If you are politically connected, or stay in an narrow lane of approved work, you get your grant. But if you stray from the politically approved path, or appear disloyal to our First Citizen and the Party, then your grant will be canceled.

The remaining supporters of the incumbent party like to claim that they aren't actually doing anything worse than in the past, and if anything they are just cracking down on things that they see as subjectively bad, so it's fine. And there's an element of truth in that: so much of American policy for a long time has been subject to agency interpretation and judicial review, and there was always room for political maneuvering and corruption in the system. Where the truth becomes a lie is the omission that this is the systematic ramping up from something that happens occasionally in a mostly-functioning system, to something that happens constantly and is systematically designed to facilitate corruption and politicization.

Election fraud, “The Swamp”, all of it. It was a roadmap.

As well, any new rulings or laws that are designed to expire right before an election are almost always the mechanisms used for those abuses claimed as being perpetrated by others. And the number of things designed this way seem to be stacking up relatively quickly.

The reasoning is quite straightforward, “I want to make sure you can’t do the things I was just doing to you.” Otherwise there wouldn’t be a reason for policies that are good for everyone to expire at the end of a presidential term.

These just make it more fixed it into rules as opposed to doing it with plausible deniability like before.

A law which will be used from the opposite side just as well, as soon as the power switches hands again.

Yes, grants were given and revoked for political purposes in the past.

But what percentage of grant proposals were reviewed by an appointed political officer whose sole job was to screen out wrongthink? It did happen, but it was ad hoc and amateur. Today’s administration is formalizing Soviet-style political reviews of science.

It’s scary, and it’s a mistake to hold up occasional (but serious!) mistakes from the past to justify systematic evil today.

He who kills the dragon becomes one.

Small consolation for those excluded. It wasn't "occasional (but serious!) mistakes" it was systematic ideological control.

I'd say explicit is better than implicit. Less hypocrisy, and more transparency. And at least now that this shit is officially set as word to paper, and is out in the open, the other side, when in power, can dismantle it and make into law guarantees that such wrongthink persecution wont happen again.

But they wont. They'll use the same mechanism of "appointed political officer whose sole job was to screen out wrongthink".

Because it was never about the principle. It was about doing it convertly as long as they politically/ideologically controlled those establishments. Controlling them through government power will suit them too, as much as it suits the other side.

Are you talking about not getting the grant in the first place, or are you talking about grants being cancelled after they had been approved and you had taken the money and started doing the funded work?

Those two situations are different.

[1] https://elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/summary-of-key-change...

Do you even know how grants work?

You’re speaking about scoring designed to ensure that all Americans (any sex, poverty level, ability, creed) benefit from the use of tax payer money. This was a metric that was well understood AND EXPLICITLY EXPLAINED.

There was NO relationship between that and canceling grants.

Edit: less incendiary. I am just very upset with how confident people are saying things that are absolutely wrong for internet points.

And I didn't say it was (though, such scoring has been also a powerful weapon against certain grants being granted, the scoring criteria not always interpreted and used in a politically neutral way - that was just the marketing pitch).

I spoke about how grants were already being connected to ideological pressure, both government and organisational, private sector grands: "You mispoke on that issue? No grant. You were of the wrong political perssuassion? No grant. Hurt the feelings of X group? No grant."

That pressure was on even after they were handed. That's the same kind ideological gate-keeping, just not from an official appointee, but spread out in ideologically motivated peer review, academic acceptance mechanisms, (and going into the private grants, sponsors), etc.

Research funding has never been insulated from politics. The difference is now a part of the overall approval becomes openly and transparently political.

> And I didn't say it was (though, such scoring has been also a powerful weapon against certain grants being granted, the scoring criteria not always interpreted and used in a politically neutral way - that was just the marketing pitch).

Your own words, not mine:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48340780

> That pressure was on even after they were handed

There is a scoring matrix that simply requires grantees not to ignore huge portions of the nation in their research. You didn't even need to score highly here if you scored highly elsewhere. Just not pretend that people with disabilities or other non-majority groups are deserving of attention in taxpayer-funded research.

> Research funding has never been insulated from politics. The difference is now a part of the overall approval becomes openly and transparently political.

It was always open and towards the goal of supporting America.

If you cannot understand what is different, I think there is little hope in writing to you.

I respond for the benefit of those who may not already understand how this process works and who aren't carrying water for a political party.

This is the real test. If these changes are so bad, will someone campaign bare on overturning these? Will the “other side” change it?

If they don’t, you know that they also agreed with it - this handwringing now is just for show.

The reactionary Supreme Court has changed the character of the executive. That court will live for many years. The executive branch exists to represent the will of the chief executive. We’ve normalized criminal behavior with the abuse of pardons and crushed the institution of DOJ.

These guys opened a very stupid Pandora’s box. The long game is brutal. When we need to start dismantling the military, that’s going to impact some places pretty severely, for example. The science and tech edge will be gone in a decade.

As the other poster mentioned, the post-Vietnam Church committee was a democratic party-led, bipartisan committee that effectively heeled the CIA and exposed many of the pretty dark abuses committed in that era.

All tactics, no strategy is the way of things currently - on the right especially, but on the left to some extent too. It’s maddening.

This is the worst part. The Democrats have nothing but outrage and protest. They don’t have a written Democrat Project 2029. Their action plan is as thin as a Reddit post.

The right spent decades working on their strategy, who to target/convert, how to do it, what they would do once in power, and how quickly: and they wrote it down. What the fuck are the Democrats doing? Holding little signs up in protest in Congress and having little press conferences where they make meek outrage noises. This is a very unserious party in the face of a very serious political problem.

Fuck 'em, pack the court.

B) do you really want to get to a place where the arbiters get politically reset and degraded every time the pendulum swings? This is the equivalent of a courtroom where a defendant or plaintiff can threaten to fire the judge or add their cousin as a co-judge.

The supreme court had a very limited role originally. And it's only by grants of Congress that they are allowed the staff, the ability to hear what cases they want to, and assorted other privileges. Beyond just packing the court, Congress could do a ton to rescind the power of these corrupt fiends who've gotten so far at tearing down the United States & gutting our nation, as they and their Leonard Leo/Federalist Society foes of America have lusted for for so long.

It's not just the Supreme Court either. Jamelle also effectively addresses so much of the incredibly vulgar court/judge shopping that makes a single judge North District of Texas such an incredibly popular and active venue, a political powerhouse that reliably will undo anything Federalist Society foes of America & government dislike. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/kacsmaryk-judge-shopping-...

No, the left should use the things right broke to abuse the right—just like the right is breaking everything to abuse the left. Otherwise the right will never learn why breaking things is a bad idea, and they’ll just keep on breaking everything like they have been for my entire life and before.

Previously, it was a more libertarian and constitutional argument: progressive causes since the new deal have assumed powers not granted.

More recently this has completely flipped to a populist culture war argument that the left, in excesses seen in the DEI hayday before COVID, has lost its mind and began attacking and punishing people.

My point isn't to argue "no you" but to instead invalidate your point about lessons and outcomes. The centers of these two tribes exist in separate realities and experiences. Escalating is unlikely to have the effect of bringing those perspectives together.

That’s all the more reason to do it. The right believes lots of things that aren’t so, so learning what abuse actually is might stop them from crying wolf in the future.

[1] - https://www.nsf.gov/funding/information/dcl-broader-impacts/...

I say this as a professor at a top computer science department. I have _never_ felt limited in my ability to collaborate with the best folks in my area. Ever. I do! And it's great! And I also believe strongly it's important to make sure we are growing those next generations of amazing people, because the thing that makes research awesome is working with them.

Especially not when said administration has a track record of cancelling things because they Ctrl-Fed outgroups they considered to be the enemy and discovered a completely irrelevant Latin prefix in someone's abstract.

