Some of these changes, if continued and expanded, will likely have long-term negative effects on the US's position in science. I have my issues with NIH but to fix NIH requires subtlety. This seems more designed to "punish those liberal researchers" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutting_off_one%27s_nose_to_sp...
This is surgery with a butter knife. It's going to cause a lot of unnecessary disruption and pain which could have been avoided with a more nuanced approach. What we are seeing with this and some of the new administration's other initiatives, is the abandonment of US soft power in the world.
Huh, I like the way you phrased that: "abandonment of US soft power in the world". But I think there is also punitive aspect: they are intentionally "punishing" the people at NIH they perceive as being liberal and favoring other countries.
It's a good point. There is a target on the back of scientists who do research that is perceived as social science but is infact biology. Seems like they then construct myths of waste/corruption (just read this thread) and punish everyone.
Even if these idiots wanted subtlety they're too stupid to make it happen. They just want to do big, bold things but have no idea how to actually make anything better.
They certainly don't know how to do this stuff with any sort of grace or subtlety but perhaps more importantly... they don't care to.
They perceive no value from "soft power" stuff like the NIH and to a large extent consider it to be (part of) the enemy.
And most of their voting base really doesn't understand a single thing about the NIH. I mean, truly: the average American doesn't know what that program even is. Other than occasionally getting roasted for funding some ridiculous-sounding project like studying depression in chickens or something.[1]
So the only real "win" here for the new ruling party is to burn it down and then brag that they saved "the American taxpayers" $XYZ billion dollars.
(Which will wind up directly in the hands of the rich via tax breaks, and by definition can't really benefit poor people because they already pay little tax)
----
[1] Most of the time these "ridiculous sounding" programs are actually pretty relevant and/or useful if you look into them.
I knew a guy who was the president of a co-op house at UC Berkeley (basically, a student-run housing system decoupled from the university). They had regular meetings and he described one of the challenges: while most people who came to the meetings just wanted to vote on measures to buy food and change policies, there was a subgroup that "just wanted to fuck shit up". You know, like during a protest there are always some people who go around doing unncessary damage to unrelated/innocent businesses. They just enjoy breaking things and enjoy making people mad.
It's not a perfect analogy but I see Trump and his cronies as a "fuck shit up" contingent- they seem to genuinely enjoy making their enemies unhappy by breaking things, regardless of the societal cost of their actions.
I was at some of those meetings, though unlikely to be the exact same ones :)
At the meetings I attended the furious debate was whether we allowed a volunteer group cook food in our kitchen to feed homeless people.
The interesting thing about this debate was that to make a decision, you had to have a position on what the coop was,
Was it cheap housing for students, or was the cheap housing something that emerged from committing to a practice of cooperative behaviour?
Supporting the volunteers cooking in our kitchen came at a cost, many volunteers were homeless, some had mental health issues.
I felt it was morally right to let them use our kitchen,
And I know that for this I did get labeled by some as pursuing chaos as performative social justice points and to upset opponents,
But from my perspective I sincerely believe it was the right thing to do.
When parallels like this are revealed, it really makes me wonder how the orange cult people and I ended up on such different paths, both as a response to dissatisfaction with the status quo, why have the stories they’ve been told resonated with them when they seem so inauthentic to me, and why is the more progressive ideology that seems reasonable to me so distasteful to them
I like this analogy. I've had the thought many, many times over the last 8 years that many people seem to like breaking things because their perceived enemies will be unhappy.
Was this co-op perhaps Barrington Hall? I had good friends that lived there while at UCB. To my young eyes it was absolute anarchy.
I doubt anyone would deny the policy actions themselves are clumsy but it's important to remember that a majority of the country believes they are directionally correct. People were desperate to escape the rot of the status quo and chose the high variance option. Michael Moore described it best when he noted that Trump was the human hand grenade that was being tossed in frustration, with a faint hope that things would settle better after the carnage.
I sometimes like to imagine if I was president ... how hard would it be to find someone in a given department who could lead it and know better than the communication restrictions as we have here.
Granted, I fear the folks in charge now DO know better and the side effects are intentional ... but I wonder if it would be possible to pick someone and get it reasonably right.
To be fair, people were saying this about voting for Trump back in 2016, that he was their "bull in a China shop" and they didn't care what he did as long as he wrecked the establishment. It's basic accelerationism - destabilize the system and force radical social change through the chaos. And it seems to be working.
As the token Trump supporter on HN, let me give you what I think's going on. I think they are doing an ideological purge. They want to get rid of anyone promoting transgender science. I think RJK JR. wants to get rid of anyone he thinks is against his MAHA agenda.
They want to get rid of any pandemic scaremongering too. Peter Hoetz said that Bird Flu will start once the trump administration takes office for example.[1]. Hoetz who is a major figure in the vaccine research industry said that "starting January 21st we've got some big stuff coming down the pike starting with H5N1..." and after the Fauci pardon anything is possible.
The bird flu outbreak had been behind a lot of food inflation. I wouldn't put it past people on the radical left who want to hurt the Trump administration to hype the bird flu pandemic to drive up food prices through mass culling of livestock.
In a minority most likely. Not even close to alone.
> Peter Hoetz said that Bird Flu will start once the trump administration takes office for example.[1].
No. He said we have big picture stuff coming down the pike starting January 21. Like a flu wide spread in birds already, that jumped species already, that could develop human to human transmission. He framed it clearly as a present danger the incoming administration would inherit. Even without the removed context about Kennedy's claims no vaccines are safe and effective and vaccines cause autism.
> The bird flu outbreak had been behind a lot of food inflation. I wouldn't put it past people on the radical left who want to hurt the Trump administration to hype the bird flu pandemic to drive up food prices through mass culling of livestock.
Whoever the radical left are, they don't decide about culling livestock. What agenda do you think was behind the culls driving up food prices before the election? And do you expect tariffs and deportations to lower food prices?
NIH staff openly conspired against both the public and the President last time Trump was in charge in many different ways. What Fauci and his grantees did wasn't subtle, so the fixes aren't going to be subtle either: the NIH needs either to be abandoned entirely or it needs a massive purge and culture change.
Fundamentally a civilized society cannot tolerate bureaucracies that act like they did during COVID. Fauci is gone now but unfortunately the NIH as an institution is deserving of any and all damage Trump does to them. Frankly if I were in his shoes I'd be going much further than mere freezes.
Odds are if you or someone you know has been treated with ... Any kind of modern medicine ... You have personally been impacted by NIH. That ignores the epidemiological knock on effects that we all benefit from oh and the whole "understanding of biological systems".
But screw it, they need to get in line with the party.
NIH also played a big role in the creation of biotech industry (funding much of the basic research that set the foundation for amazing medical treatments). I guess we'll have to depend more on the largesse of billionaires.
it's unfortunate that these funding don't actually bring in profits with which to maintain and continue future funding. It's why i somewhat dislike the publicly funded research model, because the commercialization of basic research is what leads to profit in the future, and this part is poorly done by gov'ts (or very well done by private parties looking to profit off public research).
I say that to change the system, these basic research should have IP associated with it, by which if companies use it, they pay a royalty after they achieve profit of $X (where X can be decided based on the research itself). It's obvious that taxes aren't sufficient.
Not everything needs to be profit generating, government funded research is how we get breakthroughs with very wide ranging benefits, especially when we are talking about advances in medicine. Profit making will often have the opposite effect by incentivizing the protection of existing monopolies, fake innovations to protect patentable revenue streams, and anti competitive regulatory capture.
Almost all of that is fixable by government. It doesn't have to be captured. It's paid out of taxes to not be captured. Monopoly prevention, same. Fake innovations - the way to protect against them is to make sure there's an environment in which competitors can arise.
In theory yes, in practice in the US today it’s becoming more and more of a fantasy. I hope we can get back there one day, we have the constitutional framework to do so, but the current system is running fast in the opposite direction, one party is rabidly embracing deregulation which will exacerbate these negative points, and the other one failed to live up to its ideals because the entire political class depends on lobbying dollars and was too busy focusing on performative agendas.
The amount of scrutiny on Wuhan has been astronomical and they actually proved last year it was one of a handful of wild animals as the source of Covid-19. The infections started and were initially concentrated in the market, not the lab.
The Wuhan lab is a convenient conspiracy theory distraction. mRNA vaccines are miracle and I've been saying this from day one...
If any virus were to start kill kids, you'd all be lined up in milliseconds for the vaccine.
We got extremely lucky that Covid-19 left children out of its attack vector.
The next pandemic may not be so gracious.
The Spanish Flu in 1917-18 killed young and old in its first wave. Then the second wave it also took out 25-35yo adults. And if you got it, you were dead in 48 hours.
You people don't actually read anything and know nothing about why the CDC and Fauci acted as they did. They were expecting another Spanish Flu, and they got something very different. Different incubation time. Different attack vector. But they adapted and saved lives.
You're LUCKY those people knew what they were doing DESPITE Trump's actions. And he KNEW. He acted the way he did because he knew the proper action was to lock down everything and stop the spread, but he also knew that would destroy the economy. He traded a million lives in the U.S. for the economy.
You know every single Republican was vaccinated as soon as they got the chance. They just forgot to tell you.
> You're LUCKY those people knew what they were doing DESPITE Trump's actions. And he KNEW. He acted the way he did because he knew the proper action was to lock down everything and stop the spread, but he also knew that would destroy the economy. He traded a million lives in the U.S. for the economy.
As a non-US person - I don't understand this. Didn't all the locking down happen state by state anyway? He didn't stop anyone locking down, from what I understood? And he allocated $18bn to finding and distributing a vaccine for Covid[0]?
When meat packing plants slowed down, their owners started losing money and complained to the government, who granted them waivers to open. Workers there of course caught covid and spread it to their families.
They also pushed schools to open sooner on the basis that children were not as affected, but they caused teachers and staff to become infected and die.
Trump put his dilletante son-in-law in charge of the logistic effort to distribute equipment, and Jared went on to recruit his rich buddies on the task for instead of experts, prompting Jack Kennedy's grandson of all people to blow the whistle, wondering why they were in charge of this monumental task instead of you know... experts.
One thing they did was take equipment from states that needed it and redirect it to states that were loyal to Trump but didn't need the equipment.
They also seized equipment purchased by states at airports, to the point states had to meet planes on the tarmac and escort the equipment to hospitals with state police.
The end result is that the US had one of the worst pandemic responses in the early days, and today we have the distinction as the country with the most covid deaths (over 1 million) as well as having an absurdly high death rate compared to peer nations.
I had a person on the other end of tech support tell me they’d _love_ to hear how my day was going as part of a script recently. Wasn’t Costco but still
would you expect double the nobels if you doubled their available resources?
another loaded question : do you believe the nih is the single government ran example of a perfectly lean and well managed agency without excess expenditure?
> $47.4 billion U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH)
$47.4B is a significant amount of money. I don't know whether their expenditures are appropriate. I don't see that in the article either. Unless someone does know that can comment, the $47.4B is unaccounted for in coloquial dialog, is it not?
> The hiring freeze is governmentwide
> pause on communications and travel ... Such pauses are not unprecedented when a new administration comes in.
Hmm, seem like the author is fomenting malice by using ‘devastating’ in the title. Perhaps building a character judgement that might not actually be there, helping to draw anger and hate from people already opposed to the new administration?
> NIH travel chief Glenda Conroy sent an email to senior agency officials early today notifying them of an “immediate and indefinite” suspension of all travel throughout HHS with few exceptions, such as currently traveling employees returning home. Researchers who planned to present their work at meetings must cancel their trips, as must NIH officials promoting agency programs off site or visiting distant branches of the agency. “Future travel requests for any reason are not authorized and should not be approved,” the memo said.
I guess someone needs to ask the question, how exactly is the NIH going to prevent people from "going home"? Does that mean simply that they will not be paying for their travel? Or for that matter, researchers who want to present their work must do it at their own cost or from approved unpaid time off?
I feel like someone is forgetting how hard the MAJORITY of US citizens have it. Inflation has hit non-wealthy people the most. They don't have jobs where they get paid travel or paid time off. While I don't mean to inject some form of class into the discussion, I do wonder what exactly are the things to be fearful of in this scenario. I'm just not seeing a worrying concern here given reality. Unless, there's a more rampant amount of fragility in the well paid health community? I'm sorry. I just don't get it.
> the $47.4B is unaccounted for in coloquial dialog, is it not?
Almost all of it is research grants for biomedical research, with priorities set by congress, e.g. they set what specific diseases, etc. should be worked on. This represents more than half of all funding for academic scientific research in the USA.
> Unless, there's a more rampant amount of fragility in the well paid health community?
Most of this work is done by graduate students and postdocs, which are paid very little. Traveling to conferences is part of doing their job, but they generally couldn't afford to pay for it themselves. They are already required to keep travel expenses down to the point where the hotels are often dirty and unsafe- usually whatever is cheapest in town.
Grad students in the USA currently make about $34k/year and postdocs (with PhDs) about $60k/year in the USA. They're usually in high cost of living urban areas, and in practice, they're often expected to work 60-80 hour weeks if they want to produce enough to remain in academia. This works out to less than minimum wage in the places they are generally located.
When I was a graduate student, I made just enough to rent a single bedroom in a large group house full of strangers, and as a postdoc I had a 4 hour round trip daily commute to get to someplace I could afford to live.
Have you ever worked in a government funded environment? Travel frugality is already the rule and has been for decades. This is going from "be frugal" to "don't".
NIH pays for work travel. When a person is paid for NIH travel, it's bare bones (cheaper hotel, cheaper tickets). It's for work- you go, you work many long hours drinking shitty coffee. Maybe at the end of the day there is some fun at a restaurant/bar but it's not paid for in the per diem. It was brutal- typically, if I travelled on NIH or NSF or DOE dime, it was a red eye from California to Washington DC, take cheapest possible transport to the NIH offices, then turn around and return the same night, so that I could go to work the next day (to be productive with little sleep so I could keep my job).
As for "non-wealthy": most scientists are not well-compensated. They spent their 20s and 30s working for very little pay (for example, in grad school my pay was $25-33K/year in San Francisco, and even as a Staff Scientist at a national lab, there's no way I could afford to buy a house in the area). They work punishingly hard jobs competing with super-ambitious people for fairly small amounts of money. I don't really see what your point is; breaking the NIH is not going to fix wealth disparity in the US.
Thanks for the information. It helps. People like me just don't know.
> breaking the NIH is not going to fix wealth disparity in the US
I didn't say or imply that. I'm sorry if that's how it sounded. I've traveled for work both paid and not, both with implicit and explicit frugality. I'm not seeing how a pause on paying for travel, as the norm quoted within the article, is an egregious practice, nor how it could break the NIH. Especially given it appears to be a norm when administrations turn over.
The propaganda of Trump's people has been very effective. They managed to paint a bunch of people who work hard for the US and aren't particularly well-compensated (compared to what tthey could get in industry) are some sort of "elites" who are actively working to keep conservsatives down.
The way to look at it is like this: even if previous administrations froze travel for a bit (I don't recall that ever happening; a bigger impact was when the state or the federal government failed to pass a budget. That would break everything for weeks to months), the intent of the Trump administration is to harm the people they don't like. This freeze is only an opening move; we can expect to see far more dire and serious attempts at damaging our valuable public institutions (which fairly serve liberals and conservatives alike).
I appreciate you saying "people like me just don't know". It's rare that people will actually listen to the other side and admit they lacked perspective.
> Another consequence of the communications pause, according to an NIH staffer involved with clinical trials at NIH's Clinical Center, is that agency staff cannot meet with patient groups or release newsletters or other information to recruit patients into trials. Another unknown is whether NIH researchers will still be allowed to submit papers to peer-reviewed journals.
>Officials have also ordered a communications pause, a freeze on hiring, and an indefinite ban on travel.
I thought trump was bringing American jobs back? So far he's impacted thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of jobs in 2 days, and hasn't even made a plan for how to get americans hired.
(yes, a miniscule piece of me is enjoying how fast the Schedenfreude came. But still, I do mostly want to focus on fixing the country over pointing fingers).
And with the immunity decision he doesn't even have to worry about going to jail for it. I hope we are wrong. I hope people come out of the woodwork to tell that fool where to shove it. But I am afraid the tech oligarchy + right wing media has such a hold on information sources for a majority that half the country won't even know what's happening.
Trump just mandated a legally binding and fundamental shift from equity-based hiring (eg: affirmative action, DEI, et al.) back to merit-based.
This by its very nature necessitates a temporary freeze on all human resources activites pending reviews to see if any as they currently stand violate equal opportunity guarantees and other requirements based on objective factors.
Personally, and I say this as a minority (Japanese-American male), I 300% approve of all this. People must be hired based on their character and capability, not because they happened to be born with the right skin color or sexual organs.
As someone with a fair amount of experience on hiring review boards in the public sector (local and federal), I felt what many of these programs/approaches did was ensure that minorities were given a better opportunity to be evaluated based on their merits. My expectation now is that if someone is a minority they're going to have a much harder time getting a shot to demonstrate that character and capability at all, maybe not though, time will tell.
Perhaps for some it's viewed as a positive if these groups are underrepresented in terms of percentage of federal employees as long as their roles are filled by someone perceived to be more capable with stronger character (weird how frequently that's a white guy these days).
The war against DEI is clearly over so not that it matters anymore but I have to push back every time I see this sort of comment. DEI, as it relates to hiring, does not and has never meant that people are hired because of their sex or skin color. What it means in practice is that organizations cast a wider net in the search for, and I can't stress this enough, qualified applicants. This wider net has proven to bring forth better candidates to organizations. Also, casting a wider net opens the door for people who are white/asian but come from less traditional backgrounds and/or less prestigious schools to apply as well. Please read up on what DEI truly is before applauding its demise. As scientist, engineers, programmers, and technologists (I assume you are one of those if you are in this forum) we can't blindly believe the propaganda of either side of the political spectrum. In this case, a coordinated effort has deliberately mischaracterized DEI and merit-based hiring as opposites. They are not opposites.
The problem is what "qualified" means under Affirmative Action, DEI, et al..
As a Japanese-American, I've both first- and second-hand witnessed racism against Asians (and Whites) in favor of Blacks and Hispanics in the name of Affirmative Action. That is racism and discrimination in both ways and there have been court rulings prohibiting Affirmative Action, I in absolute terms cannot in good faith accept Affirmative Action.
The "D" in DEI stands for "Diversity", which in the majority of cases meant hiring people with stronger weighting placed on their race or nationality and sex. This again is very literally racism, sexism, and discrimination and completely unacceptable.
The "E" in DEI stands for "Equity", which in clearer terms means Equal Conclusions, not Equal Opportunities as indirectly declared in our Declaration of Independence (all men created equal with an unalienable right to pursuit of happiness). This is an affront to one of the very cornerstones of our country and the American Dream, which is completely unacceptable.
Lastly the "I" in DEI stands for "Inclusion", which would be fine were it not for the fact that the actual implementation has involved excluding peoples who do not subscribe to certain narratives. Nowhere has this been more obvious than in politics and specifically identity politics, where the Center and Right simply call me an American but the Left call me various labels. I very sincerely don't have time for that divisive bullshit.
As someone who loves and appreciates science and technology and all the wonders we can accomplish, I reiterate my 300% support for the absolute rescinding of equity-based hiring and other equity-based human resources programmes. As Martin Luther King once said, I too dream of a day when everyone will be judged by the quality of their character. I dream of a day when everyone will be judged by what they are capable of, not what they are born as.
The sheer amount of regression against social liberalism over the last few decades truly is astonishing; you're literally trying to tell me that racism is equality and okay.
I hope we're on the cusp of reversing course on all that so we can make MLK's dream a reality again.
its a race based caste quota system in reality with a priesthood that accidentally spread racism. It produces the same results reliably as real world socialism. No need to read up on idealistic texts which produce the same outcome with the given real humans.
I too have to push back, because I have been the victim of these laws and profiling, and I'm not an "ignorant" person falling for propaganda as you seem to imply is the only way for anti-DEI sentiments to occur.
DEI is ideology and hidden threats of retaliation under the guise of "equality". And because nothing can be explicit, or it's all hidden under feel-good language (exactly the kind you used in your post). It adds a layer of redirection about what's really going on, and it all gets put forth with everyone having the understanding (because of examples) that if they don't find "diverse enough qualified" candidates, then they are racist and will be punished.
Meanwhile, the language provides cover for blatant anti-white, anti-asian and anti-male discrimination:
What about the fact that several countries (Western) have explicit gender-based quotas enacted as law. E.g. Norway, Germany, France, India, and others.
Or what about countries that have actual race-based points systems to discriminate against minority (white) groups: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Economic_Empowerment And no, just because it's some obscure and obfuscated "points system" doesn't mean it isn't racial discrimination, profiling and retaliation against companies that don't conform.
So why don't we drop the pretense, ordinary people see what's really going on, and no amount of sugar-coating and "feel good" words will make the very real discrimination go away, and they won't be gaslight and have their concerns waved away because of "falling for right wing propaganda" and "please read up on what DEI truly is".
Except of course what you will now get is jobs preferentially for those who are white, male Trump loyalists. You're 300% delusional when you think there's any chance that from now on "character and capability" will be the relevant hiring metrics. Just have a look at the assortment of clowns, creeps, conmen and criminals that is Trump's cabinet.
The point is to create chaos and panic so that , after a sufficient period of general suffering, the government can come back with a "solution to the problem" which is typically some vastly inferior approach with heavy privatization and corruption built in, but as the stakeholders are desperate for relief they have no choice but to accept.
This is how you tear the government down and replace it with corrupt oligarchic interests
Except that this is the kind of governance that American voters chose. They can't claim to have been misled. They explicitly voted for oligarchy and this is what they asked for.
If you're waiting for American voters to wake up and demand good governance you'll be waiting a really long time.
I don't expect voters to wake up, I do expect the assassins of the rich and powerful to become folk heroes along with riots and vandalism of corporate property, and when the government tries to crack down on it, against the government as well.
That's why they're partnering with Oracle and AI companies to build datacenters to pull in and automatically analyze all available private and public video feeds and communications to monitor for potential violent action. China got there first, the US will rapidly roll out the same playbook but painted with liberal terminology. It's not about harmony here, it's about freedom and protecting ourselves from terrorists and the radical left.
> That's why they're partnering with Oracle and AI companies to build datacenters to pull in and automatically analyze all available private and public video feeds and communications to monitor for potential violent action.
