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NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

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Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#701

Post by anonfordays »

standardUser wrote: post #444
asdsadasdasd123 wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every DEI program I've been involved in has had target quotas which put pressure on hiring managers to reach those quotas, but still "hire on merit". And then they hire a viz minority engineer who thinks translating a js file to python means renaming the file extension.

You are either lying about hard-number racial/gender quotas or you were working for companies that were flagrantly breaking the law. Did you whistle blow? You see, it doesn't add up, because usually when a company breaks the law so blatantly, it does so in crafty, shady ways intended to make more money, not in an attempt to create diversity that does nothing for the bottom line while also threatening the very existen…

He wasn't lying, IBM was caught doing just that: https://x.com/JamesOKeefeIII/status/1734374423124176944

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#702

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

damnitbuilds wrote: post #188
virgildotcodes wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a weird take. If Dems win ostensibly the negative consequences of their actions are the Republicans’ fault, and then if Republicans win their actions must be owned by the Dems? Why the weird causal swap? The actions of this administration are primarily the responsibility of… this administration and those who supported it.

Not fielding good candidates for bad reasons and giving the election to @#$%ing Trump is on the Dems. Forcing grant applicants to include irrelevant DEI language in applications is on the Dems.

maybe, but nobody is talking about that

we're talking about the story in the article: republicans totally gutting science funding regardless of presidential candidates or DEI

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#703

Post by moralestapia »

VerminOctopus1 wrote: post #478
moralestapia wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You’re getting downvoted because of your childlike naïveté and/or willful ignorance. There is no hidden “very good reason” lurking somewhere. They are slashing and burning the federal government.

Personal attacks are not allowed here.

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#704

Post by plasma_beam »

zhivota wrote: post #295

I worked at two National Laboratories, Argonne and Idaho, on NSF funded internship grants. The second one turned into a full time job, again on an NSF grant. The first one was on supercomputing, writing proof of concept code for a new supercomputing operating system (ZeptoOS). The second was on the automated stitching of imagery from UAVs for military applications (at a time when this was not commoditized at all, we…

Proud to say that in the early-mid 2000s I was a consultant dev at NSF and worked on the research proposal submission and eval website called Fastlane. They’ve since moved the functionality to research.gov, but my code ran in production for 20ish? years? It was old school Java Struts, JSPs, EJB’s..typical J2EE of the time. Lots of people I worked with decided to leave consulting and became NSF employees. They were good and smart people.

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#705

Post by 1auralynn »

roenxi wrote: post #660
bitmasher9 wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a bit of a bias in advocating more for enabling excellence than accommodating average. I will concede we have done a terrible job at sharing the harvest, but it’s often the excellent that are responsible for our harvest being so plentiful to begin with.

I agree with the perspective, the part I have trouble marrying it back to is the taxpayer funding and the NSF. The excellent & the people who benefit from their work tend to have lots of money and earning opportunities and are more than capable of just funding the research themselves. If there is a large group of people who aren't benefiting they don't need to be involved in the funding and the organising either. It…

No not all talented scientists are independently wealthy or have the charisma to raise VC funding. What you're advocating for is the return of the era of the "gentleman scientist" where the only people allowed to do science are those lucky enough to be born into wealth (or some other privilege e.g. extreme good looks).

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#706

Post by yupitsme123 »

trhway wrote: post #573
schmidtleonard wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those who think this is exaggeration, remember that JD Vance wrote a heartfelt endorsement for the skull book, the one arguing that anyone who opposes MAGA is a secret communist revolutionary who needs to be crushed by any means necessary to avoid an imagined communist genocide that they allege we are all plotting. Absolutely wild shit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unhumans It's not even midterm season yet, they…

The issues of speech, hate, deportations are the very visible ones. The less visible is for example changing the nature of US government. The old government bureaucracy which was focused on protecting people - consumer protection, EPA, civil rights, etc. - is being dismantled, and new bureaucracy is being built in place to enforce myriad of new restrictions and dole out import/export/tariff quotas, exceptions, and ot…

The old bureaucracy stopped being progressive long ago. I believe the EPA protects the environment about as much as I believe DOGE is about creating efficiencies.

At this point these organizations are just tools for the administration in power to hand out favors and therefore maintain support. The worthwhile work they do is secondary.

Trump is simply getting rid of the ones that aided democrats and creating new ones that will allow him to aid his own supporters.

Also I don't see the connection between progressivism and free trade/tech innovation. If anything, the latter only aid the status quo rather than helping it to progress.

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#708

Post by hedora »

Loughla wrote: post #663
benzible wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Faulty intelligence" accepts that DOGE / Russell Vought / Project 2025 are sincerely concerned with government spending. The evidence says that this is deliberate sabotage of government functions to erode public trust. Consider: Douglas Holtz-Eakin (former Republican CBO director) noted DOGE is specifically "going into agencies they disagree with" for ideological reasons, targeting programs that are a tiny fraction…

Something, something small enough to drown it in the bathtub. This isn't new. Republicans have always worked to erode government offerings to justify further cuts. What is new is the scale and speed. Is there literally nothing Congress can do or are they just doing nothing?

Ten democrats in the senate voted with the republicans, giving Trump (filibuster-proof) free rein for his entire agenda for the rest of 2025.

So, yeah, there’s stuff they can do, and they’ve already accomplished a lot this year.

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#709

Post by elevation »

ethbr1 wrote: post #697
breckenedge wrote: post #670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’ve been doing nothing for decades.

> They’ve been doing nothing for decades. Here's a list of the 250+ pieces of nothing that the 118th Congress passed. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acts_of_the_118th_Un... If you're going to reach for hyperbole, at least make it defensible.

[flagged]

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#710

Post by yupitsme123 »

monooso wrote: post #581
donnachangstein wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the whole program may have cost the government maybe $10k total. Your numbers are off by an order of magnitude. There is no government program in existence that costs $10k total, you are almost assuredly ignoring overhead and all other costs. It's like calling a contractor to repair something, then crying foul when he charges $350 because you found the part on Amazon for $15. But let's assume it was $10k. >…

The assumption that if something doesn't have a clear and immediate ROI it can't possibly have any value is extremely myopic.

Sure, but there needs to be some justification or measuring stick to decide what's worth researching and what isn't. Otherwise you're just burning up money and labor on fruitless tasks.

Reading some of the comments in this thread it sounds like people are in favor of spending any amount of money on researching any topic without any discrimination whatsoever. That doesn't sound like a good idea to me.

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