Trying to reframe them as "we didn't REALLY mean it!" (while also insulting a race and sex) doesn't help your case.

This is what the communist leads of universities did here in eastern europe and it was disgusting back then as well.

Honestly, if filling in those boxes with anything other than a diatribe against the suitability of women and minorities and poor people to do research is "following the politics of one party" now, that says more about the conformance demanded by the other party than the science. Good to hear you're much happier now they're in charge and introducing formal komissar roles to ensure that any studies whose results contradict RFK Lysenko Jr or reference transgenic mice or Transjordan or employs too many research assistants with funny foreign names are liable to be defunded before publication.

That's what happens when academia politicizes themselves - they become part of the game. And that means begging for scraps of who ever is currently on the top.

It's horrible... but you said yourself - you just need to fill some boxes correctly.

Nobody honestly believes the two are equivalent.

Ultimately an argument that an application question with option for researchers to state they have an equal opportunities policy is as much of an imposition as legislating for studies to be retrospectively defunded if the clinical outcomes don't align with the administrations' preferred pseudoscience says more about you than it does about past politicization of science...

People get upset as though this policy is dictating that a minority from the corner of the earth with no meaningful experience is going to be mandated into the role of heart surgeon or airplane pilot as well. That’s not how this works. However, those roles themselves stand to benefit from the diversified cultivation at the bottom of the stack, eventually.

Even very intelligent people seem to think inclusive policies mean that incompetent people will be promoted in private industry or government, but frankly, I never witnessed that to any abnormal degree until the people decrying it the most ended up in power. A game show host as president. A Fox News anchor as secretary of war. I can only keep a straight face because I’m so jaded by it.

It was idiotic to squander the talent of the best and brightest Black people that way 75 years ago, and it’s just as idiotic to use race and gender as a factor in admissions or employment today.

They immediately regretted it but the results were already printed in the newspapers. The rest as they say is history.

The nice thing about regulated discrimination is that it can be an editable, transparent, public document that can be voted on and driven by data. This is better, even if imperfect, than the kind we have when we’re not honest about it.

I’m not saying it’s perfect or wholly good. Just, arguably better. I see a lot of problems with it. It’s a bandaid on deep social and systemic problems.

If anything I appreciate that it’s in the open.

Regardless, I’ve done well in my career at times someone else could have done better. I saw it when I managed hiring processes. Discrimination was everywhere. But I was there, I was white, I was male. That was good enough. I certainly wasn’t the best for the job. There’s something wrong with that in my opinion. I should have had to try harder at times. It would have been better for everyone. How do we fix that?

The punitive institutionalized discrimination being extended against Asians merely because they on average do better at school than other ethnic groups really drives home how unfair this is. I'd go so far as to claim that no structural/institutional factors have boosted Asian kids. They do better (better than the white kids) probably because their parents value education the most, due to a shared cultural value. Our society's response to that shouldn't be to treat those kids as surplus unneeded human capital because of where their ancestors were born.

> Discrimination was everywhere... I was white, I was male... I certainly wasn’t the best for the job.

Well, if that truly did happen to you (you interviewed all those competing for the positions and knew who was best?) then yeah, that's quite racist. The solution to racism isn't "More racism, but flipped against whoever's done better recently." We already had the actual solution figured out many years ago, and it's judging people only by their merits.

And it's not even clear what issue they're supposed to be solving. Visit any STEM class, research lab - corporate or public, or so on even well before any of these sort of things began to be official guidelines and it was anything but homogeneous, even by the largely irrelevant characteristics that these guidelines target.

Not functionally identical. No grants were getting slow-rolled or cancelled.

Why are you having a hard time understanding this?

> And it's not even clear what issue they're supposed to be solving. Visit any STEM class, research lab - corporate or public, or so on even well before any of these sort of things began to be official guidelines and it was anything but homogeneous, even by the largely irrelevant characteristics that these guidelines target.

Hmm. Do you think it was an accident that these settings are not homogeneous today? Do you think these settings were different in the past? Did you spend any time trying to test your hypothesis before writing and posting it?

> Some examples that illustrate contributions in each of the five areas are given below. Proposals need not address all of these areas, and PIs are advised to focus on those areas in which they are well prepared to make meaningful contributions.

"Broadening participation of underrepresented groups" is only one of the five areas, and no proposal was required to use it. I had proposals funded that focused on workforce development, for example. I saw others focus on science communication to the public (now forbidden in the memo this post is about!).

Proposals that passed grant panels were first and foremost always those that would great science. At ~10:1 oversubscription rates or more, proposals don't pass without it. The BI component needed to be credible but could be handled lots of ways.

Fundamentally, Congress recognized when defining BI as a component for merit review in the NSF that fundamental science only pays off in the long term. BI is a pragmatic choice to ensure that grants also yield near-term benefits to society as well.

Irrespective of whatever was going on in academia I take issue with this. Everyone who has a) a double digit number of brain cells b) has ever dealt with government approval in any capacity c) is't just a straight up liar knows that if the requirements set forth by a panel with discretionary authority says to do items 1-5 that you will not be approved without doing all of them, (unless of course you have the right last name or connections).

If you don't believe me watch any local board's meetings for the next 6mo and research everyone who comes before it after finding what outcome they got.

This has nothing to do with academia, DEI or what the other items on the list of requirements were. This is just how the sausage is made. It's all the same steps even if some factories are a little dirtier than others. So yeah, I 100% believe that if someone unconnected didn't pay the right lip service to the right things in every single one of the items in the list they would not get the outcome they wanted even if theoretically their stuff could have been approved with only 4/5 boxes checked. The approvers are not going to stick their necks out like that with no reason.

I regularly submit workforce participation plans for government construction projects that have minority and women labor hour goals with 100% white male labor hours and receive approval to proceed. Things are not as black and white in reality as the media has led you to believe. I deal with state and local municipal and county governments regularly, my state’s Dept of Labor and Industry does not care what your last name or company is.

"The regulatory framework works fine", says man who works at BigCo. JFC

You really think your state's department of whatever doesn't turn the screws a little harder on the smaller companies that have to just take it?

I'm perfectly willing to believe that the demographic breakdown of labor isn't something they care much about but literally everyone with a set of functioning eyes and ears in the construction industry has endless stories about having to jump through some stupid hoop that a more favored player didn't have to because of a capricious government official or group of them. It's kinda sus that you think that doesn't happen.

Are those mutually exclusive? I know that's a common argument, but it doesn't track to me. Finding the diamonds in the rough in underrepresented groups is part of finding the best of the best to collaborate with.

its apples and ebola

The best of the best involves people from underrepresented groups. These policies exist to counteract the cronyism and “doesn’t look like me”-ism inherent to the way people make choices. We know people don’t hire and collaborate with the best of the best, because when looking for the best they see it easiest in people with similar backgrounds and perspectives as themselves.

It’s a shame the culture war cooked your brain on this one.

If there are no martian biologists because of systemic discrimination, why would the best if the best biologists include a martian.

The argument defeats itself. I don't understand why people keep repeating this lie instead of the truth.

The only way this makes sense is if you think the only way someone can be inspired by someone else is if they look the same.

Inspiring specific groups to follow a career path by showing them people on that path is “representation” not inclusivity. Representation matters because it’s easier (not impossible, as you suggest the argument is) to see yourself e.g. as a nurse or a teacher if you have seen male nurses or teachers succeeding.

Representation matters, but not nearly as much as the opposite side of things - who gets opportunities. Which is what I was talking about.

Btw one of the major groups that have benefitted from the dreaded “DEI” in universities has been white men. They are an under-represented group in many post-secondary settings.

You're acting like these things aren't intertwined.

You can't adjust the lever of representation without affecting who gets opportunities.

