https://nsidc.org/ice-sheets-today

There is no reason at all that the biggest military power, richest from GDP and the biggest co2 producer country invests anything in climate research /s

I hope the USA goes down, fast...

Shout out to Elon Musk, the richest asshole on our planet who wants to leave earth to go to a planet which is not inhabitable and a planet which can't keep humans alive without our blue marble...

But hey when we all have starlink in every remote corner of our planet, who cares if our atmosphere is getting poisned by all these rocket starts.

Btw. Starlink has 10 Million customers and putting only a single 'small' datacenter into space needs over 350 starship starts. go figure

Surely they will "give back" to the giants whose shoulders they were standing on, and start creating foundations to hire back those researchers, grant them enough money to continue their deep work, file plenty of patents, and let the society keep reaping benefits from its greatest minds.

I mean, what else would they do, invest in cryptos and trophy partners and sport teams and ad-based time waster and surveillance ? Naaaaah

Well well well. If it isn't the pot meeting the kettle

"How Much Is Too Much? Controlling Administrative Costs through Effective Oversight" (2017) https://www.goacta.org/wp-content/uploads/ee/download/contro...

For the past 20 years the budgets ballooned out of control (alongside the student debt). Yes, this WH admin is anti-science but US academia is due some introspection.

Disclaimer: I'm not from US

If $50 billion are spent on research, maybe $1 billion of the spending is actually worthwhile (totally made that number up), and that is better than $0 spent on research from a certain point of view. Wouldn't be my point of view though if I had to pay for it.

Is it though? I would like to see more evidence. The scale of the cuts is clearly larger than what we have experienced in recent history, but this has always been a struggle. Researchers have spent an inordinate amount of time shopping projects around and writing grant proposals for a long time now.

> And justifying them on the basis of politics—prohibiting, for instance, grants that include language referencing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)—was unheard of until now.

This is disingenuous. While this new policy is clearly an overcorrection, previous policies which mandated that language clearly existed -- the political overlap is not unheard of.

---

It is hard to follow the point of the article. It appears to mostly be opposed to funding cuts. Obviously the current administration is cutting the grant budgets of these organizations. But that article seems to be making the claim that the method of selecting what to cut is being done in a particular "anti-science" manner.

Given that there are cuts, are they doing a particularly bad job of choosing which projects to cut? I don't see an answer to that question in any rigorous way, just insinuations.

Just a simple example: when you play with firm biological facts, you might just open it all up to being bent. But then, wasn’t that maybe the goal all along?

Because certain people don't like one or both of these two things:

1) Having to pay tax

2) Having to be accountable to someone, whether they be a government or anyone else

With this in mind, they illegally gutted a bunch of jobs.

They do this for the same reason a dog licks his balls: because he can and no one will stop him.

Culture Change for Inclusion of Indigenous Voices in Biology

Strengthening Inclusion by Change in Building Equity, Diversity and Understanding (SICBEDU) in Integrative Biology

An Equitable, Justice-Focused Ecosystem for Pacific Northwest Secondary CS [Computer Science] Teaching

https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/NSF-Terminated-Award...

China won't stand a chance against us with studies like these!

The US public never cared about science anyway. Go read Carl Sagan’s 1996 demon haunted world and it’s only gotten worse from there

You could do a search for this headline and get a result for every year since Francis Bacon started publishing

There is only 5 items that matter:

Interest on Debt.

Social Security

Medicare.

Medicaid.

Defense.

If a CEO commits a crime does that mean the entire industry must ne shut down?

What sort of reasoning is this?

And yes it should and does. If an industry does not provide value it naturally fails because it doesn't make money. Academia has no profit by design and now gets to face its own form of regulation for disfunction.

There is no way to even attempt to fix our science base without first cutting much of it. How are we supposed to fix a system while not applying consequences to it? Every US institution is rotting from inside out demanding more money while providing less. The most effective way to begin the process for any of these is to cut money and sort out real value.

This is like US public transport argument. Should we just forever fund disfunctional systems because we are scared of trying to fix them? Our public transport is beyond disfunctional compared to basically any other country on earth.

Since the market cannot correct these systems as what makes industry so effective then you must artificially apply equivalent market forces.

It also tells us that it’s very unlikely going to be resolved on this side of some catalytic event. If reason prevailed, we would not be in this state of chaos.

People who think this is a consequence of merely the last 10 or 40 years, clearly have no understand of cause and lagging effects.

Rather than demand reversion back to mean, we should be asking, "Before we reset this system back to the way it was, was it working and are there improvements to be made?"

