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What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

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Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#441

Post by throwawaymaths »

nullocator wrote: post #328
anonylizard wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Government is exactly a codebase. Government bureaucracies is essentially constricting human judgement to more robotic code-like behavior, that's the only way to build large systems. You say government is not like code, then what exactly is it? Can you describe it in an effective way? Or are you just going to raise your hand up and say there's nothing we can do about it, nothing we can do about the $2 trillion/year t…

- Part of government is the legal system which a Judge's whole thing is being endless nuanced in understanding and applying what the law means; I would not considered this constricted robot like behavior even though the law is literally a bunch of written down rules. - Part of government is funding research that involves people doing real experiments collecting real data? Are novel experiments those of constricted ro…

> Don't like the way a part of government works? Reform it.

at what point does that become disingenuous? how many years have people bern trying to do it incrementally? just tell the reformer: oh try harder, knowing every feature of the bureaucracy is stacked against them and they wont succeed. in the meantime people are hurt, dollars are wasted.

> Unfortunately, congress has the responsibility to fix that,

that's not correct. congress has ceded execution of these things to the executive in many cases with broad leeway to do or not do (thats why it's called discretionary spending, any spending that is by law congress' responsibility is statutory spending)

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#442

Post by the_d3f4ult »

bad_haircut72 wrote: post #257
jaredklewis wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social security yes, but it seems to me that reducing the cost of Medicare and Medicaid should be very much possible. We need to provide healthcare but it should be possible to make that less expensive

Im gonna start a downvote party on myself haha but here we go - if you want cheaper healthcare, get rid of the medical licence!! Let the free market work. Of course it wont be better but rich people will pay theough the nose for the top level of care, middle class will get the best care the market can provide for what they can afford and lower class will get someone regurgitating chatGPT - but it _will_ be cheaper. I…

This is an uninformed take. A relatively small fraction of our healthcare dollars (~7%) are going to ‘providers’ i.e. doctors and nurse practitioners. I don’t have a source handy but this is easily searchable.

Most of the spiraling healthcare costs are attributable to administrative bloat, hospital profits, insurance companies and pharmaceutical profits. What you’re suggesting would just result in lower quality care in general and has effectively already been implemented with the rise of ‘supervised’ and unsupervised mid-level providers. I.e. NPs, PAs, CRNAs etc. It hasn’t resulted in any decrease in healthcare costs for the patient.

Let me give you some context for insight. If I see a patient in clinic for an intravitreal injection my fee will be $150-250 before overhead, the pharmaceutical company will be paid by medicare or private insurance around ~ $2000 for the drug that I inject. Double that for a bilateral injection.

If I operate at a hospital, my fee is $5-600. The hospital bills medicare a $4000 facilities fee plus additional fees for anesthesia, consumables etc. to the tune of over $10000 per eye.

If you want to lower healthcare costs a good start would be negotiating drug prices, repealing the clause in the ACA that bans physicians from owning hospitals, banning non-competes for healthcare professionals and getting rid of certificates of need that make it unnecessarily difficult to build outpatient surgery centers. In short, ideas that require a more nuanced understanding of our healthcare system.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#443

Post by dannersy »

boc wrote: post #9

Watching the tech community waltz into DC and pretend that they know how all the levers of government work is pathetic. Are there inefficiencies? Sure. Are there places to improve? Of course. But pretending that they can understand the intricacies of literally decades of institutional knowledge and deep connections across the globe in the course of a single weekend is asinine. We need to do better. The US government…

It may be a bad assumption to think HN comments reflect the broader tech community's opinion on what is happening in the US government right now. That being said, there are far too many commenters that seem to be okay with what's happening, especially when it comes to DoE and Musk taking over the treasury.

There just seems to be an overall lack of respect for how government works, the broader machine and bureaucracy that is supposed to protect from unilateral decisions made by a single entity. Government is not, and should not, be run like a tech startup. Going fast and breaking things isn't a recipe for stability or reliability in both government and software. History has tried kings and dictators and, well, they never turn out great for the general population. Democracy is slow and sucks sometimes, but it also has a ton of perks that we seem all too quick to dismiss and throw away.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#444

Post by tc4v »

robbiewxyz wrote: post #8
bawolff wrote: post #4

Seems like a good opportunity for other countries to recruit scientists. I think its underappreciated how much of America's modern success comes down to attracting scientists and intellectuals from war torn europe in the 30s-50s.

