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Comment by x3ro | Hacker News Reader

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U.S. government funding generates a lot of scientific and medical breakthroughs outside of what people on this forum would call “tech”.

To be fair it also heavily leverages those breakthroughs to maintain geopolitical power. Get on the US' badside (by, e.g., having resources you're not willing to allow to be exploited) and suddenly you're cut off from research, patents, data, etc. People often think of brain drain as being a natural consequence of the US providing more research funding but the US very actively seeks to undermine other nations' efforts to create similar talent-building projects. As a researcher, if you are at all associated with a domestic talent project you will be barred from access to research/funding. Often, your only option is to move to the US

Yes and no. I think the current Ebola outbreak would not be happening if the US was still committed to global health.

The Ebola virus is not simply a health issue but a cultural and eudcational "problem" too. There is a reason people eat bushmeat because 1, it's their culture 2, they would otherwise have nothing to eat especially not meat protein.

NSFL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XasTcDsDfMg

USAID was, among many other things, working on educating folks about this.

Education, cultural sensitivity, etc. are health issues.

You mean the 17th ebola outbreak in the DRC?

Yes, the one authorities are struggling to contain because of recent withdrawal of resources, and consequently predicted to be more prolonged and at greater risk of wider spread.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/29/friday-briefin...

The world should be more independent and self sufficient. It will be better in the long run.

To what goal? USAID and similar programs always had the indirect benefit of opening up foreign markets to the USA. It's just short-sighted out of sheer economic considerations - and that's ignoring the ridiculous recklessness of pulling the rug under millions of people. Hundreds of thousands have died due to the USAID cuts; those deaths could have been prevented by approaching this in a more professional manner.

Stability. In 'decentralized' systems, if any entity does something dumb, the impact is localized and consequently negligible. By contrast in centralized systems, one misstep by the central power can trigger catastrophic consequences. Another benefit of decentralized systems is that sometimes those dumb things end up being brilliant, and so we end up with a much richer system with a better idea of what works and what doesn't work, what's stable and what isn't, and so on.

Decentralized systems also help local entities develop and grow into their own. Necessity is the mother of invention and centralized systems largely remove the necessity of local expertise which cripples efforts to advance it. This is the 17th declared major outbreak of ebola in the DRC. One would think that by the time you've had a few major ebola outbreaks, let alone 16, you'd be building up a rich body of expertise, knowledge, and competence, but that does not really seem to be the case.

One might think that, if one was entirely unaware of the on-the-ground situation in the DRC for the past few decades.

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