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What's happening inside the NIH and NSF (science.org)
955 points by rrock 8 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 1520 comments





Seems like a good opportunity for other countries to recruit scientists.

I think its underappreciated how much of America's modern success comes down to attracting scientists and intellectuals from war torn europe in the 30s-50s.


I want to believe some will move for lifestyle reasons, but the problem is the post war IPO landscape (post 1980s really) across biotech and ICT has made one stark barrier: USA is a place where you can go from $100k to $100m vesting if you are lucky. That very few do achieve this isn't the point: you cannot do it, in almost any other economy.

You have to be socially smart enough to see that a $100k salary and lifestyle outcome for your remaining working career is enough, if not better than the prospect of uplift into mega-wealth, if your IPR pans out the right way.

For career scientists who were on the NSF grant train, they'd cracked a magic egg open. Beneficial to both them and us, society at large. Well, the other economies do fund research. They fund it badly compared to the NSF, the paperwork burden is less I am sure, but so is the size of the pot and the duration. You may well spend more time hassling next grant, than doing the grant funded work.

I've known US scientists who moved to my economy (OZ) and they say its a great place to live, but they keep ties to US funded research because its what made them attractive to the non-US university or corporate research environment. If that tie is going to be cut, they're competing against one quality only: skill. Sure, a more level playing field. But that, and english language competency aside, it will be a competition against scientists from the rest of the world, who also used to go to the USA and now are seeking jobs in other economies.


There's a lot of other benefits to the USA attracting high skill talent than just salary:

* English language school system so your kids (if you have them) will speak a world language.

* Racially and culturally diverse cultures, cuisines, and communities.

* Exposure to goods from most of the world, even if marked up.

* Availability of international franchises headquartered in other countries in major metros.

* A strong passport that offers visa-free travel to many locations and very favorable visa terms in many others.

and more.

My partner and I are (different) Asians and the higher-skilled members of our family who wanted to emigrate mostly rejected Europe because of non-English language instruction and honestly just feeling racially uncomfortable in most of Europe. I have some family in Germany (who like it there) so it's obviously not impossible, but European ethnostate thinking is just unattractive to a lot of non-Caucasian talent. Canada, UK, and Australia are not like this and have potentially a lot to gain if the US kneecaps its research bureaucracy.


Most of these perceived advantages are not unique to the US. I think there are only two things that still make the US more attractive nowadays: higher salaries and more jobs available to immigrants than in other places. If these two things disappear, the whole proposition starts to fall apart.

Eh, that's not a unique set of strengths. In any European country I know about (at least a dozen) you can get all-English education from kindergarten to PhD. In some for free, in some that's paid, but probably not as expensive as in the US. Everything is really rather a matter of tradeoffs and bang-for-the buck rather than categorical differences. Some European passports offer more access, but without the downsides of the US one. The only matter in which I don't know how to compare is the racial issues, but I hear the US is not exactly free of those either.

I dunno - I'm in Berlin and my kids go to a private school for English education. I don't think somebody who couldn't afford it and wasn't a native English speaker would be getting English without parental effort before 4th grade.

Also in the area I'm in plenty of people don't speak English - I just went to an eye doctor and they didn't speak English although to be fair that's the first time it's happened to me in 2 years.


Canada and Australia are immigration nations. The UK definitely is not.

Historically/as national origin story, no.

But it has in recent decades accepted quite a large number of immigrants, and is at this point at a higher foreign-born % than the US, if still lower then Canada or Australia.

That's not quite the same as having a culture rooted in the immigration narrative, but it has changed significantly.

And I'll also mention that while integration of significant immigration into an existing society is clearly a challenging prospect everywhere, the UK is overall, doing noticeably better with it than most of it's European peers. Both from my subjective perspective as a somewhat regular visitor, and from a lot of the metrics I see.

This is a decent piece for the data side of that claim: https://samf.substack.com/p/the-truth-about-integration


The national dish of England is chicken tikka masala, last time I checked.

Most common first name in France is Mohammed. I really don’t understand what he means with immigration, unless he means he wants mostly-Asian immigration because others are a problem.

That factoid is because Muslims are obsessed with the name, and you will find someone named Mohammed in the majority of Muslim families, not immigration. It doesn't take much for the name to enter the top 10 boy names when they become 0.1% of the population.

[flagged]


If you keep posting swipes and flamebait, as in your first sentence here or "shut up forever" at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42949095, we're going to have to ban you. We've had to ask you this more than once.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.


> The USA passport is far from a strong passport. Plenty of better alternatives elsewhere. Also, that implies getting citizenship, a 5 year ordeal.

This depends on the metrics chosen to evaluate. My german passport offers significantly more visa free travel options, but the German government is notorious for not really giving a shit about citizens getting stuck in crisis abroad. For example when the Sudan civil war broke out, Americans were evacuated in a pretty crazy and expensive military operation, while Germans were told to buckle up and keep their heads close to the ground...


> Americans were evacuated in a pretty crazy and expensive military operation

Which is a great marketing stunt that most countries (Germany included) couldn't afford, but otherwise, how often does it actually happen? I doubt they're spooling up Black Hawks to evacuate tourists every time there's a crisis somewhere.


It's not that the US will respond to every crisis, but that it's much easier to do so when you have resources nearby. Flashy rescue missions help justify the infrastructure and logistics networks that support such a sprawling military footprint. Also, humans are notoriously poor at thinking about low-probability, high-impact events.

> but the German government is notorious for not really giving a shit about citizens getting stuck in crisis abroad

And the USA is?

Get real. They won't help you either or if they do they'll charge you!

When it comes to that nothing beats a French passport.


I don't have the links on me, but there were other crises where Europeans were quickly evacuated but the Americans dragged their feet, so it's more case by case than you make it seem.

Fukushima in Japan.

France chartered planes when no one knew how bad it was.

Americans were just looking with envy.

I know of one case where they just married so that the spouse could be evacuated.


I don't know what to tell you, if you think the cuisine available in the US isn't great it's because you aren't looking. The "tossed salad" nature of the country comes out in full force to create a food scene that holds its own against anywhere in the world. Even if you restrict yourself to classic American cuisine the food is still world class.

One of my absolute favorite things to do any time a friend from overseas who only knows American food from our media portrayal comes to visit is to take them out to eat and watch their eyes light up. The best reaction I got was from a UK friend I met on WoW— "good lord I see why you're all so fat" said through a mouthful of cheeseburger. If there's one thing America can do it's cook.


Wording a criticism as a semi-compliment is typically British.

Not realizing this is typically American.


Am Brit, that stood out to me too. I mean, I've made the same comment, so I know what was intended. (See my next comment for another example of this "skill").

I mean I guess this could have been the case but this guy in particular was originally from South Africa and living in the UK at the time and is in now in the process of immigrating to the US after marrying one of our other guild members. So unless it's also a British thing to commit to an underhanded compliment for years and continue snarfing down American food every time he visits I'm gonna assume he continues to be genuine.

So American ;)

> Even if you restrict yourself to classic American cuisine the food is still world class [...]

> [...] said through a mouthful of cheeseburger

> If there's one thing America can do it's cook

FWIW, a variety of other opinions exist :)


Incidentally, our President today really likes his cheeseburgers.

I don't blame him.


> a UK friend

UK is also a place with amazing immigrant/ex-colonies cuisine (as in great places to eat), but if we were talking about the British cuisine itself, getting above it is far from a high standard.


It's still there under the surface, and it's still good. But it's not fashionable (when was the last time you had kedgeree, cullen skink or lardy cake?) Stichelton, about two years ago, was a religious experience but it's £30/kg and is the output of a single herd.

Our day-to-day diet is poor (we're probably the most Americanized European country when it comes to diet), but there are good bones we could build on. Someday. A lot was lost to industrialization and WWII and can't be recovered, but much still survives.


It's possible that the… uh, 4? I think? Times I've spent a month in the USA, covering California, Nevada, Utah, NYC, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Massachusetts (and Connecticut, only on the way through, but had a pizza there) may have not been diverse enough to fully encompass your cuisine, but…

But the food I actually saw in the USA was mediocre.

I didn't have any interest in 20 varieties of Oreo or bars of chocolate with bits of pork in it (for the latter, I'm vegetarian); the stuff that Whole Foods sold had slightly less flavour and variety than European discount stores like Aldi, Trader Joe's might as well have been a corner shop; the fancy restaurants were merely OK, the only positive of the fast food joints was the low cost, the "oh, you gotta try this while you're in Manhattan!" cafes and diners were on par with the random UK town centre breakfast diners you try once to see what they're like and never go back to, all the pubs were somehow even worse than Wetherspoons (UK chain with a bad reputation), the "cheese sauce" on tortilla chips was on par among the absolute worst approximations of cheese I have ever encountered.

And why is half your yoghurt thickened with gelatine, anyway?

The best food I had in the country was at a place covered by an NDA; but even that, the best, was "4 stars out of 5" by European standards.


I had the pleasure of entertaining a colleague from China who was visiting Portland while we worked at a conference some years back. She had offered many similar complaints about American food as you did. But the places I took her to (which were themed, respectively, as Argentine and Russian) seemed to abolish that completely.

America, outside of New York and maybe Orlando, isn't really set up to entertain international visitors. Many restaurants charge a high price because they serve food that kids like and parents can tolerate. Fast food is optimized to eat in the car; delivery pizza is optimized to be delivered, which is something you should never do to a decent pizza. Nachos are a meme. Whole Foods was good ten years ago; a decent host should have pointed you to Wegman's or Market Basket or Publix. Trader Joe's is great when you live here and you want to get a good price on a bag of "wild rice" (manomon) or pecans, but you wouldn't usually live off of it.

If you want to enjoy the food here, you probably need to go with a local.

>And why is half your yoghurt thickened with gelatine, anyway?

Because Americans didn't eat yogurt until they started marketing the fat-free stuff as a diet food. Real yogurt is an afterthought for most manufacturers, though Dannon sells the real thing. Now everyone has switched to strained ("Greek") yogurt so the market for the normal kind is even less.


I think when comparing where to live, it's more helpful to look at what's normal. That's what you're going to be eating at mealtimes at work, it's what your kids are going to eat at school or their friend's place, etc. It's what you get when the company moves its office away from New York and you have to follow.

> Whole Foods was good ten years ago

My visits there were between Christmas 2014-15 and the end of summer in 2018, Whole Foods wasn't that good even on the first trip.

> If you want to enjoy the food here, you probably need to go with a local.

I did, that's how I got the "oh, you gotta try this while you're in Manhattan!" cafe — can't even remember the name of that cafe now — and Whole Foods, and the Co Op in Davis, CA: https://maps.app.goo.gl/38HdERDX99vxBzF66

Overall your description seems to be broadly agreeing with me, so I'm not sure how it's supposed to "abolish" my low regard for American cuisine?


>My visits there were between Christmas 2014-15 and the end of summer in 2018, Whole Foods wasn't that good even on the first trip.

Shows something about my perception of time. I have some fond memories of the first time I went to Whole Foods in 2003 when I was eleven at math camp in Charlotte. At that point the "organic food" movement was just getting started, so food labeled "organic" was usually from independent farms, and the store had so many free samples you could practically have lunch for free. By the time I was in college I was going to a warehouse market (Your Dekalb Farmers Market in Atlanta).

I'm not sure why you would go to a grocery store as a tourist?

>Co Op in Davis, CA:

Davis is a very small town that basically just serves the University. Why would you go there? Was it for a symposium? I'm sure it was pretty good for local produce by the standards of a small town when it was the season in California, but it's not exactly the sort of place where you would normally visit. I lived an hour away for five years and never went.

Anyway it just seems like you got some dubious advice, and on behalf of America, I'm sorry.


> Davis is a very small town that basically just serves the University. Why would you go there?

My partner at the time had family living there, working at the university; this is also how my trips were each a month long.


So you think the US government should appoint someone to make our food healthier?

I'm not proposing anything, let alone that specific thing. And I'm not even writing about health, this is about taste.

If you want to surprise the entire world by having your government do anything like that, entirely your choice.

But it would be a surprise, especially as the people your electorate just voted in appear to be against all regulation and federal agencies.

Americans voting for that would be as much of a surprise as the President demanding transfer of ownership of an ally's territory and refusing to rule out use of military force to get that.


Their BBQ culture isn't bad if you avoid the sauces.

One of the BBQ sauce's is mustard based and not overly full of sugar.

Uhh, if you're comparing to the UK, maybe. Walk into a random restaurant in any big city in the US and you're going to have a bad time.

Walk into a restaurant in Paris, Milan, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Tel Aviv, Seoul, Tokyo, Lisbon, the food is going to be much better.

Maybe at the top, the very best restaurants, the US holds its own. But the standard for the average restaurant is low.


I don't disagree with this assessment at all, the food at a randomly chosen restaurant in Paris was better than randomly choosing in the US. I had the same experience in Prague. Not usually "wow" but far from disappointing. But I've lived my whole life with the mantra that 90% of everything is shit so mediocre food places existing anywhere doesn't affect my read of the scene overall.

It's not usually the "top" restaurants that are the best in the US, I take people to dives, little holes in the wall, and greasy food trucks that just happen to be where some artisan decided to hone their craft. The place that cheap plastic tables and still has a line every day.


There are amazing craftspeople of any craft in the US. Far more than any other place I've been to. Cooking, or rather restauranteuring, is no exception. But the average restaurant is... not that.

I worked at a village next to Geneve and the local restaurant was really good considering the price and location. (Cafe American in the city for the rack of lamb which is exquisite -- if they are still there; this is circa 2000)

[flagged]


This is such a perfect encapsulation of how badly the US lost the food culture war and why it's so frustrating to talk about it online. Saying that the US has amazing food always gets comments like this. I'm sure Georgetown has amazing food too. I'm excited to try it, it's been on my list for a while. I'm gonna stay with a friend's family in Thailand for a month next year and want to fly there as a weekend trip.

"Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."

a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


I totally agree with you. Scientist originally from the UK who moved to the Bay Area. Salaries are much much better here

I will say that for myself, money is a means to an end for living a “good” life. I am starting to wonder personally where the line is for the trade off between salary and its ability to translate into a good life here in the US


I should say $100k was a terribly bad choice of salary, for either $USD or "$plausible other economy" -the key point came across I think. Your decision to move on would be made even harder by the IRS: you have a very long tail of consequence for your 401k/roth, property, and even just income: they want to know worldwide income for a long, long time. I almost took a gig in the US from Australia and realized I'd drop out of lifetime rating in the Australian private health insurance model, I'd lose payment to australian superannuation and the US versions I made would not be considered tax friendly income, unless I spent a lot of time and money with an accountant. I decided against the move for other reasons but financial complexity paid it's part.

Having said that, I got stung by 49c in the doller on my British USS Pension transfer in (I'm 63) for the lump sum. Sometimes, you just can't win.


> USA is a place where you can go from $100k to $100m vesting if you are lucky. That very few do achieve this isn't the point: you cannot do it, in almost any other economy.

That's a kind of lottery-mentality that Europe doesn't want to attract anyway.


That’s not lottery mentality and thinking that it’s equivalent is why Europe isn’t innovating.

If someone wins the lottery and gets rich, society isn’t better off. If someone starts a new company that made a cure for some disease and gets rich, society is much better off.

You absolutely want to attract people that want to make huge breakthroughs with unlikely odds of success.


Once you get past a few million, you quickly get into "can't possibly spend this money in several lifetimes" territory. And wealth divides like that come at the cost of massive societal wealth divides.

The US sustains that high number of people who strike $100 million+ through having a social safety net that barely exists, which results in far more people being seen as completely disposable. It also comes at the cost of worsening public education, worsening public health, crime rates beyond most first world countries, companies that constantly invent new evils like making all formerly paid-and-done services into monthly subscriptions. Few if any that hit 100 million are doing it ethically. They're doing it by milking the residents dry.

Some countries have national pride and resent the idea of stepping on their fellow countrymen. Some would kill half of them if they were promised a few % off their yearly taxes.


It takes many billions to buy a Twitter, even when Saudi Arabia is footing most of the bill.

>> Once you get past a few million, you quickly get into "can't possibly spend this money in several lifetimes" territory. And wealth divides like that come at the cost of massive societal wealth divides.

> It takes many billions to buy a Twitter, even when Saudi Arabia is footing most of the bill.

There's some nice article out there that clearly explains how money "changes" at different income levels. First it's security, then it's comfort, then it's power.

Buying Twitter isn't spending money, it's exercising power.


> Once you get past a few million, you quickly get into "can't possibly spend this money in several lifetimes" territory.

This is incorrect and you’re really out of touch for suggesting it.

Let’s say you have a 5 million dollar exit in the Bay Area. After tax you get roughly 2.5. That’s enough to buy a nice but modest house and now you have no money left. You now have to work a full time job to pay the property taxes, the rest of your living expenses, and try to save for retirement. Same thing applies in LA, NYC, SEA, etc.

> The US sustains that high number of people who strike $100 million+ through having a social safety net that barely exists

This is false. The US spends more on healthcare than any other nation, it just goes to a bloated system. More tax money from the 0.1% won’t change that.

> crime rates beyond most first world countries

Gonna need a citation there. This is likely a result of guns being legal if you’re talking about gun deaths or a result of the war on drugs if you’re talking about incarceration. Neither of those have anything to do with taxes.

> companies that constantly invent new evils like making all formerly paid-and-done services into monthly subscriptions

We’re talking about biotech exits. Drop your “muh capitalism bad” gish gallop.

> Few if any that hit 100 million are doing it ethically. They're doing it by milking the residents dry.

Pure cope. A broad unsubstantiated statement about ethics followed by talk of milking residents dry when those residents have more disposable income per capita than nearly anywhere else in the world.

> Some countries have national pride and resent the idea of stepping on their fellow countrymen.

If they do this by treating huge breakthroughs like you are doing, they are stepping on all of their fellow countrymen through oppressive tall poppy syndrome. Knocking anyone doing well down is not how you lift everyone up.


You broke the site guidelines badly and repeatedly in this post, as well as in others in this thread (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42947261). If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

That's doubly important if your points are good, since by posting like you did here, you discredit them.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...


> Let’s say you have a 5 million dollar exit in the Bay Area. After tax you get roughly 2.5. That’s enough to buy a nice but modest house and now you have no money left. You now have to work a full time job to pay the property taxes, the rest of your living expenses, and try to save for retirement. Same thing applies in LA, NYC, SEA, etc.

So what you are saying is that ONLY if you work your brains out AND win the "lottery", then you can have a decent retirement in the US?

Maybe Europeans are just too smart to accept that kind of proposition.

The "American dream" is a lottery system used to lure people into doing hard work and consequently rewarding only a few.


> You absolutely want to attract people that want to make huge breakthroughs with unlikely odds of success.

It's fine to want that and to attract those kind of people. What you don't want is to attract people who want to do that in order to make a lot of money.


I used to think that too, but realized it’s very naive later in life. At some point people are good at what they do, but get tired, start a family, want to settle down. Money helps quite a bit to have those folks motivated.

If you want innovators, motivate them with rewards. Money is a great reward since you can turn it into mostly anything you’d like. Want to buy a mansion? Fine. Want to travel around the world? Feel free. Want to give it away to charity? Great!


Maybe I should have been more explicit. There's a difference between "money" and "a lot of money". People are in this thread talking about the likelihood of getting $100 million. If someone does a thing because they want to start a family and settle down, great. You don't need $100 million to do that. You don't even need $10 million. What I'm saying is you don't want to attract people who are aiming at making vastly more than what is needed to handle the "settle down and live a comfortable life" situation that you described. But right now our society does incentivize and glamorize that, and I think we're worse off for it.