Because the current chaos can be viewed as an opportunity to improve, and we should take it because may of the systems in chaos today, were dysfunctional or in need of modernization yesterday.

Some thoughts: 1. US Spending on R&D has gone up from $50B -> $1T annually, and from $3B -> $115B on purchasing power terms 2. The labs rely on government grants, which are hard to get and typically awarded 'equally' or 'by gatekeepers' 3. There is and have been massive scandals that question academic integrity - reproducibility, fake data. The scientific community has done almost nothing to change its mechanisms. 4. It's not clear to me what we've 'got' societally from these studies as a whole 5. The administrative burden to even do science has gotten too far out of hand 6. You can't 'fire' researchers

Research and science is a fundamentally 'good' thing; we should encourage it.

We may need to shake up the way that it's done. Yes science + R&D is long term focused, but it doesn't mean it can't be reformed.

That the article centers on hand-wringing over 'my government grant is gone!' instead of 'you're cutting this critical research that will save lives' without any discussion of 'science' needing to reform unfortunately highlights the core of the problem.

Science will become purely for recreational purposes, maybe funded by millionaires, billionaires or even trillionaires looking for a specific set of outcomes.

"To be sure" and "supposed to be" are doing some heavy lifting here. I am not so sure about that so I suppose that for many "scientists" the end product is not science at all. I'm not impugning the whole field as there are many good and honest scientists but the SYSTEM is corrupt. I think a significant portion are gaming the system for status or money or sinecures. P-hacking, fake data scandals, the replication crisis and various fake articles getting published in top journals are omens that something isn't quite right in the science world.

My own view is that it is all due to govt funding of science and especially the NSF which should be closed ASAP. Ayn Rand discusses the problem in her article "The Establishing of an Establishment" in her anthology "Philosophy:Who Needs It". Handing out govt grant money invariably locks in the status quo, i.e. an establishment. She also points out that under such terms it is impossible even for an honest man to make good choices which is why such rackets attract scammers and con artists, even fully credentialed PhD's.

Here is an excerpt from her article; https://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/government_grants_and_sch...

Or buy and read the whole article and the anthology.

While the also-quoted Gonsalves was a lackey for the zoonotic side of the covid origins debate, he's allowed his opinion as an otherwise non-protagonist in the single most consequential event in history to put the scientific enterprise as it had been practiced to date on trial.

Support for such measures (welfare, healthcare, unionization, high taxes etc) is usually low among Americans.

https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/10/welfare-cuts...

All of the other despicable stuff by this administration is easily reversible since nothing except tax cuts for billionaires (aka big beautiful bill) was passed by Congress.

But this wanton destruction of the US scientific capability for at least a generation is next to impossible to overcome. As they say, trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback.

These stats have been reported by various legitimate media sources--and you can verify these for yourself on the web:

- Outright fraud: about 2% of scientists admit fabrication or falsification, while about 14% report knowledge of similar misconduct by colleagues.

- Image manipulation: roughly 4% of biomedical papers contain problematic image duplications, with some cases suggestive of deliberate manipulation.

- Questionable research practices: up to 33.7% of researchers admit at least one such practice, while up to 72% report seeing them among colleagues.

- Replication failure is serious: results can't be duplicated in more than 50% of major psychology and biomedical research projects.

- p-hacking: researchers can unintentionally or deliberately search across data until a result becomes statistically significant, increasing false-positive risk without necessarily committing outright fraud.

- Biomedical research waste: one landmark estimate argues that up to 85% of biomedical research investment may be avoidably wasted through poor design, non-publication, and incomplete reporting.

- Unpublished research: science is science, but many null or disappointing studies remain unpublished, distorting the visible literature and causing other labs to repeat failed work.

- ...And finally: a minority of funded research (much less than 50%) is reliable, novel, usable, and clearly reported scientific journals.

Academia was not doing well pre-Trump. The DEI infection ran deep - and it still does. Complete nonsense was getting funded in the social sciences and cognitive science / psychology. It was really tragic. And now all these institutions are saddled with personnel debt. The morons they hired during the DEI moral panic - some of them are even tenured by now. People who overtly aren't even doing science - they are performing their politics with science. Overtly.

This is a blunt instrument, yes. But things were going very poorly overall, and we needed a shake-up.

Given the choice between: Biden (or later Harris) is elected and things keep going the way they were going, or the current timeline, I choose the current timeline.

