Curious what the plan is when the academic pipeline for training researchers collapses entirely. AI all the things?
It’s so weird. Presumably the conservatives still want the US to be a superpower, which presumably includes high-tech capabilities like global power projection, missile defense, and persistent space operations. At the same time they seemingly want a Cultural Revolution-like decimation of intellectuals.
I don’t see how they believe they can attain both objectives at once.
I used to think that too, but it seems evident the current crop of conservatives is only interested in hurting people they don’t like and funneling money into the pockets of oligarchs. It’s pretty evident now that none of this is being done out of patriotism or a genuine desire to improve America.
> genuine desire to improve America
We think these are related, just like you do. The difference is that you assume that hurting billionaires will improve America while we assume that hurting NGOs and postmodernist academics will do so.
And that difference results from the fact that you think you can construct a new society without billionaires and industrialists that nonetheless offers the prosperity we have today, and more. By contrast, we think the way to get more prosperity is to do more of the things that made America prosperous in the past.
Oh, we're all well aware that you think hurting people is the only way to improve the country.
> The difference is that you assume that hurting billionaires will improve America while we assume that hurting NGOs and postmodernist academics will do so.
Don't you know that lying is a sin? You can't even define "postmodernist". No. I've heard this screeching noise you're making many times but it always boils down to the same truth: you don't believe in hurting "postmodernist academics", you believe in hurting people who aren't straight, white, christians.
Like not wage foreign wars?
Why would you presume that? Isn't enough that they get rich and powerful as compared to others around them?
So, like...Thomas Massie and Rand Paul?
There were only four republicans in the House and four in the Senate to vote to limit war powers, and I don't think you could claim Murkowski or Collins are isolationists.
Or did you mean this subset was "very unhappy" in like a completely impotent and meaningless way, but they'll have been 100% against it six months or 2.5 or 4.5 years from now?
That’s how I understood it, yes. So unhappy that they’ll write him in for a third term.
You specifically have the much harder problem of explaining how you intend to maintain tech dominance with a Cultural Revolution and also without any foreigners or any of the many various groups of citizens you find personally undesirable.
Yes, you will get people who will 'qualify' for those visas, but the bar will and already is getting steadily lower.
Long-term, I suspect skilled immigration will trend down. But for positive reasons: as India and China develop, more people will make the choice to stay home rather than come to America. Same reason we see little emigration from Korea and Japan anymore. It’s a good change, just like it was a good change when our post-WWII edge was reduced after Europe rebuilt. But the attraction of American capital likely still will bring the superstars here.
On the flip-side, my academic colleagues are tearing out their hair trying to get some - any - funding to support their labs. I'm completely inundated with request from colleagues to provide an LOI or some other evidence that our company is interested in working with their lab on something. But that's even _less_ attractive for many private companies!
Apologies if this interpretation is off-base, but I don't think it's a good thing that there is a nascent cottage industry of "software dev firms" that are elbowing their way into these grants. That is another glaring warning sign that what the NSF is doing right now is grossly inconsistent with what it is _supposed_ to be doing.
But occasionally those research centers have needed help on the cloud side setting up servers to do their research. So we’ve supported them there, but again mainly in an IT/programming capacity.
We aren’t competing for grants. We leave that to the scientists. :-)
Our company is KZN Consulting (kznconsulting.com) and our product is SimplyScholar.com
For example, let's say you want to make a fundamentally different kind of microscope, or nano-fabrication lab. Something that requires many millions of $$ to setup, and further tens of millions to operate. That's too much for an SBIR grant, too expensive for industry to do on a lark. An FRO could setup the lab and run it for 5-7 years, accomplishing major research goals while proving out the concept. But it'll never get done on a spoon-fed sequence of small grants.
So you grant an organization $50M/yr to do this work, with broad freedoms to spend that money how they see fit, so long as progress is made towards the research goals. That's an FRO. Yes, technically that is a government grant with less regulatory oversight. But it's not libertarian philosophy that drives that outcome, so much as regulatory oversight is not setup to fund such efforts in the first place.