If the goal is financial security to the extent that you could not work (if you still need to work you're not really secure since you could lose that job) then I think you actually would need about $10M. By the time you buy a house, pay for your kids school (elementary through college) and medical insurance for the rest of your life theres not a lot of change left. That to me has always been the goal, I've never truly felt financially secure my entire life and even on a good tech salary I still dont cause I'm one layoff in a bad market away from being in a pretty dire situation, with a family to support too.

> I've never truly felt financially secure my entire life and even on a good tech salary I still dont cause I'm one layoff in a bad market away from being in a pretty dire situation, with a family to support too.

That's a very good point: You really do need a lot of money in the US to feel reasonably secure for the long term. This might be good for employers, entrepreneurs, investors etc., but since most people in society aren't that, I'd argue that the average quality of life is worse for it.

> If the goal is financial security to the extent that you could not work

This actually seems like an anti-goal to me, societally. Why would we want to disincentivize the people that arguably have the best track record of contributing to progress from continuing to do so?


If you are trying to say that society forces us to feel insecure in order to drive us to never stop working then yeah I agree and it sucks - doubly so because it may even be true that if we all felt financially secure, society would grind to a halt.

Crabs in a bucket.


There's certainly some truth in what you say. I see it as a societal problem that the only way to ensure you don't wind up with less than $X to live on per year is to amass some large multiple of $X. What would be better is a more robust social safety net program that ensure if that one layoff happens and you're out of work, your situation isn't that dire. Like maybe you tighten your belt a bit and maybe if you had stretched for a big house you have to move to a smaller one, but you don't wind up on the street. And in exchange for knowing that we will never wind up on the street, everyone accepts that no one will ever get to own a $100 million mansion or a superyacht or a company worth $100 billion. It seems like a fine trade to me.

$10M invested nets you (comfortably) $400K/year forever.

From that:

- 60k for capital gains tax

- 100k for (exorbitant) education for children

- 40k for healthcare (the most expensive plan on my expensive state's marketplace for a family of 4 is $36K).

That leaves $200k for living expenses. If you can't find a place to live comfortably (anywhere, since you aren't restricted by work) on $200k/year, we have very different expectations from life.


You absolutely need $10 million if you want to retire to any city in the US.

It’s absolutely mind blowing to me that people like you can sit there and go, “no, you shouldn’t be able to retire in NYC for saving a few hundred thousand lives because the thought of you getting $10 million is icky to me.”


>>You absolutely need $10 million if you want to retire to any city in the US.

And...people accept that as a natural state of being? New York has over 8M residents, do all of them have $10M saved for retirement?

Or is your idea of retirement completely out of sync with what retirement really is for most people?


You surely want to retire comfortably. You want to do what you want - and spend money along, not some arbitrary amounts but just without thinking too much.

$10M sounds very much like an arbitrary amount for a very extravagant retired lifestyle.

My numbers are like this:

    $10M over 50 years - $200k/yr or $16k/mo
    House in a rather expensive place - $5k/mo
    Food, travel, other things and especially projects can eat the rest $11k/mo
Which number is wildly off?

The 50 years is wildly off. Even taking the average male/female lifespan most people don't enjoy more than 20 years of retirement. And sadly in my family I think the average is much closer to 10 years.

If you mean the lucky few of us who can "retire" at 30-40 and enjoy 50 years of retirement - that's such a statistical anomaly that it might as well not exist.

>>Food, travel, other things and especially projects can eat the rest $11k/mo

And also yeah, that is wildly wildly off. Again, if you want to have such an absolutely extravagant lifestyle to spend $11k a month on food and travel then sure - you probably do need $10M. But it's nonsense to say "you need $10M to retire in a big city". Clearly millions of people don't.


Well, for starters I don't think most people's retirement lasts 50 years. Even if you retire fairly early at, say, 50, that's taking you to 100 years old.

Also, your numbers assume you earn nothing in retirement, which is unnecessarily pessimistic.

Also, $11k a month for "food travel and other things" seems like quite a lot to me. I mean sure someone can spend $11k a month on "projects" but that doesn't mean that's something we as a society necessarily need to support.


50 at least is not "wildly" off. Somebody could retire at 50, at it would be strange to have money run out by 100 - what if the person would live longer?

We can have something earned from the money, but pension money have to be conservative, so the upside could be limited.

$11k a month for "food travel and other things" - healthy food isn't unfortunately cheap, neither is good travel - but those other things could be even more expensive. You might want to start an enterprise, and you'll need seed money. You might support a cause, or run a non-profit, or do other things which are noble but not easily rewarding in monetary sense.

Yes, we as a society probably can't - not don't need, but can't currently - support this. But it doesn't mean people shouldn't aim for this.

Frankly, I don't see strong evidence against so far.


>>50 at least is not "wildly" off. Somebody could retire at 50, at it would be strange to have money run out by 100

Who retires at 50? But even ignoring that, I had to check the numbers - in the UK at least, only 0.02% of people live to 100, the chances are "wildly" against all of us in that regard. Sure it might happen - I wouldn't plan for it.

>>$11k a month for "food travel and other things" - healthy food isn't unfortunately cheap, neither is good travel - but those other things could be even more expensive. You might want to start an enterprise, and you'll need seed money. You might support a cause, or run a non-profit, or do other things which are noble but not easily rewarding in monetary sense.

Your assertion was that you need 10M to retire in a big city, the need part is what I'm challenging. If you want to lead a rockefeller lifestyle in retirement - sure. But that won't apply to 99.9999% of population who just want to live out their life in peace and comfort. Let me put it this way - I don't know anyone who makes $11k/month in their regular working life, the idea that you'd have that during retirement is almost....absurd? Who outside of rich elites has "seed money" during retirement? I think we're thinking of completely different social groups.

So no, unless you're part of the 0.00001% you don't need 10M to retire in a big city.


Yeah but you don’t spend 10s of years of your life studying if your primary goal is just « more money ». The incentive is waaay too far.

What you really, really, REALLY REALLY don't want is to attract people who want to do it for free. Money is at least honest.

Until we fundamentally change how the world works, wanting to make a lot of money is no better or worse than any other reason to innovate.

> If someone starts a new company that made a cure for some disease and gets rich, society is much better off.

The reality is that you get crap like Facebook, Instagram, Xwitter.


You get both, Facebook’s job is to be known about, so you know about it. There’s a ton of companies doing drug research basically silently… in the US. Most fail, it doesn’t matter as long as a few succeed.

It's worth pointing out that the biggest innovations (both scientifically, but likely also monetary) in the biomedical field in the last years happened in Europe not the US. So that seems to disprove the point that innovation happens in the US because of the chance of going from 100k to 100M.

Please tell me what those pharmaceutical companies with a similar maker cap to Facebook Are.

You are assuming that only money will make people do incredible things, but you only have to look at open source to know that this is false.

No I’m not. But it is what motivates people at a large scale.

There are very few open source contributors that are actually really good. The nature of software means that their labor of love can scale very well.

Additionally, there is nearly zero barrier to being an open source developer. Buy a laptop and start writing code.

So open source only works well because when you get lucky and get a combination of a motivated contributor and essentially zero distribution cost, a single group can ship to billions of people.

If we want someone making an artificial heart, it’s a completely different story. The research and development is very capital intensive so you need a war chest to even start tinkering. Then once you have something you want to try to get approved, you need either to be a medical doctor or employ one, which is a huge opportunity cost for a medical school debt ridden doctor.

All of the capital needed to fund this is high risk so it needs a high upside return if private investors are involved.

Now a founder could eschew all of their equity, but after going through all of the work to do this capital raising it would be quite unusual.


We can't ignore the influence of money even on open source, though. How many people are contributing in an anonymous manner, so they can't claim financial benefits from publicity and networking? How many open source projects are rejecting VC funding?

Almost all of the really high quality open source projects got that way because companies paid devs good money to work on them.

Why wouldn't you rather want to attract people with much higher odds of a reasonable quality of life regardless of whether they personally hit the jackpot?

In terms of expected value (which you'd hope that scientists and entrepreneurs understand at least at a surface level), that seems like the rational move.


>If someone wins the lottery and gets rich, society isn’t better off.

Actually, society is much better off since the money is dispersed into the economy faster and to a much greater degree than most other windfalls.

And most other windfalls are crafted to accumulate money from the economy, so the difference in who ends up with the money is another major factor.


No, it’s not better off. The lottery is paid for by poor idiots. All of the money going into those tickets would have been in circulation.

I also don’t think you understand wealth creation. A lottery is zero sum. A biotech company that makes $1 billion saving a couple hundred thousand people from early deaths allowing them to contribute to society is wealth generating.


$1bn / 200k people is $5k each. For a drug that probably costs $4. When you mark up the cost of saving a life by 1,200% I don't think you get to call that "wealth creation" or "saving lives" or even "preventing death". That's called "extortion."

I tend to agree, but having met some of the people who pursued this dream, they are very very inventive. They're smart. If that energy chasing a dream could be redirected, they'd be doing amazing things. Mostly, they wind up realizing that the goal is illusive, and re-pivot to a saner outcome but by that time they are fully vested in "america" as a plan.

The bounty here, is the people on the cusp of realizing its not going to pan out but who are both very smart, and smart enough to realize they need to pivot. It would be almost a given they are consciously walking away from IPO manna. I guess if you include it in the pre-sort on applicants, you get to winnow out the people still glued to money-is-the-prize.

BTW the EU would welcome more IPR inside the EU. Some amount of bonus may have to lie in the packaging, to get to where the EU wants to be on IPR. Novo Nordisk style.


> That's a kind of lottery-mentality that Europe doesn't want to attract anyway.

It’s not lottery mentality, it’s risk taking. And it’s something that the EU should be fostering. The US encourages risk taking where failing isn’t even seen as a bad thing.


Ending up homeless for failing is probably not the risk taking encouragement Europeans want.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31524645


That is the thing though: with the increased safety nets of the richer European countries, you would think that taking risks would both be more encouraged and naturally less dangerous than the US. And I am a big proponent of said safety nets. But we don't see this "moderate-risk-taking" mentality in the EU...

...or don't we? I am not sure. We are definitely not seeing the runaway successes of US big tech, but is it because people are not taking measured risks, or do operations fumble at a later point in their development? I don't know. What I do know is that revenue sources in the EU come with extremely onerous strings attached, are orders of magnitude below US levels, or are only available to big corporations of the old guard.


I'm not so sure there even is so much less risk-taking in Europe than in US.

There are many structural reasons why Europe doesn't produce gigagrowth oligopolies like the US. EU has a highly fractured internal market that is more difficult to dominate, EU is not bathing in reserve currency windfalls to be thrown all around and EU doesn't have as ruthless foreign/trading policies.

Also there's a difference how "risk taking" is portrayed in the public discourse. In US success of companies are seen more as result of risk-taking of individuals, whereas in Europe success its seen more as resulting from collective effort, and founders/CEOs of successful companies are not lauded as heros, or are even usually especially famous.


This!!

Risk-rewards calculus is simply worlds' apart for exploratory/long term R&D versus tech deployment, which is sadly what elon/faang/openAI/nVIDIA are only about.

(I imagine Musk thinks he's bringing back a closed, for profit Bell System, though!)

I dunno, maybe Arc Institute/research hospitals poised to collect all the bionerds falling out of universities, these are the oligopolies that have any chance of morphing into semi-open Bell Labs-like setups.

Are there nothing of comparable scale in Europe?!? (Not many, I imagine, due to mostly what you already pointed out)


>That's a kind of lottery-mentality that Europe doesn't want to attract anyway.

the problem with the European thinking you describe is not lottery vs sure-thing, it's the idea that everybody within a geography should should think the same way and not all mentalities "belong".


Not at all. It’s that we experienced several times, first-hand, that some mentalities and mindsets systematically drive our societies to discord, war and death.

And to those mentalities… yes we ought to remind they’re not welcome.


>And to those mentalities… yes we ought to remind they’re not welcome.

gee, no matter how many times Europe has told the Jews that they are not welcome, they've kept coming back, bringing ses penchants for assessing capital risk in middleman trade, and hedging financial risks!


Your comment, and you for it, is despicable.

> That's a kind of lottery-mentality

You're the one incorrectly using the concept of gambling replying talking to someone taking about risk versus reward (investing).

It is hard for somebody who believes in gambling to win at investing.

The US has both monetary and social incentives to create new businesses. I live in NZ where founders are discouraged by financial incentives and by social incentives.


That's an interesting distinction you're making.

Gambling and investing are very close together. You're only able to make rational decisions on perfect information which is not available.

So investing seems to be a sort of gambling to me, it's just part of a different societal institution.


> That's a kind of lottery-mentality that Europe doesn't want to attract anyway.

Except that it’s the opposite of a lottery.

It’s almost entirely based on your skills and the decisions you make.

There are right-place right-time effects, but it’s still your decision to be in the right place for the current time.

Europe’s economy is badly lagging the US economy, and it’s because culturally they hold these types of incorrect, fatalistic, zero-sum views towards success and innovation.


It's almost entirely based on your skills, the decisions you make, and your privileged background.

You're just not going to get past the first few rounds of the entrepreneur game if you're not a certain kind of person.

The US has terrible social mobility. Objectively, by any measure. This isn't up for debate.

Guess which state is #1 for social mobility?

Wrong. It's Utah, which is a low bar because it's 28th by GDP.

How about CA? 38th for mobility. TX? 45th.

It's a mythology of meritocracy excusing inherited privilege.

https://www.archbridgeinstitute.org/social-mobility-in-the-5...


From your link:

Four Pillars of Social Mobility: To rank each state, we measured a series of indicators related to social mobility across four pillars: Entrepreneurship and Growth, Institutions and the Rule of Law, Education and Skills Development, and Social Capital. Scores for each pillar were combined and weighted equally to create a state’s overall social mobility score.

I would think a measure of social mobility would include income percentile vs parents' income percentile.


Here, this one uses the simplest metric possible; a poor child is much more likely to remain poor in the US than in the other rich western countries looked at.

https://www.businessinsider.com/american-dream-social-econom...

https://osf.io/preprints/osf/tb3qz_v1


Only if you're trying to be objective. "Social mobility" in this case is their invented metric to arrive at their prearranged outcome for the study.

> percentile vs parents' income percentile.

Wouldn't this be a much worse metric? It would have to net out to zero change on average by the definition of percentiles. If we take abs change to look at both downward and upward mobility, the measure wouldn't tell us where most downward mobility happened, up and down could all happen within the bottom 25% and none in the top 75% and this metric would say we are highly social mobile if there was a lot of movement there.


This is nonsense.

The US is full of billionaires who came from underprivileged positions.

Infact, your advice is worse than wrong, it is actively harmful, because you're discouraging people from trying by (falsely) telling them that their efforts don't matter and they were destined to fail from birth.


No, this is apparently information that clashes strongly with your prior beliefs. The US is packed solid with underprivileged adults who came from underprivileged positions, and highly privileged adults who came from highly privileged positions - regardless of whether it has a dozen counterexamples.

https://osf.io/preprints/osf/tb3qz_v1


You don't even need to look for the count of billionaires. My grandparents were poor-as-dirt farmers. My dad's education stopped at high school. He even went to a one-room schoolhouse until he was 14.

My brother and I are both college educated and, while not "rich", have a lifestyle and income my grandparents could have only dreamed about.

It is truly painful to watch people preach learned helplessness through failure and destitution as the only possible outcome.


This is common in Europe as well. I would guess more common than in the US.

It's a lot more common for children of poor parents to stay poor in the US than in (most of) Europe.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index


Most people in mainland Europe are poor by American middle-class standards.

People living in Europe don't seem to agree, since they have the same access to credit cards and yet just choose to spend less.

Why oh why do Europeans in general choose to spend less than americans?


The relevant metric is not “did your grandparents farm” but “where in the socioeconomic continuum were your parents, and where are you”. In the US, these two answers are more likely to match than in other rich Western countries.

And need to compare with countries outside the US. It's misleading to try and talk about differences between states.

There are ~250 $1 million+ lottery winners in the US every year.

There are ~750 billionaires in total.

The average American has a better chance of becoming a billionaire through hard work and prudent investments if, at age 18, they decide to live in a cardboard box underneath a bridge and steal metals from construction sites to sell for cash to be used to purchase lottery tickets.

They can then win the multi-million-dollar prize and invest that wisely to reach billionaire status.

Easy! Why doesn't everyone do it?


Who are these billionaires from underprivileged backgrounds ?

> Who are these billionaires from underprivileged backgrounds ?

Larry Ellison, Oprah, François Pinault, Howard Schultz, Jan Koum, Kenneth Langone, Ralph Lauren, Sheldon Adelson, JK Rowling, George Soros, John Paul DeJoria… to name just a few.


I took a name randomly from your list, Sheldon Adelson:

“He began his business career at the age of 12 when he borrowed $200 from his uncle (equivalent to $3,385 in 2023) and purchased a license to sell newspapers in Boston.[23] In 1948, at the age of 15, he borrowed $10,000 (equivalent to $126,814 in 2023) from his uncle to start a candy vending-machine business.[24]”

I am not disputing that it’s possible to go from rags to riches. But don’t you find it ironic that a list of people who supposedly fit the description, doesn’t actually fit the description?

Where’s my rich uncle?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheldon_Adelson


Francois Pinault is French, and inherited a family business, that’s quite an upstart.

Rowling was British and had genuine financial issues, but lucked out with her book.

The US has very low average/median social mobility (and it'll only get worse due to insane education policies and less standardized testing), but it has very high variance.

Going from $15k a year to $150k is a lot more common in Europe,, but doing from $150k to $150m is a lot more common in the US, and it's the latter that creates most of the value.


You know that Sweden has a higher percentage of self made billionaires than the US?

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/comment/sweden-b...


Yeah, in Germany the rich stay rich.

Whereas in the US the rich get richer? Or the poor stay poor? What's your point?

> USA is a place where you can go from $100k to $100m vesting if you are lucky.

And this is irrelevant to (very conservatively) 99% of scientists in the NSF and NIH.


Never underestimate the lengths many people will go to for a cleverly framed lottery ticket.

I mean it is psychologically irrelevant to almost all scientists in the US and not something they consider in their career choices at all.

Most scientists that I know aren't motivated by the prospect of going from $100k-$100m. As long as they have a good wage, they are far more motivated by having decent funding and facilities for their work so they don't have to spend half their time applying for grants.

> USA is a place where you can go from $100k to $100m

"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires" - John Steinbeck


But how do you expect officials that are so bad at transitioning professionally enough, to be good at maintaining and fostering an economy that will support this financial attractiveness?

I’m a scientist currently on an NSF grant. I am certainly poking around other countries to see what’s out there, and I’m not the only one.

A lot of scientists (at least in my field, computational chemistry) have decent skills that are transferrable to other areas. So I expect quite a few to move on.


There’s not that many jobs going in academia in other countries, and you’ll be looking at a significant pay cut due to the strong US dollar.

Most likely, people who leave academia will be leaving for industry instead.

I do feel for those in the hard sciences, they have become collateral damage in what is mostly a battle between politicians and humanities departments.


