1. Trump has been trying to cut Science budgers by larger percentages for a while now. Congress has not let them.
2. NIH funding notice of awards has slowed to a crawl since Trump did not get his wish to cut Science funding.
3. Putting scientific funding under political control, instructing them to ignore the reviews conducted by peer scientists.
4. Have practically made international collaborations on grants impossible. An expert in Canada or Europe that would be great? Pretty much, too bad.
5. Pushing policies that make grants cancelable at any moment without need to have a justified reason, including potentially for exercising free speech, disagreeing with Administration doctrine, etc, or because you're ugly. This and the funding uncertainty makes planning difficult...just like business, stability/predictability matters.
6. Pushing policies that prevent funds to help cover costs of dissemination, including conference costs.
100% support (10s of millions of Americans do) many of these cuts when scientists are hired because they know someone, or are part of some “group” rather than being the best choice. Also not interested in funding anything not research related, including various “offices” that have nothing to do with supporting research. Lots of things to like about these cuts.
The political right is obsessed with minimizing Type II error. They feel it's better to miss good research results than to have the wrong people performing the research or chasing the wrong ideas to start with (a false negative) and the further to the right they are on the spectrum, the more important minimizing the wrong people and ideas becomes. This leads to less discovery and successes because more research gets falsely rejected at the funding level.
The political left, of course, is the opposite and obsesses over Type I error. Accepting the wrong people and ideas is less important than getting good results. This leads to things like Lysenkoism, but also tends to reject less successful research, given the other checks and balances built into a healthy system.
If the first point of comparison you reach for is the Soviet Union in the mid 20th century, that would suggest that the American political left has not in fact, in recent times, been interfering with science to the same extent as the Trump administration currently.
> 100% support (10s of millions of Americans do) many of these cuts
I doubt "10s of millions of Americans" can describe the core functions of the NIH
> when scientists are hired because they know someone, or are part of some “group” rather than being the best choice.
How do you think new appointees and hires in the NIH/HHS are selected? Political loyalty seems to be a better predictor than scientific impact or output.
> Also not interested in funding anything not research related, including various “offices” that have nothing to do with supporting research. Lots of things to like about these cuts.
The cuts and changes are dramatically impacting research support. Grant money is not being disbursed at the same rate since the new review changes began. You can more plainly characterize the changes as harmful to research in general than focused on removing whatever specific things you don't like.
You know so little about this, ad it is terribly frustrating to me. Scientists have been made out to be villains, when, on the whole, these are some the hardest working, most motivated people you will ever encounter.
They have absolutely no idea what they are destroying or why. An entire generation of scientists will be lost. It is breathtaking to watch what will surely be someday labeled as one of the greatest acts of intentional, national self-destruction ever.
I'm pretty sure only a small fraction of grants gave this issue, and the cuts have meanwhile being very wide, without any sort of intelligent approach (I know ppl doing stuff like material science at nasa that now have nothing to do because they cut costs of various inputs, while the very expensive lab equipment is sitting there now unused)
Can you cite any stats or studies that show that this is happening in any substantial amounts? This seems to be one of those "it just makes common sense" when the underlying data is ignored or assumed.
>100% support (10s of millions of Americans do) many of these cuts when scientists are hired because they know someone, or are part of some “group” rather than being the best choice.
Prove it. Prove this happens at a large scale. This is just nonsense talking points.
This should go without saying, but the person you're replying to obviously wants you to prove instances of scientists receiving grant money because they know someone or are part of a group. They are not asking you to prove the support of the people.
It's called the 2024 election. People have listened to so much propaganda aimed at destroying the anyone with credibility that can challenge whichever "truth" the propagandist chooses to push.
I'm sure the average person was completely fed up with the federal grant process for medical issues and it was a driving force in their voting decision. Excellent proof.
Could you explain how much the US spends on its science budget compared to peers? It would help us really understand how much he's cutting it and harming our science base if we knew the numbers. For example if we're spending 50% less than EU or Canada.
Issue for any country that is not China. A single country getting the most AI tokens business would be generally bad for global economy. Hoping against hope that this business gets globally distributed and there is a healthy marketplace competition overall
It’s all about economic warfare. The cheaper you can run the models, the cheaper you can offer them. Undercutting expensive tiers with token limits or exuberant billing practices.
You are right to be scared, because this race to the bottom also provides open weights/models/qat’s for the rest of us and it’s been crazy to see how good they can be on a consumer grade RTX card.
That's Intel. Probably IBM too, though they've been doing mass manufacturing with TSMC (and GloFo before) for years instead of their fabs. I wouldn't be surprised if HP did similar things back in the 80s.
What do you mean by etching? Google does also it's own chip design with TPUs, data centers, and models but afaik only TSMC Intel and Samsung do the actual semiconductor fabrication
Intel and TSMC are not what they are today just because they buy a very expensive EUV Machine from ASML but because they have the knowledge and infrastructure to even use these machines.
Some of these don't seem like "YC scandals":
- Zenefits: A non-YC company put a spy in Zenefits.
- Pebble: Still loved by many, just had black swan event of Apple launching a better product
- Cruise: Looks very much like a GM issue.
The problem is more so that I think I'd need a brain-machine interface to get what I want. If I'm brainstorming a way to solve a problem mechanically, some if it is drawing but honestly a lot of it is just imagining it in my head. From there I go straight from imagination or sketches to CAD, which is why text-to-CAD or drawing-to-CAD generally doesn't work, the act of making the CAD file is how you learn and figure out how to solve the problem better once you see it all in 3D space
Two children of different co-workers both have Oculus VR headsets and have evinced some interest in 3D printing and 3D design --- I suggested various 3D design tools intended to work with that, but no idea on how workable they are, or if there was any success....
A few things that have helped me in the past are:
- Find small wins. Don't expect big changes immediately. Small wins accumulate over time. Examples: say hi to neighbors, go to a gym, work from a coffee shop etc.
- Join a coworking space. This was a huge help personally. It still took more than a few months but this changed my life.
It's a short book giving obvious advice, that one needs to embrace change, using a metaphor of mice and cheese. It receives a lot of scorn for that, despite many needing to hear the message.
I'm ready to embrace change, however in this case no one cares. The cheese hasn't just been moved, it has been taken to another planet where us mice are not allowed to go.
I don't know what the difference is intended to be but the guidelines also don't have anything to say about voting on comments except not to complain about it.
There are 4 different categories of fixing the global CO2 challenge:
a. Remove CO2 from atmosphere
b. Prevent adding new CO2 from reaching atmosphere
This could also be a good use case for #b where CO2 is captured before being released to the atmosphere. For example factories and vehicles could be mandated to use this.
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