(P.S.: Scientific American is trash now, you shouldn't read it. https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6202 )

the vc & tech bros while rich, felt envious of the power & respect the academics had. they backed the anti-science candidate, then got involved in useless schemes such as 'government efficiency' which didn't result in any efficiency.

so blaming this on the current admin, isn't enough. some of the people to blame live in SF

It's not exactly new. We've been through this with the crackdown on climate science during the W Bush administration, with sequestration during the early/mid 2010's, and with the budget shenanigans during the first Trump administration. Denying the painfully obvious impact of our contemporary science policy is like fiddling while Rome is burning.

If your guy couldn’t say stuff like we will do outreach to local CCs, will design summer research programs, etc, then they’re just not a very good grant writer

I wrote what I think of as a fairly coherent objection. I expect it to be voted down. Would you also recommend "pre vouching" for it?

Not that the university is paying much anyway, often the opposite: the researcher gets their own grant and they are forced to pay a cut to the host university, or to their group leader. It can get rather feudal.

Generally no. But I also think that certain classes of keyword filtering were probably a good idea. Filtering for any grants with "structural determinants of health" and reviewing them intensively with the goal of defunding 99%, for example, is probably a good idea.

> Would you approve so robustly of your own research being cut with a keyword search for government-unapproved terms?

I mean, there's zero chance my research would have fallen afoul of any such terms, but let me put it this way: my field was completely up-ended by DeepMind. They not only won a Nobel for that work in record time, but used an approach so severely out of fashion that it couldn't really get any attention.

I guess I'm saying: I don't think it would have been so bad to cut most of it, if it meant that we got more actual diversity in the field.

Great! Do actual research into curing/treating/preventing diabetes. Do randomized trials on nutritional interventions in poor communities! Do any of a million other things that might actually affect the problem.

Do not: perform another observational study to see if poor people get diabetes more than rich people.

Data and research are actually useful when you're working on getting people out of poverty. It seems like you're hung up on some American culture war shit but this is a common sense observation.

(Parenthetically, the reason poor areas of China are poor is that they were always poor. They didn't have 2-car garages and color TV and then Mao made them into peasants. They were always peasants. This is obvious. Mao made a lot of mistakes because he believed in ideology and rhetoric over reality and measurable fact. That's the lesson to learn.)

They thought we were crashing, rushed the cockpit, and pushed forward as hard as they could on the stick. Forward is up, right?

Just say it the clear way, so that everyone can see what you're doing: if I don't like it, it must be because I don't understand it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6Y2wzmKHEU

The next federal election will be interesting as to the direction the Australian public wants to take the country, but it's not due until May 2028.

So either get in before then, or wait until afterwards to gauge your expectations of being welcome.

Having said that, the current Government (less conservative) won the May 2025 Federal election bigly (but maybe not quite a landslide) with 93 seats over the next most popular party at 43 seats, out of a total of 150 seats.

I'm sorry, was I not clear enough? Bad research should not get funding. Or at least, it shouldn't get it for decades and decades, while producing no results [1].

One's desire to do research into irrelevant questions does not entitle you to support in the name of "science".

[1] I'm OK with some crap science getting funded if every renewal is random!

If you knew more about it than some memes about racism, you'd know that the nihilism, this thin-skinned "at least we'll take them with us" sentiment you just expressed, was at the heart of it. But they had a lost war and the 1920s to be bitter about, the treaty of Versailles, not someone who "couldn't shut up" about something. The mind boggles.

What kinds of damages would you think your descendants should be owed? If you heard that the restitution given was for those who managed to climb into the ivory tower of academia are now first in line for research grants... Sure, that's a trade.

There are many scholarships, grants, services, and opportunities for descendants of Holocaust victims who had their property and lives taken from them. Do you support that? What's the difference?

> That they were getting government support because of it makes the me not care much about the fact the system is being burned down today.

I just want you to sit with that sentence for a minute. You'd rather have no publicly funded science, you'd rather have the entire enterprise collapse, just because of some people are getting research funding because they are descendants of genocide victims? Seriously?

Science has had waves, and people have over pushed its advances (for profit) and hidden some of its shortcomings (we can point to a lot of problems) and is going through a massive reckoning where its influence is being curtailed.

Probably (IMO) the biggest problem science has, is that people don't realise that the key to its strength isn't that it finds all these advances/truths, but that it's comfortable with the idea that we really don't know anything.

Fundamentally science says - this is the best understanding we have of the given data, AND, reiterating that this is what people miss, science absolutely accepts that a better understanding or fresh data can at any moment in time change things.

That confuses most people, they like their understanding of the world to be concrete.

It’s like: what if we took all of the principles of the enlightenment, and forced them through a sieve that served our racist, xenophobic, chauvinist world view? Rediscovering eugenics and pseudoscience, especially for christofascist ambitions and exploitative grifting.