You can believe what you want about the merits of adjusting those levers but to pretend like you can limit your pool of people to a smaller group of people and not affect the apex of the talent pool is disengenous. Be honest and say you think it's worth it.

For sure they are intertwined. More inclusion = more representation, and vice versa. But you’re saying representation is pointless because people can enter fields they don’t see themselves represented in and I am saying i think representation is a (positive) side effect not the goal. You can argue that it’s pointless all you want but idgaf because to me it’s a side effect.

> limit your pool of people to a smaller group of people and not affect the apex of the talent pool is disengenous

I agree. Limiting your pool is a bad idea. That’s literally why inclusivity is a good thing. Because people self-limit the pool to people who look like them, and because other societal barriers limit the pool by excluding people. Actively acting to include people broadens the pool, it doesn’t limit it.

If you think on the scale of an individual hire or grant, i guess i can see how it would seem like limiting the pool - but zoom out like two steps and you’d see that’s not true.

What I actually think that I haven't said is that "representation" is a self defeating idea that encourages people to view themselves as different.

> I agree. Limiting your pool is a bad idea. That’s literally why inclusivity is a good thing. Because people self-limit the pool to people who look like them, and because other societal barriers limit the pool by excluding people. Actively acting to include people broadens the pool, it doesn’t limit it.

That's true, however, when the high end of the pool all looks a certain way because of systemic issues then the team built will tend to look that way and not be inclusive.

Thise creating the team could have the best of intentions the outcome could very likely be the same as if they were discriminatory.

People feel social and sometimes legal pressure to make sure it looks like they aren't discriminatory so, when they are choosing that last (few) member, they'll limit the pool of possibilities.

The other half of what you said is logical though, that inclusion probably leads to a more diverse future but at the cost of the present. The cost of the present is the part you're pretending doesn't exist.

> If you think on the scale of an individual hire or grant, i guess i can see how it would seem like limiting the pool - but zoom out like two steps and you’d see that’s not true.

Every single hire is an individual hire.

I didn’t say that. Idk what comment you read that said that, but it wasn’t mine.

> The cost of the present is the part you're pretending doesn't exist.

Even if there was a cost to the productivity of the present - a better present isn’t one where we’re the most “productive” or efficient - it’s one where the most people are able to grasp a good and fair life.

> Every single hire is an individual hire.

The dots on the screen form a picture.

The point is that each hire is an individual decision.

If I were painting a picture I might use a lot of different colors but if you ask me to pick my favorite color 5000 times, I'll say the same color 5000 times.

In fact, we see this now in Silicon Valley where 80% of workers are foreign born. Not a representative group of Americans by any stretch, and we see a lot of negativity towards folks Silicon Valley will never interact with as a result. And who are the wealthy bigots? Not the richest people in the history of the world. No, those other bad folks in the poor states who deserve it. They aren't under-represented.

A lot of research won't be profitable for years to come or is even unlikely to be profitable at all, so you funding sources are limited. The government, having no profit motive, can encourage this kind of research by funding it. Typically the hope is that it'll lead to increased productivity or innovation down the line.

You don't have to be a statistician to see that not all groups of the populace are represented equally among scholars. If you want all viewpoints covered from you populace, wouldn't that mean you want to try and push for inclusion there? That doesn't mean everything has to be inclusive but you sure can incentivize it

This is the core of the issue. We don’t actually want all viewpoints represented because that wouldn’t by itself produce any value.

You want someone to come up with the fundamental theorems of Calculus, linking the area of a curve with its anti-derivative, because that’s incredibly useful. Generically grabbing everyone’s view isn’t a competitive strategy. You need to be selective on things that are intrinsically useful and promote that.

The study you mention can be founded with pen and paper. No expensive trials or heavy equipment or team needed.

You can put in there standard things like “we will design new grad and undergrad courses that train new students in this tech that we will develop”.

You can put wider-impact things like “we will partner with local community colleges to integrate the results of this research in their XYZ course”, or “we will design summer research programs with recruitment from community colleges”.

And yes, you can (or used to be able to) include things like “we will partner with high schools with high populations of underrepresented demographics to do outreach and involve students in research”.

Clearly, there’s a large variety of things that fall under broader impact, and scientists weren’t required to pick only the “wokest” policies.

Please don’t comment on things you don’t know much about.

It is unbelievable to watch my country give up its most unfair (and yet mostly positive) advantage -- a nearly free option on the top talent of the entire planet. Here's hoping that the increasingly multipolar research world can find ways to be even more efficient in creating new knowledge.

I expect you are right at the most specialized end of the spectrum (and certainly industrial labs in those areas), but I wonder if anyone can speak directly to where we are still globally competitive.

But for bringing elite minds from outside the country? Heck no. Sure, for the right price they will come, but few want to bring their families to actually stay. Ask someone like a surgeon or physicist whether they want to work in the US or Canada/UK. They will say something like "ya, to make bank for a few years, but long-term I would rather live in Toronto than New York, Vancouver rather than Seattle." The perception of the US by people outside the US is not something America pays much attention to these days. It is suffering.

I mean yeah, but some of us are old enough to remember how the consensus was that the world was done with America because of Bush, but then Obama got elected and suddenly it was all forgotten.

outsiders like... their immediate family back home?

https://clearedjobs.net/guides/security-clearance-foreign-co...

>> A foreign national spouse who is a citizen of the United Kingdom will be evaluated very differently from a foreign national spouse who is a citizen of China or Russia. Both must be disclosed fully, but the national security concern level is substantially different. Applicants with significant ties to adversarial countries face more intensive investigations and, in some cases, may not be eligible for certain programs even if their individual loyalty is not in question.

Even without this mandatory polygraphing and the absurd rules around lifetime drug use are enough to rule these roles out of contention for many.

Well, not all research is publicly funded. I think private funding is still fine for the most part. But yes, public research is dying a painful death.

If you don't my asking, was your wife's profession, rather than her income directly, taken into account significantly? Thanks again

[1] https://prepareforcanada.com/blog/managing-money/financial-f...

With a few exceptions like Switzerland, American levels of compensation for highly qualified people just can't be matched anywhere in the Western world.

Saudi Arabia or UAE maybe, but these don't even try to pretend to be socially and politically liberal.

Europe spends more on academic research than the US, both in absolute terms and as a fraction of GDP. (The US spends more on R&D in general.) European academics are also less dependent on government funding. While European old money has long found it prestigious to fund arts and sciences, US donors are more likely to fund education or buildings.

European academics have continued to immigrate to the US, mostly because there is less competition for resources. It's easier to get a faculty position or a grant in the US, because you are competing against fewer people. Because academic jobs are worse in the US relative to the alternatives, fewer Americans are willing to pursue an academic career. That leaves opportunities for immigrants who have already chosen the academia and are willing relocate.

Gross compensation yes. But if you begin deducting stuff like the absurd American housing costs, private healthcare, saving up for deductibles, the need to own, insure, fuel and maintain a car to do everything because almost nothing is accessible by public transport, retirement savings, everyday stuff such as restaurants being made much more expensive than what's on the paper because of mandatory tipping, saving up for your children's academic degree while paying off your own student debt, hell saving up for having a child (just the birth will be 20k out of pocket [1]), saving up for times of un(der)employment... suddenly most of Europe becomes pretty affordable if you are not on FAANG levels of compensation.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-have-a...

Yes, for FAANG during Covid and now AI.

But your average SWE? That's more like 130k in the US [1] vs 61k in Germany [2]. In Germany, that's about 3500€ net (after taxes, retirement and health insurance - that is deducted from gross wages here) per month, of which you spend about 1500-1800 on cost of living (in Munich, the most expensive city in Germany by far), so about 1700-2000 in disposable income. You don't need a car because everything is walkable and a flatrate for all public transit across Germany is about 63€ a month.