I hold the idea that brain drain, i.e. emigration of skilled people, is one of only a small handful of real methods to hold fascism to account. With that, as things start to get real bad it seems leaving is something of a moral duty for anyone who cares, has skills that hold real weight, and can still afford to do so. Obviously where this "real bad" point is is hard to say, and there's important tradeoffs to consider…

It works better when there is some viable alternative. Research job market is terrible in Europe right now because our governments are trying to make a US like system (project driven and without stability) but without putting the money. There isn't a lot of space in the world to accomodate US brain drain. A bit in Japan, a bit in Europe, most of it in China maybe.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#445

Post by lovecg »

unsnap_biceps wrote: post #169
switchbak wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The president just threatened Greenland with military action. That is absolutely fucking unprecedented in living memory, and well before. And that passed without much more than an exasperated sigh. No, I think the populace will go along with whatever these folks deem acceptable. It’s like a bad movie.

The latest is that the US is gonna take over Gaza and deport everyone there. I do wonder if there's any hot button items anymore.

My (perhaps naive) take is that we all got “Trump immunity” from the first time around the rollercoaster and understand that a lot of it is ineffective bluster that never goes anywhere. Look at the tariffs that’s already been “delayed”.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#446

Post by bakuninsbart »

77pt77 wrote: post #351
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of other benefits to the USA attracting high skill talent than just salary: * English language school system so your kids (if you have them) will speak a world language. * Racially and culturally diverse cultures, cuisines, and communities. * Exposure to goods from most of the world, even if marked up. * Availability of international franchises headquartered in other countries in major metros. * A stron…

[flagged]

> The USA passport is far from a strong passport. Plenty of better alternatives elsewhere. Also, that implies getting citizenship, a 5 year ordeal.

This depends on the metrics chosen to evaluate. My german passport offers significantly more visa free travel options, but the German government is notorious for not really giving a shit about citizens getting stuck in crisis abroad. For example when the Sudan civil war broke out, Americans were evacuated in a pretty crazy and expensive military operation, while Germans were told to buckle up and keep their heads close to the ground...

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#447

Post by energy123 »

dmagee wrote: post #59

There seems to be a lot of negativity from the HN crowd about this. But, the reality is that your fellow Americans voted for this. If you don'y like it, you're going to have to convince people that it's a bad idea. Getting worked up about Trump or Musk or SV bros isn't getting us anywhere.

> If you don'y like it, you're going to have to convince people that it's a bad idea.

You can't convince people whose attention bandwidth is entirely consumed by the social media engagement algorithms controlled by the very people doing this.

I'm afraid this might be a fait accompli for democratic institutions. The chance to stop this was 10 years ago, by breaking up concentrated media ownership and regulating social media. We didn't, and it's too late.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#448

Post by matwood »

softwaredoug wrote: post #206

The big thing is this isn't really about any real monetary savings. What we get out of these budgets is a bargain: > The biggest single share of the NIH budget goes to the NCI ($7.8 billion in 2024), and the second-most to the NIAID ($6.5 billion) with the National Institute of Aging coming in third at $4.4 billion. (See the tables on numbered pages 11 and 46 of that link at the beginning of the paragraph for the det…

> The big thing is this isn't really about any real monetary savings.

Of course not. The big gain is for Trump and Musk to say they did something. Regardless of how someone voted, I can’t believe they are still falling for this shtick.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#449

Post by bux93 »

softwaredoug wrote: post #229
stainablesteel wrote: post #223

What i've learned in the last week is that if an unelected bureaucrat thinks it will hurt the Trump administration to follow their order through a manner of malicious compliance, then they will. But if they don't, then they'll ignore the order and pretend they're defending the constitution. a serious audit of the endless money printing of the federal government is well overdue

You don't need some genius brain auditing to know that 99% of the money goes to social security, defense spending, medicare, medicaid, and interest on debt. The stuff DOGE is playing with is such a tiny percentage it won't move the needle.

But imagine all that grant money going to, say, grants for SpaceX and EV-subsidies for Tesla..

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#450

Post by baq »

skissane wrote: post #431
baq wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not happening. Getting significantly more than $100k is close to impossible in most careers in any other country and the dollar is the safest currency to get paid in. Not convinced the desperate folks who want to move despite these are good hires. Anecdotally the only people working any job at all outside of USA that I’ve met were doing that because of their non-US wives not liking it stateside. This isn’t a large gr…

> Not happening. Getting significantly more than $100k is close to impossible in most careers in any other country There are literally millions of people around the world who earn significantly more than US$100K and don’t work in the US. e.g. in Australia, many medical specialists earn more than US$200k - it is common for experienced oncologists, cardiologists, paediatricians, gastroenterologists, etc, to earn more t…

'most careers' and Australia is a special snowflake, too, though yes, a valid example. on the other hand you have Eastern Europe, 6h drive to the 'West' from approximately anywhere and salaries in the shitter except for some professions in capitals (cardiologists would probably also qualify).
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