Larry Ellison said it on record if anyone doubts it. "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on."[1]
The oligarchs are playing a losing game in the long term, they'll always have to rely on people to help them, and it's too easy to kill someone if you're willing to sacrifice your life to do it.
The scientific establishment has had 2 major crises recently - the replication crisis, and the totally insane unscientific and politicized handling of COVID.
Additionally there is undeniably a lot of waste, nepotism / back scratching, and completely ludicrous funded social “science”.
While what’s happening now may wind up bad, I have seen very little push from the establishment itself to do anything to restore public faith in the current system. Trump is the executioner, but the conviction was handed down before he came around.
The replication crisis stuff is mostly a message board fixation. The problem we have is that people unfamiliar with the field don't have a sense of what the denominator is, only the numerator. There is a truly gargantuan amount of NIH-funded research happening; NIH funds over 30,000 PIs per year, and those grants cover years worth of research, most of which involve teams of 5-10 people.
I'm not saying research fraud doesn't matter or isn't worth the stories written about it. I'm saying that people commenting on it generally don't have any sense of its scale, and fill in some very weird blanks about it.
In ml basically every paper from a Western university is either useless to industry or not replicable.
It is very much a crisis and one that academia has no interest to solve.
In a sane world we'd start with figuring out what the mystery meat in the version of pytorch used for training is and work up from there. There is zero funding for building up the required infrastructure for doing actual science instead of whatever the fuck you call the current mess.
Basically anything on a more complex dataset than cifar is probably a statistical fluke because of hyper parameter tuning. To find this out you will need to spend three months building up all the bit rotten code that doesn't work from the paper. To draw the conclusion that everyone is full of shit you'll need to waste years of your life.
To a first order approximation all of the progress is happening at Western universities and the companies they founded. Everyone else is playing catch-up.
It's hard to even name mediocre advances that come from anywhere else. As well as the entire hardware and software stack that we have.
You clearly have some sort of political agenda here and not a technical argument.
Not directly tied to GP's complaints but another thing that often comes up are people complaining about the frivolity of the research without understanding how basic science works. "Can you believe we're paying money to understand fruit fly mating behavior!?!", well yes, because fruit flies are model organisms and developing an understanding of these very mundane sounding things are important before being able to make broader hypotheses
I think something like a very public, televised shaming of researchers found to be fraudulent. Furthermore far, far more done to catch fraud before it is published, like bounties paid out, and instant career destruction to the fraudsters.
There was decades of “but everyone is doing it!” in the system, so much so that fraudsters became presidents of Ivy League institutions. The reckoning has not come.
I've been on a messageboard for more than a couple years, I am familiar with the concept of p-hacking, and it has nothing to do with what I just wrote.
The claim in the post is that the replication crisis is real. Of course, it's among those you consider messageboard folk so you can dismiss it on those grounds, but I think you are wrong to say it has nothing to do with what you wrote since it attempts to deal with both the numerator and the denominator by taking a sample across fields.
I don't know what point you're trying to make here. Is it that there are fraudulent research papers in journals? Everybody knows that's true. Is it that there are tens of thousands of them produced every year? That's made up.
People are counting on readers not to know or take the time to learn how much research is happening, so that individual instances of the problem (in the United States) seem systemic.
COVID was not a scientific crisis. It was an amazing success. We built and rolled out a vaccine in record time.
Science works. Amazingly well. We're making progress on cancer, on many disorders that used to kill or limit many people's lives.
Instead of actually looking at what science does for you constantly, every day, you prefer to attack people.
The result will be tragic. Realistically, your loved ones will die of heart disease or cancer. Sounds like a really smart move to not fund science that will save their lives. Much better to support Trump and save up for their funerals!
Wait until you learn about the first unscientific politicized traitor to Freedom in the USA. General George Washington, having survived smallpox himself, ordered the mass variolation (via inoculation, much more dangerous than a vaccine) of the Continental Army to protect troops from the disease, marking one of the first large-scale public health initiatives in American history.
I thought this was a militia made up of the public, so a modern comparison would be anyone in the current USA who happens to execute their second amendment rights?
Members of the US military actually get more vaccines and, until recently, had fewer protections with respect to declining them than the typical US citizen (specifically with COVID, Trump has indicated, not sure if he's done it yet, that he'll reinstate people who refused a lawful order to be vaccinated for it; so now I guess they can just refuse any vaccines even if it impacts readiness). During the run up to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, US service members were vaccinated for smallpox (appropriate for this thread). That was this century, 30+ years after smallpox was declared eradicated.
They were also vaccinated for other diseases. Join the military and you sign away a lot of your rights (arguably for some good benefits, but we'll see how the new VA head and others treat the veterans and current troops).
What's really cool is seeing the giant drop-off in flu rates during the lockdowns. Flu infections fell 64% and at least one strain went extinct. I'd link to the NIH publication but I'm not sure it'll stay up, lol. [1]
I’m confused by this sentiment. How was science at fault for the collective government response to a global pandemic when the hospitals were full, millions died, and countries closed their borders in attempts to slow the spread? With hindsight you may find some poor choices but at the time, what could a scientist have done differently in your opinion?
There is an entire litany of complaints that I've seen. It typically centers around "we shouldn't have funded this virology research in the first place" and "the government should have been totally transparent about every single piece of knowledge it had, and clearer about things that were ambiguous" and "it was a mistake to lie about masks not working to save masks for health workers" and freedom of choice around vaccination.
Doing public health at scale is incredibly hard. Doing so in a politicized environment with active disinformation is even harder. I'm not going to fault the government response. By and large it did what I expected it to do. Ideally, there would be an honest postmortem and we'd improve our techniques for the future, but I worry that won't every happen again.
Considering we had over a hundred million Americans fall ill to a global pandemic that ended barely two years ago, one might conclude that the only reason to hobble the groups that are intended to fight such outbreaks (among many other tasks) would be a poor decision. In fact, one could conclude based on the literal rhetoric from the President and members of his staff, that it’s out of sheer spite.
Which itself is amazing, considering that he was in charge while it happened.
I am not in favor of shuttering one of the agencies responsible for public health, although I can see why my comment could be read either way. If you believe in reform there are compassionate ways to do it.
CDC probably does more public health? The work NIH funds through its grant process is not broadly "public health"; it's virtually all American biotechnology research and bio/biochem basic research. Public health deals with the interface of health knowledge and public policy and communication; people credentialed in public health are not, generally, practicing scientists as we'd think about them. NIH grant researchers, on the other hand, are wearing white lab coats and working with fume hoods.
No, HHS does the vast majority of public health research in the US, which includes both CDC and NIH. The CDC budget is roughly a quarter of the NIH budget; most public health research is NIH-funded. The CDC is more operational- they take what is learned and apply it to prevention and treatment.
It may in fact be the case that more HHS-funded public health work is downstream of NIH than of CDC, but NIH is obviously not primarily a public health organization; here's the most recent RePORT data:
Yeah, sounds right. Let's list the unnecessary drug treatments funded directly by NIH.
The treatment of HIV with AZT and other HAART drugs. AIDS is caused by "poppers" not HIV, duh!
Treatment of breast cancer and Myeloid Leukemia and with Herceptin and Imatinib. Fake cancers!
Vaccines for HPV and Corona viruses are useless, because horse de-wormers treat both! Also, they're not real because COVID and cervical cancer are harmless.
It's time to stop the insanity and realize that jade eggs in your bum are the real solution.
Other useless drugs funded by NIH: Depo-Provera, Taxol, L-DOPA, Propranolol, Tagamet, Embrel, Tamoxifen, Cyclosporin, Warfarin, Methotrexate, Hydrocortisone.
My guess is what happening is influenced by and patterned after the Musk's Twitter initial period - getting rid of what Musk didn't like from the start, review and cuts/layoffs of what didn't pass the review.
With all the due respect to the science having been done at/with NIH, one can suspect that the bureaucracy there is out of control similar to what we see at academia. The huge sign that the things got really rotten is that NIH couldn't own its work in Wuhan on the coronavirus, and that Fauci needed preemptive pardon. So some dead tissue debriding seems to be in order.
The government grows like a cancer as it has no mechanism like bankruptcy to remove dead wood.
Agencies start out with a mission, then turn into a business, and finally become a con job. Most agencies are deep into the corrupt territory at this point.
Sounds like it's happening in at least some other parts of the government, too. This order seems to have paused disbursement of even some already-committed funding:
"Sec. 7. Terminating the Green New Deal. (a) All agencies shall immediately pause the disbursement of funds appropriated through the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (Public Law 117-169) or the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (Public Law 117-58), including but not limited to funds for electric vehicle charging stations made available through the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program and the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure Discretionary Grant Program, and shall review their processes, policies, and programs for issuing grants, loans, contracts, or any other financial disbursements of such appropriated funds for consistency with the law and the policy outlined in section 2 of this order. Within 90 days of the date of this order, all agency heads shall submit a report to the Director of the NEC and Director of OMB that details the findings of this review, including recommendations to enhance their alignment with the policy set forth in section 2. No funds identified in this subsection (a) shall be disbursed by a given agency until the Director of OMB and Assistant to the President for Economic Policy have determined that such disbursements are consistent with any review recommendations they have chosen to adopt."
My issue is more with the CDC. Are there state institutions that can take up the slack locally? Asking for a friend with kids who wants to move to a place with a lower risk of getting measles
Pretty sure a bunch of statistics that might be used to argue against Republican talking points are going to disappear or not be updated. Maybe they won't even get to be collected. It's a lot easier to lie if you prevent scientists and health care professionals from undercutting you with inconvenient truths.
As someone who has worked in public health and epidemiology, this kind of open ended restriction is extremely concerning.
Also appears to undercut the whole free speech thing that President Trump supposedly supports, and that the constitution provides for in the first amendment.
> Also appears to undercut the whole free speech thing that President Trump supposedly supports
Saying he supports "free speech" and actually doing it are two different things. In reality he supports speech that supports his preferred narrative of reality and opposes speech that doesn't.
Free speech, states rights, government accountability, any serious sense of libertarianism and so on are all with the caveat of “if I like it” as far as the current Republican Party is concerned.
If you've worked as a scientist, why not gather evidence before jumping to conclusions? For example, you could inquire of the administration why they did this. They're actually putting in quite an effort at transparency.
My concerns about the future are based on what President Trump did in 2017 with the NIH budget (attempting to cut it 22%)¹ thus preventing important scientific research funding, as well as removal of covid-19 health statistics from the CDC in 2020² in the middle of a major pandemic.
Unfortunately, given that he is now holding the highest office in the US, it's a well known fact that Donald Trump lies constantly both when in office³ and when campaigning⁴, and I lack all faith in his administration's supposed transparency.
Because for some people, this is not a scientific peer-reviewed discussion, but rather typical conversation normal people have over dinner table with gut feelings and limited information. Just assume that "I believe", "in my opinion", "AFAIK" are implied for statements like above.
> "The hiring freeze is governmentwide, whereas a pause on communications and travel appears to be limited to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), NIH’s parent agency. Such pauses are not unprecedented when a new administration comes in."
Calm down, guys. It's transitional, and it's not unusual.
From the article:
> The hiring freeze is governmentwide, whereas a pause on communications and travel appears to be limited to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), NIH’s parent agency. Such pauses are not unprecedented when a new administration comes in. But some NIH staff suggested these measures, which include pulling job ads and rescinding offers, are more extreme than any previously.
...
> Previous administrations have imposed communications pauses in their first days. And the administration of Barack Obama continued a cap on attendance at scientific meetings first imposed by the George W. Bush administration, which in some cases meant staff canceled trips to meetings.
> But an immediate, blanket ban on travel is unusual, says one longtime researcher in NIH's intramural program. “I don't think we've ever had this and it's pretty devastating for a postdoc or graduate student who needs to present their work and network to move ahead in their career,” the researcher says.
This is not an extraordinary event. It is not an attack on the NIH. It is a transitional pause, which is substantially normal when administrations change hands. The wailing and moaning is silly. Give it a week.
FWIW, I was around (i.e. working on NIH funded grants) for the last transition, and I don't remember this happening. I agree and hope that it might not be an ominous sign, but I don't think it's the norm. We're being asked to pull out of not only conferences, but even out of cross-organizational Zoom chats that involve certain institutions. Where I work, the people who've been doing this longer than me are not saying "relax everybody, this is fine," they seem to be freaking out a little bit too.
>But some NIH staff suggested these measures, which include pulling job ads and rescinding offers, are more extreme than any previously.
> halted midstream a training workshop for junior scientists, called off a workshop on adolescent learning minutes before it was to begin, and canceled meetings of two advisory councils. Panels that were scheduled to review grant proposals also received eleventh-hour word that they wouldn’t be meeting.
> “People are just at a loss because they also don’t know what’s coming next. I have never seen this level of confusion and concern in people that are extremely dedicated to their mission,” the scientist says.
>But an immediate, blanket ban on travel is unusual, says one longtime researcher in NIH's intramural program. “I don't think we've ever had this and it's pretty devastating for a postdoc or graduate student” who needs to present their work and network to move ahead in their career, the researcher says.
"The incestuous relationship between the NIH, CDC, and vaccine makers—with all of the conflict of interest it entails—cannot be allowed to continue, and the revolving door between them must be locked. As Severino writes, “Funding for scientific research should not be controlled by a small group of highly paid andunaccountable insiders at the NIH, many of whom stay in power for decades. The NIH monopoly on directing research should be broken.” What’s more, NIH has long “been at the forefront in pushing junk gender science.” The next HHS secretary should immediately put an end to the department’s foray into woke transgender activism."
This event is entirely extraordinary and politicized. Nothing will be better "in a week". The actions being taken were telegraphed well ahead of time and were widely known to be part of a strategy to destroy the NIH and replace it with some kind of propaganda arm.
It's scary to think that Trump seems to actually believe right wing media's black and white propaganda. The end point of this kind of anti-intellectual, anti-urban movement is something like Pol Pot's killing fields.
What I think we're re-discovering is that it's not so straightforward to tell while it's happening. I'm willing to bet during the rise of people like Mussolini, Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler, etc. many people were concerned, and many others were saying it was nothing and they were just being hyperbolic. However, it was the same with times when it didn't turn out like that.
What concerns me most about this, is the general attitude of entirely dehumanizing specific groups of people. That, I expect, is the crux that makes atrocities possible, and it is happening now.
> I'm willing to bet during the rise of people like Mussolini, Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler, etc. many people were concerned, and many others were saying it was nothing and they were just being hyperbolic.
Yes. A German Jewish newspaper published this.[1]
"We do not subscribe to the view that Herr Hitler and his friends, now finally in possession of the power they have desired for so long, will enact the proposals circulating in the Angriff or the Völkischer Beobachter newspapers; they will not suddenly divest German Jews of their constitutional rights, lock them away in race ghettos, or subject them to the avaricious and murderous impulses of the mob. They not only cannot do this because many other crucial factors hold their powers in check, ranging from the Reich president to some of the political parties affiliated with them, but they also clearly do not want to go this route, for when one acts as a European world power, the whole atmosphere is more conducive to ethical reflection upon one’s better self than to revisiting one’s earlier oppositional role: operating as a European world power means that one seeks an enduring place in the harmonious exchange of peoples of culture. And beyond that, it is clear that the powers at Wilhelmstrasse no longer see demagogic appeals designed to heat up mass gatherings of the Volk as strictly necessary. The new Prussian Minister of the Interior [Hermann Göring] can perform a far greater service to the old comrades in arms and party friends by rejuvenating the huge, state civil service along National Socialist lines than by making open concessions to the brutal manifesta- tions of hatred of Jews."
It was exactly like that with Putin, as well. To remind, the guy was elected fair and square in a landslide originally. And there were people back then who screamed from the rooftops that if you elect a former KGB operative as a "strong hand", that'll be the last free elections that you'll have. And yes, there were many in the middle who laughed at them. I wonder how many of those have left the country since.
Probably twentyish years ago, I read some comment or other that when reading right-wing propaganda, just mentally replace "immigrant" with "jew" and see how it sounds to you. Since then I can never not see that, and I think it really is the key to understanding the nature of these movements; they thrive on dehumanization of groups of humans. There's an LBJ quote that springs to mind immediately:
> “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
What does America or even Trump have to gain by installing a dictatorship? Assuming he even could, which is probably worth arguing. He is already the most powerful executive of the most powerful (by far, it is not close) and future-proof (again, by far) nation on Earth. His actions in my view are more aligned with getting America the best deal ahead of whatever unfavorable population and trade collapses await the world in the next few decades. As an American, I only half expect democracy to survive putting my cohort (millennials) through retirement. Industrialization has left the world on a pretty bleak course, with America most equipped to weather it. Most of the moves I see the current administration readying itself for are ones to strengthen our already dominant geopolitical advantages worldwide. Hard to do that if you have a civil war to manage on top of it.
What did past demagogues and dictators have to gain? It always turned out awful in the end, but concerns over that didn't stop them or their supporters.
Trump appears to have no stable ideals, he seems to be only interested in attention and appearing successful. He's previously tried unsuccessfully to launch into politics from the left, right, and center but eventually found traction with this new movement, so he doubled down and played the demagogue after a lifetime of being the epitome of the elite.
Ultimately there is a narrative that regular people are doing bad economically because of a few specific groups of people, and that this can be fixed by dehumanizing, terrorizing, and persecuting these people. They will need an all powerful leader not constrained by laws, opposing politics, or human rights to "solve the problem." Of course people think his actions are "aligned with getting America the best deal" or else they wouldn't want to help install him as dictator.
Trump seems to have gotten pretty far along this path already. He appointed his own sycophant supreme court that ruled him above the law and unprosecutable. He failed at trying to overthrow an election, but managed to get away scott free by intimidating people out of doing their jobs, and eventually pardoned everyone criminally convicted of participating. He was convicted of 34 felonies in a trial by jury, but received no sentence. Now he's experimented with simply announcing the 14th amendment of the US constitution invalid by executive order, and will see if he gets away with it- if so, I think that qualifies as being successfully installed as a dictator.
Honestly there are too many parts of what you wrote that I disagree with to bother writing much of a rebuttal. The people spoke about the border and other cultural issues. They spoke about the justice system and its targeting of Trump. You can be for strong borders and safe spaces for the majority of people without being for “dehumanizing” people. So that to me is disingenuous.
I’m not likely to change your mind on these things, so what I’ll say instead is to look at what he is actually doing geopolitically through the lens of a declining world, which is what we are about to be experiencing as literally every other port country in the world begins its population decline.
> You can be for strong borders and safe spaces for the majority of people without being for “dehumanizing” people
Perhaps one could be, but these people are not- their rhetoric about immigrants is based on hate and dehumanization, and the entire narrative that immigrants are harmful economically and culturally is a lie. Moreover, it is a red herring that causes people to ignore all of the real reasons people are struggling - so nobody will take actual steps towards solving any real problems- and those problems will continue to get worse as a result.
I refuse to be like the Germans who said "davon haben wir nichts gewusst" - "we knew nothing about that." I will not participate in dehumanizing, persecuting, or abusing other people, and I will do everything in my power to stop them.
> justice system and its targeting of Trump
He has Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), and he cannot accept responsibility or fault for anything- even crimes he was found guilty of by a jury. I have experience with people like that in real life and can spot it from a mile away, and I think our society would be a much better place to live for everyone if more people could spot this, and had some awareness or "antibodies" against emotional manipulation in general.
Lastly, thank you for being able to disagree with me in a calm and respectful manner- that is a rare thing online nowadays.
I can definitely understand. I actually think immigrants are necessary for our future, but I want them to follow our laws and not just have an open border. When my generation reaches retirement age the rest of the world will already be crippled more or less, and we will need the supplemental workforce that immigration can provide.
Politics can definitely get heated. I have always thought that you can get far even with people you strongly disagree with by assuming the best of their motives. Thanks for engaging with me :)
<< their rhetoric about immigrants is based on hate and dehumanization,
Have you actually talked to anyone, because this reads like a bumper sticker.
I will speak for myself. I am an immigrant, and I can tell you that while I am nervous for relatively obvious reasons, I also recognize that the inflow of illegal immigration is ( was? ) too high ( even official stats for illegal crossings are crazy ) to not piss off existing population. Under normal circumstances, few would give a fuck about a kid overstaying on their school visa, but all that has been institutionalized and normalized to the point, that the population chose an extreme to correct it.
There is no hate. There is simply a cold, harsh calculation in most people's heads and goes something like this: is there enough resources to support my family? No? Then where are the resources going ( cuz I already pay enough in taxes )?
And most people, normal people, when faced with a choice of saving their family or some nameless crowd will choose their families.
>>> justice system and its targeting of Trump
>> He has Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), and he cannot accept responsibility or fault for anything-
Both statements can be true at the same time. Both states and feds threw everything they could at him and effectively failed. The 34 felony count - a talking point that is being trotted out regularly - probably being the prime example of this.
For example, do you remember what type of felony it is and on what shaky grounds it was bumped into a felony? Do you remember the mugshot and misplaced glee it generated?
At that point, I was already talking about Democrats' inability to read the room; that the felon label ( even if it is successful ) will not be useful this election cycle, but no one was listening. More amusingly, it seems that a lot has closed their ears further ( even though there was a brief moment of introspection caused by the election result ) again. Only difference now is that the marching orders have changed from 'felon' to 'nazi'.
It is tiring and predictable.
<< I refuse to be like the Germans who said "davon haben wir nichts gewusst" - "we knew nothing about that." I will not participate in dehumanizing, persecuting, or abusing other people, and I will do everything in my power to stop them.
Do what you will. Believe what you will. You seem to have already fallen into the 'he a nazi and nazi bad' camp and I have zero intent to change your mind at this point ( my conversations with people pre-election made it clear to me some of it is rather pointless ).
<< people to ignore all of the real reasons people are struggling
Maybe.. just maybe if you focused on that part, you could get people's attention. But hey, nazis!
Probably. But this political movement won't stop with this term. 2016 Trump was more moderate than today's Trump. The next time the movement is stopped it will come back even more ferociously, especially since the movement is fed constant propaganda about being aggrieved and revenge fantasies.
The USSR wasn't doomed by communism per se. it was doomed by prioritising ideology and politics over any other considerations. The US is now in the same doom-spiral.
> Even more troubling to many researchers is a pause on study sections that many received word of today. Without such meetings, NIH cannot make research awards.
Cancer and many other topics of research will be hurt by this.
Cancer, infectious diseases, brain disorders, HIV and the RECOVER programme for Long Covid. All have significant NIH funding and will be halted by this.
Lots of smaller funded conditions as well, the NIH does a lot both from a clinical research and a public health perspective.
