What's happening inside the NIH and NSF(science.org) |
What's happening inside the NIH and NSF(science.org) |
Just a few quotes from the article:
"...This is amply laid out in the Project 2025 documents, and let me say right here that I was volcanically pissed off at the way that topic was handled during ..the campaign.", and
.. That’s a gigantic can of worms that I don’t have the energy to open at the moment, but past that, there is a broader hatred of education and expertise of all kinds. I hate to bring that one up, because it makes me sound like a crank, but there really is a strain of Trumpism that is nothing more than a desire for revenge against snooty over-educated elites who try to tell people what they should do based on their so-called "research." So if by pummelling the NIH and NSF you can simultaneously punch some huge bureaucracies in the face, revenge yourself against your imagined pandemic enemies, and cause distress at a bunch of big universities where they mostly hate you anyway, well. . .what's not to like? ... I strongly urge everyone to make their voices heard with their Senators and Representatives about these issues: the Republican ones need to hear that not everyone agrees with this stuff, and the Democratic ones need to hear that their constituents are not in a handshaking bipartisan mood."
We wouldn't be here if government funding was not overrun by leftist politics. How many grants have been rewritten the past few years to put a facade of DEI or to grab funding from funds specifically targeted for DEI or other leftist goals?
whenever any team comes up with anything worthwhile then they get the money
nevermind the fact they need the money to do anything at all, oops
On top of that, these things make the US money. We have, by far, the strongest pharmaceutical and medical technology industry anywhere. Those companies pay taxes.
(Those companies also screw us and the government over in myriad ways, and that should be addressed, but cutting off the research system that supports the entire industry in like throwing out the baby without even draining the bathwater.)
political opponents of the newly elected administration are obviously going to go fully hysterical over any change, they already did last time. the science industries in the US aren't going anywhere, neither is research at the universities.
the ideological discrimination and money laundering coming out of these departments are going to end. and did we all forget about COVID? The fact that the NIH funded the research that happened in china ILLEGALLY, because this was a really stupid idea and we found that out the hard way, and it was covered up, and we were lied to, it killed millions, destroyed economies on a global scale.... do we really not want to see this agency dissected under a microscope? They need to be investigated.
I'll shortcut it real quick - we're all dead from lung cancer and leaded gasoline, so there's no one to do the calculation.
If I were president I would probably cut from military spending - but at some point that becomes painful to cut aswell.
A lot of people have misunderstood me in this thread, at no point do I want to see public research cut. Its just that the same people who are worried about what climate change will bring over next 50 years (and I am too!) dont seen to feel any sense of alarm at the federal government living outside its means for the next 50 years, and I can not understand why
Because we invested in those technologies and they paid off handsomely. What you are seeing is the result of "profit externalization"- laws like Bayh Dole allow universities to profit from the research they carry out under contract with the government.
Everything we did, we did because the alternatives were worse.
USG revenue/spending should be reasoned about in terms of the resources it directs, and the resulting effects on US and world GDP. Everything else is just accounting.
This is the kind of comment that caused all the public backlash against DEI. Completely out of touch. If you talk this way, don't expect the public to believe your claims about defunding.
Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, and defense are larger.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
this is the grant, but this was public info for years https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Year-...
The federal government almost certainly does absurdly overspend, but you’re missing the point: all of these drops in the bucket add up to far less than the deficit.
Also, for better or for worse, operating departments efficiently may well be the executive branch’s job, but setting all these budgets is Congress’s job, not the executive branch’s. In fact, Congress tried, not all that long ago, to allow the President to veto specific line items, and the Supreme Court struck it down:
I’m not sure how to explain this to you, really - you’re fundamentally stuck, I think, on the idea that the gov is like a business or a household, and needs to budget the same way. It really doesn’t.
Maybe think of it this way, to start to get your head around it: current debt is just over 100% of GDP - so in some sense the US has borrowed about a years worth of production. 100% sounds scary, but does 12 months sound so scary? Would you consider yourself in catastrophic debt if you owed a year of your salary?
Personally I wish my mortgage was only a year of my salary!
Consider the idea that without decades of money printing, your house might only cost 1 year of salary in the first place
Or maybe let me ask it a other way - if the govt really doesnt need to balance the budget, why dont we have 50 aircraft carriers and free healthcare for all? Such huge sums of money go beyond merely number balancing, at some piint theyre forcefully managing the real resources of the nation
And the current finite number is nowhere close to causing a crisis for the US (Japan had two and a half times GDP in debt and did not collapse into hyperinflation or some other catastrophic fate, for example).
Oil companies weren't going to publish research saying leaded gas was bad. Tobacco companies weren't going to publish research saying cigarettes were bad. Have fun being healthy when you inhale leaded gasoline every day.
Forget about things like, you know, the internet. Or any medicine.
BTW, private companies are not paying for basic biological research. Good luck making a drug when no one knows what target to drug. VC firms will park their money in the bank instead. The value from biotechs is already marginal - investment basically vanished when interest rates went above 4.
Ive also been told in the past that its somehow ok that the government never breaks even, I can handle that maybe Im too stupid/uneducated to get it... but nobody ever even tries. Use little words, Im sure we will make progress. How can the government continue to exist and not go broke if it continually spends more than it brings in?
That's just one (big and easy to recall) example. There are countless.
Spending public money on public research grows the economy. Cutting it is penny wise and pound foolish.
I work at a biotech. We have $150 million in private funding. My biotech wouldn't exist, and I wouldn't have a job if it weren't for decades of public research doing the foundational work that allows us to target a protein to make a drug to help people. None of that would exist if not for NIH, NSF etc
And Musk has stumbled into several known right-wing conspiracy theories based on knee-jerk reactions, so I find it far more likely that he’s just fishing to validate his pre-held knee-jerk opinions rather than doing a careful investigation.
Part Eight: Hostile takeover by Musk & co.
a serious audit of the endless money printing of the federal government is well overdue
The stuff DOGE is playing with is such a tiny percentage it won't move the needle.
You can't convince people whose attention bandwidth is entirely consumed by the social media engagement algorithms controlled by the very people doing this.
I'm afraid this might be a fait accompli for democratic institutions. The chance to stop this was 10 years ago, by breaking up concentrated media ownership and regulating social media. We didn't, and it's too late.
His dizzying array of contradictory statements, lies, and flip-flops have always made him someone where people, his supporters in particular, see the Trump they want to see. Isolationist or imperialist, the man who would ban TikTok or its savior, pro/anti vaccine, really pick just about anything.
There was a popular sentiment in his first term that Trump seemed to believe whoever had talked to him last on any issue, but he manages to have that same effect on other people, too.
Going back to the concept of the will of the voters, Trump won Muslim-heavy Dearborn, MI on the back of people voting to protest Biden/Harris's approach to Gaza. He just announced side-by-side with Netanyahu that he wants to totally depopulate Gaza and have the US take it over and rebuild it as a resort, and throw in the West Bank too while you're at it. Is that what those people voted for?
Second, we all have a right to bitch about what seems like a new America being formed. If things go as badly as many of us seem to think, well it doesn't really matter if we convince trump voters they were wrong, because democracy will be have evaporated anyway. Our society has been almost molded for this moment: Americans are more isolated and alienated from each other than ever. The internet today is a fundamentally difficult place to organize any sort of coherent protest when the places people post are algorithmically controlled, manipulated by bots, and moderated.
We are broken as a society. What a waste was all that 20th century plundering and bloodshed and brilliance and effort. I would imagine that even for someone looking at the teetering American Empire with satisfaction, there is a bit of emptiness in just how stupid and pathetic this all is.
That's exactly what they voted for. Most people don't trust the govt. Only Trump can be expected to cannibalize the govt.
If Elon did not exist/ tie himself to Trump, I don’t think Trump could have done even 10% of the dismantling of the Administrative State that Elon has done. Elon has a certain will to power, flagrantly breaks all norms but advertises it on Twitter for his Twitter supporters, an insane sense of urgency to move fast, an ability to attract talented 20 yr olds to join him for “low pay”, and “100 hr weeks” that gets stuff done. The Trump ecosystem was mostly professional grifter (and crypto scammers), polemicists who only talked the talk, and a small set of true believers who never had a private sector job in their life. If it was just them, I might have been right in the “Nothing Ever Happens” camp. Elon and his ecosystem has given them fangs. They still probably can direct Elon, to a limit, at some things like H1b immigration they will probably concede to Elon but in return they will actually remake the government in their image. Elon is turning out to be one of the “Important People in History”.
Me too.
Is the current situation the only way, the best way, or even a good way to address the country's economic position? That is a matter of perspective. As is always the case, people will take sides. The unreasonable people (on any side) will refuse to compromise and spew inflammatory rhetoric, most often in defense of their own self interests and at the expense of others' interests.
I believe that the most sensible approach is for all parties to adhere to a metered diligence, always being mindful that the country is a collective of disparate interests. The whole point of a democracy is that through all the ups and downs, things work themselves out eventually. Sometimes there are setbacks and other times there is progress.
Things may seem chaotic, but this too shall pass.
1. The US economy was the best in the world in 2024.
2. The NIH, USAID, and NSF budgets make up just a percentage point or two of US spending.
3. These programs consistently generate ROI >>1.
In light of these painfully obvious facts, isn't it clear that the priorities of this administration have nothing to do with government finances? And that even trying to frame the discussion that way is blatantly irresponsible?
Congress' lack of will to compromise leads to winner-take-all scenarios with wild swings in policy.
Language such as "deeply basic facts" and "blatantly irresponsible" is part of the problem. I am as guilty as the next person for experiencing heightened emotions and using adverbs carrying negative connotations that lack denotational substance. However, my experience has been that the storms are best weathered by calm, consistent, and persistent actions or behaviors.
We need to do better. The US government isn't Twitter. Breaking things simply because you have the power is the opposite of leadership, it's nihilism.
But cutting money from weak nerds? Destroying education? That's fine. Nobody needs it.
In this particular case, the goal is to privatize science entirely.
Video with similar content, shows them actually talking about their ideas and plans: https://youtu.be/5RpPTRcz1no
More than 40% of US adults are obese. The rates of chronic diseases are through the roof. There's obviously a systemic problem in these institutions who are tasked with the well-being of the country. We know of many fraud in social sciences (ever heard of priming research?), medical science (eg. alzheimer researchs) and nutritional science (eg. saturated fats). In fact I'd argue it has become systemically untrustworthy. Robert Kennedy Jr vowed for: (a) dedicating 20% of science funding to replication studies, (b) systemic publication of peer reviews alongside papers, (c) publication of null results. Which seems like a very good improvement over what we have now. The field is in dire need of a reform.
Am I missing something?
PS: I am not from the USA.
Where are these scientists arguing for that?!
Hell, science has been wrong on a number of health issues. But diet and exercise has been a staple of good health science for as long as I can remember.
Your blaming the wrong institutions.
Is there a source for this? I ask because this concern me.
One source: 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.
My how we’ve fallen. Trump could says he’s bigger than Jesus and sell a bible with the quote
When I worked for Google I visited NIH, sat on study groups, and helped advise program managers how to move more compute to the cloud. Like many other techies in SV I have a PhD in a quantitative science and understand how NIH works. My efforts were entirely designed to help update the establishment, not tear it down, and that's true for the wide swath of my coworkers I encountered.
The folks who are doing this are a subset of the tech community, who do not represent the larger community.
"Been thinking a lot about whether it's possible to stop humanity from developing AI. I think the answer is almost definitely not. If it's going to happen anyway, it seems like it would be good for someone other than Google to do it first."
- Altman to Musk, immediately before proposing what became OpenAI ( https://www.techemails.com/p/elon-musk-and-openai )
"OpenAI is on a path of certain failure relative to Google. There obviously needs to be immediate and dramatic action or everyone except for Google will be consigned to irrelevance."
- Musk to Altman, later ( https://www.techemails.com/p/elon-musk-openai-path-of-certai... )
I'm not convinced. In the past half decade or so this industry has veered hard toward outright fraud and grift. I see this trend all over--adtech, cryptocoins, "AI", security... These days I assume technologists are frauds until they prove otherwise. It's a blunt instrument, but it often works well.
What came after the gilded age, again?
There just seems to be an overall lack of respect for how government works, the broader machine and bureaucracy that is supposed to protect from unilateral decisions made by a single entity. Government is not, and should not, be run like a tech startup. Going fast and breaking things isn't a recipe for stability or reliability in both government and software. History has tried kings and dictators and, well, they never turn out great for the general population. Democracy is slow and sucks sometimes, but it also has a ton of perks that we seem all too quick to dismiss and throw away.
No reason to think it will be better when applied to the federal government.
If the complaints seem well reasoned, then you adjust course.
You can certainly argue that it is crude, but it’s simpler than trying to deeply analyze and understand a very complicated system.
Carl Icahn has a story[0] about firing 12 floors of people that seems relevant
Exactly.
The fourth estates' and the masses' blind faith in and compliance to self-righteous, egotistical billionaires, one of whom may be a Nazi, is what is both disappointing and frightening.
"These folks" can absolutely be described as the tech community:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justine_Tunney
> In March 2014, Tunney petitioned the US government on We the People to hold a referendum asking for support to retire all government employees with full pensions, transfer administrative authority to the technology industry, and appoint the executive chairman of Google Eric Schmidt as CEO of America.
Are they not part of the tech community now? You highly overestimate the political homogeneity of the tech community, because opposing voices were previously so shut down. You would be surprised by what your co-workers are thinking deep down.
Move fast and break things...
If it gets bad enough that most people are starving, rather then just struggling, we'll see action, but I doubt it'll get there anytime soon.
But they now believe that movie actors are drinking the blood of babies and that China somehow rigged up the increase in CO2 as a way to confound us. They think scientists are mostly lying.
It's not clear from an information theoretic perspective how to restore stability to the US system.
Maybe once they've killed a million immigrants, I'm sorry had excess mortality in the camps in the hot SW and in Cuba, and things all around them are worse for their own children and families, they will repent and embrace truth, justice and the American way. One can hope.
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.
That’s pretty optimistic…
It's mostly too late to do anything at that point. People won't even have money for ammo.
This is an understatement to say the least, and the fact it's been denied and even refused by the powers that be until today is why the pendulum has swung as hard as it has.
Americans wanted change, and they finally got it with ferocious retribution because it's been held back for so long.
I try to understand how the "other side" is thinking about this. Disagreements on policy aside, why would "freedom loving Americans" want a king that can rule unilaterally?
Not trying to start a flame war or pose a gotcha question, I'm genuinely curious. What am I missing?
Every week a new target will be set, and no matter what will be done, people won't realize that the cause of their own problems are internal. Canada, Denmark, Mexico, Panama, you name it. At the same time there's a superpower (China) that is actively trying to unseat the leader. Superpower with more people, better manufacturing, more potential for the future income, more manpower, not cool with getting bullied and etc. That will also make the citizens unhappy, because "how dare China be better than us?!".
It also doesn't help that Americans aren't having children, which is objectively bad for the future of the leadership. The push for natalism, banning contraceptives, choice and etc. is points towards "you will have children no matter what and you will love it" scenario.
It's like a culmination of multiple problems that have been left rampant for the past couple of decades. Now they're trying to frantically swing the pendulum, but there's a chance that they'll end up pulling it a bit too hard so it will break.
There was a successful coup and the USA as such has fallen, now presumably on the route to failing.
And this, I think, points to the corruption of the entire political class in America with just being upshot.
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 human institutions.
Or, rather, they may be underestimating the bottleneck that will be introduced by trying to hoard all of those results within their own circles of trust and influence.
Andreesson has the same blindness - he wrote the first web browsers (having not invented HTTP or the web or browsers) and parleyed that into a fortune by investing. I guess he's a skilled investor, a smart financial person, but there is no evidence that he has some special science expertise or extraordinary intelligence. From my observations, one can understand nothing about science or the physical world and do well with software and investing.
As far as "far-sighted," the history from 1980 onwards is the destruction of many things in society devoted to the long view in favor of short-term financialization.
You can buy another countries tech if it benefits you or just move.
And for all you HN readers supporting these massive changes: you'd test changes beforehand and plan their deployment carefully if this were software. So why why do you support explicitly not doing those things when the livelihood of 300 million people depend on the economy being stable?!?
And before the inevitable derail or whatabout attempt: Don't play political games with people's lives.
And, again, everything is political, including every aspect of discussions on HN.
The former is 100% how it will go. The only question is: how bad will it get?
A poster down thread mentions a million dead immigrants. I personally think it will just be in the low 6 figures. Maybe high 5 figures.
The doom and gloom in these comments is truly funny. I remember the exact same when Trump won the first time.
It’s like HN has no memory.
At this point, almost certainly the former.
1. Most Trump supporters do not think that there is a problem.
2. “Regular people” — that is, the folks who don’t track news — won’t notice any problems in their day-to-day lives until after said shakedown has been completed.
The only way large swathes of people will demand action is if they are hit hard in the wallets in an immediate and clear way (e.g., rapid price increases to one or more critical goods or services) or if a critical process (e.g., social security checks) gets disrupted. I’m not sure the current types of changes will reach that level.
This was a very weird realization and one that left me pretty sad.
Edit to clarify: I also mean no condescension toward "regular people".
> 1. Most Trump supporters do not think that there is a problem.
Talk to any conservative -- even people who are/were skeptical of Trump -- or browse any conservative-leaning social media. It's clear that the people who voted for Trump fully understood what they voted for: they wanted what's happening. Project 2025 is a good thing in the eyes of many. Maybe they think politicizing the whole executive branch is a little distasteful, but in the eyes of literally millions of Americans, it's a means to a well-justified and long-awaited end.
Never know, if enough people divest , people might give a shit.
But I'm not holding my breath.
We're at the final stage of the cycle—ochlocracy. (Mob rule)
I don't think Trump will be king, to be blunt he's too old and not skilled enough.
I'm worried about the next guy or the one after that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
If one party wants to do things democratically at all cost, and the other party wants to bring down democracy, then the latter will win.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/feb/04/benjamin-...
Trump said Palestinians have “no alternative” but to “permanently” leave Gaza due to the devastation left by Israel’s war on Hamas. He described Gaza as a “pure demolition site” and claimed Palestinians would “love to leave Gaza”. “I don’t know how they could want to stay,” he said.
Trump’s comments marked the first time he has publicly floated the permanent relocation of Palestinians from Gaza. The US president’s remarks in effect endorsed ethnic cleansing of the territory over the opposition of Palestinians and the neighbouring countries.
Trump is literally for completely ridding Gaza of the Palestinians so Israel can colonize it. An ACTUAL genocide.
And I don't think that the US was mentioned by the ICJ, even if it had confirmed genocide.
The only government efficiency they’re concerned with is the efficiency of funneling other people’s money into their own pockets. Even Putin’s oligarch buddies are nowhere that bold nor think they’re that much above the law.
When I advise the NIH to do was to do a large bulk group buy on behalf of many thousands of scientists that use the scale of the NIH to negotiate in extremely large concession. My experience with Amazon is that you can basically get them down about 50% just by asking.
I work for a well-funded company now and we use the cloud and we have on-prem infrastructure. The on-prem infrastructure is extremely hard to change sometimes just asking for a GPU will take 6 months or more. Storage is always highly limited and slow. Let the cloud hyperscalers do what they're good at and focus on doing the science
In that sense, you've committed three errors in your response, but the primary fourth error is in avoiding the actual subject at hand, which is still the fact that these governmental actions will not reduce spending, so your original claim was incorrect.
This is not me “thinking about” or “supposing” — I speak from experience working with many federal agencies (including NIH) and U.S. universities.
- I have watched formerly objective journals slide down the slippery slope of editorializing, to the point of questioning the reliability of the studies they publish.
- I have talked with prestigious professors who were quite distressed about their universities (yes, plural) being bought out wholly by foreign interests.
- I have had frank discussions with researchers saying it’s not about the science or the mission - it’s about the money.
- I have had frank discussions with senior government leaders explicitly explaining how they (often unlawfully) manipulate the system to line their pockets.
- I have seen so much government funding denied because the lead was not the right sex or did not have the right color skin. (Having been on the inside of many source selection events, it most frequently boils down to favoritism and kickbacks, with ideology being the excuse for the outcome.)
- And pharmaceutical companies, like Novartis? I have watched their drug pushing in person, calling on doctors offices, borderline bribes, and strategies such as a pharmaceutical sales team wining and dining a doctor, using fine food and pretty women to push their wares. (It takes quite a bit of self control to avoid going on a long diatribe about how positively evil the pharmaceutical companies are.)
The whole damned system is corrupt to the core. The root of the corruption is not ideology — it is money. Ideology is the veneer applied to make change palatable to the public. Congress discreetly turned a blind eye until the problem got out of hand. Gerrymandering and winner-take-all politics distorted the proper functioning of Congress. Runaway inflation was the first time the structural problems significantly leaked into the public eye.
Taxes are levied on the American people and collected under threat of violence. That money should first and foremost go toward our collective safety and common defense. Instead, there is a long line of people, hands out, asking "How much will you pay me to not riot in the streets?" The whole system has gone off the rails. Competition for resources, which are no longer so abundant, breeds conflict. Congress has had decades to correct course. They did not. Why? Because nobody is willing to compromise. The incessant argument of “I am right and you are wrong” has lead to a significant cultural shift, which is what we are experiencing now.
What is happening at NIH and NSF has nothing to do with line items or ROI. It is about being swept up in a large cultural revolution precipitated by economic mismanagement and inflamed by a strategy of gradual Orwellian newspeak that has been spreading since the 1990s.
American Exceptionalism is a hell of a drug.
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?
bringing down the system?
Win or lose, I'm thinking money is flowing up to the same people.
...what?
Trump's son-in-law was put in charge of supply distribution, refused to invoke the defense production act, and when they finally did, Trump took ages to actually "order" ventilators. They refused to implement testing because they knew that tests would show how bad things were and justify measures that would hurt the stock market.
Trump largely didn't do anything at first because COVID-19 was most severely impacting the coastal blue states because of higher population densities.
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/did-trump-kushner-igno...
and https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/09/jared-kushner-let-th...
They routed supplies away from blue states to red states. He sent ventilators to Russia, FFS:
https://ru.usembassy.gov/delivery-of-u-s-ventilators-to-russ...
Trump told states to get their own PPE (because blue states needed them more badly than red states, and he didn't want red states to have to pay for it), then the feds outbid state agencies for PPE. And when that didn't work, just outright had customs steal them:
https://www.warren.senate.gov/oversight/letters/warren-deman...
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/how-the-federal-gove...
Our state's orders for PPE was impounded at the port by the feds, who them claimed they had no idea what anyone was talking about. Our state got a bunch of PPE because the NFL football team owner sent his team's 737 to China to pick up masks and gowns (which turned out to have all sorts of problems, like being sized for children.)
Our governor stopped just shy of saying "yes" when asked if he'd sent state troopers into NYC to meet the plane and escort the truck.
https://www.wbur.org/news/2020/04/14/baker-mum-on-whether-st...
> If the wealthy don't pay enough taxes, the middle class will be harmed.
"Will be"? It's been going on for decades. Bush and Trump tax cuts made it even worse and skyrocketed the deficit to boot.
But I think the earlier comment may have been referring to the restrictions in the US relative to other countries. Most other countries were much more severe for their lockdowns
It's really interesting seeing how widely varied peoples' definitions of these things are.
Ironically, the essence of a confidence trick, or con artistry, is to convince people that you're superhuman, much much much smarter than everyone else.
No LLM trained on PubMed will be able to suss this all out - more data is needed.
Even in pure mathematics, where I am currently a grad student and as needed a big fan of trying to get LLMs to explain stuff to me at 1 am, they just aren't that good. If it's a popular question where I could have tried math overflow, sure, it's probably just going to get some details weirdly wrong, but for subtle complex concepts, it's not making some golden age of truth and understanding.
And God help the LLMs trying to understand physics that are trained on all the BS on Youtube and the blogs.
People who love working at Big Tech love it for everything people who go for the Startup World hate, and vice versa.
Culture warriors only care about about their "side" winning. It's not an intellectual battle, but an emotional one. Rules be damned, their side is winning and dishing out retribution for, and rolling back decades of defeat on the battle for social values - civil rights, race mixing, gay marriage, LGBTQ rights, and the gall to elect a black president, BLM, #metoo, etc.
Vengeance can make people do crazy things and the craziest thing is how people don't realize vengeance can destroy them just as much, if not more than their intended target. Not so much shooting ourselves in the foot, more like stabbing ourselves in the heart.
My life and work is to help people to realize how responding with hate or indifference will destroy us, and that responding with love is the only way through.
I'm not sure why conservative commentators can't see the result of this knee-jerk policy of deporting every illegal immigrant, and even those with birthright citizenship. It's a scorched earth policy, and you are only going to reap ashes from it.
I thank NZ for leading the way.
Trump as POTUS ordered the VPOTUS to overturn an election, and when Mike Pence refused the order, Trump sent a mob to have the VPOTUS assassinated. It’s distinctly not funny, though very memorable, that people who voted for Trump again think of themselves as American patriots.
I remember the racist lie of birtherism.
You can grab them by the pussy, they let you do it. I remember it.
I think some are addicts to the anger, drama, and depravity of Trump TV. Perhaps they can be treated like drug, sex, and shopping addicts.
The stupid and malicious are probably lost for our lifetime. The best thing to do is cut them off. They’re not good people. They voted for a rapist, that’s how desperate and low they’ve become.
I remember Mike Pence boilerplate Republicanism wasn’t good enough. Trumpers want and need an abuser. They voted for that, not despite it.
A good deal why we’re here is liberals coddled Trumpers, forgave them in advance, helped to normalize the depravity by inviting Trumper friends and family to all the usual social functions, despite the insanity. We were too nice. And this is permission. We gave them permission all along.
Kick abusers to the curb. All of them. They’re not good people. Stop trying to make them better by lying about who and what they are. Stop normalizing the depravity. That’s the beginning.
Ironically I assume this is how people like Hitler took power.
“Kick Jews to the curb. All of them. They’re not good people. Stop trying make them better by lying about who they are. Stop normalizing the depravity. That’s the beginning.”
It’s almost like I’m reading the moustache man’s words himself.
Your attempt to be treated as some sort of victim is denied.
This time no checks and balances exist within the administration, and the supreme court has been turned.
I wish I could laugh.
But this time around something seems to have changed, where his supporters are ok with trump and team doing whatever. Be a forever president, rip up the constitution, rule by decree.
It's a sentiment I often see, not just here, and I just don't understand it.
A green new deal that set out to get electricity to people's houses at $0.08/kwh and stood a reasonable chance of doing so would have been a great start. That's not what it was, alas.
You can't just look at what the parties say they want to do when they're in power. You have to look at what they actually spend their time and energy on while in power.
Both parties are pretty hypocritical when it comes to stated goals vs revealed goals.
I can see some truth to it while living across the border. The things move extremely slow due to enormous amount of legislative barriers and opposition. When you make any big disruptive change, obviously families will suffer, incomes will be lost and etc. So, if you want gigantic changes (good or bad) for a huge country, you need either backing of super majority of people or ability to be above the law because everyone would be afraid to go after you. From my point of view, that’s why China can do drastic changes to their established sectors (tech, private education, construction and etc.) and keep pivoting as necessary. Sure, I don’t agree with their political ideology. However they have an enormous bureaucracy that will sit down and rewrite laws when the goals change.
I’ve met some Republicans throughout my travels, and after some drinks have heard how they want to feel proud of their country. How they used to be proud of their land, origins and etc. Nowadays, they just don’t feel it.
It would be very dumb of me to generalize, but when a good chunk of people don’t feel proud of anything in their lives, it shows signs of cultural weakness. A weakness that’s incredibly easy to exploit as the feeling of pride actually feels good. Current admins are giving a sense of hope that they’ll restructure entire government to some point where citizens will be proud of their progress.
Biden comes in, it was similar, maybe worse because of inflation and increased income inequality. Imposed a bunch of social changed as well. Democrats say a bunch of things and all that ends up happening is a bunch of social changes that most of the country find strange. Now we have Trump again.
I'm not all that big a fan of that style comment rising to the top threads like this myself, even though I likely lean very opposite of cft on political matters and what I think the impact of this will be like.
* The Trump Administration doesn't believe in the two state solution stalemate. * They have leverage over The Netanyahu Administration in Israel due to the ongoing military support needed. * The Netanyahu Administration wants to incorporate Gaza into Israel as also doesn't believe in two state solution but cannot do so without repercussions. * US could take over Gaza as the West won't sanction it, China needs to sell to it, RoW not an issue. * Trump wants US to take over Gaza, use US corps and workers to rebuild paid for by Israel, and then sell back to Israel at a later time.
I don't agree with that position but I think that's what the deal looks like overall.
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.
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.