Conservatives have been basically purged from academia over the last 30 years, which frankly was a pretty dumb "victory" to celebrate, because now they voted in a dumb gorilla that is just smashing things as revenge.

These are both reasonable questions about equitability and accountability. Unfortunately the solution we chose is a proliferation of bureaucracies that micromanage funding allocation and use. Some widely acknowledged consequences are 1) researchers spend more and more time writing grants and reports, and less and less doing research, and 2) the funding agencies (public and private, but especially public) are conservative and overwhelmingly fund work that they know will succeed. In practice that encourages monothink and endless incremental improvements on things that we already know how to do, and disincentives dissent, creativity, and real blue sky novel ideas.

Everyone loves to say they support creative ground breaking ideas, but that requires letting smart people sit around and think for a long time. And however smart they are, results are not guaranteed. The bureaucratic process is always going to prefer short term thinking with clear “deliverables”, even when it’s detrimental to progress.

What those companies did is notable, but I think you are overselling their contributions to science. We've gotten way more scientific advancement from publicly funded science. There are private companies allowed to do R&D all over the world. Publicly funded independed science research is what has set the US apart.

Xerox PARC is a bit of an outlier, they didn't commercialize much of the things we remember them for. But Bell labs and IBM Research fed Bell and IBM lots of commercially viable stuff.

The reformed ATT is dominant in its industry, but one of several, and its industry is no longer all forms of real time communication. And afaik, they don't make any equipment anymore, etc.

There are not so many vertically integrated companies anymore. The market values the parts moee than the whole, so spinning out manufacturing or logistics or etc is a popular thing.

They were all playing around in a new field that had just opened up.

Research effectiveness is downstream of what's available to be found in the idea mines.

Disclosure: My education was funded by NSF, and I now work for a company that sells stuff for government funded research, though not exclusively.

That meant the optimum for corporations was to invest the money in R&D. The cost of paying dividends was too large, so the advantage gained from developing competitive products was actually worth it.

As a bonus, high capital gains taxes also fill the state's coffers, which can also be used to fund research.

But as the western world has cut taxes down down down, the behaviour of big companies shifted to short term gains: dividends and stock buybacks.

Private equity is also to blame, because they set short term performance targets that remove the incentive for long term planning. The MBAs that have been installed as executives that follow PEs favorite playbook are another issue.

Post WW2, the USA continued the same approach by adopting the Vannevar Bush model, which boiled down to the USA pouring money into basic research, which is never profitable. That fed the companies like the ones you list, who were willing to make bets on medium-term things that might return a profit in a decade or so. If the USA's dominance of world science and engineering in the later 20th century is any indication, it worked a treat.

The Vannevar Bush model started to be wound back in the Reagan years, and Trump seems bent on excising it entirely. Other countries noticed its success. Most OECD countries put a few percent of public money into basic research now. The country that seems to have really taken the lesson to heart is China. They've gone way beyond what the Vannevar Bush model did even in its heyday. The end result is they dominate some areas of science and engineering and consequently manufacturing now (who here remembers Huawei was the brains behind 5G), and now the USA has thrown in the towel that dominance will grow to cover most areas in time. The gap between the West and China on AI and semiconductors is at most a few years.

The USA is crying China is cheating with subsidies and yes that's true - for example it seems the AI models are mostly developed using public money, whereas the USA is relying on VC funding to do the same. The USA's funding of AI development will very likely slow down after the IPOs happen and the companies must become profitable. China's funding of AI won't slow down.

This is the result of a policy choice China made long ago in the Deng Xiaoping era, back in the 1980s. It's taken 40 years to bear fruit, but my it is fruiting vigorously now. The USA position is also a consequence of policy choices it's been making over the last 40 or so years, starting in the Reagan era.

If you want to see how far this has gone, look up: https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/aspis-critical-technology-... It makes for sobering reading. Some key metrics they measured:

- Research Leadership: China leads the world in high-impact research in 69 out of 74 critical technologies.

- Recent Overtakings: China recently overtook the US in foundational AI and biotech fields, including Natural Language Processing (NLP) and genetic engineering.

- Monopoly Risk: ASPI tracks 41 technologies where China's research concentration is so high it poses a severe future monopoly risk, largely driven by massive hubs like the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

There is now little doubt how this will pan out over the next few decades. The USA and the rest of the West end up buying products made in China, using Chinese technology, and protected by a Chinese patent wall. They will wonder what happened. They will try and recover by going to Chinese universities, and adopting parts of Chinese culture. It won't be a big change for most of the West - the name on the label just changed from the USA to China. It will come as a hell of a shock to most of the USA.