I dunno man my salary is six figures and I’m an academic scientist living in the Netherlands. My life is much higher quality than the equivalent could buy me in anywhere worth living in the USA. Like I agree the salaries can be low but you simply don’t need to make 300k usd to have a nice life here. I have a flat in the middle of the city of Utrecht where I cycle to work and pop off to the pub after and the gym is two minutes walk and I have a 400m ice skating track twenty minutes bike away. And on the work side I have free compute on an 3000 cpu cluster with also an gpu cluster of h100s and lots of resources for travelling for conferences and other stuff like that. And a lot of my startup friends here are here specifically because they went to San Francisco and got investment offers around 1 millionish and then tried to hire around and all the engineers were expecting 250k+ and then came to Europe and found people just as good who work for 80-100k. That’s a completely different runway for them and they actually have time to develop a product because they don’t have to pay so much and their people are still happy with their lives. Like I do agree there aren’t that many jobs like mine and Europe needs to get their heads out of their asses and poach as many America based scientists and engineers right now as they can. But I think American based people have this idea of Europe that prevents them from seeing their options here. I do think Europe needs more resources and less bureaucracy surrounding big science projects but I’ll make that point when I have my own big science project haha.

Hear hear - Utrecht might be the finest city in the world, too.

And Europe is missing a gigantic opportunity right now. The fact that talent is cheap, there's a strong social safety net, and we don't have enormous amounts of entrepreneurship is really strange.


It's easier to run a startup in the US, so why do it anywhere else? The financing is easier, the labor laws more business-friendly, and the native market bigger. And that's how it's going to stay for the foreseeable future. EU internal market integration has been paused for decades, weakening labor laws is a non-starter in any European country, and European pension funds are generally not allowed to invest in index funds, let alone something as risky as VC. If you think the EU will ever catch up, think again. The political will to do so is just not there.

From my PoV, the EU doesn't need to catch up. The US will be the one crashing down. There is an ocean in the middle but I can still see Americans digging their hole deeper and deeper.

I'm more worried about the US conquering Europe.

Yeah, but I like that my kids can bike around and not get run over

Maybe because the "greed is good" thesis of America really is "correct" with respect to geopolitical competition?

It is better that we not fight wars and that we endeavour to increase the quality of life for all then we win some made up game of geopolitical competition.

I agree, but does EU via NATO not fight or encourage wars? And is encouraging or sending weapons but no soldiers to proxy war morally better? Ukraine?

This might be the sad truth. Good morals don't look like a winning strategy

safety and trust are hard to sell. it is widely known. What you say shows that "immediate gains always win" with no context.. It is literally unwise over time.

Yeah I don't get it. I know that Cherry Ventures just raised another 500 million euros but that is really nothing compared to what is in America. I think there is really a missed opportunity both from the government side of things and VC side of things. The government could relax restrictions on small businesses, hand out more tax credits, make it more beneficial to move here (e.g., my understanding is netherlands has a small business visa but it only lasts a year and you have to prove you are making money which is hard for a startup to do after a single year), more government money for research and more money to bring research results to market. Like the european research council (ERC) has a program called something like proof of concept where you get add on funds to an existing ERC grant to produce a proof of concept that could be taken to market but you are required to be the PI on the original grant to apply for the proof of concept. If instead you let anyone apply like the way NSF grants for startup work that would be better. for example postdocs that worked on the original ERC cannot apply for the follow on proof of concept money to try and make a startup that commercializes the research. only the PI of the original ERC grant can apply. That seems silly to me since probably the postdocs are better positioned to be startup leaders than the PI since the PI is more likely to have a permanent academic job and be uninterested in leaving that job to start a company out of one of the research agendas they are pursuing. you probably would get way more results out of the program than it generates now. I think from the VC side of things they could simply try and recruit more of these people who are working on such grants to become founders. In america there is a more clear MIT/Stanford/Caltech pipeline into silly valley and VC offices than there is in europe. VCs are responsible, imo, to create such a pipeline not academics. Anyways, if you are VC reading this feel free to reach out if you think that I am making sense. If I am not making sense feel free to tell me why. I am, of course, just some guy on the internet.

I have a proptech webapp that I built for myself but now gets several signups per week and has active users, yet nobody wants to invest. My last job was for an idiotic startup that had literally three dozen users at its peak yet was able to get over $2 million in VC, perhaps because it was in the US.

I really don't see why Europe can't figure this out.


yeah one thing VC is about the startup but the founders. if you went to the wrong school, got the wrong parents tough luck.

I've been suspicious that the quality of life cut is distinct from the pay cut.

Living in a dense European city, you do not need a car, healthcare is free, and you are generally afforded more time off and a stricter wlb compromise compared to the US. One doesn't need to eat takeout as often if there is time to cook. Depending on the country, rent/housing costs are more or less under control.

On the other hand swiss/Netherlands food is expensive even by bay area standards.


To be competitive in academia in Europe, you’re not going to have as much free time as you expect.

You’re unlikely to be able to afford to live in the center of a dense Western European city on researcher wages, and most of the jobs aren’t in the city center either, so you’ll probably still need a car.

I think in the US people romanticise living and working in Europe to an unrealistic degree. There are good reasons why the net migration of skilled workers is towards the US rather than away from it.


I lived in both the US for a while (Bay Area), but I am now back in Europa. Quality of life in Europa is really high and you can certainly live quite well in most Western European cities from a typical wage for a researcher. Although many people would indeed not need to own a car (public transport is often very good, in many places you can also get around via bike or even by walking), most do and this easily possible with common salaries. There are places which are expensive, but many cities are quite reasonable. Universal healthcare, a stable society, low crime are among the many advantages.

Having lived in both, how would you equate your personal “purchasing power parity” between Europe and the US? At my firm, I could generally move to Berlin whenever I desired - however this comes with a 50% pay cut. I'm honestly unclear if I'd be ahead or behind where I am in the states if I took that deal.

Not OP and I haven't been in US but I've pondered on this since I've worked in Europe where taxes are among the top3 highest, and also Japan. (And ALSO had the opportunity to work remote, hired in one living in the other)

Basically the take is first what anyone that have lived abroad (or economist should) know, that you can't flat compare salary or PPP since the expenditure and quality of goods/service per expenditures are drastically different.

So one have to also consider what your expenditure, and quality requirements are. In the most extreme case, if your goal is "early retirement" then probably work in US retire abroad is optimal. But if your goal is "working in something I like while not having to be stressed about it" then it falls to the latter. What about your requirement for socialization and size of housing, dating/children, etc. How many products do you buy and how important is that? 50% paycut but no need to upkeep a car, no need to worry for healhcare, no need to save for kids college, can all add up.

The only thing that I think you can say with absolute certainty from the personal PPP in EU vs US comparison is that if traveling abroad (and buying products from abroad) is absolutely crucial to your happiness, nowhere beat the dollar & high salary.

Since you have your high US salary why not visit the Berlin office, or travel there. Try to find someone in a similar position in life as you are, and extrapolate from that


“Since you have your high US salary why not visit the Berlin office, or travel there. Try to find someone in a similar position in life as you are, and extrapolate from that”

Good advice. Do the research before making the move. 50% salary cut at higher levels is tough to overcome though.


> You’re unlikely to be able to afford to live in the center of a dense Western European city on researcher wages, and most of the jobs aren’t in the city center either, so you’ll probably still need a car.

Universities in Europe tend to have quite central locations in the cities. Also universities are practically guaranteed to have good public transport connectivity, as students have to be able to get there.

And even though researcher wages can be low relative to US, within the respective countries they are solidly (upper) middle class, and housing isn't a major problem.


I live a 5-minute bike ride away from the Delft Technopolis, and 20 minutes by train to Leiden's Bio Science Park. If I want to, there's 24h train services to the dense city centers of Rotterdam (15 minutes), Den Haag (15 minutes) and Amsterdam (45 minutes).

I do own a car, but I actually have to set a recurring reminder on my phone to take my car out for a ride every so often to avoid the battery draining empty. I think US people romanticise car ownership because they can't imagine how good the alternative can be.

That said, I don't work in academia and don't know what the median wage for that would be. But I don't see why a researcher wouldn't able to afford to live where I do currently, it's not wildly expensive here.


> I live a 5-minute bike ride away from the Delft Technopolis, and 20 minutes by train to Leiden's Bio Science Park.

Where you live is comparable to somewhere like Raleigh and not comparable at all to NYC/SF.

There is a saying that Europe is better if you are poor and the US is better if you are rich or middle class. I think that is broadly speaking true.

Of course European countries don't allow poor Americans to migrate so the only people who would be better off aren't allowed to move.


Swiss maybe, but as a Dutch resident who was just in SF for the holidays... SF food is definitely more expensive.

Fair, my basis for comparison was the Amsterdam airport. I paid 35 euro for a soggy reheated sandwich and coffee. SFO has 18 dollar poke bowls.

Perhaps Amsterdam airport pricing is extensively marked up compared to local pricing (understandable). Geneva was just plain expensive.


airports are always a nightmare!

the other important thing to keep in mind is that in the EU in general, there's no added taxes on the bill, and tips are less of a thing here, so there's not a magical 20%+ hidden charge to factor in on everything you order.


> my basis for comparison was the Amsterdam airport

Your basis for how much people pay for groceries was how expensive a sandwich was at an airport?


We get signal wherever we can :) Boston Logan has about a 20-30% premium on normal groceries. SFO is probably closer to 5-10%. I assumed the premium could not be greater than 50% for Amsterdam airport.

At some point you have to be willing to admit you don't have any signal

A desiccated Swiss roastie will cost more than a michelin restaurant in SF.

Quality of life is highly subjective. Different people prefer different things. Many of us who value open space and privacy would see moving to a dense city as a step down.

> you do not need a car

You do need a car if you care about personal safety. A lot of the public transport network in many big cities are not safe for women anymore.

>healthcare is free

Can we stop with this lie that healthcare is free in the EU? It is not. You pay for it through your taxes and those taxes are downright confiscatory.

> Depending on the country, rent/housing costs are more or less under control.

There is an ongoing housing crisis in many European countries so I am not sure how you can say that housing costs are under control.


30 days of vacation plus 24 days for overtime are very often found. especially in university/governmental jobs.

> I do feel for those in the hard sciences

Those in the liberal arts probably have it even worse, as their experience usually doesn't translate to industry at all.

No idea if that kind of "research" is funded the same way as hard sciences in the US though, it definitely is there.


It's the hard sciences I feel for because they typically deliver good returns on taxpayer funded research expenditure, and are generally disciplined enough to keep their head down and focus on their work, rather than engage in culture wars.

In contrast, the humanities made their own bed. They became politically partisan, engaged in systematically discriminatory hiring practices, and routinely conduct research that the public perceive to hold little utility.

Ultimately academics need to keep in mind that they rely on the generosity of taxpayers to fund their research. If the public aren't happy that they are getting value for money they will defund these programs.

I hope that the blowback is contained to the humanities departments, but guilt by association is unfortunately a thing in politics.


I think very few people proactively decide to become partisan. Most liberal arts academics just want to work in their special field. Sometimes the things they study get politicized, but that’s mostly the doing of talking heads.

If somebody wanted to become a partisan hack, there are easier ways than getting tenure, right?


It's not so much that people want to become partisan, but rather the culture of the discipline.

The culture within the hard sciences is to challenge existing theories and narratives.

The culture within the social sciences is almost the polar opposite. It still superficially presents as a science, but in practice is a purity spiral with an orthodoxy of established conclusions which cannot be challenged without severe career consequences.

The hard sciences had their Galileo affair 400 years ago, the soft sciences are in the midst of theirs right now.


Are you saying that US is the only country in the world where there are many jobs in academia?

The U.S. has also become ridiculously expensive.

Yeah the dollar is stronger which is great to buy imports.

But you cannot import housing, most healthcare, most services like cooks, cleaners and bartenders.


Services are naturally expensive when people are earning more. That's a sign of low income inequality and low unemployment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

See Agatha Christie's quote about how she couldn't have imagined affording a car before WW1, and couldn't have imagined affording servants afterward.


Good luck getting 500k+ grants in other countries. If you leave there won't be a shortage of postdocs looking for a new tenure track position.

Depends on the kinds of positions. There's more to academia than tenure-track faculty (which isn't in my future at all anyway).

People around me tend to be in the RSE (Research Software Engineer) scene, which is growing in Europe. I, and many of my cohort, could fit in as research staff or faculty in many different disciplines.

Wouldn't get rich or famous, but certainly have a comfortable living working on interesting problems.


That sounds nice.

It sounds as if the universe revolves around the US. Did you know that one of the biggest HPC cluster in the world is in Saudi Arabia? I know grad students who went there got duplex villas for free lodging.

Before you start criticizing Saudi government, the reason we are discussing this right now is because a fascist government is forcing scientists out of the US.


This, the US is the country most willing to make daring bets on innovation.

Europe will not spend even 0.1% of its pension/welfare fund on big research bets. The private investors their will only want real estate investments, not fancy wancy "VC".

Young talent will flow one way from other countries to the US, because they've already seen what the grass is like on their side.


If the sentiment upthread holds, and large numbers of US academics move overseas, then relatively shortly, Europe may shift towards being more willing to make big research bets.

The population shift introduces new ideas, new perspectives, new ways of operating research, new connections towards funding and money, new views on what big bets even means.

The influx of foreign scientists and academics into America over the last century caused significant shifts in how America operated and viewed the idea of research and academia. Post-war Europeans (Von Braun's crowd being an obvious example) caused a large shift in the way America funded "big bet" projects. Saturn V perhaps. Same may happen in Europe.

Those academics can use HN from the opposite side of the Atlantic. VC money especially has the possibility of being territorially bound, yet its often far less constrained by the those types of lines in the dirt than many funding opportunities.


This theory presumes there is shortage of talented researchers in other countries, which is not the case.

There aren't countries with unfilled academic positions awaiting people from the US. If anything, the landscape is even more competitive outside the US.


The sentiments that you see online are meaningless. Ignore what people say and look at what they actually do. I guarantee you that very few US academics will move to Europe. The US has long had positive net migration from Europe, and some temporary changes to federal government funding policies won't significantly change that trend.

> the US is the country most willing to make daring bets on innovation.

… a critical tool of which we’re currently dismantling…


Yeah that's kind of the thing.

I think a lot of these guys and gals are fooling themselves with the whole, "find another country" thing. There is no other country that is A) doing research at these levels, B) Flush with cash, and C) needs you because they don't have a population that produces the necessary thinkers. That's basically only the US.


The European research budget is not insignificant. Horizon Europe 2021-2027 is the current vehicle that much of the funding is going through (European Research Council [ERC] being one of the most well known parts). It has a budget for the time-frame (all years) of EUR 96,899,000,000. [1] Of that, the ERC has EUR 16B [2], Digital, Industry and Space has ~EUR 15B, Climate, Energy and Mobility has ~EUR 15B, and several other sub-groups have smaller amounts.

Those then work with the country level organizations of Science Europe, and those together each spend about EUR 25B each year. [3] It's not insignificant. I tend to pay attention to space, and lately almost all there's been is European achievements in telescopes and astronomy.

[1] Horizon Europe, https://www.ffg.at/sites/default/files/downloads/HorizonEuro...

[2] ERC, https://erc.europa.eu/about-erc/erc-glance

[3] Science Europe RFOs, https://www.scienceeurope.org/about-us/members/?type=Researc...


Thanks for the numbers!

For comparison, the NSF budget is about $8 billion. DOE Office of Science is about the same. NIH is $45 billion

(Also, compare that with the profit of large tech companies)


That isn’t going to be anything even close to accurate before the week is over and that is kind of the entire point here.

Is the USA flush with cash? Last I checked they were deep in debt and its getting worse

The US controls its currency and has no mandate for a balanced budget. So yes, the US is very flush with cash

And importantly enjoys a privleged position in the world economy that enables them to run these types of long term deficits with minimal negative consequences.

Something which might shift over the coming decades.


I think GDP/economic output/labor productivity continues to rise briskly. The government accounts are in debt because people in the US refuse to consistently vote for [people advocating] high enough taxes. But we could tax more (still less than Europe) and get balanced budget.

Higher taxes do genuinely restrict economic growth, so it's not like raising taxes is a magic bullet.

Personally, I think there is plenty of grift and wasteful expenditure we could look at addressing first, especially within the healthcare and defense portfolios.


Not as much as having insufficient resources dedicated to the education of the young hurts economic growth (long term).

I agree not using the world proven efficient healthcare strategy of universal coverage is pretty stupid economically, as is spending a trillion USD per annum on the military. But we are so rich these mistakes can be absorbed for surprisingly long.


Those are the same thing. Higher public debt means there's more private credit available.

Yes, but when you borrow, you have money in your hands.

US firms are also very highly priced relative to their profits when compared to firms elsewhere. So while things are probably not quite sensible in the US there's still money.


This is the obvious conclusion. As the US trashes its own research ability other countries can offer good conditions to the scientists. I've never seen an own-goal so great.

I might move somewhere that gave me a person grant. The U.S. works primarily on project grants, where you are funded to do a thing, but that thing doesn't always work, and most of the time it's a bit contrived in order to appeal to the funding agency. (This is probably so the bureaucrats can exert power over what is studied.) The system would work much better if individual scientists got guaranteed salaries to study whatever seemed appropriate, and if you needed money for equipment you can request it. This would lead to more crazy ideas being explored and less derivative, p-hacked slop carried out by graduate student slave labor.

Some of my favorite novels are David Lodge's campus novels, and an element in them is the never-ending lure of American academia for British scholars.

Now it's the EU's turn. Computer science is already becoming very, very French. See you guys in Grenoble.


France is extremely unattractive for research. Lecturers positions suck (high teaching load and you need to speak French). Full-time researcher positions are extremely hard to get, and they pay very little, especially junior position. 2500 euros per month, which isn't enough in Paris and just ok in a smaller city.

What kind of employment does INRIA offer?

China, for example, could set up a very European-style English-speaking institute in Hong Kong or Macau with high salaries to attract scientists. Singapore and South Korea too. One day Americans might well follow the money and the research freedom?

China's drowning in their own PhD's. The competition is fierce, and the pressure is enormous. The best and brightest over there are insanely capable men and women.

In all honesty, it's hard to see China wanting many of the PhD's that would be available from the US in a worst case scenario NSF/NIH funding collapse. There may be a place for the top 0.1%? But for 99.9% of PhD's, there are Chinese replacements that are, frankly, better and cheaper.

Hate to bring it back to money like that, but there it is.


I see Chinese nationals in US labs thinking a return to China is a more attractive now than it was a few weeks ago. Chinese institutions should absolutely capitalize on this.

It's been happening already for a few years. Many prominent award-winning faculty are leaving US institutions and setting up brand new labs in top Chinese universities.

China has been funding students from global south, that has big room to grow if China can overcome xenophobia problem in its culture.

As for PhD from developed countries, it’s gonna be hard as you said.


There's also the angle that enticing the brains away from 'the west' is about denying the west something.

Heck, China has a reproduction of Jackson Hole, Wy. (See the documentary Americaville)

As a seventh generation American and 17 year Air Force veteran (long separated), I’m suggesting everybody the US who has any skills, talent, sociability or empathy to leave the United States as quickly as possible.

I think that that’s probably the best route for anybody who is currently in America and doesn’t want to deal with the next 20 to 50 years of total deprivation.

Unfortunately some of us can’t leave so the best most people can do is find some place safe to land.


The World Wide Web essentially exits due to grants from the NSF and alumni from those grants starting Netscape.

But WWW was made up at CERN, you might as well say it exists due to EEC grants.

I’ve too many recollections of browser developers bitching and moaning about yet another memory leak they discovered in libwww to believe that.