Protesting for Gaza was squashed last time by basically everyone, and will be again.
And actually, you in fact can argue that Trump has been better on the issue than Biden. Multiple news outlets have reported that it was Trump that forced the ceasefire:
- https://www.wsj.com/opinion/trump-forced-netanyahu-to-make-a...
- https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=64825
- https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-01-13/ty-article/.p...
- https://www.timesofisrael.com/arab-official-trump-envoy-sway...
Everything you find with regarding Trump is rhetoric while his actions have been much more peaceful than Biden's.
Which brings me back to my main point: it's absurd and hysterical to be claiming that Trump is uniquely fascist here. Whoever is freaking out now about him, and was not freaking out about Biden, is a fraud and should be called out as a fraud.
The US was in favor of a two state solution. The US is now saying that half of one state, by population, is no longer available. It's clear to anyone with two neurons to rub together that the other half is gone within the next four years.
This was the goal of the Biden administration. The difference now is that without Israel demolishing Gaza every day, the resistance has demonstrated they cannot be dislodged. Trump has no credibility. They simply cannot do it and both the U.S. and Israeli officials that enabled this are war criminals that should be prosecuted immediately.
I meant "do what they want" as in: the winning party gets to choose the policy. The winning party can ignore the will of the losing party.
They believe it has already been politicized by people who hate them.
The Project 2025 document is really interesting along those lines as well. It's close to 1000 pages, but you can skim pretty much any section that isn't about the military and get the idea. Politicizing the executive branch is an explicitly stated goal, over and over. And furthermore, the push to disband the department of education is specifically an overly political, not because it's ineffective in its mission, but because it's "a one-stop shop for the woke education cartel" -- and yes that is a direct quote.
This is a very tight and succinct summary of many conversations I’ve had with conservative family and acquaintances.
> I don't know why you're being downvoted.
The votes on my comment are going up and down like a yo-yo.
I’m pretty sure it’s because I used the term “regular people”, and I used it in quotes. I get the sense that some people are reading more into that phrase than I intended.
Your comment also tells me that this was never about immigrants taking our jobs.
You seem to be living in a right-wing fantasy world that really doesn't exist. Things are going to get really bad in the country with this administration, the first two weeks have been extremely messy. No, these policies are definitely not going to lower the price of anything - we're on track for wild inflation with these plans. The leopards are going to be well fed though!
For example, the civil service passed new rules in the dying days of the Biden administration intended to stop Trump implementing Schedule F. This didn't come from Congress or the courts. They just passed it themselves. Trump is the boss so can undo that rule with a new rule, but they passed it within a framework of yet more rules they made themselves to slow that down so - if followed - it will take months. This is purely self serving protectionism and has nothing to do with democracy or the Constitution.
There's an interesting document here [1] that goes into all the ways the civil service betrayed Trump in the first term. Betrayal is a correct and moderate term to use. They were doing things like forging documents, lying to appointees about non-existent laws, refusing to prosecute legally clear cut cases in order to propagate woke ideology (e.g. discrimination against Asian Americans), deliberately keeping their bosses in the dark, refusing direct orders to do work if it would run contra to woke ideology and many more things.
From the Trump team's perspective the rules are largely fake: when they align with what the left want they're followed to the letter, when they don't they're ignored or subverted without consequence. He played that game in his first term, and is apparently no longer willing to do so. It's hard to know what Congress will do but presumably they're aware of the fact that their own laws have created this situation to some extent (even if not the full extent). It wouldn't be surprising to see civil service reform bills appear soon.
[1] https://americafirstpolicy.com/assets/uploads/files/Tales_fr...
This is resistance. It is justified. Expect more of it.
Democracy isn't electing kings.
Did that help things?
`Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.`
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
― George Carlin
Explaining the pendulum swinging violently because folks didn’t feel heard is not the same thing as saying that it’s a good thing that the pendulum has swung so violently.
That said, that is tangential and irrelevant to explaining how and why the pendulum swung back as hard as it did.
Trump won his first term in 2016 because Americans were fed up with the Bush+Obama status quo of endless wars and waste. Drain the swamp, fuck the establishment! As the sentiment of the day went; remember Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party? Biden winning 2020 was a sharp rebuke by the powers that be; how dare the people demand change and elect an outsider, how dare the people demand peace and effective government. Biden and Harris's 2024 campaigns likewise were based strictly and ultimately on continuing the status quo; Harris "had no policy" in large part because the "policy" was the status quo.
Trump winning again in 2024 with a historic campaign is a sharp rebuke to that, he is the people's retribution for being denied and refused for so long time and time again. For voters like me and us, NASA and the like having their funding slashed and denied is merely collateral damage for a greater and long-awaited cause.
There was zero condescension in my tone or intent.
I put “regular people” in quotes simply because I think most people who do follow the news absolutely don’t realize that the vast majority of people don’t.
A simple litmus test for this is to ask random people you meet outside of your personal social and professional circles (e.g., the front desk person at the gym, a cashier at a grocery store, a rideshare driver… whatever) a simple question like “Who are our US senators?” or “What is the NIH?” I’ve done this, and the sentiment was largely “don’t know, don’t care”.
This isn’t a criticism. It’s just an observation that some issues that some folks on HN care about (e.g., details about how lesser known parts of the government function — for example, what’s happening at the NIH and NSF) just aren’t on the radar for large swathes of the population.
> absolutely notice it at the pump and at the grocery store. They aren't mindless robots.
I think we agree on this, right?
And my point is that price changes for most things won’t hit immediately.
1. There have been delays in most of the tariffs.
2. The impact of some tariffs will take longer to hit than others. Fresh food will be fast. Goods with longer shelf lives canned goods, alcohol, and prepared foods might take a while.
Edit: Scratch that, they plan to abolish the department of education
However, the DOE does things like make sure there is funding for children with additional needs, which lets be honest, are not going to be replicated in certain states if the DOE is indeed disbanded.
Price of eggs dropped yet?
Orwell wrote about this in 1984 (and also, incidentally, fought fascists on the ground during the Spanish Civil War):
"To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself -- that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink."
Correct.
I’ve heard some harrowing stories about the moment of realization straight from the mouths of some of these people.
Edit: To be clear, I’m referring to my family and their friends who lived through it.
I’d love to know more.
Probably not news, but here are a few big ones that I remember from our conversations:
1. Family member lived in a rural area. They could see the train line that ran between two major cities. I can’t remember the exact order of events (e.g., construction), but at some point they noticed packed trains turning off the main tracks to go to a facility. Packed trains went in, and empty trains came out. At first they didn’t think anything of it… just resettlement stuff or war stuff or whatever. But then it continued. And continued. The rumors started. Everything was hush hush. Nobody dared to ask the authorities. Only later did they learn that it was a concentration camp and what actually happened there. That one kind of blew my mind… they had no idea about what was going on except vague rumors, most of which were wrong.
2. One family member had access to privileged information about the war (in the later stages of the war). One bit of info they knew was about causalities, and how certain assignments were less survivable than others. The propaganda machine made it seem like it was noble to go fight the war that would inevitably be won, but this person knew with a reasonable degree of mathematical estimation that some of the kids being sent off weren’t likely to come back. They said it was tough to look those parents, especially mothers, in the eyes when they made some comment about hoping their kid came home safely. My family member knew that these parents would likely never see their son again, and all for what was looking like a lost and/or questionable war effort that was still playing on nationalist sentiments.
3. This really isn’t that interesting, but… The propaganda late in the war made it seem like Germans in general and the troops specifically were eating well with an abundance of good food, while people who actually grew the food had to do things like use sawdust and straw as filler in their bread. They had a long list of accommodations that they told me that they made so that they didn’t feel hungry, and I don’t remember them all. The cool thing is that there were ways for the rural folks to get access to food beyond the rations. Sometimes they could sneak some extra food to the city-dwelling family members, but the folks in the cities seemed to have it tougher. They were sort of bitter about how the food situation got progressively worse as the war progressed as well as the total disconnect from reality that the propaganda was presenting.
Note that these were stories that were told to me decades ago about stuff that had happened many decades before then. I’m sure that some stories were embellished while others were muted. I’m also sure that some of the details were “lost in translation” — either via my mediocre German, their mediocre English, or the limits of language assistance that some of the bilingual folks provided.
I don’t really feel like I did these stories justice.
"First they came for DEI and I didn't speak out, because I was not Black..."
DEI makes sure that everyone is part of the merit process.
It’s like how white people feel like Babe Ruth is an all time great, but say Josh Gibson isn’t because he played in the all black league. But playing in the all white league doesn’t count against you at all. No one considers them any less.
There were plenty of companies like Coinbase that ignored DEI initiatives and requested that employees leave "politics at the door" - and we all knew what kind of politics they meant. You could have voted with your feet.
I'm fully onboard with employees asking employees to be respectful to their colleagues regardless of gender, race, creed or color, that's just good for business.
If I have to hire a hitman to take out my mistress I'm going to just opt to not have a mistress. I guess we will have never ending reasons for needing a proxy against Iran?
I have voted with my feet by avoiding the self-announced inclusive. My objection is specific to reducto-ad-hitlerum.
There is such a thing as true and false, and there is such a thing as right and wrong.
I know which side's views and plans are almost always on the side of the false and the wrong.
One side wants to divide, one tries to unite, one seeks the truth, the other side does more than lie, it attempts to erase the very notion of truth. One side denigrates, insults and immiserates the weak and the poor. The other attempts to lift them up.
Often in a moral quandary ask yourself 'Which position would be more difficult for me to take?' that's a strong indicator of what is right.
It's easy to divide, denigrate, spread rumours, and to make statements without regards to truth or falsehood. It's easy to hate, to dehumanise and to cause pain.
I've said it in another post. Why are there so many people ready to line up to defend the powerful against the weak, the rich against the poor?
What a brave and noble purpose! I'd love to see you defend that.
Don't you see? They would give the exact same speech about the other side and absolutely believe it, and in fact so would many other people. You say one side is clearly right and the other clearly wrong - that's what the people at DOGE think, just the other way around from you.
That doesn't mean right and wrong don't exist. It does mean that interpreting real world events is often hard and people can come to opposing conclusions, either because they interpret shared facts differently, or because they're aware of things the other side isn't, or because they believe things that aren't actually true.
Right now the Republicans perceive themselves as the weak and oppressed (or did until five minutes ago), and they perceive the Democrats as the powerful oppressors. Putting aside the question of whether it's true or not, they believe that the Dems control every part of the Federal civil service and are willing to systematically lie and conspire in order to completely destroy the Republicans, up to and including imprisoning them on false claims, smearing them with coordinated fake news, and even directly putting their lives in danger by turning a blind eye to assassination attempts. They think the Dems are the side of the rich and powerful and they have solid reasons to believe that, e.g. they systematically out-fundraise the Republicans by a massive margin and right now Musk is busy uncovering the ways billions of dollars in federal funds are diverted into a 100% Democratic NGO ecosystem.
You might think all the above is obviously untrue, equivocation or whatever, but they think it's true. So be careful with rhetoric about resistance. That isn't how democracy is meant to work; such talk can be and is being turned around on you.
I just remember feeling like I had been punched in the gut after some of these conversations. It was like history had come alive right before my eyes.
I remember having a few sleepless nights just processing the things I had been told.
I remember almost throwing up once (the night after the story about the trains). I just couldn’t believe the level of depravity was so easily able to exist with basically no questions asked.
I remember my naive younger self thinking about what I would have done had I been in their shoes. It didn’t take me long to realize that I probably wouldn’t have done much differently, mainly because their range of options were so limited (or at least perceived to be so, with detention, death, or “disappearing”being the consequence if you were wrong).
I also remember them talking about neighbors snitching on each other (probably to the gestapo, but it could have been another entity). Some neighbors with petty intentions would make up false claims about neighbors they didn’t like. This forced everyone to be on “perfect behavior”, and it sowed a lot of distrust in normally tight-knit communities. There was one story about a tattle-tale who had a come-uppance, but I can’t remember any of the details. I think that was the first time the word Schadenfreude came alive to me… it existed in that story on multiple levels.
There a little more commentary in a reply above to jventura.
Does this include threatening Greenland with military action or does it not count as war if there is little resistance to be expected?
It's objective fact that Trump did not start a single war during his first term (he only inherited wars from his predecessors), his successor Biden immediately went back to starting wars. Americans will not tolerate declarations of war or otherwise military actions on Denmark/Greenland or Panama, we voted for him in large part because he is the first President in a long time who hates wars.
No. More. Wars. This is non-negotiable. Every single warmonger and the military industrial complex can go fuck themselves.
However, if we can get Greenland and the Panama Canal amicably through business/diplomacy then, as an American, why not?
>Dalewyn could have his family deported
If we're here illegally then fuck yeah Trump is doing the right thing; he's just enforcing the law as written. I thought we were all about rule of law?
Burning the system down because of hurt pride doesn't sound like a good thing to me.
Your agent of retribution is now threatening my country.
It's because of people like you that I now have to start thinking of what I have to do if they start massing troops in Buffalo. No wars indeed...
And just so you know, invading us will never work. You are right to not want the US to enter a war. Because it has lost every war it has ever started.
Of course I see, and like in a chess match I looked past it cos I thought it was too obvious.
But I say again your argument amounts to false equivalence.
They can believe crazy and false things as fervently as they like, it doesn't make those beliefs an equivalent mirror image to what liberals believe.
This whole thread started with a complaint from you about Schedule F being 'unfair.'
Apparently anything except the liberals handcuffing themselves and letting themselves be frogmarched out of their jobs is unacceptable.
Meanwhile the new 'unitary executive' is allowed to jump up and down like Donkey Kong on anything he feels like no matter what the rules norms, laws or the constitution says.
Did I capture the essence of it?
I am totally serious about the need for resistance. The new people in charge just walked up to an unguarded lemonade stand which runs on the honour system, drank all the lemonade, pissed in the jar stole the money and smashed everything.
And why can they do that? Because they don't go in for honour and decency, but they expect us to. Democracy provides the tools and the freedom for people to subvert democracy.
I don't expect the new regime to grant such generous 'equivalent' terms should it manage to consolidate it's position.
I don't mean violent resistance, but we do have to resist.
1. Norms, honour, decency etc. In that case, the democratic norm that's honourable and decent would be to gladly comply with both the spirit and word of whichever government is in power regardless of the individual's personal beliefs, up to and including calmly accepting redundancy. This is what the platonic ideal of a civil servant is meant to do. The Republicans believe, with good reason, that the US civil service hasn't been doing this (same issues exist in other countries).
2. Bold resistance, elections be damned. Do whatever it takes, violate every norm, exploit every procedure, regulation and rule to fuck the right as hard as possible. That they won a legitimate victory is of no importance in this worldview because they are Crazy and Wrong and Bad, and therefore it is right and true to subvert them as much as you can.
These two positions aren't compatible but you're talking as if they are. You can't both cheer on stuff like the attempts to subvert Schedule F and claim to be the side of generosity, honour and democratic norms. Either you're subversive rebels and must accept the outcome if Trump successfully crushes you beneath his bootheel, or you're genteel servants of the people in which case you have to help him achieve his goals within the bounds set by law and the courts.
Now we fully agree that world 1 is preferable, and in that world Trump/Musk would need to spend much more time waiting on Congress to pass laws before they can shut down orgs like USAID, and the intelligence community wouldn't have produced 50+ people willing to lie in order to manipulate a domestic election. But nobody believes we live in world 1. Even now you're trying to have it both ways, and arguing that you should be allowed to claim to represent world 1 whilst simultaneously calling a legitimately elected government a "regime".
Isn't the current administration more culpable on this point? (viz. the last time Trump lost an election)
And in terms of norms I mean that there isn't a strict law or constitutional clause written to proscribe each and every thing that the president can and cannot do. The system relies on the people acting in good faith, which is definitely not happening in this case. Instead they are cynically trying to exploit every loophole they can to smash a system they don't even understand.
> whilst simultaneously calling a legitimately elected government a "regime".
It _is_ a regime. Who elected Musk or his Doge minions?
Most dictatorships consolidated power legally. That it was legal doesn't mean I want to live in one.
ANd speaking of having it bot ways, you can easily infer what side I'm on, but I get the sense that you are trying to hide behind 'just so arguments'. Could it be that you support the new regime and are trying to avoid saying it out loud?
I wonder why someone would want to hide that...?
was there anything amicable about his recent claims about greenland ?
How do you reconcile having a leader suggesting curing covid with bleach to know how to make government efficients ? Musk couldn't turn twitter back as far as we know either..
What war?
Seriously, what war?
I've tried searching for what wars, and found that the only ones started by the US this century were by Bush Jr.; neither Obama nor Biden went to war.
Do you mean the war Russia started by invading Ukraine? The ongoing conflict between Israel and various but changing subsets of their neighbours? Because these were not started by the US, they are outside the control of the US.
> No. More. Wars. This is non-negotiable. Every single warmonger and the military industrial complex can go fuck themselves.
> However, if we can get Greenland and the Panama Canal amicably through business/diplomacy then, as an American, why not?
He refused, when asked, to rule out using military force.
Operation Ocean Shield (2009–2016), International intervention in Libya (2011), Operation Observant Compass (2011–2017), US military intervention in Niger (2013–2024), US-led intervention in Iraq (2014–2021), US intervention in the Syrian civil war (2014–present), US intervention in Libya (2015–2019), Operation Prosperity Guardian (2023–present), Israel–Hamas war (2024–present).
As I said, not started by the US.
This seems to apply in general to that list, e.g. Prosperity Guardian is not even a war, and crucially it is a response to Houthi-led attacks on shipping in the Red Sea so the US also didn't start it. (Which can be described as an escalation that was itself caused by US economic support of Israel, but that kind of geopolitical implications are a never-ending rabbit hole even with 50 years of hindsight that I don't get to benefit from).
Their (and Canada's, Germany's) reason for picking sides in the Syrian civil war is completely opaque from the perspective of normal people like me (if I count as 'normal'…), but again, they didn't start it: civil war.
etc.
This is a joke right? I'm not sure 'amicably' means holding a gun to someone's head to get them to do what you want them to do. Trump stated he would use force if necessary.
> No. More. Wars.
Biden also didn't start any wars. Trump is talking about annexing Gaza, and he continues to talk about war with Iran. Trumps aggression is how wars start because it puts everyone on edge.
When Trump starts a war, which seems inevitable unless his advisors get some control, will you then admit it was dumb to vote for Trump? I'm sure you'll explain it away somehow as #winning.
> I thought we were all about rule of law?
I just assume you're trolling at this point. Trump just pardoned people who beat up law enforcement. He also talks about deporting people he simply doesn't like. He's farther from the rule of law than any POTUS in history.
Congratulations, seems like you have fully bought into MAGA propaganda.
No, its not. He certainly engaged in an armed conflict with Iran which was not an active conflict before his term.
> his successor Biden immediately went back to starting wars.
No, he didn't.
> No. More. Wars.
Since election, Trump has threatened war in or with Mexico, Denmark, and Panama, as well as the US actively completing the genocide Israel has started in Gaza. “No. More. Wars." Is very clearly not his priority.
> neither Obama nor Biden went to war.
I believe this is false.
I think its underappreciated how much of America's modern success comes down to attracting scientists and intellectuals from war torn europe in the 30s-50s.
You have to be socially smart enough to see that a $100k salary and lifestyle outcome for your remaining working career is enough, if not better than the prospect of uplift into mega-wealth, if your IPR pans out the right way.
For career scientists who were on the NSF grant train, they'd cracked a magic egg open. Beneficial to both them and us, society at large. Well, the other economies do fund research. They fund it badly compared to the NSF, the paperwork burden is less I am sure, but so is the size of the pot and the duration. You may well spend more time hassling next grant, than doing the grant funded work.
I've known US scientists who moved to my economy (OZ) and they say its a great place to live, but they keep ties to US funded research because its what made them attractive to the non-US university or corporate research environment. If that tie is going to be cut, they're competing against one quality only: skill. Sure, a more level playing field. But that, and english language competency aside, it will be a competition against scientists from the rest of the world, who also used to go to the USA and now are seeking jobs in other economies.
* English language school system so your kids (if you have them) will speak a world language.
* Racially and culturally diverse cultures, cuisines, and communities.
* Exposure to goods from most of the world, even if marked up.
* Availability of international franchises headquartered in other countries in major metros.
* A strong passport that offers visa-free travel to many locations and very favorable visa terms in many others.
and more.
My partner and I are (different) Asians and the higher-skilled members of our family who wanted to emigrate mostly rejected Europe because of non-English language instruction and honestly just feeling racially uncomfortable in most of Europe. I have some family in Germany (who like it there) so it's obviously not impossible, but European ethnostate thinking is just unattractive to a lot of non-Caucasian talent. Canada, UK, and Australia are not like this and have potentially a lot to gain if the US kneecaps its research bureaucracy.
I will say that for myself, money is a means to an end for living a “good” life. I am starting to wonder personally where the line is for the trade off between salary and its ability to translate into a good life here in the US
That's a kind of lottery-mentality that Europe doesn't want to attract anyway.
And this is irrelevant to (very conservatively) 99% of scientists in the NSF and NIH.
"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires" - John Steinbeck
A lot of scientists (at least in my field, computational chemistry) have decent skills that are transferrable to other areas. So I expect quite a few to move on.
Most likely, people who leave academia will be leaving for industry instead.
I do feel for those in the hard sciences, they have become collateral damage in what is mostly a battle between politicians and humanities departments.
Now it's the EU's turn. Computer science is already becoming very, very French. See you guys in Grenoble.
I think that that’s probably the best route for anybody who is currently in America and doesn’t want to deal with the next 20 to 50 years of total deprivation.
Unfortunately some of us can’t leave so the best most people can do is find some place safe to land.
In all honesty, it's hard to see China wanting many of the PhD's that would be available from the US in a worst case scenario NSF/NIH funding collapse. There may be a place for the top 0.1%? But for 99.9% of PhD's, there are Chinese replacements that are, frankly, better and cheaper.
Hate to bring it back to money like that, but there it is.
With that, as things start to get real bad it seems leaving is something of a moral duty for anyone who cares, has skills that hold real weight, and can still afford to do so.
Obviously where this "real bad" point is is hard to say, and there's important tradeoffs to consider. I also could be talked out of this position but from what I see it seems about accurate.
Also, some top scientists who previously would have come to the US, will decide not to.
That's not going to be negative feedback that registers for the decision-makers in the US. But it's good news for competing countries and their institutions. And it's possibly better quality of life, overall, for the scientists who decide to go work somewhere currently more sensible.
First off, there is no evidence the US will never fund science again.
Second, top scientific positions in the US are at academic labs, not at NIH (bare a few top people spending some time there). The top academic labs in the US get some funding from NIH, but the top ones get it from a ton of sources with NIH not being the bulk of it.
This is wildly field specific.
So I think you're right. This could be a big opportunity for countries to poach some of these scientists or to repatriate those scientists who have left their home countries.
if you're going to boil down our "success", if you must call it that, to a root cause, it has a lot more to do with our insatiable greed and lack of respect for, well, anything. The talent is just a small detail in the narrative of America and that narrative is driven far more by capital than it is by interesting people.
The talent narrative makes for excellent propaganda, though, neatly whitewashing a violent and hateful culture.
would be if any other country actually put money in research... Well there is China, but in Europe we already have more PhD than research position.
https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/online/5299/The-scientific...
The smart thing is to outsource pure science research where it's the cheapest, but commercialize it where it's most profitable - that's what China is doing and doing it very well too.
There are literally millions of people around the world who earn significantly more than US$100K and don’t work in the US.
e.g. in Australia, many medical specialists earn more than US$200k - it is common for experienced oncologists, cardiologists, paediatricians, gastroenterologists, etc, to earn more than US$200k.
Did you accidentally a word? Because if you cross any border literally the first people you meet are border control officers, who work a job outside the USA, most of whom with no interest in living or working in the US.
Incidentally if you travel abroad you will also meet heterosexual women and homosexual men, who don't generally have a wife at all.
> 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 details).
> And to put those into perspective, the largest single oulay for the Federal government is Social Security benefits ($1.4 trillion by themselves), with interest on the national debt coming in second at $949 billion, Medicare comes in third at $870 billion, and the Department of Defense fourth at $826 billion and Medicaid next at $618 billion.
Injecting dumb politics and refusing grants just because people put the words "biases" in their application is a great way to appeal to Republicans's undereducated voters (see https://www.commerce.senate.gov/services/files/4BD2D522-2092... for an example of their idiotic rhetoric) but also a crazy gamble on the US's ability to be a superpower in two decades.
Just look at what happened in France when right-wing governments started defunding research: a slow but massive brain drain of the best minds. What does the current administration think will happen to our economy when they start burning future brains when they're at the seed stage?
Also, I'm wondering if multiple universities could band together to file a TRO and/or a class-action lawsuit against the government for something like estoppel.
Places with solid research institutions and less-dysfunctional governments.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42910829
the problems that led to these frauds are structural--no amount of patching the system will fix this.
maybe we should consider the possibility that we are due for a refactor, which is often painful, but especially painful for people (or code) with an entrenched incentive to continue existing.
i dont mean to defend what the administration is doing but I'm warning that everyone crying doom and gloom and threatening to move abroad, etc. might be eating crow. ironically, the very people most likely to move abroad (in it for the career, not for the principle) are biased to be the types bringing down our system of science. bad science is the science equivalent of a zirp.
This is taxpayers money and these agencies report to the President under the executive power. A shocker that government agencies might need account for spending.
And I’m sorry “its not a lot of money” doesn’t fly when all the “its not a lot of money” is $8 trillion dollars. The federal deficit will never get smaller if nobody looks at the “its not a lot of money” line items.
An outcome could be a greater diversity of voices influencing research, rather than the NSF and NIH continuing to serve as monoliths.
The NIH is the dominant force in medical research. Remember how theories for Alzheimer’s having an infectious etiology were sidelined for decades? And, to this day, for autoimmune conditions?
And that the ranks of researchers, which are often stagnant due to a shortage of jobs for PhD holders, would experience turnover in the interim, creating openings for fresh voices when the funding resumes.
Ideally, imo, the grant process could be distributed across more organizations rather than being as centralized as it has been. The next administration might be free to do so if the existing orgs are no longer thriving at that time.
Obvious, probably for Hacker News crowd:
• Bell Labs • Xerox PARC • IBM Watson, Almaden Research • Dow Chemical
I'm missing the big ones from petroleum and agricultural businesses. Aerospace.
I'm willing to believe that a political retreat from 21st century choices looks towards legendary captains of industry, rather than sprawling government bureaucracy, as a source of American greatness.
My attempt to frame this week's gleeful destruction of government institutions as a revitalization of the fountainhead.
But I don't know. It's easier to just call it the same old spiteful hatred of science that is as American as apple pie.
Meanwhile MAGA are patting themselves in the back because they are "tired of winning".
What do you honestly think China thinks of our DEI initiatives?
They're laughing at us in Chinese.
Meanwhile, TikTok (et al) tells us to talk about ourselves ... the current focus of attention of the Fifth most popular social network of the citizens of the United States. [1] [2]
Q: how could we have avoided this pathetic crawl into encouraging stupidity?
(Feeling sad, thinking, 'Look at our Works, and cry.')
[1] https://later.com/blog/tiktok-trends/
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...
Back to their home countries. I can think of about a half dozen world leading scientists I work with every day who would pack up their labs if funding dried up. They already did it once to move to the US because that is where the most funding was for these diseases. If you make the US inhospitable to these talented people, they will not think twice about finding a country that doesn't consider them "bottom feeders".
Also. Believe it or not, there are other fields than DEI/Climate/Gender studies, and when you remove the incentive to work in the US, the leaders in these other fields will leave.
Because you're not akin to those apathetic passive supporters of their criminals-in-power like Russians and Israelis, are you?
It’s more like this: Imagine a china shop where you don’t like some of the items or how they’re priced. So, you send an elephant into the shop. The result? The elephant doesn’t just break the pieces you dislike—it smashes everything.
Hence one needs the free market. The govt. typically lack the checks and balance that the free market automatically provides hence it _always_ results in bloat.
Having said that, I got stung by 49c in the doller on my British USS Pension transfer in (I'm 63) for the lump sum. Sometimes, you just can't win.
And I said the web as we know it, not the web period.
This is not an attempt to 'save money' at the NSF and NIH (and USAID). A serious, rational effort to reduce their costs / increase their efficiency does not start with grep-ing manuscripts for 'underrepresented'. Part Five of TFA is on the money. This is an ideological attack on acronyms, and what they symbolize to the attackers. The actual agencies, their relative importance to the budget, etc. do not matter. The iconoclasts are here to smash the icons.
It takes either an extreme amount of naïveté or motivated reasoning to maintain that perspective, IMO.
