661–670 of 1001 posts
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Funny, because while science and research funding is being cut…the debt is still rising faster than ever, because I still see taxpayer money flying towards useless things more than ever.
social security and medicare?
I would go as far as to say that the only things getting reduced funding are education and science research, but that’s just a hunch.
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> Our capitulation to Iran, a third rate military power that we chose to attack and then lost to, is really driving home the point at the moment. Uh....that's more the fault of a president who thought a totally normal thing (arms treaties with expiring restrictions) was a "scam" (not to mention, a black man he hates was responsible for said treaty) and ripped up said treaty. We literally were in a treaty, with Iran,…
> Uh....that's more the fault of a president Who so far has been put into office twice by?
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No. AI is not doing science. And also no, science is not being held back by "pearl clutching" and "unwillingness to let brilliant non-science geniuses in." While there are a lot of problems with how the journal model of publication has evolved over time, and AI has actually made that problem far worse, not better, the real threat and "mess" that science is in currently in the US is from the administration. Science in…
It disheartens me a great deal to see how the US (in particular, but they are not alone) has turned its back on good science, largely, but not exclusively, on the back of populist politics. Science has had waves, and people have over pushed its advances (for profit) and hidden some of its shortcomings (we can point to a lot of problems) and is going through a massive reckoning where its influence is being curtailed.…
Just have faith (in science, not sure about the U.S. - empires come and go)
My wife operates an optical trap (a sophisticated microscope, she uses it for studying gene/dna physical properties) and she's pretty good at working with that instrument. The number of people good at working that microscope are in the ballpark of 2000 (+- 1000) in the world! She has cried a lot in the last one year for the mess science research has become. We are moving out of the country at the end of August.
This is what happens when we are $40 Trillion in debt. I'm sorry that scientific projects are being cut but are we supposed to keep funding everything ad infinitum regardless of how our economy and our future is going to be crippled by debt? EVERYONE is going to be crying about their projects being cut and there's no good way to do it where everyone is going to be happy. Some people are going to lose their jobs, and…
What was that new number they were throwing around, 1.4 Trillion dollar budget?
But sure, let's worry about cutting funding to research institutes which were sucking the US dry with their budgets in the millions.
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What made places like Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, IBM Research, etc thrive? What happened to that mechanism, and can we have it back?
That's a good question, and I'd also add the Manhattan Project, the NIH, the NSF, NOAA, Fermilab, NIST, NCAR, and academic research including the state "land grant" universities. Every complex system has failure modes, but there must be success stories to learn from in all of those programs. Disclosure: My education was funded by NSF, and I now work for a company that sells stuff for government funded research, thoug…
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Those were all ultimately for profit companies. You can only get so far with basic science if some bean counter is looking for a return on investment in the near future. What those companies did is notable, but I think you are overselling their contributions to science. We've gotten way more scientific advancement from publicly funded science. There are private companies allowed to do R&D all over the world. Publicly…
I’ve seen it claimed that higher taxes on corporate profits incentivized that lab model. Better to invest in risky research than have that money taxed away. When the regulatory environment changed, shareholders insisted they should get that money through dividends and stock buybacks, and goodbye Bell Labs. I don’t know how accurate that argument is, but it certainly sounds plausible.
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Just having keywords associated with DEI could get a project defunded. Thee government isn't just defunding liberal projects. Look at the millions being thrown out on ocean monitoring because the Trump admin thinks global warming isnt a problem if you don't monitor it.
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I don't think it's an easy task in reality, but they were claiming there's "countless humanities graduate programs that do nothing but produce and spread left-wing propaganda" outnumbering the important grants and taking up all the funding, which should be a lot easier to audit for and cut a large portion of it without killing any "real science". Instead, we got a clumsy keyword search.
I'm sure I'll get heat for this, but I think a low-resolution first pass a la keyword search was actually an excellent call from a macro standpoint. It (1) clears out a good chunk of cruft, instantly, with little effort and (2) scares people away from doing further explicitly ideological work. There are a surprising number of social scientists who engage in both good basic research and useless ideological bone-pickin…
Luckily now the administration has great scientists like RFK Jr setting research priorities, no more useless ideological bone-picking is taking place
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There are many biotech startups and private research labs thriving and paying high salaries with excellent benefits for that specialty right now - focused on genetic testing, editing, and longevity. Before moving abroad, widening the search outside of academia and considering moving internally might be worthwhile.
well lot of ppl are always moving out of america but few actually do. thats obvious by now.
My wife operates an optical trap (a sophisticated microscope, she uses it for studying gene/dna physical properties) and she's pretty good at working with that instrument. The number of people good at working that microscope are in the ballpark of 2000 (+- 1000) in the world! She has cried a lot in the last one year for the mess science research has become. We are moving out of the country at the end of August.