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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

#761

Post by s1artibartfast »

watersb wrote: post #741
nickpsecurity wrote: post #503

While I support cuts and reforms, I'm a bit saddened and worried by cuts at NSF. Most of the best work I've shared here was funded by NSF. The private sector largely wasn't doing it. If they did, the deliverables weren't free but sometimes were when NSF funded. I'd hate to see those types of grants go. That said, there is an ideological difference driving this on at least two points (if ignoring DEI etc). One, taxes…

Your argument is well stated, if I understand it, as the power of free markets to make better choices regarding resource allocation than redistribution by government bureaucracy. If so, then I can disagree. However the market behaves in the United States, it has failed us. Compromise with market forces, in the form of "public-private partnership", has only increased the cost of providing fewer government services. Ma…

I think their first point is different than just free markets. It was about shifting the locus of control from the government, to the individuals.

1) Instead of having the money taken from you and begging the administration to do what you want, let people decide what they want, and voluntarily collaborate using the tools and organizations they choose.

This may be the government or another organization, but the individual would have the power to withdraw their support unilaterally. Essentially make more social investment and participation voluntary.

This would be a shifting of the power downwards and a decentralization.

Switzerland is an interesting case study for this. Approximately 70% of all taxes go to the Canton or lower levels (comparable to a US state county). This means the vast majority of tax spending and oversight occurs locally.

This makes a lot of sense to me. If I want social investment, a new school, or transportation, my money goes all the way to the capital, and then I have to fight to have my voice heard among 350 million Americans fighting for attention. I'm arguing against another citizen 2 thousand miles away through dozens of proxies and bureaucrats.

I recognize that some activities benefit from economies of scale, but many don't, or suffer diseconomies of scale.

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

#762

Post by saagarjha »

moralestapia wrote: post #703
VerminOctopus1 wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not a personal attack. You're just wrong.

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

#763

Post by saagarjha »

jasonfarnon wrote: post #642
MengerSponge wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, take a moment and think: what about this administration has given you the impression that they're going to take the time to carefully understand a system they're bent on dismantling?

well, this is kind of my point. We might have different ideas of which "system they're bent on dismantling".

You can look at what they're defunding!

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

#764

Post by saagarjha »

transcriptase wrote: post #711
hobs wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know that sealioning on the 1000th ridiculously bad cut is just in bad faith right? At this point we don't actually need to spend time proving how the Trump administration is doing a wrong thing actually, it can be inferred from the other EVERY SINGLE TIME.

So you’re saying being the NPC who endlessly repeats “Orange man bad!” is not only the morally responsible thing to do, but the logical thing as well.

Oh, you should be going "orange man bad", but there's no need to be an NPC about it. Organize against it.

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

#765

Post by saagarjha »

donnachangstein wrote: post #552
schmidtleonard wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money "wasted" by the NSF is far better spent than money wasted in, say, the Google Graveyard or any other monument to private malinvestment. This is because science has a value capture problem by design, making it systematically uninvestable by the private market, making opportunities plentiful -- and making it an archetypal example of a place where government investment has a role to play, because we can capture va…

This is an opportunity for private industry to step up and step in, while drastically reducing the size of government. I hear the Juicero had an outstanding power supply. For all the waste, some folks probably learned a lot about power electronics. It seems odd to me that of all places, a forum run by a VC outfit, thinks a government jobs program to churn STEM grads with nonsense projects is the way to go.

Do you think Juicero wanted to end up with a bunch of people who learned how to make an outstanding power supply and nothing else to show for it? Did the actual work on the power supply end up being available to anyone else? Maybe we should have an organization that actively wants to invest in things like this, rather than depending on the waste of VCs?

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

#766

Post by saagarjha »

TrapLord_Rhodo wrote: post #520
hengheng wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For all intents and purposes, it's self driving. Except that you're responsible for its faults and errors, because you are the one driving. "Self driving" means I can be drunk, or I can put a kid in it, or an elderly person. That's what that word means: the car drives itself.

Why don't you add anywhere to that list? If the car drives itself, why is it geofenced into only places google has HD mapped down to the centimeter. My car can drive itself to Tahoe, can a waymo?

Because Waymo is not stupid enough to take liability for a situation which they aren't extremely confident about. Tesla is also not stupid; they just don't take liability period.

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

#767

Post by userbinator »

vkou wrote: post #756
userbinator wrote: post #749

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guess what happened to quality around the time all the DEI stuff started shooting up in popularity around a decade ago? Everyone sees it. Everyone experiences it. No one wanted to talk about it, until things reached a breaking point.

You're going to have to make a much better argument of connecting the dots if you're going to blame the enshittification of everything on... Black people and women. None of you folks are ever 'afraid of talking about it', because any time this subject comes up, we see a full broadsides of tenuous, frequently mask-off racist nonsense. Meanwhile, the champions leading the fight against the DEI boogieman have a truly am…

Just look at how the dates line up.

Before DEI, minorities were hired because they're actually competent. Now they're there because of who they are and not what they can do.

Things need to get worse before they get better.

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

#768

Post by saagarjha »

sneak wrote: post #461
kevinventullo wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn’t anti-intellectual to say that most of what the US federal government does would be better performed by private industry. The problem is that industry is inherently narrowly focused in short-to-medium term profitability, and cannot be relied on to carry out work which benefits society as a whole, including many conventionally “intellectual” pursuits such as: educating the populace, or fundamental research wit…

Some industries are. Many industries do not. Pharmaceutical companies and aerospace companies are frequently investing in long term projects.

Aren't both heavily propped up with government funding?

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

#769

Post by alephnan »

bitmasher9 wrote: post #498
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…

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

If putting fries in the bag at McDonald’s payed half as much as being a FANG engineer, I would pick McDonald’s

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

#770

Post by damnitbuilds »

kelnos wrote: post #456
damnitbuilds wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If it's not ideologically aligned it won't get funded." As I show elsewhere in this thread, the previous administration forced applicants to include irrelevant DEI language in grant applications.

If you really think that's the same thing, I'm not sure what to tell you. Your ability to compare situations and evaluate consequences is completely broken.

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