Let's do the math for the US, California. Net pay is 87k/y or 7250/mo [3]. Of that, subtract ~600$ for a PPO plan (it's still not as good as Germany's default which does not have anything comparable to "in network", but good enough) and ~200$ for an average 2400$/y deductible. A 10% contribution to a 401k, 725$ a month. 2500$ for a 1-br apartment [4]. Now add in 100$ a month for car insurance (VW Golf) and 399$ in leasing rates for that VW Golf, then you're at 2.700$ a month in disposable income. But since you still have to pay half a grand a month on your average student loan [5], whoops, 2.200€ a month in disposable income left.

And frankly, making 200-500$ a month more in disposable income? That is not that much of a difference, particularly once you begin factoring in the "soft factors". Here in Germany, you can't be fired at-will, you'll always have to be paid for at least three months, that's one huge uncertainty off my back. You don't have to fear your kid getting shot (12 children a day die in the US from gun violence), you don't have to fear surprise bills when dealing with medical emergencies, you don't have to fear ICE picking you up and deporting you, you don't have to save up for the privilege of your child attending university because that's free in Germany.

If you're lucky and/or well-connected enough to land a job at FAANG/AI? By all means, go for the US. But for everyone else? Come here to Europe. Life's better here. Especially if you or your children are LGBT - or, given the recent anti-abortion crusade that bans lifesaving healthcare in many states, if you carry an uterus.

[1] https://www.indeed.com/career/software-engineer/salaries

[2] https://www.kununu.com/de/gehalt/softwareentwickler-in-15019

[3] https://www.talent.com/tax-calculator?salary=130000&from=yea...

[4] https://sfist.com/2026/05/28/average-rent-for-san-francisco-...

[5] https://admissions.usf.edu/blog/how-much-college-debt-is-too...

[6] https://www.sandyhookpromise.org/resources/gun-violence-fact...

Additionally, you're using the average software engineer salary in the US but then picking California for rent. The article you linked says country wide you'd expect $1950 for renting a 1-bedroom not the $2500 number you are picking for a studio in the bay area.

So you're off by something like $1000 per month (edit: I admit I am simply looking at what I pay for HMO, it's possible that is somehow unrepresentative but I doubt it) by picking the most expensive health plan and mixing up national salaries vs very expensive areas.

The gun violence risk is vastly overblown. The page you are linking to cites a study where gun deaths are being accumulated for ages 1 to 24 years old. Gun deaths are highly non-random and concentrated in older ages and in very specific areas (largely related to gang activity). The average software engineer with family is not going to run into any of that unless they are in the habit of leaving loaded weapons around the house.

Care to clarify how you came up with that budget? Rent an apartment, pay amenities and buy groceries for 1500 EUR in Munich? Like, the one which is in Bavaria (just in case you have some similarly named city located somewhere in ex-GDR)? I expect some hilarious mental gymnastics TBH...

My US example only included housing as well, simply because I have zero idea how much Americans pay for food, phones and internet.

In any case, a quick search for apartments in Munich (where I lived until last year) shows you quite a bunch of options (way) below that price range [1].

[1] https://www.immobilienscout24.de/Suche/de/bayern/muenchen/wo...

Now that may be fair, but anyone looking to move either has or doesn't have student loans and that won't change.

They weren't. Our highly taxed and relatively stagnant economies are more affordable & attractive for poorer people, but the well-paid professional class was simply better off in the US. Especially with some optimizations, such as: get your professional degree for free in Germany, then move to the US for its high salaries without a debt to pay.

Well, now with Trump and his madness, suddenly Europe or Canada become a lot more attractive. It simply is not worth it any more to stay in the US, and if the Democrats don't make a landslide in the midterms... get the fuck out as long as you still can.

I did just that in a sibling comment. 80k is upper class in Germany, solid middle class can be achieved at 60k.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48340349

It is 100% possible for me to have a high salary in the US and save most of it while temporarily exposing myself to larger risks. And it is far more useful for me to be able to say and show that I have a high salary, for access to credit and resources, private investments that give me the best shot of escaping a permanent underclass.

Of course, I don't want to budget, nobody wants to given the choice, so I pay for the conveniences and assurances that I can afford.

But even if the margins are smaller, the absolute numbers are great. If you aren't living paycheck to paycheck due to debt and lifestyle inflation, then you are really saving thousands of dollars a month. potentially many thousands. a single one of those is enough to travel around the world, it's just the irony that we have to come back to the US very soon in order to continue making that money. its enough to attempt to make a homerun in our capital markets on a equity name.

So, sorry commonwealth and Europe, you really don't compete on that front for people that don't already have capital. The wages are just too low.

In fact, the wages are ironically sooooo low that their main selling point - social welfare - is at parity to Americans on welfare! Who do have healthcare without premiums in some states, subsidized higher education in some cities, and more. So the systems aren't really as different as billed. Saying it another way, a European/Commonwealth citizen making their same salary in USD would get the same benefits in some parts of US, just losing all of their social standing in the process.

And finally, when Americans do earn their freedom back, with unlimited sums of money, Europe and Commonwealth countries once again become uncompelling, because the US has a more expensive, larger, funner version of everything those countries have to offer, while our US Gentry experience a different form of social welfare supporting themselves.

The incentives to really exit the US system aren't quite there. As another person mentioned, Switzerland is closest. Switzerland and schengen access is pretty appealing to me as well.

If you're very young, single and childless, sort of. You can pick the lowest tier of health coverage from your employer which is often fully covered by the employer and have no other major costs. If you're young and single and healthy this can work out. Of course, if you have some kind of accident or medical emergency, expect to be bankrupted, which is not how it works in other countries.

But once you have to cover childcare and school and university, and the lack of time off for parents (add expensive babysitters on top of daycare and school) and pay for good medical coverage for a whole family and of course contribute maximums towards retirement because social security won't be there and so on. Suddenly that large gross salary is mostly gone and what little is left over isn't very different from what may be left over from a much smaller salary in a different country.

And of course here in the US we get to work our nice 60 to 80 hour weeks instead of a regular 40 hours and disconnect from work. And we might two weeks vacation, if you can afford to take it, instead of 4 to 6 weeks.

European companies could offer higher salaries with a wholesale structural adjustment in their culture, and the US could offer healthcare higher education and child care in a wholesale structural adjustment

But right now the wrong things are different to really be compelling to tale advantage

That is hardly the norm, if you work in the hottest AI startup or some field of quant then sure, but average SWE do work the same 40 hour week. Lack of paid vacation is true tho.

That's the thing. Temporarily. Sure, you can save on healthcare with a high deductible and in-network-only plan. But then, all it needs to wipe you out is a bad traffic accident - say, you run a red light by accident, get t-boned at high velocity and airlifted to the next hospital. You're at fault, the hospital is out of network, the HEMS ride isn't covered anyway. Your car is toast, you're out of work for months and fired sooner than later.

In Germany? HEMS is covered by your health insurance. You get full pay for 6 weeks (and 70% afterwards) while out sick. Your boss can't (realistically) fire you without an insane lot of effort that most don't bother. All in all, you only have to eat the cost of the totaled car.

It really depends on your situation. I am living alone in an apartment that costs 60% of the median rent in my metro area and my generous healthcare plan ($1500 deductible, $3000 max OOP) is fully paid by my employer, short and long term disability insurance paid for by my employer, and my car will be paid off in 3 months. I am able to save around half of my income, but my sister and BIL have three kids and a house and they spend almost all of their money. Their combined income is probably 2.5-3x of what I make, but by myself I have a higher net worth than them. They’ll probably surpass me in net worth once they can stop paying for daycare and get their student loans cleared, they just have a lot of expenses I don’t.

https://ats.rippling.com/en-CA/d-wave-quantum/jobs?page=0

what about private companies making profits luring researchers?