Of course not. The big gain is for Trump and Musk to say they did something. Regardless of how someone voted, I can’t believe they are still falling for this shtick.
We're being robbed by these people.
If you have talent, why deal with the (frequently) middling pay and the existential risk that could follow every election?
Who do you think benefits medium term from our best researchers getting less funding? The toll on our economy will only be visible in 15-20 years, and it will be massive.
== "not being allowed to include"
i.e. a restriction on free speech with more worrying implications than "injecting dumb politics"
And yeah, as a white male who sees few women, and even fewer people from minorities other than Chinese and Indian, in the hard sciences (especially computer related), I definitely support efforts to try to include them more. It results in more diverse views of a problem, which often leads to better science.
Of course, they forget what came after the gilded age. It's raining stockbrokers - err, oligarchs!
No "DEI" boogeymen in there.
> The institutions, already, were self sabotaging, doling out tons of taxpayer money, not to the best ideas, but to labs that had a few women of various colors other than white working in them.
I'm calling this complete BS.
Quit the BS.
Musk is neither competent nor efficient. He looks at line items and makes stuff up. He destroys a hundred useful things to destroy a bad one. Details don't matter to him. Its the same con man mentality that feeds off the works of his workforce. People who think he is a genius are gullible.
There is no accountability or efficiency in unelected technocrats blowing up what was working without a plan or subject matter expertise.
- Audit spending (at USAID or wherever else)
- Come up with details of where there is waste, being transparent about it for the public to see and review
- Use that to recommend change to congress / the president, again in full public view
Then I'd have no issues. The problem is, what's actually happening is:
- Musk and team are in there with no accountability and no transparency. We don't know what he has access to, what was done
- Unilaterally making changes without public review or oversight. It's a "trust me bro" stance.
- From the few things that has been published, many seem to be outright lies (50m on condoms) or extremely biased conclusions (IRS direct filing)
Where do you see that? What accountability is present?
I never thought about it like this and it makes so much sense. I have financial (and maybe social) power therefore I should have intellectual power and if you show to people that you have more than I do, then I feel embarrassed and will use my financial (and social) power to make you feel embarrassed.
> maybe we should consider the possibility that we are due for a refactor
People in tech need to stop with those analogies. A government is not a codebase. You can not apply the principles of "refactoring" and "patching" in the same way. It just doesn't work like that. But the problem is we have a bunch of people (some malicious, some clueless) trying to do exactly that.
You can try it, but the consequences of a poor refactoring? Look to the planned economies and five year plans.
The government is not a codebase; that mistakes its artifacts for its process. And the importance of process - in politics, in government - cannot be overstated.
not only does it NEED to be done, people VOTED for it :)
You say government is not like code, then what exactly is it? Can you describe it in an effective way? Or are you just going to raise your hand up and say there's nothing we can do about it, nothing we can do about the $2 trillion/year titanic deficit?
Historical governments often needed little beyond an army and a tax collection system. And tax collection system was primarily data gathering and analysis, since if you knew how much property someone owned, you can easily tax them for an appropiate amount.
The tech way of thinking has proven extremely successful in many industries already. That's why tech companies (and tech adjacent ones, like say quant trading, or even index fund trading) have been so economically dominant, and utterly kicked out the traditional MBAs from their pedestals.
Stop being a self hating programmer who despises the mentality of tech.
I think it's the second-order stuff here. Even assuming Musk were to do a fantastic job at just clearing out inefficiency in a smart way (which seems unlikely given the actions he's taken/leaks around cutting funding based on key-word matching etc.), the higher-order point that someone can just buy their way into the President's inner-circle and have complete free-reign to seize government operations and make changes with 0 transparency/accountability seems like it does just stupid amounts of harm to the integrity of the system
pray tell who was accountable for the grant issuance in the first place? was congress approving every disbursal? could the citizenry vote up/down on every RO1 or SBIR that went past the NIH desk?
What the hell are you talking about? I chose to get into science for the benefit of the masses, rather than, for instance, helping some corporation abuse human psychology to sell more ads. If there is no money to do the science, I have no choice but to emigrate.
edit: And to give you an example of the science being targeted by these early moves: pulse oximeters have a racial bias leading them to overestimate the oxygen saturation of minorities, which led to deaths during the pandemic. All the work toward addressing that issue at the FDA has now been terminated, because it's related to DEI.
why do you suppose most science benefits the masses?
a stunning amount of science is negative. homme hellinga cheating and claiming a triosephosphate isomerase, for example. stripey nanoparticles, as another. Thousands of western blots that were cleverly edited by unscrupulous postdocs. everything by diderik stapel. anil potti.
those are the ones that got caught. so many more got away with it.
and yes, if you can't tell, i know what the fuck I'm talking about.
> And to give you an example
why dont i give you an example. NIH is responsible for 80% of the budget of an NGO that collaborated with WIV and advocated for GOF research. on the grounds of likely being responsible in part for the deaths of millions worldwide maybe we should suspend funding to the NIH until all of its policies can be reviewed
Yes there is structural issue.
When researchers see that appealing to DEI and inclusion make is easy to gain finding for, allegedly, research that is wasteful and not meritorious, everyone will attempt to do it.
Conversely, when appealing to "equality of white people" becomes more likely to get you funded, everyone will also attempt that. Which is going to be the case going forward. If you do not believe me, DJT has appointed someone at the helm of EEO commission who explicitly does this in their LinkedIn bio.
So the issue is structural, it is not dei or white power.
but what the admin is trying to do has nothing to do with "making science right". it has a very clearly stated goal of 1) rooting out anything remotely related to DEI; 2) rooting out anything related to previous investigations into Trump and the Jan6 attempted coup (see purges at FBI, DOJ); 3) cutting government spending (so there's money to pass a promised tax cut); 4) whatever Elon decides he wants to gut
None of these have anything to do with making science more honest and accurate. If that were the goal, you'd probably need to _increase_ funding because you'd need more reproducibility studies.
Not a single personal alive thinks these institutions are perfect. But only morons think haphazardly defunding shit without understanding what you're breaking or what the real-world ramifications might be is a way to fix problems.
The past couple of weeks have historically stupid.
the sooner we cut this shit out, realize consequences, and start over, the better.
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 attacking science with the full intent of replacing it with a system where lies and fraud reign supreme. In the world of RFK and Donald Trump, lies are just what people do every day for breakfast.
RFK Jr. gets a dozen things wrong on science and tells a dozen lies and funds and pals around with major fraudsters and charlatans every week.
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 consistency if it resolves a hundred years from now, which would obviously be too little too late. how many people were hurt, how much research dollars were wasted in the meantime. "well, Eventually" is not good enough, and the self correcting slogan is just running cover for entreched interests in the face of their misdeeds.
This article notes that some federally-funded nonprofits "couldn’t access funds to make payroll": https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5115026-white-house-fund...
People rely on their paycheck to pay bills! If anyone stops getting their paycheck, that's not "keeping the lights on". Do you agree that any "review" mustn't prevent anyone from receiving their paycheck?
> Ok, so all payments are paused while funding is reviewed? ... This is taxpayers money ... A shocker that government agencies might need account for spending.
Reviewed for what?
Reviewed for whether the spending was authorized by Congress? If Musk finds that money is being spent in ways that are not authorized by Congress, and cuts that spending, great.
Reviewed for whether the money is being used efficiently to accomplish the goals set by Congress? Again, if Musk finds ways to stretch the same amount of money to accomplish more, that's great. For example, if Musk makes USAID more efficient so it delivers more aid for the same amount of money, that would be wonderful.
Or "reviewed" for whether Trump/Musk agree with them? It's illegal for the President to unilaterally cut programs just because he doesn't like them.
By that logic and taken to an extreme, Congress could pass a budget law (overriding the executive’s veto) to set executive spending for specific agencies to only be spent on computers, say the FBI, and the executive is powerless to Congresses control over the executive function to carry out the laws that the Congress has passed?
So clearly the intention is one of checks and balances, for example the President can’t spend money Congress does appropriate but also has some power over how that money is spent as such to exercise the power of the Executive.
So let’s see what the Constituion says as per Congress.gov!
“The constitutional dimensions of impoundment disputes have been confined to the political branches. The Supreme Court has not directly considered the extent of the President’s constitutional authority, if any, to impound funds.16 However, a case decided in 1838, United States v. Kendall,17 has been cited as standing for the proposition that the President may not direct the withholding of certain appropriations that, by their terms, mandate spending.18”
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artII-S3-3-7/...
Very interesting! Sounds like something he may want the Supreme Court to rule on!
I for one look forward to getting some clarity on this issue.
Doesn’t make tossing $50B out the window “ok”.
It’s like the people making a $100k who don’t know where all the money goes. It’s all just a rounding error, but rounding errors add up fast.
How much do you think he will raise it by during this term?
It's simply a delusion that DEI is some unmeritocratic disaster. The reality is academia has its pick of top talent regardless of race or gender. I don't know any scientists who buy into this delusion irl. Diversity is a small factor in hiring because the field is already predominantly white men and it's no harder to pick top star talent when you diversify.
Simply insane that you are promoting the destruction of US science, US foreign aid, and so much of the good stuff the US government does, all in the name of a deeply delusional witch hunt.
>Just let us vote and ask if we feel discriminated against or oppressed because of DEI.
A majority of the electorate did vote for ending this.
Even now that it's "better" I would only write something like this anonymously in fear of a future person seeing and judging my beliefs. I have personally watched in corporate and academia the effects. I am small fish but have personally wanted to hire someone who I thought was the most qualified for the position and was rather non obviously told to not because the team already had to many white men. We instead had to go with my 3rd choice a female who while great did not have the technical skills I valued in the first.
The main problem is people who say things like you do is that you don't realize you have a very incomplete picture. Those who disagree with the ideas will literally never say them. In many career paths saying your beliefs that don't align is basically career suicide.
This is demonstrably false. Harvard and many other universities recently lost a Supreme Court case due to persistent racial discrimination over decades (https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/jun/29/us-supreme-court...). Whites and especially Asians were methodically discriminated against on the basis of their race. Just because you don't personally see the racism doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
I'm not advocating for shutting down these departments at all, or slashing and burning research.
I'm hoping that we can help people realize that people love them and care about them and support them more than they could ever imagine, even if they're a white man.
I say this as a white man who has dated black women and had them say some really harsh things about me as a white man, only to realize that often it was an internal conflict that they had about being black but also liking some things from white culture. Some of them had been called white by their own black communities, and so feeling stuck between those worlds.
I think the vast majority of us just need to learn how to deal with emotional attacks, to realize life is combat and everyone is trying to deal with innumerable conflicts at the same time, all the time.
How long ago was that? In Canada 60% of college grads are women[1]. In the US the story is similar and the gap is widening[2]. Part of the reason that some left wing ideas seem so out of touch is because they are. People are still parroting social problems from the 1960s as justification for policy in 2024.
[1] https://heqco.ca/pub/understanding-the-gender-gap-in-postsec...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2024/08/07/wome...
I understand that that is the stated intention. I also believe they are racist and discriminatory.
> Not sure you’re aware of this, but academia used to be basically off-limits to anyone not white and male.
I also understand this. And now it is not. What is the point here?
Do you know what is the original and ultimate identity politics? Enslaving people because you deem them inferior to your own race. The civil war, the civil rights movement, and modern social justice movements are a response to this, not the root of the conflict.
I'm a white guy in academia - not tenured yet - and I cannot fathom the ignorance necessary to believe that white males are at an disadvantage because of university administrators being "woke". Give me a break!
This is irrelevant to the discussion of hiring in 2025, unless you believe your fellow “white” population harbors literal beliefs of a.) racial identity and b.) racial superiority, that c.) the “white” people making hiring decisions are actively excluding candidates based on these beliefs, and that d.) application of a nonwhite bias is just and measured in the face of a-c. I think all are incredible claims, and they’ve only lasted a decade because they have become rabidly-defended shibboleths for people who want to fix racism (and sexism and…).
> I cannot fathom the ignorance necessary to believe that white males are at an disadvantage because of university administrators being "woke"
If 1000 group A individuals and 10 group B individuals apply for a team, and both groups are accepted at ~50% due to a group B preference, then group B is ~100x as likely to be selected for the role due to that preference. Such observations are where my own perception of “disadvantage” comes from. Unless you’re claiming that no such preference exists, or that some prejudice you might have about group A justifies its individual members’ relatively unlikely chances of being selected, I can’t see how this preference doesn’t qualify as a disadvantage for such individuals.
You mention in another comment diversity in admissions but that is not hiring or grants. Do you have any examples of hiring people based on race in academia?
From the journalism department at CU [1]:
> Our commitment, should we be successful with this application, is to hire someone from the BIPOC community
From the geography department at CU [1]:
> Our aim is specifically to hire a Black, Indigenous, or Latinx faculty member
From ethnic studies at UC [1]:
> We have an urgent and qualified need for BIPOC femme/women of color faculty in an Africana Studies focus who will contribute to the social science division thematic cluster hire in racism and racial inequality.
From psychology dept. at U Washington [2]:
> I advise deleting the statement below as it shows that URM [underrepresented minority] applications were singled out and evaluated differently than non-URM applications (which is not allowed as [redacted] noted)
> At a faculty meeting, someone whose name is redacted “informed faculty that the Hiring Committee had three outstanding candidates and so they used DEI to distinguish and select a first offer"
[1] https://www.wsj.com/opinion/how-dei-conquered-the-university...
[2] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/diversity...
I have friends in faculty positions at well-known universities who were very unhappy about these practices, but could not publicly discuss it fearing repercussion, prior to these events.
TBC, I am not supporting any of the things happening. I do think the DEI thing went too far, but what the new admin. is doing can be much worse.
https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/fire-statement-use-di...
"Speech First, a group advocating for First Amendment rights on US campuses, released an investigation on Thursday that found 165 of 248 selected institutions — from American University to Williams College — mandate DEI-related classes to meet general education requirements."
https://nypost.com/2024/04/11/us-news/two-thirds-of-us-colle...
[1] https://www.wsj.com/opinion/how-dei-conquered-the-university...
This simply is not the case, I know it is something that you and many others believe is that case but you are being lied to by actual racists. I say that as a white man working in STEM academia. Academia had a long history and tradition of NOT doing meritocracy, but of claiming meritocracy and using bad markers of meritocracy to prove it. The 'DEI work' that people are so concerned about is about trying to make merit based decision making actually merit based. You think that is based on giving some preference, but it isn't - its based on acknowledging and working to eliminate actual prejudice. Its about hiring the best people instead of the person who's advisor is friends with our search chair.
I'll give a concrete example: I ran a hiring search for three faculty members. We did a blind search. The hiring committee did not know the gender, race, ethnicity, or even institutional affiliation of any candidate. The candidates were ranked, the top invited for phone interviews, and then ranked again during the interviews with everyone blind to the first set of rankings. We repeated this for a smalled group of in person interviews The order of the rankings at all three phases matched. More relevant, we interviewed and hired the most diverse crop of faculty we have ever hired. Simply because of the appearance who we hired, two different candidates who were did not received interviews emailed me and my department chair to decry that we had used 'DEI' in our BLIND hiring process. One threatened a lawsuit. We blinded it to race, to gender, to all markers of 'diversity', but the gender and race of who we hired was all the proof that person needed they were less qualified than him.
In other cases, this 'stuff' protects against asshole colleagues and bad science. (1) Diversity statements help us avoid getting sued by students and employees. The statements that wax philosophic about inclusion, that quote MLK, the ones people use to label this as some ideological test, SUCK to read and get applications ignored because they lack serious thought about being a colleague. The good ones, which get noticed, are about how people work effectively with other people, and how they make an effort to understand people as part of working with them. The context, whether its about being Green, Left-handed, or Neurodivergent tell us whether this person has thought about being a mentor to people unlike them, has a capacity to empathize with a student, or is going to be a self-righteous asshole that is going to make us hate faculty meetings even more. They help us know if their grad students are going to be in tears in the chairs office or the parents of an undergrad are calling the dean. (2) They actually tell us a lot about doing good science and getting grants. Theres a long history in medicine of fucking up because of who is in our participant pool. NIH now makes you articulate about how you will not do bad science through lazy recruitment[2]. We've asked questions about this requirement of candidates during interviews. The answers are fun and telling - using coded language to say you won't recruit Black people because they are 'less reliable' is just evidence you don't get it, not that you are some purist doing important work.
That is the DEI you are being propagandized to be against - what it actually is not what you are told it is. It is not hyperbole and you are tired by design - because you are a victim of propaganda. The nonsense narrative that is being pushed is, without concern for the truth, entirely grounded in the assertion that certain groups are unqualified to do intellectual work (c.f.[3]). It is (by design) meant to establish that the mere appearance of a Black Women or a gay person on a faculty is only because they are unqualified. It is meant to exclude people who have always been excluded. It is not about pushing back on (nonexistant) out of control efforts to include them. What is changing is efforts to counteract the actual, long established, clearly evidenced, bias in favor of certain groups of candidates. That is not some ideological project to eliminate people like me because I'm not a minority, that is the thing you want.
[1] https://mbb.yale.edu/news/mbb-radically-changing-how-we-sear... [2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6053906/ [3] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/darren-b...
When I talk to people outside academia about “DEI”, it’s clear to me that whatever they think that term means, it has no relationship to anything I’ve ever seen in my career (involving faculty searches, recruitment of students and staff, education, involvement in clinical trial design and recruitment, etc.).
Why does anyone need to write a diversity statement ? This is bonkers. When I applied for grad school many years ago as an international student, many applications asked for a diversity statement. My stupid ass didn't even know what that meant at the time. I forced myself to write some crock about how I studied Physics and Computer Science, and how I had some ideas about interdisciplinary work. I thought they meant diversity in technical backgrounds. Not only was what I wrote a load of crap, the stuff that these people expect is an even bigger pile of crap. Can we do away with this ?
I would like to understand your point here. I agree with you that the stated justification for DEI policies is based on "acknowledging and working to eliminate actual prejudice". I also believe that they explicitly give preference to certain groups of people over others. So what is the point here? Because they are based on a noble goal, we should accept them? And if, instead, they were based on another nefarious purpose, they would not be acceptable?
A policy may arise from various motivations, but eventually it must be evaluated on its own merits. Of course, the same policy may be implemented in various ways, toward a nefarious purpose or to a noble purpose. You sound like you genuinely care about this issue and I appreciate that when you hire people you consider they may contribute to the community in your department, how well they will mentor students, and so on. Those are all important things and I am happy you interpret DEI that way, but unfortunately that is not how they are often interpreted.
From the journalism department at UC [1]:
> Our commitment, should we be successful with this application, is to hire someone from the BIPOC community
From the geography department at UC [1]:
> Our aim is specifically to hire a Black, Indigenous, or Latinx faculty member
From ethnic studies at UC [1]:
> We have an urgent and qualified need for BIPOC femme/women of color faculty in an Africana Studies focus who will contribute to the social science division thematic cluster hire in racism and racial inequality.
From psychology dept. at U Washington [2]:
> I advise deleting the statement below as it shows that URM [underrepresented minority] applications were singled out and evaluated differently than non-URM applications (which is not allowed as [redacted] noted)
> At a faculty meeting, someone whose name is redacted “informed faculty that the Hiring Committee had three outstanding candidates and so they used DEI to distinguish and select a first offer"
> Before finalists were narrowed to three, five finalists were invited to virtual visits, with the schedules including meetings with the Women Faculty and Faculty of Color groups. But a member of the latter group expressed opposition to meeting the white candidates. “As a person who has been on both sides of the table for these meetings, I have really appreciated them,” the unnamed person wrote in an email. “Buuut, when the candidate is White, it is just awkward. The last meeting was uncomfortable, and I would go as far as burdensome for me. Can we change the policy to not do these going forward with White faculty?”
If you believe that the sentiments expressed above are acceptable in a professional, academic setting, then we have totally different ethical values.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/opinion/how-dei-conquered-the-university...
[2] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/diversity...
Also, I would like to say, I agree with you! Such a sentiment is deplorable and must be condemned. However, it does not follow that academic departments should use race or sexuality or gender as a factor when hiring professors.
In fact, when you are hiring professors on the tenure track, I am sure the first ten or even twenty professors (at least!) are all eminently qualified. Of course, there is a degree of randomness in any selection process. But as the sources in my sibling comment suggest, DEI factors are being used explicitly to distinguish and rank people. That I believe is unacceptable.
You're welcome, of course, to make your substantive points thoughtfully.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
They don’t have an entitlement to other people’s money, and if they are perceived as wasting it or spending in discriminatorily then you should expect the public to become less willing to give it to you.
Whats probably most egregious is the idea that its good because its racist against the right people.
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 more than Boeing--but my point is that it's a huge conflict of interest.
A person receiving very large amounts of money from the government is now deciding which parts of the government should be cut in order to "save taxpayers money".
If this sounds like something that would only happen in a place like Russia, or the DRC, it's because it's something that would only happen in those places.
In other democratic countries you go to jail for this sort of thing (i.e., Nicholas Sarkozy in France--not saying the situation is exactly the same, but there's an actual judicial system in place that doesn't exonerate someone just because they're president, like our SCOTUS did).
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.
WSJ also reported in October about how Musk has been in regular contact with Putin.
Luckily, that is unlikely to happen again. Now, the broligarchs are in power and the LA times has been captured and turned into a propaganda tool.
What are some practical actions that we can take to resist these sweeping changes?
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 purpose, which is to enable the search for truth. Free speech is the goal of exchanging ideas between peoples, to foster competition in thought so that collectively we can understand our shared reality.
If such a market place were to become inefficient, or if such a market place were to resolve itself to serve the most attention grabbing takes, we would see much of what the media carries.
THIS ISNT the problem you face! This is the problem we discuss!
The problem is when someone combines the media with a political party. The media itself has no recourse but to play the game of advertizing to survive.
But once it is in service of an entity, then you can create your own justifications for war, and then declare victory yourselves.
This makes the most mercenary of politics the most succesful. It is the natural recourse of people who want to win at all costs. It is far more efficient than doing economic research to understand the pros and cons of a decision.
We can solve the problems we all mutuall face. There is more to life than our polarization.
However, if we are pulled between two magnets, and our goal is to not be pulled apart - then the magnets need to be addresed.
Honestly though, I'm in the same situation and I don't know.
I did just start paid subscriptions to several media outlets that have been doing good reporting on the situation (Guardian, Verge). I unsubscribed to the Washington Post after they pulled their Harris endorsement (which was appalling), but their coverage since feels relatively thorough and they are well placed to report on all this so far, so I resubscribed. I already support PBS. I'll probably donate to Pro Publica next.
I expect media outlets will be under rapidly increasing pressure, so supporting them financially feels important and positive.
I've also have a standing donation to the NAACP legal defense fund from his first administration that I've just kept running.
So... money I guess?
The best thing I can think of is to make the EU a strong, powerful, wealthy democracy that can defend itself from invasion and try to encourage other democracies around the world.
Which means we have a lot of work ahead, to put it mildly.
This is a global phenomenon. It’s part grassroots, driven by discontent with sclerotic establishment parties that are not solving problems, but also being driven by propaganda from authoritarian countries like Russia and China. The latter is opportunistic.
Personally, I am working on replacing any American made products or services I use myself or through my job. Both as an act of protest and in preparation for the upcoming economic war they plan to wage.
There's a reason that Germany's current main center-right parties were both born after the war.
The “coup” happened a long time ago. The US has demonstrated that there’s no rule of law at the federal level for some time now. Once the Chief Justice leaned back and tolerated the open sale of the court, that was basically it.
We don’t have the same system of governance anymore… we’re like Italy 1936 or Argentina in 1948 now. We’ll invade Greenland instead of Ethiopia, and skip the funny hats.
The question is do we continue on this trajectory or is there a real coup with tanks on DC streets at some point.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/05/opinion/trump-musk-federa...
The world as we knew it is gone and we're not going back.
I don't know about that part... those red ball caps are pretty goofy looking.
My understanding is the USA executive is an obscenely powerful position by the standard of the rest of the Western world and they can also delegate that power to accomplish specific objectives.
Is this a coup of Musk against Trump or the executive doing things its not allowed to do or a coup of the executive against the legislature?
(Maybe tabooing (in the rationalist sense) the word "coup" might help...)
Aside: the article paints a very concerning picture about the consequences of contemptuous ignorant imposition of abrupt blanket rules on valuable complex systems. I thank the OP for posting it.
The reason it’s being used is a combination of the US having never experienced a real coup, and thus it’s citizens not really knowing what the word means, plus one side of politics being sore losers after having lost an election and using whatever insult they can think of in order to deflect rather than self reflect on why they lost.
> Most of us will change the channel or scroll to the next social media clip. Most in the media will “both sides” the end of our democracy into a melisma of euphemisms and equivocations. Most of our political leaders will focus on the pitch for their next fund-raiser email. And if this oblivious, indolent cowardice continues as I fear it will, we will look back on these days of chaos, destruction, hatred and lunacy as only prelude. Unchecked, we are on the path not just to autocracy, but to the worst form of malevolent dictatorship.
> My reaction is not hysteria. It’s not exaggeration. It’s not premature. Where we are is a place we have never been in this country and the threat we face is by no means one that we can survive—because something precious and fragile is at dire risk of being lost.
They need periodic retrenchment -in the private sector there are economic pressures to re-organize; in the government the tendency is for greater taxation.
Throwing out the baby along with the bath water is not the answer but neither is the status quo.
Government is not a monolith, this isn’t the action of one single person, but the result of tens of millions people voting for change (that you disagree with).
So whether tens of millions of people voted for Trump doesn't mean Trump can just disregard law because people liked him and maybe even liked that he said he would disregard the law. As far as I know, that's not how the rule of law works in representative democracies.
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
Trump is passing as much stuff as quickly as he can to bypass the separation of powers while they catch up.
As much as you personally disagree with these decisions, they are in line with the broad policy positions Trump et al communicated prior to the election, and can be considered the will of the people.
Challenging the mandate the public gave them, by hyperventilating over minor procedural hiccups that will inevitably be resolved by congress in favour of Trump, comes across to voters as undemocratic.
Isn’t it what the head of executive branch supposed to mean?
Trump does exactly how he promised he would do if you elected him, and you guys elected him overwhelmingly to do exactly that.
In a nation governed by a constitution and laws, absofuckinglutely not. The chief executive is supposed to operate within the bounds of the constitution and the laws created under it.
And the head of the branch should still be subject to checks and balances.
Most certainly not overwhelmingly:
Trump: 49.80% Harris: 48.32%
This is one of the more frustrating aspects of the United States. Not even 1.5% more and the result is "near total evisceration of the federal government" compared to "largely the same".
The result is even worse with the Senate. 55.9m votes for Democratic Senators, 54.4m for Republican Senators, and yet Republicans ended up with 53 seats.
And this doesn't even get into gerrymandering for House seats, which is predominantly Republican-driven.
This is by a good margin not a representative government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_Senate_elec...
ALso a slim majority of the 60% who voted is not an overwhelming majority. Biden's win against Trump was bigger.
It is not a coup because he became president by force. It is a coup because he is consolidating power. (The president is not supposed to be all powerful.)
1) Remove all opposition for DOJ (already done)
2) Pass executive orders that should require congressional approval (doing)
3) Illegally seize control of the treasury (doing)
4) Broadly dismantle key government services (doing)
5) Watch politicians say, "you can't do that!" with no recourse (doing)
Continually take control more and more broadly until you have absolute power.
I wonder if Trump and Vance in 2029 can somehow pull the Putin/Medvedev switch, where the real leader takes a nominal secondary position until they can fix the constitutional issue.
The thing about democracy is, every person is going to sometimes wildly disagree with what the elected officials do. Declaring it a 'coup' is as silly as when Trump lost in 2020 and declared it a 'rigged election.'
Now, you can make limited inroads to block executive actions with the courts, but even when SCOTUS was friendly to the anti-Trump cause, when that's done to advance an unpopular (majority-disapproved-of) agenda, it is usually a hollow and temporary victory. To get the policies you want, you need to win over voters. That's the part the DNC seems to be completely unaware of. You don't win by insulting, by dunking on the other guys on ~Twitter~ bluesky, or by protesting. You win in a democracy only by convincing the very reasonable middle that you share their values. The DNC has taken a position of "Everyone not already in our tent is evil, fascist, dastardly white supremacists," but to their chagrin, their current tent is under 50% of the voting public and it isn't growing.
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.
- Imagine if the president allowed Jeff Bezos to reprogram the Treasury’s payment system as if it were an online shopping cart.
- Picture the president authorizing Sam Altman to treat the federal payment system maybe as a live AI experiment.
- Envision the president allowing Larry Page to run the Treasury system.