I don't know if they are more competent now. There are just fewer people willing to push back, and few to no guardrails in place for when the leader doesn't adhere to the usual governmental and ethical norms.
I guess it depends on what you mean with "competent". In essence their pitch is that government is bad, so from that sense "competent" means "able to burn these institutions down". From that perspective these people do seem more "competent" in various ways: there is less chaos, a better sense on how to use the legal means, more focus. Trump may be a unfocused bumbling fool, but the Project 2025 people aren't.
This is not my (and presumably your) definition of "competent", which would be "able to run these institutions well", or something along those lines.
And since it seems there isn't any real accountability any more other than anything that is strictly legally imposed, anything that goes wrong in this process is just blamed on the democrats, deep state, or whatever. Or its simply denied that the problems exists in the first place.
This was the sense in which I was using the word "competent", thanks for clarifying. What I meant was now they are better able to realize their destructive vision, but insofar as I can tell its mostly the same vision as it ever was.
I'm pretty sure the current administration has already shown themselves willing to abandon many previous established norms formed over the history of the US so I am not entirely convinced this is returning to "normalcy".
Well maybe authoritarianism is is the 'natural' place that the social order tends to.
It's weird that people like you use dyeing hair as some kind of shorthand for radical leftist ideology as if you stepped out of a time portal from the 1950s. Zoe Quinn really did a number on you guys, didn't she?
The position they've taken is that they want to shift cancer funding from treatment to prevention. I have no idea whether this makes any sense or if it will actually happen but that is the current messaging.
There is no prevention strategy that will prevent all cancers. Even people with the most healthy lifestyle can get a cancer. That's why you have to do both.
Just to give one example: the majority of men will get prostate cancer if they live long enough (~70% of men over 80). It's just that other things tend to kill people before the cancer.
Democrats need to put these messages out hard. If they win the 2026 election we might even have a chance at putting a brake on Trump's idiocy. (I know, I know, trust Democrats to shoot their own foot in the most crucial moments, but one can hope...)
I reject the premise of your entire comment. Of course they can hide actual scientific data and replace it with their own version. They will tell anyone and everyone over and over that their version is the truth and people will believe it as such. They will also believe that anyone trying to dispute it is wrong and vilify them.
This has already happened in 1.0, and plenty of other examples of it from history. But one would have to crack open a history book to know about that, and the populace is trending to banning books rather than opening them.
Well, you see laws of physics and periodic table doesn't swap out every time there's a change in administration. Neither are field effect transistors swapped out for vacuum-tubes with a different ruling party.
That makes a pretty good first order approximation of what is and isn't scientific, and worth spending taxpayer dollar on.
Science isn't prescriptive (doesn't tell you what to do), it's descriptive. Prescriptions are policy and have nothing to do with science.
There you go trying to apply logic to where it is not welcomed. The people that try to squash science and promote whatever notions they prefer do not care about descriptive vs prescriptive. They will push their agenda regardless of facts. It just happens the periodic table doesn't threaten their agenda. These are the same types that threaten to jail those that disagree with them.
Well, they do deal mostly with prescriptive policy things given the global context.
Namely, do the "green" policies make sense given that:
1. China will only increase it's total energy and resource consumption
2. And so will India and rest of the developing nations (unless you want them to be relegated to being perpetual backwater shitholes?)
All these will result in ever increasing CO2 output and pollution as these and other countries develop and transition. Many "green" products - solar panels, inverters, etc are made in China. And they are gearing up to be a very strong competitor in electric vehicles too. Which will futher increase the trade deficit and directly subsidize the competitors.
Most sensible discussions - as far as I can tell - deal with these realpolitik considerations first and foremost.
I don't know what role NIH played in the Covid response, but if they carry some responsibility for the previous administration's decision to force/coerce people to take the vaccine against their will then it seems fair that the new administration should hold them to account.
> previous administration's decision to force/coerce people to take the vaccine against their will
I'm glad they did. Because people are idiots and would listen to their social media influencer's tell them that vaccines cause autism then chug down some horse de-wormer.
If you trust the election results, and I generally do because I have no proof otherwise, then the American people voted for this. But it certainly looks like an authoritarian power transfer.
I am affected by this and I didn't vote for this. It's easy to say that "the American People" voted for this, but it's not correct to say that I am personally being affected by my bad choices.
I think the elections were "fair", for what its worth- I just don't agree that "fairness" makes me blame-worthy when I face the consequences of other folks actions.
I agree with you completely, but this gets at a debate that's been going on since the ancient days about whether democracy is actually good or not. Whether a tyrant is elected by a fair majority or inherits the throne at best (or Divine Right of Kings, whatever) makes little difference IMHO.
That said, while I have criticisms for democracy and do enjoy pointing out it's imperfections when people talk about democracy as some self-evident ideal, I do think it's probably the best system of government in a sea of less than ideal choices.
I'd argue the problem lies less with democracy, more with the media. Democracy requires an informed populace. The success of populist politicians shows you don't have that
This is why early democracies limited voters to a subset which was perceived as better informed or more responsible - rule of any person passing thresholds (like e.g. land ownership) that proved a minimum level of capacity.
It would be more accurate to say that it was intended to (and did) limit voting to a subset that was perceived as more loyal to the social order, such as property laws and other arrangements that define who's on top of the social pyramid.
They were informed. Trump told them that science is crap, that tariffs are good, that we should punish immigrants, that he would pardon the jan 6th people, etc.
This is what people voted for and what they wanted. Hate and retribution.
When Democrats finally stop with this false narrative that if only people knew better, they'd vote for Democrats, maybe we'll start actually winning again.
Sure, they heard from Trump that tariffs would fix inflation. But they still aren't informed because they didn't actually know what tariffs are [1].
> When Democrats finally stop with this false narrative that if only people knew better, they'd vote for Democrats, maybe we'll start actually winning again.
Really do not hate to point this out. Democrats are really responsible for a lot of this mess. Both Republics and Democrats really love to blame the other one but they're really just the Father and Mother and when the child is having problems, it's both of their faults.
Personally, I think it's gotten this way because of the whole first-past-the-post so if you have a belief like "far right" or "far left" then your best bet politically is to run underneath Republican or Democrat and push out the "moderates" in a primary as opposed to making a new political party that actually has your beliefs.
I don't think it's just FPTP, given that other countries that have it are nowhere nearly as polarized.
I think it's actually the combination of FPTP and open (or at least broadly accessible) primaries. In Canada and UK, parties generally have much more control over their primaries, and party elites generally try to exercise that power to ensure that candidates don't upset the existing arrangements too much. Not even necessarily as a deliberate strategy, but when you have to work your way through the "smoke-filled rooms" as a candidate, that filters out the purists and favors those willing to compromise. US was also like that for a long time, and notably we didn't have this degree of polarization then.
But once primaries are wide open and the party no longer controls the candidates, it seems inevitable that more extreme candidates will win. They appeal to the more ideologically motivated voters who are generally more likely to show up and vote (especially so in the primaries), and so any candidate who wants to win there has to appeal to them first.
The problem is the Democrats aren't far left, they aren't even really left. There is no viable political counterbalance to the right wing in US politics anymore, the so-called left is moving right, and the right is moving further right. Kamala Harris' whole campaign (such as it was) was an attempt to court "moderate" Republicans rather than the base who was never enamored with Biden to begin with.
I agree that first past the post is a problem and this election was more lost by the Democrats than won by the Republicans, but I think it's a myth that any of it has to do with the Democrats going "too far left." Call me when any Democratic Presidential candidate openly calls for dismantling American imperialism and scaling back the military, or criticizes capitalism and endorses nationalized healthcare, education and UBI, or doesn't kiss the ass of police or curry favor with Evangelical Christians, or has immigration policies that actually materially differ from those of Republicans.
Is it the media or unfettered capitalism? Traditional media (newspapers, and local news) is dying slowly, they cannot successfully compete with centralized juggernauts with global footprints sucking up all the ad dollars. Was it Thiel who remarked that capitalism may not be compatible with democracy? One guess on which he'll choose to keep.
I do think a big part of the problem is the two party system. It makes negative campaigning far to effective. That way you get pathological choices, like Biden vs Trump when you wouldnt entrust any of them with running a small business you own.
"Willing" in what sense? What's my realistic alternative? Lay it on me.
I didn't vote, for what it's worth. I don't think it's ethical to participate in that kind of thing.
The US is 2 crimes and a real estate scam in a trench coat. When I was younger, I indeed thought that maybe it had some legitimacy, but after having read quite a lot of the history of the millions that the government here has enslaved and murdered I no longer thing it's legitimate.
I understand that they have the guns and the power, but realistically I am not a willing participant in this system.
Yeah, "just colonize somewhere else" is pretty much the response that I expected.
I spent last night doing a shift till 4 in the morning at a warming center for folks who don't have houses, and I've spent the last several months working on taking an off grid chunk of property to a place where I can host full families of folks to "come and play music".
None of that makes the US government one bit more legitimate.
All eligible voters are collectively responsible for the outcome of the election. You can't be proud of democracy if you won't shoulder the blame when it renders poor outcomes.
I 100% agree with what you said, but no one looks back and remembers the people who voted against Hitler, or says 'there were some good people in Nazi Germany'.
States rights has been too closely associated in the popular mind with slavery and racism (via arguments over what the civil war was really about). It'll be tough to disassociate those enough to make a persuasive argument for secession.
At the point you actually want a secession movement people aren't worried about the optics of it. It's not happening because the actual cost of secession, civil war and everything else is staggering. These are one way, permanent changes where a large number of the agitators will not live to see the better world.
It's compromise, carnage and collateral damage. Doing anything else is a better option 100% of the time.
Nobody's going to hear "we're seceding because we're sick of dying from lack of healthcare" and think "ooh, I wonder if it's secretly about slavery?"
Authoritarian power transfers usually involve (immediate) executions, or at least the imprisonment/exile of important people from the previous government/administration/regime, to stabilize the new regime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Political_Surviva...
The Heritage Foundation (who is behind all this and has been at it since 1973), says that the transfer of power will be bloodless if we allow it to remain bloodless.
Presumably authoritarian regimes only execute/imprison/exile dissidents if they think it's necessary to eliminate opposition. An authoritarian regime which does not think there's much of a threat to opposition probably wouldn't bother.
Serves to prove it's not an authoritarian regime? They know they won by not so much and are likely to lose next time, especially given Trump can't run anymore.
TBF, we're only on day 2. (I am 90% certain it won't come to that, but there's a 10% queasiness left that hasn't been ameliorated by the haphazard approach untethered from legality that we've seen so far)
"This guy is running around giving everyone pardons. The funny thing, maybe the sad thing, is he didn’t give himself a pardon. And if you look at it, it all had to do with him."
I fully expect Trump to ruin Biden's final years with investigations and court cases. Maybe that's not out right execution, but Trump definitely wants revenge.
I mean if Biden actually was making corrupt deals trading influence/access for money then he absolutely should be investigated and prosecuted for it. And there's already hard proof that Hunter was selling access to his father, and that the foreigners he was selling said access to believed he could actually provide it.
If we didn't have the DOJ and other institutions protecting Biden for the last several years it would be pretty easy to find out if he actually did sell influence (vs. Hunter deceiving the people he was making deals with) with just a couple of warrants and subpeonas.
He ran on “lock her up” in 2016 and never followed through.
I find it hilarious that everyone is scared of Trump when there was a concerted effort by the other side to use the justice system to stop him from ever running again.
Need I remind everyone of multi-year Russiagate investigation that was all made up? The misdemeanor charges that becomes felonies with massive fines? The media collusion to silence the Hunter Biden laptop story when the FBI knew at the time it was real?
It’s the pot calling the kettle black. It’s the thieves accusing everyone else of stealing.
> I find it hilarious that everyone is scared of Trump when there was a concerted effort by the other side to use the justice system to stop him from ever running again.
I honestly don't get what you mean by this. Lets say all your comments about Biden, the FBI, laptops and whatever else are 100% true. How does that change if I should be worried about stuff Trump might do? To use a totally extreme example, if John Wayne Gacy went around talking all the shit in the world about Jeffrey Dahmer, does that somehow make Dahmer not a serial killer?
> He ran on “lock her up” in 2016 and never followed through.
So that proves he lies and makes promises he can't/won't/doesn't keep? Is that a positive trait in a politician? How are we supposed to determine when he is 'just joshing, bro' and actually is being truthful? And yes, I know Biden and the dems also make promises they don't keep, but again that doesn't excuse Trump from doing the same.
An established bureaucracy used to "following orders" will just soldier on assuming the authoritarian comes in legally. The most well known example is Germany. The Führer came in elected, got voted to dictator after the Reichstagsbrand and then never left power - and barely anyone in the executive resisted.
And this is likely also where the US are heading. The putsch will not be loud and with a bang like Syria, it will be slow as molasses but about as difficult to impossible to stop like a broken dam worth of water moving downstream.
I mean, it's pretty clear they want to sue Fauci and more. Attacking dedicated public servants working for the health of the country is going to have serious negative effects.
It seems unlikely that any court case would "uncover the truth" about the decision making behind that. Unfortunately, this has become so politicized that determining the steps that lead to NIH funding research in China, determining if a law was broken, and what the intent was, are unlikely to happen in the future.
It seems very unlikely to me that a knowledgeable head of an NIH institute would break the law in a discoverable way. My guess is that when this occurred, the decision-makers did not believe they were doing anything illegal.
(I think NIH funding virology research in China is dumb. That should not have happened.)
A couple things make me think they knew they were doing something illegal. One, they changed the definition of GoF when questioned about it, in a way that makes no sense. Two, they tried to avoid transparency laws like FOIA as well:
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/nih-foia-covid-ori...
If you keep using HN primarily for political and ideological battle, we're going to have to ban you. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, and we've asked you more than once already.
Understood.
Gain-of-function is one of those terms that only really makes sense with a lot of biological context and knowledge. Trying to explain that to the general public or politicians (especially in an adversarial context like a congressional hearing) is just not going to work.
Trying to hide things in their chat messages and texts and emails was dumb. I still can't believe they did that (one guy even used the exact scenario that we learned at Google: don't say anything in email that would get printed in a negative light on the front page of the NY Times; I had a manager there who actually did have one of his emails, as part of the Oracle Java court case, in a prominent article in the Times). Public employees of the government should assume that literally everything they produce as part of their job (including on personal devices) will eventually be seen externally by people without the necessary context to understand.
From what I can see, Fauci already admitted he made a collection of bad statements and decisions. For me, that's the end of the matter. Suing him over this is just going to damage the country. For example, next time there is a crisis, all those hardworking public servants are going to look at what happened and conclude "no, I will not be the public communicator that helps the country understand the situation we are in and how we are going to get out of it".
>I think NIH funding virology research in China is dumb. That should not have happened.
This gets really subtle and tricky. This type of thing is closely linked to biological weapons research and we want collaboration and transparency to an extent to maintain access to information.
> (I think NIH funding virology research in China is dumb. That should not have happened.)
I'm not sure why "in China" is your point of concern here? Lots of virology research presents minimal danger, and seems fine to me to fund even in geopolitical adversaries (after calculation of the diplomatic and scientific costs and benefits).
My concern with the WIV's work is that they were searching for deadlier and faster-spreading human viruses. So if their research succeeds, then they're deliberately just a containment failure away from a novel human pandemic. China's laxer safety standards compounded that risk, but I'd oppose such work in Baric's lab at UNC too.
Ok but that is where the bats are. And funding gives you access. Even with funding China blocked a lot of investigation. Just wait until we get Ebola 2 or what not.
Unfortunately, a good chunk of people who voted for him really didn't pay much attention beyond him promising to lower prices. But this is the electorate we have - a lot of them just can't be bothered with much detail as attention spans are short these days.
I listened to and watched a lot of interviews with people who voted for Trump. They just said he didn’t mean it whenever they were confronted with quotes from Trump that obviously disagreed with their views as evidenced by earlier questions in the interviews. Or take the many Muslims in Dearborn who still claim Trump is better than Harris would be on Israel/Palestine - they refuse to believe the evidence despite action days in,(or from trumps last term) it’s not possible to argue rationally with these people. Not only are they barely paying attention, they only see and hear what they want to.
> If you trust the election results, and I generally do because I have no proof otherwise, then the American people voted for this.
No, if you trust the election results, it's a legitimate election by defined process and there are no grounds to contest it.
But "The American people voted for this" is a distinct, strong, affirmative statement that doesn't hold.
The people that voted for this are the people that voted for it, and even among the people who voted for the incoming administration (who only represent a third or so of eligible American voters and an even smaller share of American people), this isn't what many of them were voting for.
> ... even among the people who voted for the incoming administration (who only represent a third or so of eligible American voters and an even smaller share of American people), this isn't what many of them were voting for.
Yes it is. I understand the argument that this type of outcome wasn't their motivation for the ballot they cast. But it's also an entirely predictable outcome of their vote, which to me means this is exactly what they were voting in favor of happening.
I think one of the biggest issues with democracy in the US and probably democratic countries in general is infantilizing voters into being able to take credit for their intent rather than judging them based on the totality of the outcome of their choices. If you buy an Italian sports car because it's cool and your spouse is mad because it's also unreliable and can't fit your childrens' car seats, it's generally not considered a wise defense to say you only picked it based on the 0-60 time so it's not your fault it was less great by other metrics. Democracy would be a lot better off if we thought about voting the same way.
> Democracy would be a lot better off if we thought about voting the same way.
civic duty should be emphasized in school more. It's not a 10 second exercise every 4 years. It's something to be vigilant about indefinitely, and forever. Any change to laws, or any votes, require scrutiny, rational thought on the choices, and personal maximization.
Unfortunately, people are too lazy, or too dumb, to do this, and choose to listen to someone else's recommendation on votes.
So democracy represents somewhat of an averaged choice of the population. As the population becomes dumber due to lack of good education or cadence, their choices become increasingly worse.
Authoritarian regimes don't have this problem. The average person in one don't get to make many, if any, choices. The elites make them all - and if the elites are more altruistic, the country generally do better than average.
So, Trump loses popularity over his original administration over lies and underdelivered promises, "we" vote him out. Then 4 years later we vote him back in?
At what point do we come and accept responsibility for falling for lies? And yes, there are in fact some people that voted against their best intertests because they fell into partisan politics; they still got their results, they just didn't read the fine print of the Devil's contract.
voter turnout was slightly low, but well within ballpark of every other Us election.
If this is your position, you must conclude no American election is a strong signal of anything.
Furthermore, this is just bad stats. We received a massive sample of the population, that sample is not without bias, but at least is geographically distributed. Do you think if had a 100% sampling rate the result would be dramatically different?
I suspect that missing portion is going bias towards low information population and immigrants who have no interest in US election. Democracy is not about finding every adult with a pulse. You must build a coalition of citizens with a vested interest in their community to get on your program, and take physical action to indicate that support you.
If this isn't what they were voting for, what did they think they were voting for? Did none of them believe that he would actually do the crazy shit he said he would? Did none of them pay attention to the insanity of his first term?
I have a simpler explanation: they all know what they were voting for, and none of them give a shit. It's the same as the mob cheering and applauding the sieg heil on Monday. They know it's deplorable and unamerican and they don't care. Because the only thing that matters is that their boy will stick it to the enemy.
Given the binary choice, much if the American people simply didn't vote. You can't present a false dichitomoty, and then act as if any downstream choice is full approval.
Not voting is a choice. It's a choice for "I don't care how this train moves, I'm moving with it". So yes, those non-voters tacitly approved of the idea of Trump being elected. They didn't hate it enough to get to the polls.
Those who thought "nothing would change no matter what"... well nothing has changed I guess. I suppose Harris would have done mass deportation raids and cutting funding from science and healthcare at all, right?
I lived in New York during the election, nothing would have changed regardless of who I voted for, because New York went to Harris anyway. So in my case, “nothing would change no matter what” was objectively true.
Do you really believe that the majority of Americans — or even the majority of Trump voters — are applauding the use of Nazi symbols? That is completely divorced from reality. The only people openly supporting Nazism are the extreme fringe right which is fortunately still nowhere near the majority in the real world.
I think you are wrong about the overwhelming mandate unless you are solely using the electoral college total as the yardstick. The popular vote is much closer.
Trump won with 49% of the popular vote vs Harris' 48%, with one of the smallest margins of victory ever - just 0.15% of eligible voters. He won just a handful more electoral votes than Biden in 2020, and far fewer than Obama or Reagan.
That is not an overwhelming mandate, nor does it represent a majority of the country.
But then Trumpists never let the truth get in the way of their own mythmaking. They said they had an overwhelming mandate and the support of most Americans even in 2016 when literally millions more people voted for Hillary Clinton. Hell, they didn't even think they actually lost in 2020. I'm surprised they can square the cognitive dissonance of Trump being elected to a third term.
More eligible voters didn't vote for any candidate then for Trump or Harris.
Trump won a slim majority of the people who did choose to vote, but it's hardly an endorsement by a majority of Americans, much less the American people as a whole.
Choosing not to vote is a vote for the status quo. That still is a choice.
There are BS loopholes we need to correct, but people who can't do the bare basics to reserve a morning to fill out a ballot fundamentally have themselves to blame.
Nonsense. If you live in one of the ~40 states where the outcome is a foregone conclusion, who you vote for makes no more difference than it does in Russia. It’s reasonable to protest by refusing to participate in that unfair system, and doing so doesn’t mean you support one candidate or the other.
36% of eligible voters - 90 million people - likely had a similar attitude. The margin of victory was 2.3m votes. What's that phrase? Something about how no single raindrop thinking they're responsible for the flood.
If someone clicks on "click here to update your password" in a phishing email, are they choosing what actually happens, or what they thought would happen? Even if they should have known, and could have known, I think it's objectively true that they didn't.
it depends on the advancement of society to be honest. I wouldn't blame someone getting scammed in 2000 over a "Hot sexy singles in your area, click now!". I would 100% blame them in 2020+.
I don't know how far we've come in regards to email phishing to make a call on that.
Americans also voted for their US Senators and Representatives.
It's funny how these discussions forget about that, which is part of the problem.
It's also worth remembering how the Trump campaign consistently denied Project 2025, and ridiculed those who suggested it was their agenda. Maybe it won't go there but so far it seems to be headed in that direction, and if so actively lying about your agenda raises questions about exactly what the American electorate was voting for.
It doesn't look like, it is. e.g. violent coup and Nazi salutes during inauguration. Are people expecting the rise of authoritarianism to look different or something? This is the exact same fascist playbook that's been run every time. I really thought WW2 would have taught humanity as a whole the lesson but apparently not.