The ironic thing will be - the change has very little to do with the things people will focus on, like who manufactures what, or patent walls, or political systems, or excellence in universities. China pulled that off by adopting some key USA policies, while the USA abandoned those same policies.

There are tens of thousands of grants. Some of them are classified as "medicine" and study things like hormones, some are classified as "computer science" or "mathematics" and study things like statistical bias. Which of these are the "real science" ones (e.g. HRT in older people with menopause or low-T) and which are the partisan-coded ones (e.g. gender HRT)?

Put aside whether or not you think the latter should be funded and suppose you're just trying to distinguish them to make sure the former continues to be. If you can't do it accurately then the current administration will do it anyway but with a machete instead of a scalpel. You'd need a large team of people who can tell the difference to go through them all and classify them. This is nominally the job of the thing referred to as the "deep state", but what do you do if you don't expect them to be non-partisan?

This is why strategies like "have partisans capture the administrators for our side" are a mistake.

As one famous example, Sokal intentionally made up funny bullshit and still fooled a ton of people!

They literally look down on the idea of updating your previous beliefs.

If you're a scientist by principles and a moderate by political views, and the right-wing party comes out in opposition to science, well, it's fair that you might then join the "pro-science party". Being pro-science becomes a liberal position.

So it's not that conservatives were "purged" from the ranks of academia.

They have drowned their municipalities in debt cumulatively equivalent to the US federal and state debt as a percentage of GDP. Localities aren’t allowed to tax but are responsible for local services and industry. Local governments borrowed heavily to hit GDP growth targets and compete with each other for investment and talent.

There is now a backwards migration of the working class back to rural towns from the cities because the incentives China gives is towards technologies that only benefit their already upper-middle class workers. About 500 million Chinese live in rural areas and over 20% of their workforce toils in the fields. That’s not changing anytime soon. Youth unemployment has been 15-20+ percent for some time.

Most people are against bad research, but not everyone agrees with you on what bad means. Maybe the research you label "bad", I label "good". Your opinion has just as much weight as mine. So where does that leave us on the question of who gets research funding? Or did you have a different definition of "bad" in mind that doesn't consult your biases?

> One's desire to do research into irrelevant questions

Who decides what's a relevent question? The president? Political parties? B/Trillionaires? Big Tech / Oil / Pharma ? You?

> Well, I proposed one way (which you completely ignored, in order to accuse me of being biased): just fund stuff at random.

Sorry I ignored it, but you only included it as a footnote to your reply, so I wasn't sure you were actually serious. You gave two ideas really: fund stuff at random and fund continuations at random but holding a minimum objective bar. I'll take them in turn:

> just set some minimum objective bar for competency (degrees, institution, basic review for research viability, etc.) then fund whomever passes the bar at random.

This is more or less how the system operates now. You get a PhD, you go to a good institution, get some results, publish some papers, submit a proposal, and then it's a dice roll from there whether it gets funded or not. You said you had a career in research so you know this. How do you do "basic review for research viability" to your liking that's different from what's done now? Because now it's done by experts in their respective fields. You seem to think that means "bias is built into the system", yes? How do you evaluate basic research viability without consulting people specifically for their biases to determine that viability?

But funding continuations at random means that good research and bad research, whatever that means, would have a random chance of just not continuing. How does a country build long time-horizon research programs if they can just be defunded at the roll of the dice despite good results? How does that improve the system if good research can just randomly die and bad research can continue randomly as a matter of policy?

> just fund stuff at random.

Doesn't prevent bad research from being funded, as you admit. So to me, since both of your ideas aren't really designed to eliminate bad research but do work to eliminate biases, it seems like you're less concerned with not funding bad research, and more concerned with how biased you perceive the funding process to be.

> you've stumbled upon a legitimate class of argument: how does anyone separate their personal bias from objective evaluation of science?

That's my whole point, you can't. The system we've built is a compromise because so many people have an opinion on what should / should not be funded. You and I are biased and will never agree, so we leave it up to experts who are biased and will also never agree, but at least they know what they're talking about. So at the end of the day some things we both don't like get funded from a very small pot. Maybe a dice roll improves the whole process, but given the system has been wildly successful in producing technological breakthroughs despite inefficiencies and biases and disagreements, we shouldn't just go throwing wrenches in it just because it's biased.

Is this a field you've been following closely, or am I listening to the equivalent of a person with no interest in quantum mechanics complaining that nothing new has happened in quantum mechanics?

It happens indirectly all the time. As of 2025, despite all the funding cuts, the AAAS is still publishing its yearly DEI report, now rebranded as an "Inclusivity for Excellence Report", but containing all of the same stuff: an effort to collect and publish as much demographic data as possible, and a stated goal of getting all the numbers to go in the "right" direction. These practices are too ingrained and sacrosanct at this point to let a mere funding crisis throw them off course.

