US Election 2016

[Word]

I think 1 stood, so 1 is many now? watch it, CGPT is great at making up it's own alternative narrative when it has no clue about the event at all.

Half of them. Again, you pick like the least important side issue and even there you're more inaccurate than ChatGPT. As Z-Man mentioned, Trump just cut cancer research. Context matters. How do you think your best cancer scientists will react to these cuts? Some will probably leave the country and maybe return once this chaos is over.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/social ... r-survivor
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/20 ... t-session/

[Z-Man]

How do you think your best cancer scientists will react to these cuts? Some will probably leave the country and maybe return once this chaos is over.

Yes, that. Even if the claims of corruption and waste were true (No evidence for it right now, and you can be certain they won't admit they were not true if that's the case, because there is always SOME waste, even if it's a coffee machine somewhere that never gets used), you can't turn research off and on like a faucet. If you turn it off, people leave. They have bills to pay, and especially young scientists often live in financially precarious situations. They leave the field, research in general, maybe the country. Applications for research positions in European institutes have already gone up.
Also, experiments and studies can't always be interrupted and continued later. Especially in medical research.
And even if you were spending 75% on administration overhead and 25% on actual research, and you cut funding by 50% overnight, who is in charge of distributing that funding? Right, the lazy evil administration. So where do you think the cuts will hit first? The actual research. Even if you believe the premise, this is the dumbest way to go about it.

[Word]

Yeah, and just from an emotional perspective, imagine you spent 40 years in cancer research, lead a large team with very specific projects where you are the entity that holds everything together, but then suddenly some 20-year-old Musk disciple locks you out of your office and there's now a big question mark dangling over your life's work. Same for all the career officials, veterans and so on.

Also, the betrayal of Ukraine. I do want that war to end, but the way Trump goes about it feels like we are all trapped in a Tom Clancy novel where the president is the obvious traitor and Jack Ryan has already been fired.

edit: i googled "trapped in a tom clancy novel" after this and it is a thing, haha

[sinewav]

We will have research soon, just pulling away from places that 80-90% of the funds are going to support administrative costs rather than research, so many places are inefficient at using the the money we spend.

I just want to add a little truth to this comment. I worked in research for five year and part of my job was literally grant budgeting. You know what a lab spends most of their money? Salaries. It's not making the admins rich I can tell you that. On average something like 80% of the grant money went to payroll, and 20% went to things like lab equipment and consumables. Maybe you think the researchers are overpaid? Yeah, maybe a few, but at least where I worked those people making 250k a year were also the top people of their field for the entire world. I would rather pay someone 250k a year to do groundbreaking science than 250k a year working for an insurance company that mostly just steals money. Before I worked in research I did tech installations on military bases. The military is absolutely terrible with money. Audit them first, then go after the NIH, DOE, etc.

[kyle]

Half of them.

You might be slightly confused, just over half of the people in the room were republicans, they stood up, it was the other half whom are democrats that did not, meaning basically all the democrat, senators and representatives in our congress did not stand.

On average something like 80% of the grant money went to payroll, and 20% went to things like lab equipment and consumables.

that doesn't disprove what I was pointing out, of the 80% payroll, how many were actual researchers? how many were office staff? Another things to point out is private companies, typically operate way more efficiently than the government does, as they have to be a lot more accountable for what the money is going towards, or risk is collapsing.

Anyway It looks like NIH funding cuts are not going anyway, but the proposed budget for it is the same or more, just with a cap on indirect costs at 15%

[Word]

Half of them.

You might be slightly confused, just over half of the people in the room were republicans, they stood up, it was the other half whom are democrats that did not, meaning basically all the democrat, senators and representatives in our congress did not stand.

Ok, admittedly "half of them" sounds a bit more definitive than it should be. Here's a Snopes article about the whole thing with evidence. Again, why does it matter so much if they seated or stood up when Trump just defunded/froze cancer research?

how many were office staff?

At our archeology institute, "office staff" was one person. Most administrative work still has to be done by the archeologists themselves. Which means they have very little time for actual research and well-prepared lectures. Now, archeology isn't medicine, but I'd say the effect of such an imbalance there might be even worse.

[Z-Man]

On average something like 80% of the grant money went to payroll, and 20% went to things like lab equipment and consumables.

that doesn't disprove what I was pointing out, of the 80% payroll, how many were actual researchers? how many were office staff?

You ask like you think it would be a lot, but really have no idea, right? When I was at the Department for Theoretical Physics for my failed PhD, it had (I think) three tenure track professors, each of them with about two postdocs and three PhD Students, so about 18 researchers/teachers. We had one secretary, who also had to deal with all the students, hand one IT guy shared with the other Physics departments. I'm not sure whether you want to count him as administration, he kept our work equipment functional. Now, all these people have different pay grades... but the secretary sure was not getting paid the most. Depending on how you look at it, maybe 5% administration, definitely single digit.
Now, it has to be said that the researchers, especially the primary investigators, need to spend a chunk of their time on administrative tasks. Part of their job, and any one of them will tell you it's too big a part, is procuring the finances to keep the department going. That involves writing proposals for research projects to government agencies and private entities, all that fun stuff. But that's how we decide what research gets done; It's not that the departments get a free check and can do with it whatever they want.

