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Comment by tomp | Hacker News Reader

> The National Science Foundation (NSF) has put a cork in its grantmaking pipeline after BILLIONAIRE Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) set up shop at the agency this week.

Really, "billionaire", that's what you're going with (emphasis mine)?! Isn't it more relevant that he founded and runs 2 biggest startups (as in, high velocity, high growth companies) in the world (Tesla & SpaceX) that run circles around both legacy companies and government agencies? So, yeah, if you want things to radically improve fast, of course you call someone like Elon.

It's sad that "unbiased news" basically no longer exists.

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The emperor is not wearing any clothes.

It's obvious if you see measures like web pages getting deleted because they contain the word "privilege". You know, as in "privilege escalation". I'm sure the people at NSA who wrote these pages are happy about their work being in vain.

were you equally opposed to leftwings deleting concepts such as "git master" and "quantum supremacy"?

One person blogged about `git master` and many people agreed that it may be needlessly antiquated. So private companies chose to take a few hours to change a dumb default string under no external pressure and certainly not under duress of government action.

The fact you conflate these two demonstrates either a clear lack of earnestness or common sense. Take your pick.

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Not really, I've been opposing sexism, racism, political correctness, science denial (yes, burn it all down!) and supporting meritocracy and freedom of speech since early 2010s, way before it became big in the media.

Well you are doing a poor job of conveying it if your two biggest pain points are "git master" and "quantum supremacy".

God help us this is the way all of these conversations have gone over the last 8 years.

Group A: "You are gutting our scientific research infrastructure, a entity that has provided tremendous benefit to scientific progress worldwide and has been a source of national pride!"

Group B: "Yea well some tech companies voluntarily changed the name of their git branch from 'master' to 'main' so you all had it coming."

There's nothing I can do with that, except hunker down and hope all the horrors of this are felt by someone else.

And when did you abandoned it? Fact is, it was never about freedom, it was using the word freedom to help fascist agenda.

Were there directives from the Biden administration to defund all CS research done by people who used "main" instead of "master" as a branch name?

Two companies which are massively dependent on government handouts to function.

I didn't know Tesla ran circles around legacy car companies. Well other than P/E ratio. I was under the impression that they made fewer and worse cars that are currently not very popular.

Elon did not found Tesla. SpaceX's financials are private so we don't actually know if it's doing well.

I really hope your views do not represent the majority of those watching this unfold from outside America.

What would the unbiased version of this report look like? "...after SUPERMAN Elon Musk's...", "...after NATIONAL HERO Elon Musk's..."? In what way would you like journalists to show their deference to this great man?

I doubt that would be unbiased.

The answer would be, any description that doesn't lean right nor left. Maybe "technologist", "entrepreneur", "startup founder", "industrialist" etc.

Explain how "billionaire" is anything but an accurate, unbiased, term.

Billionaire is incredibly relevant. It highlights the inherent conflict of interest in the moneyed class demolishing the state that is meant to protect the rest of us from them.

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