And I said the web as we know it, not the web period.


the irony of Andreesen now being one of those now gloating over its destruction

Is he really? Where? I'm no Eric Bina but I ate from the same table and would be happy to remind him of the petulant brat reputation he left behind in the halls of NCSA.

I've heard several interviews about the decisions he made at that time and came from a neutral opinion to hating his guts.

It's like he was surrounded by knowledgeable people and decided to make wrong decision upon wrong decision just to spite them because he resented them being better than him.


I got to sign an MOU from NCSA about wage ranges about a year after he left because Marc was trying to extort more money out of them to stay there working on Mosaic. He left in a huff is the story, after they paid him a bunch including his tuition.

The plus side was I was already making 10% more than any of my other friends and got another 7% for signing it.


Read the interview that Ross Douthat did with him in the NYT

start w/ his twitter feed (@pmarca)...

I’m not going on one arrogant asshole’s platform to make jabs at another.

Just the ol’ pull up the ladder trick

I don’t think that is a fair characterisation of Andreessen.

He’s always been a Democrat, including supporting Obama and Clinton.

His recent support of Trump appears to be a tactical reaction to some of the misbehaviour during the Biden administration such as debanking political rivals and encouraging race-based hiring.


He is a legit Moldbug techno-fascism believer now.

No he hasn't! He's been a Republican all that time and supported Romney.

https://www.businessinsider.com/surprise-silicon-valleys-her...

People are just so surprised to find out he's a Republican that whenever it happens they assume he's a recent convert.


Not really.

He wanted Romney to win the Republican primary, believing him to be more pro-tech than the other candidates, but he ultimately he supported and voted for Obama in that election.


He's pretty explicitly said it's because the Biden administration tried to do the smallest amount of regulation in the tech industry. When Obama and Clinton let the tech barons run wild, he was happy to be a Democrat.

A16Z specifically doesn't have exposure to the big tech anti-monopoly stuff the last decade. They've just been doing crypto scams for the last decade.

Yeah, and the previous administration was pretty anti crypto.

Someone has forgotten the Clipper Chip.

He's openly neo-reactionary for fucks sake

> misbehaviour during the Biden administration such as debanking political rivals

"Both Sides" Citation, please. Really interested in learning more (but no paywalls if possible).


Operation Chokepoint 2.0 is what you're looking for here. The FDIC is accused of violating the APA and some constitutional amendments during the Biden presidency for it.

I hold the idea that brain drain, i.e. emigration of skilled people, is one of only a small handful of real methods to hold fascism to account.

With that, as things start to get real bad it seems leaving is something of a moral duty for anyone who cares, has skills that hold real weight, and can still afford to do so.

Obviously where this "real bad" point is is hard to say, and there's important tradeoffs to consider. I also could be talked out of this position but from what I see it seems about accurate.


And really who would choose to stay in 1938 Germany if you could leave. Even if you are some rich upper class Herr Doktor Professor, life for the next 20 years in Germany wasn't that great compared to England or the US. Why risk having your children killed paratrooping into Greenland. The world is still quite beautiful and quite full of kind people.

Interestingly, Werner Heisenberg was decidedly non-Nazi (and was regularly attacked as a “white jew”), and even though he had ample opportunity to leave, he chose to stay to work on the German nuclear fission program.

I don’t think it tarnished his scientific legacy, but it definitely created some friction in the post-war years.


It's funny how the politicization of science in Nazi Germany led to things like "Aryan physics" to counter the "Jewish physics" of Einstein's relativity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik

Along with the flight/expulsion/imprisonment/murder of top scientists who weren't ideologically or racially "pure", it's no wonder their nuclear program was such a failure.


There were skilled people in the French and Dutch resistances, as well.

I am withdrawing my money from the US stock market. Other people might not give a shit, but I want to invest my money in a functional democracy.

Out of curiosity, where are you moving your money to?

It works better when there is some viable alternative. Research job market is terrible in Europe right now because our governments are trying to make a US like system (project driven and without stability) but without putting the money. There isn't a lot of space in the world to accomodate US brain drain. A bit in Japan, a bit in Europe, most of it in China maybe.

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At this point it's a question of whether the fundie extremists take out the broligarchs first, or vice versa.

You can't run a modern economy by being anti-science and anti-education. Believing otherwise is a self-harming absurdity.

There will absolutely be a brain drain, and the EU is already thinking about how to take advantage of it.


> Seems like a good opportunity for other countries to recruit scientists.

Also, some top scientists who previously would have come to the US, will decide not to.

That's not going to be negative feedback that registers for the decision-makers in the US. But it's good news for competing countries and their institutions. And it's possibly better quality of life, overall, for the scientists who decide to go work somewhere currently more sensible.


as an American I'd be sad to see science move out of my country at the same time I'd be happy and relieved that science continues to flourish and treated with the respect it deserves in other countries (hoping these would be democratic countries with a high regard for human rights such as those of Europe or elsewhere), decentralizing itself away from the US's chronic political issues that show no sign of abating likely for the next few decades at least.

I think that might be an implicit goal here. With antics around H1B, birthright citizenship, general worsening sentiment against "people who dont look white" and "experts bad, podcasters good" its probably worth while for researchers, scientists and professors to start looking elsewhere outside of the US.

I think this comment confused a few things.

First off, there is no evidence the US will never fund science again.

Second, top scientific positions in the US are at academic labs, not at NIH (bare a few top people spending some time there). The top academic labs in the US get some funding from NIH, but the top ones get it from a ton of sources with NIH not being the bulk of it.


"The top academic labs in the US get some funding from NIH, but the top ones get it from a ton of sources with NIH not being the bulk of it."

This is wildly field specific.


But does anyone take any science seriously anymore, if the conditions of the US funding would be that don't even mention the topics related to women or climate change?

But those aren’t real research anyway /s

I would think if you are a European national this situation would have a silver lining in perhaps incentivizing European scientific investment to remain at home and strengthen those nations' scientific research institutions and grant programs. If the U.S. sees fit to rework its institutions, that's its own business. If funding in the U.S. dries up, then doesn't it make sense to go your own way and seek funding in your home country?

So I think you're right. This could be a big opportunity for countries to poach some of these scientists or to repatriate those scientists who have left their home countries.


> i think its underappreciated how much of America's modern success comes down to attracting scientists and intellectuals from war torn europe in the 30s-50s.

if you're going to boil down our "success", if you must call it that, to a root cause, it has a lot more to do with our insatiable greed and lack of respect for, well, anything. The talent is just a small detail in the narrative of America and that narrative is driven far more by capital than it is by interesting people.

The talent narrative makes for excellent propaganda, though, neatly whitewashing a violent and hateful culture.


> Seems like a good opportunity for other countries to recruit scientists.

would be if any other country actually put money in research... Well there is China, but in Europe we already have more PhD than research position.


Not just that but capital is attracted there as well to the point there is a glut of it which is probably where at least some of the political problems arise. They literally have more money than sense while innovators elsewhere can't get funding.

Are we to tether it's decline to the different immigrant groups that came after then?

No one other than the USA was really doing that. That's what makes US, US.

I don't think Operation Paperclip was about "attracting".

Hundreds of high-ranking scientists left Germany in the 1930s. The exodus had nothing to do with Operation Paperclip.

https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/online/5299/The-scientific...


Please, do take the US "talent" away. Most of real world progress and wealth creation comes from engineering style tinkering and copycatting, and not from pure academic style science research. But the latter gets all the hype, media coverage and the Noble prizes. This system of glorified scientific research is a vestige of anti-communist, anti-Soviet era, which is no longer useful, if it ever were.

The smart thing is to outsource pure science research where it's the cheapest, but commercialize it where it's most profitable - that's what China is doing and doing it very well too.


it would be a dumb move. any scientist who moves on a whim so easily to chase money is more likely to not be doing good science.

This is a funny take. As researchers, half of their job was just writing grant applications to get more money. Lab supplies don't grow on trees.

Not happening. Getting significantly more than $100k is close to impossible in most careers in any other country and the dollar is the safest currency to get paid in. Not convinced the desperate folks who want to move despite these are good hires. Anecdotally the only people working any job at all outside of USA that I’ve met were doing that because of their non-US wives not liking it stateside. This isn’t a large group as you can imagine.

> Not happening. Getting significantly more than $100k is close to impossible in most careers in any other country

There are literally millions of people around the world who earn significantly more than US$100K and don’t work in the US.

e.g. in Australia, many medical specialists earn more than US$200k - it is common for experienced oncologists, cardiologists, paediatricians, gastroenterologists, etc, to earn more than US$200k.


'most careers' and Australia is a special snowflake, too, though yes, a valid example. on the other hand you have Eastern Europe, 6h drive to the 'West' from approximately anywhere and salaries in the shitter except for some professions in capitals (cardiologists would probably also qualify).

That’s spare change for a US doctor.

> the only people working any job at all outside of USA that I’ve met were doing that because of their non-US wives not liking it stateside.

Did you accidentally a word? Because if you cross any border literally the first people you meet are border control officers, who work a job outside the USA, most of whom with no interest in living or working in the US.

Incidentally if you travel abroad you will also meet heterosexual women and homosexual men, who don't generally have a wife at all.


The big thing is this isn't really about any real monetary savings. What we get out of these budgets is a bargain:

> The biggest single share of the NIH budget goes to the NCI ($7.8 billion in 2024), and the second-most to the NIAID ($6.5 billion) with the National Institute of Aging coming in third at $4.4 billion. (See the tables on numbered pages 11 and 46 of that link at the beginning of the paragraph for the details).

> And to put those into perspective, the largest single oulay for the Federal government is Social Security benefits ($1.4 trillion by themselves), with interest on the national debt coming in second at $949 billion, Medicare comes in third at $870 billion, and the Department of Defense fourth at $826 billion and Medicaid next at $618 billion.


Even quoting the NIH/NSF budgets (or their line items) misses the point of the current actions. Yes, they're smaller fractions of the USG budget, but they not immaterial.

This is not an attempt to 'save money' at the NSF and NIH (and USAID). A serious, rational effort to reduce their costs / increase their efficiency does not start with grep-ing manuscripts for 'underrepresented'. Part Five of TFA is on the money. This is an ideological attack on acronyms, and what they symbolize to the attackers. The actual agencies, their relative importance to the budget, etc. do not matter. The iconoclasts are here to smash the icons.


Note: pg appears to be "generally sympathetic" to what Musk is doing here.

https://xcancel.com/paulg/status/1886741943050211408


Thanks for sharing, worth having the full quote I think:

> I'm generally sympathetic to what you're doing. But I hope you will take your time and do it carefully. This isn't just a company. Companies are born and die within the system, and it's ok. But this is the system itself we're talking about here.

PG sounds nervous. I have to imagine there are a lot of nervous conservatives who didn't think it would go this far and are now too scared to stand in the way.


I don't want no trans liberal curing my cancer!

Killing mawmaw to own the libs.

*meemaw

Is that what they are saying?

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With the previous system being famously meritocratic...

What's your argument?

The argument is that the previous system wasn't a meritocracy either, and by accounting for the existing biases we gather up the talent that was previously ignored.

You don't stop reading the resume upon hitting <minority group> and hit the hire button. They still need the other required skills too.


> The argument is that the previous system wasn't a meritocracy either, and by accounting for the existing biases we gather up the talent that was previously ignored.

Whether or not that is true (you haven't given evidence for it), this doesn't justify additional anti-meritocratic practices like diversity hiring. Two wrongs don't make a right.

> You don't stop reading the resume upon hitting <minority group> and hit the hire button. They still need the other required skills too.

An analogous argument wouldn't justify e.g. nepotism ("we don't care only about nepotism, we also care partly about merit!") and it doesn't justify diversity hiring either. The argument is that, when deciding who should be hired for doing difficult cancer surgeries, only merit should be considered, and diversity (or nepotism etc) shouldn't play any role at all.


The previous system wasn't just not a meritocracy, it was famously discriminatory. And not just against gay or black people - poor and disabled white people were discriminated against too. Not to mention rampant nepotism and favouritism, which the anti-DEI crowd don't seem to care as much about.

Sure. But today's right-wing assumes, a priori, that any minority or female professional must have been a product of "representation" and not actually qualified.

Only in your head. Nearly half of Trump's leadership picks are women, including his chief of staff, and many are minorities, including the Secretary of State.

Social security and Medicare are inexpugnable liabilities.

Everything is expendable if you kick in the door and fire everyone, like USAID. I think they're politically smart enough to not cut off the elderly voters, but who knows.

Unless you don't need any kind of voter anymore

Well I mean this is it isn't it? Any election that does not go their way will be called "stolen" and decertified and there is no one left to challenge that. I'd love to be shown how it could be otherwise, someone convince me, please.

He has to do it, he's already a felon, jail time probably awaits him if a dem is elected.

I’m not a lawyer, but I think he was sentenced already to serve no time. Unless prosecuted for something else, I think he’s in no danger of prison even if Dems come into power soon.

According to the Supreme Court, he can do whatever he wants in the Oval Office and be immune from prosecution

Social security yes, but it seems to me that reducing the cost of Medicare and Medicaid should be very much possible. We need to provide healthcare but it should be possible to make that less expensive

Medicare would become cheaper tomorrow if the government would negotiate drug prices down. Trump isn't going to do that.


What leverage does the US government actually have?

Is "we just won't fund your drug, even though people will die and you're the only option on the market" actually something that could happen? Would that be politically palatable to anybody?

I guess there's patent invalidation and forced genericization, but that would kill innovation real quick.

I think a far better idea would be to impose very strict caps on admin / non-medical costs, potentially at the expense of paying a bit more to fraudsters, changing FDA regulations to minimize (death from side effects + death from no available drugs) instead of just the former, as well as becoming a lot more aggressive about expensive and unnecessary procedures that doctors perform to get rich quick.


The US pays much more for drugs than any other country. I guess one possibility is that no one has any leverage and big pharma is able to charge Americans more because they're richer. But the more popular theory is that countries can negotiate better prices than individuals can (yes, technically insurance companies can negotiate prices, but they seem unmotivated to drive any costs down). It seems the previous administration thought the government can negotiate lower prices: https://www.cms.gov/inflation-reduction-act-and-medicare/med....

How do other countries do it? Why is Ozempic $100/m in EU and $1000/m in the US. Cost to manufacture Ozempic is $10.

Yup. Was working for a major European blood product distributor as my first real job and the prices US customers would pay were just obscene.

Most EU countrys payed $40-$60 (per unit, shipped by 3rd party courier, who do their own billing), SE Asia and Australia $60-$80 and the US $1500-$2000. Before I left we started also shipping to Canada, dunno about the prices anymore, but substantially less.

The head of our institute was apparently involved in the negotiations and although I didn't get a chance to talk to him directly, the popular story was that our guys showed up, were presented with a pretty much done deal and told that the price and payment terms were nonnegotiable. Also, during meetings, he would refer to the Amis often as "Die, die nicht mehr alle Tassen im Schrank haben", which roughly translates to "The crazy ones."

Also, the product they wanted specified a significantly less complex and cheaper pooling procedure than we were able to offer...


> What leverage does the US government actually have?

Literally all the leverage.


I don't think it's the case that there are many conditions with only single treatment option. "Lower the price or we let our people die" probably isn't right, but "Our cost benefit analysis shows, at this price point, therapy X is preferable. If you want us to use your drug your prices need to be lower."

Presumably the government also has the option to permit purchase of pharmaceuticals from other countries. "Oh, you've raised the cost of X? That's okay, we'll buy it from licensed suppliers in the EU for a tenth of the price."


> we'll buy it from licensed suppliers in the EU for a tenth of the price

Actually is that possible? Are the EU suppliers allowed to resell at the gov negotiated price? Or are the gov negotiated price only for internal market?

(I've been wondering since I don't understand why swiss drug price are so much higher given that EU suppliers are next door)


A single-payer system is literally designed for this.

They are negotiating with drug manufacturers. In the case there is only one, the negotiation just wouldn't go well.

As WW2 was ramping up there was only 1 aluminum manufacturer - Alcoa (Aluminum Co of America). When they hemmed and hawed that they could not increase production to meet the US war demands, the FDR administration made an investment to start Reynolds, who would go on to supply all of the aluminum needed to create thousands of ships and airplanes. Today they make foil and plastic bags. Alcoa still exists too as a much smaller fish in a much larger pond.

The government has all the cards, negotiation is really just a matter of will.


Sure, but that's not the law being discussed. It's literally a negotiation process.

That ignores the point of the story and what I was responding to.

If there is only 1 company to negotiate with, the government is really the only entity that can threaten to simply create a competitor and give them the IP rights (by legal fiat) to do so. If you tell the existing company that your alternative solution is to compete with them using taxpayer money, they might choose to take the lesson of history and accept the government's negotiating position.


Trump MO would be implement a 100% tax on pharma profits and unrealized capital gains next Monday, then reverse it once they agree. But only if Trump cares to die on that hill.

How can Trump change tax law?

Same way he's getting the executive to (apparently) dismantle federal departments.

With no legal precedent supporting him but absolutely no resistance from the branches of government meant to keep him in check.


He can simply take all pharma manufacturer portfolio off the medicare schedule, for example. That's what I would do, and it would be the right lawful move.

On the side, he may open the door for generic substitutes as well from CAN etc.

A simple price directive would be set at the same time, without any negotiation:

The price US medicare will pay will only be the average price for each drug, in all OECD countries.


Same way he created tariffs.

Wrong. Congress granted the Presidency an almost limitless power to levy tariffs in the early 1900s. It has no such power to change the tax laws.

Or manufacture drugs themselves, and distribute "at cost".

Im gonna start a downvote party on myself haha but here we go - if you want cheaper healthcare, get rid of the medical licence!! Let the free market work. Of course it wont be better but rich people will pay theough the nose for the top level of care, middle class will get the best care the market can provide for what they can afford and lower class will get someone regurgitating chatGPT - but it _will_ be cheaper.

I continue to post this, not even fully convinced - Im scared I wouldnt be able to afford good care without govt subsidies, but I am open to the idea at least. I dont think care in the USA would be worse overall


This is an uninformed take. A relatively small fraction of our healthcare dollars (~7%) are going to ‘providers’ i.e. doctors and nurse practitioners. I don’t have a source handy but this is easily searchable.

Most of the spiraling healthcare costs are attributable to administrative bloat, hospital profits, insurance companies and pharmaceutical profits. What you’re suggesting would just result in lower quality care in general and has effectively already been implemented with the rise of ‘supervised’ and unsupervised mid-level providers. I.e. NPs, PAs, CRNAs etc. It hasn’t resulted in any decrease in healthcare costs for the patient.

Let me give you some context for insight. If I see a patient in clinic for an intravitreal injection my fee will be $150-250 before overhead, the pharmaceutical company will be paid by medicare or private insurance around ~ $2000 for the drug that I inject. Double that for a bilateral injection.

If I operate at a hospital, my fee is $5-600. The hospital bills medicare a $4000 facilities fee plus additional fees for anesthesia, consumables etc. to the tune of over $10000 per eye.

If you want to lower healthcare costs a good start would be negotiating drug prices, repealing the clause in the ACA that bans physicians from owning hospitals, banning non-competes for healthcare professionals and getting rid of certificates of need that make it unnecessarily difficult to build outpatient surgery centers. In short, ideas that require a more nuanced understanding of our healthcare system.


