I do think that there’s an aspect of small government that connects those 70M to their government in a way that large scale federalization may fail to do. Not sure how to achieve benefits of scale without this problem…
(Ironically, my dad won an award as a USDA bureaucrat for the economic analysis and rule set that allowed Mexican avocados into the US.)
When you remove a barrier to a market the intersection of supply and demand curves shifts to the right (more supply) and the equilibrium price drops and the equilibrium supply increases. “Why does this happen?” is more correctly explained by “the supply increased” because the supply curve is what changed, not the demand curve. Note that the article argues for a subsequent change in the demand curve, fueled by tax-funded advertising.
I visited colleagues in the U.K. and France a couple of weeks ago over spring break. Definitely interesting to compare grading approaches with ours here in the US. Both still have end of the semester in class exams which count for a large majority of the grade.
Things I really appreciated: in the U.K. model - the professors job is not to teach; instead they provide reading material/assignments via which the student will learn by themselves. In the French model grades are out of 20. I asked what fraction of their students get a 20/20 in a class every year, and they looked at me confused - “Students never get a 20/20. A good grade is a 16/20!”.
In France, tuition is essentially free. I think expecting every student to finish in 4 years is a huge loss compared to my experience at big state school in the late 90’s where people routinely did 5 or 6 years. I think we can widespread meaningful learning, accurate grades, and fixed duration programs, but not all 3!
I don’t think this in quite fair. Since the time of Reagan, I think that liberals have consistently upheld the possibility of non-military government service being of value in contrast to the Reagan-ite generalization that only military service was generally honorable.
An interesting question is if/when there will be big protests. Ignoring a judge is a breach of constitutional order, and if people don’t speak up for Venezuelan “gang members”, it becomes normalized, and quickly can escalate. I think we’ve all been waiting to see how long it would take to get here (if ever). Now what next???
I think that the tragedy of our current circumstance is that “public service” is apparently only valuable or respectable if it involves military (or in this case diplomacy). I think many people sacrifice opportunity to enter other roles in government with a sense that they are serving their country. Why not look beyond force in the way that Roosevelts public service core built so much of our now crumbling public infrastructure???
Something that I was quite surprised not to see in this story were questions about mental illness. There’s obviously a huge modern tendency to medicalise things, but the link to the grandfather made me wonder. What we call mental illnesses like depression, schizophrenia, anxiety are all obviously extremes on a continuum. (I’d love to see evidence to the contrary, but seizures or infarcts are probably one of the few binarized events related to the brain and even those have micro-versions.)
When reading these program announcements, it's important to keep in mind that the (unofficial?) mandate for a DARPA program officer is to fund proposals that lie in the boundaries of [Doesn't at face violate laws of physics, P(Success) = 0.2]. A program where the vast majority of aims were clearly successfully delivered would be a program that should have been funded by other government agencies.
Of course, with R&D currently on the chopping block, we'll see if the same people that complain about NSF/NIH start coming for DARPA also...
This is exactly what NASA has had on its timeline since the Obama era ("Constellation"). Trump #1 didn't like the slow timeframe (get to the moon faster - "Artemis"). Current plan from Trump/Elon ("let's scrap the space station and the moon and go to Mars ASAP") sounds like an even more accelerated abandonment.
I had the same thought, but this has no effect on necessary delta-V. In terms of risk, I suspect it's already baked in to his analysis at some level. The risk comes from human-time-on-planet or time-in-space, which having a return vehicle doesn't change.
I should point out that I review for a basic science (learning and memory) panel. So quite divergent from food or vaccines or what people might imagine as "woke" topics.
Having stayed up until 4 AM to prepare reviews for a Thursday study section, only to have it cancelled Wednesday at noon, I am feeling very frustrated. Anonymous sources say that since early February the program officers are receiving instructions to pretend that meetings will take place until the afternoon before, but that so far there have been no waivers to allow them.
No grant review means either no grants funded OR (conveniently) the normal rigorous grant review system is bypassed.
I was shocked to find AI generated post match interviews after the recent Liverpool derby. I was watching and thinking “whoa - I thought Mo Salah was classier than that”. Then I noticed the channel was called “DangerousAI”. But generated within a few hours of the final whistle and undetectable from a quick glance…
Because certain concepts have been repeated so often they've become elements of faith (e.g., "taxes are too high", "government is filled with fraud and waste", "taxing the 1% will solve our country's financial problems"), careful conversation about the complexities of the modern world is difficult to have.
