| ▲ | TimorousBestie a day ago |
| More or less a handout to the tech industry. This is just the STTR program with even less oversight and a questionable funding source. Curious what the plan is when the academic pipeline for training researchers collapses entirely. AI all the things? |
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| ▲ | contemporary343 a day ago | parent | next [-] |
| I think it's also a way to reduce funding to universities (which are politically disfavored), since other things like arbitrary reductions to indirect costs didn't work. It also defies both congressional will in the appropriations bill (which is directorate-specific) and of course the whole charter and mandate of NSF, from Vannevar Bush's original case for it. |
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| ▲ | TimorousBestie a day ago | parent [-] | | Yeah, this is all well-attested. 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. | | |
| ▲ | rayiner a day ago | parent | next [-] | | The assumption is that the people in the universities who can build missiles can pretty easily be distinguished from those who can’t. | | |
| ▲ | TimorousBestie a day ago | parent [-] | | Anyone with a bare understanding of the history of science would understand how bad of an assumption that is. 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. | | |
| ▲ | rayiner a day ago | parent [-] | | I’m pretty sure we can maintain technological dominance with the O-visa and E-visa programs. | | |
| ▲ | khriss a day ago | parent [-] | | The implicit assumption is that the people who would genuinely quality for the O visa would want to come to the US. That claim generally held in the past, however it has not been very true in the recent years. Yes, you will get people who will 'qualify' for those visas, but the bar will and already is getting steadily lower. | | |
| ▲ | rayiner a day ago | parent [-] | | Apart from a COVID blip, O1 visa petitions have been steadily growing. They’re up 57% since 2013. 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. |
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| ▲ | solid_fuel a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Presumably the conservatives still want the US to be a superpower, 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. | | |
| ▲ | rayiner a day ago | parent [-] | | > hurting people they don’t like > 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. | | |
| ▲ | NewJazz a day ago | parent | next [-] | | By contrast, we think the way to get more prosperity is to do more of the things that made America prosperous in the past. Like not wage foreign wars? | | | |
| ▲ | voxl a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Oh you mean like funding science? Dumbass. | | |
| ▲ | rayiner a day ago | parent [-] | | This is funding science. Literally just reallocating funding from one part of the pipeline to another. | | |
| ▲ | DangitBobby a day ago | parent [-] | | You have to fund both ends of the pipeline or it dries up. You can't just fund the money end and expect money to pour out forever. |
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| ▲ | a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | solid_fuel a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | > We think these are related, just like you do. 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. | | |
| ▲ | rayiner a day ago | parent [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | solid_fuel a day ago | parent [-] | | > How about “people who bring intersectional personal attributes into a discussion of science funding?” Yeah, that's what I figured - you are in fact completely incapable of defining "postmodernist". I don't think anyone is surprised that you have no idea what you're talking about though, it's pretty obvious that you're just a really emotionally fragile guy who is having some big feelings about minorities existing. By the way, I know there's no god, because if there was you would have spontaneously imploded from the sheer irony of whining about bringing “intersectional personal attributes into a discussion of science funding” in a post-DOGE world. | | |
| ▲ | TimorousBestie a day ago | parent [-] | | “By that definition, DOGE was postmodernist” is sincerely great, good job. | | |
| ▲ | solid_fuel a day ago | parent [-] | | 0/10 on reading comprehension, repeat 5th grade. I'm sure that's not the first time you've been told that. |
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| ▲ | SoftTalker a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There's at least a subset of them who do not. They want isolationism. Almost a juche sort of mentality. Stop propping up Europe/NATO. "No more foreign wars" was their rallying point. The Iran war really brought them to the surface, a lot of them were very unhappy with the Trump administration about that. | | |
| ▲ | magicalist a day ago | parent [-] | | > The Iran war really brought them to the surface, a lot of them were very unhappy with the Trump administration about that. 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? | | |
| ▲ | TimorousBestie a day ago | parent [-] | | > Or did you mean this subset was "very unhappy" in like a completely impotent and meaningless way? That’s how I understood it, yes. So unhappy that they’ll write him in for a third term. | | |
| ▲ | SoftTalker 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | In our system we generally have the choice between two candidates. You can be "very unhappy" with one but still think he is a better option than the other one. | | |
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| ▲ | exe34 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Presumably the conservatives still want the US to be a superpower Why would you presume that? Isn't enough that they get rich and powerful as compared to others around them? | | | |
| ▲ | monknomo a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [flagged] | |
| ▲ | hilariously a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] | | |
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| ▲ | counters a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| But not even. At least in the domain I work in, there is virtually no interest of engaging with these NSF programs. Regardless of what's put in writing in the calls for applicants, there's still a significant prejudice that NSF - by being a part of the government - will be slow and ineffective at administering awards, and therefore it's a waste of time for any agile, fast-moving company. 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! |
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| ▲ | atonse a day ago | parent [-] | | We have worked with many (NSF funded) research centers over the past decade. It (accidentally) became our speciality. If you know research centers that are looking for software dev firms that understand how to work with NSF funded grants and research centers, I’d love to connect. |
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| ▲ | wahnfrieden a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It’s a political revenge move, there’s no strategy toward a better outcome such as AI (however questionable that would be) as that’s not the point of it |
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| ▲ | adastra22 a day ago | parent | prev [-] |
| That seems like typical establishment / reactionary push-back. NSF is spinning up Focused Research Organizations, which are very effective ways of getting basic research done that wouldn't otherwise be funded, and to do so in a way that allows for commercial spin-offs. That's not a handout. |
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| ▲ | TimorousBestie a day ago | parent [-] | | The whole point of an FRO is to have less oversight than a traditional government grant or contract. | | |
| ▲ | adastra22 19 hours ago | parent [-] | | That is the point, but not the purpose. Traditional funding mechanisms leave large gaps across whole research areas. A more traditional government grant is small and focused, and only makes sense within the context of an ongoing research effort, e.g. in a university. That's great and fine, except that there are whole categories of things that existing labs and agencies do not do, yet are still too close to basic science for an industrial research lab to pick up. 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. |
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