Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Complete ignorance on your part, both about the degree of sexual dimorphism, and your apparent, assumed position that gender diverse identities do not have biological origins. There is insufficient data to make firm conclusions, but I will note that brain differences are observed.
WH proposes rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants
491–500 of 676 posts
Re: WH proposes rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants
#492IF YOU ARE A SMART PERSON LOOKING TO DO SCIENCE AND OR RESEARCH: DO NOT COME TO THE USA.
They want to turn this place into a the real life version of idiocracy? So be it. The lay voter needs to see what voting badly does. They need to see consequences. The cure for cancer could be there in this research. WHO knows what could become of real mRNA research. But no. We just want to believe the world is 6k years old and some donor is gonna tell some begging scientists they get their funding or not.
Re: WH proposes rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants
#493Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why does science need to be through the government? Irrespective of the proposal, science research is just as open after this change as before so long as it's funded by private citizens who can control the channels through which they donate to this work. On the other hand, if we can't get private citizens to donate to science research, then they are not likely to vote for it either--polls don't register much of a con…
It was realized some time ago that having citizens decide to "donate to the research we care about" was not the most efficient way to get the most important research done. So we switched to a system where we pool our resources (taxes), and then use a somewhat complex process (described in TFA) to decide how to allocate them to possible research.
and those taxes are distributed by our government... which is political. simple as.
Re: WH proposes rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants
#494Earlier quoted context omitted.
$$$$$ > €€€ or ££ With a few exceptions like Switzerland, American levels of compensation for highly qualified people just can't be matched anywhere in the Western world. Saudi Arabia or UAE maybe, but these don't even try to pretend to be socially and politically liberal.
> With a few exceptions like Switzerland, American levels of compensation for highly qualified people just can't be matched anywhere in the Western world. Gross compensation yes. But if you begin deducting stuff like the absurd American housing costs, private healthcare, saving up for deductibles, the need to own, insure, fuel and maintain a car to do everything because almost nothing is accessible by public transpor…
I've done that math too and the other reality is that most of those costs are optional in the US.
It is 100% possible for me to have a high salary in the US and save most of it while temporarily exposing myself to larger risks. And it is far more useful for me to be able to say and show that I have a high salary, for access to credit and resources, private investments that give me the best shot of escaping a permanent underclass.
Of course, I don't want to budget, nobody wants to given the choice, so I pay for the conveniences and assurances that I can afford.
But even if the margins are smaller, the absolute numbers are great. If you aren't living paycheck to paycheck due to debt and lifestyle inflation, then you are really saving thousands of dollars a month. potentially many thousands. a single one of those is enough to travel around the world, it's just the irony that we have to come back to the US very soon in order to continue making that money. its enough to attempt to make a homerun in our capital markets on a equity name.
So, sorry commonwealth and Europe, you really don't compete on that front for people that don't already have capital. The wages are just too low.
In fact, the wages are ironically sooooo low that their main selling point - social welfare - is at parity to Americans on welfare! Who do have healthcare without premiums in some states, subsidized higher education in some cities, and more. So the systems aren't really as different as billed. Saying it another way, a European/Commonwealth citizen making their same salary in USD would get the same benefits in some parts of US, just losing all of their social standing in the process.
And finally, when Americans do earn their freedom back, with unlimited sums of money, Europe and Commonwealth countries once again become uncompelling, because the US has a more expensive, larger, funner version of everything those countries have to offer, while our US Gentry experience a different form of social welfare supporting themselves.
The incentives to really exit the US system aren't quite there. As another person mentioned, Switzerland is closest. Switzerland and schengen access is pretty appealing to me as well.
Re: WH proposes rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants
#495Earlier quoted context omitted.
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You did exactly what GP was commenting on - conflating something that happened occasionally in the past with policy that mandates it should happen every time today. Yes, grants were given and revoked for political purposes in the past. But what percentage of grant proposals were reviewed by an appointed political officer whose sole job was to screen out wrongthink? It did happen, but it was ad hoc and amateur. Today’…
>But what percentage of grant proposals were reviewed by an appointed political officer whose sole job was to screen out wrongthink? It did happen, but it was ad hoc and amateur.
