It is a sign of the times when I think huh, climate.gov… is that a reputable source?
Climate.gov’s Polar Vortex Blog is written, edited, and moderated by Amy Butler (NOAA Chemical Sciences Laboratory) and Laura Ciasto (NOAA Climate Prediction Center), with editorial and graphics support from the Climate.gov team (NOAA Climate Program Office). These are blog posts by subject matter experts, not official agency communications; if you quote from these posts or from the comments section, you should attribute the quoted material to the individual blogger or commenter, not to NOAA or or Climate.gov.
Or is there some distinction I'm missing?
Back in university we would publish news entries for all our publications without any input from the university. But for some papers there was also an official press release by the university. That came both with additional restrictions (length, language level, flashiness) but also with additional reach (getting picked up by newspapers directly). I assume that pre-Trump this would have been a similar setup. No guess as to now though
https://www.forbes.com/sites/marshallshepherd/2025/03/21/wea...
This applies across the board to these firings/rehirings. Why would anyone go back to work for real when you know you're just gonna be fired again?
Come on, you know you can't just throw that out. Support your claim.
It's not a productive comment, it doesn't invite discussion, it doesn't add useful information.
For a journalistic perspective, when events are moving fast, you report what is known at a given time.
Hindsight is always 20/20 and no doubt there are some cases like you point out. However, are you sure that those are the only cases? The fact that the govt is scrambling to hire back fired people would suggest otherwise.
The desire to impute political bias to everything is not a useful way of viewing the world.
https://www.gsa.gov/real-estate/real-estate-services/real-pr...
Are these the journalists you have an issue with for reporting on it?
https://apnews.com/article/gsa-federal-buildings-doge-fbi-do...
I'm all for free media but the legacy outlets currently screaming about cuts are primarily upset because THEY just lost a ton of government funding but that's good because I don't want government run news, even if it comes in a bunch of brand names, and it's funny that all the "reputable" outlets just happen to be the ones with the closest relationships to the CIA and FBI and historically have covered for their worst injustices.
no, I do not shed a tear for what is happening to the old government controlled legacy media.
One probably sponsored by the Russian government: https://apnews.com/article/russian-interference-presidential...
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/02/25/second-trump-term-0...
Based on the way things have been going, that seems to be the goal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOAA_under_the_second_presiden...
Noaa's free information is really good so it makes the playing field a bit too level for private companies. They don't really offer a substantially better product than NOAA so it makes their product less valuable.
A few years ago we had a company reach out to us saying they could give us hyper-localized forecasts for our ultra endurance events. After our first event using them I checked their data against NOAA. Surprise, their data was far less accurate than weather.gov.
Every private weather service is using NOAA's dataset and then tweaking it or adding their own data. All of them.
If you doge it, you can sell a private version.
Biggest potential winners are anyone willing to directly pay the President a kickback for massive corrupt payments from the government, anyone facing severe legal liability for past illegal actions who can buy a get-out-of-jail card, and foreign autocrats who want the US to stop protecting its own interests.
Most big corps are run for the short term. Management's biggest concern is how the market will react to results in the next few quarters.
"Over the past decade, before pursuing a particular line of research, scientists (including C.G.B.) in the haematology and oncology department at the biotechnology firm Amgen in Thousand Oaks, California, tried to confirm published findings ... scientific findings were confirmed in only 6 (11%) cases. Even knowing the limitations of preclinical research, this was a shocking result." [1]
and from Bayer:
"To mitigate some of the risks of such investments ultimately being wasted, most pharmaceutical companies run in-house target validation programmes. However, validation projects that were started in our company based on exciting published data have often resulted in disillusionment when key data could not be reproduced.
only in ∼20–25% of the projects were the relevant published data completely in line with our in-house findings
Surprisingly, even publications in prestigious journals or from several independent groups did not ensure reproducibility
Our observations indicate that literature data on potential drug targets should be viewed with caution
If the stream of research that came out of NIH-grant funded work was genuinely useful, venture capitalists would be falling over themselves to commercialize it. In reality [3]
[Atlas Venture partner] Booth said that the “unspoken rule” among early stage VCs is that at least 50% of published studies, even those in top-tier academic journals, “can’t be repeated with the same conclusions by an industrial lab. Atlas now insists on external validation studies of a new company’s basic science as a precondition to further investment.”