A person who struggles to put food on the table and a roof over their heads, for one.

Creationists.

A person who is certain they already know the answer.

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/cost...

US science is in chaos not because of pushback against this evil "demographic tracking and reporting", but rather an extremely capricious attitude towards any research from the administration. This isn't about the practices of the universities choosing who gets a grant. The administration is terminating random grants based on keywords that they find in the abstracts even if the keyword has nothing to do with evil DEI.

> If Science is really the priority, it should be easy to stay neutral on unrelated contentious social issues.

Science is being used to study these contentious social issues. That's the kind of science that's getting suppressed, _but that's not even the issue here_

Luckily now the administration has great scientists like RFK Jr setting research priorities, no more useless ideological bone-picking is taking place

Moreover China’s govt was the cause of this by setting gdp growth quotas to get promoted, see all my other comments regarding this.

You’re just repeating propaganda and interestingly the other commenter responding to me has said the exact opposite, but also has said that China’s response was “morally superior”

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/05/conservati...

Why not?

If you cut funding for helpful science on the basis of ignorant claims, you're acting backwards. If you act backwards, you may get called backwards.

You should still change, become not-backwards, and fund science.

I don't think this reasoning can work. To the extent these things are directly related, the relationship would have to be: returns on investment are at an all-time high --> more investing than usual.

And, yes, this overlooks the times when conservative scientists like Richard Muller have come in to disprove the mainstream consensus and then come up with the exact same results, but... that's not considered important when they have so many other "examples" of "liberal science".

I know that ultimately, there isn't really any space for 'conservative science' in climate. Either they do bad science, so it's not really 'science', or they do good science and come up with the same 'liberal' answers. But I don't think conservatives have figured this out yet; they're still convinced that good science will prove them right.

As much as I hate it, we're heading into a more violent and less prosperous world. Whatever that morphs into long term almost certainly won't be as nice for Americans as the recent past was.

Our capitulation to Iran, a third rate military power that we chose to attack and then lost to, is really driving home the point at the moment.

No, it's bad science that bothers me, and this particular article prominently mentioned this example of bad science in like, the third paragraph. I quoted this at the top of the thread.

But I appreciate the subtle insinuation!

I object. The CCP is much more deeply indebted than the US when taking into account provincial and local governments as well as state-owned enterprises.[0] And of course the US debt is financed in its own currency while Chinese foreign debt is financed in dollars or other currencies.

The problem in the US is regulation. An environmental impact study takes 54 months in the US.[1] The CCP, which has no problem poisoning its people or even launching rockets over inhabited villages, doesn't delay itself at all.[2] I'm glad we don't poison our people or place dangerous industry in places that could harm populated areas, or even perform some prophylactic measures to protect nature, but I'm confident that we could do this in less then a year (less than six months?) and make much faster progress. Even for something like nuclear, the ten years (mostly caused by red tape) are really onerous.

> China is the only one that can run if it comes down to it (unless of course the numbers coming out of China are mega bogus, but for that I don't know enough to have an opinion).

Yes, the common opinion among China watchers is that any number the CCP touches is "mega bogus." They're actually in the midst of something of a financial crisis at the moment because of the high debt.

[0]https://www.statista.com/topics/11662/debt-in-china/

[1]https://www.rff.org/publications/reports/how-long-does-it-ta...

[2]https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/11/china-keeps-dropping...

Spoken like somebody who has no idea what they are talking about.

Apart from the large share of fundamental science which Europe has always been bigger in and better at (I mean, there's a huge tunnel in Texas to show that Americans at some point understood this and tried to compete), Europe is funding the military tools of the next generation in Ukraine.

Americans used to be excellent executors, then China took that role. What's left?

Conservatives spread propaganda about woke universities -> conservative kids are less likely to go. Do this for decades and you end up in the situation we're in.

Either that or conservatives are just stupider and less likely to be academics; which is, in my opinion, more likely than your hypothesis about grand conspiracy.

> The lack of diversity among professors is problematic for both education and research, ostensibly the overriding purposes of universities.

I basically did a spit-take here. Lack of diversity is suddenly--and only--a problem when it doesn't include conservatives.

The funny thing is that racial and cultural diversity is higher amongst faculty than the general population. For decades America has attracted the brightest and highest-achieving college students and researchers from around the world, and those people eventually get faculty positions and advance their careers. It has gotten to the point that we hear people (usually conservatives) complain that some fields are dominated by non-white people.