Thank you for the reply. As in all things, I'm prepared to be wrong, if that 7% is indeed even ballpark accurate.

btw I appreciate being called uninformed (which I dont dispute and find no offence in) rather than stupid or pigheaded or whatever. The point of talking about things is to share and increase our understanding.


For what its worth I did check this today and it seems to be more like 20% of healthcare is going to providers, not 7%.

However in the grand scheme of things this still isnt that bad, and I do think doctors/nurses deserve a good compensation, so given the problems associated, maybe we dont go with removing medical licences as a solution to healthcare costs


Hey, good attitude to have. I've been seeing this type of exchange less and less on HN, but agree completely that it's (reassessing their positions) something more people should be doing / willing to do.

Look, the plausible version of this is spelled: "force the AMA to allow and the USG to fund more residency slots, so the supply of MDs can meaningfully grow, and the premium they demand be reduced. Also maybe let NPs and CRNAs and the like practice more independent".

But throwing medicine to the whims of the market is absurd. We're going to pick surgeons by reading reviews on Google?


Are medical licenses actually the cause of expensive healthcare?

No it's largely just the magical "a market will fix this" thinking that's been ruining policy for decades. It's silly and doesn't work because the assumptions that go into the underpinnings of the economics theory about the functioning of free markets don't exist in many potential markets they want to apply the logic to. Health care isn't the same as shopping for a pair of shoes and it's mind numbingly stupid to me to try to treat them the same.

I’d probably ask this question on a website for nurses, doctors, or maybe healthcare public policy folks. Instead of a website for programmers.

i.m.o. a different, significant factor is excessive testing for protection against malpractice lawsuits

Also doctors can be compelled to sign enforceable, legally binding noncompetes. Unlike most of us, they have to move far away to change employers, thereby making competition in the health care space very difficult.

I wanna say yes but to be fair, I cant prove it. I think without licencing we would get reduced length degrees & more people like nurses transitioning into primary care physicians - and I think that would be fine for a lot of conditions

I don't think licensure is really that much of a barrier, though. One of the huge trends going on is that nurses are increasingly replacing doctors in primary care. In my market it's unusual to have an actual doctor as a primary care provider. These nurses just go through some additional training for a PA or NP license and it's still a great deal cheaper than medical school.

This happens to me (my PCM is a nurse) but funnily enough my costs haven't gone down. Those nurses still work under a qualified doc, who will never look at your file until youre nearly dead, but theyre still getting a cut believe you me.

They’re not ‘getting a cut’ unless they directly own the clinic. What you’re seeing is a cost-cutting measure increasing the bottom line for whoever owns the clinic. Physicians are forced to agree to ‘supervise’ midlevels as a condition of their employment these days.

I replied to your other comment but wanted to reply here to say that this is also probably a fair point. I guess I dont really see doctors as employees taking orders (dont doctors mostly own their own practice?) since theyre so highly paid, but probably thats how being a software dev looks to others aswell.

Im curious if you think malpractice insurance is also a significant, unnecessary cost? What if we made it harder to sue doctors? On the flip side, malpractice is still a real problem - probably not one that will be fixed by removing medical licences :D just hoping you see this comment since I am genuinely interested in your answer


In the last decade, private practice rates for doctors has dropped from ~60% to ~45%.

By me in FL, it's hard to find a doctor that actually has a private practice now. Most are corporate owned clinics where doctors are just employees.


The US only allows a specific number of people to enter medical training each year to be doctors. This is the reason we pay so much.

The financial incentives a specialist headache doc has whos spent the time and money to get to where they are would never tell a patient to eat less and radically adjust your diet for your ailment to go away, they wouldn't have patients coming back to them and they would go broke (that education was super long and expensive). I like the uncanny idea of getting rid of training requirements and let the free market handle it.

That kind of change though would leave someone with the bag and tends to never get voted or happen so we stay stuck in the over priced pharma, insurance, beating around the bush health game were in. Everyone is incentivezed to keep the bandaids rolling. Don't tell people their drug habits (I mean eating habits) are killing them.

Ohh wait, we got a new pgp blocker for you!

How about just skip breakfast.....


Letting the free market handle it equals letting quacks handle it. I really doubt quacks will be any more incentivized (or qualified) to do right by their patients.

What I find ridiculous is that USA spends more on the interest on the national debt than either on Medicare or on the Department of Defense.

What needs to be overcome? They're directly paid for through payroll taxes.

And it comes to about $120 per tax payer in total. I’ve had dinners that cost more. Give me my science and medicine please.

Gee, I'm still waiting for these proclaimed anti-socialists & anti-marxist to kill the most obviously socialist programs in the country.

Everything is expungable if no one says no.

Of course it’s not about saving money. It’s about extinguishing facts. This is Orwell 101.

So you still believe government-funded research is equivalent to facts in 2025? What about the replication crisis? The political control of research finance e.g. in Alzheimer’s research?

It takes either an extreme amount of naïveté or motivated reasoning to maintain that perspective, IMO.


> The big thing is this isn't really about any real monetary savings.

Of course not. The big gain is for Trump and Musk to say they did something. Regardless of how someone voted, I can’t believe they are still falling for this shtick.


Then why are drug prices in the USA higher than anywhere else?

We're being robbed by these people.


So many brilliant researchers in the US are funded by NSF grants. Even beyond public research, just the private sector benefits just from the training (and associated freedom from not having to chase money and TA) that NSF fellows get is immense.

Injecting dumb politics and refusing grants just because people put the words "biases" in their application is a great way to appeal to Republicans's undereducated voters (see https://www.commerce.senate.gov/services/files/4BD2D522-2092... for an example of their idiotic rhetoric) but also a crazy gamble on the US's ability to be a superpower in two decades.

Just look at what happened in France when right-wing governments started defunding research: a slow but massive brain drain of the best minds. What does the current administration think will happen to our economy when they start burning future brains when they're at the seed stage?


No matter what happens in the next few years, the damage is done. It is now known that the next administration could kill your apolitical career with the stroke of the pen if your ideas vaguely support the wrong team.

If you have talent, why deal with the (frequently) middling pay and the existential risk that could follow every election?


So you don't think being forced to include a statement on diversity in every single grant request reviewed by the NIH was "injecting dumb politics" but you do think that being forced to NOT include a statement on diversity in every single grant request is?

There’s a very big difference there between “including a statement in diversity” and “your funding gets pulled because you previously included a statement about diversity”. The new administration is essentially pulling funding from everyone who got grants previously based on those criteria.

Who do you think benefits medium term from our best researchers getting less funding? The toll on our economy will only be visible in 15-20 years, and it will be massive.


Destroying the economy IS the goal it seems like.

These money shark guys that have got a hold of our government and economy since 2007 seem to have a long term plan that is specifically designed to destroy the US economy. Its counter intuitive, since their wealth is directly linked, but they have some kind of plan.


> forced to NOT include

== "not being allowed to include"

i.e. a restriction on free speech with more worrying implications than "injecting dumb politics"


Diversity statements were used to facilitate race-based grant approvals. They should never have been legal.

This is false. The grants were not approved based on race. The grants were approved based on merit toward the goals of the field of science to which they were submitted. Showing how your work had broader impacts toward a more diverse, equitable and inclusive society was one part of a list of many criteria, recently updated here:

https://new.nsf.gov/funding/merit-review#our-merit-review-cr...


I think a link to archive.org might be better here, the criteria changed and so must have the website as well no?

Never were legal.

Compelled speech is far, far, far worse than constricting speech by every conceivable dimension.

Even in day to day interaction, forcing someone to be silent, is far more of a gentler 'social action' than forcing someone to speak.


I don't think I agree. What's your reasoning?

Really? You see a narrow contextual restriction for irrelevant information in a grant/hiring packet to be worse than compelled speech?

I think people are more concerned about the economic fallout and the illegality of what is being done.

Including statements on diversity, and defunding projects because they have diversity are two very different things.

And yeah, as a white male who sees few women, and even fewer people from minorities other than Chinese and Indian, in the hard sciences (especially computer related), I definitely support efforts to try to include them more. It results in more diverse views of a problem, which often leads to better science.


You call it "injecting dumb politics," but I call it "explaining why I shouldn't believe you'll just hire your buddies." It's an attempt to prevent the grift everyone claims is in research, but it's been politicized by bad-faith non-participants.

Let's not sugarcoat it. DEI is the new N-word. Only people who are covert racists would be bothered by a mere statement about inclusion.

It's very clear once you realize the people perpetrating this don't care one whit for the "economy" writ large, only their personal wealth and that of their cronies. The dumber, meaner and more desperate the population is, the easier the time they think they'll have ruling over them, as unto kings in this new gilded age.

Of course, they forget what came after the gilded age. It's raining stockbrokers - err, oligarchs!


that's bad strategic thinking (obviously) because it places at a huge disadvantage to our main competitors.

What makes you think they care?

It's hard to be a feudal lord with bows and arrows when the civilization next door has cannons and covets your resources.

I thought they'd care because if they are working so hard to sieze control, you'd think they'd want to hold on to it.


To a large degree their wealth is transnational and will move on to the next trough after emptying this one.

I’m in leadership at a place everyone here has heard of. We are in absolute panic behind the scenes.

Why do you think your workplace will be affected?

FWIW this comment would work on almost any HN post.

Hang in there. Hope for the best. Don’t give up.

Yup. 2 weeks down, 190 to go!

1% done

Progress will stop at 99%.

Remember that that is the goal. Acknowledge the data and deal with it as another obstacle.

Also, I'm wondering if multiple universities could band together to file a TRO and/or a class-action lawsuit against the government for something like estoppel.


It's past time these institutions were audited. I had an NSF fellowship and was on numerous NIH grants during my PhD work (Chemist). All of them, even in 2013, had DEI language that made it clear if you were a white/chinese/indian male you were not going to be funded. The institutions, already, were self sabotaging, doling out tons of taxpayer money, not to the best ideas, but to labs that had a few women of various colors other than white working in them. It pushed me and almost all of the other chemists (who were generally white/chinese/indian males) in my class to leave the field either after our PhD or post-doc.

I can only speak for my own experience, but this is 100% not what I have seen (as an NIH-funded white male PI, and one of many at my institution and in my field). I just submitted an R01 last week, and can firmly say that there is no "DEI" language in the grant application forms or in the program announcement; anybody who is interested can easily see the kinds of documents that are required in NIH grants: https://grants.nih.gov/grants-process/write-application/samp...

No "DEI" boogeymen in there.


Wow so not a single white/chinese/indian male has been funded since 2013? For over a decade? That's an incredible claim. Literally.

So sex and racial prejudice has to be 100% efficient to be wrong?

you know what they're talking about, don't play dumb

I don't know. Can you elaborate?

I will elaborate, for the intentionally obtuse and for people who have not lived in the world of academia. When writing NIH grants you typically have a section describing prior foundational work in the field or in the lab itself that the grant proposes to fund.

In our lab, at the time I was there, the majority of our publications were from 2 white and a chinese male. When writing grant proposals to continue this work (to be continued by the same 3 chemists) the gender/racial characteristics of other members of the lab who were female and of other racial backgrounds were described in great detail, even though they had not contributed to the prior work and were not going to continue the project in the future. Our backgrounds were left unmentioned. This was the way to secure funding was what the PI in our lab told me when I inquired about the glaring discrepancy.

It is my opinion that backgrounds should be irrelevant and funding should be granted on the strength of the proposal. That's not the case today.

EDIT: I left academia in 2013, maybe things have changed.


> This was the way to secure funding was what the PI in our lab told me when I inquired about the glaring discrepancy.

I'm not saying that what your PI told you was wrong, but I will say that it would've been useful to get some additional information about why your PI decided that was the right thing to do. It might have been useful at some particular time or in some particular situation.

> EDIT: I left academia in 2013, maybe things have changed.

That's an important piece of information, as when I read your original post, "even in 2013" made me think that you were still in academia.


Might have been how your PI operated, but that's _not_ been my experience in writing grants.

This isn't an auditing. This is a gutting based on senseless and illegal procedures. You want to get rid of DEI, fine. That doesn't mean get rid of the whole agency. This is incredibly alarming.

Here is another perspective, there are many more deserving research proposals than there are grants. Even if they banned all minorities from grant funding there would still be many disgruntled and unfunded scientists languishing without grants.

I'm not disputing your personal experience, but I've worked on numerous science-related NIH grants over the past decade and the vast majority of performers were white (sometimes asian) males (myself included).

> The institutions, already, were self sabotaging, doling out tons of taxpayer money, not to the best ideas, but to labs that had a few women of various colors other than white working in them.

I'm calling this complete BS.


This is an absolute trash take. I've been through the NIH grant process as a white male and there was absolutely 0 mention of diversity, DEI, or whatever other qualifying characteristic of my grant. It came totally down to the content of my proposal. You don't know what you're talking about

I am a male of Indian descent, my PI was white male and we collaborated with a number of Asian male PIs and postdocs. I was in PhD research starting in 2015. All of us were funded.

Quit the BS.


This isn't an "audit." It's an extralegal raid.

As Sir Ian Jacob said, the Allies won World War II because "our German scientists were better than their German scientists." Brain drain is a real problem for fascist countries.

So who is fighting the US in WW3?

I guess the only option is everyone.

So should we move to Thailand or Canada or ???

Canada, the EU, Australia, ...

Places with solid research institutions and less-dysfunctional governments.


The problem is that academic hiring is anemic in those places (as it will be in the US very soon, once Trump is done wrecking the NIH, NSF, etc.).

CA, AU, and some EU countries are about to elect conservative governments

Conservative there are a lot more closer to US democrat than republican, so that's not a problem

Canadian gag order on climate scientists repealed by Justin Trudeau.

Your best option is sometimes your least worse.

There is conservative... then there is Trump.


We'll see about Canada, depending on who LPC elect for party leader and how Trudeau continues to handle Trump

Canada where we can be debanked for supporting a protest.

Part of me thinks this is just incompetence. People put in charge to "change" things without knowing what the thing is or does and just randomly mashing buttons.

I contend that there existed too much incompetence across what the government has been funding. I’m looking forward to a ‘change’ for more competence, efficiency, innovation, accountability, etc

The process is the problem. There is no oversight and accountability for Musk and his "DOGE". That's pure poison to Democracy and to a functioning society.

Musk is neither competent nor efficient. He looks at line items and makes stuff up. He destroys a hundred useful things to destroy a bad one. Details don't matter to him. Its the same con man mentality that feeds off the works of his workforce. People who think he is a genius are gullible.


It's easy to dismiss eccentric people as conmen. But you have to consider, he has been at least partially instrumental in at least 2 impossible companies: electric cars and rockets.

Regardless of what you think of his intellectual capacity, he has a proven track record of organizing people to produce exceptional outcomes !

An inevitable characteristic of his algorithm is chaos: delete as many constraints and parts as possible. When things break, re-add those necessary parts.


> An inevitable characteristic of his algorithm is chaos: delete as many constraints and parts as possible. When things break, re-add those necessary parts.

This might work sometimes for companies (surprisingly, often it doesn't) - it has far more significant and wide-reaching consequences when you're doing it to an entire country and its institutions, particularly one as influential as America.


"You can't be loony and rich. You've got to be eccentric if you're rich.

- Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man


> Regardless of what you think of his intellectual capacity, he has a proven track record of organizing people to produce exceptional outcomes !

And? Getting people whipped up into a frenzy through fear, us vs them mentality, narcissism, to do good work is toxic. Musk is toxic.

We should stop elevating leaders as extra-ordinarily capable. Especially leaders who employ a negative leadership style instead of one founded on empathy, trust, respect, and importance of the group over leader.


ask yourself who is doing the whipping into frenzy

the media + bureaucratic class + democrat leaders who all have a vested interest in these un-audited institutions remaining in the shadows,

or

the people doing exactly what half the country asked them to do: clean up the government in an unprecedented way


There's no media here, just people talking about the jobs they lost and the jobs they're going to lose, everyone can see it.

For better or worse, there is no media, only social media mobs.


Electric cars are a con job though, impressive, but still a con.

Can you give specific examples to back up your comments about Musk? I am quite gullible otherwise.

- He claimed the US funded bio-weapons when they found payments for gain of function research.

- Calling payments to non-profit organizations fraudulent on a whim.

- The sweeping condemnation of what USAID was doing.

- His call for a blanket drop of regulations.

Either he knows better or he is totally lost in his sauce. Hard to say what's worse for where he is right now.

I believe, he does not care. He only cares about his conception of the world and how AI and Mars are more important than those tiny tiny human problems. Society has to serve him and his god complex. He was told to find his subsidies and tax cuts by himself. That's what he is doing.


Evidence is being presented in real-time on X for each of the things you mentioned. Suggest you do some homework instead of gleaning headlines from old media, who btw, was getting money from USAID - the latest series of evidence coming out on X today.

You really need to take a hard look at who is gullible here.


Can you point me to some of the evidence being presented? I know elon's been posting claims of fraud and abuse, but I'm only seen his claims, without any evidence.


There is ZERO context in those Tweets. Only showing a line item, with a dense description is NOT evidence for fraud. Its like if I were looking at your bank transactions and assuming the worst.

Don't get me wrong. There is certainly fraud and overpayment happening in government operations. But just looking at receipts is not the smoking gun. If anyone suspects fraud, there are a processes. Inspectors Generals are (were) one way to have those payments investigated, DOJ and FBI would be another step. The IGs were fired last week. I wonder why...

Also, this "Ian Miles Cheong" guy is literally a Kremlin operative - really someone worth blocking. So that's important to know about his motivations to sow doubt in US Democracy.


There is no fraud that can be proven!

NIH Official account is saying last year $9B of the $35B in grant money was for "administrative overhead". Not fraud. But does that sound reasonable to you??

https://x.com/NIH/status/1888004759396958263


Fraud can be proven. But its a process and its not as easy than just claiming something to be fraud. We (hopefully still) have a justice system, with due process for the same reason.

That $9B is just a number. Whether it is reasonable or not can only be determined by looking into the details:

- What accounts as overhead?

- What were decisions that lead to that overhead?

- Were there alternatives that would have costs less?

- Why and how were those decisions made?

- Can we learn for future decisions?

- Was there actual fraud?

- When there was fraud, why wasn't it referred to DOJ to be investigated properly?

"Administrative overhead" is not bad by itself. Outside government, its simply called "Operating Expense" and "Cost of Revenue" (not a concern of government luckily). I am certain, if you look into SpaceX' or Tesla's expenses, you would find fraud too.

Because Musk and his brainwashed followers can claim stuff on Twitter doesn't make it true. And it certainly MUST NOT be basis to destroy Democracy and democratic processes.


and what basis are you claiming destruction of democracy on? And why don't you sit down to answer your own questions?



Thanks for the info, I'll read into it more.

EDIT to make my current position clear, I do think there is probably waste in various government agencies. My objection with the current approach is mainly 2 folds:

1. The lack of transparency and accountability

2. Some of the statements from the administration that are false or misleading. e.g. the 50 million on condoms.

The 2 combined makes it difficult to have trust on what's happening.


Bro gets his news from X. hahahahaha. Adorable.

where do you get your "curated" news sir?

His manage-by-trolling technique is demonstrably effective in industry.

It’s just that government isn’t that.


> His manage-by-trolling technique is demonstrably effective in industry.

Or are his companies successful despite that? The impression I get is that his direct reports are exceptionally good managers and shield the companies from his dumbest moves. Except at Twitter--that's lost, what, 75% of its value? (still works as a political platform for him though)


Considering that twitter never profited since he took over, nah

"Twitter" wasn't profitable when he bought it so I'm not sure this is a fair comparison.