Outsiders like to imagine that the pure pursuit of science without any agendas is what university research is all about. That is mostly a veneer.

ETA: Slightly off topic, but a colleague had his already-granted NSF grant killed by DOGE because it contained the word "censorship". He was researching ways to allow Iranian people to bypass their regime's Internet censorship.

It's not true, because The people who want power will just make a typo—or do a stupid keyword match—and now Harry Buttle is gone. They have no incentive to be consistent or accurate.

We created laws to prevent this from being the case. They work(ed) most of the time.

The current administration believed that it didn't have to follow those laws. After being slapped down multiple times by courts for this, they want to change the law(s) so that what your father said becomes true. But worse - "what the administration gave you last week, they can take away next week".

Also as someone who lost a grant from this administration for supposed DEI (it was fucking biology, but ignorant fucks didn't give a shit), I also want to say fuck them.

What could go wrong?

Definitely not more corruption.

Definitely not more uncertainty that kills gross fixed capital formation.

Exactly.

For example, if your research is about how to perform extreme body modifications on minors who think they are a gender that didn't exist 5 minutes ago, your funding is safe. But if you stray from the politically approved path, and discover something heretical like, "Actually, humans are sexually dimorphic" then you and your grant will be cancelled.

https://archive.is/2025.02.21-160254/https://www.scientifica...

There are two developmental pathways for sexual reproduction: - one produces small mobile gametes - one produces large immobile gametes

There can be plenty of variation in how an individual organism in different species ends up on one pathway or the other, there can be plenty of variation in how an individual organism on either pathway develops, and there can be plenty of variation in how an individual on either pathway behaves. But in sexually reproductive organisms, there are only two pathways.

A male who wants to obey stereotypical feminine stereotypes in behaviour and dress is free to do so, but it doesn’t make him any kind of female, or a different kind of male.

The thing about reality is that it persists no matter how stridently one denies it.

Nope. Not what I said at all. Nothing I said in any way related to the idea that some combinations were “blessed”. Merely that there are two pathways. Individuals may travel those two pathways in numerous ways, but until someone discovers a third gamete, there are only two pathways.

> The thing about reality is that it persists no matter how stridently one denies it.

Very true! No matter how many drugs or how many surgeries or behaviour changes, reality persists - males in dresses are still male, females in suits are still female.

I’ll give an analogy. Male and female are to biology as orbitals are to nuclear physics. A really, really useful shorthand. But they do not describe actual physical electrons “orbiting” a nucleus. Don’t mistake the shorthand for the reality. Scientific shorthand is generally not useful for reasonably discussing edge cases.

When people get all up in arms being anti trans, they are not getting up in arms about people not respecting the gametes... They are getting up in arms because they don't like it that the expression of sex phenotypes is heterogenous, overlapping, and scary, and that makes their small minds feel funny. Because they want to pretend that the world can be categorized into simple boxes that alleviate their anxiety, and gives them a sense of control. No, they don't even fucking know what a gamete is, for the most, and we sure as hell didn't know 200 years ago.

If you want to define biological sex as only being the gametes, fine. But that is a small thing. It's a definition that has little relevance. All the phenotypic variability in the expressed biology, phenotypic expression that depends on multifactorial developmental processes that can go in any of a billion different directions, that, while informed by sex chromosomes, are also affected by other non sex chromosomes genes, and also from variability in environmental exposures, which can affect the timing and dosing of sex hormones during development that actually DIFFERENTIATES thr biology? This article, and your perspective, only finds solid ground by limiting what biological sex encompasses to such a small piece of territory, that I can even give to that kingdom without losing any meaningful territory, in how bodies are made, how sex is expressed and lived in, and to what matters in shaping their lives, personalities, who they feel akin to, and everything else. Have the gamete, who gives a shit? Get it?

Compare to: "If it burns diesel, it's a truck, if it burns gasoline, it's a car. Thus, there are only two kinds with no overlap, easy peasy."

[More detail in reply to sibling-comment]

A better example would be how many axles a road vehicle can have to be considered a road vehicle.

You might reasonably conclude that the number starts at one and essentially goes to infinity and you’d be right.

But somewhere, deep in academia, some critical theorists are going to get upset that you’ve excluded zero and excluded the all the real numbers. They are going to call this oppression, and they’re going to invent a theory that says “actually vehicle axle identities exist on a spectrum that includes zero and all the real numbers, irrational numbers, etc.” if you give them long enough, they will also tell you if you don’t consider a vehicle whose axle count is an imaginary number, then you are imaginary axle-phobic.

Out here in the real world it’s very obvious that vehicles can’t have half an axle or 4.29 axles.

And the point is not because you want to exclude or oppress any road vehicles, it’s simply that being able to count the number of axles is a useful categorization for humans who work with road vehicles, so it has to be possible to say how many there are in an objective sense, in the real world.

Similarly, knowing which of the two sexes an individual belongs to does not tell you everything about that individual, but it definitely tells you a few things that are very useful in policy, law and custom.

It’s one thing for a man to put an a dress, it’s quite another for us to allow the law to consider that by putting on the dress he is now the weaker sex.

Yeah, I'm thinking you don't have much exposure to real world trucking and lift axles at all.

It's not uncommon for heavy load truck trailers to have axles that are only dropped to the road to take up a heavy load and are retracted for lighter and no loads to extend the lifetime of tyres and bearings.

Operationally, over their road time, the number of axles in contact with tarmac becomes fractional.

If you're going to make sweeping claims about "the real world" it's best to be across all those pesky actual edge cases.

I'm saying that their attempt to reduce a human-categorization question to just-gametes is the same kind of stupid and incomplete as trying to reduce another vehicle-purpose question to gas-vs-diesel.

> “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.”

-- H.L. Mencken.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

This definition of sex is fundamental. It's the only one that applies across all sexually-reproducing species.

> They are getting up in arms because they don't like it that the expression of sex phenotypes is heterogenous, overlapping, and scary, and that makes their small minds feel funny.

They probably just disagree with the bizarre and false claim, made so often in recent years for reasons of ideology rather than fact, that humans can change sex and that there are medical interventions that supposedly make this possible.

Ah the classics!

“Everyone who disagrees with me is stupid”

If that is literally the only reason you can comprehend that someone doesn’t buy this ideology hook line and sinker, then you are the one with the small mind.

I have spent the last several months learning everything I can, and not just about trans, but about the academic undercurrents like queer theory, and of course about the concept of sex in biology.

Until earlier this year, my assumption was the trans rights was just gay rights 2.0 and that seemed pretty fine to me. I was aware that there was controversy, but I paid a little heed. Like you I assumed anyone who was fighting it was just a small minded bigot. Eventually, the good people would prevail and the world would go on.

But then I started actually listening to what trans activists and queer theorists were saying. And then I started reading from people with a wide variety of thoughts.

I came out the other end pretty much aligned with J. K. Rowling:

Wear whatever clothes you like.

Sleep with whoever will have you.

But sex is real and immutable in humans, and this has real consequences for policy and law that cannot be ignored in pursuit of a utopian fantasies of a world where everything is a spectrum and all categorization is interpreted as oppression.

Wrong.

https://archive.is/2025.02.21-160254/https://www.scientifica...

I happen to subscribe to bimodal - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLH-y2nLocw but I understand why the dimorphic viewpoint has utility.

There are exceptional individuals, in every population. Just like there is a non-zero chance that a baseball thrown at a wall will pass through a wall due to a quirk of quantum fluctuation (10^-10^32 chance or whatever), the utility of the differentiation point is a matter of perspective (including intent). Bimodal does not exclude these individuals, but does imply the spectrum has limits (which it does).

Arguing about what two people, of differing perspective, think won't change either's views without associating a utility that has not been considered.