And shock, as it turns out, American conservative viewpoints are actually a minority in the world. If higher education were actually representative of world population, 1/5 would be Chinese, 1/5 would be Indian, 1/5 European, and only 1/20 would even be American. If we were generous and say that half of America is conservative (it's not), then only 1/40 would be an American conservative. Most people in the world are not American conservatives. This is just a fact. They say that reality has a liberal bias. For the record, I don't believe it has a liberal bias, because American liberalism is just a weird grab bag of outposts on the cultural war front, but reality absolutely does not support a rightwing view.

We hear conservatives whine and moan about diversity exactly when it suits them, and we've all seen just exactly how they feel about diversity.

Reminds me of the when all the catholic priests were molesting kids and being moved around instead of outed and prosecuted. This was also a controversial topic too for the same reasons. Some people wanted to take action, while other (more powerful) people wanted to ignore it.

It’s entirely possible Russia will find itself with a pacific warm water port.

Perhaps tons of tundra frost will become fertile farm land.

Of course this is at the costs of billions of climate refugees having to migrate as well as a bunch of other side effects

If you’d like to do your part against climate change, you can start by walking everywhere today, avoiding heating and cooling your home, and never flying a plane again. These are changes I’m not willing to make, so the issue isn’t just inconvenient for the wealthy—it’s inconvenient for everyone. It’s easy to shift the problem onto others without doing anything about it yourself.

At some point this was not going to continue to sustain itself, something would give. Now, I think it's unfortunate that it became political. That means that my criticisms will be viewed through partisan lenses. I am not a fan of political types deciding what to fund. But I also think academia can be full of itself and this shield they can hide behind of "just doing pure science" is baloney. Some are. Definitely not everyone. So I personally think there should be a reduction in the number of PhDs granted and the overall size of academia but that is not in favor of getting rid of it or the way it's being done presently.

1. Invest in propaganda to ensure the US becomes hostile to immigrants.

2. Invest in opening yourself up to immigration.

China is openly doing 2. It would be foolish to assume they are are not also investing in 1 and secretly cheering on the current administrations hateful stupidity.

Immigration is the US superpower, and everyone who wants to knock them off the number 1 spot is eroding it.

Bluntly, racists have decided IQ measurements mean they're not racist instead of wondering whether IQ, as a measurement, is itself racist.

Secondly there's no strong argument that links larger population groups genetic makeup to intelligence - that's what Watson claimed and what's so infuriating; it's plain racism. There's an inherited component in intelligence - that much is right. But population groups have enough diversity that this does not have a statistically relevant impact on these groups as a whole.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/13/james-watson-s...

I am saying this as someone who pursued Canadian citizenship by descent and moved to New Zealand in the last year, so it's definitely happening some, but my impression so far is that the total number of people who actually make the move is small. Most people who are skilled enough for an overseas employer to jump through hoops to put them on a visa have more lucrative jobs available in the US that are closer to home without all of the downsides of emigration.

I would believe that a lot of dual citizens or skilled immigrants to the US are moving home.

Maybe other things are more important? Maybe they're not. Maybe black hole data won't be actionable for 500 years. I don't know, I'm also more interested in space than health so I'm with you if we had to pick one. But I wouldn't call this work "not science".

Probably more accurate to say the healthcare sector is propping up the US economy. The only sector broadly hiring through all the layoffs of recent years.

Tech grabs the headlines and has extremely valuable firms concentrated in a handful of cities. On the other hand, those firms tend not to employ a lot of people. Healthcare is less flashy, but every city has a hospital (or a few) that (each) does a few billion $ in revenue while providing thousands of recession-resistant jobs.

See https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2026-01-01...

Quote: ``` Anticircumvention law originates in the USA: Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 establishes a felony punishable by a five year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense for bypassing an “access control” for a copyrighted work.

