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What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

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Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#831

Post by rtkwe »

Manabu-eo wrote: post #824
insane_dreamer wrote: post #761

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other big elephant in the room is that the self-appointed wanna-be ruler, Musk, owns companies which have received very large amounts of both government (taxpayer) grants and contracts. Back in 2015, the LA Times reported Musk's companies had received nearly $5 billion in grants. That's taxpayer money. Plus there's the SpaceX contracts--not saying those are unwarranted, certainly SpaceX deserves the contracts mor…

Most of that $5 billion in the LA times article was not received by Musk's companies at the time, and I'm not sure if they ever received the full amount as it was contingent on reaching several milestones in the span of 20 years. A big part of those $5 billion was not having to pay sales taxes on possible future Gigafactory production, for example, but that gigafactory never reached the initally planned size AFAIK.

The big question then is did the incentives then get clawed back. The pattern I'm familiar with says probably not; usually the company building the factory doesn't lose much of anything they were given when they fail to meet the milestones.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#832

Post by scarab92 »

yoyonamite wrote: post #830
scarab92 wrote: post #775

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This sounds like a potential conflict of interest: PROJECT ANNOUNCEMENT: Inspection of USAID's Oversight of Starlink Terminals Provided to the Government of Ukraine May 14, 2024 https://oig.usaid.gov/node/6814

Immaterial.

The contract value is less than $1 mill per year, and SpaceX initially provided it for free so clearly not designed as a money maker.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#833

Post by dialup_sounds »

scarab92 wrote: post #775
insane_dreamer wrote: post #761

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other big elephant in the room is that the self-appointed wanna-be ruler, Musk, owns companies which have received very large amounts of both government (taxpayer) grants and contracts. Back in 2015, the LA Times reported Musk's companies had received nearly $5 billion in grants. That's taxpayer money. Plus there's the SpaceX contracts--not saying those are unwarranted, certainly SpaceX deserves the contracts mor…

[flagged]

Trump has stated that immigrants are eating dogs in Springfield, too. Maybe take what he says with a grain of salt.

More plausibly, USAID was a focus over the SEC because it had 20x the budget of the SEC and $16b of that goes to Ukraine.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#834

Post by [deleted] »

scarab92 wrote: post #513
xp84 wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I can tell, Trump is doing things he openly announced he would do for at least a year. So all of this is either a result of robust public support for his policies, or, (my preferred explanation) an even more robust public repudiation of the only alternative that was put forward by the other party, a candidate famous for dropping out before Iowa in 2020 but somehow was coronated the nominee without any voter…

Purity spiral. The left won't be competitive in elections until they learn what it is, why it results in alienation of people who would otherwise support them, and find a way to escape it.

[deleted]

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#835

Post by wat10000 »

nonethewiser wrote: post #750
nwatson wrote: post #746

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musk's operations likely are using illegal means and are an overextension of power, while legislative and judicial branches, as well as internal executive branch watchdogs, have abdicated their roles in oversight and control. This is effectively an overthrow.

When I read your comment I am sympathetic to your characterization that its illegal. I expect it will be litigated. But then you conflate illegal with "an overthrow" (of what?) to show its a "coup". This is incredibly hand-wavy and makes the "coup" language look like hyperbole.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-coup

Trump is essentially ruling by decree and taking actions far outside his authority. If successful, this will de facto strip Congress of much of its power and transfer it to the President. If you want to see what the outcome of that looks like, read about events in Germany in January-March 1933.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#836

Post by sporkland »

intended wrote: post #634
brylie wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an expat in the EU, I have a surreal sense of being a bystander at an ongoing emergency scene. I don’t want to be yet another gawker as this situation is unfolding but am struggling to come up with actions that are within my power to take as a form of protest, resistance, or solidarity. What are some practical actions that we can take to resist these sweeping changes?

I have a suggestion - at least one of several, which is to understand why we got here. The fact that this is escalating since cable TV, Murdoch, and the internet is not a coincidences. Democracies globally are facing a similar problem, which is an abuse of a core democractic principle: Free speech. Free speech is often valued in and of itself. However, free speech in itself is only a tool that serves a greater purpos…

I like how you analyzed that, one addition: I also think some form of the anthropic principle is at play.

