will be the end of America and the whole world will be poorer for it.