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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

#791

Post by rad_gruchalski »

Ray20 wrote: post #598
anigbrowl wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you have believed a few months ago that the US government would be trying to strong-arm foreign nations who are nominally allies into compliance with its policy preferences? Here's another recent example of that: https://www.dw.com/en/france-voices-shock-at-us-calls-to-dro... I have been warning for years (often here on HN) that the US risks tilting into a failed state due to political extremism, and its genera…

>Would you have believed a few months ago that the US government would be trying to strong-arm foreign nations who are nominally allies into compliance with its policy preferences? What do you mean? Hasn't the USA pretty much ALWAYS done this? >The whole hysteria about illegal immigrants is based on the specious claim that one party is importing them wholesale and somehow converting them into voters to steal election…

> based on the existence of tens of millions of illegal immigrants

Oh, hello Trumpist Number. Like apparent “millions” who died in the Ukraine war.

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

#792

Post by jjani »

urda wrote: post #640
insane_dreamer wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was talking about scientific research and specifically academic institutions. China only has a half-dozen of top academic institutions with high credibility: Peking U, Tsinghua U, Fudan U, Zhejiang U, and _maybe_ one or two others (Renmin U in some fields). There a number of mid-level unis, and the rest are low credibility (for lots of reasons). By comparison, the US has 100+ (you could even argue 200+) well respec…

Exactly, coliveira is either really out of touch of reality, or is parroting state-propaganda they have read. Both really bad looks for them.

You're being far too harsh. Yes, this post is about academia but they said "technological leader", strongly suggesting they're talking about it more broadly - "technology" usually implies business.

And China is absolutely the technology leader.

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

#793

Post by regularization »

absolutelastone wrote: post #696
regularization wrote: post #692

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.

From 1901 up to FDR's election in 1932, 5 Americans won Nobel Prizes in the sciences. There was not much government funding back then, and not much was going on either.

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

#794

Post by rad_gruchalski »

space-savvy wrote: post #158
busterarm wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That ended up not being the gotcha that y'all thought it was and CNN had to add a correction on their fact-check because mice were indeed being administered cross-sex hormone therapy, just not for the purpose of changing their sex. One of the experiments in particular was to determine how gender-affirming care would affect humans, which indeed makes it at odds with the administration's DEI policy and is not just them…

I read the papers posted by the White House to support their claim of transgendered mice . https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/03/yes-biden-spent-... I’m not a molecular biologist, but some seemed just good solid research on women’s health, like asthma prevalence, that just happened to study a mixture of transgender individuals and mice models since both are useful for understanding androgen sensitivity. Another…

And that’s on the official White House page? The language is crazy in that post.

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

#795

Post by zero-sharp »

bitmasher9 wrote: post #554
Frost1x wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 can't tell if you actually read the comment that you're responding to because you seem to be ringing the same bell. The issue at hand is creating opportunities for people who are clearly not cut out for white collar work. Framing this as "enabling excellence vs accommodating average" is out of touch and sounds extremely arrogant.

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

#797

Post by ggandv »

ethbr1 wrote: post #789
zvorygin wrote: post #776

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Wikipedia article you link states: > It has been called one of the least productive Congresses since 1951 Let’s not measure productivity in terms of count of bills passed like measuring output by lines of code. Healthcare reform, SS reform, fiscal sustainability, electoral reform, climate, immigration, information environment, cybersecurity, how many of these pressing issues have been tackled and solved by congre…

If "nothing for decades" isn't true, then parent can use different words. "Least productive" != "nothing" If language collapses into describing a different reality just because of the way someone feels, then communicating is going to be difficult.

Exactly. They raise campaign funds and appear on tv and cross examine industry leaders like Altman and Zuckerberg. Clearly that is not “nothing”. But some worry that is not enough to keep pace with emerging threats and opportunities and that’s given justification for presidents to increasingly fill that gap, to disastrous effect. Some argue that a single strong leader calling the shots via EOs is better than having congress try to get up to speed on complex, emerging matters (ie AI export controls) but I’m unconvinced.

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

#798

Post by UncleMeat »

int_19h wrote: post #736
standardUser wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When this kind of thing happens - and it absolutely does - it's never put in writing. The company training is always going to say what the law requires it to say. But let's say that the top management in your org have made a public commitment to "increase representation of underrepresented groups". The managers in that org are then required, by company policy, to have their own goals be "aligned" with it, so they wri…

Hiring on merit can increase representation of underrepresented groups. There are also shitloads of decisions one can make that increase representation of underrepresented groups without violating Title 7.

You can have better parental leave and part-time work policies. Or you can open an office in a region with different racial demographics. Or you can send recruiters to events like Grace Hopper. The idea that leadership saying "we want to increase representation of underrepresented groups" converts to people illegally hiring worse candidates because of their demographics is... odd.

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

#799

Post by UncleMeat »

monero-xmr wrote: post #655
const_cast wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)

The way in which "society mandates DEI" in the US is via Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act, which expressly prohibits hiring decisions being made based on race or gender (or sexuality, through Bostock).

Where are these mandatory affirmative action policies anywhere?

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

#800

Post by coliveira »

dragonwriter wrote: post #567
coliveira wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that someone agrees with Russia's position doesn't immediately prove that he's an asset owned by them. All you said could be explained if he thinks that peace with Russia would be much better for the US than NATO expansionism, since it would reduce the tremendous cost of maintaining a war machine, put less money on the pockets of the war industry, and increase the opportunities for someone like him who wants…

> The fact that someone agrees with Russia's position doesn't immediately prove that he's an asset owned by them “Asset” in the officer/agent/asset trio of terms for relations to foreign intel/influence operations does not denote ownership, and refers to people who provide access and information or other support without necessarily having the kind of formal control relationship and commitment that makes an agent. (On…

But this is not the meaning assigned in the case of Trump. The conspiracy theory is that he is "owned" in the sense of having some secret that can be exploited by Russia.
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