I take it you haven't encountered the contempt that Trump supporters have for "mainstream science," particularly anything to do with biomedicine? Not even remotely a stretch. Ever since COVID they view those "health research capabilities" in the same way everyone else views the experimentation of Joseph Goebbels and Unit 731. Most of them still think Biden and Fauci cooked it up in a lab.
Trump got 49.8% of the vote. 50.2% went to other candidates (48.32% Harris, 0.56% Stein, 0.49% Kennedy, 0.42% Chase, 0.42% others).
If anyone is curious, here are the Presidents since the 19th century who got at least 50% of the vote:
Biden
Obama (both terms)
Second Bush (second term)
First Bush
Reagan (both terms)
Carter
Nixon (second term)
Johnson
Eisenhower (both terms)
Second Roosevelt (all four terms)
Hoover
Coolidge
Harding
Taft
First Roosevelt
McKinley
The lowest since 1900 is Wilson's first term at 41.8%, followed by Clinton's first term at 43%, Nixon's first term at 43.4%, and Trump's first term at 46%.
You might think that Wilson at 41.8% must have lost the popular vote but actually he beat the person with the second highest popular vote total by over 14%. That was back when the US had more than two viable parties. The vote went 41.84% to Wilson (Democrat), 27.4% to Teddy Roosevelt (Progressive), 23.17% to the incumbent Taft (Republican), 5.99% to Debs (Socialist), and the rest to a few others.
Similar with Clinton's 43%. That was about 5% more than second place. That year Ross Perot running as an independent got 18.91%.
Same with Nixon. His 43.42% was the biggest slice of the popular vote, followed by Humphrey at 42.72%. George Wallace running for the American Independent party got 13.53%.
Trump spent a huge amount of his time during the election disavowing Project 2025. Did people vote for a change in government? Yes, but they didn’t vote for this this theocratic authoritarian bullshit.
If you believed his disavowl, I've got a bridge... fuck it. Just give me your bank account number and I promise there will be $47 million in it tomorrow morning.
This is the informed voter thing, right? We know Trump is a liar, and beyond that perhaps the most documented liar in human history, and we also can plainly see who is involved in the campaign, his cabinet, his inner circle and easily cross reference them to the people whose names are directly on Project 2025. That is to say: to anyone paying even the minimum amount of attention, it was obvious that there is a 100% negative correlation between Trump disavowing Project 2025 and the expectation that he would lean in hard to it.
Trump has been pushing theocratic authoritarian bullshit for nearly a decade. It's what Trumpism is known for. It's what his supporters are known to support. We're not doing this historical revisionism now. This is exactly what people voted for.
You'd think he'd do that? Go on the ~~internet~~ podium and tell lies?
nevermind he never had a plan for any of the issues people voted for him on. A still vague plan on fixing inflation (spoilers: he cannot do as much to fix inflation as many think), still rough numbers on what these tarriffs are supposed to do. What else did conservatives think he was going to do...
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‘You want to come to America? Earn it, like I did’
well he is indeed hastening the deportation... nevermind conservatives with undocumented workers only lose from this and don't want to pay americans minimum wage. Well done.
'He invokes fear in the rest of the world’
Yeah, I guess pissing off all our friends and getting cozy with China/Russia will invoke fear.
Hey, Maybe Trump is more honest than I thought. Of course, when it comes to making lives worse for the world.
This constant false equivalence between parties is part of the reason we got here.
The Democrats are terrible but somehow I doubt Kamala Harris would be doing this much damage two days in. I don't think people would be wondering whether Tim Walz actually did a Nazi salute at the inauguration. It can be the case that both parties are evil, and they are, but that America still chose the greater evil.
So many false equivalences and assumptions in these few sentences alone lol. Why don't we wait at least a few months before deciding if their actions are evil or not.
Why are we suddenly pretending that Trump is an unknown quantity? We know what he's about, and we know what his agenda is. It was literally published to the public with bullet points and everything.
I keep on thinking maybe it's time to move somewhere else. I'm a first generation American, so I'd just be doing what my parents did before me. The problem is, I have no idea what country I would move to.
I think most of the rest of the world is facing the same issues, just a few years behind the USA.
Except where the culture is completely different, e.g. East Asia. But they have different problems.
Australia is definitely facing the same problems and the same emerging far-right populist anti-immigration narrative as a result. Though to be fair, Australia has always had a pretty strong authoritarian populist far-right anti-immigration thing going on.
The one that has totally surprised me is Germany. Seeing them go down that same road again is genuinely shocking.
If you prefer the policies of the Democratic Party and have no special attachment here, then Canada or any European country is probably a level up for you.
Except Pierre Poilievre is likely to become Prime Minister of Canada and is explicitly taking cues from Trump, so it's unlikely to be much different a few years from now.
England has the same weak implementation of democracy with the same flaws. You'll want to move a country that indirectly chooses the government and president.
Uhh the only thing positive is the UK citizens finally saw through the conservative bullshit.. this is only because they were ahead of the USA in implementing disastrous policies which played out and showed that they had no clothes.
If the republicans are smart they won’t impose austerity but it won’t matter as whatever they do will have unintended consequences they can’t predict and it will likely tank them in the midterms and in 4 years.
But right now they are targeting the intellectual elite that actually run things/society. All because they can’t handle the truth.
Tech thinks they will be spared by focusing on their magic counting machines. Trump AI will fix everything.
New Zealand is not the richest first world country, but when this global shitshow escalates into a major international war it'll probably be one of the safer places around.
Hang in there, this is a long overdue correction. It's gonna over correct a bit, but then things should be better than before. The rhetoric of Trump being a dictator is way overblown. If this didn't happen we'd be heading toward bankruptcy around the time your kids grow up.
Considering the Republicans are the ones that weaponized debt in the 1980s with their policy to 'starve the beast' I don't see how Republicans are going to fix it. Unless you mean 'fix it' by shutting down those part of the government that they targeted in the 1980s?
Because covid? Congress wanted to pass a covid relief bill sending $700B to corporations. Trump said to get the money to the people so they increased it to do so. Biden happily kept the budget way overblown even though covid was essentially over. Neither party has addressed the budget in decades. One wants to spend more and the other wants to cut taxes. Neither fixes anything.
No, not because covid. Obama's second term decreased the amount of deficit added each year. Since then (excluding drop after 2020/2021) the amount has trended upward every year.
I guess you could say less deficit was added during Trump's first term (excluding covid), than in Obama or Biden's first terms. Not sure that tells us anything useful though.
There hasn't been an actual deficit decrease since 2001 though.
yes, he's just reassuring that we go bankrupt and have no kids by throwing half a trillion into AI. You complain about giving a trillion partially to people, and Trump is throwing all that, day one, into the richest corporations.
May as well speed to the inevitably cyberpunk future. Shame I'm not getting that cool cyborg arm.
Remember what happened to Trump after his first term. He's extremely invested in making sure that he won't be raided/arrested/etc again at the end of this term.
The power structures that tried that the first time won't be here in 4 years...his personal freedom depends on it.
I just listened to an NPR newscast where they were clutching at their pearls and then whispered “this is common when a new administration comes in” and then went right back to screeching. Not looking forward to 4 years of this.
This is common? Did the Biden admin halt all communications, grants, travel, etc.? NPR posts transcripts of their programs, do you have a link so I can see what they said?
For anyone that's been in corp/BigCo land for some time, this is the typical corp reboot playbook.
Pause all hiring, freeze travel and other casual expenditures, relook at all major initiatives/projects/programs, etc.
Definitely something (IMHO) worth doing every 5-7 years in any environment. Can't imagine what it will uncover in government where I'm guessing it hasn't happened in much longer in most cases.
Having worked in big corporations and been married to and friends with a number of NIH folks, I can assure you that the government has 10x the openness of even the most transparent corporation, has a bunch of people trying to maximize the return on all expenditures related to their research, fanatical abilities to repair and reuse equipment for new things, and a base line of people who have consciously dedicated to service for the country rather than maximizing their personal prestige and wealth.
Their budgets are debated in TV. Imagine that in a big corp. it is simply false to say this organized attack on research is anything than a spasm of anti-science ideology.
While I agree with the sentiment that continual evaluation of how any organization operates is a good thing, there is an extensive corpus of studies on the fallacies of treating the management of public services like private business.
There is a good reason why there isn’t much (successful) precedent around this type of thing being done before.
I would argue with that looking at Argentina. I do see however there is not enough data to be biased against any side, but disruptive changes in management are in my perception more effective on changing the status quo.
Achieving change against current incentives with politically mindful measures I'd say is very time consuming and slow.
In regards to your point I agree that treating public services as companies that can't be running at a loss is been demonstrated to be bad, but there is a fine line between trying to make public services profitable VS trying to make them more efficient.
Why do most people in this thread assume this move intends to politicalize the NIH? I don't think the administration thoroughly thought out the consequences of this decision, but that's a typical government move. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Hard to attribute it to stupidity and lack of planning when almost every executive order signed by Trump during his first days back in office are straight out of Project 2025.
As others have said, his actions are all straight from the project 2025 playbook. Go read page 284, it's very explicit about them viewing it as politicized and wanting to fix that (read actually politicize it):
"The incestuous relationship between the NIH, CDC, and vaccine makers—with all of the conflict of interest it entails—cannot be allowed to continue, and the revolving door between them must be locked. As Severino writes, “Funding for scientific research should not be controlled by a small group of highly paid andunaccountable insiders at the NIH, many of whom stay in power for decades. The NIH monopoly on directing research should be broken.” What’s more, NIH has long “been at the forefront in pushing junk gender science.” The next HHS secretary should immediately put an end to the department’s foray into woke transgender activism."
I agree with you about this. I think it's worth calling out where the shoulder of the highway ends and the cliff begins, now that the guardrails have been (if temporarily) removed, but I'm optimistic that nobody is crazy enough to totally jam up the NIH given its importance to our economy and national security.
> Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
This quote does not apply in a place where the actor has specifically promised to be malicious.
Now, you may not see their promises as malicious and that is your prerogative. But that quote isn’t applicable for a ton of people when it comes to Trump.
I would have to disagree with the criteria. More times than not, I've seen people who have promised maliciousness (AKA bullies) make really stupid decisions. It seems to go hand-in-hand in a lot of cases.
Either way, this seems like a political flip-flop, with the opposing party now putting on the tin hats. That's just the way it looks to me as an independent.
My original comment was regarding the claim that this is being done to politicize the NIH. To me, it requires the same tin hat that conservatives put on when they were making all sorts of crazy assumptions about the government's moves during Covid.
I never said you had to put on a tin foil hat to call someone malicious. I'm just saying that malicious people tend to do stupid things which have unintended consequences they didn't fully realize.
I am also an independent. I did not vote for Biden, Kamala, nor did I vote for Trump.
However, I am still able to put 2 and 2 together to see his behavior during COVID, his statements before this current elections, and the current decisions (especially regarding gender definitions) and understand what the goal of silencing the NIH (even temporarily) is.
As long as they're not fucking up the NIH grantmaking process, I (ruthlessly) don't care, and am not going to allocate attention to it. But once they do start fucking up grants, they're throwing a monkeywrench in basically all American therapeutic research and basic science, which is a big problem, since one of the government's primary missions should be to set in motion whatever things will end human cancer.
The impact of these travel restrictions is to cancel/delay grant review meetings, which could plausible "fuck up the NIH grantmaking process".
However, grant review can really be done remotely. And there are many other embedded inefficiencies in granting. For example, when my PI and I applied for an R01 (the basic individual investigator grant that is core to funding early investigators) we had to print a 500 page application which contained duplicate data, full CVs, pages and pages of boilerplate, and fedex it to NIH where it sits in a room with all the other applications (it's been 20 years; maybe this doesn't happen anymore?). The review committees instead get a digital copy and the grant meeting itself is really just a bunch of people sitting in a circle making yes/no decisions.
Yes, I share the concern this article relates and hopefully saner (conservative) heads will prevail on the administration not to jank this up further. What I really want to do here is defang dumb debates about whether operational efficiency and headcount cuts inside NIH proper are disastrous. They may not be, so long as the grants keep happening.
Good to know. It looks like NIH dropped the fedexed physical copy requirement around when I left academia (https://cen.acs.org/articles/84/i14/NIH-Grants-Electronic.ht...). In fact now that I think of it, the R01 I submitted must have been digital-only, and that must have changed between 2003 and 2007.
Thanks to "AI" and mRNA vaccines, it's gonna be fine. Probably best to cut all other funding and just funnel it into the data centers that will solve everything very beautifully, lives are at stake after all.
Stargate is just a joint venture between a bunch of investors and big tech companies. If Biden had won, Biden would be the one announcing it. The amount of "Stargate" I factor into anything going on right now is zero.
Someone very close to me had their study section next week cancelled with no further comms. They are already fucking up grants. Please everyone, educate yourselves on this; the sky actually is falling this time.
The travel part makes sense to me: as HN is pro-remote-work they should understand that these researchers can simply make their presentations via tele-attendance. The rest of the "refrain from releasing anything until a Presidential appointee can look at it first" seems very commissar-like. The HHS screwed the pooch on COVID, making a lot of nonsensical claims that ruined the reputation of public health in the population's eyes. I still don't like the idea of the Commissar reviewing every paper on bird-flu (our newest epidemic) but I can see the motivation.
The actual presentations are usually the least important part of a conference. Most conferences would be better if you could cancel 80% of the program but still convince the same people to attend (and their employers to pay). Then there would be more time for informal discussions and ad hoc work, which often lead to new ideas and new collaborations.
Tele-attendance basically does not work for science conferences, as 99% of the value is from ad hoc in person discussions. When I attend science conferences I attend few if any of the talks, and instead network to form collaborations for future projects.
In medical research there is an awful lot of tissue, blood and other samples that go into the NIH's work. They run numerous labs and biobanks and a part of what they do is transit samples and the personal and sometimes equipment to various labs across the country.
Certainly, and in Silicon Valley there is hardware, semiconductors, and other tangible items that go into work. But clearly that's not what we're discussing since the article says:
> Today, the scientist encountered one group of early-career researchers who were scheduled to attend and present at a distant conference next week—presentations that are now impossible.
What's the big deal? Present via Zoom. We should probably cancel all conference travel.
Some of these changes, if continued and expanded, will likely have long-term negative effects on the US's position in science. I have my issues with NIH but to fix NIH requires subtlety. This seems more designed to "punish those liberal researchers" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutting_off_one%27s_nose_to_sp...
This is surgery with a butter knife. It's going to cause a lot of unnecessary disruption and pain which could have been avoided with a more nuanced approach. What we are seeing with this and some of the new administration's other initiatives, is the abandonment of US soft power in the world.
Huh, I like the way you phrased that: "abandonment of US soft power in the world". But I think there is also punitive aspect: they are intentionally "punishing" the people at NIH they perceive as being liberal and favoring other countries.
It's a good point. There is a target on the back of scientists who do research that is perceived as social science but is infact biology. Seems like they then construct myths of waste/corruption (just read this thread) and punish everyone.
the purge is real :)
Even if these idiots wanted subtlety they're too stupid to make it happen. They just want to do big, bold things but have no idea how to actually make anything better.
They certainly don't know how to do this stuff with any sort of grace or subtlety but perhaps more importantly... they don't care to.
They perceive no value from "soft power" stuff like the NIH and to a large extent consider it to be (part of) the enemy.
And most of their voting base really doesn't understand a single thing about the NIH. I mean, truly: the average American doesn't know what that program even is. Other than occasionally getting roasted for funding some ridiculous-sounding project like studying depression in chickens or something.[1]
So the only real "win" here for the new ruling party is to burn it down and then brag that they saved "the American taxpayers" $XYZ billion dollars.
(Which will wind up directly in the hands of the rich via tax breaks, and by definition can't really benefit poor people because they already pay little tax)
----
[1] Most of the time these "ridiculous sounding" programs are actually pretty relevant and/or useful if you look into them.
>have no idea how to actually make anything better
True, but that is not their intention.
I knew a guy who was the president of a co-op house at UC Berkeley (basically, a student-run housing system decoupled from the university). They had regular meetings and he described one of the challenges: while most people who came to the meetings just wanted to vote on measures to buy food and change policies, there was a subgroup that "just wanted to fuck shit up". You know, like during a protest there are always some people who go around doing unncessary damage to unrelated/innocent businesses. They just enjoy breaking things and enjoy making people mad.
It's not a perfect analogy but I see Trump and his cronies as a "fuck shit up" contingent- they seem to genuinely enjoy making their enemies unhappy by breaking things, regardless of the societal cost of their actions.
I was at some of those meetings, though unlikely to be the exact same ones :)
At the meetings I attended the furious debate was whether we allowed a volunteer group cook food in our kitchen to feed homeless people. The interesting thing about this debate was that to make a decision, you had to have a position on what the coop was, Was it cheap housing for students, or was the cheap housing something that emerged from committing to a practice of cooperative behaviour?
Supporting the volunteers cooking in our kitchen came at a cost, many volunteers were homeless, some had mental health issues. I felt it was morally right to let them use our kitchen, And I know that for this I did get labeled by some as pursuing chaos as performative social justice points and to upset opponents, But from my perspective I sincerely believe it was the right thing to do.
When parallels like this are revealed, it really makes me wonder how the orange cult people and I ended up on such different paths, both as a response to dissatisfaction with the status quo, why have the stories they’ve been told resonated with them when they seem so inauthentic to me, and why is the more progressive ideology that seems reasonable to me so distasteful to them
I like this analogy. I've had the thought many, many times over the last 8 years that many people seem to like breaking things because their perceived enemies will be unhappy.
Was this co-op perhaps Barrington Hall? I had good friends that lived there while at UCB. To my young eyes it was absolute anarchy.
Cloyne. I think barrington had been shut down by then?
Was shutdown around '89. Was there from '80-84.
I doubt anyone would deny the policy actions themselves are clumsy but it's important to remember that a majority of the country believes they are directionally correct. People were desperate to escape the rot of the status quo and chose the high variance option. Michael Moore described it best when he noted that Trump was the human hand grenade that was being tossed in frustration, with a faint hope that things would settle better after the carnage.
I sometimes like to imagine if I was president ... how hard would it be to find someone in a given department who could lead it and know better than the communication restrictions as we have here.
Granted, I fear the folks in charge now DO know better and the side effects are intentional ... but I wonder if it would be possible to pick someone and get it reasonably right.
This is what happens when you let a horse in the hospital. It wrecks stuff
Which the voters in majority voted for as they considered stuff already wrecked for them
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To be fair, people were saying this about voting for Trump back in 2016, that he was their "bull in a China shop" and they didn't care what he did as long as he wrecked the establishment. It's basic accelerationism - destabilize the system and force radical social change through the chaos. And it seems to be working.
a small percentage of Trump voters are accelerationists.
A much larger percentage would seem to sympathize with the accelerationists' goals, even if they're ignorant of their methods.
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Some things are too fundamental to be simple "disagreements" in a society. Disagreements over slavery led to the Civil War.
As the token Trump supporter on HN, let me give you what I think's going on. I think they are doing an ideological purge. They want to get rid of anyone promoting transgender science. I think RJK JR. wants to get rid of anyone he thinks is against his MAHA agenda.
They want to get rid of any pandemic scaremongering too. Peter Hoetz said that Bird Flu will start once the trump administration takes office for example.[1]. Hoetz who is a major figure in the vaccine research industry said that "starting January 21st we've got some big stuff coming down the pike starting with H5N1..." and after the Fauci pardon anything is possible.
The bird flu outbreak had been behind a lot of food inflation. I wouldn't put it past people on the radical left who want to hurt the Trump administration to hype the bird flu pandemic to drive up food prices through mass culling of livestock.
[1] https://x.com/TaraBull808/status/1865026704504426860?t=hZnEk...
> As the token Trump supporter on HN
In a minority most likely. Not even close to alone.
> Peter Hoetz said that Bird Flu will start once the trump administration takes office for example.[1].
No. He said we have big picture stuff coming down the pike starting January 21. Like a flu wide spread in birds already, that jumped species already, that could develop human to human transmission. He framed it clearly as a present danger the incoming administration would inherit. Even without the removed context about Kennedy's claims no vaccines are safe and effective and vaccines cause autism.
> The bird flu outbreak had been behind a lot of food inflation. I wouldn't put it past people on the radical left who want to hurt the Trump administration to hype the bird flu pandemic to drive up food prices through mass culling of livestock.
Whoever the radical left are, they don't decide about culling livestock. What agenda do you think was behind the culls driving up food prices before the election? And do you expect tariffs and deportations to lower food prices?
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I think you wanted to write that for better part of his life Trump was licking Clinton’s balls :)
NIH staff openly conspired against both the public and the President last time Trump was in charge in many different ways. What Fauci and his grantees did wasn't subtle, so the fixes aren't going to be subtle either: the NIH needs either to be abandoned entirely or it needs a massive purge and culture change.
Fundamentally a civilized society cannot tolerate bureaucracies that act like they did during COVID. Fauci is gone now but unfortunately the NIH as an institution is deserving of any and all damage Trump does to them. Frankly if I were in his shoes I'd be going much further than mere freezes.
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174 scientists either at the NIH or funded by the NIH have won the Nobel prize. https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/what-we-do/nih-almanac/nobel-l...
Odds are if you or someone you know has been treated with ... Any kind of modern medicine ... You have personally been impacted by NIH. That ignores the epidemiological knock on effects that we all benefit from oh and the whole "understanding of biological systems".
But screw it, they need to get in line with the party.
NIH also played a big role in the creation of biotech industry (funding much of the basic research that set the foundation for amazing medical treatments). I guess we'll have to depend more on the largesse of billionaires.
> funding much of the basic research
it's unfortunate that these funding don't actually bring in profits with which to maintain and continue future funding. It's why i somewhat dislike the publicly funded research model, because the commercialization of basic research is what leads to profit in the future, and this part is poorly done by gov'ts (or very well done by private parties looking to profit off public research).
I say that to change the system, these basic research should have IP associated with it, by which if companies use it, they pay a royalty after they achieve profit of $X (where X can be decided based on the research itself). It's obvious that taxes aren't sufficient.
Not everything needs to be profit generating, government funded research is how we get breakthroughs with very wide ranging benefits, especially when we are talking about advances in medicine. Profit making will often have the opposite effect by incentivizing the protection of existing monopolies, fake innovations to protect patentable revenue streams, and anti competitive regulatory capture.