Another things to point out is private companies, typically operate way more efficiently than the government does, as they have to be a lot more accountable for what the money is going towards, or risk is collapsing.

My sweet summer child, you keep believing that It's only true for small companies involved in actual physical work, like making stuff or fixing stuff. Where there is a direct relation between the amount and quality of the work and the revenue. For large corporations, the same mechanisms that lead to government inefficiencies kick in. You have managers Bill and Jill, and Bill will just hire two more guys even though he does not need them, in order to look more important and powerful than Jill. When Google and others made more money than makes sense, they massively overhired engineers, not because they needed them, but because they could afford them and wanted to take them away from the other guys.
Then there is the problem that companies will be profit oriented. They'll do what is good for them. Governments/Administrations may not be the best at efficiency, but they're the ones qualified to determine research priorities that are for public benefit. That's part of what they're elected/appointed for. And it doesn't hurt to go both ways, or three. Take fusion research. You have these big international cooperations like ITER, which follow a well laid out plan where we are pretty sure it would yield results if followed through, but it's going to take time and lots of money. Then there are smaller national projects, like Wendelstein in Germany and the artificial sun thing in China, just doing research. And you have two handful of private companies trying completely alternative approaches, where each has a low chance of success, but if it works, it would work relatively quickly (years instead of decades) and make piles over piles of money.

Anyway, I rambled off again, point stays, just by shutting down government funding you're not solving anything. And keep in mind:
They're not just cutting future funding. No, that's not good enough.
They are cancelling running contracts. Wait, no, that's not good enough either.
They are refusing to pay the bills for work that has already been done. They ignored court orders to pay up (attacked the judge who ruled against them, naturally). Only a narrow Supreme Court ruling now probably forces them to pay. We'll see. The ruling wasn't even 'you have to pay', but 'the federal court has the right to demand you pay, provided the timeline is reasonable'.

At this point, there are two possible ways to explain your administration's behavior:
1. They really believe the stuff they're claiming and think what they're doing helps. Or, put another way, they're bloody idiots.
2. They very well know what they are doing and are doing it with the explicit intention of hurting the people they don't like.

Top hurt receivers so far would be trans people. Right now, the state is that their rights have not just been eroded, they are gone. Trans people no longer exists. The Sex entry in official documents has to be what the doctor determined after you plopped out of your mother by looking at the bits between your legs, and if you know anything, or watched the video Lucifer linked last, is ambiguous or wrong in a shocking percentage of perfectly natural cases. Trans women are sent to prisons for men now. You care about sexual assault, don't you? "Well, just don't go to jail, then" doesn't work, mind that it's remarkably easy to land in jail in the USA.

[sinewav]

...of the 80% payroll, how many were actual researchers? how many were office staff?

Z-Man covered most of what I would have written, but let me give you a breakdown of how things might go for a typical grant at the famous private research institute I worked at in Southern California.

Grant Funding Secured from NIH: 5 million dollars distributed over 5 years

Of the one million per year, half goes to the lab and the other half goes to the institute. Salaries are controlled by the NIH for this specific grant so you have to make the minimum but no more than the maximum. The range exists because of cost of living in different areas. Southern California is expensive so below are typical salaries of the people who's names will be on the paper when published:

Principal investigator: $180k
3 Postdocs: $55k
1 Research Programmer: $60k
Total salary expenditures: 405k

Great, that leaves 95k left for research. But because this is cutting edge research we need to upgrade one of our instruments and that upgrade costs 80k. Ouch. That's OK we have just enough left for consumables such as gas cylinders, gloves, pipettes, vials, methanol, acetone, and other chemicals. Oops! Now that we've started it's obvious we need a dedicated server to process several terabytes of data and it looks like we need a software license for one of the postdocs. We were hoping to use that extra money toward the service agreement for our instrument, but I guess we can borrow it from the Institute and pay that back with future grant funding, hopefully, maybe. We won't need to upgrade again for the remaining duration of the grant, but any extra cash will be used for instrument maintenance and to pay down the lab's previous debt to the institute.

Now you might wonder what the institute is doing with their half of the money. All of it goes the things like building maintenance, insurance, property taxes, utilities, IT, administration, and my salary which was covered by the institute and not the lab. Remember, I worked at a private research institute and the lab was almost always in the red. Trying to get postdocs reimbursed for travel expenses (conferences) and whatnot was difficult because the budget was so tight. The institute got NIH and DOE grants all the time but relied heavily on patent licencing and philanthropy to stay afloat. That "sweet government cash" wasn't making anyone rich and it all had to be strictly accounted for.

[Lucifer]

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/2 ... e-00003871

So much for free speech.

[kyle]

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/2 ... e-00003871

So much for free speech.

