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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

#721

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The upcoming generation will be plenty happy with factory jobs instead of jobs in supercomputing or science.

I know you’re being facetious, but I think there’s some nugget buried in this sarcasm. One issue with our ever increasingly intellectual focused economy is that it leaves behind people who may just not be cut out for these such careers. I’m not against having these economies (I too used to work in supercomputing, with national labs), they’re very necessary, but we need to find a way for people who might not fit very…

Uh... I think it's more likely this is all the result of the 24 hour for-profit entertainment 'news' network which has been pushing this conspiracy theory bs for the last 40 years.

You have a media ecosystem devoted to encouraging division, inventing problems when there are none, and finding people to blame for things.

Use your eyes and ears. It's right there.

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

#722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trump said yesterday he wants to raise taxes on people earning over $2.5MM[1] People on the left are going to be caught totally flat-footed if they don't pull their head out of their bubble. Trump is a populist president. He was elected by working class individuals and so far he has shown every intent of following through for them. People on the left don't recognize it because they don't recognize the tools that righ…

> Trump said yesterday he wants to raise taxes on people earning over $2.5MM[1] He also said he would end the Ukraine war on day 1. > He is clearly not working for billionaires when he tanked the stock market and spiked bond rates playing his tariff game. Stop using that dog whistle because it makes it clear you are ungrounded from what is happening, unless all you care about is praise from other detached people. Of…

You don't have to be a billionaire to purchase a cabinet position in the Trump White House, but it helps.

Trump makes the billionaires work for _him_.

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

#723

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Go back far enough and there was only private industry, and no government funding until the space race basically. How do you think the railroads were built in the US? The bonds of the Pacific Railroad Acts date back to the 1860s. Pretty easy to build a railway line when government foots the bill.

Government funding of research. We were talking about the NSF after all, not free markets versus central planning. On that though, I read somewhere that the hierarchical committee-led operation of the funding agencies is the same way communist systems dole out money for everything else too. Not sure if they were being completely serious.

Doesn’t that pretty much describe every corporate hierarchy as well? It isn’t communist, it’s the nature of any large organization.

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

#724

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…

I think the problem with seeing it this way, is someone was making $1M as overhead to hire you for 10k.

Who do you think made $1M overhead on this 10k?

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

#725
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They sent one to the municipality of Stockholm. The majority leader in Stockholm responded by suggesting they could just turn off the water and sewer system for the embassy :P

I thought HN User burnte was being hyperbolic in the assertions that post put forth. Then I read a few articles. sigh. I mean, I guess we'll try to find competent and sane leaders again in 4 years. I don't know? There's not much else we can do at this point if this is the level of irrationality you're dealing with. I'll add in way of explanation to non-US citizens that in the US, we've always had a fixation on certai…

> I guess we'll try to find competent and sane leaders again in 4 years.

Why do you think these people will let us do so in 4 years? Whatever else they have in mind, none of them want to go to prison afterwards, and I think it's virtually guaranteed that by the end of this term, they will all have a rap sheet long enough to seriously worry about that.

(Trump will surely do blanket pardons, but he can only pardon federal crimes, not state.)

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

#727

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> Being denied advancement in your career because you don’t have enough drops of black blood, or don’t have enough homosexual sex, is insanely wrong! It's a good thing this is something that is not happening, then. What's happening is you are assuming that black individuals or homosexuals finding success must have been handed something. Which is, obviously, prejudiced. The lede you're burying is that those people wer…

If you live in a society that mandates DEI, it’s assumed that anyone getting a job via affirmative action is not the most qualified. If you make affirmative action illegal, then of course you will hire a variety of races and identity groups (unless you are so racist as to believe they can’t compete on merit)

DEI is not affirmative action.

DEI mostly revolves around programs for outreach, employee resource groups, statements of diversity considerations for research, that kind of thing. The idea that DEI means you have quotas for how many black people you have to hire is just GOP nonsense.

> If you make affirmative action illegal, then of course you will hire a variety of races and identity groups

I mean, not necessarily. Historically, and currently, you're going to end up with a disproportionate amount of white people. Because that's just how the US works - white people are incredibly advantaged so naturally they're going to get more, and better, jobs, in relation to their level of qualification.

Naturally over the past ~80 years it's gotten better. We don't explicitly say "we don't hire black engineers" anymore, so that's great. But you'd be a fool to think this systemic racism just vanishes overnight.

It will takes hundreds, yes hundreds, of years before it is completely eradicated. We live in the shadow of the systems and institutions of our grandparents. Who, might I add, are still alive and still making decisions.

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

#728

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You could be right... I'm just going off of what I've seen in the other departments they touched. Let's hope at least this program would be left untouched. https://www.nsf.gov/funding/initiatives/reu There are tons more though, this is only the tip of the iceberg of what the NSF funds of course.

It seems a lot of REUs were not funded this year. One of my students applied to 25 REUs. He says about a third of them evaporated because of funding stops.

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

#729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mean, I guess we'll try to find competent and sane leaders again in 4 years. I don't know? There's not much else we can do at this point if this is the level of irrationality you're dealing with. There are absolutely not going to be free and fair elections 4 years from now. People really need to start preparing for this reality.

If I'm a working class person without much in the way of assets, what does preparing even mean here?

From the personal safety viewpoint, the single best thing you can do as an American today is leave the country. Being working class without much in the way of assets precludes the more lucrative destinations, but there are still many countries out there that are pretty easy to emigrate to, even if quality of life there is lower than what US can offer today.

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

#730

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First I’ve heard of this. It’s quite fascinating! I have read a lot of literature on the subjects at hand and never have I seen this come up. Usually Hitler in particular is characterized as a delegator and more adept than this makes it out to be. Frankly I’m not surprised, but interesting history none the less

Gives you plausible deniability, he never actively told you to do anything, you decided to act in that way by yourself. The president keeps saying that "he doens't know", "that's up to someone else", so he isn't taking any illegal actions or directing them, the people under him are doing it themselves.

This is also exactly how it works in Russia today.
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