The societies that exist have something that allows them to continue to exist. Free speech can allow a society to seek truth and being aligned with reality can be important in the survival of a society. But so can cohesion while being "wrong".

There's a lot of information floating around and there's a lot of play between truth seeking free speech and cohesion signaling going on. Esp. as noise has been added to all signals including the scientific channels both via corporations and via well meaning ideologues.

I'm sure this is naive but I assume most of us would just love to be able to filter the signal from the noise in places that are relevant to us and be able to ensure low malfeasance in the places that aren't.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#838

Post by AlexandrB »

jcgrillo wrote: post #275
switchbak wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The president just threatened Greenland with military action. That is absolutely fucking unprecedented in living memory, and well before. And that passed without much more than an exasperated sigh. No, I think the populace will go along with whatever these folks deem acceptable. It’s like a bad movie.

When their children are being drafted to go die in some war things will change rapidly. I'd give it a coin flip that's where we're headed right now. EDIT: To be clear, that's predicated on assumption things are fundamentally different here and now from Germany in the 1930s. If not, we're already cooked.

> To be clear, that's predicated on assumption things are fundamentally different here and now from Germany in the 1930s.

It's hard to take stuff like this seriously. Even if you're worried about fascism specifically, why Germany in the 1930s and not Italy in the 1920s? The latter seems more relevant to the present moment. I think the reason is that the German Nazis are the bad guys of history and these kinds of comparisons have less to do with historical parallels but more with Godwin's Law.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#839

Post by SmirkingRevenge »

systemstops wrote: post #800
intended wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a suggestion - at least one of several, which is to understand why we got here. The fact that this is escalating since cable TV, Murdoch, and the internet is not a coincidences. Democracies globally are facing a similar problem, which is an abuse of a core democractic principle: Free speech. Free speech is often valued in and of itself. However, free speech in itself is only a tool that serves a greater purpos…

Public trust in the media is at an all time low along with other institutions. People are turning to social media because the press is unreliable. Reform that institution and fix many of our problems. Maybe AI agents will be able to help identity bad reporting in the press and hold them more accountable. A sort of epistemic anti-virus.

There are a lot of arsonists complaining about fires on this particular point. The mainstream press is mostly decent.

American right-wing propaganda personalities and media outlets drive the negative sentiment to a large degree. They radicalize their audiences against traditional media institutions, and they do it very, very well. Sometimes there are kernels of truth to their criticisms. Mostly they are wildly exaggerated, or even totally fabricated. It sucks we can't have nice things, but it is what it is. Free speech is free speech.

But it won't really get better unless all that propaganda is successfully countered, even if you magically figured out how to build a perfect mainstream media.

Where things get really dangerous is when demagogues come along and join in, like Trump.

On the list of things to look for to tell if you're dealing with a rising authoritarian movement, near the top are sustained attacks on the press. Enemy of the people, Trump calls them. Zuckerberg gets threatened with life in prison. He encourages supporters to menace and attack reporters at rallies. The list goes on.

These all become the pretext for drastic anti-constitutional attacks on the free press, and we're seeing that take shape already in Trump 2.0.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#840

Post by hnfong »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #417
tstactplsignore wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the scientific community identified this failure. They published the evidence against it. And shed light here. And heck, they did a lot of unrelated great science at the same time. Science is a process that will have failures, mistakes, errors, and these are subject to natural selection. We can work to make that process sharper, more rigorous, but that's obviously not what the administration is doing. They're att…

> "They" they did not . in the case of tessier-levigne, who was responsible for getting him out of there? not the NIH. it was a fucking Stanford undergrad journalism student. let that sink in. a heroically persistent undergrad had to do the job that the NIH was morally and legally obligated to do. this "science is self correcting" trope needs to stop being propagated right now. and you can claim eventual self consist…

This.

I'll add that all systems are self-correcting given sufficiently long timescale. (Or they die out and we're none the wiser due to survival bias)

Science isn't any special in this regard. Even the Catholic Church was self correcting (it doesn't do Inquisitions or sell indulgences any more, does it?). As was Nazi Germany (WWII fixed that, hurray for... whatever that was).

To be honest the real "self-correcting" mechanism is some kind of Darwinian survival system where you have to ensure the wrong things don't perpetuate. Government funding really doesn't help with that unless the mechanism deciding which projects/people to fund have a really good model of the real world (i.e. "truth").

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