He went on to say that the NIH should have higher standards and do more to vet the data. That never happened. He also said that due to the low quality of NIH output, "there’s such a scarcity of venture firms willing to take on early work, you rarely find yourself having to jump in quickly."
That was 15 years ago. There was no serious effort to improve, and VCs are still much more interested in computing startups than biotech.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/483531a
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd3439-c1
[3] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1038/scibx.2011.416#pre...
No, they’re not. Biotech VC has been bigger than tech VC in terms of absolute funding for decades (based on annual data from the Venture Capital Association). Most years its not even close.
Pharmaceutical companies do depend on NIH funding but indirectly: most of their products are now acquired rather than developed in house. Universities spin off their NIH funded projects as biotech startups that are funded by VCs and public investors (biotech startups usually IPO long before they have any revenue, which is one of the reasons there’s so much money in biotech VC) and the small fraction that are most successful in clinical trials are acquired by the pharmaceutical industry.
https://nvca.org/document/q4-2024-pitchbook-nvca-venture-mon...
If you go to "Deals x Sector" and then scroll down they split out deals by dollar value by sector and software alone is $89.2B vs $25.3B for pharma last year. But software isn't all of the tech industry, they also have a row for IT hardware startups which is $8.2B. Adding it up the tech industry sees 4x more money flowing into it than pharma despite that most tech startups are selling optional nice-to-haves to people who buy from their own pocket, vs pharma who sells stuff that might be life-critical to people who socialize the costs via insurance.
In theory, pharma should dwarf tech. You can't say no to a life saving drug if you need it: it should be easy money. In practice, the VCs interviewed in my source seem to have it right - pharma VC is much less competitive overall.
It’s kind of like saying “solar panels are only 20% efficient, so are you sure the sun is critical for the solar energy industry?”
25% is crazy low, but 11% is even lower. If someone told you things and 90% of the time they were wrong, you'd stop listening.
Solar panels having low effectiveness would actually be a good argument against them, because although the solar industry needs solar panels the correct comparison is with the energy industry overall, which doesn't.
Bayer might find individual academic studies to be poor basis for starting new drug development trials, or whatever, but they certainly wouldn't pretend that they can independently replace the entirety of American academic biomedical research, which is substantially dependent on public funding. It's much too large and expensive a task for industry to take on, especially since industry would have to pay much higher salaries to attract the same talent.
You'll see similar in most fields: basic research into interesting curiosities in academic labs does not instantly and immediately lead to new commercial products. But immediate productization is neither the purpose nor motivation of scientific research, and effectively all new product development is completely dependent on having open research as a part of the same global social system: non-commercial labs, substantially funded by public money, find and explore most of the novel phenomena, train nearly all of the researchers including the ones who end up in industry, provide the structure for knowledge sharing like journals and conferences, and so on.
Funding scientific research is among the highest leverage things the US government can do. While many research grants go to projects that fail or don't lead anywhere promising (which is why they rarely get funded by industry), occasionally one of those projects ends up creating huge (sometimes literally trillions of dollars) benefits down the line, with little if any reward accruing to the researcher who did the work, but massive improvement for the whole society.
> Funding scientific research is among the highest leverage things the US government can do.
A deeply subjective claim asserted as obvious fact. It can just as easily be argued that governments could spend nothing on scientific research and progress would occur at the same rate or even faster.
As for the mRNA vaccines, just be aware that this is a bad example to use for the wonders of government science. Lots of people who carefully checked the data and studies at the time realized the mRNA vaccines didn't work and public health agencies were lying about their effectiveness, as they lied about so many other things. Later on many other people realized this too, usually after taking several boosters and still getting infected repeatedly.
There are better and less controversial examples to cite if you want examples of government funded science with high impact (e.g. AlexNet), but it's not enough to point to a handful of examples. You have to show that they'd have never happened otherwise, which is impossible to show as usually it's clear that they would.
The silver lining is that understanding of this disrepute is nearing universality.
In another comment there are bitter words about the nature of Monarchy, but it appears that it does not require a Monarchy to get things badly, seriously wrong.
In case you've not read it, I suggest this brilliant compilation of interviews about fire management practices of indigenous nations in California; the degree of documented anthrogensis is much higher than I imagined prior to reading.
Some have been wondering that for years already.