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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

#861

Post by verzali »

newsclues wrote: post #563
belter wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I recall an election recently not a coup. List of dictators that achieved power via what were at the time, free and fair elections: Adolf Hitler - 1933 Ferdinand Marcos - 1965 Alberto Fujimori - 1990 Robert Mugabe - 1980 Alexander Lukashenko - 1994 Hugo Chávez - 1998

Which of these was elected, lost power, and were elected again? Normally dictators don’t let go of power

That's the really sad part, that Americans saw what he did and decided they actually don't care about the Republic or their democracy.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#862

Post by cyberlurker »

anonylizard wrote: post #195
Damogran6 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter wasn't purchased for it to make money, it was purchased to get Musk in the Whitehouse.

In that respect it is astonishingly successful by every measure. Musk got his global political shift and becoming co-president of the US for a causal $40 billion.

But was the complete annihilation of all safety measures on twitter and chasing away most advertisers necessary to accomplish that? Couldn’t he have bought twitter, truly kept it an open place to discuss topics with less misinformation, kept his advertisers, and still shit post and donate his way into the White House?

He undoubtedly slashed spending, but didn’t he also tank revenue? The question I have is was any of that really necessary for him to get to where he is right now?

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#863

Post by myheartisinohio »

_elf wrote: post #801
systemstops wrote: post #788

"There has been a government-wide purge going on of references to any sorts of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) criteria, and indeed, various elected and unelected officials have for some time now been using "DEI" as a scapegoat term and apparently a shorter way of casting suspicion on anything that is not being run by some white guy. As a white guy myself, I find this phenomenally offensive, and I can't even i…

[flagged]

He has plenty of "lived experience" :-3

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#864

Post by zelon88 »

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]

He's at USAID because USAID ended apartheid in South Africa, which Elon Musk grew up in. [1] But not just "grew up in" by happenstance. His grandfather selected South Africa and Apartheid specifically for the privileges because they were Nazi sympathizers [2][3].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/05/world/africa/elon-musk-so... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_N._Haldeman [3] https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-world-accor...

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#866

Post by timewizard »

softwaredoug wrote: post #206

The big thing is this isn't really about any real monetary savings. What we get out of these budgets is a bargain: > The biggest single share of the NIH budget goes to the NCI ($7.8 billion in 2024), and the second-most to the NIAID ($6.5 billion) with the National Institute of Aging coming in third at $4.4 billion. (See the tables on numbered pages 11 and 46 of that link at the beginning of the paragraph for the det…

Then why are drug prices in the USA higher than anywhere else?

We're being robbed by these people.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#867

Post by joe_the_user »

DecoySalamander wrote: post #572
whatthedangit wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that what we're not accounting for is the belief among many wealthy people that scientific research and all other intellectual labor will soon be automated by AI. I believe that what those wealthy people aren't accounting for is the need for some class of humans to act as a translation layer between the expert AI systems and the rest of us in order to allow the discoveries and results to percolate through h…

But are they wrong? I'm pretty sure that I can ask any LLM to produce a followup for "Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" and get one as good, or even better than the original. Lack of percolation would actually be an improvement.

Sure, LLMs may indeed produce plausible bs akin to the classic bs paper you mention. But it should be considered that all science is being gutted, including unambiguously substantial fields (biology, physics, chemistry).

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#869

Post by Xelynega »

bubblethink wrote: post #460
tstactplsignore wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is simply a delusion detached from reality. I am a white man in STEM academia. I've never been discriminated against once. None of my white male colleagues have either. They are all successful in academia. And my colleagues who aren't white men are in no way inferior. Just let us vote and ask if we feel discriminated against or oppressed because of DEI. We'll vote no. It's simply a delusion that DEI is some unme…

It's an ideological disaster. Viewing this through a white v/s black lens is itself too simplistic. Look at the Harvard affirmative action lawsuit. Asians are in fact and provably being discriminated against. This is also the case in immigration policy. DEI/affirmative action policies were created by the executive and are being undone by the executive. >Just let us vote and ask if we feel discriminated against or opp…

Shocker, a majority white country voted to end programs that identified biases which benefitted them...

> Asians are in fact being discriminated against

I have a feeling someone fed you some false information about this case.

The judges ruled that Harvard's admission program violated the equal protections act, but never said once that Asian Americans were ever discriminated against.

The programs that these decisions got rid of impacted minorities other than Asians a lot more, but for some reason you don't want to talk about that?

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#870

Post by ceejayoz »

_l2po wrote: post #868

> "Elon Musk has said recently that his goal is to have no regulations at all" Is there a source for this? I ask because this concern me.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-eliminate-regulation...

It's not a fair paraphrase of what he said.

> "Regulations, basically, should be default gone," the head of the White House's Department of Government Efficiency said on the call, as spotted by HuffPost. "Not default there, default gone." "If it turns out that we missed the mark on a regulation, we can always add it back in," he suggested.

It's to some extent advocating for the "first, do no harm" default of not treating doctors are supposed to have.

Musk's definition of "missed the mark" likely varies wildly from mine, though.

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