- Imagine Mark Zuckerberg not only with the power to update federal payment rules, with access to all U.S. taxpayer data. Incredible coincidence Musk runs, privately, a social networking site...
I dont include an example with Palantir...Because some of the 19 years old bros working with the Musk team, were interns at Palantir. So I am just going to assume Thiel has all the info on all US citizens now...
No concerns with conflicts of interest, no vetting, no official role because...People voted for the current president? When did voting become a blank check?
Call it whatever you want, the fact of the matter is that you have an unelected private person, who happens to be the richest person on earth, taking control of federal agencies. I don't think anyone should consider this silly, as nobody thought it was silly when MAGA tried to actually stage a literal coup by force 4 years ago.
> You don't win by insulting, by dunking on the other guys on ~Twitter~
The last years have made it very clear that's exactly how you win. You seem to be under the impression that the democrats, not MAGAs, are unhinged in their rhetoric.
Because if people in the middle can be so damn gullible to vote for a criminal who said:
"I don't care about you, I only want your votes",
like Trump because he promised good economy I don't know how anyone can conclude that the issue here is with democrats and not the people's lack of critical thinking.
It's a bit late to correctly point out that focusing on demographics as you voter base is stupid and that it's interest groups you should focus on (as this should've been done in 2008 after Obama's victory), because this isn't a race between two sane candidates.
The reason people are calling this a coup is not (only) because they disagree with what Trump/Musk are doing, but because their actions are illegal. A president is still expected to follow the rule of law and respect separation of powers. If there are no more checks and balances, then it's a coup. If Congress decided to allocate budget to something, the president should not ignore this. The legislature is losing its power.
At this point any discussion on HN about Trump delivering his campaign promises (which got him a resounding electoral victory) seems to be filled with elitist rage ("Every single IT board I'm on") and thus is just proving his point.
This is the blowback for the medical overreach of the covid years, for the 1984-esque re-labeling of open gender- and race-based discrimination as DEI, for basically shaming every opposing view as
> evil, fascist, dastardly white supremacists
and many more transgressions.
I'm saying this as a non us citizen working in a sector in Europe that is very likely to get absolutely clobbered by Trump. The blame is simply to put at the losing side.
Them denying the merit of their loss, the lack of any introspection and instead just one-upping their everybody-i-disagree-with-is-hitler mantra is at least comforting in the sense that I know they shouldn't be in charge.
Then he certainly didn't say that he was going to dismantle the US government with Elon Musk outside of any legal framework (or I missed that). And even if he did, that wouldn't make it okay either.
> You win in a democracy only by convincing the very reasonable middle that you share their values
I feel like you haven't paid enough attention, this isn't a democracy anymore but a mixed regime, convincing opponents is still necessary but isn't enough to influence power anymore.
Look at Hungary if you want some indication of how it's going.
> You don't win by insulting, by dunking on the other guys on ~Twitter~ bluesky
The guy who won did exactly all that
And what on earth did Trump do to convince the “reasonable middle” that he shares their values?
Who are these reasonable people who decide that Kamala spends too much time insulting people, so they’re better off voting for Donald Trump?
Sources requested for this statement, made unilateral with no evidence.
> Declaring it a 'coup' is as silly as when Trump lost in 2020 and declared it a 'rigged election.
A single person, who somehow owns multiple major companies with, clear conflict of interest, is not a coup? What? He & his "engineers" reportedly have access to American citizen information. Where's the required oversight by Congress? I get trimming the government, but let's talk about it in the open rather than relying on his word and his word alone.
> You don't win by insulting, by dunking on the other guys on ~Twitter~ bluesky, or by protesting.
Would you say that to Tea Party folks who widely protested Obama? What? This makes no sense. Didn't they also insult Obama and his birth? Or anyone who voted for Obama? Whataboutism.
Frankly, I feel you are delusional and have bought into the ruse of the current news cycle.
> "Everyone not already in our tent is evil, fascist, dastardly white supremacists," but to their chagrin, their current tent is under 50% of the voting public and it isn't growing.
Trumps share of the vote was <50% via https://www.fec.gov/resources/cms-content/documents/2024pres...
These money shark guys that have got a hold of our government and economy since 2007 seem to have a long term plan that is specifically designed to destroy the US economy. Its counter intuitive, since their wealth is directly linked, but they have some kind of plan.
> I'm generally sympathetic to what you're doing. But I hope you will take your time and do it carefully. This isn't just a company. Companies are born and die within the system, and it's ok. But this is the system itself we're talking about here.
PG sounds nervous. I have to imagine there are a lot of nervous conservatives who didn't think it would go this far and are now too scared to stand in the way.
As for PhD from developed countries, it’s gonna be hard as you said.
I don’t think it tarnished his scientific legacy, but it definitely created some friction in the post-war years.
Along with the flight/expulsion/imprisonment/murder of top scientists who weren't ideologically or racially "pure", it's no wonder their nuclear program was such a failure.
> On Sunday, CNN reported that DOGE personnel attempted to improperly access classified information and security systems at the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and that top USAID security officials who thwarted the attempt were subsequently put on leave.
Retaliation is very bad, especially when it comes to trying to protect national security information. As a semi-technical person running several large technical companies, even if he had zero experience with the DoD before, Musk should at the very least understand how important it is to guard your "IP".
Bullying, intimidation, arrogance. Traits that I would’ve hoped most would be against.
I dont need a line item list to know that USAID DEI Scholarships in Burma $45.00M is wasteful spending.
>Come up with details of where there is waste, being transparent about it for the public to see and review
The waste is right there in the name. Funding DEI Scholarships in Burma is not how the American people want their taxes spent.
>- Unilaterally making changes without public review or oversight. It's a "trust me bro" stance.
The public review was the presidential election. Making changes without oversight is what an executive order is.
I thought they'd care because if they are working so hard to sieze control, you'd think they'd want to hold on to it.
There is conservative... then there is Trump.
Here's his original reporting where he describes this: https://www.editorandpublisher.com/stories/5-tips-for-using-...
Kudos to the kid for breaking the story before other media sources, but the actual scientific investigative work here was done by people with scientific training
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").
It's also interesting to see statistics brought up about women and not races, since the percentage that identifies as "Black or African American" is still underrepresented: https://pnpi.org/factsheets/black-students/
> 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?
Meanwhile, increasing my focus on my immediate community and sharing my creativity are fulfilling activities within my power.
This is 14 DAYS since election. March isnt even here yet. There are 4 tax filings before the next election.
Please take a look at things like demonitization, or many "harsh" medicine programs in other countries.
The fallout is going to be decades. The government is going to pivot to bread and circuses. The sides are going to get more entrenched, and then theres going to be riots and violence.
This will pass, and new crap will come in. This is banana republic territory, not America territory.
When I have the privilege of working with new college graduates, they get me out of my old modes of thinking. And they are quite talented. We will still have college graduates in four years.
Granted, if you believe there is a significant risk that the United States falls into irreversible autocracy within the next four years, the analysis does change. However, I just don’t buy it. There are two branches of government that check the executive branch. Trump has been elected as a lame duck with no possibility for a second term.
People who have lived in first world countries are prone to miss many crucial signs of banana republics.
And why not - it looks hysterical from the surface.
The crux of the matter is institutions. And your institutions have been under attack since watergate.
In addition, our society is unprepared for a media industry that must be profitable and fast paced.
I would think about what red lines y9u would have had in the 90s. And where your red lines are. Call it being the 90s back again.
Then decide what you think the outcomes are likely to be.
In the US the gov has become too big so that it cannot support a free market. ( there are some estimates that say 60% of our income goes into taxes of various forms). More over govt are the reason for a no freemarket. For me Govt is synonymous with the mafia, a more polished, legalized version ( yes, we differ here, so we can leave it at that)
>so any tinkering with it ought to be done carefully.
Most of the govt can be removed and no one will notice except govt employees.
Not if the elected official pledged to break the law before being elected.
> People can't vote to break the law.
That's exactly what they did.
> As far as I know, that's not how the rule of law works in representative democracies.
I fear that's also not what the US has become now.
Valerie Jarret was UNELECTED. OMG OMG /s
See how dumb it sounds?
In our lab, at the time I was there, the majority of our publications were from 2 white and a chinese male. When writing grant proposals to continue this work (to be continued by the same 3 chemists) the gender/racial characteristics of other members of the lab who were female and of other racial backgrounds were described in great detail, even though they had not contributed to the prior work and were not going to continue the project in the future. Our backgrounds were left unmentioned. This was the way to secure funding was what the PI in our lab told me when I inquired about the glaring discrepancy.
It is my opinion that backgrounds should be irrelevant and funding should be granted on the strength of the proposal. That's not the case today.
EDIT: I left academia in 2013, maybe things have changed.
I'm not saying that what your PI told you was wrong, but I will say that it would've been useful to get some additional information about why your PI decided that was the right thing to do. It might have been useful at some particular time or in some particular situation.
> EDIT: I left academia in 2013, maybe things have changed.
That's an important piece of information, as when I read your original post, "even in 2013" made me think that you were still in academia.
Considering 90s norms for the present is interesting. I see social taboos that I’m grateful we’ve revised, though that social progress is not what you’re talking about, I understand. But I would still say that you can’t step in the same river twice, and that the red lines of yesterday might or might not be important today.
Right! but its a point that we can acknowledge. We've made progress on overcoming some taboos. Hmm, in a way, we've overcome taboos here as well, its ok to be an asshole politically.
So the question becomes one of utility and morals - some taboos were ok to remove, others were not.
You can use that to compare how certain red lines have moved more in accord with your values, and others are being breached.
Either way, this is a tool for you, and others who read this, to look to their own values and judgement, and decide objectively if they should reasses and start responding.
From my experience, the answer is heck yes. For people who are in a constant state of gradual escalation, their red lines get massaged fully out of shape, and you look to your peers to see if you are nuts.
Which is why the idea is for you to judge the red lines for yourself, against your own ideals.
At least thats what I am thinking by brining that comparison up. The 90s werent so far away that they couldnt be used to compare agains today.
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.
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.
He's a conservative, and Project 2025 was from other conservatives.
You would expect there to be some overlap in policy perspectives because of the ideological overlap. It doesn't necessarily mean he's taking orders from the heritage foundation.
https://new.nsf.gov/funding/merit-review#our-merit-review-cr...
Even in day to day interaction, forcing someone to be silent, is far more of a gentler 'social action' than forcing someone to speak.
Americans' blind faith that their peculiar system of government makes tyranny impossible will only lead them to deny reality even when it hits them in the face with a truncheon.
Even those who crafted the American system knew that it was not perfect. Benjamin Franklin said:
"I confess that there are several parts of this Constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them. For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that, the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay more respect to the judgment of others."
"In these sentiments, Sir, I agree to this Constitution, with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a General Government necessary for us, and there is no form of government, but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered; and believe further, that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government."
Source: https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/constitutionalconvention-se...
Also in the area I'm in plenty of people don't speak English - I just went to an eye doctor and they didn't speak English although to be fair that's the first time it's happened to me in 2 years.
But it has in recent decades accepted quite a large number of immigrants, and is at this point at a higher foreign-born % than the US, if still lower then Canada or Australia.
That's not quite the same as having a culture rooted in the immigration narrative, but it has changed significantly.
And I'll also mention that while integration of significant immigration into an existing society is clearly a challenging prospect everywhere, the UK is overall, doing noticeably better with it than most of it's European peers. Both from my subjective perspective as a somewhat regular visitor, and from a lot of the metrics I see.
This is a decent piece for the data side of that claim: https://samf.substack.com/p/the-truth-about-integration
Some of it is a loan, I know Tesla had a loan from the govt, they paid it back early if I remember correctly.
Plus all of that is in the past. What would be a huge problem is if the federal govt started throwing grant money at Tesla now, while Musk is running around playing in the govt.
All that said, I think it's a terrible state of affairs we find ourselves in, but I mean we voted Trump into power, what did we expect would happen? Rainbows and kittens?
As part of the curriculum, there were distinct lessons (in this hard-science course) on feminist design, avoiding white-savior rollouts, and cultural relativism -- with much room to expound on their importance, and little room to critique.
I happened to agree with lots of the mindsets of these lessons a priori, but I was definitely acutely aware the whole course that there was an ideological bent, even in STEM.
The networking stack obviously had no viewpoint, but the course teaching it certainly did.
In neuroscience there have been studies showing that the methods developed may not be effective for all races or sexes https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-022-01046-0
Historically studies have had an overrepresentation of white men as subjects. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1761670/
The problem is that the people who have seen and who have experienced this will never tell you. I and many like me I've talked to will simply never tell their actual beliefs to a colleague who believes like this.
Cannot tell you how many countless meetings I've been in where I have a differing opinion and say nothing because of backlash and loss of softpower.
The truth is that there are huge numbers of your coworkers, bosses, and employees who have different thoughts that don't align with the current ideology. These people have learned to say nothing. I myself being one of them.
I have on multiple occasions just straight lied to a liberal coworker about my beliefs because me telling what I actually think would make it very difficult to work with them.
I believe many of my fellow "whites" believe this, but more importantly it's pretty obvious that many of the most powerful "whites," including the current President and his boot-licking minion Donald Trump, absolutely believe this.
I really hate how poisoned the well has become on this topic, there’s definitely elitism and exclusion that should be systematically addressed in hiring. I’d support programs promoting cheaper and universally-accessible paths to getting skilled jobs (e.g. accepting projects/certs/etc or offering literal job training) as long as they were open to anyone regardless of protected characteristics. You shouldn’t need to mainline an ivy-league path your entire childhood to have a chance at being hired at Google. I think such programs would be far less controversial and produce real value for real people.
How about "Gleichschaltung", or "synchronization" for the English speaking folks, instead?
Now I (as a non US citizen, but one of a country that has it's fair share of needless bureaucracy) wholeheartedly agree that there is waste, a lack of oversight/transparency and probably a need for more say of the common taxpayer on how their money is spent.
But as someone who learnt the meaning of the Terms "Gleichschaltung" and "Ermächtigungsgesetz" in school, I wholeheartedly disagree with the current measures and how they unfold right in front of our eyes.
You still haven't explained how this is biased toward people "in it for the career, not for the principle."
> I also believe that they explicitly give preference to certain groups of people over others. So what is the point here?
You give the example of the journalism, geography, and ethnic studies departments specifically seeking minority viewpoints.
FWiW I don't think the DEI corporate and other programs in the USofA have been particularly well executed, they appear (from afar) to be more performative than substantive, however ...
The three examples you gave should more or less answer your own question for you.
Journalism, good reporting, brings deep informed insights from the ground. That's not going to happen when reporting on foreign countries and disadvantaged communities if all the reporters are (say) from a WASP background and perspective.
Geography isn't just maps, there are strong elements of people's relations with land that are part of that domain .. again a breadth of viewpoints gives richer coverage.
Ethnic studies. .. I mean does this really need a comment as to why diverse viewpoints deliver broader outcomes?
> breadth of viewpoints gives richer coverage
Breadth of viewpoint has nothing intrinsically to do with the color of one's skin.
> Journalism, good reporting, brings deep informed insights from the ground. That's not going to happen when reporting on foreign countries and disadvantaged communities if all the reporters are (say) from a WASP background and perspective.
Again, the quality of a reporter and their work has nothing to do intrinsically with the color of their skin.
I didn't say that. Perhaps you might like to re-read. We may have different backgrounds in parsing English.
> Breadth of viewpoint has nothing intrinsically to do with the color of one's skin.
Again, I didn't say that.
The point of these fat fingered US attempts to fix a problem is to ... fix a problem.
The problem is that the starting point in reporting, ethinic studies, and geography was that the fields were dominated by an unrepresentative minority; white faces with vanilla backgrounds being the voices of authority on subjects they had no experience of.
That was the problem. These fixes aren't great.
Ofc not every decision is fully democratic, but the people making them are beholden to rules and systems which are - or at the least, have a clear chain of command back to individuals who Congress has direct authority over. No one ever said you needed 100% democratic oversight on every action, as long as those actions are obeying the system that was democratically established
The problem is doing it in an extra-legal way, where the Executive Office is giving a crony power his branch doesn't/shouldn't be able to bestow, where people telling this crony no when he tries things he shouldn't be able to do all seem to get put on leave etc
point is, live by the sword, die by the sword. it's hypocritical to whine about cutting funding by the exact same mechanism that is used to give it out because you dont like the political party of the cutter.
and you can't say "keep politics out of science". because when you're pulling from the public purse, it is inherently political.
there are ways to fund science that are apolitical. HHMI, ACS, ADA, AHA, etc.
And again, my main issue here is that under any reasonably interpretation, Musk would qualify as a Principal officer, which as the Appointments clause of the Constitution clearly lays out requires Senate approval. It is beyond ridiculous that the head of a new "Department" who seems to have unilateral power over other departments now, is not subject to any kind of oversight or accountability to other branches of government - this is exactly the kind of shit the checks and balances were designed for
I used to work in academia and was involved in NSF and DOE grants. I’ve been in industry (IC then manager) since then.
My sense is that grant funding was less merit based than industry funding. I’m not saying it’s so corrupt that it should be completely torn down, but there’s just less accountability in academia - you can get a grant, fail to deliver on what you promised, and still get another grant after that and that can be your whole career if you know how to play the academic social game and are good at writing proposals.
The last time I checked when I worked at a Stanford biomedical university department that was substantially NIH-funded, there were 2 full time employee grant writers who had to supply the government grant process with a laundry list of specific data with each carefully-worded proposal because they were regularly competing with other universities to win a specific grant.
Also, if nepotism and favoritism are the criteria for removal, let's start with the Executive branch.
Insiders right fucking here are insisting they have not experienced that.
Which insiders are right?
Guess what, it's both! America is 350 million people. Most things have been experienced by someone. That does not allow you to generalize usefully.
Meanwhile the women and non-white insiders are still experiencing straight up racism and sexual harassment and sexism so....
[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/coup
The violent part and the army part seems to be optional
When people vote for President, it is only to inform the State of how they want the State to vote, and the State has significant freedom to allocate its votes for President how it wishes e.g. some States use a proportional allocation instead of winner-takes-all.
Popular vote for Federal office was largely a 20th century invention.
The only votes that matter are the votes of the State. It may still not be "overwhelming" at 58% (312 out of 538) but pretending that wasn't the result only serves to muddy the water.
Shouldn't they then use Congress as intended rather than what they're doing now which bypasses it?
As a bystander in another country your line of argument is mind-boggling. You don't just throw out the constitution and way the government works because one guy won an election one time. But that seems to be what a lot of people are suggesting, that because Trump won the election whatever he does is democratic and therefore okay.
They can’t because of the filibuster [1]. They cannot bypass the filibuster without a 3/5 majority which they do not have. Thus any bill which the Democrats oppose will be blocked by filibuster in the Senate.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster_in_the_United_State...
Your reply also runs counter to the parent comment I was replying to where they state that Congress would repair any irregularities after the fact. Frankly it feels like people are making things up to support their guy doing things counter to the established mechanisms of government and your own constitution.
And secondly no, Trump also publicly lied about his positions by saying he had nothing to do with Project 2025.
But it doesn't matter if he did say the truth anyways, saying that you'll make a coup doesn't make the coup okay.
I feel more and more like a large portion of the American public exists at the weaponized intersection of the subbing Kruger effect and Chesterton fence. They hear so many vague platitudes about waste that it’s just taken as dicta without evidence. That somehow provides a global mandate to break anything.
If we survive this I hope that the government workforce starts to get more respect of the hard work they do on complicated problems to make fair processes and that they stop getting just blanket accused of incompetence for ideological gain.
Greens just went through a stupid political scandal in Berlin where the leftist radical wing tried to frame a realo candidate for sexual harassment. SPD goes to this election with the worst chancellor in history. CDU lost its mind and voted together with AFD. FDP is serving a few special interests groups. Die Linke are borderline irrelevant.
We are in a strange situation where we have strong presence on populist left and right, but no decent political force in the center to contain them.
Ironically enough, this very much sounds like the "let's re-write and everything will be better" fallacy encountered in software engineering.
That aside, what you are wishing for is a war and/or revolution where the pillars of society have been shattered to pieces, the old incumbents removed/killed/retired, and where a new political landscape is built upon the ruins and ashes of what has been.
Be careful what you wish for..
Be careful what you wish for. If AfD would grab the power (unlikely at this point), it'll weaken Germany nationally and internationally like the US is being weakened now.
Waste needs to be cut back - that is morally required to happen, because it's not waste of some private company's money, it's the waste of other peoples' money - the only problem is that you can't take the Office Space "What would you say you do here?" approach of randomly cutting people, but have to address the systemic issues that result in tens of billions of dollars lost yearly.
Some of these include:
- literal incentives to waste money in the form of "if you don't use your whole budget every year, we'll cut it next year" (which applies to large parts of the military and defense, which happen to be some of the biggest spenders)
- massive bureaucracy that takes processes that should take a day and turns them into multi-week-long nightmares
- terrible office cultures that encourage single-points-of-failure...and then gives those people lots of vacation time
- large policy sub-orgs that focus on evaluating requests against hundreds of thousands of pages of policy instead of trying to help the workers actually get things done
- terrible contracting processes that result in the government paying 2-10x more than private industry does for goods and services (which only a small increase in quality or reliability)
...and many, many more problems.
> I hope that the government workforce starts to get more respect of the hard work they do on complicated problems
You can simultaneously believe that the average government worker is competent and hard-working, and that the bureaucracy as a whole is extremely inefficient due to systemic issues.
Blanket defense of government (in)efficiency actively makes the problems worse. Focus your energy instead on adding nuance when discussing the problems and solutions.
The issue though is with the way it’s being done. Giving it the most charitable take, it’s at best reckless. No oversight, no transparency. We can only take him at his word that things are being improved. But given the various false and misleading statements that’s already come out, of the limited info being released, how can we trust him?
But that is _not_ what is happening here.
Quoting from the page you linked:
> Impoundments usually proceeded on the view that an appropriation sets a ceiling on spending for a particular purpose but typically did not mandate that all such sums be spent. According to this view, if that purpose could be accomplished by spending less than the appropriation’s total amount, there would be no impediment in law to realizing savings. Impoundments were also justified on the ground that a statute, other than the appropriation itself, authorized the withholding.
In other words, if Congress appropriates $X for the FBI to buy computers, then Congress didn't necessarily mean "the FBI shall spend exactly $X on computers, down to the cent". It could be interpreted to mean "the FBI may spend up to $X on computers". But Congress has clarified this ambiguity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Budget_and_Impou...
> the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 specifies that the president may request that Congress rescind appropriated funds. If both the Senate and the House of Representatives have not approved a rescission proposal (by passing legislation) within forty-five days of continuous session, any funds being withheld must be made available for obligation.
In other words, if Congress appropriates $X for the FBI to buy computers, but the President thinks $X is excessive, then the President may ask Congress for permission to spend less than $X. If Congress doesn't grant the permission within 45 days, then the President must go ahead and spend the full $X. Again, Congress literally has the power to set the laws, and the President is required by his oath of office to execute those laws.
Furthermore, the Supreme Court already ruled on this exact question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_v._City_of_New_York
> President Richard Nixon was of the view that the administration was not obligated to disburse all funds allocated by Congress to states seeking federal monetary assistance under the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972 and ordered the impoundment of substantial amounts of environmental protection funds for a program he vetoed, and which had been overridden by Congress.
That case seems directly analogous to what Musk is currently trying to do. Nixon lost that case in the Supreme Court.
Even if the Supreme Court did rule that the President had impoundment powers, it would probably be on the condition that "[the purpose of the law] could be accomplished by spending less than the appropriation’s total amount" (quoting from the page you linked). For example, the President would still be required to buy sufficient computers for the FBI, even if he spent less than $X on them. The President still wouldn't be able to just unilaterally decide "no, the FBI doesn't need computers, this is a waste of money".
So, I think it's already quite clear that Trump/Musk do not have the constitutional authority to just start cutting government programs. Do you agree? If not, which part do you want further clarity on?
Any impoundment authority and how it has been curtailed is purely a political solution, not a constitutional one.
If the Democrats think they are right they can go to the Supreme Court to force him to spend money with no say in the matter.
And while the President is mandated to execute the law you’re forgetting how much of the government is not described in law. USAID “to further the mission of the US in foreign countries” would give the President a lot of latitude in how that money is spent. A lot.
Then layer on the immense agency structure written all through “interpretation” of the law that the agencies no longer can rely on Chevron to defend and things get really interesting.
And while the Supreme Court did rule on Empoundment law curtailing Nixon, it did not rule specifically on the constitutionality of it and a lot has changed on the Supreme Court since Nixon.
So please don’t respond with “doesnt have the constitutional authority” when that is most definitely not the case.
They did sue, and a federal judge temporarily blocked the "federal spending freeze".
> you’re forgetting how much of the government is not described in law
It's true that many aspects of the government are not described in law. But the major federal expenditures are definitely described in law. That's why Republicans in Congress are currently debating the budget! https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-spending-bill-stalls-congre...
Both legislation and Supreme Court precedent say that the President cannot impound funds. You seem to be arguing that it's OK for him to impound funds because the Supreme Court decision was fifty years ago and they might rule differently today.
Couldn't that argument be used to justify breaking any law? I think Trump must follow the law. Do you agree that Trump must follow the law even if the Supreme Court hasn't specifically reaffirmed that particular law recently?
(I'd feel differently if Trump illegally impounded some trivial amount of money just to get a case before the Supreme Court; but that's not what he's doing here.)
In simple terms: how free do you think you would truly be to lead life the way you want if there were no institutions that produce and distribute electricity, manage communications networks, research and produce medicine, provide emergency services, build transportation infrastructure... something to think about. Few modern westerners would equate the idea of "freedom" with that of fully self-sufficient, isolated hermit life with everything that entails.
A lot of people today probably simply forgot how much of their cushy lifestyle was made possible by government, because they never had to work or fight to build it.
We are taking common everyday interactions: small businesses, deals, trade, customer service etc. Americans by far ( and so would citizens of other first world nations) are relatively superior culturally when it comes to everyday interactions.
As far as I know, the chevron deference ruling makes it easily arguable that these agencies don't necessarily have any legal standing anyway.
The 8 month buyout was completely legal, Clinton did the same.
I actually find it highly unlikely any of this is illegal, it's just completely unbearable to anyone who is part of the bureaucracy. But prove me wrong. Show me the legal opinions.
The 1995 buyout offer was passed by Congress and signed by Clinton.
https://clintonwhitehouse6.archives.gov/1995/04/1995-04-04-p...
Seven restraining orders. Seems like lots is not legal.
The current administration replaced the head of an agency and had that agency shut itself down. Shutting yourself down is clearly not a power given to any federal agency, so by the very policy you're citing either the judicial or executive branch must act to allow such a move.
Instead, our cheeto in chief decided that those other branches don't actually need to do any of that pesky work and it's a lot easier if everyone just does what he wants.
There's a word for that style of governance.
I think you meant legislative, not executive?
Shutting down an agency like USAID require congressional approval, but was done by executive order.
Withholding congressionally approved funding for government agencies is illegal.
Sharing sensitive documents from the fiscal service with (Doge) team members who do not have the appropriate security clearances is illegal.
Giving Elon Musk an unofficial seat and allowing him unfettered access to the entire federal government without any congressional confirmation is illegal and basically amounts to setting up a shadow government.
The list goes on...
I'm not going to stop you calling it a coup, but your opponents will just smile and say "not true" and they would be right.
Musk is committing illegal acts, over a weekend, in taking government power by, at minimum, not being appointed and confirmed. This is a coup by the definition YOU provided.
The 6th January capitol attack was an attempted coup, what's happening now is Gleichschaltung. Please read up on "Gleichschaltung" [1] if you think that's in any way or form less of an condemnation as "coup".
[1] https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/gleichscha...
[1] https://www.cms.gov/inflation-reduction-act-and-medicare/med...
Is "we just won't fund your drug, even though people will die and you're the only option on the market" actually something that could happen? Would that be politically palatable to anybody?
I guess there's patent invalidation and forced genericization, but that would kill innovation real quick.
I think a far better idea would be to impose very strict caps on admin / non-medical costs, potentially at the expense of paying a bit more to fraudsters, changing FDA regulations to minimize (death from side effects + death from no available drugs) instead of just the former, as well as becoming a lot more aggressive about expensive and unnecessary procedures that doctors perform to get rich quick.
Literally all the leverage.
Presumably the government also has the option to permit purchase of pharmaceuticals from other countries. "Oh, you've raised the cost of X? That's okay, we'll buy it from licensed suppliers in the EU for a tenth of the price."
I continue to post this, not even fully convinced - Im scared I wouldnt be able to afford good care without govt subsidies, but I am open to the idea at least. I dont think care in the USA would be worse overall
The truth is that if you are on the "left" your blind to what many are thinking. In person I will never tell you the bias or problems I see. I've learned doing so would make it nearly impossible to work with you.