That’s exactly what I mean by manage by trolling. He forces his directs to be good by trolling them with idiotic ideas.

I don’t condone manage by trolling; it’s not how I want to manage or be managed. But it seems to have worked out for his industrial complex.


So he fosters competence with his incompetence? Seems like it would work just as well without him except for marketing. I'm impressed with Tesla and SpaceX as a whole, but from what I've heard, he hasn't been heavily involved with day to day decisions for more than a decade. From my perspective, his role is to be a hype man that consistently over promises and under delivers.

Musk specializes at succeeding in fields where nobody else is seriously trying. He's never actually faced good old-fashioned market competition.

He's good at identifying ideas whose time has come, I'll give him that much credit. Ransacking the US Treasury wasn't on the radar, though, as far as I could see.


"He's never actually faced good old-fashioned market competition."

https://waymo.com/blog/2024/03/scaling-waymo-one-safely-acro...

Note the date. Tesla still doesn't have a taxi.


Waymo is doing good work but it's still very much a science-fair project, just another side hobby of Larry and Sergey.

Self-driving taxis will be a "market" someday, but not yet, and when they are, there is no reason to think Musk will be a force to be reckoned with. (Well, no reason other than the regulatory capture that he's no doubt putting into place now, that is.)


https://waymo.com/blog/2024/12/year-in-review-2024

from their blog that GP linked to, which says they gave 4 million rides in 2024, which seems like more than a "science faire side project", whatever that's supposed to mean.


It means it's not the least bit responsive to my assertion that Musk has never faced any serious market competition.

How so? I can give Waymo money and they send a driverless taxi to pick me up in SF. That's a market. Can't do the same for Tesla despite Musk saying they'd have robotaxis for years now, they're so far behind they're not even an option. How do you reconcile that with what you're saying here?

I can reconcile it by saying that I don't think he cares. He's being outcompeted in the self-driving taxi business, such as it is, but he has taken his eye off of that particular ball completely. People forget that he owns less than 20% of Tesla at this point.

If he does manage to outcompete Waymo, my guess is that it will be because he hosed them via regulatory capture somehow, thanks to his buddy in the White House. Or because Larry and Sergey got bored and folded their tent.


What "competence"? What "efficiency"? What "innovation"? What "accountability"?

There is no accountability or efficiency in unelected technocrats blowing up what was working without a plan or subject matter expertise.


I have no problem with that. I don't even disagree with government waste, we all see it. If what trump and musk did was:

- Audit spending (at USAID or wherever else)

- Come up with details of where there is waste, being transparent about it for the public to see and review

- Use that to recommend change to congress / the president, again in full public view

Then I'd have no issues. The problem is, what's actually happening is:

- Musk and team are in there with no accountability and no transparency. We don't know what he has access to, what was done

- Unilaterally making changes without public review or oversight. It's a "trust me bro" stance.

- From the few things that has been published, many seem to be outright lies (50m on condoms) or extremely biased conclusions (IRS direct filing)


Thank you for making an actually thoughtful comment with very reasonable points about the ways in which Musk et al are failing the taxpayers/citizens. I'd add on another one, from the article:

> On Sunday, CNN reported that DOGE personnel attempted to improperly access classified information and security systems at the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and that top USAID security officials who thwarted the attempt were subsequently put on leave.

Retaliation is very bad, especially when it comes to trying to protect national security information. As a semi-technical person running several large technical companies, even if he had zero experience with the DoD before, Musk should at the very least understand how important it is to guard your "IP".


Retaliation seems like the norm from the current administration. Calls to investigate and jail political opponents, agents that investigated the Jan 6 “protestors”, to deport the Bishop for calls for mercy.

Bullying, intimidation, arrogance. Traits that I would’ve hoped most would be against.


>I’m looking forward to a ‘change’ for more competence, efficiency, innovation, accountability, etc

Where do you see that? What accountability is present?


20% of funding going to study replication is a good start.

This is hopelessly naive.

With a focus on the hopeless part.

I feel more and more like a large portion of the American public exists at the weaponized intersection of the subbing Kruger effect and Chesterton fence. They hear so many vague platitudes about waste that it’s just taken as dicta without evidence. That somehow provides a global mandate to break anything.

If we survive this I hope that the government workforce starts to get more respect of the hard work they do on complicated problems to make fair processes and that they stop getting just blanket accused of incompetence for ideological gain.


I've worked for the government before and have personally witnessed a very large amount of waste. It's absolutely there, and it's disgusting.

Waste needs to be cut back - that is morally required to happen, because it's not waste of some private company's money, it's the waste of other peoples' money - the only problem is that you can't take the Office Space "What would you say you do here?" approach of randomly cutting people, but have to address the systemic issues that result in tens of billions of dollars lost yearly.

Some of these include:

- literal incentives to waste money in the form of "if you don't use your whole budget every year, we'll cut it next year" (which applies to large parts of the military and defense, which happen to be some of the biggest spenders)

- massive bureaucracy that takes processes that should take a day and turns them into multi-week-long nightmares

- terrible office cultures that encourage single-points-of-failure...and then gives those people lots of vacation time

- large policy sub-orgs that focus on evaluating requests against hundreds of thousands of pages of policy instead of trying to help the workers actually get things done

- terrible contracting processes that result in the government paying 2-10x more than private industry does for goods and services (which only a small increase in quality or reliability)

...and many, many more problems.

> I hope that the government workforce starts to get more respect of the hard work they do on complicated problems

You can simultaneously believe that the average government worker is competent and hard-working, and that the bureaucracy as a whole is extremely inefficient due to systemic issues.

Blanket defense of government (in)efficiency actively makes the problems worse. Focus your energy instead on adding nuance when discussing the problems and solutions.


I think this is part of the problem. There is merit in the stated goal. Most people think there is waste in government, so cleaning things up resonates.

The issue though is with the way it’s being done. Giving it the most charitable take, it’s at best reckless. No oversight, no transparency. We can only take him at his word that things are being improved. But given the various false and misleading statements that’s already come out, of the limited info being released, how can we trust him?


> The issue though is with the way it’s being done. Giving it the most charitable take, it’s at best reckless. No oversight, no transparency.

Yes, spot on, I think this is very accurate and truthful.

I'm just trying to differentiate between "the government is wasteful, and here's the careful and prudent way to make it better" and "the government isn't very wasteful and we should avoid even talking about the possibility".


I’m not sure there are many people arguing for the latter. The former yes, but more than that it’s the types of things that are being targeted.

Method aside, musk is trying to save a few million here and there on things that are “wasteful” but provide benefit to a lot of people, including Americans. Meanwhile, a multi trillion dollar tax cut that’s going mostly to the wealthy is fine and not wasteful for some reason. Jacked up prices from a handful of defense contractors is also fine.


I don't think anyone on this forum is against curbing government waste, which exists in any government from any political spectrum.

But that is _not_ what is happening here.


It's a little from column A and a little from column B.

Incompetence. Mixed in with a fair amount of malevolence. Mixed in with that rich guy thing of really hating smart people because why do they always keep telling me I'm wrong and embarrassing me in front of people if they were really so smart why aren't they rich like me huh?

> Mixed in with that rich guy thing of really hating smart people because why do they always keep telling me I'm wrong and embarrassing me in front of people if they were really so smart why aren't they rich like me huh?

I never thought about it like this and it makes so much sense. I have financial (and maybe social) power therefore I should have intellectual power and if you show to people that you have more than I do, then I feel embarrassed and will use my financial (and social) power to make you feel embarrassed.


He has 4yoe though. This is by design.

We all know years of experience doesn't always mean someone is qualified.

Side note: the article's author is Derek Lowe, who also wrote this memetic piece on Chlorine Trifluoride: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/sand-won-t-save-yo...

just two days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42910829

the problems that led to these frauds are structural--no amount of patching the system will fix this.

maybe we should consider the possibility that we are due for a refactor, which is often painful, but especially painful for people (or code) with an entrenched incentive to continue existing.

i dont mean to defend what the administration is doing but I'm warning that everyone crying doom and gloom and threatening to move abroad, etc. might be eating crow. ironically, the very people most likely to move abroad (in it for the career, not for the principle) are biased to be the types bringing down our system of science. bad science is the science equivalent of a zirp.


> no amount of patching the system will fix this.

> maybe we should consider the possibility that we are due for a refactor

People in tech need to stop with those analogies. A government is not a codebase. You can not apply the principles of "refactoring" and "patching" in the same way. It just doesn't work like that. But the problem is we have a bunch of people (some malicious, some clueless) trying to do exactly that.


Precisely. There’s no wisdom in the approach. “I’ll try refactoring - that’s a good trick!” is a poor approach.

You can try it, but the consequences of a poor refactoring? Look to the planned economies and five year plans.

The government is not a codebase; that mistakes its artifacts for its process. And the importance of process - in politics, in government - cannot be overstated.


yes you most definitely can apply these to government, what an insidious comment.

not only does it NEED to be done, people VOTED for it :)


Government is exactly a codebase. Government bureaucracies is essentially constricting human judgement to more robotic code-like behavior, that's the only way to build large systems.

You say government is not like code, then what exactly is it? Can you describe it in an effective way? Or are you just going to raise your hand up and say there's nothing we can do about it, nothing we can do about the $2 trillion/year titanic deficit?

Historical governments often needed little beyond an army and a tax collection system. And tax collection system was primarily data gathering and analysis, since if you knew how much property someone owned, you can easily tax them for an appropiate amount.

The tech way of thinking has proven extremely successful in many industries already. That's why tech companies (and tech adjacent ones, like say quant trading, or even index fund trading) have been so economically dominant, and utterly kicked out the traditional MBAs from their pedestals.

Stop being a self hating programmer who despises the mentality of tech.


This is so naive.

Not all of government is the DMV.

Government has a massive policymaking function, which is not "robotic code-like behavior". It's about solving nuanced, challenging problems. Government has a huge research function.

And tech has created some great things, but it's also created some really terrible things, mostly because of this "move fast and break things" mentality that doesn't consider the consequences of its actions.


>You say government is not like code, then what exactly is it?

Government is mostly individuals deciding goals and attempting to convince others. Then rules are added to prevent harm to others or using corrupt methods of convincing. That "code" part is more like a moderated forum: necessary for the huge task, but it's just the framework for the actual content.

>Historical governments often needed little beyond an army and a tax collection system.

And historical computers used vacuum tubes. What's your point?

>The tech way of thinking has proven extremely successful in many industries already.

Even in tech companies, the richest people are almost always the smooth talkers. Because the best, and really only, way to get money is convincing somebody else to give it to you. You can do it by offering a better product or charming them.

Most government goals aren't technically difficult and certainly don't require advanced algorithms or fast computers. The real work is aligning people.


i hate to break it to you but it's literally called "the federal code".

I hate to break it to you, but 2 million people engaged in an endless list of activities that encompasses repairing tanks, making grants, building bridges, supporting citizens abroad, distributing pension checks, performing surgery, making sure airplanes don’t crash and conserving forests is not the same kind of thing as a codebase and requires a different skill set to effect change in.

and yet the structure of the federal code is generally designed to be read as a recipe. judges are instructed to be as objective as possible. disbursers of funds are expected to justify decisions in as mechanical a fashion possible (this maximizes accountability) perfection is impossible, but the idea of running government like code is a quasi-ideal, or else you cant go back to the taxpayer and say "hey we did good by you".

Your discourse screams delusion or next-to-none experience in any mid-sized life and collective/team work.

Maybe try first to spend some time and speak with the actual people (judges, administrators, clerks, etc.) that do this daily, to understand how it works in reality.


For the love of God. How old are you?

If you cannot make the distinction between computer code and law/regulation, that get applied by humans in humans time and humans circles…?

« Refactoring » an org or a government like you project to, like Elon and his boys is doing, it is going to cost actual lives. People killed.


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You keep spouting this language without providing other evidence than what all tracks back to Elon’s theory that all government is broken and evil, like he’s an oracle all alone in his tower of knowledge. That’s a bit thin.

- Part of government is the legal system which a Judge's whole thing is being endless nuanced in understanding and applying what the law means; I would not considered this constricted robot like behavior even though the law is literally a bunch of written down rules.

- Part of government is funding research that involves people doing real experiments collecting real data? Are novel experiments those of constricted robots or LLMs?

- Part of government are the dedicated every day folks who are doing the best they can despite being overworked and under resourced who have to make life and death decisions in the moment every day (air traffic controllers), who monitor and coordinate relief and management of disasters big and small in a very interconnected world (we just had a global pandemic, are culling record numbers of chickens, had a bad hurricane season, and large wildfires) these are not people behaving like robots they are just people following laws and regulations primarily passed via efforts of lobbyists, or else are those that are written in blood.

Don't like the way a part of government works? Reform it. Don't try to burn the whole thing to the ground by doing shit like emailing the people responsible for keeping planes from crashing into each other that if they want to they can fuck off for the next 8 months on the tax-payers dime and then find a new low-stress job. Don't like certain regulations or the ways laws are weaponized against everyone but corporations and the wealthy? I get it, me neither I'd like to see affordable housing too. Unfortunately, congress has the responsibility to fix that, not Donald Trump, not Elon Musk, nor any of his former SpaceX interns. If they want to make those changes they should get elected to congress or hell maybe for shits and giggles use some of that lobbying money for the common good they claim to care so much about.


> Don't like the way a part of government works? Reform it.

at what point does that become disingenuous? how many years have people bern trying to do it incrementally? just tell the reformer: oh try harder, knowing every feature of the bureaucracy is stacked against them and they wont succeed. in the meantime people are hurt, dollars are wasted.

> Unfortunately, congress has the responsibility to fix that,

that's not correct. congress has ceded execution of these things to the executive in many cases with broad leeway to do or not do (thats why it's called discretionary spending, any spending that is by law congress' responsibility is statutory spending)


You are mistaken. Discretionary spending is spending that Congress allocates during the annual appropriation process, while mandatory spending is spending that is required by prior law. See https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

I'm very pro some systematic auditing/cleaning of out sclerotic waste, but I don't see how anyone can look at the way this is being handled and not be incredibly worried

I think it's the second-order stuff here. Even assuming Musk were to do a fantastic job at just clearing out inefficiency in a smart way (which seems unlikely given the actions he's taken/leaks around cutting funding based on key-word matching etc.), the higher-order point that someone can just buy their way into the President's inner-circle and have complete free-reign to seize government operations and make changes with 0 transparency/accountability seems like it does just stupid amounts of harm to the integrity of the system


> make changes with 0 transparency/accountability seems like it does just stupid amounts of harm to the integrity of the system

pray tell who was accountable for the grant issuance in the first place? was congress approving every disbursal? could the citizenry vote up/down on every RO1 or SBIR that went past the NIH desk?


Hey man, if you wanna make a point just make a point - no need to try the whole snarky rhetorical thing

Ofc not every decision is fully democratic, but the people making them are beholden to rules and systems which are - or at the least, have a clear chain of command back to individuals who Congress has direct authority over. No one ever said you needed 100% democratic oversight on every action, as long as those actions are obeying the system that was democratically established

The problem is doing it in an extra-legal way, where the Executive Office is giving a crony power his branch doesn't/shouldn't be able to bestow, where people telling this crony no when he tries things he shouldn't be able to do all seem to get put on leave etc


the executive has broad leeway to spend as it sees fit. i 100% guarantee you that disbursal of funds to grant recipients involves calling on extralegal outside-the-government "experts" making advisory recommendations without direct consultation of congress or the voter.

point is, live by the sword, die by the sword. it's hypocritical to whine about cutting funding by the exact same mechanism that is used to give it out because you dont like the political party of the cutter.

and you can't say "keep politics out of science". because when you're pulling from the public purse, it is inherently political.

there are ways to fund science that are apolitical. HHMI, ACS, ADA, AHA, etc.


Executive branch has leeway to decide on what to fund within the parameters set for the program by Congress. It can evaluate grants and set processes but not completely change the acceptance criteria or scope, which is under the jurisdiction of Congress - USAID is jointly under the purview of the executive and legislative branches. This isn't a "team" thing - Congress sets the scope of what USAID should be doing, and anyone changing that - or dismantling the program altogether - without their authority is overreaching

And again, my main issue here is that under any reasonably interpretation, Musk would qualify as a Principal officer, which as the Appointments clause of the Constitution clearly lays out requires Senate approval. It is beyond ridiculous that the head of a new "Department" who seems to have unilateral power over other departments now, is not subject to any kind of oversight or accountability to other branches of government - this is exactly the kind of shit the checks and balances were designed for


Whatever rational refactor/rewrite you want does not start with `find . -iname 'dei' -delete`.

Refactoring means incrementally changing things in a non-destructive way.

> ironically, the very people most likely to move abroad (in it for the career, not for the principle) are biased to be the types bringing down our system of science.

What the hell are you talking about? I chose to get into science for the benefit of the masses, rather than, for instance, helping some corporation abuse human psychology to sell more ads. If there is no money to do the science, I have no choice but to emigrate.

edit: And to give you an example of the science being targeted by these early moves: pulse oximeters have a racial bias leading them to overestimate the oxygen saturation of minorities, which led to deaths during the pandemic. All the work toward addressing that issue at the FDA has now been terminated, because it's related to DEI.


> I chose to get into science for the benefit of the masses

why do you suppose most science benefits the masses?

a stunning amount of science is negative. homme hellinga cheating and claiming a triosephosphate isomerase, for example. stripey nanoparticles, as another. Thousands of western blots that were cleverly edited by unscrupulous postdocs. everything by diderik stapel. anil potti.

those are the ones that got caught. so many more got away with it.

and yes, if you can't tell, i know what the fuck I'm talking about.

> And to give you an example

why dont i give you an example. NIH is responsible for 80% of the budget of an NGO that collaborated with WIV and advocated for GOF research. on the grounds of likely being responsible in part for the deaths of millions worldwide maybe we should suspend funding to the NIH until all of its policies can be reviewed


Luckily those things never happen in the private sector. Theranos?

what does being the private sector have to do with anything? We're talking about use of taxpayer money.

I'd like to make the point that private and public are coupled, in a way that if you dismantle everything public/tax funded, there is effectively nothing left except private by definition (with all it's upsides and downsides where the latter will be amplified in the absence of public oversight bodies funded by public money based on public law).

Now I (as a non US citizen, but one of a country that has it's fair share of needless bureaucracy) wholeheartedly agree that there is waste, a lack of oversight/transparency and probably a need for more say of the common taxpayer on how their money is spent.

But as someone who learnt the meaning of the Terms "Gleichschaltung" and "Ermächtigungsgesetz" in school, I wholeheartedly disagree with the current measures and how they unfold right in front of our eyes.


The small fraction of people perpetrating fraud does not warrant leaving science for private corps to pursue. The end result from that is companies sitting on their IP and suing anyone who comes up with something similar--with the cost passed on to consumers, and the pace of technology development slowing.

You still haven't explained how this is biased toward people "in it for the career, not for the principle."


You might be on to something here.

Yes there is structural issue.

When researchers see that appealing to DEI and inclusion make is easy to gain finding for, allegedly, research that is wasteful and not meritorious, everyone will attempt to do it.

Conversely, when appealing to "equality of white people" becomes more likely to get you funded, everyone will also attempt that. Which is going to be the case going forward. If you do not believe me, DJT has appointed someone at the helm of EEO commission who explicitly does this in their LinkedIn bio.