Almost all of that is fixable by government. It doesn't have to be captured. It's paid out of taxes to not be captured. Monopoly prevention, same. Fake innovations - the way to protect against them is to make sure there's an environment in which competitors can arise.
In theory yes, in practice in the US today it’s becoming more and more of a fantasy. I hope we can get back there one day, we have the constitutional framework to do so, but the current system is running fast in the opposite direction, one party is rabidly embracing deregulation which will exacerbate these negative points, and the other one failed to live up to its ideals because the entire political class depends on lobbying dollars and was too busy focusing on performative agendas.
Undoing regulatory capture may well involve removing some regulations, though. That won't exacerbate regulatory capture.
NIH-funded research generates IP owned by the university that contracted with the NIH to do the work. This is due to Bayh-Dole (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act).
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The amount of scrutiny on Wuhan has been astronomical and they actually proved last year it was one of a handful of wild animals as the source of Covid-19. The infections started and were initially concentrated in the market, not the lab.
The Wuhan lab is a convenient conspiracy theory distraction. mRNA vaccines are miracle and I've been saying this from day one...
If any virus were to start kill kids, you'd all be lined up in milliseconds for the vaccine.
We got extremely lucky that Covid-19 left children out of its attack vector.
The next pandemic may not be so gracious.
The Spanish Flu in 1917-18 killed young and old in its first wave. Then the second wave it also took out 25-35yo adults. And if you got it, you were dead in 48 hours.
You people don't actually read anything and know nothing about why the CDC and Fauci acted as they did. They were expecting another Spanish Flu, and they got something very different. Different incubation time. Different attack vector. But they adapted and saved lives.
You're LUCKY those people knew what they were doing DESPITE Trump's actions. And he KNEW. He acted the way he did because he knew the proper action was to lock down everything and stop the spread, but he also knew that would destroy the economy. He traded a million lives in the U.S. for the economy.
You know every single Republican was vaccinated as soon as they got the chance. They just forgot to tell you.
> You're LUCKY those people knew what they were doing DESPITE Trump's actions. And he KNEW. He acted the way he did because he knew the proper action was to lock down everything and stop the spread, but he also knew that would destroy the economy. He traded a million lives in the U.S. for the economy.
As a non-US person - I don't understand this. Didn't all the locking down happen state by state anyway? He didn't stop anyone locking down, from what I understood? And he allocated $18bn to finding and distributing a vaccine for Covid[0]?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed
When meat packing plants slowed down, their owners started losing money and complained to the government, who granted them waivers to open. Workers there of course caught covid and spread it to their families.
They also pushed schools to open sooner on the basis that children were not as affected, but they caused teachers and staff to become infected and die.
Trump put his dilletante son-in-law in charge of the logistic effort to distribute equipment, and Jared went on to recruit his rich buddies on the task for instead of experts, prompting Jack Kennedy's grandson of all people to blow the whistle, wondering why they were in charge of this monumental task instead of you know... experts.
One thing they did was take equipment from states that needed it and redirect it to states that were loyal to Trump but didn't need the equipment.
They also seized equipment purchased by states at airports, to the point states had to meet planes on the tarmac and escort the equipment to hospitals with state police.
The end result is that the US had one of the worst pandemic responses in the early days, and today we have the distinction as the country with the most covid deaths (over 1 million) as well as having an absurdly high death rate compared to peer nations.
Remember when Idiocracy was just a movie?
I had a person on the other end of tech support tell me they’d _love_ to hear how my day was going as part of a script recently. Wasn’t Costco but still
amazing :D
But screw it, they need to get in line with the party.
To be fair to both sides, I hear your right saying hiring has becone political. With DEI pledges for hiring.
Hiring should be merit baed, and not based upon politics either.
would you expect double the nobels if you doubled their available resources?
another loaded question : do you believe the nih is the single government ran example of a perfectly lean and well managed agency without excess expenditure?
> $47.4 billion U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH)
$47.4B is a significant amount of money. I don't know whether their expenditures are appropriate. I don't see that in the article either. Unless someone does know that can comment, the $47.4B is unaccounted for in coloquial dialog, is it not?
> The hiring freeze is governmentwide
> pause on communications and travel ... Such pauses are not unprecedented when a new administration comes in.
Hmm, seem like the author is fomenting malice by using ‘devastating’ in the title. Perhaps building a character judgement that might not actually be there, helping to draw anger and hate from people already opposed to the new administration?
> NIH travel chief Glenda Conroy sent an email to senior agency officials early today notifying them of an “immediate and indefinite” suspension of all travel throughout HHS with few exceptions, such as currently traveling employees returning home. Researchers who planned to present their work at meetings must cancel their trips, as must NIH officials promoting agency programs off site or visiting distant branches of the agency. “Future travel requests for any reason are not authorized and should not be approved,” the memo said.
I guess someone needs to ask the question, how exactly is the NIH going to prevent people from "going home"? Does that mean simply that they will not be paying for their travel? Or for that matter, researchers who want to present their work must do it at their own cost or from approved unpaid time off?
I feel like someone is forgetting how hard the MAJORITY of US citizens have it. Inflation has hit non-wealthy people the most. They don't have jobs where they get paid travel or paid time off. While I don't mean to inject some form of class into the discussion, I do wonder what exactly are the things to be fearful of in this scenario. I'm just not seeing a worrying concern here given reality. Unless, there's a more rampant amount of fragility in the well paid health community? I'm sorry. I just don't get it.
> the $47.4B is unaccounted for in coloquial dialog, is it not?
Almost all of it is research grants for biomedical research, with priorities set by congress, e.g. they set what specific diseases, etc. should be worked on. This represents more than half of all funding for academic scientific research in the USA.
> Unless, there's a more rampant amount of fragility in the well paid health community?
Most of this work is done by graduate students and postdocs, which are paid very little. Traveling to conferences is part of doing their job, but they generally couldn't afford to pay for it themselves. They are already required to keep travel expenses down to the point where the hotels are often dirty and unsafe- usually whatever is cheapest in town.
Grad students in the USA currently make about $34k/year and postdocs (with PhDs) about $60k/year in the USA. They're usually in high cost of living urban areas, and in practice, they're often expected to work 60-80 hour weeks if they want to produce enough to remain in academia. This works out to less than minimum wage in the places they are generally located.
When I was a graduate student, I made just enough to rent a single bedroom in a large group house full of strangers, and as a postdoc I had a 4 hour round trip daily commute to get to someplace I could afford to live.
Thanks for the information. It helps. People like me just don't know.
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Have you ever worked in a government funded environment? Travel frugality is already the rule and has been for decades. This is going from "be frugal" to "don't".
NIH pays for work travel. When a person is paid for NIH travel, it's bare bones (cheaper hotel, cheaper tickets). It's for work- you go, you work many long hours drinking shitty coffee. Maybe at the end of the day there is some fun at a restaurant/bar but it's not paid for in the per diem. It was brutal- typically, if I travelled on NIH or NSF or DOE dime, it was a red eye from California to Washington DC, take cheapest possible transport to the NIH offices, then turn around and return the same night, so that I could go to work the next day (to be productive with little sleep so I could keep my job).
As for "non-wealthy": most scientists are not well-compensated. They spent their 20s and 30s working for very little pay (for example, in grad school my pay was $25-33K/year in San Francisco, and even as a Staff Scientist at a national lab, there's no way I could afford to buy a house in the area). They work punishingly hard jobs competing with super-ambitious people for fairly small amounts of money. I don't really see what your point is; breaking the NIH is not going to fix wealth disparity in the US.
Thanks for the information. It helps. People like me just don't know.
> breaking the NIH is not going to fix wealth disparity in the US
I didn't say or imply that. I'm sorry if that's how it sounded. I've traveled for work both paid and not, both with implicit and explicit frugality. I'm not seeing how a pause on paying for travel, as the norm quoted within the article, is an egregious practice, nor how it could break the NIH. Especially given it appears to be a norm when administrations turn over.
The propaganda of Trump's people has been very effective. They managed to paint a bunch of people who work hard for the US and aren't particularly well-compensated (compared to what tthey could get in industry) are some sort of "elites" who are actively working to keep conservsatives down.
The way to look at it is like this: even if previous administrations froze travel for a bit (I don't recall that ever happening; a bigger impact was when the state or the federal government failed to pass a budget. That would break everything for weeks to months), the intent of the Trump administration is to harm the people they don't like. This freeze is only an opening move; we can expect to see far more dire and serious attempts at damaging our valuable public institutions (which fairly serve liberals and conservatives alike).
I appreciate you saying "people like me just don't know". It's rare that people will actually listen to the other side and admit they lacked perspective.
Here's a really excellent piece on the guts of how NIH's processes work:
https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/distinguishing-real-...
> Another consequence of the communications pause, according to an NIH staffer involved with clinical trials at NIH's Clinical Center, is that agency staff cannot meet with patient groups or release newsletters or other information to recruit patients into trials. Another unknown is whether NIH researchers will still be allowed to submit papers to peer-reviewed journals.
That seems unnecessary at best.
None of this is necessary, that's the point.
>Officials have also ordered a communications pause, a freeze on hiring, and an indefinite ban on travel.
I thought trump was bringing American jobs back? So far he's impacted thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of jobs in 2 days, and hasn't even made a plan for how to get americans hired.
(yes, a miniscule piece of me is enjoying how fast the Schedenfreude came. But still, I do mostly want to focus on fixing the country over pointing fingers).
people who voted for trump is not going to change their mind based on evidence. They're essentially voting on faith, it's almost like a religion.
I guess there's hope for the tens of thousands that decided to sit out this time too.
If that is the case, is there any way back from Trumpism to the "normal" Republican party from the era of Bush?
Short of civil war, nuclear war, or a twenty-point election blow-out, no.
Trump just pardoned the core of an army of thugs that will be legally allowed to stow election chaos in every swing district in the country.
Watch. In the mid-terms there will be violence. Then possibly martial law. Then the end of our constitution.
Then Trump will have us all spying on each other to see who's loyal and people will just get murdered without consequence.
He will do everything in his power to become a dictator.
And with the immunity decision he doesn't even have to worry about going to jail for it. I hope we are wrong. I hope people come out of the woodwork to tell that fool where to shove it. But I am afraid the tech oligarchy + right wing media has such a hold on information sources for a majority that half the country won't even know what's happening.
Trump just mandated a legally binding and fundamental shift from equity-based hiring (eg: affirmative action, DEI, et al.) back to merit-based.
This by its very nature necessitates a temporary freeze on all human resources activites pending reviews to see if any as they currently stand violate equal opportunity guarantees and other requirements based on objective factors.
Personally, and I say this as a minority (Japanese-American male), I 300% approve of all this. People must be hired based on their character and capability, not because they happened to be born with the right skin color or sexual organs.
As someone with a fair amount of experience on hiring review boards in the public sector (local and federal), I felt what many of these programs/approaches did was ensure that minorities were given a better opportunity to be evaluated based on their merits. My expectation now is that if someone is a minority they're going to have a much harder time getting a shot to demonstrate that character and capability at all, maybe not though, time will tell.
Perhaps for some it's viewed as a positive if these groups are underrepresented in terms of percentage of federal employees as long as their roles are filled by someone perceived to be more capable with stronger character (weird how frequently that's a white guy these days).
The war against DEI is clearly over so not that it matters anymore but I have to push back every time I see this sort of comment. DEI, as it relates to hiring, does not and has never meant that people are hired because of their sex or skin color. What it means in practice is that organizations cast a wider net in the search for, and I can't stress this enough, qualified applicants. This wider net has proven to bring forth better candidates to organizations. Also, casting a wider net opens the door for people who are white/asian but come from less traditional backgrounds and/or less prestigious schools to apply as well. Please read up on what DEI truly is before applauding its demise. As scientist, engineers, programmers, and technologists (I assume you are one of those if you are in this forum) we can't blindly believe the propaganda of either side of the political spectrum. In this case, a coordinated effort has deliberately mischaracterized DEI and merit-based hiring as opposites. They are not opposites.
>qualified applicants.
The problem is what "qualified" means under Affirmative Action, DEI, et al..
As a Japanese-American, I've both first- and second-hand witnessed racism against Asians (and Whites) in favor of Blacks and Hispanics in the name of Affirmative Action. That is racism and discrimination in both ways and there have been court rulings prohibiting Affirmative Action, I in absolute terms cannot in good faith accept Affirmative Action.
The "D" in DEI stands for "Diversity", which in the majority of cases meant hiring people with stronger weighting placed on their race or nationality and sex. This again is very literally racism, sexism, and discrimination and completely unacceptable.
The "E" in DEI stands for "Equity", which in clearer terms means Equal Conclusions, not Equal Opportunities as indirectly declared in our Declaration of Independence (all men created equal with an unalienable right to pursuit of happiness). This is an affront to one of the very cornerstones of our country and the American Dream, which is completely unacceptable.
Lastly the "I" in DEI stands for "Inclusion", which would be fine were it not for the fact that the actual implementation has involved excluding peoples who do not subscribe to certain narratives. Nowhere has this been more obvious than in politics and specifically identity politics, where the Center and Right simply call me an American but the Left call me various labels. I very sincerely don't have time for that divisive bullshit.
As someone who loves and appreciates science and technology and all the wonders we can accomplish, I reiterate my 300% support for the absolute rescinding of equity-based hiring and other equity-based human resources programmes. As Martin Luther King once said, I too dream of a day when everyone will be judged by the quality of their character. I dream of a day when everyone will be judged by what they are capable of, not what they are born as.
You experienced racism and are calling it DEI
The sheer amount of regression against social liberalism over the last few decades truly is astonishing; you're literally trying to tell me that racism is equality and okay.
I hope we're on the cusp of reversing course on all that so we can make MLK's dream a reality again.
DEI and other such affirmative action concepts are racism.
its a race based caste quota system in reality with a priesthood that accidentally spread racism. It produces the same results reliably as real world socialism. No need to read up on idealistic texts which produce the same outcome with the given real humans.
I too have to push back, because I have been the victim of these laws and profiling, and I'm not an "ignorant" person falling for propaganda as you seem to imply is the only way for anti-DEI sentiments to occur.
DEI is ideology and hidden threats of retaliation under the guise of "equality". And because nothing can be explicit, or it's all hidden under feel-good language (exactly the kind you used in your post). It adds a layer of redirection about what's really going on, and it all gets put forth with everyone having the understanding (because of examples) that if they don't find "diverse enough qualified" candidates, then they are racist and will be punished.
Meanwhile, the language provides cover for blatant anti-white, anti-asian and anti-male discrimination:
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/06/tech-industry-2020-anti-raci...
They even have specialized software that uses AI to determine race (profiling?): https://www.piratewires.com/p/gem-hr-software-dei
Or what about ESG that has a racial-quota point system that allows investors and people to discriminate against companies that don't conform? https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/10/30/racial-equity-aud...
This kind of stuff is just the tip of the iceberg, there is more: https://www.bloomberg.com/company/press/bloomberg-2023-gei/
What about the fact that several countries (Western) have explicit gender-based quotas enacted as law. E.g. Norway, Germany, France, India, and others.
Or what about countries that have actual race-based points systems to discriminate against minority (white) groups: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Economic_Empowerment And no, just because it's some obscure and obfuscated "points system" doesn't mean it isn't racial discrimination, profiling and retaliation against companies that don't conform.
How some places in the US have race-quotas for boards: https://pacificlegal.org/discriminatory-mandates-prevent-qua...
And there are so many more, it's right infront of our eyes:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/red-state-sues-tec...
So why don't we drop the pretense, ordinary people see what's really going on, and no amount of sugar-coating and "feel good" words will make the very real discrimination go away, and they won't be gaslight and have their concerns waved away because of "falling for right wing propaganda" and "please read up on what DEI truly is".
Except of course what you will now get is jobs preferentially for those who are white, male Trump loyalists. You're 300% delusional when you think there's any chance that from now on "character and capability" will be the relevant hiring metrics. Just have a look at the assortment of clowns, creeps, conmen and criminals that is Trump's cabinet.
It is a exercise of power for the sake of power. The pointlessness of it is the point.
The point is to create chaos and panic so that , after a sufficient period of general suffering, the government can come back with a "solution to the problem" which is typically some vastly inferior approach with heavy privatization and corruption built in, but as the stakeholders are desperate for relief they have no choice but to accept.
This is how you tear the government down and replace it with corrupt oligarchic interests
Joke's on them, they're just going to hasten a revolution.
I hear Mario Party has been pretty popular recently.
Except that this is the kind of governance that American voters chose. They can't claim to have been misled. They explicitly voted for oligarchy and this is what they asked for.
If you're waiting for American voters to wake up and demand good governance you'll be waiting a really long time.
I don't expect voters to wake up, I do expect the assassins of the rich and powerful to become folk heroes along with riots and vandalism of corporate property, and when the government tries to crack down on it, against the government as well.
That's why they're partnering with Oracle and AI companies to build datacenters to pull in and automatically analyze all available private and public video feeds and communications to monitor for potential violent action. China got there first, the US will rapidly roll out the same playbook but painted with liberal terminology. It's not about harmony here, it's about freedom and protecting ourselves from terrorists and the radical left.
> That's why they're partnering with Oracle and AI companies to build datacenters to pull in and automatically analyze all available private and public video feeds and communications to monitor for potential violent action.
Larry Ellison said it on record if anyone doubts it. "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on."[1]
[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/omnip...
I feel like his yacht shouldn't be that hard to track...
What a dystopian hellscape we are approaching.
The oligarchs are playing a losing game in the long term, they'll always have to rely on people to help them, and it's too easy to kill someone if you're willing to sacrifice your life to do it.
Now let's go break some windows!
Shocktheraphy as seen in Iraq
The scientific establishment has had 2 major crises recently - the replication crisis, and the totally insane unscientific and politicized handling of COVID.
Additionally there is undeniably a lot of waste, nepotism / back scratching, and completely ludicrous funded social “science”.
While what’s happening now may wind up bad, I have seen very little push from the establishment itself to do anything to restore public faith in the current system. Trump is the executioner, but the conviction was handed down before he came around.
@dang why is this flagged?
The replication crisis stuff is mostly a message board fixation. The problem we have is that people unfamiliar with the field don't have a sense of what the denominator is, only the numerator. There is a truly gargantuan amount of NIH-funded research happening; NIH funds over 30,000 PIs per year, and those grants cover years worth of research, most of which involve teams of 5-10 people.
I'm not saying research fraud doesn't matter or isn't worth the stories written about it. I'm saying that people commenting on it generally don't have any sense of its scale, and fill in some very weird blanks about it.
In ml basically every paper from a Western university is either useless to industry or not replicable.
It is very much a crisis and one that academia has no interest to solve.
In a sane world we'd start with figuring out what the mystery meat in the version of pytorch used for training is and work up from there. There is zero funding for building up the required infrastructure for doing actual science instead of whatever the fuck you call the current mess.
Basically anything on a more complex dataset than cifar is probably a statistical fluke because of hyper parameter tuning. To find this out you will need to spend three months building up all the bit rotten code that doesn't work from the paper. To draw the conclusion that everyone is full of shit you'll need to waste years of your life.
I'm an AI/ML researcher. If this was true, then we would never have made progress in the first place.
Instead, we're making astounding progress at a rate that no one really would have expected.
Learning to replicate papers is a skill. It's just a matter of practice. You'll get it if you try.
The progress isn't happening at Western universities.
Why you keep emphasihing the "Western" part? Non-western are any better?
To a first order approximation all of the progress is happening at Western universities and the companies they founded. Everyone else is playing catch-up.
It's hard to even name mediocre advances that come from anywhere else. As well as the entire hardware and software stack that we have.
You clearly have some sort of political agenda here and not a technical argument.
Not directly tied to GP's complaints but another thing that often comes up are people complaining about the frivolity of the research without understanding how basic science works. "Can you believe we're paying money to understand fruit fly mating behavior!?!", well yes, because fruit flies are model organisms and developing an understanding of these very mundane sounding things are important before being able to make broader hypotheses
I think something like a very public, televised shaming of researchers found to be fraudulent. Furthermore far, far more done to catch fraud before it is published, like bounties paid out, and instant career destruction to the fraudsters.
There was decades of “but everyone is doing it!” in the system, so much so that fraudsters became presidents of Ivy League institutions. The reckoning has not come.
This is what I mean by how messageboardy this issue is.
What is your solution to prevent continued fraud and abuse in our research process, other than random people going through published papers?
The optimal amount of fraud in any large system is almost never "zero".
Maoist struggle sessions, now with shitcoins!
If you cant replicate foundational papers your faculty is a house of cards built on lies.
Have you read this post about p-value suspiciousness as a means of testing for widespread non-replicable results? https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/ranking-fields-by-p-value-suspici...
And that's not to speak of things like biotech which is full of photoshopped images of fluorescence and whatnot.
I've been on a messageboard for more than a couple years, I am familiar with the concept of p-hacking, and it has nothing to do with what I just wrote.
The claim in the post is that the replication crisis is real. Of course, it's among those you consider messageboard folk so you can dismiss it on those grounds, but I think you are wrong to say it has nothing to do with what you wrote since it attempts to deal with both the numerator and the denominator by taking a sample across fields.
I don't know what point you're trying to make here. Is it that there are fraudulent research papers in journals? Everybody knows that's true. Is it that there are tens of thousands of them produced every year? That's made up.
People are counting on readers not to know or take the time to learn how much research is happening, so that individual instances of the problem (in the United States) seem systemic.
Here speaks someone with no scientific training or knowledge of the NIH, public health, or how any of it operates.
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Can you elaborate on "years of failure"?
what? I cannot even parse this argument.
COVID was not a scientific crisis. It was an amazing success. We built and rolled out a vaccine in record time.
Science works. Amazingly well. We're making progress on cancer, on many disorders that used to kill or limit many people's lives.
Instead of actually looking at what science does for you constantly, every day, you prefer to attack people.
The result will be tragic. Realistically, your loved ones will die of heart disease or cancer. Sounds like a really smart move to not fund science that will save their lives. Much better to support Trump and save up for their funerals!
Wait until you learn about the first unscientific politicized traitor to Freedom in the USA. General George Washington, having survived smallpox himself, ordered the mass variolation (via inoculation, much more dangerous than a vaccine) of the Continental Army to protect troops from the disease, marking one of the first large-scale public health initiatives in American history.
Inoculating the military isn’t public health. Nobody would call today’s military vaccines a “public health program”, its military readiness.
The word “public” is key. You know, the overall population.
