How many million graduate students do you need to give the US the military hegemony and political influence over allies and adversaries that the F-35 program provides ?

Looked at from a policy maker's viewpoint, things look very different.

I’m sure this has nothing to do with 3.1 million graduate students versus 500 F-35s.

For actual context, F-35 program receives $9B per year (amortized over lifetime), which is $3000 per year per graduate student. Erasing the F-35 program entirely would make something like a 10% difference in graduate wages, while destroying the US Air Force as a modern military.

So no — your request to fund graduate students is more expensive than the F-35 program and delivers at best marginal results.

When you math through per unit or per capita or per year, we already spend more on education and science than the military — and it’s unclear further science funding to the detriment of the military would improve things.

I understand why you want more money, though.

Basic science is never cheap, but none of that money goes to the grad students.

Then again, military weapons are indeed insanely expensive.

Someone has to pay for the kings mistakes and it might as well be you.

It's cheap but it's prestigious. Ideologues and fascists hate that.

> the maintenance cost per flight hour of F-35 was a bit more than $40k, which is significantly more than I make in a year as a grad student

This is not an unreasonably ratio between cutting-edge affection and long-term potential. Particularly when grad students aren’t currently configured to be earning positions.

"Proffer a strongly worded capitulation" was probably too much for publication.

Yrah probably someone at doge or the dept of war watched that and suggested dismantling it. What's next, closing down the NOAA because it's a "con job" and climate change is "a hoax"?

77,302,580 Americans made it happen. 87,037,184 voting-elligible Americans sat it out.

Why not name them?

Zuck Musk Bezos Pichai Thiel

Add more

let's not forget that orange retard would have never got reelected if the preceding retards had not cranked their clown world antics up to eleven. the senile grandpa was awakened and paraded around when it was strictly necessary, but for the most part, it was lunatics running the asylum. just look at this for example https://xcancel.com/USDOL/status/1795879796599111997 and try to imagine the kind of people who wrote and/or approved that message.

"Ignorance is strength" would be the Orwellian take.

The Power of Positive Thinking is one of the few books Donald Trump has really internalized and it shows in his approach to a lot of issues.

‘If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any’ - Trump on COVID19

We live in a post-factual world [1].

I'm not sure people realize just how dire this is. The politics of the largest, most powerful country on Earth are dominated by people who truly believe in dispensational premillenialism [2]. For these people their time on Earth is limited. Wrecking the Earth doesn't matter. The afterlife is forever. Senior government officials take seriously bringing on the apocalypse through a red heifer [3]. In fact, it's the cornerstone of Christian Zionism [4].

And what began this political movement? Racism [5], specifically a ruling that schools in the South couldn't be both tax-exempt and segregationist.

We live in the dumbest timeline.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-truth_politics

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkWl7NaGprE

[3]: https://medium.com/@nour_alhakk/the-red-heifer-and-the-u-s-a...

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Zionism

[5]: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-ri...

https://archive.is/fZ9CN

> Michael England, a spokesman for the National Science Foundation, said the decision to dismantle the network, known as the Ocean Observatories Initiative, “aligns with N.S.F.’s wider strategy to have a nimbler approach to prioritizing support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies as well as a deliberate approach to smart life cycle management within its portfolio of research infrastructure.”

1) it's not hard to do your own research. If you're here, I assume you know how.

2) does that answer satisfy you? The bullshitty word salad doesn't surprise me. With this administration I expect incompetence and double speak and am rarely disappointed. I wonder why at this point in time you choose to give them so much leeway.

Ah! Both siding science.

> I know nothing about Atlantic currents or this particular monitoring project

That's the problem.

> This article failed on any level to help me make an informed decision.

You shouldn't rely on just one article to make an "informed decision." Indeed, anyone who genuinely wants to make "informed decisions" must cultivate the habit of actively seeking out to be better informed rather than passively relying on a single article.

There's an entire chain of events that the links in this article lead to...

...The NSF is descoping.

...It's descoping because of federal funding cuts to science projects

...Federal funding cuts are due to the pro-fossil-fuel biases and climate change skepticism of the rightwing Trump admin and its backers. Their ideological strategy to redesign American society, Project 2025, specifically mentions disbanding this very monitoring project.

I was able to find that all out in about 15 minutes though I'm neither American nor reside there or anywhere close to it.

A performative pretense of informed decision making is not the same as genuinely making informed decisions.

Or even the UN? That organization that this administration wants no part of...

Don’t blame the worms, they’d have done better on their own…

Or insect infected brains (ref: Braindead TV series)

Tracking the currents isn’t going to have any effect on the currents.

It's mostly just about getting the data out of the news cycle. If you don't have new data on the oceans warming then there's no news story, so less pressure on Big Oil to greenwash their industry.

It's arguably not particularly inconvenient for the us political class? the us has been on a tear reducing per capita ghg emissions (also trade corrected ghg emissions). this has been going on for five decades now (consistently 2.5) independent of whether administrations or congress have been red or blue

iiuc us per capita emissions are not far from 1910s levels

That stretch of ocean is closer to Canada than it is to mainland Europe.

