Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

science.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

581–590 of 1001 posts

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#581

Post by CalRobert »

nlitened wrote: post #562
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…

> deciding everything that happens in government as if they were a king Isn’t it what the head of executive branch supposed to mean? Trump does exactly how he promised he would do if you elected him, and you guys elected him overwhelmingly to do exactly that.

Well, it wasn't overwhelming, he got less than 50% of the vote (but still more than Harris).

And the head of the branch should still be subject to checks and balances.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#582

Post by adrian_b »

drivebyhooting wrote: post #236
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…

Social security and Medicare are inexpugnable liabilities.

What I find ridiculous is that USA spends more on the interest on the national debt than either on Medicare or on the Department of Defense.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#583

Post by DarkmSparks »

areyousure wrote: post #548
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.

In case anyone was curious, the interest being paid on the national debt is of the order of $1 trillion per year, while the amount collected in taxes (federally only) is of the order of $5.5 trillion per year.

federally only is about $1.6Trillion, the rest is state taxes and never goes near the federal government to cover the interest on their debt. ($1.8Trillion at a poultry 5% interest)

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#584

Post by tsimionescu »

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).

When an elected official goes far beyond their legal powers to take control of the country, that's called a coup. Yes, even if they were perfectly legally elected.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#585

Post by jimkleiber »

tstactplsignore wrote: post #392
Gabriel54 wrote: post #141

Despite all the hyperbole in this thread I will try to speak plainly. It has become tiring to see how DEI has affected all aspects of academia. Hiring people based on race, awarding grants to work exclusively with members of a particular set of minorities, etc. I'm sure most people choose to close their eyes to such things and move on and focus on the actual important work but there must be unimaginable waste going o…

This is simply a delusion detached from reality. I am a white man in STEM academia. I've never been discriminated against once. None of my white male colleagues have either. They are all successful in academia. And my colleagues who aren't white men are in no way inferior. Just let us vote and ask if we feel discriminated against or oppressed because of DEI. We'll vote no. It's simply a delusion that DEI is some unme…

Even if it's a delusion, people believe it and I think we should take it seriously and help them see through that delusion.

I'm not advocating for shutting down these departments at all, or slashing and burning research.

I'm hoping that we can help people realize that people love them and care about them and support them more than they could ever imagine, even if they're a white man.

I say this as a white man who has dated black women and had them say some really harsh things about me as a white man, only to realize that often it was an internal conflict that they had about being black but also liking some things from white culture. Some of them had been called white by their own black communities, and so feeling stuck between those worlds.

I think the vast majority of us just need to learn how to deal with emotional attacks, to realize life is combat and everyone is trying to deal with innumerable conflicts at the same time, all the time.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#586

Post by amelius »

dan_can_code wrote: post #3

The cynic in me thinks that the US is going to roll over and take this fascist shake down. The optimist in me thinks that the people will rise up with a resounding NO and do something about it. Right now I'm not sure which I believe.

This will probably decide it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

If one party wants to do things democratically at all cost, and the other party wants to bring down democracy, then the latter will win.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#587

Post by fuzzfactor »

kortilla wrote: post #283
amelius wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> USA is a place where you can go from $100k to $100m vesting if you are lucky. That very few do achieve this isn't the point: you cannot do it, in almost any other economy. That's a kind of lottery-mentality that Europe doesn't want to attract anyway.

That’s not lottery mentality and thinking that it’s equivalent is why Europe isn’t innovating. If someone wins the lottery and gets rich, society isn’t better off. If someone starts a new company that made a cure for some disease and gets rich, society is much better off. You absolutely want to attract people that want to make huge breakthroughs with unlikely odds of success.

>If someone wins the lottery and gets rich, society isn’t better off.

Actually, society is much better off since the money is dispersed into the economy faster and to a much greater degree than most other windfalls.

And most other windfalls are crafted to accumulate money from the economy, so the difference in who ends up with the money is another major factor.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#588

Post by 3D30497420 »

nlitened wrote: post #562
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…

> deciding everything that happens in government as if they were a king Isn’t it what the head of executive branch supposed to mean? Trump does exactly how he promised he would do if you elected him, and you guys elected him overwhelmingly to do exactly that.

> you guys elected him overwhelmingly to do exactly that

Most certainly not overwhelmingly:

Trump: 49.80% Harris: 48.32%

This is one of the more frustrating aspects of the United States. Not even 1.5% more and the result is "near total evisceration of the federal government" compared to "largely the same".

The result is even worse with the Senate. 55.9m votes for Democratic Senators, 54.4m for Republican Senators, and yet Republicans ended up with 53 seats.

And this doesn't even get into gerrymandering for House seats, which is predominantly Republican-driven.

This is by a good margin not a representative government.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_Senate_elec...

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#589

Post by CalRobert »

mnky9800n wrote: post #481
scarab92 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s not that many jobs going in academia in other countries, and you’ll be looking at a significant pay cut due to the strong US dollar. Most likely, people who leave academia will be leaving for industry instead. I do feel for those in the hard sciences, they have become collateral damage in what is mostly a battle between politicians and humanities departments.

I dunno man my salary is six figures and I’m an academic scientist living in the Netherlands. My life is much higher quality than the equivalent could buy me in anywhere worth living in the USA. Like I agree the salaries can be low but you simply don’t need to make 300k usd to have a nice life here. I have a flat in the middle of the city of Utrecht where I cycle to work and pop off to the pub after and the gym is tw…

Hear hear - Utrecht might be the finest city in the world, too.

And Europe is missing a gigantic opportunity right now. The fact that talent is cheap, there's a strong social safety net, and we don't have enormous amounts of entrepreneurship is really strange.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#590

Post by amitrip »

scarab92 wrote: post #566
concordDance wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had an idea in my head about what the word "coup" means and why it is bad and I'm struggling to figure out how it applies to this situation (possibly because being no-American I don't get their news). My understanding is the USA executive is an obscenely powerful position by the standard of the rest of the Western world and they can also delegate that power to accomplish specific objectives. Is this a coup of Musk…

It’s not a coup in any literal sense of the word, not even in the autocratic sense. The reason it’s being used is a combination of the US having never experienced a real coup, and thus it’s citizens not really knowing what the word means, plus one side of politics being sore losers after having lost an election and using whatever insult they can think of in order to deflect rather than self reflect on why they lost.

[dead]
Post reply on HN