I thought this was a militia made up of the public, so a modern comparison would be anyone in the current USA who happens to execute their second amendment rights?
I'm sorry, what?
Pretty sure that would bee illegal in several ways today.
Members of the US military actually get more vaccines and, until recently, had fewer protections with respect to declining them than the typical US citizen (specifically with COVID, Trump has indicated, not sure if he's done it yet, that he'll reinstate people who refused a lawful order to be vaccinated for it; so now I guess they can just refuse any vaccines even if it impacts readiness). During the run up to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, US service members were vaccinated for smallpox (appropriate for this thread). That was this century, 30+ years after smallpox was declared eradicated.
They were also vaccinated for other diseases. Join the military and you sign away a lot of your rights (arguably for some good benefits, but we'll see how the new VA head and others treat the veterans and current troops).
I was mostly thinking of how today you'd need three levels of clinical studies and an FDA approval.
The war would be over long before that process concluded.
Or maybe the military can decide to order unapproved vaccines?
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>Every single person responsible for how the government handled COVID needs to be fired.
Where do you stop? Because the administration overseeing the start of it just got re-elected.
Which part of the response? Vaccines and masking were effective. Or was there something else you were referring to?
What's really cool is seeing the giant drop-off in flu rates during the lockdowns. Flu infections fell 64% and at least one strain went extinct. I'd link to the NIH publication but I'm not sure it'll stay up, lol. [1]
[1] https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/a-sharp-drop-in-flu-cases-duri...
We just rehired the guy in charge…minor observation I’m sure.
So Trump belongs in jail then? Or do you have a special carve out for the president that oversaw this?
I’m confused by this sentiment. How was science at fault for the collective government response to a global pandemic when the hospitals were full, millions died, and countries closed their borders in attempts to slow the spread? With hindsight you may find some poor choices but at the time, what could a scientist have done differently in your opinion?
There is an entire litany of complaints that I've seen. It typically centers around "we shouldn't have funded this virology research in the first place" and "the government should have been totally transparent about every single piece of knowledge it had, and clearer about things that were ambiguous" and "it was a mistake to lie about masks not working to save masks for health workers" and freedom of choice around vaccination.
Doing public health at scale is incredibly hard. Doing so in a politicized environment with active disinformation is even harder. I'm not going to fault the government response. By and large it did what I expected it to do. Ideally, there would be an honest postmortem and we'd improve our techniques for the future, but I worry that won't every happen again.
Or to put it another way, "The cruelty is the point."
People love that line, but is it true? The premise of this freeze --agree or not-- is that the U.S. Government spends too much.
Or are you suggesting that this is to get back at NIH because of Fauci?
Or, are you saying that Republicans hate cancer research, or...?
> Or are you suggesting that this is to get back at NIH because of Fauci?
Yes, I believe thats a main driver for why this administration does not like the NIH
Considering we had over a hundred million Americans fall ill to a global pandemic that ended barely two years ago, one might conclude that the only reason to hobble the groups that are intended to fight such outbreaks (among many other tasks) would be a poor decision. In fact, one could conclude based on the literal rhetoric from the President and members of his staff, that it’s out of sheer spite.
Which itself is amazing, considering that he was in charge while it happened.
If you still believe the republican have principles that they actually believe in, I have a bridge to sell you
I think arcticbull is saying NIH is not necessary, essentially in favor of the freezes.
I am not in favor of shuttering one of the agencies responsible for public health, although I can see why my comment could be read either way. If you believe in reform there are compassionate ways to do it.
CDC probably does more public health? The work NIH funds through its grant process is not broadly "public health"; it's virtually all American biotechnology research and bio/biochem basic research. Public health deals with the interface of health knowledge and public policy and communication; people credentialed in public health are not, generally, practicing scientists as we'd think about them. NIH grant researchers, on the other hand, are wearing white lab coats and working with fume hoods.
No, HHS does the vast majority of public health research in the US, which includes both CDC and NIH. The CDC budget is roughly a quarter of the NIH budget; most public health research is NIH-funded. The CDC is more operational- they take what is learned and apply it to prevention and treatment.
It may in fact be the case that more HHS-funded public health work is downstream of NIH than of CDC, but NIH is obviously not primarily a public health organization; here's the most recent RePORT data:
https://tinyurl.com/nih-grant-report
Yeah, sounds right. Let's list the unnecessary drug treatments funded directly by NIH.
The treatment of HIV with AZT and other HAART drugs. AIDS is caused by "poppers" not HIV, duh!
Treatment of breast cancer and Myeloid Leukemia and with Herceptin and Imatinib. Fake cancers!
Vaccines for HPV and Corona viruses are useless, because horse de-wormers treat both! Also, they're not real because COVID and cervical cancer are harmless.
It's time to stop the insanity and realize that jade eggs in your bum are the real solution.
Other useless drugs funded by NIH: Depo-Provera, Taxol, L-DOPA, Propranolol, Tagamet, Embrel, Tamoxifen, Cyclosporin, Warfarin, Methotrexate, Hydrocortisone.
Truly sad that I believed you were being genuine for a second
Poe's Law strikes again.
See, there's my mistake. You could tell. I'll try harder to appear genuine.
They weren't saying the NIH was unnecessary, but since that thread got flagged, it's not easy to see their clarification.
My guess is what happening is influenced by and patterned after the Musk's Twitter initial period - getting rid of what Musk didn't like from the start, review and cuts/layoffs of what didn't pass the review.
With all the due respect to the science having been done at/with NIH, one can suspect that the bureaucracy there is out of control similar to what we see at academia. The huge sign that the things got really rotten is that NIH couldn't own its work in Wuhan on the coronavirus, and that Fauci needed preemptive pardon. So some dead tissue debriding seems to be in order.
The government grows like a cancer as it has no mechanism like bankruptcy to remove dead wood.
Agencies start out with a mission, then turn into a business, and finally become a con job. Most agencies are deep into the corrupt territory at this point.
I assume the NIH was singled out as some sort of vengeance for the CV19 response?
Hopefully they'll restore some semblance of order after the pound of flesh is theatrically exacted.
Sounds like it's happening in at least some other parts of the government, too. This order seems to have paused disbursement of even some already-committed funding:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/unle...
"Sec. 7. Terminating the Green New Deal. (a) All agencies shall immediately pause the disbursement of funds appropriated through the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (Public Law 117-169) or the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (Public Law 117-58), including but not limited to funds for electric vehicle charging stations made available through the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program and the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure Discretionary Grant Program, and shall review their processes, policies, and programs for issuing grants, loans, contracts, or any other financial disbursements of such appropriated funds for consistency with the law and the policy outlined in section 2 of this order. Within 90 days of the date of this order, all agency heads shall submit a report to the Director of the NEC and Director of OMB that details the findings of this review, including recommendations to enhance their alignment with the policy set forth in section 2. No funds identified in this subsection (a) shall be disbursed by a given agency until the Director of OMB and Assistant to the President for Economic Policy have determined that such disbursements are consistent with any review recommendations they have chosen to adopt."
My issue is more with the CDC. Are there state institutions that can take up the slack locally? Asking for a friend with kids who wants to move to a place with a lower risk of getting measles
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Pretty sure a bunch of statistics that might be used to argue against Republican talking points are going to disappear or not be updated. Maybe they won't even get to be collected. It's a lot easier to lie if you prevent scientists and health care professionals from undercutting you with inconvenient truths.
As someone who has worked in public health and epidemiology, this kind of open ended restriction is extremely concerning.
Also appears to undercut the whole free speech thing that President Trump supposedly supports, and that the constitution provides for in the first amendment.
>statistics that might be used to argue against Republican talking points are going to disappear
So, you're saying the WHOLE map will be drawn with Sharpie? ;-)
> Also appears to undercut the whole free speech thing that President Trump supposedly supports
Saying he supports "free speech" and actually doing it are two different things. In reality he supports speech that supports his preferred narrative of reality and opposes speech that doesn't.
Free speech, states rights, government accountability, any serious sense of libertarianism and so on are all with the caveat of “if I like it” as far as the current Republican Party is concerned.
If you've worked as a scientist, why not gather evidence before jumping to conclusions? For example, you could inquire of the administration why they did this. They're actually putting in quite an effort at transparency.
My concerns about the future are based on what President Trump did in 2017 with the NIH budget (attempting to cut it 22%)¹ thus preventing important scientific research funding, as well as removal of covid-19 health statistics from the CDC in 2020² in the middle of a major pandemic.
Unfortunately, given that he is now holding the highest office in the US, it's a well known fact that Donald Trump lies constantly both when in office³ and when campaigning⁴, and I lack all faith in his administration's supposed transparency.
1.https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-plan-reduce-over... 2.https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/07/16/coronavirus... 3. https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/16/politics/fact-check-dale-top-... 4. https://www.salon.com/2024/11/09/six-big-lies-that-won-the-e...
Because for some people, this is not a scientific peer-reviewed discussion, but rather typical conversation normal people have over dinner table with gut feelings and limited information. Just assume that "I believe", "in my opinion", "AFAIK" are implied for statements like above.
Kinda telling the NIH to mask up
HHS suspended their association with the Eco health Alliance, so I'm not sure what vector is of worry.
https://oversight.house.gov/release/breaking-hhs-formally-de...
https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-says-grantee-fai...
I am waiting to see what will happen with NASA, NSF... Obviously it's less important than health, but still thousands of people, lives.
if musk et al cannot fill all the positions they have open with people leaving NIH, be sure NASA is certainly next.
> "The hiring freeze is governmentwide, whereas a pause on communications and travel appears to be limited to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), NIH’s parent agency. Such pauses are not unprecedented when a new administration comes in."
Calm down, guys. It's transitional, and it's not unusual.
From the article:
> The hiring freeze is governmentwide, whereas a pause on communications and travel appears to be limited to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), NIH’s parent agency. Such pauses are not unprecedented when a new administration comes in. But some NIH staff suggested these measures, which include pulling job ads and rescinding offers, are more extreme than any previously.
...
> Previous administrations have imposed communications pauses in their first days. And the administration of Barack Obama continued a cap on attendance at scientific meetings first imposed by the George W. Bush administration, which in some cases meant staff canceled trips to meetings.
> But an immediate, blanket ban on travel is unusual, says one longtime researcher in NIH's intramural program. “I don't think we've ever had this and it's pretty devastating for a postdoc or graduate student who needs to present their work and network to move ahead in their career,” the researcher says.
This is not an extraordinary event. It is not an attack on the NIH. It is a transitional pause, which is substantially normal when administrations change hands. The wailing and moaning is silly. Give it a week.
FWIW, I was around (i.e. working on NIH funded grants) for the last transition, and I don't remember this happening. I agree and hope that it might not be an ominous sign, but I don't think it's the norm. We're being asked to pull out of not only conferences, but even out of cross-organizational Zoom chats that involve certain institutions. Where I work, the people who've been doing this longer than me are not saying "relax everybody, this is fine," they seem to be freaking out a little bit too.
>But some NIH staff suggested these measures, which include pulling job ads and rescinding offers, are more extreme than any previously.
> halted midstream a training workshop for junior scientists, called off a workshop on adolescent learning minutes before it was to begin, and canceled meetings of two advisory councils. Panels that were scheduled to review grant proposals also received eleventh-hour word that they wouldn’t be meeting.
> “People are just at a loss because they also don’t know what’s coming next. I have never seen this level of confusion and concern in people that are extremely dedicated to their mission,” the scientist says.
>But an immediate, blanket ban on travel is unusual, says one longtime researcher in NIH's intramural program. “I don't think we've ever had this and it's pretty devastating for a postdoc or graduate student” who needs to present their work and network to move ahead in their career, the researcher says.
"Usual" but overly extreme. Seems to fit 2025.
Page 284 of Project 2025:
"The incestuous relationship between the NIH, CDC, and vaccine makers—with all of the conflict of interest it entails—cannot be allowed to continue, and the revolving door between them must be locked. As Severino writes, “Funding for scientific research should not be controlled by a small group of highly paid andunaccountable insiders at the NIH, many of whom stay in power for decades. The NIH monopoly on directing research should be broken.” What’s more, NIH has long “been at the forefront in pushing junk gender science.” The next HHS secretary should immediately put an end to the department’s foray into woke transgender activism."
This event is entirely extraordinary and politicized. Nothing will be better "in a week". The actions being taken were telegraphed well ahead of time and were widely known to be part of a strategy to destroy the NIH and replace it with some kind of propaganda arm.
I can fix it:
:)Likely many folks who depend on funding from NIH voted for Trump.
Feel sorry for those who didn’t vote for him. No sympathy for those who did.
Can you be more specific -- who are you thinking of?
It's scary to think that Trump seems to actually believe right wing media's black and white propaganda. The end point of this kind of anti-intellectual, anti-urban movement is something like Pol Pot's killing fields.
Doesn't it seem a tiny wee bit like a hyperbole?
What I think we're re-discovering is that it's not so straightforward to tell while it's happening. I'm willing to bet during the rise of people like Mussolini, Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler, etc. many people were concerned, and many others were saying it was nothing and they were just being hyperbolic. However, it was the same with times when it didn't turn out like that.
What concerns me most about this, is the general attitude of entirely dehumanizing specific groups of people. That, I expect, is the crux that makes atrocities possible, and it is happening now.
> I'm willing to bet during the rise of people like Mussolini, Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler, etc. many people were concerned, and many others were saying it was nothing and they were just being hyperbolic.
Yes. A German Jewish newspaper published this.[1]
"We do not subscribe to the view that Herr Hitler and his friends, now finally in possession of the power they have desired for so long, will enact the proposals circulating in the Angriff or the Völkischer Beobachter newspapers; they will not suddenly divest German Jews of their constitutional rights, lock them away in race ghettos, or subject them to the avaricious and murderous impulses of the mob. They not only cannot do this because many other crucial factors hold their powers in check, ranging from the Reich president to some of the political parties affiliated with them, but they also clearly do not want to go this route, for when one acts as a European world power, the whole atmosphere is more conducive to ethical reflection upon one’s better self than to revisiting one’s earlier oppositional role: operating as a European world power means that one seeks an enduring place in the harmonious exchange of peoples of culture. And beyond that, it is clear that the powers at Wilhelmstrasse no longer see demagogic appeals designed to heat up mass gatherings of the Volk as strictly necessary. The new Prussian Minister of the Interior [Hermann Göring] can perform a far greater service to the old comrades in arms and party friends by rejuvenating the huge, state civil service along National Socialist lines than by making open concessions to the brutal manifesta- tions of hatred of Jews."
[1] https://www.ushmm.org/m/pdfs/20091110-Matthaus-Ch-1.pdf
Wow that is really something else, and closely echoes what people are saying nowadays.
I wonder if a term like "Hitler Derangement Syndrome" was popular at the time.
It was exactly like that with Putin, as well. To remind, the guy was elected fair and square in a landslide originally. And there were people back then who screamed from the rooftops that if you elect a former KGB operative as a "strong hand", that'll be the last free elections that you'll have. And yes, there were many in the middle who laughed at them. I wonder how many of those have left the country since.
Probably twentyish years ago, I read some comment or other that when reading right-wing propaganda, just mentally replace "immigrant" with "jew" and see how it sounds to you. Since then I can never not see that, and I think it really is the key to understanding the nature of these movements; they thrive on dehumanization of groups of humans. There's an LBJ quote that springs to mind immediately:
> “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
>What concerns me most about this, is the general attitude of entirely dehumanizing specific groups of people
And they are armed to the teeth.
What does America or even Trump have to gain by installing a dictatorship? Assuming he even could, which is probably worth arguing. He is already the most powerful executive of the most powerful (by far, it is not close) and future-proof (again, by far) nation on Earth. His actions in my view are more aligned with getting America the best deal ahead of whatever unfavorable population and trade collapses await the world in the next few decades. As an American, I only half expect democracy to survive putting my cohort (millennials) through retirement. Industrialization has left the world on a pretty bleak course, with America most equipped to weather it. Most of the moves I see the current administration readying itself for are ones to strengthen our already dominant geopolitical advantages worldwide. Hard to do that if you have a civil war to manage on top of it.
What did past demagogues and dictators have to gain? It always turned out awful in the end, but concerns over that didn't stop them or their supporters.
Trump appears to have no stable ideals, he seems to be only interested in attention and appearing successful. He's previously tried unsuccessfully to launch into politics from the left, right, and center but eventually found traction with this new movement, so he doubled down and played the demagogue after a lifetime of being the epitome of the elite.
Ultimately there is a narrative that regular people are doing bad economically because of a few specific groups of people, and that this can be fixed by dehumanizing, terrorizing, and persecuting these people. They will need an all powerful leader not constrained by laws, opposing politics, or human rights to "solve the problem." Of course people think his actions are "aligned with getting America the best deal" or else they wouldn't want to help install him as dictator.
Trump seems to have gotten pretty far along this path already. He appointed his own sycophant supreme court that ruled him above the law and unprosecutable. He failed at trying to overthrow an election, but managed to get away scott free by intimidating people out of doing their jobs, and eventually pardoned everyone criminally convicted of participating. He was convicted of 34 felonies in a trial by jury, but received no sentence. Now he's experimented with simply announcing the 14th amendment of the US constitution invalid by executive order, and will see if he gets away with it- if so, I think that qualifies as being successfully installed as a dictator.
Honestly there are too many parts of what you wrote that I disagree with to bother writing much of a rebuttal. The people spoke about the border and other cultural issues. They spoke about the justice system and its targeting of Trump. You can be for strong borders and safe spaces for the majority of people without being for “dehumanizing” people. So that to me is disingenuous.
I’m not likely to change your mind on these things, so what I’ll say instead is to look at what he is actually doing geopolitically through the lens of a declining world, which is what we are about to be experiencing as literally every other port country in the world begins its population decline.
> You can be for strong borders and safe spaces for the majority of people without being for “dehumanizing” people
Perhaps one could be, but these people are not- their rhetoric about immigrants is based on hate and dehumanization, and the entire narrative that immigrants are harmful economically and culturally is a lie. Moreover, it is a red herring that causes people to ignore all of the real reasons people are struggling - so nobody will take actual steps towards solving any real problems- and those problems will continue to get worse as a result.
I refuse to be like the Germans who said "davon haben wir nichts gewusst" - "we knew nothing about that." I will not participate in dehumanizing, persecuting, or abusing other people, and I will do everything in my power to stop them.
> justice system and its targeting of Trump
He has Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), and he cannot accept responsibility or fault for anything- even crimes he was found guilty of by a jury. I have experience with people like that in real life and can spot it from a mile away, and I think our society would be a much better place to live for everyone if more people could spot this, and had some awareness or "antibodies" against emotional manipulation in general.
Lastly, thank you for being able to disagree with me in a calm and respectful manner- that is a rare thing online nowadays.
I can definitely understand. I actually think immigrants are necessary for our future, but I want them to follow our laws and not just have an open border. When my generation reaches retirement age the rest of the world will already be crippled more or less, and we will need the supplemental workforce that immigration can provide.
Politics can definitely get heated. I have always thought that you can get far even with people you strongly disagree with by assuming the best of their motives. Thanks for engaging with me :)
<< their rhetoric about immigrants is based on hate and dehumanization,
Have you actually talked to anyone, because this reads like a bumper sticker.
I will speak for myself. I am an immigrant, and I can tell you that while I am nervous for relatively obvious reasons, I also recognize that the inflow of illegal immigration is ( was? ) too high ( even official stats for illegal crossings are crazy ) to not piss off existing population. Under normal circumstances, few would give a fuck about a kid overstaying on their school visa, but all that has been institutionalized and normalized to the point, that the population chose an extreme to correct it.
There is no hate. There is simply a cold, harsh calculation in most people's heads and goes something like this: is there enough resources to support my family? No? Then where are the resources going ( cuz I already pay enough in taxes )?
And most people, normal people, when faced with a choice of saving their family or some nameless crowd will choose their families.
>>> justice system and its targeting of Trump >> He has Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), and he cannot accept responsibility or fault for anything-
Both statements can be true at the same time. Both states and feds threw everything they could at him and effectively failed. The 34 felony count - a talking point that is being trotted out regularly - probably being the prime example of this.
For example, do you remember what type of felony it is and on what shaky grounds it was bumped into a felony? Do you remember the mugshot and misplaced glee it generated?
At that point, I was already talking about Democrats' inability to read the room; that the felon label ( even if it is successful ) will not be useful this election cycle, but no one was listening. More amusingly, it seems that a lot has closed their ears further ( even though there was a brief moment of introspection caused by the election result ) again. Only difference now is that the marching orders have changed from 'felon' to 'nazi'.
It is tiring and predictable.
<< I refuse to be like the Germans who said "davon haben wir nichts gewusst" - "we knew nothing about that." I will not participate in dehumanizing, persecuting, or abusing other people, and I will do everything in my power to stop them.
Do what you will. Believe what you will. You seem to have already fallen into the 'he a nazi and nazi bad' camp and I have zero intent to change your mind at this point ( my conversations with people pre-election made it clear to me some of it is rather pointless ).
<< people to ignore all of the real reasons people are struggling
Maybe.. just maybe if you focused on that part, you could get people's attention. But hey, nazis!
Probably. But this political movement won't stop with this term. 2016 Trump was more moderate than today's Trump. The next time the movement is stopped it will come back even more ferociously, especially since the movement is fed constant propaganda about being aggrieved and revenge fantasies.
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Dunno. Wasn’t there for the ramp up.
The USSR wasn't doomed by communism per se. it was doomed by prioritising ideology and politics over any other considerations. The US is now in the same doom-spiral.
> Even more troubling to many researchers is a pause on study sections that many received word of today. Without such meetings, NIH cannot make research awards.
Cancer and many other topics of research will be hurt by this.
Cancer, infectious diseases, brain disorders, HIV and the RECOVER programme for Long Covid. All have significant NIH funding and will be halted by this.
Lots of smaller funded conditions as well, the NIH does a lot both from a clinical research and a public health perspective.
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I don't know if they are more competent now. There are just fewer people willing to push back, and few to no guardrails in place for when the leader doesn't adhere to the usual governmental and ethical norms.
I guess it depends on what you mean with "competent". In essence their pitch is that government is bad, so from that sense "competent" means "able to burn these institutions down". From that perspective these people do seem more "competent" in various ways: there is less chaos, a better sense on how to use the legal means, more focus. Trump may be a unfocused bumbling fool, but the Project 2025 people aren't.
This is not my (and presumably your) definition of "competent", which would be "able to run these institutions well", or something along those lines.
