but I was told Musk has been one of the major forces in the administration fighting to preserve and fix NASA
Devils advocate, Musk is no longer part of the administration, and news reports have cited Nasa nonsense as part of why.
4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program
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Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program
#502Collateral damage of Americans thinking academics has gone off the deep end + the replication crisis.
Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program
#503Earlier quoted context omitted.
People who should be fired are the very people who would be the best at justifying why they shouldn't be fired. Not at all by a coincidence. "Slicing at random" could actually outperform most other methods, as long as it's truly random. You can weasel your way out of a firing based on vibes or performance reviews - but you can't convince an RNG that its roll was wrong.
Slicing at random would leave the same ratio of worker types. Random slices have the potential to cause enormous damage by removing critical contributors while also creating exploitable power vacuums. The actual solution is to just continue operating the way NASA has been operating because it's not actually a problem.
Not actually a problem? Have you seen what NASA is doing lately?
SLS. Orion. Gateway. Ambitionless Artemis. JPL's disaster of an MSR proposal. NASA reeks of rot and decay. It's not in a good place, and hasn't been in a long time now.
If you "just continue operating", it's only going to get worse.
Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program
#504Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s going to kill institutional knowledge and be so expensive to repair after regime change.
Ever org I've worked for slowly became unable to innovate because of "institutional knowledge". I think it's important to forget, to some extent, every once in a while. It forces a new traversal of the problem space, but in a modern context, with modern tools, fresh eyes, and a better understanding of what's needed. Thus we have Space X. There are some great interviews with Jim Keller, who has a similar perspective:…
This seems similar to the "let's just rebuild from scratch" impulse that has been tried so many times on very large complicated systems and often, although not always, fails.
Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program
#505but I was told Musk has been one of the major forces in the administration fighting to preserve and fix NASA
Devils advocate, Musk is no longer part of the administration, and news reports have cited Nasa nonsense as part of why.
> Devils advocate, Musk is no longer part of the administration, and news reports have cited Nasa nonsense as part of why.
Only a devils advocate would believe that with this administration still giving his companies massive government contracts [1] and regulation win falls [2]
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/grok-elon-musk-xai-pentagon-con...
[2] https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-musk-spacex-rocket-...
Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program
#506Earlier quoted context omitted.
They have done some pretty interesting not for profit missions like inspiration 4. do the axiom missions count too (lol)?
Appreciate the charitable fundraising but Inspiration 4 was just run of the mill rich folks doing space tourism.
Polaris dawn did real science
Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program
#507but I was told Musk has been one of the major forces in the administration fighting to preserve and fix NASA
Devils advocate, Musk is no longer part of the administration, and news reports have cited Nasa nonsense as part of why.
Reportedly, Jared Isaacman, the rumored Musk's NASA pick of choice, wanted to cut down SLS/Orion and axe Gateway - and was opposed to science cuts.
Jared Isaacman is out, and what we're seeing actually happen now is the opposite of that. All the pork barrels are getting funded, and the brunt of budget cuts seems to be stated to be born by science missions like Roman Space Telescope.
Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program
#508I am highly sympathetic to all impacted. It’s devastating.
The rhetoric around cost cutting is something I can’t figure out how to deal with. The media makes it sound like the sky is falling with every cut. But having worked in enormous organizations myself, I also know that teams can and do lose headcount all the time, and somehow manage to carry on.
I guess the issue I wrestle with the most is how we can spend tax dollars on programs, but also have the ability to reduce those programs when needed, without it seeming like the end of the world.
We can’t have government agencies and programs that go on forever, expanding, growing in headcount and budget, for eternity. But the rhetoric around these events would have you believe that is the only path forward.
Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program
#509Earlier quoted context omitted.
> a way of hitting back at "the elites" who have the temerity to call GOP politicians and donors out for their lies and bad behavior True for academic institutions. No evidence this is the motivation at NASA. Simpler: science costs money and leadership believes that money is better spent giving folks like me a tax cut than paying for poor folks' healthcare or basic research. Fortunately, it looks like Beijing is read…
The cuts to NASA as well as NOAA, NIH, USGS, USDA, FWS, DOE, etc. are not really saving that much money, but are destroying literally trillions of dollars of future economic value (not to mention all sorts of work whose value can't be easily quantified). Maybe "smashing things and ruining people's lives and work is fun per se" is a better explanation than anything more complicated. Pretty shitty for the rest of us th…
NOAA, NASA, NIH, FWS, and DOE all regularly push how bad the situation is around global climate change. That's likely why they're getting targeted. The GOP's position on climate change is sticking their fingers in their ears and screaming LALALALALA and having credible government agencies pointing out the ongoing effects is detrimental to this strategy.
Meanwhile the USDA, FWS, and DOE do those pesky regulatory things, like making it so you can't torture animals quite as much in the pursuit of profits, can't build coal power plants in the center of national parks, and can't dump raw chemical waste into your local wetlands. Utter killjoys they are.
Like, not meaning to be shitty to you in specific, but it's no secret why these agencies are getting targeted. If you say anything the admin doesn't like, or dare to tell people with money that they can't do literally anything they want at all times irrespective of it's effects on broader society, you've got a target on your back.
Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program
#510Earlier quoted context omitted.
>that money is better spent giving folks like me a tax cut The federal government now accepts donations if you don't want the money.
> federal government now accepts donations if you don't want the money This is silly. I prefer the money be spent on things that have a larger ROI, collectively, than I can attain individually. Destroying the money doesn't achieve that aim.
Well, the rest of us disagree. You need consensus for public institutions and no one on the left or the right has been willing to build that.