For the record, various studies conclude the ratio of individuals that are neither 46,XX nor 46,XY as being anywhere between 0.02% to 1.3% of the population. Or roughly 10^30 more likely than throwing a baseball through a solid wall (based on your stated likelihood).

I specifically mentioned the purpose of the thought experiment as a matter of framing a perspective, rather than setting it as some kind of rough equivalency. This is reinforced by the endorsed video.

You've intentionally missed the point, which is disingenuous. Good luck with whatever.

That's how its always been, it's just that most people are not attuned to academic politics.

Do you mean that the EU spends 1/10th that, rather than Europe? Because France, Germany and the UK all spend €100-150bn each in grants depending on how you set your definition, and that’s atop the EU’s grant money.

Just eyeballing the figures across different countries, it looks like the USG distributes approximately the same amount in grants per capita as the EU & UK. Certainly not a 90% diff.

Scientists have two easy avenues if they are currently in the US, the US or their home country. Immigration to work in a foreign nation is not always easy and takes time.

If the choice is between $0 in the US and >$0 someplace else, you emigrate to >$0 if you want to continue your research.

Way off, it's way closer, even if we're just talking EU. EU (the body) alone is about 200 billion/year. EU member states are like 1-1.5 trillion/year.

US: $848B (2024)

EU: $508B (2024)

---

UK: $102B (2023)

Switzerland: $22B (2023)

Norway: $8.2B (2024)

OECD "Gross domestic spending on R&D"

We fund science, research and we have accelerated programs for researchers affected by these kinds of things.

If you're interested, email me (see profile). I have been helping Americans emigrate to Europe (for free) for several years.

If you spend $900 Billions on BS you will lose to other countries that only spend 1/100th of that.

Quantity over quality doesn’t work in science because reality doesn’t care who paid how much.

Thats why there was so much funding for intelligent design all these years.

I know a lot of hay and media exists about how academia is yadda yadda biased and anti intellectual. But of course a lot of that is cherry picked examples of controversial figures or individual missteps among individual institutions. This is a bit like taking a classroom with one rowdy asshole and then declaring the whole school must use physical violence as discipline from now on.

Edit: don’t forget how he’s forcing NSF headquarters to move. All the NSF, not just the “bad” research.

Almost everyone has entertained the idea of leaving the US for more stability, which is required for research.

Unfortunately, getting money from industry isn’t much easier in my opinion.

We have some software projects we want to spin out into a small business or non-profit (because federal funding…), but industry is absolutely cold right now. Had a few very promising partners lined up, but it all evaporated last spring. Between tariffs, AI spending, and now oil, everyone is reluctant to spend.

https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/NSF-Terminated-Award...

I wouldn't even need to cherry pick.

Culture Change for Inclusion of Indigenous Voices in Biology

Strengthening Inclusion by Change in Building Equity, Diversity and Understanding (SICBEDU) in Integrative Biology

An Equitable, Justice-Focused Ecosystem for Pacific Northwest Secondary CS [Computer Science] Teaching

Great to read these are being defunded.

Appears it didn't receive any funds since 2022 after being extended for years (so your "daddy" is Biden) and wouldn't get any more money so was canceled to get it off the books.

If anything this shows the list includes regular grants that were canceled for normal reasons, which further demonstrates the cuts were not of real science.

The amount of capability that America is burning is impressive. Since its not part of everyone else's life, it looks like it has no impact.

The same way that a drug discovery today has no impact on your life now, but is life saving 10 years down the line.

With this, I guess the US will end up as a third rate country much quicker.

That of course is all setup for consent: Trump doing all that stuff is just fighting fire with fire, the justified means to the end of not only making America great again but now saving it from certain doom.

People are both more clever than you think, and dumber than you think. Few non-experts would claim to understand skyscraper design. And yet somehow everyone with a social media account and 4th grade literacy skills claims to understand how to govern 300m people and the largest economy in the world.

I don't consider myself a Jeffersonian Republican, but I can see clearly that tens of millions people voted for short-term action to fight against this or that perceived boogeyman, and did so largely from an emotional perspective with little foresight into what the consequences might actually be, beyond "X candidate says he will fix Y bad thing and I think Y is very important". The fact that 3-time Trump voters feel disappointed and betrayed and yet somehow still claim that Harris "would have been worse" points to a serious lack of unemotional big-picture thinking when it comes to the future of the USA. Hell I see people going all the way back to Obama -- "yeah OK so Trump did [100 unimaginably horrible things that will eventually hurt me] but Obama once hit a US citizen with a drone strike so what's the big deal? get lost snowflake god bless my president"

They've been doing this for like 70 years at this point and it's frankly a testament to how strong our institutions were that they're still kind of functioning, in the same way a 1999 Corolla you haven't gotten an oil change on since the Clinton admin is still kind of functioning.

And no I'm not going to do the song and dance for both sides. Yes, plenty of Democrats suck and I would love to see them ousted, but by and large the party consistently in power when the U.S. is in decline of it's own making is the Right. Something something facts don't care about your feelings.

it will take longer than this decade, maybe even next, to restore the brain loss and faith in secure jobs for research

basically this country will just become a highway of non-stop warehouses, alternating ICE prisons vs "AI" datacenters

science, medicine, all research and development just gone to other countries

This is not just picking which ideas the government supports. This sounds like it’s taking all the “fun” out of having grant funding.

Sure, that’s a flip remark, but doesn’t this have a similar sense of arguments against other government funded programs?

~SNAP food assistance is raising food prices~ [1] or ~SNAP food assistance is my tax dollars going towards anyone who says they’re hungry.~ [2]

And don’t forget to mention the replication crisis.

~Public funded grants let scientists go to parties and publish junk science.~

The cynical would argue it’s proof the scientific community is filled with charlatans milking a system that can’t police itself.

[1]: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DYNZT43R705/

[2]: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DY2k2MNxf97/

- With no workers working, no worker fraud problem, sure. If you cut core scientific processes, politicize science, and destablize paycheck predictability enough to chase everyone good out of science, then yes any small amount of waste is also caught in the cuts.

- This seems to increase what you call bad "fun": Increases abuse of tax funding being corruptly given to projects advocated by political appointees despite rejection by scientific peer review. Vicious feedback loop.

Surprise! I'm just a middle-age American reading HN with his coffee trying to wrap my head around the topic. I don't think this remark helps anyone understand your argument. Doth protest too much.

I'm wondering if you're focused on the "approved" science, and missing the idea this corruption is riding on the back of even a "small amount of waste", and an overall rejection of scientific activities in the face of the replication crisis. All part of the schism of your facts and our facts insanity.

The bigger issue is failure to significantly increase r&d funding, vs last decade+ shrinkages and Trump-era eating of the young, and focuses like you now propose suggest a continuation of such economy-inhibiting thinking. Also, note how your post was goalpost moving. This in turn is classic trolling with asymmetric effort, so I don't see your response in good faith.

I feel like I commented on someone’s marriage. Peace.

Look at Russia, they jumped off a cliff to protect a regime from democracy, and people are checked out - they take no accountability and still act confused of why Russia is being despised - all while accelerating economic and demographic decline with more than one million casualties in a special 3 day military operation.

You can't make this up.

In the US you might get your funds cancelled, in Russia you'll get your life cancelled instead - and not in the metaphorical sense.

Also as incompetent as the current US government is, the incompetence of the Russian government is on a whole different level (the "3 days to Kyiv" are taking longer than the whole "Great Patriotic War").

> Russia is a de-jure democracy

As is North Korea, it must be even more democratic than the rest of the world because it calls itself "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" ;)

Trump and Hegseth are explicit in their admiration for Putin and Xi. So being technically right here is largely to miss the point. The trajectory the US is on is pretty clear.