And since it seems there isn't any real accountability any more other than anything that is strictly legally imposed, anything that goes wrong in this process is just blamed on the democrats, deep state, or whatever. Or its simply denied that the problems exists in the first place.
This was the sense in which I was using the word "competent", thanks for clarifying. What I meant was now they are better able to realize their destructive vision, but insofar as I can tell its mostly the same vision as it ever was.
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Nonplussed here. In what way is normality returning to the social order?
Or are you pegging the 'normal' social order to some particular time in the past?
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I'm pretty sure the current administration has already shown themselves willing to abandon many previous established norms formed over the history of the US so I am not entirely convinced this is returning to "normalcy".
Well maybe authoritarianism is is the 'natural' place that the social order tends to.
It's weird that people like you use dyeing hair as some kind of shorthand for radical leftist ideology as if you stepped out of a time portal from the 1950s. Zoe Quinn really did a number on you guys, didn't she?
The position they've taken is that they want to shift cancer funding from treatment to prevention. I have no idea whether this makes any sense or if it will actually happen but that is the current messaging.
There is no prevention strategy that will prevent all cancers. Even people with the most healthy lifestyle can get a cancer. That's why you have to do both.
Just to give one example: the majority of men will get prostate cancer if they live long enough (~70% of men over 80). It's just that other things tend to kill people before the cancer.
Wouldn't that require... conducting research on cancer prevention?
Democrats need to put these messages out hard. If they win the 2026 election we might even have a chance at putting a brake on Trump's idiocy. (I know, I know, trust Democrats to shoot their own foot in the most crucial moments, but one can hope...)
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I reject the premise of your entire comment. Of course they can hide actual scientific data and replace it with their own version. They will tell anyone and everyone over and over that their version is the truth and people will believe it as such. They will also believe that anyone trying to dispute it is wrong and vilify them.
This has already happened in 1.0, and plenty of other examples of it from history. But one would have to crack open a history book to know about that, and the populace is trending to banning books rather than opening them.
> Of course they can hide actual scientific data and replace it with their own version.
They'll just break out the magic markers on all the dis-favorable weather reports.
After a few sips of bleach things tend to get blurry
Well, you see laws of physics and periodic table doesn't swap out every time there's a change in administration. Neither are field effect transistors swapped out for vacuum-tubes with a different ruling party.
That makes a pretty good first order approximation of what is and isn't scientific, and worth spending taxpayer dollar on.
Science isn't prescriptive (doesn't tell you what to do), it's descriptive. Prescriptions are policy and have nothing to do with science.
There you go trying to apply logic to where it is not welcomed. The people that try to squash science and promote whatever notions they prefer do not care about descriptive vs prescriptive. They will push their agenda regardless of facts. It just happens the periodic table doesn't threaten their agenda. These are the same types that threaten to jail those that disagree with them.
Well, they do deal mostly with prescriptive policy things given the global context.
Namely, do the "green" policies make sense given that:
1. China will only increase it's total energy and resource consumption
2. And so will India and rest of the developing nations (unless you want them to be relegated to being perpetual backwater shitholes?)
All these will result in ever increasing CO2 output and pollution as these and other countries develop and transition. Many "green" products - solar panels, inverters, etc are made in China. And they are gearing up to be a very strong competitor in electric vehicles too. Which will futher increase the trade deficit and directly subsidize the competitors.
Most sensible discussions - as far as I can tell - deal with these realpolitik considerations first and foremost.
I don't know what role NIH played in the Covid response, but if they carry some responsibility for the previous administration's decision to force/coerce people to take the vaccine against their will then it seems fair that the new administration should hold them to account.
> previous administration's decision to force/coerce people to take the vaccine against their will
I'm glad they did. Because people are idiots and would listen to their social media influencer's tell them that vaccines cause autism then chug down some horse de-wormer.
This seems more like a coup in developing countries as time goes by.
If you trust the election results, and I generally do because I have no proof otherwise, then the American people voted for this. But it certainly looks like an authoritarian power transfer.
I am affected by this and I didn't vote for this. It's easy to say that "the American People" voted for this, but it's not correct to say that I am personally being affected by my bad choices.
I think the elections were "fair", for what its worth- I just don't agree that "fairness" makes me blame-worthy when I face the consequences of other folks actions.
I agree with you completely, but this gets at a debate that's been going on since the ancient days about whether democracy is actually good or not. Whether a tyrant is elected by a fair majority or inherits the throne at best (or Divine Right of Kings, whatever) makes little difference IMHO.
That said, while I have criticisms for democracy and do enjoy pointing out it's imperfections when people talk about democracy as some self-evident ideal, I do think it's probably the best system of government in a sea of less than ideal choices.
I'd argue the problem lies less with democracy, more with the media. Democracy requires an informed populace. The success of populist politicians shows you don't have that
I'd the cause is advertising-based business model of the media industry, then.
Too few people pay for news these days. So the news aren't the product and we ended mis- and ill-informed.
This is why early democracies limited voters to a subset which was perceived as better informed or more responsible - rule of any person passing thresholds (like e.g. land ownership) that proved a minimum level of capacity.
It would be more accurate to say that it was intended to (and did) limit voting to a subset that was perceived as more loyal to the social order, such as property laws and other arrangements that define who's on top of the social pyramid.
Considering it was a similar subset which in the US was largely responsible for the US revolution, I can't say that interpretation is persuasive.
If it worked it would work.
If having an informed populace is required for democracy to work then it doesn't work. Especially when you ask the question, "informed about what"?
I'm tired of hearing that people aren't informed.
They were informed. Trump told them that science is crap, that tariffs are good, that we should punish immigrants, that he would pardon the jan 6th people, etc.
This is what people voted for and what they wanted. Hate and retribution.
When Democrats finally stop with this false narrative that if only people knew better, they'd vote for Democrats, maybe we'll start actually winning again.
Sure, they heard from Trump that tariffs would fix inflation. But they still aren't informed because they didn't actually know what tariffs are [1].
> When Democrats finally stop with this false narrative that if only people knew better, they'd vote for Democrats, maybe we'll start actually winning again.
Really do not hate to point this out. Democrats are really responsible for a lot of this mess. Both Republics and Democrats really love to blame the other one but they're really just the Father and Mother and when the child is having problems, it's both of their faults.
Personally, I think it's gotten this way because of the whole first-past-the-post so if you have a belief like "far right" or "far left" then your best bet politically is to run underneath Republican or Democrat and push out the "moderates" in a primary as opposed to making a new political party that actually has your beliefs.
[1]: https://thenightly.com.au/politics/us-politics/what-is-a-tar...
I don't think it's just FPTP, given that other countries that have it are nowhere nearly as polarized.
I think it's actually the combination of FPTP and open (or at least broadly accessible) primaries. In Canada and UK, parties generally have much more control over their primaries, and party elites generally try to exercise that power to ensure that candidates don't upset the existing arrangements too much. Not even necessarily as a deliberate strategy, but when you have to work your way through the "smoke-filled rooms" as a candidate, that filters out the purists and favors those willing to compromise. US was also like that for a long time, and notably we didn't have this degree of polarization then.
But once primaries are wide open and the party no longer controls the candidates, it seems inevitable that more extreme candidates will win. They appeal to the more ideologically motivated voters who are generally more likely to show up and vote (especially so in the primaries), and so any candidate who wants to win there has to appeal to them first.
The problem is the Democrats aren't far left, they aren't even really left. There is no viable political counterbalance to the right wing in US politics anymore, the so-called left is moving right, and the right is moving further right. Kamala Harris' whole campaign (such as it was) was an attempt to court "moderate" Republicans rather than the base who was never enamored with Biden to begin with.
I agree that first past the post is a problem and this election was more lost by the Democrats than won by the Republicans, but I think it's a myth that any of it has to do with the Democrats going "too far left." Call me when any Democratic Presidential candidate openly calls for dismantling American imperialism and scaling back the military, or criticizes capitalism and endorses nationalized healthcare, education and UBI, or doesn't kiss the ass of police or curry favor with Evangelical Christians, or has immigration policies that actually materially differ from those of Republicans.
Earnestly: do you have a sense of when and where such an informed populace existed?
Is it the media or unfettered capitalism? Traditional media (newspapers, and local news) is dying slowly, they cannot successfully compete with centralized juggernauts with global footprints sucking up all the ad dollars. Was it Thiel who remarked that capitalism may not be compatible with democracy? One guess on which he'll choose to keep.
It was worse than you remembered. Thiel said freedom and democracy were not compatible.
I do think a big part of the problem is the two party system. It makes negative campaigning far to effective. That way you get pathological choices, like Biden vs Trump when you wouldnt entrust any of them with running a small business you own.
You’re over complicating things.
You are a willing participant in the political system. You agree to live by the results of the election, even if you don’t personally agree with them.
You’re not personally responsible for the results, but you are a willing participant in the system that caused them.
"Willing" in what sense? What's my realistic alternative? Lay it on me.
I didn't vote, for what it's worth. I don't think it's ethical to participate in that kind of thing.
The US is 2 crimes and a real estate scam in a trench coat. When I was younger, I indeed thought that maybe it had some legitimacy, but after having read quite a lot of the history of the millions that the government here has enslaved and murdered I no longer thing it's legitimate.
I understand that they have the guns and the power, but realistically I am not a willing participant in this system.
> "Willing" in what sense? What's my realistic alternative? Lay it on me.
Leave the country. I did it.
> I didn't vote, for what it's worth. I don't think it's ethical to participate in that kind of thing.
That's your choice.
You have plenty of options. Get involved politically. Organize. Fund raise.
Plenty of opportunity to affect the outcome. But you'd rather just complain about it online.
Yeah, "just colonize somewhere else" is pretty much the response that I expected.
I spent last night doing a shift till 4 in the morning at a warming center for folks who don't have houses, and I've spent the last several months working on taking an off grid chunk of property to a place where I can host full families of folks to "come and play music".
None of that makes the US government one bit more legitimate.
> Yeah, "just colonize somewhere else" is pretty much the response that I expected.
How is immigrating to a new country "colonizing"? Are you suggesting Mexicans (for example) who come to the US are "colonizing" it?
> None of that makes the US government one bit more legitimate.
Of course not, why would it?
All eligible voters are collectively responsible for the outcome of the election. You can't be proud of democracy if you won't shoulder the blame when it renders poor outcomes.
There's a difference between shouldering the burden of the outcome and the outcome indicating that you made bad choices.
I didn’t say burden and choices, I said blame and responsibility.
Right… in response to someone talking about choices.
I 100% agree with what you said, but no one looks back and remembers the people who voted against Hitler, or says 'there were some good people in Nazi Germany'.
What is possible though is a form of actual resistance. There is nothing forcing us to just share a union so to speak.
States rights has been too closely associated in the popular mind with slavery and racism (via arguments over what the civil war was really about). It'll be tough to disassociate those enough to make a persuasive argument for secession.
At the point you actually want a secession movement people aren't worried about the optics of it. It's not happening because the actual cost of secession, civil war and everything else is staggering. These are one way, permanent changes where a large number of the agitators will not live to see the better world.
It's compromise, carnage and collateral damage. Doing anything else is a better option 100% of the time.
Nobody's going to hear "we're seceding because we're sick of dying from lack of healthcare" and think "ooh, I wonder if it's secretly about slavery?"
No, but the folks talking about it will be given labels like 'racist'...and that makes it a lot harder for them to gain traction.
Elon Musk found that if you throw billions at getting our low propensity rural voters you can sway the election by enough percents.
That's true, but man am I mad at the Democrats for entirely abandoning that demo for decades before. It lead to this situation.
Authoritarian power transfers usually involve (immediate) executions, or at least the imprisonment/exile of important people from the previous government/administration/regime, to stabilize the new regime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Political_Surviva...
The Heritage Foundation (who is behind all this and has been at it since 1973), says that the transfer of power will be bloodless if we allow it to remain bloodless.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/03/us/politics/heritage-foun...
They've been telling us exactly what they're going to do ... and we just let it happen.
Presumably authoritarian regimes only execute/imprison/exile dissidents if they think it's necessary to eliminate opposition. An authoritarian regime which does not think there's much of a threat to opposition probably wouldn't bother.
There is a huge cost in executions. Especially in places where they have not been super common place and super public.
Serves to prove it's not an authoritarian regime? They know they won by not so much and are likely to lose next time, especially given Trump can't run anymore.
TBF, we're only on day 2. (I am 90% certain it won't come to that, but there's a 10% queasiness left that hasn't been ameliorated by the haphazard approach untethered from legality that we've seen so far)
"This guy is running around giving everyone pardons. The funny thing, maybe the sad thing, is he didn’t give himself a pardon. And if you look at it, it all had to do with him."
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
I fully expect Trump to ruin Biden's final years with investigations and court cases. Maybe that's not out right execution, but Trump definitely wants revenge.
Sure. But that is, for better or worse, perfectly legal. (No, I'm not saying it's great, but I'm saying this is still within non-dictatorship realms)
Whereas executions have a small issue in that area.
I don't think even Trump wants to call in the constitutional landmark case of a president pardoning himself. That'd be true chaos.
>I fully expect Trump to ruin Biden's final years with investigations and court cases
I'm still 50/50 on if Trump makes it that far, physically. He's older than when Biden ran his administration and not exactly in the best health.
But I guess they did get Regean through his last years. Nothing's impossible.
> That'd be true chaos.
We've crossed the Rubicon.
I mean if Biden actually was making corrupt deals trading influence/access for money then he absolutely should be investigated and prosecuted for it. And there's already hard proof that Hunter was selling access to his father, and that the foreigners he was selling said access to believed he could actually provide it.
If we didn't have the DOJ and other institutions protecting Biden for the last several years it would be pretty easy to find out if he actually did sell influence (vs. Hunter deceiving the people he was making deals with) with just a couple of warrants and subpeonas.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/politics/former-fbi-informa...
Which has nothing to do with the hard evidence on Hunter's laptop
He ran on “lock her up” in 2016 and never followed through.
I find it hilarious that everyone is scared of Trump when there was a concerted effort by the other side to use the justice system to stop him from ever running again.
Need I remind everyone of multi-year Russiagate investigation that was all made up? The misdemeanor charges that becomes felonies with massive fines? The media collusion to silence the Hunter Biden laptop story when the FBI knew at the time it was real?
It’s the pot calling the kettle black. It’s the thieves accusing everyone else of stealing.
All made up? You're thinking of the Benghazi hearings, which were admitted to be nothing but a smear campaign by the Republicans[0].
"Russiagate" meanwhile found plenty of stuff[1].
[0]https://www.vox.com/2015/9/30/9423339/kevin-mccarthy-benghaz...
[1]https://www.acslaw.org/projects/the-presidential-investigati...
Yes, the Steele Dossier which the entire Russiagate investigation was based on was fake and funded by Hillary Clinton.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-2022-midterm-elect...
Four years and immense government resources were wasted investigating the President calling him a "tool of the Russian government".
And the "plenty of stuff" found? "Undisclosed contacts" and "obstruction of the investigation".
What a massive flop.
> I find it hilarious that everyone is scared of Trump when there was a concerted effort by the other side to use the justice system to stop him from ever running again.
I honestly don't get what you mean by this. Lets say all your comments about Biden, the FBI, laptops and whatever else are 100% true. How does that change if I should be worried about stuff Trump might do? To use a totally extreme example, if John Wayne Gacy went around talking all the shit in the world about Jeffrey Dahmer, does that somehow make Dahmer not a serial killer?
> He ran on “lock her up” in 2016 and never followed through.
So that proves he lies and makes promises he can't/won't/doesn't keep? Is that a positive trait in a politician? How are we supposed to determine when he is 'just joshing, bro' and actually is being truthful? And yes, I know Biden and the dems also make promises they don't keep, but again that doesn't excuse Trump from doing the same.
An established bureaucracy used to "following orders" will just soldier on assuming the authoritarian comes in legally. The most well known example is Germany. The Führer came in elected, got voted to dictator after the Reichstagsbrand and then never left power - and barely anyone in the executive resisted.
And this is likely also where the US are heading. The putsch will not be loud and with a bang like Syria, it will be slow as molasses but about as difficult to impossible to stop like a broken dam worth of water moving downstream.
I mean, it's pretty clear they want to sue Fauci and more. Attacking dedicated public servants working for the health of the country is going to have serious negative effects.
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It seems unlikely that any court case would "uncover the truth" about the decision making behind that. Unfortunately, this has become so politicized that determining the steps that lead to NIH funding research in China, determining if a law was broken, and what the intent was, are unlikely to happen in the future.
It seems very unlikely to me that a knowledgeable head of an NIH institute would break the law in a discoverable way. My guess is that when this occurred, the decision-makers did not believe they were doing anything illegal.
(I think NIH funding virology research in China is dumb. That should not have happened.)
A couple things make me think they knew they were doing something illegal. One, they changed the definition of GoF when questioned about it, in a way that makes no sense. Two, they tried to avoid transparency laws like FOIA as well: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/nih-foia-covid-ori...
If you keep using HN primarily for political and ideological battle, we're going to have to ban you. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, and we've asked you more than once already.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
(This is not about NIH or GOF - it's about your account's commenting history. I just put it here because it's your most recent post.)
Understood. Gain-of-function is one of those terms that only really makes sense with a lot of biological context and knowledge. Trying to explain that to the general public or politicians (especially in an adversarial context like a congressional hearing) is just not going to work.
Trying to hide things in their chat messages and texts and emails was dumb. I still can't believe they did that (one guy even used the exact scenario that we learned at Google: don't say anything in email that would get printed in a negative light on the front page of the NY Times; I had a manager there who actually did have one of his emails, as part of the Oracle Java court case, in a prominent article in the Times). Public employees of the government should assume that literally everything they produce as part of their job (including on personal devices) will eventually be seen externally by people without the necessary context to understand.
From what I can see, Fauci already admitted he made a collection of bad statements and decisions. For me, that's the end of the matter. Suing him over this is just going to damage the country. For example, next time there is a crisis, all those hardworking public servants are going to look at what happened and conclude "no, I will not be the public communicator that helps the country understand the situation we are in and how we are going to get out of it".
>I think NIH funding virology research in China is dumb. That should not have happened.
This gets really subtle and tricky. This type of thing is closely linked to biological weapons research and we want collaboration and transparency to an extent to maintain access to information.
> (I think NIH funding virology research in China is dumb. That should not have happened.)
I'm not sure why "in China" is your point of concern here? Lots of virology research presents minimal danger, and seems fine to me to fund even in geopolitical adversaries (after calculation of the diplomatic and scientific costs and benefits).
My concern with the WIV's work is that they were searching for deadlier and faster-spreading human viruses. So if their research succeeds, then they're deliberately just a containment failure away from a novel human pandemic. China's laxer safety standards compounded that risk, but I'd oppose such work in Baric's lab at UNC too.
Ok but that is where the bats are. And funding gives you access. Even with funding China blocked a lot of investigation. Just wait until we get Ebola 2 or what not.
Why? Trump didn’t face any in the end, did he?
that's the beauty of it all outright murders usually create resistance
this way the opposition is cleansed in a mini genocide as well as algorithmically in a decentralized manner so resistance can't form
the fourth reich is here :)
Unfortunately, a good chunk of people who voted for him really didn't pay much attention beyond him promising to lower prices. But this is the electorate we have - a lot of them just can't be bothered with much detail as attention spans are short these days.
I listened to and watched a lot of interviews with people who voted for Trump. They just said he didn’t mean it whenever they were confronted with quotes from Trump that obviously disagreed with their views as evidenced by earlier questions in the interviews. Or take the many Muslims in Dearborn who still claim Trump is better than Harris would be on Israel/Palestine - they refuse to believe the evidence despite action days in,(or from trumps last term) it’s not possible to argue rationally with these people. Not only are they barely paying attention, they only see and hear what they want to.
No they listened about TikTok
for 13 hours? I suppose we never specificied how long it had to be banned for.
> If you trust the election results, and I generally do because I have no proof otherwise, then the American people voted for this.
No, if you trust the election results, it's a legitimate election by defined process and there are no grounds to contest it.
But "The American people voted for this" is a distinct, strong, affirmative statement that doesn't hold.
The people that voted for this are the people that voted for it, and even among the people who voted for the incoming administration (who only represent a third or so of eligible American voters and an even smaller share of American people), this isn't what many of them were voting for.
> ... even among the people who voted for the incoming administration (who only represent a third or so of eligible American voters and an even smaller share of American people), this isn't what many of them were voting for.
Yes it is. I understand the argument that this type of outcome wasn't their motivation for the ballot they cast. But it's also an entirely predictable outcome of their vote, which to me means this is exactly what they were voting in favor of happening.
I think one of the biggest issues with democracy in the US and probably democratic countries in general is infantilizing voters into being able to take credit for their intent rather than judging them based on the totality of the outcome of their choices. If you buy an Italian sports car because it's cool and your spouse is mad because it's also unreliable and can't fit your childrens' car seats, it's generally not considered a wise defense to say you only picked it based on the 0-60 time so it's not your fault it was less great by other metrics. Democracy would be a lot better off if we thought about voting the same way.
> Democracy would be a lot better off if we thought about voting the same way.
civic duty should be emphasized in school more. It's not a 10 second exercise every 4 years. It's something to be vigilant about indefinitely, and forever. Any change to laws, or any votes, require scrutiny, rational thought on the choices, and personal maximization.
Unfortunately, people are too lazy, or too dumb, to do this, and choose to listen to someone else's recommendation on votes.
So democracy represents somewhat of an averaged choice of the population. As the population becomes dumber due to lack of good education or cadence, their choices become increasingly worse.
Authoritarian regimes don't have this problem. The average person in one don't get to make many, if any, choices. The elites make them all - and if the elites are more altruistic, the country generally do better than average.
> this isn't what many of them were voting for.
So, Trump loses popularity over his original administration over lies and underdelivered promises, "we" vote him out. Then 4 years later we vote him back in?
At what point do we come and accept responsibility for falling for lies? And yes, there are in fact some people that voted against their best intertests because they fell into partisan politics; they still got their results, they just didn't read the fine print of the Devil's contract.
Fool me once… fool me twice.
Everyone's to blame - those who voted for this idiot and everyone else for not doing enough to stop it.
voter turnout was slightly low, but well within ballpark of every other Us election.
If this is your position, you must conclude no American election is a strong signal of anything.
Furthermore, this is just bad stats. We received a massive sample of the population, that sample is not without bias, but at least is geographically distributed. Do you think if had a 100% sampling rate the result would be dramatically different?