I think that complex solutions CAN be grasped by the large majority of voters, but their time and attention are so captured by sloganeers that they aren't exposed to the explanations.
Universities have been offering doctoral degrees for at least 800 years. It’s unclear to me that they have ever been linked to powerful/ultra-wealth careers. I think that completely discounting the “prestige” factor would fail to capture a large number of academics. Especially in fields like Philosophy (from whence the Ph gets it’s abbreviation).
> it seems that HN turns out to be a very money-centric place
Counter - I recently asked a faculty candidate how he would recruit curious, talented graduate students, and he said “I develop connections from interesting online communities like Hacker News.” I loved this answer because it’s consistent with my observations. HN may seem cynical but the average level of potential PhD students is higher than many alternatives!
Wanting to give the DOGE folks the benefit of the doubt, I decided to look for military spending. Per Wikipedia, there should be ~400k active duty folks in the US Army (not counting other military branches). These are definitely under the Executive branch, but seem to be absent from the data???
“Ideological” would involve, e.g., any tabulation of race? This is the French approach - “There’s no racism here! See! Our data says everyone (hired, arrested, elected) is French.” Tautologies are always the easiest solution to thorny arguments…
Tremendous respect, btw, to the New Yorkers I met last year. Some of them were unhappy about things like, e.g., having no soccer fields or having the libraries closed on Sundays. But for the most part, the large majority of folks I talked with did not begrudge the migrant families a place to stay even though this $$ was coming mostly from NYC taxes (and only a little bit from the Federal government).
I think in this particular case, it was to help recoup some of NYC's costs for housing the 100Ks of migrants (some undocumented, some with pending asylum cases, some with humanitarian parole work authorizations) that were being bussed from TX in 2023/24. From my understanding, because NYC has a "right-to-shelter" law, they needed to house people, and apart from building a giant tent-city, once the standard homeless shelters filled up much of the housing had to be done in hotels. I think total cost to NYC was i the $5-10B range. It's unclear what the exact "fraud" or "waste" claim is. I think people are upset because they consider some hotels in NYC "luxury". Personally, I'd suggest staying in a $200/night hotel in NYC, and then staying in, e..g, the Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise at $2k/night before concluding that the migrant hotels were "luxury".
Well phrased analysis of how for broadcast specifically and society in general the current race to “change” government is potentially driving towards an unfortunate outcome for society. I think it’s a very interesting question of how the internet will change how society responds to rapid destabilization. Will it facilitate pushback? Or will it feedback polarization. Interesting times for future historians!
> Here's one: you can't be in both of these states at the same time. It's literally one or the other.
It is definitely the case that certain neuromodulators exert negative feedback on each other, but this may not be factual. Maybe the way I would make your point is that the external feedback we interact with can more or less quickly drive our brain into extremes on the brain state continuum.
The federal rules around indirect costs give a default minimum. So this point about negotiation taking time is only relevant to going beyond that minimum. Critically 15% is at or below this minimum. Current grants prohibit paying operating costs as part of the budget. So if this is allowed to stand, the marginal benefit of a new research grant to an org will be NEGATIVE. It’s hard to understand this as anything other than an attempt to crush university research?
It’s worth noting that negotiations of overhead rates requires extensive documentation and justification. So institutions really do have 30+% overhead expenses that have to be paid…
Since overhead rates are negotiated with a separate federal entity, federal law requires NIH to follow negotiated rates. If they don’t want to, they have to justify their reasoning[1]. It’s remarkable that the reasoning they give in this notice cites rates paid to large foundations. The foundations have demanded low overhead bc the federal government has backstopped keeping the lights on. Without that backstop, the model will necessarily transition to researchers having to pay rent for lab space, electricity, supplies like compressed air, salaries for administrative assistants and the like. It’s unclear whether these things can be budgeted on a grant due to other rules. Remarkable that the administration in one go is trying to gut NIH. I would have thought that there would be more congressional resistance. More broadly, I wonder if we can look forward to more rules being published on Friday afternoons as a strategy…