Not saying you are "wrong" but the problem I an many like me face is that the softpower pressure to conform to left ideals mean I never do or say anything because I assume everyone around me would push back or push me out.
It's partly paranoia but it's also part of a factual experience I've had in highly liberal environments. They don't want to hear it and if they do you are damaged. Very different from the people we all know who are expounding and preaching liberal ideals in ever conversation they have.
To your point about being blind to what many around me are thinking- by definition, I wouldn't know if I was, right? So I'm not going to try and argue one way or another about that. I will say, however, that I have worked with many colleagues with whom I disagreed about many different things, some of which fall under the general umbrella of what one might call "identity politics", and as a general rule have been able to have open and civilized conversations with them. One thing I have learned is to not make any assumptions about what somebody does or doesn't think about a given topic, as basically every time I've done that I have been surprised.
I have blatantly lied.
For someone on the liberal side, these conversations mean nothing and there's literally no risk in discussing.
If you are not on that side it's a risk of career suicide to openly discuss it.
I always just thought I was an outsider but I am starting to think there are many who are just like me. I wonder how many conversations in Sillicon valley I have had where both of us were lying about our political beliefs worried the other may be liberal.
Who gets to decide what "qualified" means? and what counts and what doesn't count as a qualification?
I literally skipped dozens of men in the interview application pipeline just because it had to be a female hire.
It was a very bad feeling for me but I have no doubt HR is doing this constantly, to read a name and specifically pass them over because it didn't sound like a woman's name. For every female applicant there is easily 20+ male for a technical role.
Shortly after this I was no longer allowed to search or filter for my own applicants. It was an odd time where our HR was gone and I had to do it myself. Really giant eye opener to how this bias works in a real sense.
Still remember I told my manager: "I am not used to not hiring the most qualified"
Their response: "Work is not just about work but also about life"
Not sure what that meant (I believe he was pushed from his boss, same as I) but stuff like this is an every day occurrence in SV
Most of the spiraling healthcare costs are attributable to administrative bloat, hospital profits, insurance companies and pharmaceutical profits. What you’re suggesting would just result in lower quality care in general and has effectively already been implemented with the rise of ‘supervised’ and unsupervised mid-level providers. I.e. NPs, PAs, CRNAs etc. It hasn’t resulted in any decrease in healthcare costs for the patient.
Let me give you some context for insight. If I see a patient in clinic for an intravitreal injection my fee will be $150-250 before overhead, the pharmaceutical company will be paid by medicare or private insurance around ~ $2000 for the drug that I inject. Double that for a bilateral injection.
If I operate at a hospital, my fee is $5-600. The hospital bills medicare a $4000 facilities fee plus additional fees for anesthesia, consumables etc. to the tune of over $10000 per eye.
If you want to lower healthcare costs a good start would be negotiating drug prices, repealing the clause in the ACA that bans physicians from owning hospitals, banning non-competes for healthcare professionals and getting rid of certificates of need that make it unnecessarily difficult to build outpatient surgery centers. In short, ideas that require a more nuanced understanding of our healthcare system.
btw I appreciate being called uninformed (which I dont dispute and find no offence in) rather than stupid or pigheaded or whatever. The point of talking about things is to share and increase our understanding.
But throwing medicine to the whims of the market is absurd. We're going to pick surgeons by reading reviews on Google?
Normally dictators don’t let go of power
Reality check.
This was attempt number one: https://youtu.be/Iludfj6Pe7w
All including the ones using violence against policeman were just freed less than a week ago.
"Republican Senator Graham calls Trump's Jan. 6 pardons a 'mistake'" - https://www.reuters.com/world/us/republican-senator-graham-c...
"Mitch McConnell calls Donald Trump pardons a 'mistake,' Jan. 6 'an insurrection'" - https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5122585-trump-mcconnell-...
Not anymore.
But that’s not what happened.
A failed dictator is still a dictator. What's next, the events in South Korea weren't the result of a failed attempt at a coup?
I really hope so too. My pessimist side fears that the powerful are observing the US, seeing that it works there and will do the same thing here.
The parties turn on people who show up to do the work. There is a remarkable amount people can achieve if they show up as people who are willing to learn, do the work, and have their own eyes and ears open.
From my perspective, Trump voters distrust and dislike the old media so much, a newspaper telling them they shouldn't vote for Trump would only strengthen their resolve.
I'd rather not pay for that sort of thinking. However, I'd rather have the WaPo in its current form as opposed to severely diminished (or none at all).
Yeah, same. Since the Brexit a lot of populist parties in the EU don't want to leave the EU anymore (only reform it). Let's hope that this is another warning that the destructive populist path doesn't lead anywhere good.
(And I hope that the UK will join the EU again, they are close friends.)
I did just start paid subscriptions to several media outlets that have been doing good reporting on the situation (Guardian, Verge).
Yeah, independent, non-clickbait news is very important in these times. We recently renewed our newspaper subscription for three years.
When you are in the EU (or really anywhere non-US anyway), it's probably a good moment to start moving your data out of the US and away from US companies. So far Trump has done exactly what he promised, so a large trade war or, even worse, a war over Greenland is possible. Since pretty much anything is fair game now, blackmailing the EU using its dependency on US tech companies is not far-fetched anymore.
Get your data out and reduce your dependency on US tech.
Not all of government is the DMV.
Government has a massive policymaking function, which is not "robotic code-like behavior". It's about solving nuanced, challenging problems. Government has a huge research function.
And tech has created some great things, but it's also created some really terrible things, mostly because of this "move fast and break things" mentality that doesn't consider the consequences of its actions.
Government is mostly individuals deciding goals and attempting to convince others. Then rules are added to prevent harm to others or using corrupt methods of convincing. That "code" part is more like a moderated forum: necessary for the huge task, but it's just the framework for the actual content.
>Historical governments often needed little beyond an army and a tax collection system.
And historical computers used vacuum tubes. What's your point?
>The tech way of thinking has proven extremely successful in many industries already.
Even in tech companies, the richest people are almost always the smooth talkers. Because the best, and really only, way to get money is convincing somebody else to give it to you. You can do it by offering a better product or charming them.
Most government goals aren't technically difficult and certainly don't require advanced algorithms or fast computers. The real work is aligning people.
If you cannot make the distinction between computer code and law/regulation, that get applied by humans in humans time and humans circles…?
« Refactoring » an org or a government like you project to, like Elon and his boys is doing, it is going to cost actual lives. People killed.
- Part of government is funding research that involves people doing real experiments collecting real data? Are novel experiments those of constricted robots or LLMs?
- Part of government are the dedicated every day folks who are doing the best they can despite being overworked and under resourced who have to make life and death decisions in the moment every day (air traffic controllers), who monitor and coordinate relief and management of disasters big and small in a very interconnected world (we just had a global pandemic, are culling record numbers of chickens, had a bad hurricane season, and large wildfires) these are not people behaving like robots they are just people following laws and regulations primarily passed via efforts of lobbyists, or else are those that are written in blood.
Don't like the way a part of government works? Reform it. Don't try to burn the whole thing to the ground by doing shit like emailing the people responsible for keeping planes from crashing into each other that if they want to they can fuck off for the next 8 months on the tax-payers dime and then find a new low-stress job. Don't like certain regulations or the ways laws are weaponized against everyone but corporations and the wealthy? I get it, me neither I'd like to see affordable housing too. Unfortunately, congress has the responsibility to fix that, not Donald Trump, not Elon Musk, nor any of his former SpaceX interns. If they want to make those changes they should get elected to congress or hell maybe for shits and giggles use some of that lobbying money for the common good they claim to care so much about.
Name calling typically results in people viewing you as immature.
If the left ever want to reclaim the respect of voters, they need to lose this bad habit.
As a Brit, so do I. However, despite all of the evidence showing it will be massively beneficial, we won't. Not fully, imho, for a good while. Best I'm hoping for is closer ties in a customs union, but that requires compromise I don't think will happen.
at what point does that become disingenuous? how many years have people bern trying to do it incrementally? just tell the reformer: oh try harder, knowing every feature of the bureaucracy is stacked against them and they wont succeed. in the meantime people are hurt, dollars are wasted.
> Unfortunately, congress has the responsibility to fix that,
that's not correct. congress has ceded execution of these things to the executive in many cases with broad leeway to do or not do (thats why it's called discretionary spending, any spending that is by law congress' responsibility is statutory spending)
The judges ruled that the program was unconstitutional and had to be changed, not that Harvard had been illegally discriminatory in their admission practices(as was attempted years prior by the same conservative funded activism group)
Just because you personally see racism, doesn't mean it's actually happening(aka, "facts don't care about your feelings")
What on Earth are you talking about? Here are the 237 pages of the Supreme Justices exploring centuries of American law and hundreds of relevant cases regarding racial discrimination: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf
Specifically, the Justices found Harvard's race-based admissions practices violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court found that these practices resulted in racial discrimination against Asian American applicants.
Did you just make that up and hope no one would call you out?
No, but it looks like a lot of people are misunderstanding the court's ruling...
`The question presented is whether the admissions systems used by Harvard College and UNC are lawful under the Equal Protection Clause of the Four- teenth Amendment`
"This admission system is not lawful" is not the same as "your institution has been illegally discriminatory towards a certain race". One is pointing out mismatches between law and reality, the other needs to be backed up by data.
It's also possible that the "unconstitutional" program lead to satisfactory results for minority groups(both asian and non-asian), but we are just guessing either way based off of a ruling that's only tangentially related.
2. That court case is for undergraduate admissions - what does it have to do with hiring practices in the academic sciences?
2. The user I replied to stated they have not been discriminated against. I corrected them.
Actually is that possible? Are the EU suppliers allowed to resell at the gov negotiated price? Or are the gov negotiated price only for internal market?
(I've been wondering since I don't understand why swiss drug price are so much higher given that EU suppliers are next door)
Most EU countrys payed $40-$60 (per unit, shipped by 3rd party courier, who do their own billing), SE Asia and Australia $60-$80 and the US $1500-$2000. Before I left we started also shipping to Canada, dunno about the prices anymore, but substantially less.
The head of our institute was apparently involved in the negotiations and although I didn't get a chance to talk to him directly, the popular story was that our guys showed up, were presented with a pretty much done deal and told that the price and payment terms were nonnegotiable. Also, during meetings, he would refer to the Amis often as "Die, die nicht mehr alle Tassen im Schrank haben", which roughly translates to "The crazy ones."
Also, the product they wanted specified a significantly less complex and cheaper pooling procedure than we were able to offer...
Of course that can be gamed, and of course we need good faith oversight, but if none of the research projects we're funding were to ever fail, that would be evidence that we're being massively too conservative in the avenues for new discoveries that we're investing in exploring.
(Side note - the people who migrate from those 3rd world nations to America are generally a reliable, conscientious lot, way much more than people in their home countries)
Yes, spot on, I think this is very accurate and truthful.
I'm just trying to differentiate between "the government is wasteful, and here's the careful and prudent way to make it better" and "the government isn't very wasteful and we should avoid even talking about the possibility".
Method aside, musk is trying to save a few million here and there on things that are “wasteful” but provide benefit to a lot of people, including Americans. Meanwhile, a multi trillion dollar tax cut that’s going mostly to the wealthy is fine and not wasteful for some reason. Jacked up prices from a handful of defense contractors is also fine.
However in the grand scheme of things this still isnt that bad, and I do think doctors/nurses deserve a good compensation, so given the problems associated, maybe we dont go with removing medical licences as a solution to healthcare costs
The left don't have to any soul searching to do when again the so called middle literally voted for a man who to their face told them that he doesn't care about them he just wants their votes, who yes is a criminal that has swindled, lied and now rug pulled.
The problem can be, someone can feel attacked even if the other person is treating them in a very kind and loving way, because they think it's fake.
On the contrary, someone could receive verbal and physical abuse and still not feel attacked because they maintain faith in their and the other person's good intentions.
So I think it's more about changing the behaviors of the person on the receiving end than on the giving end.
If this was true, Trump wouldn’t be president. Either that, or America doesn’t see an issue with immaturity.
The name calling is part of his blustery comedic Hollywood side, which people understand is different to his policy making side. Watch the all-in podcast episode with him if you genuinely want to see a different side to him.
In contrast, Democrats often come across as only having a singular serious facet to their personality, and so immaturity undermines their entire character.
Neither of those numbers include any state revenue or tax.
My understanding is that's nowhere near enough.
The USA deficit is $1.8 Trillion a year with $30T total. The net worth of all USA billionaires is around $4.5T. So 5% would reduce the deficit by 10% until the billionaires wise up and move their wealth out of the country.
Even confiscating it all in a one-off pile reduces the national debt by about 15%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
It's pretty clever in its cruelty: Once you have cut taxes, it essentially doesn't matter which party wins the next election: The have to gut expenditures anyway.
See the current Labour government in the UK, who would very much like to spend money on government initiatives but can't because the Tories made sure there was nothing left.
Elect US senators and Representatives to go to the floor and debate about individual programs on CSPAN so people can actually hear arguments about it.
This is why, for example, the ISS didn't get cut, but the SSC did. Both were huge science programs that cost tens of billions of dollars and Clinton's administration explicitly wanted to keep both programs but the voting public, through senators and house reps, including democrat members of both forced them to pick only one.
It's like he was surrounded by knowledgeable people and decided to make wrong decision upon wrong decision just to spite them because he resented them being better than him.
The plus side was I was already making 10% more than any of my other friends and got another 7% for signing it.
He’s always been a Democrat, including supporting Obama and Clinton.
His recent support of Trump appears to be a tactical reaction to some of the misbehaviour during the Biden administration such as debanking political rivals and encouraging race-based hiring.
https://www.businessinsider.com/surprise-silicon-valleys-her...
People are just so surprised to find out he's a Republican that whenever it happens they assume he's a recent convert.
He wanted Romney to win the Republican primary, believing him to be more pro-tech than the other candidates, but he ultimately he supported and voted for Obama in that election.
"Both Sides" Citation, please. Really interested in learning more (but no paywalls if possible).
Regardless of what you think of his intellectual capacity, he has a proven track record of organizing people to produce exceptional outcomes !
An inevitable characteristic of his algorithm is chaos: delete as many constraints and parts as possible. When things break, re-add those necessary parts.
This might work sometimes for companies (surprisingly, often it doesn't) - it has far more significant and wide-reaching consequences when you're doing it to an entire country and its institutions, particularly one as influential as America.
- Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man
And? Getting people whipped up into a frenzy through fear, us vs them mentality, narcissism, to do good work is toxic. Musk is toxic.
We should stop elevating leaders as extra-ordinarily capable. Especially leaders who employ a negative leadership style instead of one founded on empathy, trust, respect, and importance of the group over leader.
the media + bureaucratic class + democrat leaders who all have a vested interest in these un-audited institutions remaining in the shadows,
or
the people doing exactly what half the country asked them to do: clean up the government in an unprecedented way
- Calling payments to non-profit organizations fraudulent on a whim.
- The sweeping condemnation of what USAID was doing.
- His call for a blanket drop of regulations.
Either he knows better or he is totally lost in his sauce. Hard to say what's worse for where he is right now.
I believe, he does not care. He only cares about his conception of the world and how AI and Mars are more important than those tiny tiny human problems. Society has to serve him and his god complex. He was told to find his subsidies and tax cuts by himself. That's what he is doing.
This is factual though.
The previous NIH director Dr. Hugh Auchincloss and current deputy director Dr. Lawrence Tabak agree that the definition of "gain of function" as was listed on the NIH website applies to engineering a biological agent to infect something it normally wouldnt be able to.
That coupled with the fact that Dr.Daszak submitted the Year 5 Annual Progress Report Nearly Two Years Late. Said report had the experiment with infected transgenic mice with four different coronaviruses, three of which were chimera or recombinant viruses with different spike proteins.
When confronted in the deposition Daszak said that the reporting system was inaccessible. So they deposed the IT stack of the reporting system, and they showed logs that it was accessible and actually logged into several times during the 2 year period that the report was late.
This is pretty strong circumstantial evidence that they were attempting to hide or delay the experiments from being discovered by the grant review process at the end of the year. The report is pretty damning.
https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/12.04...
You really need to take a hard look at who is gullible here.
It’s just that government isn’t that.
Or are his companies successful despite that? The impression I get is that his direct reports are exceptionally good managers and shield the companies from his dumbest moves. Except at Twitter--that's lost, what, 75% of its value? (still works as a political platform for him though)
I don’t condone manage by trolling; it’s not how I want to manage or be managed. But it seems to have worked out for his industrial complex.
The article doesn’t seem to be about abolishing the NIH and NSF. Instead it seems to be about NIH and NSF grants to third parties. That seems to fall squarely on the executive side of the line.
This is the third time I've seen someone pushing this line of thinking on HN in as many days and I'd like to know more about where it's coming from. Can you cite any source that supports it and justifies it?
FWIW, the conventional wisdom is that the independent agencies really are independent, and the president's control over them is exactly what is stipulated in the legislation that created them. If the statute of the Dept of XYZ and says the president can fire its governing board but only on weekends, then he has to wait til Saturday, period end of story. The idea that the president can interfere with the independent agencies because they're part of the executive branch was, AFAICT, invented out of whole cloth in the last couple of years, and has no constitutional support at all. So I'm curious to hear more about what this new theory is and how far it extends. In particular, if the president can decide to cancel NIH grants because the NIH is under the executive branch, what keeps him from raising and lowering interest rates?
edit to add: to be clear, the president does have a great deal of power over most of the independent agencies; in most cases he hires and fires their leaders. But he has that power because Congress specifically granted it, not because the executive branch is his personal fiefdom. If he wants to, say, get a pharmaceutical drug approved, he has to direct HHS to direct the FDA to do that in the usual way, not just decree it. This has little to do with thwarting his power and lots to do with effective and efficient governance.
There really is no limit to the power, but they say the check is impeachment -- if the people don't like it they can elect a congress that will impeach the president. But in reality it doesn't work that way when the president's party controls congress.
It's Civics 101. You should have learned it in 8th grade. Congress makes the laws. The President executes the laws. It's also right there in Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution: https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-2/ ("The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.").
If an independent agency is exercising "The executive Power," then it does so derivatively of the President. Article II doesn't say that "the executive branch" shall execute the law. It says: "he"--the President--"shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed."
Note also the parallel structure with Article I ("All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States") and Article III ("The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish").
The President is the executive branch, in the same way Congress is the legislative branch, and the Supreme Court and the lower courts are the judicial branch. All of these branches have various offices and subdivisions, but they are within the control of one of those three constitutional actors.
Congress cannot create an entity that exercises executive powers but does not answer to the President any more than the President can create an entity that exercises legislative powers but does not answer to Congress.
> FWIW, the conventional wisdom is that the independent agencies really are independent, and the president's control over them is exactly what is stipulated in the legislation that created them.
That has not been the "conventional wisdom" for anyone who went to law school in several decades. The notion of an "independent agency" exercising executive power independently of the President was an absurd idea cooked up by a racist in the early 20th century who hated democracy and had fantasies of "scientific government" (https://fedsoc.org/commentary/fedsoc-blog/woodrow-wilson-s-c...). It peaked in the mid 20th century, but the project of whittling it back to constitutionality has been ongoing my entire lifetime.
> If the statute of the Dept of XYZ and says the president can fire its governing board but only on weekends, then he has to wait til Saturday, period end of story.
The Supreme Court held in 1926 that the President's removal power over executive-branch officials is essentially unconstrained (Myers v. United States). The Court then reversed itself in 1935 (Humphrey's Executor v. United States) but that case has since been limited pretty much to its facts (Seila Law LLC v. CFPB).
People around me tend to be in the RSE (Research Software Engineer) scene, which is growing in Europe. I, and many of my cohort, could fit in as research staff or faculty in many different disciplines.
Wouldn't get rich or famous, but certainly have a comfortable living working on interesting problems.
Before you start criticizing Saudi government, the reason we are discussing this right now is because a fascist government is forcing scientists out of the US.
Europe will not spend even 0.1% of its pension/welfare fund on big research bets. The private investors their will only want real estate investments, not fancy wancy "VC".
Young talent will flow one way from other countries to the US, because they've already seen what the grass is like on their side.
The population shift introduces new ideas, new perspectives, new ways of operating research, new connections towards funding and money, new views on what big bets even means.
The influx of foreign scientists and academics into America over the last century caused significant shifts in how America operated and viewed the idea of research and academia. Post-war Europeans (Von Braun's crowd being an obvious example) caused a large shift in the way America funded "big bet" projects. Saturn V perhaps. Same may happen in Europe.
Those academics can use HN from the opposite side of the Atlantic. VC money especially has the possibility of being territorially bound, yet its often far less constrained by the those types of lines in the dirt than many funding opportunities.
There aren't countries with unfilled academic positions awaiting people from the US. If anything, the landscape is even more competitive outside the US.
… a critical tool of which we’re currently dismantling…
I think a lot of these guys and gals are fooling themselves with the whole, "find another country" thing. There is no other country that is A) doing research at these levels, B) Flush with cash, and C) needs you because they don't have a population that produces the necessary thinkers. That's basically only the US.
The difference I think, is that the purity spiral on the left encompasses the entire party. If your perspectives are too moderate you are shunned from the entire hemisphere of politics and often suffer a barage of name calling (e.g. bigot) from your own 'side'.
On the right, this is far less often the case. The right is significantly more tolerant of people who fall outside of purity definitions. For example, the majority of republicans are pro-life, but co-exist with roughly a third of republicans who are pro-choice.
In contrast, most Democrats will not tolerate a pro-life member under any circumstance.
The party that chose Biden and Harris is in a purity spiral? They’re not exactly marxists…
And on the right it’s not the case? As soon as anyone disagrees with Trump they get steamrolled and labeled a traitor
The right is every bit as bad at this as the left because at the end of the day people are going to people.
Democrats for life of America disagrees with your assessment. The organization has existed since 1999. Henry Cuellar is a member of the democratic party and is very "pro-life".
The issue is that "pro-life" has morphed into anti-choice. What is happening in Texas and other states is not pro-life. Forcing women to die is not a pro-life stance.
I believe the problem is that people need to learn how to feel loved. To realize that even our enemies are trying their best and most likely care about us a lot more than they would ever admit. Both sides struggle with this. People on the current left tend to just resign and give up on the relationships. People on the right tend to seek vengeance.
If there is only 1 job but 10 candidates, the job has to go to someone. If everyone has the same scores on an exam, what's the fair way? Flip a coin? Perhaps. What if there are intangible skills/knowledge that are important for the job? One person has a better score on the exam, another person speaks a language (or dialect) that is important for the job. Maybe 9 of 10 come from one academic background, the 10th comes from a different one...which may actually provide a different perspective and provide new insights and break group think. Maybe one comes from a culture that is more confrontational, which means they may speak out more than others.
So many factors are intangible or at least not explicit and I think that's where "merit" can become so dimensionally reduced, not realizing how multidimensional each individual is.
It's not hard to effect change over time with a few memos (e.g. no more "pregnant people") and reviews. It may not be quick enough for certain items already in motion, but that really doesn't matter if the pipeline quickly empties out as the memos take effect.
The scorched earth policy is intended to sow fear.
This time looks very different.
Illegal acts TO CONSOLIDATE POWER. You're missing/ignoring a key phrase in your defense of fascist takeovers. This, right now, is still a coup. What about another time? I don't care. This time is happening now. We have a coup now.
The filibuster remaining in place is a good thing because it encourages negotiations and compromise instead of a seesaw battle.
That's called democracy.
Those then work with the country level organizations of Science Europe, and those together each spend about EUR 25B each year. [3] It's not insignificant. I tend to pay attention to space, and lately almost all there's been is European achievements in telescopes and astronomy.
[1] Horizon Europe, https://www.ffg.at/sites/default/files/downloads/HorizonEuro...
[2] ERC, https://erc.europa.eu/about-erc/erc-glance
[3] Science Europe RFOs, https://www.scienceeurope.org/about-us/members/?type=Researc...
For comparison, the NSF budget is about $8 billion. DOE Office of Science is about the same. NIH is $45 billion
(Also, compare that with the profit of large tech companies)
US firms are also very highly priced relative to their profits when compared to firms elsewhere. So while things are probably not quite sensible in the US there's still money.
It's a big problem for the left because numerically they are now the minority of voters, but are still trending away from the center, and shedding their more moderate members.
It's a complete social poison pill in the city to have voted a certain way. Have had the same look of "how could you be that dumb" from people ranging from strippers to lawyers.
All I want is love and belonging, not sure how to feel love when I've heard the word "barbarian" to describe certain types of people. Not sure how to feel love when men's loneliness and suicide problems aren't being prioritized
Yeah, the hurt turns into anger sometimes, but yes, I need them too. For me to exist, my opposite has to exist, and I should love us both.
And it can hurt me so much when I see people in my life attack people very hard for voting for Trump. The ones in my life who voted for him sometimes seem to be the ones who are craving the most social connection, the most interaction, and don't get it. They seem to want to engage with people and sometimes the best way to engage is to say something controversial. Like the kid who can't get the mom's attention and so starts hitting her in the leg.
People on the right are not a basket of deplorables, they're human beings who want love and attention, often from those who they fear think they're better than them. Often from those they admire the most, who keep ignoring them and running away from them.
So thank you for sharing this and helping me see this even more deeply and lovingly.
We do not need to enter a deep philosophical debate about what is "merit" and its many dimensions. I agree with you, it's complicated. But the issue is universities are explicitly discriminating and ranking candidates and students on the basis of DEI factors. We know this because, as in the CU case I have linked to already in other comments, their very own notes say so! This is just the tip of the iceberg.
Is a relative statement. Someone who expresses anger in one culture can be considered thoughtful and in another culture can be considered disrespectful.
I agree it's super complex and even believe that it may have been too formulated and structured. I personally want humans of different cultures to befriend each other. But intercultural connection can be uncomfortable and hard and have lots of conflict, and some people don't do that well without some nudging.
Again, I think the nudging has gone too far, yet I don't think the solution is to pendulum swing all the way back.
I suggest we instead return to the idea that aptitude be our north star. IQ tests were originally created to provide opportunity to underrepresented children who might otherwise have been looked over due to their socioeconomic conditions or race. Let us return to a colour-blind north star.
(Bashes head on table.) Intelligence, aptitude, and potential are incredibly hard to measure and judge in a purely objective way. The SAT is just a thin slice of that picture.
> In many universities more than 90% of faculty identify as left wing.
And less than 10% of university astrophysicists think the world is flat. Where's the diversity?!
Um. Racism and sexism have not been eliminated in our country. I mean, just look at who's running the executive branch of the government at the moment. We need initiatives to lift up traditionally underrepresented groups now more than ever.
From psychology department at University of Washington [1]:
> I advise deleting the statement below as it shows that URM [underrepresented minority] applications were singled out and evaluated differently than non-URM applications (which is not allowed as [redacted] noted)
> At a faculty meeting, someone whose name is redacted “informed faculty that the Hiring Committee had three outstanding candidates and so they used DEI to distinguish and select a first offer"
[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/diversity...
> sanity check (why it is problematic): The phrase sanity check is ableist, and unnecessarily references mental health in code bases. It denotes that people with mental illnesses are inferior, wrong, or incorrect. Using an appropriate replacement will also clarify what is intended.
There are of course endless examples. Such sentiments are so absurd on their face, and yet they abound. The first thing "actual leadership" must do is speak the truth and acknowledge that there is a problem.
[1] https://it.uw.edu/guides/identity-diversity-inclusion/inclus...
University of Michigan DEI is 1100+ employees strong (!!) at a cost of over $30M/year (the equivalent of 1,800 students’ worth of tuition), and they are launching an even bigger DEI 2.0.
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/2025/02/02/kabbany...
I am not a DJT fan at all, but stories like these are exactly what has people stark raving mad. I can’t really blame them.
While the stated goals are noble, the truth in many cases is that it is an excuse to exclude white males. And I expect downvotes, but you don’t have to look too far to see the truth.
Even if someone thinks DEI had to go, they ought to be aware that their beliefs are being used as nothing but a smokescreen for unparalleled destruction and plunder.
White men feel abandoned, powerless, ignored, blamed, and all sorts of attacks, and if we don't talk about this, then this country may continue a sort of death spiral, borderline suicidal people taking us all down with them.
I think it was someone on the right, Steve Bannon or even Andrew Breitbarting, that said politics follows culture. So to focus on culture first.
They're trying to change culture at the political level, and I'm not sure that's how it works.
What is happening now is not at all a rational response to DEI. It's not even motivated by DEI. Trump and his gang simply want to gut the federal government, because they don't want to pay taxes. DEI is just an excuse.