Small consolation for those excluded. It wasn't "occasional (but serious!) mistakes" it was systematic ideological control.
I'd say explicit is better than implicit. Less hypocrisy, and more transparency. And at least now that this shit is officially set as word to paper, and is out in the open, the other side, when in power, can dismantle it and make into law guarantees that such wrongthink persecution wont happen again.
But they wont. They'll use the same mechanism of "appointed political officer whose sole job was to screen out wrongthink".
Because it was never about the principle. It was about doing it convertly as long as they politically/ideologically controlled those establishments. Controlling them through government power will suit them too, as much as it suits the other side.
Re: WH proposes rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants
#496Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your comment suggests you think cronyism was in some part responsible for America's rise as a global power. Common sense would indicate that we became a power despite the cronyism, not because it, and you've provided nothing to support your wildly counter intuitive claim. This is your comment basically: People really need to read their history. When America definitively surpassed the UK in 1880 as the richest country…
> Your comment suggests you think cronyism was in some part responsible for America's rise as a global power. Not at all. My comment was that America’s good run began a century before the 20th century practice of administration through independent experts. Thus, such administration cannot be a necessary condition for America’s “good run” as OP suggested.
That's fair, but I think your original comment could be much more clearly written.
"There was a spoils system in the late 1800s. It sure would be great if we could go back to that time." Technically these can be interpreted as unrelated statements (as apparently the statements are in your original comment), but most people would infer from that they were related and that the reason it would be nice to rollback to the earlier time was the aforementioned spoils system.
Re: WH proposes rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants
#497Earlier quoted context omitted.
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"You mispoke on that issue? No grant. You were of the wrong political perssuassion? No grant. Hurt the feelings of X group? No grant." Are you talking about not getting the grant in the first place, or are you talking about grants being cancelled after they had been approved and you had taken the money and started doing the funded work? Those two situations are different.
Both happened, and ideologically alligned people controlled or influenced both steps of the process (and more).
Re: WH proposes rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants
#498Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Can you provide some calculations of being able to afford anything at all for a, say, software developer earning 80k per-year in Paris, Berlin or Amsterdam and compare that to 280k in the Valley? I did just that in a sibling comment. 80k is upper class in Germany, solid middle class can be achieved at 60k. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48340349
Does achieving "solid middle class" in Munich on 60k somehow involve inheriting an apartment from your late grandma?
It does not. Source: did that until last year when we had to move for the new job of my wife. Rented a 60 m² apartment.
Re: WH proposes rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants
#499Earlier quoted context omitted.
Insinuating that the administrative state is racist by genetic fallacy while longing for a return to the era of Jim Crow is hypocritical enough for me to disregard his opinion.
The administrative state wasn’t merely created by the same progressives that gave us eugenics. It has its roots in the same dim view of the common man and how much agency they should be given. Woodrow Wilson and other progressives were deeply skeptical of democracy. He wrote about the how the “unphilosophical bulk of mankind” didn’t know what was good for them. And his solution to that was to have the government run…
> [blah, blah, progressives are the real racists, blah]
I never argued that you don’t believe this. I guess you’re disputing the word “insinuating”? Fine, you’re explicitly saying the administrative state is racist.
> Last I checked you guys are the ones who went to the supreme court to defend racial discrimination in college admissions and racially segregated voting districts.
Nice tu quoque but I’m neither a Democrat nor a liberal. You make this mistake with people a lot! Have you considered not assuming everyone who disagrees with you is a liberal?
The person I actually replied to wondered why you got downvoted. Thanks for the demonstration.
Re: WH proposes rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants
#500Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any country that doesn't openly say that it will bar funding to grant applications that include any word from a given list of words. Which, of the countries on this planet, is quite a few.
Can you name one?
No country in Europe does this, for example.