Just pointing out that Putin has systematically turned Russia into a full-blown fascist autocracy, but even in Russia this took nearly two decades until all opposition was crushed.

MAGA has the same goal (turning the US into a fascist autocracy), but I bet it will be much harder and would take much longer to dismantle the checks-and-balances system in the US as completely as Putin did in Russia.

> I'm not sure what difference there is between them.

Good hyperbole

If you weren't aware of these differences, I'd encourage you to radically change your media diet; there are unfortunately many outlets which find it advantageous to exaggerate how bad the US is and deemphasize how bad dictatorships are. (Some are paid Russian propaganda, I've seen a shocking number of people send me RT links as though they're a legitimate news source.)

But those four puppets served the same ruling class interests, and they manufactured consent for each other the whole time.

I also struggle to see how it can be that different Presidents with often directly contradictory policies could both be serving the same ruling class interests. Gay marriage, for example, was slowly legalized over the period from from 2002 to 2015; is your claim that this is simply because the ruling class disliked gay marriage in 2000 and liked it in 2015?

> I also struggle to see how it can be that different Presidents with often directly contradictory policies could both be serving the same ruling class interests.

Using the polarizing topic of COVID (whose risks remain in 2026) as an example, we can answer both of your questions:

https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/how-the-press-manufactured-co...

Which ultimately led to:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240802024326/https://docs.hous...

This can be applied to virtually any topic. The party of "good cop" and the party of "bad cop" promise no change from the status quo. Of course, anybody easily distracted by the culture wars will not see the commonality between both corporate parties, by design. These people see a close election and use that as "proof" we still have a functioning democracy.

People who are concerned about "corporatism" have the same problem. I often see them get confused and frustrated when the news presents "big government" as a scary thing that people are worried about - doesn't everyone know big business is the more important concern? Most Americans don't agree with them (https://news.gallup.com/poll/701054/perceived-threat-big-bus...), but if all your friends think big business sucks and government programs are great, it's hard to know that this is something you should check.

/r/ZeroCovidCommunity continues to be growing community for good reason.

That's why they're considered a rogue state at the moment.

So at best you can say the Russian regime claims Russia is a democratic, that's not de jure, because for it to be de jure you'd need institutions to make sure it was in fact de jure.

There's none, just signs with the name on the wall, and people roleplaying.

The flagrant corruption and voter suppression efforts underway at the moment make the next 2-3 years the final chance to bring it back from the brink. That doesn't just mean a Democrat winning. It means an actual democrat (lowercase) winning and building a coalition to repair what has been broken. I don't personally think that looks very likely, but I hope for all our sakes it can happen.

NSFL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XasTcDsDfMg

Education, cultural sensitivity, etc. are health issues.

Decentralized systems also help local entities develop and grow into their own. Necessity is the mother of invention and centralized systems largely remove the necessity of local expertise which cripples efforts to advance it. This is the 17th declared major outbreak of ebola in the DRC. One would think that by the time you've had a few major ebola outbreaks, let alone 16, you'd be building up a rich body of expertise, knowledge, and competence, but that does not really seem to be the case.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/29/friday-briefin...

Musk: “So, for example, with USAID, one of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly was Ebola prevention.”

“As of early February, the U.S. was not providing funding to support testing and port screenings in Uganda because of Trump's freeze on almost all U.S. foreign assistance.”

“Within USAID's Global Health Bureau there was a team of people that specialized in high risk outbreaks, like Ebola. "Virtually all of those people have been pushed out of the agency, and they have not been brought back. Only a very small handful — like low single digits — remain from what had been something like a 30 person team," says Jeremy Konyndyk, who oversaw USAID's response to the 2014 Ebola outbreak.”

“As for the role of the CDC, Spencer says what its officials can do is limited by Trump's order that the CDC not communicate with WHO.”

Sure, of course.

But to even ask the question presumes that politics isn’t already overriding science within the academy, just from a different direction.

This new direction turns the magnet around and pushes away everything else.

Also it really is sad to see “Hacker” News be “World News”. More Zig and less White House, please. Redditors have infiltrated. The rate of political posts have increased dramatically since 2016 election.

Since many of those grants concern science and tech it does seem relevant to this site.

> " Why Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog (Whether We Like It Or Not)"

> ...but a few asked questions regarding what Techdirt is focused on these days, and how much we were leaning into covering “politics.”

> When the very institutions that made American innovation possible are being systematically dismantled, it’s not a “political” story anymore. It’s a story about whether the environment that enabled all the other stories we cover will continue to exist.

https://www.techdirt.com/2025/03/04/why-techdirt-is-now-a-de...

The current "Tech" culture, also traces its roots to people who very much didn't like the way things were done in corporate offices in places like NY.

Thats why Google used to have statements like do no evil, and it mattered to those early recruits. Things were built, with the intention to make things better for people.

The leaders of AI companies talk constantly about democracy and other values, while new CS grads are being told they will have no jobs.

For the record, I really wish HN was not as politically active. However this change is downstream of the environment.

I have been on this website for 17 years (ugh that's scary), and people have been posting variations of this remark the entire time. It's a tiresome sort of post the thousandth time.

Politics have always been a consistent part of this website: it's a big part of the world that hackers live in, and barring rule enforcement to the contrary, hackers will always find politics interesting and want to talk about it.

If you want a website with a more narrow focus, there's always lobste.rs.

It illustrates to me how quickly everyone gets wrapped up in the current thing. There is no principle about which content is allowed or not. Entire threads representing alternative views are removed.

For example, In 2018 I remember you could not say a single thing critical of Elon or Tesla .

So they’ll be sued. The theories will be tested and we’ll see exactly where the line is (eventually). And probably somewhere uncomfortable, given SCOTUS.

There are legitimate ways agency political appointees can set funding priorities. Like this year we’ll focus on Alzheimer’s. But of course, we should take the least charitable reading of this - that it’ll likely be used for shenanigans. Punish enemies. Award cronies. Go after junk science, etc.

So now the administration is attempting to follow those rules to create these new procedures, which they believe will then be lawful.

If they are successful, challenges would have to be made judicially based on non-procedural grounds, or through Congress.

They can follow APA to come up with all kinds of illegal rules. And the actual rules are so broad they could be used from anything sane to something that might be just political revenge.

The actual language:

> “As part of the merit review process, Federal agencies must perform pre-issuance reviews to ensure that Federal award proposals selected for funding are consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest.”

Science and Educational purposes are valid 501(c)(3) purposes. A donation to a 501(c)(3) that funds open-source scientific software, public STEM education, basic research, science grants, or public-interest tech research can be deductible.

Up to 60% of Adjusted Gross Income can be tax-deductible as charitable contributions to a qualified 501(c)(3) with itemization, depending on the contribution type.

This would create a non-partisan defined/dedicated non-profit funding layer with serious governance that will benefit all sides. Might be possible to go global.

This would need serious structure: independent board, conflict-of-interest rules, grant review, public reporting, no private benefit, and probably fiscal sponsorship first.

Maybe this deserves a separate Ask HN to avoid derailing this thread: would people here actually support or help design a 501(c)(3)-style vehicle for public-benefit science and technology funding?

But these very endowments have been special cased as additionally taxable, despite that status, under the 2025 OBBBA, resulting in research budget cuts [0].

Would independent endowments as you describe them be more immune?

[0] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/college-endowment-tax...

Why a hypothetical? Plenty of options available to donate to or to contribute otherwise. Not help built it, help grow and maintain it.

Federal grants have always been subject to politics.

$2.4 million for "Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility) Girls in a Robotics Leadership Project"

$1.2 million for "FW-HTF-R: Collaborative Research: Virtual Meeting Support for Enhanced Well-Being and Equity for Game Developers"

$700k for "CAREER: Advancing Equity in Middle School Mathematics by Engaging Students and Families of Color in Participatory Design Research"

Etc., etc., etc.