So the issue is structural, it is not dei or white power.


scientific fraud is absolutely a problem -- a universal problem, because it's inherently a human problem (it's inextricably tied to academic careers, so it's not really a money problem, it's a career problem--in other words, people aren't doing it to get rich, they're doing it to further their career or prestige; that doesn't make it any better, it just makes the context more complicated)

but what the admin is trying to do has nothing to do with "making science right". it has a very clearly stated goal of 1) rooting out anything remotely related to DEI; 2) rooting out anything related to previous investigations into Trump and the Jan6 attempted coup (see purges at FBI, DOJ); 3) cutting government spending (so there's money to pass a promised tax cut); 4) whatever Elon decides he wants to gut

None of these have anything to do with making science more honest and accurate. If that were the goal, you'd probably need to _increase_ funding because you'd need more reproducibility studies.


Refactor. Ha. This is just randomly and mindlessly deleting large chunks of code because you think it's woke.

Not a single personal alive thinks these institutions are perfect. But only morons think haphazardly defunding shit without understanding what you're breaking or what the real-world ramifications might be is a way to fix problems.

The past couple of weeks have historically stupid.


no not because it's woke. because it's broken. this is literally the system that let a person become the President of Stanford a federally granted research professor with years of fabricated data that absolutely fucked some people that i personally know. lets say, negative man-decades of research just among people in my limited circle. i guarantee you this was not an isolated incident

the sooner we cut this shit out, realize consequences, and start over, the better.


But the scientific community identified this failure. They published the evidence against it. And shed light here.

And heck, they did a lot of unrelated great science at the same time.

Science is a process that will have failures, mistakes, errors, and these are subject to natural selection. We can work to make that process sharper, more rigorous, but that's obviously not what the administration is doing. They're attacking science with the full intent of replacing it with a system where lies and fraud reign supreme. In the world of RFK and Donald Trump, lies are just what people do every day for breakfast.

RFK Jr. gets a dozen things wrong on science and tells a dozen lies and funds and pals around with major fraudsters and charlatans every week.


> "They"

they did not. in the case of tessier-levigne, who was responsible for getting him out of there? not the NIH. it was a fucking Stanford undergrad journalism student.

let that sink in. a heroically persistent undergrad had to do the job that the NIH was morally and legally obligated to do.

this "science is self correcting" trope needs to stop being propagated right now. and you can claim eventual self consistency if it resolves a hundred years from now, which would obviously be too little too late. how many people were hurt, how much research dollars were wasted in the meantime. "well, Eventually" is not good enough, and the self correcting slogan is just running cover for entreched interests in the face of their misdeeds.


Yeah, but that's actually not really true, the undergrad just reported in the campus newspaper what other scientists had found and reported in pubpeer: https://pubpeer.com/search?q=Tessier-Lavigne

Here's his original reporting where he describes this: https://www.editorandpublisher.com/stories/5-tips-for-using-...

Kudos to the kid for breaking the story before other media sources, but the actual scientific investigative work here was done by people with scientific training


This.

I'll add that all systems are self-correcting given sufficiently long timescale. (Or they die out and we're none the wiser due to survival bias)

Science isn't any special in this regard. Even the Catholic Church was self correcting (it doesn't do Inquisitions or sell indulgences any more, does it?). As was Nazi Germany (WWII fixed that, hurray for... whatever that was).

To be honest the real "self-correcting" mechanism is some kind of Darwinian survival system where you have to ensure the wrong things don't perpetuate. Government funding really doesn't help with that unless the mechanism deciding which projects/people to fund have a really good model of the real world (i.e. "truth").


Ok, so all payments are paused while funding is reviewed? Allowance for emergency payments to keep the lights on?

This is taxpayers money and these agencies report to the President under the executive power. A shocker that government agencies might need account for spending.

And I’m sorry “its not a lot of money” doesn’t fly when all the “its not a lot of money” is $8 trillion dollars. The federal deficit will never get smaller if nobody looks at the “its not a lot of money” line items.


> Allowance for emergency payments to keep the lights on

This article notes that some federally-funded nonprofits "couldn’t access funds to make payroll": https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5115026-white-house-fund...

People rely on their paycheck to pay bills! If anyone stops getting their paycheck, that's not "keeping the lights on". Do you agree that any "review" mustn't prevent anyone from receiving their paycheck?


Federal money is allocated by Congress, and the President is required to spend the money as allocated by Congress. The President does not have authority to cut spending. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impoundment_of_appropriated_fu...

> Ok, so all payments are paused while funding is reviewed? ... This is taxpayers money ... A shocker that government agencies might need account for spending.

Reviewed for what?

Reviewed for whether the spending was authorized by Congress? If Musk finds that money is being spent in ways that are not authorized by Congress, and cuts that spending, great.

Reviewed for whether the money is being used efficiently to accomplish the goals set by Congress? Again, if Musk finds ways to stretch the same amount of money to accomplish more, that's great. For example, if Musk makes USAID more efficient so it delivers more aid for the same amount of money, that would be wonderful.

Or "reviewed" for whether Trump/Musk agree with them? It's illegal for the President to unilaterally cut programs just because he doesn't like them.


The idea that the President, the head of the Executive branch, has zero power over Executive branch spending down to the agency level, because Congress said X must be spent and dammit they must spend it, makes no sense.

By that logic and taken to an extreme, Congress could pass a budget law (overriding the executive’s veto) to set executive spending for specific agencies to only be spent on computers, say the FBI, and the executive is powerless to Congresses control over the executive function to carry out the laws that the Congress has passed?

So clearly the intention is one of checks and balances, for example the President can’t spend money Congress does appropriate but also has some power over how that money is spent as such to exercise the power of the Executive.

So let’s see what the Constituion says as per Congress.gov!

“The constitutional dimensions of impoundment disputes have been confined to the political branches. The Supreme Court has not directly considered the extent of the President’s constitutional authority, if any, to impound funds.16 However, a case decided in 1838, United States v. Kendall,17 has been cited as standing for the proposition that the President may not direct the withholding of certain appropriations that, by their terms, mandate spending.18”

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artII-S3-3-7/...

Very interesting! Sounds like something he may want the Supreme Court to rule on!

I for one look forward to getting some clarity on this issue.


Congress quite literally has the power to pass laws. According to the Constitution, the President "shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed"; the President's oath of office requires that he execute the laws set by Congress. So for example, if Congress were to pass a silly law saying "the FBI shall spend exactly $X on computers, down to the cent", then the President would be required to make sure the FBI spent exactly $X on computers, down to the cent. The President has many powers, but "deciding not to execute the laws passed by Congress" is not one of them.

Quoting from the page you linked:

> Impoundments usually proceeded on the view that an appropriation sets a ceiling on spending for a particular purpose but typically did not mandate that all such sums be spent. According to this view, if that purpose could be accomplished by spending less than the appropriation’s total amount, there would be no impediment in law to realizing savings. Impoundments were also justified on the ground that a statute, other than the appropriation itself, authorized the withholding.

In other words, if Congress appropriates $X for the FBI to buy computers, then Congress didn't necessarily mean "the FBI shall spend exactly $X on computers, down to the cent". It could be interpreted to mean "the FBI may spend up to $X on computers". But Congress has clarified this ambiguity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Budget_and_Impou...

> the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 specifies that the president may request that Congress rescind appropriated funds. If both the Senate and the House of Representatives have not approved a rescission proposal (by passing legislation) within forty-five days of continuous session, any funds being withheld must be made available for obligation.

In other words, if Congress appropriates $X for the FBI to buy computers, but the President thinks $X is excessive, then the President may ask Congress for permission to spend less than $X. If Congress doesn't grant the permission within 45 days, then the President must go ahead and spend the full $X. Again, Congress literally has the power to set the laws, and the President is required by his oath of office to execute those laws.

Furthermore, the Supreme Court already ruled on this exact question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_v._City_of_New_York

> President Richard Nixon was of the view that the administration was not obligated to disburse all funds allocated by Congress to states seeking federal monetary assistance under the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972 and ordered the impoundment of substantial amounts of environmental protection funds for a program he vetoed, and which had been overridden by Congress.

That case seems directly analogous to what Musk is currently trying to do. Nixon lost that case in the Supreme Court.

Even if the Supreme Court did rule that the President had impoundment powers, it would probably be on the condition that "[the purpose of the law] could be accomplished by spending less than the appropriation’s total amount" (quoting from the page you linked). For example, the President would still be required to buy sufficient computers for the FBI, even if he spent less than $X on them. The President still wouldn't be able to just unilaterally decide "no, the FBI doesn't need computers, this is a waste of money".

So, I think it's already quite clear that Trump/Musk do not have the constitutional authority to just start cutting government programs. Do you agree? If not, which part do you want further clarity on?


No, it’s not “quite clear” as the link provided described.

Any impoundment authority and how it has been curtailed is purely a political solution, not a constitutional one.

If the Democrats think they are right they can go to the Supreme Court to force him to spend money with no say in the matter.

And while the President is mandated to execute the law you’re forgetting how much of the government is not described in law. USAID “to further the mission of the US in foreign countries” would give the President a lot of latitude in how that money is spent. A lot.

Then layer on the immense agency structure written all through “interpretation” of the law that the agencies no longer can rely on Chevron to defend and things get really interesting.

And while the Supreme Court did rule on Empoundment law curtailing Nixon, it did not rule specifically on the constitutionality of it and a lot has changed on the Supreme Court since Nixon.

So please don’t respond with “doesnt have the constitutional authority” when that is most definitely not the case.


> If the Democrats think they are right they can go to the Supreme Court to force him to spend money with no say in the matter.

They did sue, and a federal judge temporarily blocked the "federal spending freeze".

> you’re forgetting how much of the government is not described in law

It's true that many aspects of the government are not described in law. But the major federal expenditures are definitely described in law. That's why Republicans in Congress are currently debating the budget! https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-spending-bill-stalls-congre...


> They did sue, and a federal judge temporarily blocked the "federal spending freeze".

Last I saw the judge blocked the mechanism, and needed time to decide on other issues.

Hence the confusing email (only if you don’t know how the government works) that rescinded the original mechanism and replaced it with another.

> They then returned with a proposal of $700 billion in spending cuts, but that failed to convince some of those in the right flank.

It’s going to be a knockdown drag out fight over this. Trump will win some, but lose others. That’s just how it goes.

But unlike last time where he got there day 1 with “ok, what’s next”, he went in this time with a laundry list and an actual strategy.

Which is just smart. I’ve worked for big corps and it’s impossible to turn that ship. I can’t imagine the federal government. The only people I’ve seen be successful are the ones that get creative.


> Last I saw the judge blocked the mechanism, and needed time to decide on other issues.

A second judge is now quite clearly reiterating that the money must keep flowing for now: https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/5124167-trump-f...

> It’s going to be a knockdown drag out fight over this. Trump will win some, but lose others. That’s just how it goes.

Yes, that's how spending cuts are supposed to be decided: Congress.

> it’s impossible to turn that ship. I can’t imagine the federal government. The only people I’ve seen be successful are the ones that get creative.

Trump has every right to "get creative" within his constitutional power; he doesn't have the right to "creatively" violate the constitution by refusing to faithfully execute the law.

Let's return to the original question. Suppose that Congress passed a law fifty years ago saying that "there shall be an agency to do ABC, with a budget of $X/year, and the President can figure out the details". I agree that the President has wide latitude to decide how the agency does ABC. But he cannot just decide "ABC is a waste of money, let's abolish the agency and use that $X/year to pay off the debt instead". Do you agree? Or are you claiming that the President could unilaterally abolish the ABC agency and stop doing ABC? (Setting aside the question of whether Trump is currently doing that; do you agree that he would not be allowed to do that?)


> But he cannot just decide "ABC is a waste of money, let's abolish the agency and use that $X/year to pay off the debt instead". Do you agree? Or are you claiming that the President could unilaterally abolish the ABC agency and stop doing ABC?

Oh I agree, if the law Congress passed was explicit in the funding and the purpose of it.

My comment was more around the multitude of spending in the federal government that is not tied to a specific purpose approved by Congress.

Which is why USAID is likely being targeted.

I would argue that the room to maneuver is where the courts will need to decide - if the President is still following the law but not spending all the money, what happens? Or if the money spent is shifted significantly but still represents a “good faith” effort to follow the law, is that allowed?


> a lot has changed on the Supreme Court since Nixon

Both legislation and Supreme Court precedent say that the President cannot impound funds. You seem to be arguing that it's OK for him to impound funds because the Supreme Court decision was fifty years ago and they might rule differently today.

Couldn't that argument be used to justify breaking any law? I think Trump must follow the law. Do you agree that Trump must follow the law even if the Supreme Court hasn't specifically reaffirmed that particular law recently?

(I'd feel differently if Trump illegally impounded some trivial amount of money just to get a case before the Supreme Court; but that's not what he's doing here.)


This stuff is a rounding error against SS, Medicare, and the military.

It’s all a rounding error until it isn’t.

Doesn’t make tossing $50B out the window “ok”.

It’s like the people making a $100k who don’t know where all the money goes. It’s all just a rounding error, but rounding errors add up fast.


8 trillion is the amount the debt rose while Trump was in office last time: https://www.consumeraffairs.com/finance/us-debt-by-president...

How much do you think he will raise it by during this term?


Looking like it will go down this time! Isn’t that what everyone seems to be complaining about in this comment section?

This hurts, but it also presents an opportunity for rebuilding.

An outcome could be a greater diversity of voices influencing research, rather than the NSF and NIH continuing to serve as monoliths.

The NIH is the dominant force in medical research. Remember how theories for Alzheimer’s having an infectious etiology were sidelined for decades? And, to this day, for autoimmune conditions?


Do people recognize what rebuilding entails?

I think it means the next administration would have to hire new people to offer grants to researchers. This would bring new perspectives into the process. There is never any shortage of researchers to fund.

And that the ranks of researchers, which are often stagnant due to a shortage of jobs for PhD holders, would experience turnover in the interim, creating openings for fresh voices when the funding resumes.

Ideally, imo, the grant process could be distributed across more organizations rather than being as centralized as it has been. The next administration might be free to do so if the existing orgs are no longer thriving at that time.


why.. where will the money come from? And next administration?

This is 14 DAYS since election. March isnt even here yet. There are 4 tax filings before the next election.

Please take a look at things like demonitization, or many "harsh" medicine programs in other countries.

The fallout is going to be decades. The government is going to pivot to bread and circuses. The sides are going to get more entrenched, and then theres going to be riots and violence.

This will pass, and new crap will come in. This is banana republic territory, not America territory.


The Alzheimer’s debacle was already a generation. Perhaps a timely retirement or two would have cut that short.

When I have the privilege of working with new college graduates, they get me out of my old modes of thinking. And they are quite talented. We will still have college graduates in four years.

Granted, if you believe there is a significant risk that the United States falls into irreversible autocracy within the next four years, the analysis does change. However, I just don’t buy it. There are two branches of government that check the executive branch. Trump has been elected as a lame duck with no possibility for a second term.


I’ve lived in developing nations.

People who have lived in first world countries are prone to miss many crucial signs of banana republics.

And why not - it looks hysterical from the surface.

The crux of the matter is institutions. And your institutions have been under attack since watergate.

In addition, our society is unprepared for a media industry that must be profitable and fast paced.

I would think about what red lines y9u would have had in the 90s. And where your red lines are. Call it being the 90s back again.

Then decide what you think the outcomes are likely to be.


While I still don’t think it’s likely, there’s always the possibility that I’m wrong. The conversation is shifted to a slightly different topic at this point, but going back to the NIH and the NSF, they aren’t exactly democracy’s bulwarks.

Considering 90s norms for the present is interesting. I see social taboos that I’m grateful we’ve revised, though that social progress is not what you’re talking about, I understand. But I would still say that you can’t step in the same river twice, and that the red lines of yesterday might or might not be important today.


>though that social progress is not what you’re talking about

Right! but its a point that we can acknowledge. We've made progress on overcoming some taboos. Hmm, in a way, we've overcome taboos here as well, its ok to be an asshole politically.

So the question becomes one of utility and morals - some taboos were ok to remove, others were not.

You can use that to compare how certain red lines have moved more in accord with your values, and others are being breached.

Either way, this is a tool for you, and others who read this, to look to their own values and judgement, and decide objectively if they should reasses and start responding.

From my experience, the answer is heck yes. For people who are in a constant state of gradual escalation, their red lines get massaged fully out of shape, and you look to your peers to see if you are nuts.

Which is why the idea is for you to judge the red lines for yourself, against your own ideals.

At least thats what I am thinking by brining that comparison up. The 90s werent so far away that they couldnt be used to compare agains today.


Research labs wholly owned and operated by large corporations were prevalent sources of innovation throughout the 20th century in the United States.

Obvious, probably for Hacker News crowd:

• Bell Labs • Xerox PARC • IBM Watson, Almaden Research • Dow Chemical

I'm missing the big ones from petroleum and agricultural businesses. Aerospace.

I'm willing to believe that a political retreat from 21st century choices looks towards legendary captains of industry, rather than sprawling government bureaucracy, as a source of American greatness.

My attempt to frame this week's gleeful destruction of government institutions as a revitalization of the fountainhead.

But I don't know. It's easier to just call it the same old spiteful hatred of science that is as American as apple pie.


From my basic understanding of Bell labs, the government granted AT&T a monopoly in communications with the condition that they spend a portion of their revenue on public research. The other labs I don’t know much about, but my guess is it was either similar situations or high corporate tax rates incentivizing spending profits on research to decrease their tax burden.

Another win for China. While the US guts its research capacity, China already dominates scientific research (according to Perplexity, 29% of the most highly cited peer reviewed articles are authored by Chinese scientists). Of course all those people who voted for this regime don't believe that there is any benefit to funding science. After all, what did science ever do for them? (OK, except for the science of pick-up trucks - I'll give you that. Oh yes, and the transistor: I think I may have one in my phone. But otherwise: name one thing, bro). Maybe those hats should replace the "A" with a "C".

The slump began from first DJT presidency. US lost the 5G race to China. If deepseek etc. are any indication, they are losing the AI race too. Looking and the prevalence of cheap Chinese EVs all over the world, US is losing on that front too.

Meanwhile MAGA are patting themselves in the back because they are "tired of winning".


Do you not think DEI is harming US research capacity?

What do you honestly think China thinks of our DEI initiatives?

They're laughing at us in Chinese.


Despite all the hyperbole in this thread I will try to speak plainly. It has become tiring to see how DEI has affected all aspects of academia. Hiring people based on race, awarding grants to work exclusively with members of a particular set of minorities, etc. I'm sure most people choose to close their eyes to such things and move on and focus on the actual important work but there must be unimaginable waste going on in addition to unethical race based preferences.

This is simply a delusion detached from reality. I am a white man in STEM academia. I've never been discriminated against once. None of my white male colleagues have either. They are all successful in academia. And my colleagues who aren't white men are in no way inferior. Just let us vote and ask if we feel discriminated against or oppressed because of DEI. We'll vote no.

It's simply a delusion that DEI is some unmeritocratic disaster. The reality is academia has its pick of top talent regardless of race or gender. I don't know any scientists who buy into this delusion irl. Diversity is a small factor in hiring because the field is already predominantly white men and it's no harder to pick top star talent when you diversify.

Simply insane that you are promoting the destruction of US science, US foreign aid, and so much of the good stuff the US government does, all in the name of a deeply delusional witch hunt.


