'Never seen anything like this' – NIH meetings and travel halted abruptly

Cancer research anywhere is cancer research everywhere

Have they seen European salaries?

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Just a short pause to your circulatory system, clearly it's the system at fault.

A weakness in a system that can only be exploited by malice from those in power isn't necessarily something we can always expect to protect against, and at most only mitigate.

that conclusion does not follow

If you firmly believe that your job is important and helping people, then it seems reasonable that you would complain and try to get an exception or other people who know of the program would complain. It's not perfect, some people would just be defeatist and assume things are happening at a higher level that they have no control over, even if they think their role is important.

The solution would not be to privatize anything that produces value, the solution would be to assess whether privatization would be a good fit for some of the things that do have value, but don't strictly need to be run by the government.

I'm not assuming anything seamless, but the process would occur before something gets shut down, not after. I didn't get the impression from the article that anything was totally shut down, just some kinds of activities were paused? I'm not really responding specifically to this, so much as just the general critical need to reduce costs.

That said, cutting government costs and people's dependencies on the government down to within a reasonable threshold is in people's best interest.

In China and Russia, so many people work for the government. Keeping people not just employed, but ideologically on the side of the status quo of the government can get out of control. It's convenient in some ways, because you can just create jobs out of thin air if the job market is struggling.

The best interest of the people is definitely not infinite government growth.

Government spends a lot of money too. Spending some money can be in the interests of the people. Spending too much money can flip over to not being in their interest. Spending too much can reduce both the value and the trust (necessarily linked) in the US Dollar, slowly weakening our economic leverage for doing things on behalf of US citizens and our allies.

So just spending infinitely like there's no cost to creating money is also not in people's best interest.

Some projects could fail, some things that were valuable might fall apart, I don't know. Ideally it's done with some finesse and important things are either kept or found a new home. But the logic of compassion significantly favors cutting government spending and government dependency when it gets past some threshold.

Absolutely, governments should work for the people. Sometimes in order to do more for someone, you do less for them. There's a balance. Sometimes what you or the country needs is not what you want.

A lot of people don't necessarily want us spending a lot on military and defense, but we need to. By spending on it, we maintain the private industries even in times of relative peace so that when we do need them they're still there and we don't have to build them up from scratch again. It also becomes an expected necessary cost, so any other initiatives we try to fund have to contend with that part of the budget already being spent. This way we don't accidentally tie up what used to be military funding in all kinds of other programs so that not only do you have to rebuild production, but you have to sort out the financial problems too.

Governments make all kinds of decisions based on calculations from analysts, politicians, geopoliticians and so on. What people want is a factor, but not necessarily the most important one.

With our government shutdowns, congress and the president both have to agree on where to appropriate funds and how much funding to appropriate for the government. This funding has to occur, because there are critical programs that everyone agrees on, so there's actual pressure to get it passed. At the same time, there are other things that different representatives want to get funded or programs they disagree about and they'll leverage the pressure to appropriate funds before a shutdown or to shorten a shutdown in order to squeeze out decisions that are normally delayed/ignored.

That said, there is a critical culture in the US around hassling the government and not treating it as your friend. The government may work for you, but it is not your friend. Governments are bears. Do not feed the bears. Respect them, accepting their co-existence and the value they offer in an ecosystem, sure. Just don't train the bears to come to you when they're hungry, because some day you'll find that it's not a good idea to have a hungry bear in front of you.

Even though this is historically true and deeply wise, people find themselves steadily expanding the government despite the government being in debt. We also get people in congress that will vote no on almost anything, because they believe in small government with limited power and are concerned every time it expands.

So the shutdowns kind of happen as they haggle over these kinds of issues.

It's not really clear that the situation that has been in place since WW2 that was mainly due to the destruction of Europe and Europe and America's intentional underdevelopment of the rest of the world is a situation that will persist. Most likely the new world will be multi-polar, which has its own challenges but also opportunities.