I suspect that missing portion is going bias towards low information population and immigrants who have no interest in US election. Democracy is not about finding every adult with a pulse. You must build a coalition of citizens with a vested interest in their community to get on your program, and take physical action to indicate that support you.
If this isn't what they were voting for, what did they think they were voting for? Did none of them believe that he would actually do the crazy shit he said he would? Did none of them pay attention to the insanity of his first term?
I have a simpler explanation: they all know what they were voting for, and none of them give a shit. It's the same as the mob cheering and applauding the sieg heil on Monday. They know it's deplorable and unamerican and they don't care. Because the only thing that matters is that their boy will stick it to the enemy.
Given the binary choice, much if the American people simply didn't vote. You can't present a false dichitomoty, and then act as if any downstream choice is full approval.
Not voting is a choice. It's a choice for "I don't care how this train moves, I'm moving with it". So yes, those non-voters tacitly approved of the idea of Trump being elected. They didn't hate it enough to get to the polls.
Those who thought "nothing would change no matter what"... well nothing has changed I guess. I suppose Harris would have done mass deportation raids and cutting funding from science and healthcare at all, right?
I lived in New York during the election, nothing would have changed regardless of who I voted for, because New York went to Harris anyway. So in my case, “nothing would change no matter what” was objectively true.
They always had the choice of not voting.
The people who voted for this actively engaged and endorsed it. It strains credulity for them to claim ignorance.
Plenty of Americans chose not to vote, many others did mainly out of massive social pressure.
Do you really believe that the majority of Americans — or even the majority of Trump voters — are applauding the use of Nazi symbols? That is completely divorced from reality. The only people openly supporting Nazism are the extreme fringe right which is fortunately still nowhere near the majority in the real world.
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How does that contradict what I wrote?
> Do you really believe that the majority of Americans — or even the majority of Trump voters — are applauding the use of Nazi symbols?
Did you not see the entire inauguration applaud and cheer him? Do you think they won't be heiling right back at him on the next rally?
The ones that wouldn't are bending themselves into pretzels to explain how it's just a weird autistic handwave.
Do you think people who were at the inauguration are representative of Americans as a whole?
Social media and HN included is a magnet for people with extreme political views to voice them (presumably because it’s the only audience they have).
Trump won with an overwhelming mandate. He is popular with a majority of the country.
The fact that nobody on HN seems to support Trump should tell you about who is on HN.
I think you are wrong about the overwhelming mandate unless you are solely using the electoral college total as the yardstick. The popular vote is much closer.
Trump won with 49% of the popular vote vs Harris' 48%, with one of the smallest margins of victory ever - just 0.15% of eligible voters. He won just a handful more electoral votes than Biden in 2020, and far fewer than Obama or Reagan.
That is not an overwhelming mandate, nor does it represent a majority of the country.
But then Trumpists never let the truth get in the way of their own mythmaking. They said they had an overwhelming mandate and the support of most Americans even in 2016 when literally millions more people voted for Hillary Clinton. Hell, they didn't even think they actually lost in 2020. I'm surprised they can square the cognitive dissonance of Trump being elected to a third term.
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More eligible voters didn't vote for any candidate then for Trump or Harris.
Trump won a slim majority of the people who did choose to vote, but it's hardly an endorsement by a majority of Americans, much less the American people as a whole.
Choosing not to vote is a vote for the status quo. That still is a choice.
There are BS loopholes we need to correct, but people who can't do the bare basics to reserve a morning to fill out a ballot fundamentally have themselves to blame.
Nonsense. If you live in one of the ~40 states where the outcome is a foregone conclusion, who you vote for makes no more difference than it does in Russia. It’s reasonable to protest by refusing to participate in that unfair system, and doing so doesn’t mean you support one candidate or the other.
36% of eligible voters - 90 million people - likely had a similar attitude. The margin of victory was 2.3m votes. What's that phrase? Something about how no single raindrop thinking they're responsible for the flood.
Looking at history authoritarian power transfers usually start with a vote, or at least wide spread public support.
If someone clicks on "click here to update your password" in a phishing email, are they choosing what actually happens, or what they thought would happen? Even if they should have known, and could have known, I think it's objectively true that they didn't.
it depends on the advancement of society to be honest. I wouldn't blame someone getting scammed in 2000 over a "Hot sexy singles in your area, click now!". I would 100% blame them in 2020+.
I don't know how far we've come in regards to email phishing to make a call on that.
The claim I'm contradicting is that they knew full well, not that they should have known.
I'm not so sure about them.
https://old.reddit.com/r/somethingiswrong2024/
*23% of American people voted for this.
I'd put that number closer to 67%: adding in the 90M eligible voters who, you know, didn't.
How many of those 90M were in one of the few states where your vote matters?
I dunno, probably similar to how many of the 75M that did vote.
I'll still stand by the point though: 23% is an unreasonable number to throw out.
Americans also voted for their US Senators and Representatives.
It's funny how these discussions forget about that, which is part of the problem.
It's also worth remembering how the Trump campaign consistently denied Project 2025, and ridiculed those who suggested it was their agenda. Maybe it won't go there but so far it seems to be headed in that direction, and if so actively lying about your agenda raises questions about exactly what the American electorate was voting for.
It doesn't look like, it is. e.g. violent coup and Nazi salutes during inauguration. Are people expecting the rise of authoritarianism to look different or something? This is the exact same fascist playbook that's been run every time. I really thought WW2 would have taught humanity as a whole the lesson but apparently not.
I think we as a society forget once the previous generation is gone.
The media has been sane washing Trump for the last 9 years. If Trump had been treated like the joke he has always been he wouldn't have been elected.
It's a stretch to say the American people voted for gutting our health research capabilities.
I take it you haven't encountered the contempt that Trump supporters have for "mainstream science," particularly anything to do with biomedicine? Not even remotely a stretch. Ever since COVID they view those "health research capabilities" in the same way everyone else views the experimentation of Joseph Goebbels and Unit 731. Most of them still think Biden and Fauci cooked it up in a lab.
Trump got 49.8% of the vote. 50.2% went to other candidates (48.32% Harris, 0.56% Stein, 0.49% Kennedy, 0.42% Chase, 0.42% others).
If anyone is curious, here are the Presidents since the 19th century who got at least 50% of the vote:
The lowest since 1900 is Wilson's first term at 41.8%, followed by Clinton's first term at 43%, Nixon's first term at 43.4%, and Trump's first term at 46%.You might think that Wilson at 41.8% must have lost the popular vote but actually he beat the person with the second highest popular vote total by over 14%. That was back when the US had more than two viable parties. The vote went 41.84% to Wilson (Democrat), 27.4% to Teddy Roosevelt (Progressive), 23.17% to the incumbent Taft (Republican), 5.99% to Debs (Socialist), and the rest to a few others.
Similar with Clinton's 43%. That was about 5% more than second place. That year Ross Perot running as an independent got 18.91%.
Same with Nixon. His 43.42% was the biggest slice of the popular vote, followed by Humphrey at 42.72%. George Wallace running for the American Independent party got 13.53%.
Trump spent a huge amount of his time during the election disavowing Project 2025. Did people vote for a change in government? Yes, but they didn’t vote for this this theocratic authoritarian bullshit.
If you believed his disavowl, I've got a bridge... fuck it. Just give me your bank account number and I promise there will be $47 million in it tomorrow morning.
This is the informed voter thing, right? We know Trump is a liar, and beyond that perhaps the most documented liar in human history, and we also can plainly see who is involved in the campaign, his cabinet, his inner circle and easily cross reference them to the people whose names are directly on Project 2025. That is to say: to anyone paying even the minimum amount of attention, it was obvious that there is a 100% negative correlation between Trump disavowing Project 2025 and the expectation that he would lean in hard to it.
Trump has been pushing theocratic authoritarian bullshit for nearly a decade. It's what Trumpism is known for. It's what his supporters are known to support. We're not doing this historical revisionism now. This is exactly what people voted for.
You are telling me Trump lied? Shocked...
You'd think he'd do that? Go on the ~~internet~~ podium and tell lies?
nevermind he never had a plan for any of the issues people voted for him on. A still vague plan on fixing inflation (spoilers: he cannot do as much to fix inflation as many think), still rough numbers on what these tarriffs are supposed to do. What else did conservatives think he was going to do... -----
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyg5jdgzy1o
‘You want to come to America? Earn it, like I did’
well he is indeed hastening the deportation... nevermind conservatives with undocumented workers only lose from this and don't want to pay americans minimum wage. Well done.
'He invokes fear in the rest of the world’
Yeah, I guess pissing off all our friends and getting cozy with China/Russia will invoke fear.
Hey, Maybe Trump is more honest than I thought. Of course, when it comes to making lives worse for the world.
Every 4 years, American voters get to choose between garbage and trash.
This constant false equivalence between parties is part of the reason we got here.
The Democrats are terrible but somehow I doubt Kamala Harris would be doing this much damage two days in. I don't think people would be wondering whether Tim Walz actually did a Nazi salute at the inauguration. It can be the case that both parties are evil, and they are, but that America still chose the greater evil.
So many false equivalences and assumptions in these few sentences alone lol. Why don't we wait at least a few months before deciding if their actions are evil or not.
Why are we suddenly pretending that Trump is an unknown quantity? We know what he's about, and we know what his agenda is. It was literally published to the public with bullet points and everything.
I keep on thinking maybe it's time to move somewhere else. I'm a first generation American, so I'd just be doing what my parents did before me. The problem is, I have no idea what country I would move to.
I think most of the rest of the world is facing the same issues, just a few years behind the USA.
Except where the culture is completely different, e.g. East Asia. But they have different problems.
Australia is definitely facing the same problems and the same emerging far-right populist anti-immigration narrative as a result. Though to be fair, Australia has always had a pretty strong authoritarian populist far-right anti-immigration thing going on.
The one that has totally surprised me is Germany. Seeing them go down that same road again is genuinely shocking.
If you prefer the policies of the Democratic Party and have no special attachment here, then Canada or any European country is probably a level up for you.
Except Pierre Poilievre is likely to become Prime Minister of Canada and is explicitly taking cues from Trump, so it's unlikely to be much different a few years from now.
Britain is great, you don't have to deal with another language and it's affordable.
England has the same weak implementation of democracy with the same flaws. You'll want to move a country that indirectly chooses the government and president.
Uhh the only thing positive is the UK citizens finally saw through the conservative bullshit.. this is only because they were ahead of the USA in implementing disastrous policies which played out and showed that they had no clothes.
If the republicans are smart they won’t impose austerity but it won’t matter as whatever they do will have unintended consequences they can’t predict and it will likely tank them in the midterms and in 4 years.
But right now they are targeting the intellectual elite that actually run things/society. All because they can’t handle the truth.
Tech thinks they will be spared by focusing on their magic counting machines. Trump AI will fix everything.
New Zealand is not the richest first world country, but when this global shitshow escalates into a major international war it'll probably be one of the safer places around.
Ireland.
Hang in there, this is a long overdue correction. It's gonna over correct a bit, but then things should be better than before. The rhetoric of Trump being a dictator is way overblown. If this didn't happen we'd be heading toward bankruptcy around the time your kids grow up.
Considering the Republicans are the ones that weaponized debt in the 1980s with their policy to 'starve the beast' I don't see how Republicans are going to fix it. Unless you mean 'fix it' by shutting down those part of the government that they targeted in the 1980s?
right. because he did so much to reduce the deficit last time.
yup, loves nothing more than to reduce the deficit /s
people are tragically funny these days I swear
Because covid? Congress wanted to pass a covid relief bill sending $700B to corporations. Trump said to get the money to the people so they increased it to do so. Biden happily kept the budget way overblown even though covid was essentially over. Neither party has addressed the budget in decades. One wants to spend more and the other wants to cut taxes. Neither fixes anything.
The deficit was increasing from 2017, long before covid.
No, not because covid. Obama's second term decreased the amount of deficit added each year. Since then (excluding drop after 2020/2021) the amount has trended upward every year.
I guess you could say less deficit was added during Trump's first term (excluding covid), than in Obama or Biden's first terms. Not sure that tells us anything useful though.
There hasn't been an actual deficit decrease since 2001 though.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/natio...
so.. how does this make things better long term if you just said neither side fixes anything?
So decreasing the increase of the problem is considered progress? No.
How did the deficit trend 2017-2019?
And 2020-2024? That extra trillion was supposed to be a one time covid measure, not the new pork.
yes, he's just reassuring that we go bankrupt and have no kids by throwing half a trillion into AI. You complain about giving a trillion partially to people, and Trump is throwing all that, day one, into the richest corporations.
May as well speed to the inevitably cyberpunk future. Shame I'm not getting that cool cyborg arm.
If I understood correctly, that was private funding, and he was just taking credit for a business/private investment deal?
Ah yes the deficit which Republicans are famous for increasing will be fixed by... Trump? Ok.
https://miro.medium.com/v2/format:webp/0*-1b-D-2GuuH2_h_w
Remember what happened to Trump after his first term. He's extremely invested in making sure that he won't be raided/arrested/etc again at the end of this term.
The power structures that tried that the first time won't be here in 4 years...his personal freedom depends on it.
If he is still around. He is older than when Biden started at his term.
Except it's not a coup and it's not a developing country but ok.
Drink some water.
It is most assuredly a coup. It just took a few years rather than a few days.
It's not developing anymore, that's for sure. Now it's devolving.
"just business as usual". i guess after you work hard to normalize these interventions on the thrid world, it becomes second nature here too.
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Read the whole article.
I just listened to an NPR newscast where they were clutching at their pearls and then whispered “this is common when a new administration comes in” and then went right back to screeching. Not looking forward to 4 years of this.
This is common? Did the Biden admin halt all communications, grants, travel, etc.? NPR posts transcripts of their programs, do you have a link so I can see what they said?
Some parts are usual, but the article notes how extreme other parts are, and how unprecedented and suddent a few others are.
So little of A, a lot of B.
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For anyone that's been in corp/BigCo land for some time, this is the typical corp reboot playbook.
Pause all hiring, freeze travel and other casual expenditures, relook at all major initiatives/projects/programs, etc.
Definitely something (IMHO) worth doing every 5-7 years in any environment. Can't imagine what it will uncover in government where I'm guessing it hasn't happened in much longer in most cases.
Having worked in big corporations and been married to and friends with a number of NIH folks, I can assure you that the government has 10x the openness of even the most transparent corporation, has a bunch of people trying to maximize the return on all expenditures related to their research, fanatical abilities to repair and reuse equipment for new things, and a base line of people who have consciously dedicated to service for the country rather than maximizing their personal prestige and wealth.
Their budgets are debated in TV. Imagine that in a big corp. it is simply false to say this organized attack on research is anything than a spasm of anti-science ideology.
While I agree with the sentiment that continual evaluation of how any organization operates is a good thing, there is an extensive corpus of studies on the fallacies of treating the management of public services like private business.
There is a good reason why there isn’t much (successful) precedent around this type of thing being done before.
I would argue with that looking at Argentina. I do see however there is not enough data to be biased against any side, but disruptive changes in management are in my perception more effective on changing the status quo.
Achieving change against current incentives with politically mindful measures I'd say is very time consuming and slow.
In regards to your point I agree that treating public services as companies that can't be running at a loss is been demonstrated to be bad, but there is a fine line between trying to make public services profitable VS trying to make them more efficient.
Using Argentina as an example is wild. They have a pretty singular situation.
Agree with pausing hiring and causal expenditures. Why block external communication? What does that do
Why do most people in this thread assume this move intends to politicalize the NIH? I don't think the administration thoroughly thought out the consequences of this decision, but that's a typical government move. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Because they've all been openly talking about taking revenge on NIH for the COVID lockdowns and support for transgender healthcare for a while now?
Hard to attribute it to stupidity and lack of planning when almost every executive order signed by Trump during his first days back in office are straight out of Project 2025.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_executive_orders_in_...
Edit: https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-executive-orders-proje...
As others have said, his actions are all straight from the project 2025 playbook. Go read page 284, it's very explicit about them viewing it as politicized and wanting to fix that (read actually politicize it):
"The incestuous relationship between the NIH, CDC, and vaccine makers—with all of the conflict of interest it entails—cannot be allowed to continue, and the revolving door between them must be locked. As Severino writes, “Funding for scientific research should not be controlled by a small group of highly paid andunaccountable insiders at the NIH, many of whom stay in power for decades. The NIH monopoly on directing research should be broken.” What’s more, NIH has long “been at the forefront in pushing junk gender science.” The next HHS secretary should immediately put an end to the department’s foray into woke transgender activism."
I agree with you about this. I think it's worth calling out where the shoulder of the highway ends and the cliff begins, now that the guardrails have been (if temporarily) removed, but I'm optimistic that nobody is crazy enough to totally jam up the NIH given its importance to our economy and national security.
If there is a new pandemic soon we will see it without any question. Hurricanes were redirected on a whim.
> Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
This quote does not apply in a place where the actor has specifically promised to be malicious.
Now, you may not see their promises as malicious and that is your prerogative. But that quote isn’t applicable for a ton of people when it comes to Trump.
I would have to disagree with the criteria. More times than not, I've seen people who have promised maliciousness (AKA bullies) make really stupid decisions. It seems to go hand-in-hand in a lot of cases.
Either way, this seems like a political flip-flop, with the opposing party now putting on the tin hats. That's just the way it looks to me as an independent.
How is it putting on a tin foil hat to call someone out for being malicious when they've promised to be malicious?
My original comment was regarding the claim that this is being done to politicize the NIH. To me, it requires the same tin hat that conservatives put on when they were making all sorts of crazy assumptions about the government's moves during Covid.
I never said you had to put on a tin foil hat to call someone malicious. I'm just saying that malicious people tend to do stupid things which have unintended consequences they didn't fully realize.
I am also an independent. I did not vote for Biden, Kamala, nor did I vote for Trump.
However, I am still able to put 2 and 2 together to see his behavior during COVID, his statements before this current elections, and the current decisions (especially regarding gender definitions) and understand what the goal of silencing the NIH (even temporarily) is.
Fair enough. I seem to often sit in the minority view on HN :)
The overarching goal seems to be "Achieve more, more efficiently, with fewer resources".
But making that happen when there are 20+ levels of management between the guy doing the work and the guy making the rules seems impossible.
There are, of course, not 20+ levels of management. The average fan-out in the federal government is 1:7 to 1:10, with ~2.5 million employees total.
That strongly implies 7-8 levels of hierarchy, on average.
What makes you think that is the actual goal rather than just what you are being told the goal is?
So cut 15 levels of management. Budget cuts to match. Carry on.
As long as they're not fucking up the NIH grantmaking process, I (ruthlessly) don't care, and am not going to allocate attention to it. But once they do start fucking up grants, they're throwing a monkeywrench in basically all American therapeutic research and basic science, which is a big problem, since one of the government's primary missions should be to set in motion whatever things will end human cancer.
The impact of these travel restrictions is to cancel/delay grant review meetings, which could plausible "fuck up the NIH grantmaking process".
However, grant review can really be done remotely. And there are many other embedded inefficiencies in granting. For example, when my PI and I applied for an R01 (the basic individual investigator grant that is core to funding early investigators) we had to print a 500 page application which contained duplicate data, full CVs, pages and pages of boilerplate, and fedex it to NIH where it sits in a room with all the other applications (it's been 20 years; maybe this doesn't happen anymore?). The review committees instead get a digital copy and the grant meeting itself is really just a bunch of people sitting in a circle making yes/no decisions.
Yes, I share the concern this article relates and hopefully saner (conservative) heads will prevail on the administration not to jank this up further. What I really want to do here is defang dumb debates about whether operational efficiency and headcount cuts inside NIH proper are disastrous. They may not be, so long as the grants keep happening.
I've only applied for NSF and NASA grants, but it's digital. Can't imagine NIH is too different.
Good to know. It looks like NIH dropped the fedexed physical copy requirement around when I left academia (https://cen.acs.org/articles/84/i14/NIH-Grants-Electronic.ht...). In fact now that I think of it, the R01 I submitted must have been digital-only, and that must have changed between 2003 and 2007.
My understanding is that study sections have been cancelled and that is a key part of the grant review process.
>I (ruthlessly) don't care, and am not going to allocate attention to it
For someone not allocating attention to it, you’ve been commenting a lot of this thread and others of similar nature.
you don't get a karma like tptacek without doing a lot of commenting
>> As long as they're not fucking up the NIH grantmaking process
I'll be happy if they ban "gain of function" research entirely.
> one of the government's primary missions should be to set in motion whatever things will end human cancer.
Have you seen the "Stargate" announcement?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYUoANr3cMo&t=646s
Thanks to "AI" and mRNA vaccines, it's gonna be fine. Probably best to cut all other funding and just funnel it into the data centers that will solve everything very beautifully, lives are at stake after all.
Stargate is just a joint venture between a bunch of investors and big tech companies. If Biden had won, Biden would be the one announcing it. The amount of "Stargate" I factor into anything going on right now is zero.
Someone very close to me had their study section next week cancelled with no further comms. They are already fucking up grants. Please everyone, educate yourselves on this; the sky actually is falling this time.
The travel part makes sense to me: as HN is pro-remote-work they should understand that these researchers can simply make their presentations via tele-attendance. The rest of the "refrain from releasing anything until a Presidential appointee can look at it first" seems very commissar-like. The HHS screwed the pooch on COVID, making a lot of nonsensical claims that ruined the reputation of public health in the population's eyes. I still don't like the idea of the Commissar reviewing every paper on bird-flu (our newest epidemic) but I can see the motivation.
The actual presentations are usually the least important part of a conference. Most conferences would be better if you could cancel 80% of the program but still convince the same people to attend (and their employers to pay). Then there would be more time for informal discussions and ad hoc work, which often lead to new ideas and new collaborations.
I have heard on HN that ideation and collaboration does not decrease if everyone works remote.
Tele-attendance basically does not work for science conferences, as 99% of the value is from ad hoc in person discussions. When I attend science conferences I attend few if any of the talks, and instead network to form collaborations for future projects.
In medical research there is an awful lot of tissue, blood and other samples that go into the NIH's work. They run numerous labs and biobanks and a part of what they do is transit samples and the personal and sometimes equipment to various labs across the country.
Certainly, and in Silicon Valley there is hardware, semiconductors, and other tangible items that go into work. But clearly that's not what we're discussing since the article says:
> Today, the scientist encountered one group of early-career researchers who were scheduled to attend and present at a distant conference next week—presentations that are now impossible.
What's the big deal? Present via Zoom. We should probably cancel all conference travel.
What nonsensical claims did the HHS make about COVID?