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Comment by kennywinker | Hacker News Reader

> The focus should be on harnessing AI and out-competing China

Lol. Braindead take. First of all, who cares if we invent next-big-technology before china? We’ll get them to make it for us and then they’ll be better at it than us because they make it and we don’t.

> writes Michael Kratsios, the White House science chief

Ah, yes. That makes the braindeadness of the take make sense. This is just more anti-science bullshit from a gov that hates science. Once you get past the talk, it’ll boil down to “we should only give NSF funding to companies that kick back enough cash to the trump 2028 campaign fund”

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Letting China or other foreign nations invent the next great technologies and then buying it from them sounds to me an lot like outsourcing R&D. The US already outsourced much of its manufacturing, if we outsource the R&D as well what jobs will remain in the US? Surely we cannot become a nation of middle managers.

Ah, i see the mistake. You read what I said as: it’s ok if they invent it because they’ll make it and sell it to us. What I was saying is the opposite. Even if we invent it we will ship production off to china and loose any control, expertise, and skill within a decade max.

Without building a foundation where we can both invent AND produce things at home, chasing invention is a loosing game.

Weird seeing such emotionally charged angry comments.

Tens of millions of lives have been ended, destroyed, or substantially impacted by this administration. It's not a fucking game.

The Trump administration began its engagement with the scientific community by attempting to nuke dozens of university programs from orbit, declaring them ideological enemies and illegally cancelling all of their grants. Do you expect everyone to just pretend that didn't happen? I agree with a lot of what Kratsios has to say in principle, but if you want the research community to engage with or respect him, at an absolute minimum you're going to have to convince him to apologize.

Because the Trump administration is doing a great deal of damage to Federally funded US science research.

I mean as long as you don’t care about the future of your friends, family, or country, and the collective struggle for knowledge that scientists have dedicated their entire lives to, then sure — why get so fired up about stuff like that anyway?

I wasn’t angry when I wrote that. Annoyed and disgusted is probably closer to the truth.

You’ve let your worldview get so small your counterpart is convinced Biden funded the Covid pandemic to steal the 2020 election. He’s got all the proof, as I’m sure you do too. Take a breather for a few months.

For the record, the conspiracy is Obama and Trump funded the COVID-19 pandemic via EcoHealth Alliance (and Trump funded the vaccines in late 2019, before COVID was public) in direct circumvention of the Obama era prohibition on dangerous gain-of-function.

I think we need to keep our conspiracy allegations accurate:

We’re not doing anything constructive to strawman one group was a way to insult another.

You’re suggesting I’m a conspiracist. But the track record of quid pro quo and kickbacks are public knowledge - my only new assertion is “hey looks like they’re running that same play again” - where’s the conspiracy?

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