What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah that's kind of the thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Except that it’s the opposite of a lottery.

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

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

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

Yeah, in Germany the rich stay rich.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just the ol’ pull up the ladder trick

It's a third rail to touch but important: "wokism" has been weaponized by the right, and for low information voters (i.e., a majority of the population), voting is an emotional act. Hate and anger are powerful emotions.

> Covid response in the US wasn't that bad

...what?

Trump's son-in-law was put in charge of supply distribution, refused to invoke the defense production act, and when they finally did, Trump took ages to actually "order" ventilators. They refused to implement testing because they knew that tests would show how bad things were and justify measures that would hurt the stock market.

Trump largely didn't do anything at first because COVID-19 was most severely impacting the coastal blue states because of higher population densities.

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/did-trump-kushner-igno...

and https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/09/jared-kushner-let-th...

They routed supplies away from blue states to red states. He sent ventilators to Russia, FFS:

https://ru.usembassy.gov/delivery-of-u-s-ventilators-to-russ...

Trump told states to get their own PPE (because blue states needed them more badly than red states, and he didn't want red states to have to pay for it), then the feds outbid state agencies for PPE. And when that didn't work, just outright had customs steal them:

https://www.warren.senate.gov/oversight/letters/warren-deman...

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/how-the-federal-gove...

Our state's orders for PPE was impounded at the port by the feds, who them claimed they had no idea what anyone was talking about. Our state got a bunch of PPE because the NFL football team owner sent his team's 737 to China to pick up masks and gowns (which turned out to have all sorts of problems, like being sized for children.)

Our governor stopped just shy of saying "yes" when asked if he'd sent state troopers into NYC to meet the plane and escort the truck.

https://www.wbur.org/news/2020/04/14/baker-mum-on-whether-st...

> If the wealthy don't pay enough taxes, the middle class will be harmed.

"Will be"? It's been going on for decades. Bush and Trump tax cuts made it even worse and skyrocketed the deficit to boot.

>Covid response in the US wasn't that bad

Lockdowns were in violation of the right to free assembly, and more broadly the emergency powers used for protracted timeframes to enforce them were ruled illegal by various State courts.

>global warming really is causing the floods and fires and hurricanes and the EVs really are helping, as would methane emissions rules and so on

But screeching Global Warming or Climate Change against everything doesn't actually help. It certainly helps you feel warm and fluffy, though.

>if people think the bi-coastal elites are looking down on them (and they are), like so what

"So what?" is how Trump got elected and then re-elected. Don't underestimate peoples' resentment to being talked down, especially over long periods of time for no justifiable reason. There's a reason Trump called his 2024 run the people's retribution.

>If the wealthy don't pay enough taxes, the middle class will be harmed.

The wealthy pay more taxes, anyone who understands how tax brackets are structured should know this. Yes, tax avoidance/efficiency shenanigans abound, Trump himself has admitted to using them, but why not? Noone is going to leave money on the table. The law allows for them. The tax laws should be rewritten if it's a problem.

>Making sure black folks and other historically disadvantaged groups do better will raise the quality of life for all of us

Speaking as a Japanese-American, equity initiatives like DEI and Affirmative Action have always left me a bad taste. They are racism, sexism, and all the other forms of discrimination. I 300% support Trump's mandate to judge everyone strictly based on merit, it's MLK's dream given new life.

>if we don't encourage the successful migration and acculturation of people from around the world, our population will decline and our economy will decline.

There is nothing successful about illegal aliens spamming the country en masse. There is nothing prosperous about an economy propped up by illegal slave labor.

>If we don't invest in science, we will loose power and knowledge to those that do. The entitled white folks that teased all the kids that were good at math and science in the 1970s etc. might wish it weren't so, but it is so.

The sheer amount of tax dollars being spent with wanton abandon is ridiculous science or otherwise, especially when we also have many pressing concerns that need to be on the budget.

The latest is that the US is gonna take over Gaza and deport everyone there. I do wonder if there's any hot button items anymore.

Something small like in-person gatherings for several years in response to a pandemic? Like someone else in the thread claimed was a made-up problem that's only in peoples' heads?

It's really interesting seeing how widely varied peoples' definitions of these things are.

Something depressingly self defeating about people paying money into the system to acquire ammo for the purposes of..

bringing down the system?

Win or lose, I'm thinking money is flowing up to the same people.

I'm confused. Are you saying specifically that you think the experiences described in this article are for the good of the country? Or do you think they're an exaggeration/lie.

Like the old Mencken quote:

`Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.`

More like Americans repeatedly vote for change, because the change they got four years earlier was too bad. It reminds me of Chile, which keeps oscillating between socialist and conservative presidents every four years.

The sentiment I get in this regards is that people are angry and want to "burn it to the ground", without any thought of what might possibly take its place.

> From what I gather, life for most of these "regular people" types in Germany was still very much in the tolerable range until well into WWII.

Correct.

I’ve heard some harrowing stories about the moment of realization straight from the mouths of some of these people.

Edit: To be clear, I’m referring to my family and their friends who lived through it.