They probably think it's "cutting costs" or "reducing waste" or something. At least the fraction of the motive that isn't just corruption.

None will. But hide them in a box, away from where others can see, and they will happily sign a piece of paper that says they do. One so called a ballot.

Remember when North Carolina banned sea level rise? https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/12/north-caroli...

That wasn't arbitrary, and it wasn't for no benefit. It was so that landowners along the coast could continue to use faulty sea level studies to justify state road and infrastructure investments.

This, too, isn't mindless vandalism. It's worse. It's greedy, it's short-sighted, and it's cruel.

Or down. You know what, just strap those vr goggles on and stop looking at anything real at all!

This doesn't really seem relevant, nor does it seem credible that only Democrats are ever tempted to use trickery to make crime rates seem better than they are.

> And it’s not just a Trump or Republican thing either. For example crime stats in blue cities ...

Trying to "both sides" dismantling oceanographic science by equivocating it with "blue cities often tell a misleading story" is disingenuous at best and can easily be interpreted as deceitful by a reasonable person.

For real. Cant fix stupid. Its so sad.

Where I work we research some environmental data like ocean temperature (at depth and at surface), currents, acidity, salinity, and oxygen content. Most of this occurs at the surface, but a lot occurs via CTD (many depths) and autonomous drones along the continental shelf in BC, Canada.

You'd think this stuff isn't worth monitoring, but it paints a very interesting picture of where things were, where they are now, and where they're going.

We also do experiments on key species of the food web, analyze environmental DNA to see what's present and where, and generally try to figure out what this data says about living things and how they will handle these changes.

The bottom line is that something as significant as ocean currents will have massive implications for crucial things like transport, food, agriculture, and more.

This stuff is integral to the stability of everything you care about.

And it's not looking great. Acidity is increasing, temperature is increasing, oxygen is decreasing, food webs are transforming; we need to know what this means ASAP, and we need to figure out how to adapt. This isn't your kids' kid's problems alone. You will likely experience impacts in your lifetime.

A simple example: fat, nutrient-rich foundational species of the BC Coast's food web are gradually decreasing in population and presence, being replaced by less nutrient-dense species from warmer climates. Countless juvenile fish which underpin our commercial fishery stocks depend on the richer, more nutritious species to thrive. This could impact their populations and lead to even more expensive fish; and we're talking about species which were plentiful and affordable in my lifetime. As those species decrease in quantity, the higher trophic levels suffer as well. This will be reflected in countless ways.

We need to measure this stuff because it's the beating heart of our planet, and it's changing for the worse (as far as our well-being is concerned).

Can you think of any economically valuable reason why it might be important to know about weather trends or events in advance? Any at all?

Because it would be really nice to know if some of the currents collapse when it happens rather than months later.

Even beyond that immediate need, the oceans are incredibly poorly studied and are of massive economic and military value to the United States. Baseline statistics on currents could be very useful for all kinds of as yet unknown science and applications. Countries that run a big navy do ocean science. It’s a form of dual purpose funding that benefits both civilian and military ships.

Because the other responses are incredulously focused at why someone would ask such a dumb question, the answer is that oceans affect everyone's lives.

Ocean currents and temperatures are major factors in storms, economic activity like trade, and ecosystems across the country. Monitoring them costs virtually nothing, and the benefits are huge.

> The system, which began operating in 2016, was designed to run for at least 25 years

It's likely that a majority of the cost to collect the data has already been paid for...

https://awakenedcompany.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/share...

because it is useful information for the public benefit, and not very expensive.

So the currents will continue to be tracked, no? :) Seriously, we should find out why this system was desired and created in the first place to answer this question. Good question...

Because the information could sensibly inform public policy, potentially has serious effects on everyone, and doesn't obviously lend itself to private actors paying for its collection because there's no great way to monetize it. Though I wonder how genuine the question really is.

Yes, it might be like watching Trump (or really all the news). If you keep at it 24x7 you ll feel that the sky will fall down in a couple of days.

But if you stop watching him for like a month, nothing of consequence happens (mostly).

Maybe these current watching is like that. If you keep looking at it,too closely and because we don't know all the variables, may be we keep making wrong "doomsday" predictions every time something moves. I have observed that this shows up in many places where we don't really know how things work..

I would much prefer if someone closely monitor the level of poisons and pesticides in the food and water we consume. For example, every store should be visited by a government agencey to collect samples and test them for poison levels...

Because if they suddenly stop, it will quite likely have devastating repercussions for the entire globe. Weather patterns (which also effects food growing), sea life (more food), and probably some other non-food related things too!

Obvs That money is much better spent helping those poor ‘victims’ of ‘lawfare’

First of all, science is good in and of itself. Second of all, this science in particular seems helpful to predict the impact of potentially disastrous climate change.