So practically speaking, if you design a device or service with even the flimsiest of systems to prevent modification of its application code or firmware, it’s a felony — a jailable felony — to modify that code or firmware. It’s also a felony to disclose information about how to bypass that access control, which means that pen-testers who even describe how they access a device or system face criminal liability.

```

This works well for tech, because a good design can be scaled to serve the whole world, and we can outsource manufacturing to companies like China or Taiwan who are better at cost-effectiveness. (And have lower wages. Maybe that's the entire explanation.)

- science that simply will not get done, and may be lost to humanity altogether. There is research the US would have done this year that will not get done elsewhere this year. Once the individual researchers leave the field, there is no guarantee the research will get done this decade, or the next, or the next.

- Intel and AMD lean on technology developed in the 1950s. US science and R&D done in 2026 similarly will underwrite US industrial success in the 2050s and beyond. This is like the classical warning against eating your seed corn (instead of saving it to plant). Pressing pause will have an impact, but one would not expect it to show up in the industry league tables for some time.

California has added roughly 17GW of grid-scale batteries in the last five years. Modern GPU (NVIDIA). Modern electric car (Tesla). Reusable Rockets (SpaceX).

I agree that the US has an "Only Elon-led companies can get things done outside of computers" problem.

We can talk about Indian coal companies (Thermal), global steel demand (Metallurgical), US natural gas extractors, etc.

Still, at least we have the vast areas untouched by modern man: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rh9IkUUgaww

Australia is about as serious as you get in terms of climate action without being unreasonable. We need power, you can't switch off coal overnight. We also need the country to remain afloat, we cannot turn off all natural resource exports either.

If and only if what they'll be given is not taken away by anyone under any reason.**

Loss aversion bias innately exists within us for a reason: How can anyone live if someone else seeks to take what they have away?

They are turning to racism because of their wants and fears.

Tech investments don't come with interest payments usually, so if interest rates go up it pulls money into government and corporate bonds which are much lower risk. Why take a gamble on new tech that might lose you everything to get 10% ROI, if you can get 6% "risk free" in bonds?

Everyone else is using it to mean "the Federal Reserve has set the interest rate high right now"

Very different situations.

The thing about the academic job market is it's paper thin. I argue we produce too many PhDs. People seek out prestigious degrees. Our immigration system rewards more highly educated foreign students, sensibly, but that means there's more incentive to get advanced degrees. There's absolutely not just pure science going on in academia. Grad student wages are depressed and more foreign grad students does not help that.[1] There's a lot of careerism. I would argue some people exploit grad students. I don't think this is even very debatable. So I think put together, we likely print too many PhDs. One could argue that's not true relative to the overall job market but relative to tenure track positions, it is absolutely a fact.

[1]: https://www.nber.org/digest/dec06/impact-foreign-students-ea...

(1) He wasn't a practicing scientist.

(2) He wasn't fired for making scientific claims, but rather for saying things like "I'm pessimistic about Africa".

(3) He didn't do any research in behavioral genetics, psychometrics, or molecular genetics; his authority in the discussion was "famous science guy".

(4) He lost an honorary and, later, an emeritus position, in which his role was not "scientist" but rather "spokesperson for a scientific organization". I wouldn't want him for a spokesperson either, any more than I'd want Ibram X. Kendi or, maybe closer to the mark, Elijah Mohammed as my spokesperson.

James Watson was closer to Donald Sterling than to Galileo.

It's another contributing factor to the "brain drain" effect. In that it's a worse deal for a US Citizen to move to Canada on a CUSMA visa than for the opposite.

I'm not sure that that's possible. If someone is motivated by religion or finance to believe something that's simply not true, and your scientific evidence contradicts them, there's a fundamental misalignment. They won't support you, because the real-world evidence contradicts their beliefs, and you're bringing more real-world evidence.

On issues of climate change, evolution, age of the universe, etc., the hard science just straight up disagrees with conservatives. I don't see a way around that.

The reason there’s no conservatives in science, or startlingly little conservatives in education as a whole, is because they’re incompatible ideologies. It’s like asking why there aren’t more polar bears in the rain forest.

This isn't revolutionary. But it's a perfect example.

This is a completely derivative conclusion from something I learned in molecular biology as an undergrad. The only "new" thing here is saying that poor people live in environments, since we've known for literally decades that DNA methylation is affected by environment.

> a person's perception of whether they "are" rural is actually a better predictor of their health outcomes than whether they actually are rural.

OK. Great. I'm poor if I think I'm poor. Roger.

> These are both potentially useful things to know as we try to eliminate extreme health disparities between Americans. You seem to think we have all the answers though, so what's the answer? How do we do it?

I don't know! You tell me how your "potentially useful" information provides a solution. Win me over!

As someone who hates the current administration and thinks it's doing untold harm to our future, I'm disappointed by how many people in the sciences chose option two.

Did you know: some people like Canada?

For many people, it does get better with time, though.

I'm pleased to hear a response was made and hope Eddy_Viscosity2 sees your comment.

Nothing will change (and nothing has fundamentally changed since the climate scaremongering started), because people in the West do not want to change their lifestyles, and people elsewhere aspire to a Western lifestyle. There is nothing you can do about this. I am not not going to eat less meat or drive my car less than I find convenient to please some leftist eco-warrior.

> Richard Muller have come in to disprove the mainstream consensus

He's a dishonest con through and through.