The old quote, "first they came for ..." was written by a Nazi sympathizer -- until he was in jail by them. It's rooted in truth how it played out to him.

"First they came for DEI and I didn't speak out, because I was not Black..."

> Maybe they think politicizing the whole executive branch is a little distasteful

They believe it has already been politicized by people who hate them.

> Maybe they think politicizing the whole executive branch is a little distasteful, but in the eyes of literally millions of Americans, it's a means to a well-justified and long-awaited end.

This is a very tight and succinct summary of many conversations I’ve had with conservative family and acquaintances.

> I don't know why you're being downvoted.

The votes on my comment are going up and down like a yo-yo.

I’m pretty sure it’s because I used the term “regular people”, and I used it in quotes. I get the sense that some people are reading more into that phrase than I intended.

If your engagement with politics, civics and public policy begins and ends with how much groceries and gas cost, then you are the perfect consumer, and something less than a thinking, rational human with agency and awareness. What is a human without curiosity or critical thinking, but a biological consuming robot? Which incidentally is what the new department of education will try to create a population of, by destroying public education.

> These "regular people" that you seem to condescendingly speak about

There was zero condescension in my tone or intent.

I put “regular people” in quotes simply because I think most people who do follow the news absolutely don’t realize that the vast majority of people don’t.

A simple litmus test for this is to ask random people you meet outside of your personal social and professional circles (e.g., the front desk person at the gym, a cashier at a grocery store, a rideshare driver… whatever) a simple question like “Who are our US senators?” or “What is the NIH?” I’ve done this, and the sentiment was largely “don’t know, don’t care”.

This isn’t a criticism. It’s just an observation that some issues that some folks on HN care about (e.g., details about how lesser known parts of the government function — for example, what’s happening at the NIH and NSF) just aren’t on the radar for large swathes of the population.

> absolutely notice it at the pump and at the grocery store. They aren't mindless robots.

I think we agree on this, right?

And my point is that price changes for most things won’t hit immediately.

1. There have been delays in most of the tariffs.

2. The impact of some tariffs will take longer to hit than others. Fresh food will be fast. Goods with longer shelf lives canned goods, alcohol, and prepared foods might take a while.

Boy are those folks gonna get what they voted for…

Price of eggs dropped yet?

> How does a government become more fascist by spending less money and having less "employees"?

Fascism isn't a spending level (and because corporatism is an element of fascism and blurs the lines between public and private institutions supporting the governing ideology, the level of resources that are formally in government is particularly irrelevant to fascism.)

Also, employees are countable individual entities and not an undifferentiated mass, so fewer, not less.

More fucking morons. The gap with biomedical research isn't in the realm of language models, but in the amount of information that exists in biology that we don't know. I'm not sure what percentage of all the genetic data on Earth we've sequenced, but it's not much, and we still don't quite have a mechanical understand of a single cell, much less some complex multicellular organisms with proteins affecting gene expression, cell membrane receptors being reused in 50 different tissue types, molecular secretion and diffusion altering our minds functioning, and electrical currents synchronizing brain firing at a distance.

No LLM trained on PubMed will be able to suss this all out - more data is needed.

Even in pure mathematics, where I am currently a grad student and as needed a big fan of trying to get LLMs to explain stuff to me at 1 am, they just aren't that good. If it's a popular question where I could have tried math overflow, sure, it's probably just going to get some details weirdly wrong, but for subtle complex concepts, it's not making some golden age of truth and understanding.

And God help the LLMs trying to understand physics that are trained on all the BS on Youtube and the blogs.

Where do you suppose they will go? Russia?

[flagged]

We allow them to live. Never forget how much we outnumber them by.

A few countries may not want him after this.

US scientific research funding is largely driven by nepotism and favoritism. Insiders know but don't talk too much about it. They have a few options: a) just quietly stay in the system trying their best to do good work b) join the gravy train through social climbing c) quietly leave and move on with their careers.

I feel like were on the same side but youre gonna need a (credible!) source that US govt money was funding virus research in China, that doesnt seem to pass the sniff test

"healthy people stay alive, sick people will die" that's a tautology. I do not know you, but I am willing to bet that there are some people who you know who'd have a far worse life if it was not for modern publicly funded research

I can't tell if you're intentionally misunderstanding, or not. So I'll spell it out: public non-biased research is a public good.

Oil companies weren't going to publish research saying leaded gas was bad. Tobacco companies weren't going to publish research saying cigarettes were bad. Have fun being healthy when you inhale leaded gasoline every day.

Forget about things like, you know, the internet. Or any medicine.

BTW, private companies are not paying for basic biological research. Good luck making a drug when no one knows what target to drug. VC firms will park their money in the bank instead. The value from biotechs is already marginal - investment basically vanished when interest rates went above 4.

While the Unabomber, Luigi Mangione, and Communism may have correctly diagnosed socioeconomic pathologies their prescriptions were largely counterproductive. It is magical or superficial thinking to believe that aggressive chaos is somehow curative or better than following a more consultative and cooperative process like first assessing and auditing an organization thoroughly by eliciting input from all parties at all levels and gathering data before proposing recommendations, implementing those recommendations, and following up to adjust them.