This using an unaccountable fall guy to break the law at will, so that congress can avoid accountability is gross. Folks with your opinion like to wax on about constitutional principles, blah blah blah, as we stand by and watch the shitshow that is happening right now.
People voted for the administrative state in the 1930s, and they've been voting to cut back on it since 1980. Since then, the only President who won elections without promising to shrink government were Obama (in response to the disaster of Iraq and the Great Recession) and Biden (in response to COVID).
I don’t remember an article in the constitution that allows a rich crony to act in contempt of the laws established by congress as an officer of the government without appointment. But I guess our dedication to solemn constitutional principles varies.
Accountability means democratic accountability. The APA is not meaningful democratic accountability--it just means that lawyers like me end up running the country.
And I’ve never seen a clear explanation of how that change was constitutionally justifiable.
Most don’t even have sufficient clearances to know the names of random middle managers in many many offices in the CIA/NSA, let alone do anything to them.
The obsession with firing people is this weird narrative the right wingers are always obsessed with. The cognitive dissonance between these high and mighty principles and what our principled republican colleagues have and will do is beyond ridiculous.
Functional government is the goal of any mature stakeholder. We have 100+ years of spoils system that aptly demonstrates why that methodology doesn’t make sense in a modern society.
Most of Congress can’t acquire sufficient clearances to even learn the names of random middle managers in many offices in the IC, let alone to do anything about them.
Trump is free to spend less than budgeted.
The bounds and laws should have been finetuned long ago, reducing the power of the President on the one side, and reforming the government to be more representative instead of a two party Us vs Them system. But that is also a democratic process and neither side has had a majority or incentive to do so.
Doesn't mean we shouldn't speak up and call bullshit on what's happening. It's important to call it what it is. It's important to speak up.
The way things are going, speaking up can EASILY mean going to jail within a few months.
You should STILL speak up. Acknowledge that potetnial risk, respect people, and ask of it all the same.
Probably should tell people to clean their HN accounts if they elect not to risk themselves.
It may become necessary for Trump and Musk to show their potential for brutality before people's minds change, unfortunately. But it has worked, in the past. The Kent State shooting is a good example; the obviously excessive brutality of the state caused a massive increase in willingness to speak out, protest, strike, etc. That massive public response became too large to ignore.
I also recognize that by speaking up I may make myself a target for that brutality. At this point, I've decided "so be it, if that happens, it happens."
Evil wins when good people stand by and do nothing.
By the way, posting about how much you hate the government on bluesky is not revolutionary activity, and talking about expecting "brutality" in retaliation shows just how out of touch you are with reality.
Last I saw the judge blocked the mechanism, and needed time to decide on other issues.
Hence the confusing email (only if you don’t know how the government works) that rescinded the original mechanism and replaced it with another.
> They then returned with a proposal of $700 billion in spending cuts, but that failed to convince some of those in the right flank.
It’s going to be a knockdown drag out fight over this. Trump will win some, but lose others. That’s just how it goes.
But unlike last time where he got there day 1 with “ok, what’s next”, he went in this time with a laundry list and an actual strategy.
Which is just smart. I’ve worked for big corps and it’s impossible to turn that ship. I can’t imagine the federal government. The only people I’ve seen be successful are the ones that get creative.
A second judge is now quite clearly reiterating that the money must keep flowing for now: https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/5124167-trump-f...
> It’s going to be a knockdown drag out fight over this. Trump will win some, but lose others. That’s just how it goes.
Yes, that's how spending cuts are supposed to be decided: Congress.
> it’s impossible to turn that ship. I can’t imagine the federal government. The only people I’ve seen be successful are the ones that get creative.
Trump has every right to "get creative" within his constitutional power; he doesn't have the right to "creatively" violate the constitution by refusing to faithfully execute the law.
Let's return to the original question. Suppose that Congress passed a law fifty years ago saying that "there shall be an agency to do ABC, with a budget of $X/year, and the President can figure out the details". I agree that the President has wide latitude to decide how the agency does ABC. But he cannot just decide "ABC is a waste of money, let's abolish the agency and use that $X/year to pay off the debt instead". Do you agree? Or are you claiming that the President could unilaterally abolish the ABC agency and stop doing ABC? (Setting aside the question of whether Trump is currently doing that; do you agree that he would not be allowed to do that?)
Oh I agree, if the law Congress passed was explicit in the funding and the purpose of it.
My comment was more around the multitude of spending in the federal government that is not tied to a specific purpose approved by Congress.
Which is why USAID is likely being targeted.
I would argue that the room to maneuver is where the courts will need to decide - if the President is still following the law but not spending all the money, what happens? Or if the money spent is shifted significantly but still represents a “good faith” effort to follow the law, is that allowed?
Maybe try first to spend some time and speak with the actual people (judges, administrators, clerks, etc.) that do this daily, to understand how it works in reality.
Something which might shift over the coming decades.
And Europe is missing a gigantic opportunity right now. The fact that talent is cheap, there's a strong social safety net, and we don't have enormous amounts of entrepreneurship is really strange.
Living in a dense European city, you do not need a car, healthcare is free, and you are generally afforded more time off and a stricter wlb compromise compared to the US. One doesn't need to eat takeout as often if there is time to cook. Depending on the country, rent/housing costs are more or less under control.
On the other hand swiss/Netherlands food is expensive even by bay area standards.
You’re unlikely to be able to afford to live in the center of a dense Western European city on researcher wages, and most of the jobs aren’t in the city center either, so you’ll probably still need a car.
I think in the US people romanticise living and working in Europe to an unrealistic degree. There are good reasons why the net migration of skilled workers is towards the US rather than away from it.
Universities in Europe tend to have quite central locations in the cities. Also universities are practically guaranteed to have good public transport connectivity, as students have to be able to get there.
And even though researcher wages can be low relative to US, within the respective countries they are solidly (upper) middle class, and housing isn't a major problem.
I do own a car, but I actually have to set a recurring reminder on my phone to take my car out for a ride every so often to avoid the battery draining empty. I think US people romanticise car ownership because they can't imagine how good the alternative can be.
That said, I don't work in academia and don't know what the median wage for that would be. But I don't see why a researcher wouldn't able to afford to live where I do currently, it's not wildly expensive here.
Perhaps Amsterdam airport pricing is extensively marked up compared to local pricing (understandable). Geneva was just plain expensive.
You do need a car if you care about personal safety. A lot of the public transport network in many big cities are not safe for women anymore.
>healthcare is free
Can we stop with this lie that healthcare is free in the EU? It is not. You pay for it through your taxes and those taxes are downright confiscatory.
> Depending on the country, rent/housing costs are more or less under control.
There is an ongoing housing crisis in many European countries so I am not sure how you can say that housing costs are under control.
Those in the liberal arts probably have it even worse, as their experience usually doesn't translate to industry at all.
No idea if that kind of "research" is funded the same way as hard sciences in the US though, it definitely is there.
In contrast, the humanities made their own bed. They became politically partisan, engaged in systematically discriminatory hiring practices, and routinely conduct research that the public perceive to hold little utility.
Ultimately academics need to keep in mind that they rely on the generosity of taxpayers to fund their research. If the public aren't happy that they are getting value for money they will defund these programs.
I hope that the blowback is contained to the humanities departments, but guilt by association is unfortunately a thing in politics.
If somebody wanted to become a partisan hack, there are easier ways than getting tenure, right?
Yeah the dollar is stronger which is great to buy imports.
But you cannot import housing, most healthcare, most services like cooks, cleaners and bartenders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
See Agatha Christie's quote about how she couldn't have imagined affording a car before WW1, and couldn't have imagined affording servants afterward.
Imagine a world where us intellectual types hadn’t given the right this kind of talking point on a silver platter. Election might have gone differently.
I mean that genuinely. It's unclear reality matters at all. People just make up things to be mad about now.
But it is. DEI indicates ideological capture. Whether it's good or bad doesn't matter, it's not germane to the purported goals of "advancing science/health/military readiness/etc". At best it's tangential.
If we were a robust and wealthy country, then perhaps we could engage in these sorts of boutique social experiments. But we are not. We've got serious problems on multiple fronts. Fixing it before it all goes blooey means serious disruption, and we're now well into 30 years of positive reinforcement on the ideological capture. You're not going to get the results you need from the people who benefitted from the previous mismanagement. Trump learned that lesson quite directly the last time he was in office.
Outside of academia you have things like the FAA hiring scandal coming to light: https://substack.com/home/post/p-156166190
The list goes on and on.
I think Trump decisively stripped the last of the illusions away, most people feel the vulnerability in their bones now.
But the new government of pro-russian neonazis (FPÖ) and conservatives (ÖVP) will probably be very anti-EU.
It's 2025. You can drive across most European countries in a day (a long day, in some cases, but still).
If Europe wants to stick to the borders a bunch of kings and princes hashed out in blood a hundred+ years ago it can, for the moment, but if we do, there's a decent chance it will just be crushed by the next global superpower (US, China, or weirdly enough maybe Russia considering how much influence they have over many US politicians now).
I love Europe. I was proud to become an EU citizen and my favourite scarf is an EU flag. I think it's an amazing place full of amazing countries and people. And it still can be! But for it to continue to exist, we MUST work together. Militarily, economically, and even practically (why is it so hard to book train tickets across 3 countries again?)
I know it stings, but the reality is the wolves are at the gates. Democracy has its back against the wall and we need a force that can fight back. Or government of the people, by the people, for the people, will soon perish from the Earth.
If the EU wants to stick to a technocratic structure pushing unpopular laws over the democratic institutions won in blood, it'll be probably be democratically a hard sell to give it more powers.
I agree that Europe should have more unification and coordinated action. But I don't love the EU. I quite liked social democracy, but then it was outlawed by the EU.
It was nice to have public control over the infrastructure, possibility to have industry for public benefit, possibility to nationalize out of control private sectors, possibility to retain assets and capital domestically, to control fiscal and monetary policy etc.
In the current form federal EU would be someting like having an unelected powerful executive branch, and a semi-elected weak legistlative branch. Furthermore the populace has very little idea about what is happening in the EU and who to hold accountable, partly because the media doesn't cover it, and partly because the processes are extremely convoluted and quite opaque.
Such "democratic centralism" bureaucracy probably would have benefits like more stability for long term strategy, swift execution of policies and coordinated action, but it's also very prone to corruption and elite capture.
What do you mean? The European Parliament is directly elected.
be someting like having an unelected powerful executive branch
They (the EC) need to be approved by the European Parliament and the Parliament can dissolve the EC.
If you consider the structure of the EU undemocratic, the same would apply to most countries that are considered democratic.
Somehow, though all the plausible deniability winking and nodding, his fan base got the message; You can see it plainly throughout their communications and postings before and throughout the attack.
I'm not saying this is what's coming from you, just reminded me of how many people have had so much animosity towards me over the years because of my intelligence, or maybe more so, my confidence in my intelligence. A jealousy/envy/admiration all mixed together.
Article I says: "All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States." May Congressional staff exercise legislative powers independently of the Congressmen? Nobody thinks that.
Article III says: "The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish." May judiciary branch staff exercise judicial powers independently of Supreme Court Justices and lower-court judges? Nobody thinks that.
Article I says: "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America." May executive branch staff exercise executive powers independently of the President? My sixth grader could understand that the answer is "no."
There is nothing in here about the president being a "king." It's simply that the President controls the executive branch, in the same way the Congressmen control the legislative branch and the Supreme Court justices control the judicial branch.
The Constitution establishes control and checks on that control. "checks and balances". Unitary executive theory is all control, no checks. How does Congress conduct oversight of the executive branch in this scenario?
And you're also trying to do the same thing to me right here. To accept that unitary executive theory isn't about being a king, I'd have to ignore everything the advocates of the theory have said and done. He argued in court that he has absolute immunity to commit crimes, including directing the government to kill his political opponents. You can't argue that in court and then tell me it's not about being a king. That's dictator logic.
Look at the executive right now, he's essentially got the power of a king. He can't be arrested, charged, or investigated. Can commit crimes and hide them. Can direct others to commit crimes and pardon them. Can direct his DOJ to investigate and prosecute anyone he wants. Can control and direct his military without review. Congress can't conduct oversight. Can you explain how the president is now functionally different from a king, and square that with the point of the Revolutionary War?
Personally, I think there is plenty of grift and wasteful expenditure we could look at addressing first, especially within the healthcare and defense portfolios.
I agree not using the world proven efficient healthcare strategy of universal coverage is pretty stupid economically, as is spending a trillion USD per annum on the military. But we are so rich these mistakes can be absorbed for surprisingly long.
On the right, you can be shunned by MAGA or shunned by the religious right, but still be welcome within the republican party.
On the left, you cannot challenge with any of the tent pole policies without being shunned entirely.
The opposite is true for the left and the Democratic Party. Those circles tend to be very orthodox if you live in a lefty urban area. Disagree with one major platform issue and you're immediately suspected. If you're in the suburbs or a rural area you'll find that left-leaning people are much more heterodox.
Purity spirals are most intense in enclaves, which are echo chambers.
You'll find the same phenomenon online with regard to echo chambers. If you're in a left or right wing echo chamber, the purity spiral phenomenon is intense.
That was 20 years ago, today merit only hiring is called evil by the same people, there is a reason people started to get really against what they do lately.
The culture within the hard sciences is to challenge existing theories and narratives.
The culture within the social sciences is almost the polar opposite. It still superficially presents as a science, but in practice is a purity spiral with an orthodoxy of established conclusions which cannot be challenged without severe career consequences.
The hard sciences had their Galileo affair 400 years ago, the soft sciences are in the midst of theirs right now.
It's the right thing to do. Every one of us that does creates opportunities for others to do the same.
We're running towards fascism. We must fight back.
So you can have a civil service (and the framers assumed there would be one) but Congress can’t insulate the civil service from the president’s direct supervision. That’s obviously true—because the presidential election is the only way people have to politically influence the internal operation of the executive branch itself.
I've struggled with the former a lot in my life. I was really good at school and feel very confident in my intelligence. So when I feel attacked, I often punch back at someone's intelligence without even realizing it.
Sometimes me feeling attacked is just confusion or sadness or disappointment that someone doesn't know something and I feel lonely that I'm the only one who does, and often angry when their decisions impact my life. Takes a lot to remind myself they know other things a lot better than me.
Defence is a homogenous concept, or close to it, so people can confidently state they support it.
Research is a messy mix of things people like and things they don’t.
It is it significantly easier to obtain public support for, say, cancer research, than say, fat phobia, but both are lumped together from the public’s perspective as NIH funding.
This makes it harder for people to support, because they cannot easily support what they care about without supporting what they perceive as wasteful spending.
I don’t think the public resent intelligence per se, but rather dislike when it is combined with judgementalism
The american public, beyond all else, hates being told they are wrong.
They are rarely right. So how do you square that circle?
The Federal government found a niche in basic research for a few decades and funded the vast majority of that. Per NSF, today even basic research is <40% funded by the Federal government, again not due to a decline in Federal funding but due to vast increases in industry investment. This shift toward industry investment in basic research was not overnight, it has been a monotonic trend for decades. Over the last century, the areas where Federal research funding is critical have dwindled greatly in scope because industry spends more money and is willing to take more risks.
One of the more interesting stories here is why and how this change happened in the US, to the point where the vast majority of R&D is funded by industry even in areas historically dominated by Federal government funding.
Also, industry isn't really doing that much to train the next generation of scientists.
Further more, my wife works in biotech so I have seen first hand the compromises one has to make to secure private funding. They care about things like market size and revenue potential when making these investments, which means you end up with most of the money flowing towards diseases that largely affect rich people and solutions that are either expensive or recurring. And lets also not forget that almost all of these companies are working off of or spinning out from research programs that were funded by the government. I have yet to meet a single company where that wasn't the case.
The R&D figures you're citing are for engineering the latest iPhone, not for figuring out how basic biology works.
Maybe it’s more true in some fields (biotech?)
How is this counted? If it’s based on tax figures, there’s a lot of corporate “R&D” that gets written off that wouldn’t be considered research in an academic setting.
The idea that the blatantly illegal actions by the current administration reflect public will simply isn't based in any kind of reality- just calling it out as a lie.
For example, I suspect the public strongly supports taxpayer funding of medical research, but strongly opposes taxpayer funding for social sciences.
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.
Holmes was suprisingly nihilistic, and I feel his formation of the search and competition for truth held now idealized beliefs of human behavior.
He accepted that people woudl be driven by their passions and biases, including things like a desire to create cohesion. That this was also something traded as a value and motivating force.
I generally agree, but I also think this was a natural and probably unavoidable result of having many different sources of “news”.
Prior to the internet, pretty much all news in the US came from ~5 TV networks and 1 or 2 newspapers (per city). It wasn’t practical for any of those sources to align exclusively with either political party because then they would be alienating ~half of their potential customers.
Today, there are far, far more sources to choose from. People self select those sources that they agree with. In the “old days” the news was more middle of the road politically, but that’s largely gone now. This is a major source of polarization IMO.
Unless you know someone else is going to be doing this, or you know this doesnt interest you - then see how far this makes sense to you.
I did my soul searching the day Trump won. I had a 0% chance for that occurence, and my prediction was wrong.
I relooked at everything I believed, because I had made a high confidence prediction on how the world worked, and I had made the wrong call. If this was a massive stock play, I would have been broke.
My revised position made me stop asking why Harris lost, but instead focused on how Trump ran in 2016 in the first place.
I felt it forced me to take my thinking seriously, and my assumptions seriously. Perhaps it matters and will help you too.
Who exactly holds the magnets here? Is it even knowable or is it even necessary to know to address the problem? I agree regarding media but how do you get your information at national scale then? The world seems way more complex than what it once was, the interdependence feels more like grappling moves as we approach a malthusian crunch.
Seems there is a market place for truth . Truth has become ware and has price (which is not same as cost). All else follows..
One of my other conclusions is that, with gen AI, the old assumptions of truth are gone.
Instead we're at the dawn of something like the fiat money revolution, in analogy terms. Like the value of a idea isnt about how its based on fact, but on the relation between the person sharing it, and the person paying attention to it.
Im hoping someone makes a blog post about this.
Also - this used to be hacker news. As in who gives a shit about what is, its about what needs to change.
Think of it this way - this is just a puzzle that needs to be cracked. Take it as a job application problem, and see how it can be dissected over the weekend.
Come up with some theories, then go see if you can disprove them.
Fixing anything, comes from defining the right problem anyway.
Also, China is nominally a communist country. Vietnam is a communist country.
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.
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.
We really have no way of knowing that. It's not like there is any organization that analyzes and critiques the mainstream press in any regular fashion. For instance, the press clearly knew that Biden had major cognitive impairments but they misreported it to the public. There was no accountability at all when the truth was discovered. Same with the story of Trump colluding with Russia, or the many, many different racial hate crime hoaxes. There is ZERO accountability for misleading the public.
I'm skeptical of all the talk about "authoritarianism." All those ideas seem be based on shoddy social science theorizing after WW2 - e.g. "The Authoritarian Personality." I don't think you can accurately predict the rise of a totalitarian leader based on what happened in Germany.
Also, most conflict is back-and-forth attacks and counterattacks. You reject me, I ignore you, you call me names, I block you, etc. Instead, if you reject me, then I tell you it hurts you said that to me, and yet I imagine you've had a long day and are trying your best, it breaks the cycle.
For better or worse, there is no media, only social media mobs.
I would think both sides of the political spectrum agree that the government spends money frivolously; so I am confused on why people are so upset. Maybe they aren't actually upset and all we are hearing in any form of media are government leeches crying about the end to their gravy train.
And yes, everyone agrees that there is waste on government, however, what is being labeled as waste is medicare and SNAP and foreign aid.
Why are people upset? there's 200,000 people getting laid off and its only february, of course people are upset, I very much doubt 200k employees are DEI hires.
> The layoffs include between 1,200 and 2,000 employees at the Department of Energy (DOE), including staff from the nuclear security administration and the loans office, two sources familiar with the decision told Reuters.
https://www.newsweek.com/federal-layoffs-live-thousands-prob...
Let's not forget about FAA, which immediately had 2 crashes after it was gutted.
> The aviation security committee, which was mandated by Congress after the 1988 PanAm 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, will technically continue to exist but it won’t have any members to carry out the work of examining safety issues at airlines and airports. Before Tuesday, the group included representatives of all the key groups in the industry — including the airlines and major unions — as well as members of a group associated with the victims of the PanAm 103 bombing. The vast majority of the group’s recommendations were adopted over the years.
https://apnews.com/article/coast-guard-homeland-security-pri...
That kind of change though would leave someone with the bag and tends to never get voted or happen so we stay stuck in the over priced pharma, insurance, beating around the bush health game were in. Everyone is incentivezed to keep the bandaids rolling. Don't tell people their drug habits (I mean eating habits) are killing them.
Ohh wait, we got a new pgp blocker for you!
How about just skip breakfast.....
It goes from "its the lefts fault, and maybe you shouldnt call people Nazi."
To "It works for Trump!"
to "trump connects to people. the left doesnt"
Lol. This is like when you are in an abusive relationship, and you are always wrong, and theres no real way to explain why you are always wrong - until you accept that one side is meant to be the loser in an abusive realtion.
If your primary personality is perceived as immature, it's going to cost you votes.
If you can connect with people on multiple levels, you can broaden your appeal by appeal to people with preferences for different levels of maturity.
He's good at identifying ideas whose time has come, I'll give him that much credit. Ransacking the US Treasury wasn't on the radar, though, as far as I could see.
https://waymo.com/blog/2024/03/scaling-waymo-one-safely-acro...
Note the date. Tesla still doesn't have a taxi.
You can be shunned from MAGA, while remaining republican. You can be shunned from the religious right, while remaining republican.
There is significantly more ideological diversity within the republican party than within the democratic party, and the result is democrats switching to republican at a rate 4 times higher than the republicans switch to democrats.
Can you really? Who is that?
This poll is a little old, but in 2023 only 38% of republicans identify as MAGA republicans
https://www.vanderbilt.edu/unity/2023/04/07/first-ever-vande...
And here's a list of prominent republicans who are not MAGA republicans:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Republicans_who_oppose...
No one's too rich to get shot by the world's largest superpower.
Zuckerberg didn't do a giant public 180 for funsies.
I must say though, this "billionaires as terrified victims" narrative is hilarious. I hope the Democratic party rescues these poor billionaires from the man they're publicly supporting!
There's a good summary of all the changes at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/10/technology/meta-mark-zuck...
> I must say though, this "billionaires as terrified victims" narrative is hilarious.
Do you not think Putin's oligarchs fear him? They're immensely wealthy, but they live within the reach of the guy in charge.
Trump previously threatened Zuck with life in prison. https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/28/trump-zuckerberg-el...
Both can be true. I also consider it a failure of regulation and humanity that a billionaire can just own a newspaper and nix stories for clout.
This country was built on privately owned newspapers wielded as weapons by their owners; I'm sure you've heard of Benjamin Franklin. The First Ammendment protects this more than anything else for this reason.
The government has all the cards, negotiation is really just a matter of will.
If there is only 1 company to negotiate with, the government is really the only entity that can threaten to simply create a competitor and give them the IP rights (by legal fiat) to do so. If you tell the existing company that your alternative solution is to compete with them using taxpayer money, they might choose to take the lesson of history and accept the government's negotiating position.
With no legal precedent supporting him but absolutely no resistance from the branches of government meant to keep him in check.
On the side, he may open the door for generic substitutes as well from CAN etc.
A simple price directive would be set at the same time, without any negotiation:
The price US medicare will pay will only be the average price for each drug, in all OECD countries.
Not to mention, he ran on the opposite of what he's doing. He claimed he was going to end wars and immediately threatened war on multiple allies, with the latest being a threat of mass ethnic cleansing in Gaza. And on and on.
> coup: a sudden decisive exercise of force in politics and especially the violent overthrow or alteration of an existing government by a small group.
> Not to mention, he ran on the opposite of what he's doing. He claimed he was going to end wars and immediately threatened war on multiple allies, with the latest being a threat of mass ethnic cleansing in Gaza. And on and on.
Voters appear to disagree with you. [His approval rating has never been higher while in office.](https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/favorability/dona...)
Trump is doing an otherthrow of an existing government by a small group. That fits perfectly.
> the Supreme Court ruled nine to nothing that when Congress directs that money be spent, the president is obliged to do it. [...] Presidents can certainly send recommendations to Congress that funds should be cut. The Impoundment Control Act provides an expedited procedure for having those recommendations considered. But the president simply doesn’t have this unilateral authority.
https://www.vox.com/politics/398618/elon-musk-doge-illegal-l...
Democraties work with checks and balances, which are being broken right now.
On a final note, historically a lot of coup came from elected presidents
I didn't claim everything he does is democratic. I claimed that what he is doing is as promised to voters. Don't take my word for it. He is now at the highest approval rating he has ever had in office (https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/favorability/dona...). People obviously feel he is delivering what he promised.
I don't think any checks and balances are being broken. Trump and the Republicans won the popular vote (which is kind of insane in an of itself), the Electoral College, the House, and the Senate. They have an unprecedented mandate to carry out unprecedented change by voters who were obviously VERY unhappy with the Democrat Party.
> On a final note, historically a lot of coup came from elected presidents
I can't fathom what you're trying to argue with this. That we should stop elections because the people might elect an authoritarian?
See Napoleon 3, Hitler himself...
Your opinion is revealing, if you already think he has full power, then you agree it's a coup.
US collects about $12Trillion in taxes total (30% ish of GDP), under $2trillion of that is given to the federal government for medicare, medicade and the military, they spend more than $5trillion, which is what they spend on medicare, medicade the military and the interest on the $37Trillion debt they have accumulated spending more than they were given by the states for medicare medicade and the military - mostly bank and insurance fund bailouts to prop up the failed US financial system, adding about $3trillion to the federal debt each year, which is why it has gone from $30trillion at the end of 2022, to $37trillion now.
Getting downvoted because I do my own research instead of believing the latest gormless chatbot, that's new.
Uh, we didn't. Even in the “balanced budget” years 1998-2001, the debt increased.
Unless you mean reducing the debt to GDP ratio, which we did in parts of the 1990s, and some periods since, but that's not much explained by the spending control methods you discuss, but by growing the economy.
Four; federal fiscal years 1998-2001, had a federal surplus, per OMB figures: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFSD
But, through that entire period (almost every quarter, and definitely every year) the federal debt still increased: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEBTN
So, not really a demonstrated playbook to reduce the debt.
OTOH, for a longer period in the 1990 (starting about 1995), in the last half of the long and strong 1990s expansion, the arguably more important debt: GDP ratio was going down. The 2010s might have seen something similar -- it had roughly, though more noisily than in the 1990s, plateaud before the Trump tax cuts, and might have dropped even with similar spending patterns without them.
But, yeah, the secret there is largely strong economic expansion, though you can still screw it up on the fiscal policy side.
I said we have a playbook to reduce the US debt. A more correct statement would have been "We already have a playbook to audit and reduce US government spending".
It is NOT done by giving one of the least competent ketamine junkies in front of a computer with a list of budget item names and tweeting the ones he finds most offensive.
Air that shit in congress where it can face PUBLIC scrutiny and debate, not in a forum literally controlled by the guy doing it. That's how we got rid of the unfortunate boondoggle SSC and kept the better ISS.
The fed reports a doubling of tax receipts from 1990 to 2000. There has been at least another doubling since then. Because Trump is a corrupt grifter and a shill for certain corps, he has already floated a plan to cut more taxes. Trump supporters do not want to bring taxes back up on companies apparently. They'd rather keep seeing their own taxes go up.
So they're going to cut stuff. Probably good stuff, probably important stuff. I'm saying there is a demonstrated productive way to cut stuff in the US system while limiting the pain and cutting of actually important stuff and that's what they would be doing if they actually wanted to fix any problem
Also I'm pretty sure the GAO has a standing list of things to do. That would also be better than this.
Where you live is comparable to somewhere like Raleigh and not comparable at all to NYC/SF.
There is a saying that Europe is better if you are poor and the US is better if you are rich or middle class. I think that is broadly speaking true.
Of course European countries don't allow poor Americans to migrate so the only people who would be better off aren't allowed to move.
Life isn’t an episode of the apprentice… nobody in congress sees their oversight role as firing random post office clerks. That’s idiocy. Congress controls the law and the purse. Conservatives have been wielding this power for years - that’s why single moms are routinely nabbed in audits for earned income fraud, while rich people get away with donating millions to phoney foundations that they control for years. (Congress limits funding for enforcement)
The executive has broad authority to take personnel actions while adhering to the law.
This doesn’t make sense, to suggest they have the opportunity to defund something that they don’t even know exists or what it includes is just not credible.
How could if possibly come to their attention in the first place?