It's an ideological disaster. Viewing this through a white v/s black lens is itself too simplistic. Look at the Harvard affirmative action lawsuit. Asians are in fact and provably being discriminated against. This is also the case in immigration policy. DEI/affirmative action policies were created by the executive and are being undone by the executive.

>Just let us vote and ask if we feel discriminated against or oppressed because of DEI.

A majority of the electorate did vote for ending this.


Shocker, a majority white country voted to end programs that identified biases which benefitted them...

> Asians are in fact being discriminated against

I have a feeling someone fed you some false information about this case.

The judges ruled that Harvard's admission program violated the equal protections act, but never said once that Asian Americans were ever discriminated against.

The programs that these decisions got rid of impacted minorities other than Asians a lot more, but for some reason you don't want to talk about that?


That is because none of your colleagues who think so would ever tell you. The problem with this is that the ideology has led to a point where I and many like me will simply never tell someone like yourself what they think of.

Even now that it's "better" I would only write something like this anonymously in fear of a future person seeing and judging my beliefs. I have personally watched in corporate and academia the effects. I am small fish but have personally wanted to hire someone who I thought was the most qualified for the position and was rather non obviously told to not because the team already had to many white men. We instead had to go with my 3rd choice a female who while great did not have the technical skills I valued in the first.

The main problem is people who say things like you do is that you don't realize you have a very incomplete picture. Those who disagree with the ideas will literally never say them. In many career paths saying your beliefs that don't align is basically career suicide.


> This is simply a delusion detached from reality. I am a white man in STEM academia. I've never been discriminated against once.

This is demonstrably false. Harvard and many other universities recently lost a Supreme Court case due to persistent racial discrimination over decades (https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/jun/29/us-supreme-court...). Whites and especially Asians were methodically discriminated against on the basis of their race. Just because you don't personally see the racism doesn't mean it doesn't exist.


Why are so many people saying "Asians and whites were discriminated against" and pointing to this case?

The judges ruled that the program was unconstitutional and had to be changed, not that Harvard had been illegally discriminatory in their admission practices(as was attempted years prior by the same conservative funded activism group)

Just because you personally see racism, doesn't mean it's actually happening(aka, "facts don't care about your feelings")


> The judges ruled that the program was unconstitutional and had to be changed, not that Harvard had been illegally discriminatory in their admission practices(as was attempted years prior by the same conservative funded activism group)

What on Earth are you talking about? Here are the 237 pages of the Supreme Justices exploring centuries of American law and hundreds of relevant cases regarding racial discrimination: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf

Specifically, the Justices found Harvard's race-based admissions practices violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court found that these practices resulted in racial discrimination against Asian American applicants.

Did you just make that up and hope no one would call you out?


> Did you just make that up and hope no one would call you out?

No, but it looks like a lot of people are misunderstanding the court's ruling...

`The question presented is whether the admissions systems used by Harvard College and UNC are lawful under the Equal Protection Clause of the Four- teenth Amendment`

"This admission system is not lawful" is not the same as "your institution has been illegally discriminatory towards a certain race". One is pointing out mismatches between law and reality, the other needs to be backed up by data.


Is it quite possible that the program was unconstitutional and had to be changed because they were being illegally discriminatory in their admission practices?

Yes it is, but the court case only answered the first question and previous court cases failed to get a satisfactory(for the conservative groups behind them) ruling on the "illegal discrimination" parts.

It's also possible that the "unconstitutional" program lead to satisfactory results for minority groups(both asian and non-asian), but we are just guessing either way based off of a ruling that's only tangentially related.


1. So if the supreme court ended 'racial discrimination' at universities in 2023, why is the administration destroying scientific organizations now in the name of doing so?

2. That court case is for undergraduate admissions - what does it have to do with hiring practices in the academic sciences?


1. It ended one specific form of racial discrimination, not all forms.

2. The user I replied to stated they have not been discriminated against. I corrected them.


Even if it's a delusion, people believe it and I think we should take it seriously and help them see through that delusion.

I'm not advocating for shutting down these departments at all, or slashing and burning research.

I'm hoping that we can help people realize that people love them and care about them and support them more than they could ever imagine, even if they're a white man.

I say this as a white man who has dated black women and had them say some really harsh things about me as a white man, only to realize that often it was an internal conflict that they had about being black but also liking some things from white culture. Some of them had been called white by their own black communities, and so feeling stuck between those worlds.

I think the vast majority of us just need to learn how to deal with emotional attacks, to realize life is combat and everyone is trying to deal with innumerable conflicts at the same time, all the time.


Unethical race-based preferences is what those policies have been trying to fix. Not sure you’re aware of this, but academia used to be basically off-limits to anyone not white and male.

> academia used to be basically off-limits to anyone not white and male.

How long ago was that? In Canada 60% of college grads are women[1]. In the US the story is similar and the gap is widening[2]. Part of the reason that some left wing ideas seem so out of touch is because they are. People are still parroting social problems from the 1960s as justification for policy in 2024.

[1] https://heqco.ca/pub/understanding-the-gender-gap-in-postsec...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2024/08/07/wome...


How many of these women are graduating from programs that people wanting to eliminate DEI see as "unimportant"?

It's also interesting to see statistics brought up about women and not races, since the percentage that identifies as "Black or African American" is still underrepresented: https://pnpi.org/factsheets/black-students/


It did, but how long ago was that the case? I'm not aware that academia was off-limits to anyone non-white and male right before DEI training became the norm.

> Unethical race-based preferences is what those policies have been trying to fix.

I understand that that is the stated intention. I also believe they are racist and discriminatory.

> Not sure you’re aware of this, but academia used to be basically off-limits to anyone not white and male.

I also understand this. And now it is not. What is the point here?


Not the OP, but I believe any distribution of limited resources could be seen as inherently discriminatory or racist or classist or whatever ist one wants.

If there is only 1 job but 10 candidates, the job has to go to someone. If everyone has the same scores on an exam, what's the fair way? Flip a coin? Perhaps. What if there are intangible skills/knowledge that are important for the job? One person has a better score on the exam, another person speaks a language (or dialect) that is important for the job. Maybe 9 of 10 come from one academic background, the 10th comes from a different one...which may actually provide a different perspective and provide new insights and break group think. Maybe one comes from a culture that is more confrontational, which means they may speak out more than others.

So many factors are intangible or at least not explicit and I think that's where "merit" can become so dimensionally reduced, not realizing how multidimensional each individual is.


In academia, there are more qualified people than positions, on an extreme level in fact. I agree, we have to distinguish people. We must distinguish on intangible characteristics sometimes. Suppose I am hiring for a position in an department and there are three finalists. They are all extremely qualified. What is an acceptable way to distinguish people? "Alice was more thoughtful and well-spoken during than Bob and Charlie, I believe she will make a better colleague and mentor to our undergraduates. I suggest we accept her." Compare with the following. "Alice is a black, homosexual, woman unlike Bob and Charlie, who are white, presumably homosexual men. Our university has a stated DEI policy promoting the acceptance of more women and BIPOC faculty. Therefore we should admit Alice." Do you see the difference?

We do not need to enter a deep philosophical debate about what is "merit" and its many dimensions. I agree with you, it's complicated. But the issue is universities are explicitly discriminating and ranking candidates and students on the basis of DEI factors. We know this because, as in the CU case I have linked to already in other comments, their very own notes say so! This is just the tip of the iceberg.


> Alice was more thoughtful and well-spoken during than Bob and Charlie

Is a relative statement. Someone who expresses anger in one culture can be considered thoughtful and in another culture can be considered disrespectful.

I agree it's super complex and even believe that it may have been too formulated and structured. I personally want humans of different cultures to befriend each other. But intercultural connection can be uncomfortable and hard and have lots of conflict, and some people don't do that well without some nudging.

Again, I think the nudging has gone too far, yet I don't think the solution is to pendulum swing all the way back.


I think this is well articulated. My response would be: what is the north star? What is the aspirational state? It is perhaps inherently unachievable, but what should we be aiming towards? I suggest that that be the thing which guides all other policies. If we intend to admit students on the basis of ability, an SAT score is just about the fairest way to do that. The waters became very muddy over the last few decades because universities decided that having people of many different skin colours was the goal. They dressed that goal up by pretending it had something to do with diversity, but that fails the sniff test. A poor black and white man have much more in common with each other than they do a rich man. If diversity were the goal, students would have been selected on the basis of place of residence, wealth, religion, voting affiliation, values, and interests. Quite the opposite occurred. In many universities more than 90% of faculty identify as left wing. So the goal had nothing to do with diversity.

I suggest we instead return to the idea that aptitude be our north star. IQ tests were originally created to provide opportunity to underrepresented children who might otherwise have been looked over due to their socioeconomic conditions or race. Let us return to a colour-blind north star.


> If we intend to admit students on the basis of ability, an SAT score is just about the fairest way to do that.

(Bashes head on table.) Intelligence, aptitude, and potential are incredibly hard to measure and judge in a purely objective way. The SAT is just a thin slice of that picture.

> In many universities more than 90% of faculty identify as left wing.

And less than 10% of university astrophysicists think the world is flat. Where's the diversity?!


> (Bashes head on table.) Intelligence, aptitude, and potential are incredibly hard to measure and judge in a purely objective way. The SAT is just a thin slice of that picture.

What is a better test?

> And less than 10% of university astrophysicists think the world is flat. Where's the diversity?!

I suspect you wouldn't be making this naturalistic fallacy if the ratio were flipped. Either way, you appear to confirm that the purpose was not diversity.


> What is a better test?

Exactly. A true objective test doesn't exist.

As far as the SAT: You can take prep classes, hire a tutor, and do all sorts of resource-intensive things that will boost your SAT without really contributing to your overall intelligence. You can study for the test. And guess who is more likely to have resources available to access these things? Is a rich kid who spends a year in prep inherently smarter than a poor kid who can't afford a tutor and has to work an evening job to help her family make ends meet?

And why, more broadly, are we completely fine tilting the tables in favor of the wealthy and entrenched but the second something seems like it might give an ounce of advantage to a disadvantaged class people lose their minds?

We get rid of DEI, but I haven't heard a word about getting rid of legacy admissions and rooting out nepotism.


I agree that there is no perfect test, but throwing up our hands and using racism seems the exact opposite to how we should respond to that challenge.

> And now it is not.

Um. Racism and sexism have not been eliminated in our country. I mean, just look at who's running the executive branch of the government at the moment. We need initiatives to lift up traditionally underrepresented groups now more than ever.


My guy you aren't getting it. You were lied to. You bought it. You are just plain wrong and openly propagating a lie as fact and you seem to be doubling down.

Is this also a lie?

From psychology department at University of Washington [1]:

> I advise deleting the statement below as it shows that URM [underrepresented minority] applications were singled out and evaluated differently than non-URM applications (which is not allowed as [redacted] noted)

> At a faculty meeting, someone whose name is redacted “informed faculty that the Hiring Committee had three outstanding candidates and so they used DEI to distinguish and select a first offer"

[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/diversity...


Nobody is saying it's not happening but the notion that it's systemic -- as the opposite is -- is categorically a lie and, again, as you've been told a few times in this thread, DEI's goal is to prevent even this scenario from happening as its intended goal is to foster merit-only hiring.

My most charitable reading of your comment is that the DEI policies were simply grossly misunderstood by the department in this case. Therefore, it would seem that an unintended consequence of DEI policies has been to foster the scenarios it was designed to prevent.

> DEI's goal is to prevent even this scenario from happening as its intended goal is to foster merit-only hiring.

That was 20 years ago, today merit only hiring is called evil by the same people, there is a reason people started to get really against what they do lately.


(Psst: There's no such thing as purely merit-based hiring. And DEI's mostly just about just making sure perfectly capable individuals aren't passed over or alienated because they're not white men. Because that's what's been going on for most of the past -- checks notes -- 500 years of American history. Pass it on.)

Hiring people based on race (white) and gender (male) is what happened _before_ Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives.

Do you know what is the original and ultimate identity politics? Enslaving people because you deem them inferior to your own race. The civil war, the civil rights movement, and modern social justice movements are a response to this, not the root of the conflict.

I'm a white guy in academia - not tenured yet - and I cannot fathom the ignorance necessary to believe that white males are at an disadvantage because of university administrators being "woke". Give me a break!


> Enslaving people because you deem them inferior to your own race.

This is irrelevant to the discussion of hiring in 2025, unless you believe your fellow “white” population harbors literal beliefs of a.) racial identity and b.) racial superiority, that c.) the “white” people making hiring decisions are actively excluding candidates based on these beliefs, and that d.) application of a nonwhite bias is just and measured in the face of a-c. I think all are incredible claims, and they’ve only lasted a decade because they have become rabidly-defended shibboleths for people who want to fix racism (and sexism and…).

> I cannot fathom the ignorance necessary to believe that white males are at an disadvantage because of university administrators being "woke"

If 1000 group A individuals and 10 group B individuals apply for a team, and both groups are accepted at ~50% due to a group B preference, then group B is ~100x as likely to be selected for the role due to that preference. Such observations are where my own perception of “disadvantage” comes from. Unless you’re claiming that no such preference exists, or that some prejudice you might have about group A justifies its individual members’ relatively unlikely chances of being selected, I can’t see how this preference doesn’t qualify as a disadvantage for such individuals.


> ...unless you believe your fellow “white” population harbors literal beliefs of a.) racial identity and b.) racial superiority, that c.) the “white” people making hiring decisions are actively excluding candidates based on these beliefs, and that d.) application of a nonwhite bias is just and measured in the face of a-c.

I believe many of my fellow "whites" believe this, but more importantly it's pretty obvious that many of the most powerful "whites," including the current President and his boot-licking minion Donald Trump, absolutely believe this.


I proclaim that no such preference exists in the US in 2025!

Hah definitely now, tho we’ll see how things play out.

I really hate how poisoned the well has become on this topic, there’s definitely elitism and exclusion that should be systematically addressed in hiring. I’d support programs promoting cheaper and universally-accessible paths to getting skilled jobs (e.g. accepting projects/certs/etc or offering literal job training) as long as they were open to anyone regardless of protected characteristics. You shouldn’t need to mainline an ivy-league path your entire childhood to have a chance at being hired at Google. I think such programs would be far less controversial and produce real value for real people.


How does it require ignorance to believe something that’s spelled out in black and white policies? It’s not even belief it’s just reading comprehension at that point.

"It has become tiring to see how DEI has affected all aspects of academia. Hiring people based on race, awarding grants to work exclusively with members of a particular set of minorities, etc."

You mention in another comment diversity in admissions but that is not hiring or grants. Do you have any examples of hiring people based on race in academia?


There are not countless examples. Instead of "hiring of people on the basis of race" I may more accurately say "using race as a decisive factor in the consideration of an application resulting in its acceptance or rejection" which also happens to be illegal.

From the journalism department at CU [1]:

> Our commitment, should we be successful with this application, is to hire someone from the BIPOC community

From the geography department at CU [1]:

> Our aim is specifically to hire a Black, Indigenous, or Latinx faculty member

From ethnic studies at UC [1]:

> We have an urgent and qualified need for BIPOC femme/women of color faculty in an Africana Studies focus who will contribute to the social science division thematic cluster hire in racism and racial inequality.

From psychology dept. at U Washington [2]:

> I advise deleting the statement below as it shows that URM [underrepresented minority] applications were singled out and evaluated differently than non-URM applications (which is not allowed as [redacted] noted)

> At a faculty meeting, someone whose name is redacted “informed faculty that the Hiring Committee had three outstanding candidates and so they used DEI to distinguish and select a first offer"

[1] https://www.wsj.com/opinion/how-dei-conquered-the-university...

[2] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/diversity...


This is one: https://x.com/JohnDSailer/status/1883648993974169641

I have friends in faculty positions at well-known universities who were very unhappy about these practices, but could not publicly discuss it fearing repercussion, prior to these events.

TBC, I am not supporting any of the things happening. I do think the DEI thing went too far, but what the new admin. is doing can be much worse.


Do you have any verifiable numbers to back up the impact?

"A 2021 American Enterprise Institute survey of academic job postings found that 19% required DEI statements, and elite institutions were more likely to require them."

https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/fire-statement-use-di...

"Speech First, a group advocating for First Amendment rights on US campuses, released an investigation on Thursday that found 165 of 248 selected institutions — from American University to Williams College — mandate DEI-related classes to meet general education requirements."

https://nypost.com/2024/04/11/us-news/two-thirds-of-us-colle...


“DEI exists” isn’t an argument.

DEI is a good idea that has led to a catastrophic backlash.

Imagine a world where us intellectual types hadn’t given the right this kind of talking point on a silver platter. Election might have gone differently.


I like to imagine a world where the institutions that were supposed to protect us had done their jobs, and enforced the gentleman’s agreement we had, that worked so well these past 50 years.

They'd have just invented another issue.

I mean that genuinely. It's unclear reality matters at all. People just make up things to be mad about now.


> They'd have just invented another issue.

I largely agree but I doubt other issues would be such massive free wins for Republicans. The Republican base has become rabid over DEI and trans issues and it has been really obvious for a while now that it was going to be a massive problem for Democrats. Sadly these issues have become more divisive than even gun control.


"trans issues" are literally an issue they invented. They've been workshopping attack vectors for years. Bathrooms didn't really work, so they switched to athletes, which did.

They will continue inventing issues until they find one that sticks.


They spend hundreds of millions of dollars on ads trying to convince people these things were a problem. That is, by definition, not a free win.

You have to realize some of these issues didn't used to be as divisive. They made them divisive. Abortion being the most obvious. If you need an issue to rally around, you create one.


You point to the issue Republicans have with trans people existing, isn't that a counterpoint to your point?

They were able to make a massive issue out of the existence of less than a percent of the population, if the can do that how can you say they wouldn't have made issues of literally anything?


Should one be required to submit a statement proving their past support of DEI as part of the hiring process in academia? What should people who disagree with such efforts put in this statement?

If simply requiring it filters out the kind of people that would abhor minorities coexisting with them, I think it's worth it to them.

And if it also filters out people who think these programs have good intentions but in reality are complete BS?

“BS programs with good intentions” is like 80%* of all jobs. It’s a useful hiring signal.

* YMMV


That is quite literally what this thread is about.

I don’t think they were asking to quantify the existence of DEI, that would be silly. DEI’s existence is a fact, that’s not under debate.

How much it exists in the hiring process is very much under debate.

Of course it exists in the hiring process. How is that question?

Maybe the real issue is people don’t actually know what DEI is.


>“DEI exists” isn’t an argument.

But it is. DEI indicates ideological capture. Whether it's good or bad doesn't matter, it's not germane to the purported goals of "advancing science/health/military readiness/etc". At best it's tangential.

If we were a robust and wealthy country, then perhaps we could engage in these sorts of boutique social experiments. But we are not. We've got serious problems on multiple fronts. Fixing it before it all goes blooey means serious disruption, and we're now well into 30 years of positive reinforcement on the ideological capture. You're not going to get the results you need from the people who benefitted from the previous mismanagement. Trump learned that lesson quite directly the last time he was in office.


You don’t even know what you’re arguing against. “Ideological capture” is not an argument either. Whatever system is in place will be the result of one ideology or another.

“We are not a robust and wealthy country.” Good lord, who is telling you this?


If you could please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42951612 and stop breaking HN's rules, regardless of how wrong anyone else is or you feel they are, we'd appreciate it.

I know it's not easy when times are urgent and feelings understandably run high, but those are the times when the rules need to count the most (as the site guidelines say: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.")

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


Oh sorry, just noticed this.

What does this prove?