The first (https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award?AWD_ID=2116118) and third (https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award/?AWD_ID=2144506) were approved as part of the NSF's Directorate of STEM Education, a still-ongoing initiative to ensure the US has a strong talent pipeline of upcoming scientists. It was and remains common for them to toss money at people with kids who otherwise might not be educated well in science; recent Trump-era grants include "Social Mobility through ARkansas Tech program" (https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award?AWD_ID=2527972) and "STEM Journeys - From College to Career" (https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award?AWD_ID=2527683). (I suspect we'll agree that the original examples are framed with strange racial overtones, which you could imagine legitimate political guardrails against even if the peer reviewers don't mind.)

The second (https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award/?AWD_ID=2128991) is core social science research. Virtual meetings had recently become an extremely common phenomenon, and the investigators claim this led them to discovering (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1089/cyber.2021.011...) the mechanism behind the then-novel phenomenon of Zoom fatigue.

All those cancel-at-any-moment-in-time or ICE gunning down US citizens or "war versus Iran", next day no war, nope, it is war, no, it is not. Dementia ruling here. At the same time a few pocket away tons of money. This is like the chaos version of game, but ... stupid.

It's also interesting how quickly the USA becomes a de-facto country run by a mafia. Granted, this was obvious to many people for decades, and history shows that too, but it is fascinating how few internal blocks they have to a dementia king. It is like the ultimate pillage crew. How much money can they pillage? Anyone still remember Epstein by the way? How did he have that much money? Only two people organised sexy parties with the superrich? That story makes sense to anyone? Why is only Ghislaine in prison? Seems a bit bold to claim two people organised naughty parties involving underage people for the superrich.

Yeah, the USA has a few problems here ... thankfully dementia king is in bad health, but eyeliner-boy may simply take over without an election. Best democracy ever ...

(Unless you're doing science for military development. Then the funding spigot is open.)

And to those who say "oh, it's the same as it was before, just different ideologies" -- no, it is not at all the same. Not even comparable.

How the Russian interests have taken over significantly invalidates the purpose and existence of the FBI, CIA, and NSA.

But then again, President Biden's administration had multiple grounds to prosecute Trump for crimes committed, whether the attempted coup or espionage with top secret documents or Epstein, and they just did not make it happen in a way that had any effect.

What is this, North Korea?

Wait, maybe not that last one.

Things can definitely get worse.

I don't think any practicing scientist of any political persuasion will think these are good for science.

Science progresses by sharing knowledge openly and publicly, so others can evaluate it, criticize it, and build on it. These severe restrictions on collaboration, publication, and public communication will damage science's naturally open, merit-based culture.

We will all suffer due to lost discoveries--maybe not today, but over years and decades.

On the other hand, if we can't get private citizens to donate to science research, then they are not likely to vote for it either--polls don't register much of a concern from the average citizen*. I don't think most of us want to be under a dictator or go back to having a king.

That means the only practical option is to act of our own volition and support science through vocal advocacy and private money. In this way, we can each donate to the research we care about the most with maximum academic freedom.

* https://news.gallup.com/poll/1675/most-important-problem.asp...

Both are bad, but one allows some diversity; the other produces a monoculture.

A political monoculture that can be completely upended before even any useful crop is grown, given the nature of a working democracy versus the length of research projects.

And yes, I'm aware that those last two words are no longer guaranteed.

The USG is quite often the only group able and willing to fund most projects.

Everyone knows that many things that are not directly beneficial to society would go unfunded because humans optimize for what’s around them, and things that are self-interested.

There isn’t even alignment. One person wants to fund science, the other wants to fund high speed rail, the other wants farm subsidies, one wants social security and the other wants the military. Government balances all of that together. Of course people will make value judgements about their pet interests and declare the other aspects to be better funded separately.

I mean I'm not inherently opposed to laws or government, but I think a lot of people need to be more measured and considerate of what they are using tax money for when it is being taken from their fellow citizens at gunpoint.

Believe it or not, it's possible to hate both Kash Patel/Kristi Noem and the unelected bureaucrats burning tax money on awful research.

BTW your “believe it or not” is quite condescending. Do you talk to people in real life like that?

>BTW your “believe it or not” is quite condescending. Do you talk to people in real life like that?

Yes, especially when they're the sort of people who support taking my tax money to fund idiotic and outright racist "research".

Russ Vought was not elected either.

If that sounds absurd… you’re right! It is!

using grep to defund grants that contain words we don't like is the exact opposite of measured and considerate. so is punishing scientists for the sin of working for a 'woke' institution. in fact all this seems extremely punitive, and not in the spirit of optimizing outcomes for costs at all.

note that this policy explicitly removes the requirement to provide any kind of rationale. that sort of directly contradicts the notion that this is a measured discussion about priorities.

Contrary to what you said, there is actually quite a bit of private philanthropic funding for research, it's just that it's not evenly distributed. The vast majority of it seems to go to medical research, in particular cancer and Alzheimer's. That's obviously a good thing, but my point here is that we can't necessarily depend on private philanthropy to distribute funds optimally.

https://www.cato.org/blog/governments-should-not-fund-resear...

I'm generally a fan of Cato and a libertarian approach to economics, but I'm still not convinced that we should be spending zero public money on basic research. I would like to see a decent amount going into mathematics and theoretical physics for example, and I doubt those fields would stay afloat on donations.

Aside from that, so much money was wasted on Alzheimer's research based on fraud.

I want a competent government who directs the funds in an appropriate way. Not one who sets up a shush fund, using my money, to pay their private army of thugs.

This comment reflects a level of ignorance that would make Dunning & Kruger facepalm.

The idea that you compare a democratically elected government’s taxes… to that of an unelected tyrant show a complete lack of perspective.

From a naive perspective, this sounds a lot like the breeding ground for Lysenkoism (Stalin-approved). In that example, aligning science to the party line led to a couple of famines. I say naive because there were other factors at play (e.g. it was forbidden to criticize Lysenko's theories).

It is all fascinating to me.

I highly doubt you could do that in the US without being shot.

Example: "They're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats."

Cancel Haitian grants. And also round them up in deportation holding facilities.

Having incentive to produce useful outcomes seems like it would be something folks would be in support of, but it appears many here think this is the end of the world just because it's Trump doing it. At least there's consistency in that regard. Le sigh.

You could argue peer review has become a mechanism to encourage incrementalism. That it doesn’t reward big leaps. And the public isn’t getting ROI on science funding compared to 50 years ago.

Peer review is a closed system of expertise that doesn’t let you challenge the core tenants - some might say theology - of the field. It’s basically a cartel for keeping a field of study alive, regardless of its value. True innovation happens when people collaborate outside their fields.

Steelman aside, there probably are better ways to solve this problem systematically than just let a politically appointee have final say. If we were serious about this problem, smart people thinking about scientific policy probably have some great ideas that are not being listened to.

Strong claims require strong evidence. The tenants some people want to challenge are climate change, gender identity, renewable energy, vaccinations, etc.

So its a hard bargain, I believe science benefits from being a bit stubborn.

And I’d argue all fields could use more dissenting opinions and new options. I don’t know if this would be the path to that but keep in mind there have been many things historically where someone needed to take a leap of faith to go against the current dogma.

Consensus is a thing, but science is not one institution, is a bunch of different warring factions of people trying to get published and cited and funding.

Are you arguing that or not

Also: tenets

>some might say theology - of the field

Some might, I'm sure! Are you saying that?

https://www.lesswrong.com/w/steelmanning

Personally, I am sympathetic to the idea that science has stagnated. But I do not think this is the solution.

This is a case of correctly diagnosing the problem - but not actually having a real solution