That's far closer to a dystopia than anything the US has proferred recently.
The parliament is directly elected, but it doesn't have full legislative powers. It can't propose new laws and the Council of the EU has veto over the parliament. Dissolving the EC also needs a supermajority.
The structure is at least way less directly democratic than any EU country.
What is a better test?
> And less than 10% of university astrophysicists think the world is flat. Where's the diversity?!
I suspect you wouldn't be making this naturalistic fallacy if the ratio were flipped. Either way, you appear to confirm that the purpose was not diversity.
Exactly. A true objective test doesn't exist.
As far as the SAT: You can take prep classes, hire a tutor, and do all sorts of resource-intensive things that will boost your SAT without really contributing to your overall intelligence. You can study for the test. And guess who is more likely to have resources available to access these things? Is a rich kid who spends a year in prep inherently smarter than a poor kid who can't afford a tutor and has to work an evening job to help her family make ends meet?
And why, more broadly, are we completely fine tilting the tables in favor of the wealthy and entrenched but the second something seems like it might give an ounce of advantage to a disadvantaged class people lose their minds?
We get rid of DEI, but I haven't heard a word about getting rid of legacy admissions and rooting out nepotism.
I largely agree but I doubt other issues would be such massive free wins for Republicans. The Republican base has become rabid over DEI and trans issues and it has been really obvious for a while now that it was going to be a massive problem for Democrats. Sadly these issues have become more divisive than even gun control.
They will continue inventing issues until they find one that sticks.
You have to realize some of these issues didn't used to be as divisive. They made them divisive. Abortion being the most obvious. If you need an issue to rally around, you create one.
They were able to make a massive issue out of the existence of less than a percent of the population, if the can do that how can you say they wouldn't have made issues of literally anything?
I really don't see why Europe can't figure this out.
I know it's not easy when times are urgent and feelings understandably run high, but those are the times when the rules need to count the most (as the site guidelines say: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.")
Budgets are an approval to spend up to a certain amount, not a requirement to spend a certain amount.
We passed laws about that because of a previous Republican president who was also fond of executive overreach.
Exactly how else are you supposed to get this tested by the courts?
Not without approval from Congress:
"The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 provides that the president may propose rescission of specific funds, but that rescission must be approved by both the House of Representatives and Senate within 45 days. In effect, the requirement removed the impoundment power, since Congress is not required to vote on the rescission and, in fact, has ignored the vast majority of presidential requests."
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impoundment_of_appropriated_fu...
Life is not some break and forgive world, it's neutral if you bring a child in this world through rape and destruction, that is innately equal to consentual, kind and forgiving child rearing.
Even Trump claiming the election was stolen wasn't new. Hillary Clinton did the exact same thing.
Some just shrink away, others lash out with vengeance, but I do think it is a huge societal problem, especially as the demographics of the country shift and white men may no longer have the majority in a democratic society.
Many democratic societies that are ruled by a minority demographic do not tend to survive, and so I think the transition from white majority to non-white majority is actually a fundamental issue for our democracy.
But about why people are upset about DEI, I think that has more to do with white people, especially men, not feeling well. Unless there's a huge portion of non-white people who have such vitriol towards DEI. I think maybe some of the Asian-American population, but I don't know about other segments. But im open to being wrong on that
> I don't think any checks and balances are being broken. Trump and the Republicans won the popular vote (which is kind of insane in an of itself), the Electoral College, the House, and the Senate.
Well but right now why isn't he using any of those then? Musk operates outside any legal framework.
Maybe Trump isn't as confident as you seem on the loyalty of his fellow non-MAGA Republicans.
> I can't fathom what you're trying to argue with this. That we should stop elections because the people might elect an authoritarian?
I'm just disproving the nonsensical argument "he's been elected, therefore it'll remain a democracy". Well no, that isn't a sufficient guarantee.
Of that, individual income tax was about $2.4 trillion, payroll tax was $1.7 trillion, corporate income tax was $530 billion, and there's about $253 billion of "other."
Fortunately Trump hasn't destroyed revenue reporting yet. This contains info for FY2024:
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/gover...
Is bad math.
Or if you spend $5.5T a year and your debt increases $3.5T you had $2T in revenue.
But here you go Medicare 2023 https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-does-the-government-s... $848.2 billion
Medicade 2023 $606 billion https://www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/medicaid-financing-...
Military 2023 https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-does-the-us-spend-on-... $820 billion
848+620+820 = $2.2T
National debt https://www.investopedia.com/us-national-debt-by-year-749929... $30,928 end of FY 2022 $33,167 end of FY 2023
How exactly are you saying they spent 2T more than they collected in revenue again? Is this a Joe Biden forget where he put it or smth?
Meanwhile Debt now https://www.usdebtclock.org/ $36.4T =$33,167 end of FY 2023, spent $3.3T on interest, Collected and spent $2.2T on medicare,medicade and the military. = $33.1 +3.3 -2.2 +2.2 = $36.4T
good luck have fun. Im out. enjoy your fantasy economics for the few months it has left. Last group of federated states with group finances in a similar position was the USSR circa early 1991, pop quiz, can you guess what I think happens to the US next?
I think Myers v. United States was correctly decided: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/272/52/#tab-opin...
"The vesting of the executive power in the President was essentially a grant of the power to execute the laws. But the President, alone and unaided, could not execute the laws. He must execute them by the assistance of subordinates. This view has since been repeatedly affirmed by this Court. Wilcox v. Jackson, 13 Peters 498, 38 U. S. 513; United States v. Eliason, 16 Peters 291, 302; Williams v. United States, 1 How. 290, 42 U. S. 297; Cunningham v. Neagle, 135 U. S. 1, 135 U. S. 63; Russell Co. v. United States, 261 U. S. 514, 261 U. S. 523. As he is charged specifically to take care that they be faithfully executed, the reasonable implication, even in the absence of express words, was that, as part of his executive power, he should select those who were to act for him under his direction in the execution of the laws."
The Constitution, of course, imposes limits on executive power, and statutes create private rights and obligations and provide procedures and substantive standards. But if the executive power otherwise may be exercised, Congress cannot constitutionally insulate the exercise of that power from the President's influence. Put differently, the procedural framework of a law can't merely be there to insulate the exercise of executive power from the President's influence.
To address your examples:
> Can he, for example, raise and lower interest rates over the objection of the Fed?
Probably.
> Approve an IPO that the SEC rejected?
It depends. The securities laws regulate private conduct--that's important--and impose various standards and procedures. So the president can't alter private rights without following those procedures and standards. But can the president supervise and direct how the SEC does it's job? Yes. The Arthrex case is relevant here: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/19-1434_ancf.pdf.
> Lend money to his supporters through the SBA and deny loan applications from his adversaries? Refuse to deliver Hunter Biden's mail?
No to both, because nobody at SBA or USPS could permissibly do those things.
I don't see why. A specific person at the SBA is empowered to approve or deny the loan, and that person works for someone who works for someone who works for the president, right? I assume we both agree that Trump could likely get the loan approved indirectly, by ordering the SBA administrator to get it done and replacing him if he refuses. What's the difference between that, and Trump accomplishing the same thing faster via executive order, "As president I have reviewed this loan and all relevant regulations and determine that it is approved"?
For me and (despite what you say) conventional wisdom, the difference is that the SBA is empowered by statute to loan money and the president isn't. Under your interpretation, I don't think there is a difference and he really could do that. What would stop him? At least in the case of the SEC, someone might plausibly argue that he had broken a law, but I believe the criteria the SBA uses to approve loans are departmental regulations, which by your reasoning ought to be subject to the same presidential whims.
edit- I just realized that I used firing earlier as an example - "If the statute of the Dept of XYZ and says the president can fire its governing board but only on weekends, then he has to wait til Saturday" - which is probably why you brought up Myers. I don't really disagree with Myers (or Seila for that matter), but I also don't think it's very relevant to the larger question of whether creating an agency to do X is tantamount to empowering the president to personally do X.
These people in power are using any good faith doubt about dei that an everyday citizen may have, and are using it to revert to White-by-default government, and tearing up the entire civil service.
If you don't know if and despise Russell Vought and Stephen Miller and their philosophy of the Constitution, you need to.
That's racist. It doesn't excuse existing racist policies.
I think the challenge with DEI is the framing of it. If we called it intercultural competence, or intercultural teambuilding, or whatever, then it focuses on how we are a highly multicultural society in the US and that there are huge benefits to being able to connect and collaborate with people across a wide variety of cultures.
Have customers who are in a rural area? Well, sometimes it's really hard for people in the city to comprehend what rural life is like, sometimes much easier to have someone on your team from the rural area to provide that tacit knowledge. Sell beauty supplies and looking to get into the African-American market? Can be really hard for white men to know the tacit knowledge involved in managing 4c level curly hair (most white men probably have never knew there was a classification system on the level of curliness of hair).
I worked in innovation consulting for a few years. The ability to empathize and connect with people across cultures may be one of the most important skills in innovation and problem solving. So maybe it's just a framing issue.
And it would be a lie because DEI is not solely about race.
I don’t see DEI helping poor white males, for example, and there’s a lot of those in America. Even those whose families don’t own property and have never been to college.
> the truth in many cases is that it is an excuse to exclude white males.
One might think that the current pushes are an excuse to exclude various minorities. Considering what DEI initiatives were born of just a few decades ago, I don't think that's an unreasonable conclusion either.
I do think there's some truth to listen to from those so opposed to the initiatives - there's some that go too far and should be reigned in - but, as others have pointed out in this thread, drinking the Kool Aid with this push isn't really going to fix anything. It's just swinging back and forth on the political pendulum. Is that really what people want?
Because no, I have never said that I would ignore those gullible people.
Ontop of this I fail to see what supposed soul searching we need to do, for example if I believe in free speech and the gullible voter voted for a president because they promised to flattered them while also promising to remove free speech and jail anyone who speak unfavorablely about them.
Or how about a real example, what soul searching did the republicans have to do when the south seceed? Or how about the social democrats, liberals and the few conservatives who were executed by the nazis, they should've have been more antisemitic? While Hitler took control via technicality rules?
He gets extremely angry when NFL players do "N*** behavior", like get in a bar fight, and has never once talked about a white football player doing things like, IDK, stealing from charities.
Any time he drinks whiskey at all, he uses it as an excuse to get very very very aggressive and attack strangers in bars.
He thinks the solution to school shootings is for teachers to be armed. My mother, a teacher of 35 years who has had to literally break up two large teenage boys trying to kill each other, explained that she doesn't get paid enough to learn how to operate a firearm safely around kids, and that's asking for more trouble than it would help. She also used to make daily jokes about running over the bad kids in the school parking lot, so I think it's not a great idea either.
He used to fly a confederate flag as "honoring his heritage". He is french canadian from northern maine, so his heritage is: Marrying native americans princesses because you left the wife at home, murdering those slaving bastards from the south for the glory of the union, and being oppressed by the KKK restarting in our state because we are french catholic
He insists he has never been sicker than since he has gotten the COVID vaccine. In high school he spent a month shitting blood due to a rare medical defect and didn't go to the hospital because he thought he was dying from being an alcoholic. Before COVID existed, he was infamous in our family for exhibiting the worst "man colds" we have ever known of periodically.
He insists that education is liberal brainwashing despite never setting foot in an education institution past high school, which he spent failing biology and learning how to repair cars instead in the vocational wing, and his own mom being a college adjunct professor for decades.
He TAUGHT my nephew to hate Biden. He didn't tell my nephew "here's some things biden and democrats have done that make life worse for people", he just says, multiple times a day in front of the child, "democrats are evil". For reference, our mother did not tell us basically any political opinion for our entire life. He was allowed to go listen to absurd AM radio without anyone telling him what was right or wrong. I thought she DID teach us empathy though.
He thinks Unions are evil.
My sister runs one of the most successful childcare program businesses in the southern part of the state, and has been successfully running businesses involving childcare since 2006. My brother has run zero business other than buying stuff off Facebook marketplace and flipping it to a dumber buyer for a profit. He tried to give her business advice, and became extremely hostile to her when she told him that his advice didn't make sense and was wrong.
He believes we need to strengthen the US border with Mexico to keep out immigrants for our national safety and that immigrants are taking our jobs. His lifelong best friend, who has the same opinion and voting history, is the heir and operator of one of the largest farms in northern maine. Every year they bus in hundreds of people who don't speak english, sleep 50 to a shack, and get paid under the table to pick crops. They've never committed crime while in town.
During the BLM protests, he informed my mother that there were violent protests in my city. The protest was 12 young adults silently laying on the ground in front the entrance to the police station. Our state has high requirements for being a police officer, and even progressives around here have faith in the police, possibly without reason as the shooting with Robert Card showed.
His explicit opinion is that spending $25 to give a junkie a second chance with Narcan is wrong because "it's your choice to ruin your life with drugs". He has had a nicotine addiction since 14 that his wife has begged him to stop for a decade and he has promised he doesn't have anymore.
My brother does not believe women and black people are his equal, full stop. He admits he doesn't like Trump and admits that Trump did not win the 2020 election and people saying he did are nuts. He genuinely believes himself to be "centrist", not republican, and claims he only votes for republicans because of Gun Rights.
He has firsthand experience, multiple times of getting stuff stolen from him and the police basically giving him a shrug because they don't feel like doing their job. He is FRIENDS with most of the police that do this. He believes that crime is going up and not being reported because of democratic scheming. Our state had a republican governor at the time the cops didn't want to do their jobs.
He's "NEVER wrong", and he believes that 100%. I don't know any other way to say this, but that statement is incredibly incorrect.
He is wrong, or lying. The story is identical with 80% of my family. They believe themselves the best thing since sliced bread, and believe that a few diversity programs trying to get black people and women into jobs they have never wanted have irreparably damaged the country and their lives. They have, not an exaggeration, never ever ever been in competition with black people or women for any position, any job, any task, etc.
The only difference between my fairly empathetic liberal reality and his "Democrats should be shot" (exact quote) one is that I grew up reading books and having my open minded friend asking me how gay marriage ACTUALLY hurts me and admiring my single mom for being such a powerful force despite the deck stacked against her and learning how science actually works, and he grew up hanging out with people who told N-word jokes and meant it and insisted the civil war was "the war of northern aggression", and claimed science doesn't work, without evidence mind you.
Trump is 100% about names, holy shit.
I think the left needs to get better at name calling, and match the winning strategy. Maybe it needs to keep coming up with new funny names.
TO be serious - nthing the left does will likely work, because they have to somehow appeal to everyone. Be polite and strong, firm and flexible, forgiving and retributive.
Basically a unicorn.
One problem is that the "left" has NO media at all. Republicans opt in to a completely controlled media platform, on Truth Social which is owned by Trump, on Fox News which multiple times has had to argue in court that nobody would take anything they say seriously, and also was knowingly lying to their audience, on AM radio which is used to yell at you 24/7 about how the dems are going to destroy you ANY DAY NOW, on Joe Rogan the podcast viewed by a hundred million people as it talks about how oppressed and cancelled it is and also if Biden said that it's evidence of brain damage but if Trump said that he didn't mean it, on our local news which is bought and paid for by a conglomerate that contractually obligates it's stations to pretend they came up with a story on their own and run identical pieces all across the country about how "damaging to our democracy" democrats are".
What do liberals have to push whatever message they want pushed?
Reddit? Nah, it's half dead, most activity is literally bots reposting year old threads comment for comment to build up karma, it has the cultural pull of HN if HN didn't have YC behind it.
Facebook? You can call people mentally disabled on there now for the crime of being born with genitals that don't match your brain.
CNN? Give me a break. Nobody has trusted CNN since at least the original gulf wars. After that Malaysian airlines plane vanished they asked a aviation expert if it could have been a black hole that swallowed up the plane. They were bought recently by new people, who want to be more pro Trump, mostly because it's just outright more profitable. People watched more CNN during Trump's first term because shit was always being broken, while nobody watched during Biden's term, because nobody expected biden to do anything.
MSNBC? Weirdly popular with "liberal" celebrities and hollywood, but nobody on the east coast cares about it. Even on a good day it has HALF the viewership of Fox News. It's also more like "Laugh at republicans doing stupid things" than actually about liberal policy. MSNBC will tell you that what Trump is doing is illegal, but they wont comprehensively explain why
Liberals and progressives don't seem to be even remotely as willing to opt in to a purposely ideological media stream. I guess AOC does well when she goes on twitch, but even on that platform, the big """leftist""" streamer is a bad person and Noam Chomksy style "america bad" concern troll, and there are multiple much more popular streamers who teach literal children that if video games don't have hyper exaggerated overly sexualized anime women in them, they're "woke". The "I'm a child who likes video games, I'm going to watch video game content" to "I hate women" pipeline is truly insane. Even the people who are part of it don't seem to understand the part they are playing. A group of 12 year old boys met one of their favorite streamers from the Fresh and Fit podcast, and after getting a selfie with him, chanted "I hate women, kill all women", as the podcaster went "what, no no don't hate women!"
90% of the Fresh and Fit podcast is the hosts, men, complaining about how women are inherently less rational than men, complaining that women overreact, complaining that women are shallow on a podcast ostensibly about "gains", bringing very very drunk women on to argue with them about, anything, and shouting them down if the women try to make a point, and threatening them with legal action if they argue too much by claiming the women (who have been invited onto the show) are "trespassing", complaining that women are less accepting of outright facts than men like the fact "women are inherently less rational than men", complaining that women are whores and use sex as a weapon...
But he had a shocked pikachu face when his 12 year old fan said he hates women.
The rise in basic research in industry coincides with the rise of technology as a major component of the US economy decades ago. I suspect these are not unrelated. The growth of deep tech investment by the private sector probably has a lot to do with it.
In terms of following the strictures of the Constitution, nothing the administration has done has made things any worse in that regard and in fact, has the potential to make things much better. The bureaucracy has grown into an extraconstitutional (which is to say, unconstitutional) fourth branch of government with separated powers of its own. Destroying that independence and returning executive power to the elected executive is a massive step in the right direction.
The key is to tie it to national pride, something everyone instinctively appreciates.
It was openly discussed that Biden was not looking sharp (even though Trump couldn't hold a debate with a mirror).
Biden Stepped down, mid cycle - this was something unthinkable to election strategists and pundits.
It remains one of the most amazing things I've seen, because I understand what it takes to do that, and what many others did in a similar position.
If you want to talk about how perceptions are made - consider that less is made of Biden's actions here, and more is made of the fact that he ran at all.
Did you know that the Russia case resulted in 8 guilty please and 1 conviction? Trump didn't get touched because they knew of the Russian interference, but didnt expect it to harm them.
A sitting president cant be indicted on federal crimes, so the obstruction of justice case was dropped.
This is unfortunate, since it gives ammunition to everyone, at which point it just becomes a team sport.
However, having seen authoritarian states, this is 100% from that play book. And yes, it feels insane and high strung to write that, but what can one do?
It looks like a wolf, it bites like a wolf, but maybe its just a massive dog.
The "mainstream press" is actually hundreds or thousands of individual institutions, some big, small, and each have their own flaws, strengths, biases, audiences, cultures and incentives. They compete with and often criticize/check one another. It's not even all that unusual for an editorial columnists to lambast their own publications.
I don't want to idealize it too much, but feedback loops for self-correction are baked into the pie, and they do actually work from time to time.
There's a completely different physics in the right-wing media world though, best illustrated by the aftermath of the 2020 election. Fox had to pivot hard to election denialism because they were getting killed in the ratings by upstarts like Newsmax and OANN who went all in on the election lies. The right-wing media feedback loops don't self-correct, they incentivize extremism, grievance and conspiracy theory.
> For instance, the press clearly knew that Biden had major cognitive impairments but they misreported it to the public. There was no accountability at all when the truth was discovered.
This is mostly right-wing media fiction. Stories and commentary on Biden's age were quite frequent in my experience.
(There's basically a whole genre of faux right-wing media criticism in the style of: "The mainstream media won't talk about X...", even while headlines about X all over the place in on "mainstream" media outlets)
> Same with the story of Trump colluding with Russia
It's not quite that simple. That's not a single story, it's was an ongoing series of stories and investigations that developed over time.
There was plenty of measured, careful reporting around all of that stuff. There was plenty of irresponsible reporting too. There was also plenty of self-flagellation afterwards over a lot of it.
(The Trump campaign, along with folks in it's orbit, did collude with Russia. People went to jail. Paul Manafort literally met a Russian spy on a park bench, kind of like you see in the spy movies, to covertly hand over proprietary voter data. Roger Stone was coordinating with Russian hackers and wikileaks to leak hacked DNC data, etc.)
> I'm skeptical of all the talk about "authoritarianism."
If you can't recognize it as a sign of authoritarianism when a sitting president nearly murdered an entire building full of cops, legislators, staff and his own vice president in a mad, desperate bid to nullify an election and seize power, I'm not sure what can break through.
But we are backsliding, there's no doubt about that. How far we fallback will depend on how effectively we oppose... well.. the current ruling party as it currently exists.
the other important thing to keep in mind is that in the EU in general, there's no added taxes on the bill, and tips are less of a thing here, so there's not a magical 20%+ hidden charge to factor in on everything you order.
Your basis for how much people pay for groceries was how expensive a sandwich was at an airport?
Basically the take is first what anyone that have lived abroad (or economist should) know, that you can't flat compare salary or PPP since the expenditure and quality of goods/service per expenditures are drastically different.
So one have to also consider what your expenditure, and quality requirements are. In the most extreme case, if your goal is "early retirement" then probably work in US retire abroad is optimal. But if your goal is "working in something I like while not having to be stressed about it" then it falls to the latter. What about your requirement for socialization and size of housing, dating/children, etc. How many products do you buy and how important is that? 50% paycut but no need to upkeep a car, no need to worry for healhcare, no need to save for kids college, can all add up.
The only thing that I think you can say with absolute certainty from the personal PPP in EU vs US comparison is that if traveling abroad (and buying products from abroad) is absolutely crucial to your happiness, nowhere beat the dollar & high salary.
Since you have your high US salary why not visit the Berlin office, or travel there. Try to find someone in a similar position in life as you are, and extrapolate from that
Good advice. Do the research before making the move. 50% salary cut at higher levels is tough to overcome though.
People should stop bashing the EU. Like any democracy it has its issues, but it is hugely successful in avoiding war between countries that have been in war for centuries, plus the EU actually has a spine and has generally (with exceptions) protected people's privacy, protected people against large companies, etc.
The primary weakness of the EU is that it cannot do enough yet (but every crisis makes leaders realize that working together at the EU-level is more successful than trying to operate as a single country).
Every government in the world has a permanent set of employees which enact policy and turn political intentions into legislation. Usually these are split into departments, each headed by temporary political appointee.
So exactly like the European Commission, then. Why is it only "undemocratic" when the European Union does it?
Are you suggesting that all 32000 people working for it should be elected? I'm quite certain there is no government in the world which does that and it seems quite impractical.
Or should every political appointment be directly elected, instead of appointed by a head of state? You could do that, but I am not aware of any major government which does so, so if that's the sole reason to call it "undemocratic" then it's a double standard.
Myers happened to be about removal, but it articulated a broader principle:
> As he is charged specifically to take care that they be faithfully executed, the reasonable implication, even in the absence of express words, was that, as part of his executive power, he should select those who were to act for him under his direction in the execution of the laws.
There may places where it has become discriminatory in practice by overcorrection or by demonizing certain groups.
My point is that the people you cheer on are white supremacists, and people who want to destroy the federal government while making the president completely unaccountable.
You're cheering on a serial killer being made a custodian because he's a clean freak and the halls are messy.
You think we need to start trade wars with our allies, hire white supremacists throughout government, end all DEI, cease all foreign aid, attempt to illegally abolish multiple federal agencies, gut consumer and worker protections, and institute a purge of apolitical career civil servants because you saw a stupid list of words put out by a liberal college group?
Are you serious? I'm not trying to troll. You can't separate out what is being done right now, and who is being put in charge. Trump is a package deal with no surprises. Reading your other comments I can tell we disagree but you seem to be reasonable. I simply can't see how what is happening to the US right now is worth it in order to clean up perceived problems with DEI.
Govt money going to NYTimes, AP, Reuters, Politico: https://x.com/stillgray/status/1887191056074350690 https://x.com/Austen/status/1887179699874304210 https://x.com/kylenabecker/status/1887179349440290883 https://x.com/stillgray/status/1887184877197410455 https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/1887147866688213254
This guy has been providing evidence for a decade: https://x.com/MikeBenzCyber
Long list of questionable funding by USAID: https://x.com/RapidResponse47/status/1887151291895267553
...
Don't get me wrong. There is certainly fraud and overpayment happening in government operations. But just looking at receipts is not the smoking gun. If anyone suspects fraud, there are a processes. Inspectors Generals are (were) one way to have those payments investigated, DOJ and FBI would be another step. The IGs were fired last week. I wonder why...
Also, this "Ian Miles Cheong" guy is literally a Kremlin operative - really someone worth blocking. So that's important to know about his motivations to sow doubt in US Democracy.
> The above claim was false. Publicly available records showed that in 2023 and 2024, the USAID paid a total of $44,000 — not $8 million — to Politico, and the payments were earmarked for institutional subscriptions to E&E News, a Politico publication. No other transactions between USAID and Politico were listed for the entire previous decade.
Nice, how much are you getting to propagandize?
EDIT to make my current position clear, I do think there is probably waste in various government agencies. My objection with the current approach is mainly 2 folds:
1. The lack of transparency and accountability
2. Some of the statements from the administration that are false or misleading. e.g. the 50 million on condoms.
The 2 combined makes it difficult to have trust on what's happening.
People have despaired of making common cause, because bipartisanship IS punished within the republican party, and by FOX.
I can apprecaite my fellow man, but I must also answer the question posed by the success of their tactics. I know that during the Bush era, the republicans would be AGHAST at someone like him. Someone who openly doubted McCain?? Good gravy, that would have been something to see.
But reality has drifted, and political success has dependend more and more on extremism and animosity. They can dispute the existence of evolution, and succeed in making it an issue!
Today, all that seems to matter is poltical efficiency. People have voted for Trump even KNOWING that he is going to be terrible, but because he is better for their goals.
I can feel for everyone, but as the right likes to say - who gives a frig about your feelings?
What matters is winning.
Make emapthy win. Make bipartisanship work again, then you have a chance. But why should the republicans ever do that? Their approach has given them everything they have ever desired.
Their primary focus should be retaining voters, by broadening the range of opinions which are acceptable within the party.
They are a decade down a purity spiral, which has resulted in the range of acceptable opinions within the party shrinking considerably, and the shunning of many individuals unnecessarily, who either stop voting altogether or find company on the right.
I gave the example above of how the republican party is able to accomodate a significant number of both pro-life and pro-choice members. The Democrats will similarly need to learn to expand their umbrella as well. Perhaps not with abortion rights, but maybe by shedding some of their zero-sum economic thinking, or race-centric thinking.
If they can fix this, they will grow, because their biggest source of new members is young adults becoming eligible to vote, not people they pull away from the right. The Democrats just need to stop churning so many people away.
I think this is the big one here. Race and gender, this seems to be the only thing Dems can even talk about. I just saw videos from the recent DNC winter meeting. Watch for just 75 seconds starting here: https://youtu.be/1pHvkq4ehkE?t=93
I guess this apparently plays well among the tiny base that the DNC still has, but when most independents and moderates look at this nonsense, this party is a caricature of itself.
And my point isn't that they need to pull the far right into their tent somehow. But rather that most people including the average first-time voters, are much more moderate than the current DNC has positioned itself now, and it seems like Dems mostly just want to shock them rather than win their hearts.
The Bush era has been the worst disaster for the right wing this century in both the US and potentially globally. He was a warmonger, an economic vandal and an unprincipled man at the helm of a state that flubbed any chance at setting up for meaningful long term success in favour of the patriot act and slaughtering goat herders in the middle east. Under his eye the Republicans exiled the right from cultural relevance for around a decade. The party around him were cut from the same cloth.
There is a reason the modern Republican party went with Trump rather than another person who looked like Bush. The entire Trump story has been the Republicans - without too much recrimination - attempting to purge the remains of the Bush era because they were a gross embarrassment whos legacy has been little short of a disaster. If the US Democrats had undertaken the same purge instead of embracing the leadership of the same era then they wouldn't have tried to run Biden then Kamala.
And how those standards don’t matter on the right.
Bush was an idiot, does stating that satisfy you ? Would that allow you the peace to reconnect with the point ? (Also yeah. Warmongers suck. Surprisingly something everyone agrees on. The anti war position is the OG leftie position, so it’s great to see it on the right.)
I see that in politics in a lot of ways. I'm still figuring out my concept model for it, but the experience of religious exit is showing similarities.
