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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

#551

Post by belter »

newsclues wrote: post #533
jmward01 wrote: post #490

This is a coup and we are calmly debating budgets. Debating the % of budget and how useful organization x is and if y will still get grant money, and, and, and... All of this is ignoring the big elephant in the room that there is one single person deciding everything that happens in government as if they were a king. The right thing to be debating is how we can stop this from continuing and how we can hold those resp…

Funny how democracy works, I recall an election recently not a coup. Government is not a monolith, this isn’t the action of one single person, but the result of tens of millions people voting for change (that you disagree with).

> I recall an election recently not a coup.

List of dictators that achieved power via what were at the time, free and fair elections:

Adolf Hitler - 1933

Ferdinand Marcos - 1965

Alberto Fujimori - 1990

Robert Mugabe - 1980

Alexander Lukashenko - 1994

Hugo Chávez - 1998

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#552

Post by jimkleiber »

Sharlin wrote: post #524
mewc wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is happening is a good thing. rm corruption -rf

Ah, yes. Billionaires who funded the campaign with hundreds of millions, being delegated powers that the president does not have the authority to delegate, getting free access to classified information without any clearance, demanding things they have no authority to demand, promising buy-outs they have no authority or intention to ever honor (if you believe otherwise, I have a hell of a lot of bridges to sell you),…

Some people think politicians make money in corrupt ways but the richest people in the world do it through very clean ways. Almost as if very very rich people are super genius, but the semi-rich people are just corrupt.

Ironically, the essence of a confidence trick, or con artistry, is to convince people that you're superhuman, much much much smarter than everyone else.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#553

Post by concordDance »

wholinator2 wrote: post #543
DarkmSparks wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not really a coup, its a default. US government is already using pension fund money to pay its bills since early January (aka special measures), the interest on their national debt is already more than they collect in taxes.

This is what i never understand. Okay, not enough money, soooo _tax more_. Or at least stop giving tax cuts to the richest people in the history of the planet? Like, implement a 5% tax on their wealth, and just fix all the problems. We could have services _and_ rich people, we just have to make insanely rich people contribute to our world like we all do to theirs

> Like, implement a 5% tax on their wealth, and just fix all the problems.

My understanding is that's nowhere near enough.

The USA deficit is $1.8 Trillion a year with $30T total. The net worth of all USA billionaires is around $4.5T. So 5% would reduce the deficit by 10% until the billionaires wise up and move their wealth out of the country.

Even confiscating it all in a one-off pile reduces the national debt by about 15%.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#554

Post by lawn »

meheleventyone wrote: post #530
scarab92 wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The left need to accept that they lost the election, that Trump won the presidency and the Republicans won control of congress. As much as you personally disagree with these decisions, they are in line with the broad policy positions Trump et al communicated prior to the election, and can be considered the will of the people. Challenging the mandate the public gave them, by hyperventilating over minor procedural hicc…

> The left need to accept that they lost the election, that Trump won the presidency and the Republicans won control of congress. Shouldn't they then use Congress as intended rather than what they're doing now which bypasses it? As a bystander in another country your line of argument is mind-boggling. You don't just throw out the constitution and way the government works because one guy won an election one time. But…

The same people typically argue that whatever Trump is right anyway. For example when he lost the last election people rallied behind is made-up election fraud claims.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#555

Post by DecoySalamander »

leptons wrote: post #516
nerdponx wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why you're being downvoted. > 1. Most Trump supporters do not think that there is a problem. Talk to any conservative -- even people who are/were skeptical of Trump -- or browse any conservative-leaning social media. It's clear that the people who voted for Trump fully understood what they voted for: they wanted what's happening . Project 2025 is a good thing in the eyes of many. Maybe they think politic…

One thing conservatives are famously not good at is anticipating the consequences of their actions. What could possibly go wrong with immediately deporting all the people who harvest our crops?

But what if they are replaced by government workers who are made redundant? It might just balance out.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#556

Post by jimkleiber »

alienthrowaway wrote: post #413
bloopernova wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wealthy will just take their money and leave the country. And for all you HN readers supporting these massive changes: you'd test changes beforehand and plan their deployment carefully if this were software. So why why do you support explicitly not doing those things when the livelihood of 300 million people depend on the economy being stable?!? And before the inevitable derail or whatabout attempt: Don't play po…

> So why why do you support explicitly not doing those things when the livelihood of 300 million people depend on the economy being stable?!? Culture warriors only care about about their "side" winning. It's not an intellectual battle, but an emotional one. Rules be damned, their side is winning and dishing out retribution for, and rolling back decades of defeat on the battle for social values - civil rights, race mi…

Precisely. This is probably not a long-term constructive plan, but rather "they punched me, I'm gonna punch them back 10x harder." (didn't Trump even say something like that before?)

Vengeance can make people do crazy things and the craziest thing is how people don't realize vengeance can destroy them just as much, if not more than their intended target. Not so much shooting ourselves in the foot, more like stabbing ourselves in the heart.

My life and work is to help people to realize how responding with hate or indifference will destroy us, and that responding with love is the only way through.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#557

Post by [deleted] »

jimkleiber wrote: post #538
scarab92 wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Purity spiral. The left won't be competitive in elections until they learn what it is, why it results in alienation of people who would otherwise support them, and find a way to escape it.

In other words, the left needs to learn how to love the right (and many people within the left). But I don't know if that's the case. I think there are a lot of people on the right who want the left to love them but believe that the people on the left do not love them. I believe the problem is that people need to learn how to feel loved. To realize that even our enemies are trying their best and most likely care abou…

[deleted]

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#558

Post by hinkley »

riffraff wrote: post #410
hinkley wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The World Wide Web essentially exits due to grants from the NSF and alumni from those grants starting Netscape.

But WWW was made up at CERN, you might as well say it exists due to EEC grants.

I’ve too many recollections of browser developers bitching and moaning about yet another memory leak they discovered in libwww to believe that.

And I said the web as we know it, not the web period.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#559

Post by tremendoussss »

jimkleiber wrote: post #535
DarkmSparks wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not really a coup, its a default. US government is already using pension fund money to pay its bills since early January (aka special measures), the interest on their national debt is already more than they collect in taxes.

That has very little if anything to do with the executive branch brazenly disregarding laws.

[flagged]

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#560

Post by __loam »

scarab92 wrote: post #499
realusername wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes let's call a spade a spade, it's a coup. Trump is passing as much stuff as quickly as he can to bypass the separation of powers while they catch up.

The left need to accept that they lost the election, that Trump won the presidency and the Republicans won control of congress. As much as you personally disagree with these decisions, they are in line with the broad policy positions Trump et al communicated prior to the election, and can be considered the will of the people. Challenging the mandate the public gave them, by hyperventilating over minor procedural hicc…

By mandate do you mean the 3 vote majority in the house?
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