This is not an attack on free speech, she is a government official and must comply to the laws passed, she can state her opposition, but it can come with funding being revoked, the federal government did this with legal drinking age and other age based laws. Individuals can still state their opposition to it as well, where freedom of speech is more applied to individuals rather than government officials. This is nothing compared to the throttling the democrats forced on social media when people disagreed with what the governments doing, in that case individual freedom of speech was literally compromised. (yes one could argue businesses can force it, but it was the democrats forcing it on the businesses)

[Z-Man]

...when people disagreed with what the governments doing..

Remind me, when has that ever been the reason for any interference with social media?

[Word]

This is not an attack on free speech

she can state her opposition, but it can come with funding being revoked

aren't you all about meritocracy and the like? That would include listening to other people’s qualified opinions and exclude dangling some sword of Damocles above their head so they all become your personal yes-men. Especially in politics, where you're elected to represent opinions of a multitude of people. That includes minorities. Historically what Trump is doing now just encourages discriminatory violence. Also, here you try to justify why the state government has to adhere to the federal government but when it's about immigration, guns and/or abortion you just swap your principles.

but it was the democrats forcing it on the businesses

Wishing they had done a better job then.

[kyle]

Remind me, when has that ever been the reason for any interference with social media?

Hunter Biden laptop story was suppressed, the bad effects from COVID shots, (yes I agree with you getting covid could have been much worse, but they should not have forced suppression of the heart issues people were having from them)

Historically what Trump is doing now just encourages discriminatory violence.

The only violence that's going on is people who think Elon is a Nazi, brainwashed by the media because he raised his arm in a certain way. They are burning Tesla's and superchargers, this is all done by the left.

I probably should not go here knowing most of your stances, and I know you'll disagree on my take, but this story was about banning trans kids from sports, one of the big running points from Trumps campaign, the majority of Americans voted for him, but now you say minorities are important, yet the majority of Americans don't support that their girls are now getting beat on track by biological men, setting new women records just because they are running in a larger body than women have. Do you not care about women? It's abuse on girls to force them to put up with that.

I've been doing a lot more thinking of what the left and right is right now. I've come to this idea, everything the left has been doing is making people slowly weaker. They want to weaken women(trans in sports) They want to weaken men, allow them to transition young before they can think critically about what they are actually doing. (I feel like I have to say that with a warning, I don't mind if your transition, but at least wait until your brain is mature enough to make that lifelong choose, I argue for mid 20's). They want to weaken us financially, by causing high inflation. The funny thing is they attack Tesla which is one of very few companies, working towards sustainable abundance for all. When one day there will be a fleet of humanoid robots making anything, getting materials to make those things, meaning labour goes away, transforming the economy drastically. it's like they don't want that, they continue to want to weaken you,

[Word]

The only violence that's going on is people who think Elon is a Nazi, brainwashed by the media because he raised his arm in a certain way. They are burning Tesla's and superchargers, this is all done by the left.

Some thoughts of a brainwashed person: Yes, the liberal media have a tendency to attract socially-liberal-minded people, that's the nature of free press. Yes, these liberal journalists will probably say Elon Musk is a fascist, because there's enough material to substantiate that claim and it's a good headline. Yes, people like me think he's a fascist, because there's enough he does to substantiate that claim, like how he turned Twitter into an alt-right orgy (acting like the messiah of "free speech", then silencing all of his critics). Yes, in addition to that, he did that gesture, at least we agree about that. I actually wrote earlier that I wasn't so sure if it was a Nazi salute. I'm more worried about what he does with the nuclear arms safety personel and if he'll make Planet of the Apes come true soon. Then again, Maga republicans worship him like he's an omniscient forgiving god but when he does the Hitler salute, it was an excusable accident, so for me, that alone means it probably wasn't.

You complain about "violence" towards Tesla when actual people are dying. There are enough other articles but you'll dismiss them all as liberal propaganda.

but now you say minorities are important, yet the majority of Americans don't support that their girls are now getting beat on track by biological men, setting new women records just because they are running in a larger body than women have. Do you not care about women? It's abuse on girls to force them to put up with that.

What about ruthless oligarchs who force you to put up with a ****** up system where they always win because you're too busy worrying about some sports result? "Do you not care about women", says the party that outlawed abortion.

I've been doing a lot more thinking of what the left and right is right now[...]everything the left has been doing is making people slowly weaker.

You should really read up on eugenics and the übermensch. Here's a start:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_ ... ryan_ideal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics# ... f_eugenics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cber ... _the_Nazis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aktion_T4

They want to weaken us financially, by causing high inflation

And what is the end goal here? They too need to sell their shit and want a peaceful life.

[kyle]

You complain about "violence" towards Tesla when actual people are dying. There are enough other articles but you'll all dismiss them as the liberal media.

MY BS detector goes off when reading the source of that https://pepfar.impactcounter.com/

the funding to the majority of USAID-supported PEPFAR programmes were stopped on 26 February 2025 - likely meaning permanent discontinuation of the funding for those services

Emphasis on Likely, meaning services may not have been stopped at all, meaning they are just pulling numbers out of their a**, they don't have an actual evidence, just guesses.