More or less right after the "fight like hell" part of his speech:
"So we're going to, we're going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. I love Pennsylvania Avenue. And we're going to the Capitol, and we're going to try and give.
The Democrats are hopeless — they never vote for anything. Not even one vote. But we're going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones because the strong ones don't need any of our help. We're going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country."
It's clear (even through his rambling) that he meant they should march down there give the Republicans/Pence the guts (or whatever) to send it back to the states to recertify.
> Trial by combat
That was Giuliani, apparently, who said that.
“Over the next 10 days, we get to see the machines that are crooked, the ballots that are fraudulent, and if we’re wrong, we will be made fools of, but if we’re right, a lot of them will go to jail,” he told the crowd that day. “So, let’s have trial by combat.”
Yes, clearly he's talking about an actual trial by combat.
Come on.
So ... 4 senators and 2 representatives are not MAGA. Everyone else has had to swear fealty to Trump or leave. And you say that's diversity of opinion?
The list is not an exhaustive list of non-MAGA republicans, it is a list of non-MAGA republicans who publically opposed Trump's election even after he won the primary.
Non-MAGA republicans overall are about half the republican party.
In both cases, the issue was the murder, not the democracy. It is important that we not blame democracy for the actions of evil men.
And then the head of state in the Weimar republic really was the chancellor, that's why Hitler could dismantle the republic.
This country is filled with tens of millions of people openly defying Trump. None of them have been illegally arrested for it, none of them have been assassinated for it. Reddit's executive team isn't on the run from Trumpian death squads trying to murder them for defying Trump. There is no credible threat to people for defying Trump, least of all to people with the extreme resources available to Zuckerberg and Bezos.
(I don't think they'll be successful in appeasing him, but they're visibly trying.)
"So as an example, in Pennsylvania, or whatever, you have a Republican legislature, you have a Democrat mayor, and you have a lot of Democrats all over the place. They go to the legislature. The legislature laughs at them, says we're not going to do that. They say, thank you very much and they go and make the changes themselves, they do it anyway. And that's totally illegal. That's totally illegal. You can't do that.
In Pennsylvania, the Democrat secretary of state and the Democrat state Supreme Court justices illegally abolished the signature verification requirements just 11 days prior to the election."
"More than 10,000 votes in Pennsylvania were illegally counted, even though they were received after Election Day. In other words, they were received after Election Day. Let's count them anyway."
There's a ton more. Some true, some not, etc. The annoying part is the media completely disregarded stuff like this, which only enraged his base more.
The real issue in my opinion that we don't have enough systems and transparency in place to be 100% sure our elections are fair. We should have random audits. Hijinks with what same states pulled with their election laws during COVID shouldn't happen. Hillary Clinton claimed Trump stole the election from her, so this isn't a new feeling - Trump just had an actual support base he could rile up. Unfortunately for all of us, with the political system being so partisan I fear nobody can even propose more election security without coming off like a crazy person.
Im curious if you think malpractice insurance is also a significant, unnecessary cost? What if we made it harder to sue doctors? On the flip side, malpractice is still a real problem - probably not one that will be fixed by removing medical licences :D just hoping you see this comment since I am genuinely interested in your answer
By me in FL, it's hard to find a doctor that actually has a private practice now. Most are corporate owned clinics where doctors are just employees.
Its not our Job to aid the world. Foreign aid is a huge money laundering scam by and large. We have major problems here on our own shores.
> The layoffs include between 1,200 and 2,000 employees at the Department of Energy (DOE), including staff from the nuclear security administration and the loans office
Good. Maybe we can actually build some more nuclear plants instead of having to fight green energy bureaucracy.
>Let's not forget about FAA, which immediately had 2 crashes after it was gutted.
Circumstantial timing. The FAA has been having close calls before it was gutted. The government can do more with less. The plane crashes will stop when we return to meritocracy.
Not that huge, not a scam either given America is so deeply hated on most of the world, America decided to fight and kill everyone who even thought about "communism" whatever that meant, USAID is its foreign marketing team. Seems like it doesn't want to market itself. that's fine, You also quoted medicare and snap there, I hope you're not one of those that think having well fed people and farmers is not part of a governments job.
> Good. Maybe we can actually build some more nuclear plants instead of having to fight green energy bureaucracy.
If you can't build a nuclear power plant safely, maybe you shouldn't build it at all. Also some firings were people who handle the nuclear weapons.
> Circumstantial timing. The FAA has been having close calls before it was gutted. The government can do more with less. The plane crashes will stop when we return to meritocracy.
It's so great that you mention doing more with less and a meritocracy in this instance given that, the washout rate for being an air traffic controller is incredibly high and there is a deficit of air traffic controllers.
https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/one-thing/episodes/8b310a...
> The government can do more with less.
Can it though?
https://www.gq.com/story/no-irs-audits-for-the-rich
> The cuts are depleting the staff members who help ensure that taxpayers pay what they owe. As of [2017], the IRS had 9,510 auditors. That’s down a third from 2010. The last time the IRS had fewer than 10,000 revenue agents was 1953, when the economy was a seventh of its current size. And the IRS is still shrinking. Almost a third of its remaining employees will be eligible to retire in the next year, and with morale plummeting, many of them will.
> The plane crashes will stop when we return to meritocracy.
Return to when? When was this true?
Doesnt matter how huge, its a waste of money doing DEI programs in Burma.
>If you can't build a nuclear power plant safely
plenty of safe nuke plants running and they are building more for datacenters
>washout rate for being an air traffic controller is incredibly high
not really a problem of government spending unless you are saying they should pay more? not sure what youre getting at
>Can it though?
Yes it can I mean afterall we had no income tax during the industrial revolution
>Return to when? When was this true?
this was true when we hired people based on merit and not immutable characteristics.
And I don't find the argument convincing that because some of his policies are similar to Project 2025's, he must subscribe to ALL of them.
> Well but right now why isn't he using any of those then? Musk operates outside any legal framework.
Donald Trump gave Elon Musk the power of Special Government Employee (SGE), which is defined under U.S. federal law, 18 U.S.C. § 202. Further laws which cover this title are 5 CFR § 2641.104 and 17 CFR § 200.735-12. Musk is performing legal duties, entitled to him under democratically instituted and operationalised laws.
> I'm just disproving the nonsensical argument "he's been elected, therefore it'll remain a democracy". Well no, that isn't a sufficient guarantee.
I'm not making any claims about the future. I don't have a crystal ball. I am clearly arguing that you should accept the will of the people in a democracy.
Otherwise why he would be personally so close to this project then? That doesn't make sense.
> Donald Trump gave Elon Musk the power of Special Government Employee (SGE), which is defined under U.S. federal law
That's not enough to make what Musk is doing legal, this status is mostly for an advisor and Musk is an active executive member. The real way of making it legal is going through congress.
Not to mention the other DOGE workers which as far I know have no status at all.
> I'm not making any claims about the future. I don't have a crystal ball. I am clearly arguing that you should accept the will of the people in a democracy
Well there's two things which are not true here in this sentence. First he lied about his actions (unless you can find me a statement where he says that he'll put Musk in charge of dismantling the government), so it's not the will of the people, it's the will of Trump.
Secondly, he's not using the executive and legislative right now so it's hardly democratic, it's something you see in authoritarian regimes. In the EU, only Hungary works like that.
PT stopped being a left-wing party decades ago. The current vice president was once a presidential candidate and leader of a neoliberal party.
If someone wins the lottery and gets rich, society isn’t better off. If someone starts a new company that made a cure for some disease and gets rich, society is much better off.
You absolutely want to attract people that want to make huge breakthroughs with unlikely odds of success.
The US sustains that high number of people who strike $100 million+ through having a social safety net that barely exists, which results in far more people being seen as completely disposable. It also comes at the cost of worsening public education, worsening public health, crime rates beyond most first world countries, companies that constantly invent new evils like making all formerly paid-and-done services into monthly subscriptions. Few if any that hit 100 million are doing it ethically. They're doing it by milking the residents dry.
Some countries have national pride and resent the idea of stepping on their fellow countrymen. Some would kill half of them if they were promised a few % off their yearly taxes.
This is incorrect and you’re really out of touch for suggesting it.
Let’s say you have a 5 million dollar exit in the Bay Area. After tax you get roughly 2.5. That’s enough to buy a nice but modest house and now you have no money left. You now have to work a full time job to pay the property taxes, the rest of your living expenses, and try to save for retirement. Same thing applies in LA, NYC, SEA, etc.
> The US sustains that high number of people who strike $100 million+ through having a social safety net that barely exists
This is false. The US spends more on healthcare than any other nation, it just goes to a bloated system. More tax money from the 0.1% won’t change that.
> crime rates beyond most first world countries
Gonna need a citation there. This is likely a result of guns being legal if you’re talking about gun deaths or a result of the war on drugs if you’re talking about incarceration. Neither of those have anything to do with taxes.
> companies that constantly invent new evils like making all formerly paid-and-done services into monthly subscriptions
We’re talking about biotech exits. Drop your “muh capitalism bad” gish gallop.
> Few if any that hit 100 million are doing it ethically. They're doing it by milking the residents dry.
Pure cope. A broad unsubstantiated statement about ethics followed by talk of milking residents dry when those residents have more disposable income per capita than nearly anywhere else in the world.
> Some countries have national pride and resent the idea of stepping on their fellow countrymen.
If they do this by treating huge breakthroughs like you are doing, they are stepping on all of their fellow countrymen through oppressive tall poppy syndrome. Knocking anyone doing well down is not how you lift everyone up.
It's fine to want that and to attract those kind of people. What you don't want is to attract people who want to do that in order to make a lot of money.
If you want innovators, motivate them with rewards. Money is a great reward since you can turn it into mostly anything you’d like. Want to buy a mansion? Fine. Want to travel around the world? Feel free. Want to give it away to charity? Great!
The reality is that you get crap like Facebook, Instagram, Xwitter.
There are very few open source contributors that are actually really good. The nature of software means that their labor of love can scale very well.
Additionally, there is nearly zero barrier to being an open source developer. Buy a laptop and start writing code.
So open source only works well because when you get lucky and get a combination of a motivated contributor and essentially zero distribution cost, a single group can ship to billions of people.
If we want someone making an artificial heart, it’s a completely different story. The research and development is very capital intensive so you need a war chest to even start tinkering. Then once you have something you want to try to get approved, you need either to be a medical doctor or employ one, which is a huge opportunity cost for a medical school debt ridden doctor.
All of the capital needed to fund this is high risk so it needs a high upside return if private investors are involved.
Now a founder could eschew all of their equity, but after going through all of the work to do this capital raising it would be quite unusual.
In terms of expected value (which you'd hope that scientists and entrepreneurs understand at least at a surface level), that seems like the rational move.
Actually, society is much better off since the money is dispersed into the economy faster and to a much greater degree than most other windfalls.
And most other windfalls are crafted to accumulate money from the economy, so the difference in who ends up with the money is another major factor.
The bounty here, is the people on the cusp of realizing its not going to pan out but who are both very smart, and smart enough to realize they need to pivot. It would be almost a given they are consciously walking away from IPO manna. I guess if you include it in the pre-sort on applicants, you get to winnow out the people still glued to money-is-the-prize.
BTW the EU would welcome more IPR inside the EU. Some amount of bonus may have to lie in the packaging, to get to where the EU wants to be on IPR. Novo Nordisk style.
It’s not lottery mentality, it’s risk taking. And it’s something that the EU should be fostering. The US encourages risk taking where failing isn’t even seen as a bad thing.
...or don't we? I am not sure. We are definitely not seeing the runaway successes of US big tech, but is it because people are not taking measured risks, or do operations fumble at a later point in their development? I don't know. What I do know is that revenue sources in the EU come with extremely onerous strings attached, are orders of magnitude below US levels, or are only available to big corporations of the old guard.
the problem with the European thinking you describe is not lottery vs sure-thing, it's the idea that everybody within a geography should should think the same way and not all mentalities "belong".
And to those mentalities… yes we ought to remind they’re not welcome.
gee, no matter how many times Europe has told the Jews that they are not welcome, they've kept coming back, bringing ses penchants for assessing capital risk in middleman trade, and hedging financial risks!
You're the one incorrectly using the concept of gambling replying talking to someone taking about risk versus reward (investing).
It is hard for somebody who believes in gambling to win at investing.
The US has both monetary and social incentives to create new businesses. I live in NZ where founders are discouraged by financial incentives and by social incentives.
Gambling and investing are very close together. You're only able to make rational decisions on perfect information which is not available.
So investing seems to be a sort of gambling to me, it's just part of a different societal institution.
Except that it’s the opposite of a lottery.
It’s almost entirely based on your skills and the decisions you make.
There are right-place right-time effects, but it’s still your decision to be in the right place for the current time.
Europe’s economy is badly lagging the US economy, and it’s because culturally they hold these types of incorrect, fatalistic, zero-sum views towards success and innovation.
You're just not going to get past the first few rounds of the entrepreneur game if you're not a certain kind of person.
The US has terrible social mobility. Objectively, by any measure. This isn't up for debate.
Guess which state is #1 for social mobility?
Wrong. It's Utah, which is a low bar because it's 28th by GDP.
How about CA? 38th for mobility. TX? 45th.
It's a mythology of meritocracy excusing inherited privilege.
https://www.archbridgeinstitute.org/social-mobility-in-the-5...
Four Pillars of Social Mobility: To rank each state, we measured a series of indicators related to social mobility across four pillars: Entrepreneurship and Growth, Institutions and the Rule of Law, Education and Skills Development, and Social Capital. Scores for each pillar were combined and weighted equally to create a state’s overall social mobility score.
I would think a measure of social mobility would include income percentile vs parents' income percentile.
The US is full of billionaires who came from underprivileged positions.
Infact, your advice is worse than wrong, it is actively harmful, because you're discouraging people from trying by (falsely) telling them that their efforts don't matter and they were destined to fail from birth.
Going from $15k a year to $150k is a lot more common in Europe,, but doing from $150k to $150m is a lot more common in the US, and it's the latter that creates most of the value.
Self-driving taxis will be a "market" someday, but not yet, and when they are, there is no reason to think Musk will be a force to be reckoned with. (Well, no reason other than the regulatory capture that he's no doubt putting into place now, that is.)
from their blog that GP linked to, which says they gave 4 million rides in 2024, which seems like more than a "science faire side project", whatever that's supposed to mean.
Yes thats the key word. Control perception, and you can win. Which is what the repubs do. They can make someone who says heinous things, sound presidential.
The dems need to create that. Its cheaper, its more efficient, and it works.
I'd love for someone to come up with a workable alternative, but until they figure that technique out, the dems should figure out how to emulate what is working. Within their constraints of course. They are still a big tent party, so they cant do the same things as trump.
They do that by lying and gaslighting their voters. Fox News will call January 6 a "day of peace" and refuse to show the footage from that day of the insurrection, to the point where when Republican voters are shown footage of insurrectionists beating cops with American flags and crushing them in doors, they are surprised that's what actually happened.
That's the degree of information control that's necessary to make Trump sounds presidential, and we shouldn't wish our own representatives to gaslight and lie to us like that.
I don’t wish this anywhere in the world. But until the righteous find a solution to this tactic, people need to emulate it, if only to bring their political battle to parity.
Restraint IS a value, and it might well be yours. But the value needs someone to create a path for it to be viable and competitive. Otherwise your choice is simply between restraint and electoral irrelevance, or between combat and a chance to get some votes.
"To have a better look at things" is a very euphemistic way of saying "to override the vote counts." In fact, Trump had a very specific plan for what Pence should do, involving slates of fake electors that Pence should seat, in place of the actual electors chosen through the electoral process. Those fake electors would then cast their votes for Trump, overturning the will of the voters. The whole thing failed because Pence refused to go along with such a blatantly illegal scheme. That's why the rioters that Trump whipped up set up a gallows outside the Capitol to hang Pence on.
> Hijinks with what same states pulled with their election laws during COVID shouldn't happen
Allowing people to vote without endangering themselves during a pandemic is not "hijinks."
> the Democrat state Supreme Court
It's the Supreme Court of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Period. Not the "Democrat state Supreme Court." They made an entirely reasonable decision, based on their understanding of the law: any ballot put in the mail before the election deadline was valid. There was a legal dispute over this, the court made a ruling well before the election, and those were the rules for the election.
So no that is not what I am saying the problem isn't even changing their behavior as a priority but instead it's the fact they are that gullible.
> DEI is [...] hurting him specifically.
He's not wrong on this, since DEI promotes hiring based on skin color and not on merit. There isn't much room to dispute this. Considering race when making your hiring decisions may in some people's value systems be justifiable to right wrongs perpetrated hundreds of years ago (I disagree) but the effect on the people now factually is: to harm people below some arbitrary level of melanin by pushing everyone else to the front of the line. It assumes that everyone making hiring decisions would otherwise hire racistly, which is absurd and offensive to anyone not stupid enough to judge people based on color.
> My brother does not believe women and black people are his equal, full stop
With that, he agrees with the DNC too, since they believe women and black people are automatically better than him. The only difference between their flavors of racism is which color is fantasized to be inherently morally superior at birth.
DEI does not promote hiring based on skin color and not on merit, DEI promotes tracking hiring demographics, and identifying and rectifying/mitigating issues that result in perpetuating existing underrepresentation, such as inadequate exposure of traditionally underrepresented communities in the hiring funnel.
Hiring based on “skin color” (or race, which is not the same thing, though some races have names that come from color words, or ethnicity, or sex, or many of the other axes of concern for DEI) remains explicitly and blatantly illegal, and DEI proponents do not oppose such laws, and in fact tend to prefer extending them to additional axes of concern (DEI opponents, OTOH, are more likely top both expose such extensions and to oppose existing anti-discrimination laws.)
Good luck buddy.
That was kinda my entire point, Its on its way back to at least the 15% of the 1980s.
That isn't what is happening; if they were focused on winning at all costs they wouldn't ever nominate Trump. The man has some of the most dedicated enemies out there short of those found in a multi-generational religious war and he doesn't poll especially well. The female half of the population tend to be a bit lukewarm towards him and that doesn't help win elections either since there are a lot of them.
The Republicans are engaged in an ideological reform to clear out specifically the people who were active in the Bush years. That happens to be a broader election winner too.
All that matters is that Trump wins elections. This isn’t even a secret, this is literally what many Trump voters have said.
And since when do Repubs care 1 whit about enemies?
Finally - you are free to believe what you like. If this makes you feel better, so be it. I have no desire to take it from you.
> It takes many billions to buy a Twitter, even when Saudi Arabia is footing most of the bill.
There's some nice article out there that clearly explains how money "changes" at different income levels. First it's security, then it's comfort, then it's power.
Buying Twitter isn't spending money, it's exercising power.
That's doubly important if your points are good, since by posting like you did here, you discredit them.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
So what you are saying is that ONLY if you work your brains out AND win the "lottery", then you can have a decent retirement in the US?
Maybe Europeans are just too smart to accept that kind of proposition.
The "American dream" is a lottery system used to lure people into doing hard work and consequently rewarding only a few.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/comment/sweden-b...
That's opinion.
> plenty of safe nuke plants running and they are building more for datacenters
Yeah, and they were doing it safely.
> not really a problem of government spending unless you are saying they should pay more? not sure what youre getting at
You do, you're just ignoring it on purpose.
> Yes it can I mean afterall we had no income tax during the industrial revolution
And now you do, because it was necessary, back when it was implemented... this is just ignoring economic history.
Also, Industrial revolution!? the 1800s!? huh!?
Of course there was small government back then, the government only worked for landowners, not blacks or even women. Just white land owners. There wasn't even plumbing back then on most of america, barely any public utility, hell there wasn't even electricity, there was literally nothing to do apart from not dying of cholera.
plus the slaves/women did everything for free and if they died you just replaced them.
> this was true when we hired people based on merit and not immutable characteristics.
Pretty sure you're still hiring doctors and people with degrees, just now you have to hire a black one sometimes. what's so bad about a 1% in diversity hires?
(also trans people have mutable charactistics, ha)
That's opinion
>Yeah, and they were doing it safely.
That's opinion.
>And now you do, because it was necessary, back when it was implemented... this is just ignoring economic history.
You mean the centuries of history with public works projects that didnt require taxes?
>Also, Industrial revolution!? the 1800s!? huh!?
I obviously mean at the turn of the 20th century with the huge leaps in applied sciences and engineering giving us planes trains and automobiles. All done without taxes before 1913. You know, the greatest period of advancement in modern history?
>what's so bad about a 1% in diversity hires?
What's so good about it exactly? It does a disservice to everyone including the diversity hire.
>(also trans people have mutable charactistics, ha)
body dysmorphia is mental illness as evidenced by the ~40% suicide rate. Hows that for an opinion (Fact)?
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/usaid-payments-to-politico...
NIH Official account is saying last year $9B of the $35B in grant money was for "administrative overhead". Not fraud. But does that sound reasonable to you??
That $9B is just a number. Whether it is reasonable or not can only be determined by looking into the details:
- What accounts as overhead?
- What were decisions that lead to that overhead?
- Were there alternatives that would have costs less?
- Why and how were those decisions made?
- Can we learn for future decisions?
- Was there actual fraud?
- When there was fraud, why wasn't it referred to DOJ to be investigated properly?
"Administrative overhead" is not bad by itself. Outside government, its simply called "Operating Expense" and "Cost of Revenue" (not a concern of government luckily). I am certain, if you look into SpaceX' or Tesla's expenses, you would find fraud too.
Because Musk and his brainwashed followers can claim stuff on Twitter doesn't make it true. And it certainly MUST NOT be basis to destroy Democracy and democratic processes.
There are many structural reasons why Europe doesn't produce gigagrowth oligopolies like the US. EU has a highly fractured internal market that is more difficult to dominate, EU is not bathing in reserve currency windfalls to be thrown all around and EU doesn't have as ruthless foreign/trading policies.
Also there's a difference how "risk taking" is portrayed in the public discourse. In US success of companies are seen more as result of risk-taking of individuals, whereas in Europe success its seen more as resulting from collective effort, and founders/CEOs of successful companies are not lauded as heros, or are even usually especially famous.
Risk-rewards calculus is simply worlds' apart for exploratory/long term R&D versus tech deployment, which is sadly what elon/faang/openAI/nVIDIA are only about.
(I imagine Musk thinks he's bringing back a closed, for profit Bell System, though!)
I dunno, maybe Arc Institute/research hospitals poised to collect all the bionerds falling out of universities, these are the oligopolies that have any chance of morphing into semi-open Bell Labs-like setups.
Are there nothing of comparable scale in Europe?!? (Not many, I imagine, due to mostly what you already pointed out)
https://www.businessinsider.com/american-dream-social-econom...
Wouldn't this be a much worse metric? It would have to net out to zero change on average by the definition of percentiles. If we take abs change to look at both downward and upward mobility, the measure wouldn't tell us where most downward mobility happened, up and down could all happen within the bottom 25% and none in the top 75% and this metric would say we are highly social mobile if there was a lot of movement there.
If he does manage to outcompete Waymo, my guess is that it will be because he hosed them via regulatory capture somehow, thanks to his buddy in the White House. Or because Larry and Sergey got bored and folded their tent.
That is GDP times taxation as a % of gdp
roughly $36T times 30%
Precisely what that is doesnt matter, could be $10T, could be $20T
The federal government collects its tax from the states which it does through programs approved in congress.
Those programs are medicare, medicade and military spending + a few hundred billion total in scraps like the FAA or NASA. in total that sums to around $2T, which is all the states are obliged to give the federal government from the taxes they collect, if they dont like it they can choose the nuclear option and simply exit the union - California has a reasonable campaign long time ongoing to do exactly that called calexit - although right at this moment it lacks momentum. According to wikipedia there are growing movements in Alaska, California, Texas, Louisiana, Florida, and New Hampshire to secede.
Those movements will grow very very quickly when the states are actually presented with the now inevitable choice of doubling what they give the federal government while the federal government stops spending on pretty much every federal program - which is the only way the federal government can sustain paying its bills now the interest on their debt is larger than they take in revenue.
You’re aware that income tax, corporate income tax and payroll tax are paid directly to the federal government from individuals and companies right? The states don’t collect on the federal government’s behalf.
>nuclear option
There is no nuclear option. The country decided that 160 years ago.
That's a very good point: You really do need a lot of money in the US to feel reasonably secure for the long term. This might be good for employers, entrepreneurs, investors etc., but since most people in society aren't that, I'd argue that the average quality of life is worse for it.
> If the goal is financial security to the extent that you could not work
This actually seems like an anti-goal to me, societally. Why would we want to disincentivize the people that arguably have the best track record of contributing to progress from continuing to do so?
From that:
- 60k for capital gains tax
- 100k for (exorbitant) education for children
- 40k for healthcare (the most expensive plan on my expensive state's marketplace for a family of 4 is $36K).
That leaves $200k for living expenses. If you can't find a place to live comfortably (anywhere, since you aren't restricted by work) on $200k/year, we have very different expectations from life.
And...people accept that as a natural state of being? New York has over 8M residents, do all of them have $10M saved for retirement?
Or is your idea of retirement completely out of sync with what retirement really is for most people?
My brother and I are both college educated and, while not "rich", have a lifestyle and income my grandparents could have only dreamed about.
It is truly painful to watch people preach learned helplessness through failure and destitution as the only possible outcome.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index
There are ~750 billionaires in total.
The average American has a better chance of becoming a billionaire through hard work and prudent investments if, at age 18, they decide to live in a cardboard box underneath a bridge and steal metals from construction sites to sell for cash to be used to purchase lottery tickets.
They can then win the multi-million-dollar prize and invest that wisely to reach billionaire status.
Easy! Why doesn't everyone do it?
Larry Ellison, Oprah, François Pinault, Howard Schultz, Jan Koum, Kenneth Langone, Ralph Lauren, Sheldon Adelson, JK Rowling, George Soros, John Paul DeJoria… to name just a few.
“He began his business career at the age of 12 when he borrowed $200 from his uncle (equivalent to $3,385 in 2023) and purchased a license to sell newspapers in Boston.[23] In 1948, at the age of 15, he borrowed $10,000 (equivalent to $126,814 in 2023) from his uncle to start a candy vending-machine business.[24]”
I am not disputing that it’s possible to go from rags to riches. But don’t you find it ironic that a list of people who supposedly fit the description, doesn’t actually fit the description?
Where’s my rich uncle?
Crabs in a bucket.
Why oh why do Europeans in general choose to spend less than americans?
$10M over 50 years - $200k/yr or $16k/mo
House in a rather expensive place - $5k/mo
Food, travel, other things and especially projects can eat the rest $11k/mo
If you mean the lucky few of us who can "retire" at 30-40 and enjoy 50 years of retirement - that's such a statistical anomaly that it might as well not exist.
>>Food, travel, other things and especially projects can eat the rest $11k/mo
And also yeah, that is wildly wildly off. Again, if you want to have such an absolutely extravagant lifestyle to spend $11k a month on food and travel then sure - you probably do need $10M. But it's nonsense to say "you need $10M to retire in a big city". Clearly millions of people don't.
Also, your numbers assume you earn nothing in retirement, which is unnecessarily pessimistic.
Also, $11k a month for "food travel and other things" seems like quite a lot to me. I mean sure someone can spend $11k a month on "projects" but that doesn't mean that's something we as a society necessarily need to support.
We can have something earned from the money, but pension money have to be conservative, so the upside could be limited.
$11k a month for "food travel and other things" - healthy food isn't unfortunately cheap, neither is good travel - but those other things could be even more expensive. You might want to start an enterprise, and you'll need seed money. You might support a cause, or run a non-profit, or do other things which are noble but not easily rewarding in monetary sense.
Yes, we as a society probably can't - not don't need, but can't currently - support this. But it doesn't mean people shouldn't aim for this.
Frankly, I don't see strong evidence against so far.
Who retires at 50? But even ignoring that, I had to check the numbers - in the UK at least, only 0.02% of people live to 100, the chances are "wildly" against all of us in that regard. Sure it might happen - I wouldn't plan for it.
>>$11k a month for "food travel and other things" - healthy food isn't unfortunately cheap, neither is good travel - but those other things could be even more expensive. You might want to start an enterprise, and you'll need seed money. You might support a cause, or run a non-profit, or do other things which are noble but not easily rewarding in monetary sense.
Your assertion was that you need 10M to retire in a big city, the need part is what I'm challenging. If you want to lead a rockefeller lifestyle in retirement - sure. But that won't apply to 99.9999% of population who just want to live out their life in peace and comfort. Let me put it this way - I don't know anyone who makes $11k/month in their regular working life, the idea that you'd have that during retirement is almost....absurd? Who outside of rich elites has "seed money" during retirement? I think we're thinking of completely different social groups.
So no, unless you're part of the 0.00001% you don't need 10M to retire in a big city.