And will soon launch their own version of Hubble: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xuntian
Deeply embarrassing as a US citizen.
agreed. America's attitude towards china has been absurd. instead of seeing it as an opportunity for us to step up, we deflect responsibility as if america was forced to offshore its manufacturing and venerate idiots over scientists.
That sort of discussion and the consequences from having it just isn't on the menu.
There isn't going to be a massive wealth redistribution in the other direction to offset the redistribution that has taken place over the last 40 years. There isn't going to be taxation reforms to prevent this from occuring again. There isn't going to be a focus on white collar crimes from the Justice department.
Things are just going to slowly get worse and worse in America.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sLSveRGmpIE&pp=0gcJCfwAo7VqN5t...
Is this comment a bit reductionist? Sure. Doesn't mean its more wrong than right.
There's been no significant antitrust actions or a focus on white-collar crimes. These are critical in stopping bad actors in American society from accruing more resources and power.
There's been no real investment in education or industrial capacity that would enable the US begin to compete with China in green technology and manufacturing automation.
There's no cohesive and consistent plan to encourage domestic manufacturing, it's just these nonsensical on again, off again tariff announcements that absolutely destroy the ability for anyone in industry to make long-term plans.
Talk is cheap. What's needed is a systemic, sustained effort and we’re not seeing it in America.
I am not optimistic that the systemic solutions to the problems that I'm talking about are going to come from anyone in American politics and it is obvious to me that American hegemony is waning with little hope of it returning.
I worry about what this means for the future of democracy if a country run by an autocrat becomes the dominant power.
It is far from clear that the Chinese government supports this type of open data sharing.
Because let's be real here all the patriotism is just a facade the rich want to keep the money for themselves. Singing the national anthem on the fourth of July is cheap.
At least the wealth of the richest people in the US is made by people producing value and services. Bezos is rich because people like myself find Amazon and AWS to be quite good.
IMHO, the biggest wealth problem in the US is the rise of upper-middle class “elites” and management class. The one driving “mergers and acquisitions” to reduce competition between grocery stores or using rent control software to eke up rent costs.
1: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2024/oct/8/intelligence...
Can we see expenditures, big equipment contributions, Nobel prizes, etc. on a graph?
I bet the graph of this over time would present a powerful story.
This is a really interesting story. It's not the US pulling back so much as it is China's rapid and incredible growth. According to this graph, the only period of US scientific expenditure stagnation was during the 2008 housing crisis. Our expenditures over the last decade have been increasing at a pretty good growth rate too.
The data points for the forthcoming years will be interesting (sad) to see after all of these cuts.
Agreed. The US has squandered so much money over the decades that they're now over $300k/taxpayer in debt, with interest to that that being the fourth largest cost, and two of the top three being insufficiently funded programs that simply steal from the grandchildren.
It would be even more embarrassing if we didn't cut back on non-essential spending.
U.S. National Debt Clock : Real Time https://share.google/adgsGnl43Yk8S0zDq
It is literally one of the most important things to make a nation great.
Boy are you going to feel bad as you watch what happens to the debt over the next few years.
Just walk around the Boston area and look at how much of the economy is driven by federal research funding attracting global talent to universities, which then generates ideas and the next generation of talent, which feeds the biotech companies, which grow the economy.
Letting all of that happen in China instead of the US just to make a tiny dent in the deficit (and to punish progressive institutions and prevent cultural change from immigration) is unbelievably fucking stupid.
TCP was invented in the US 20 years before HTTP.
It's not as though the rest of the non-web internet is a historical curio or abandoned obsolete technology.
Actually a great summary of why the world does not actually blindly thinks USA! When they think about tech advancements
For a technology forum, the sheer volume of pettiness and anti-science and technology attitude is confounding.
People here sounds like the most mediocre managers I've ever worked with in my life.
However, I feel that what is argued about, by all sides, misses the point.
The US spends 2X what China does on civilian space programs, and 4X what Europe spends. We spend 2X as much on health care, 1.5X as much on education, and 2X as much on science research.
Our systems are inefficient and corrupt, and that is what needs to be addressed.
Arguing for or against how much money we need to spend or to cut is just the modern day circus that distracts everyone from the real problems and provides everyone on both sides with feel good excuses.
Citation needed. Even Musk's DOGE trolls found no evidence of significant corruption/inefficiency.
Health. We spend $5T a year on our "health", which is 2X the per capita amounts spent by western European countries, yet we have poorer outcomes. We have poorer outcomes not just among lower income classes, but also poorer outcomes when comparing upper class incomes between the US/Europe
Education. We spend 1.5X per capita compared to western European nations, and we have poorer outcomes
If we would simply match the budgets for these two areas with European budgets, and even accept the fact that they would have better systems in place, we would save $3T a year. This is a fairly direct measure of how much more efficient Europe is with their resources. They are either that much better/smarter than we are, or we have a corrupt system, or a combination of the two.
Public construction costs. It costs 50% to 200% or even more to build public projects in the US than in Europe. That is, if we can even complete our projects. One of many reports and analysis: https://www.constructiondive.com/news/us-rail-projects-take-...
Other areas are difficult to have direct comparisons, and it is difficult to compare results. The US solution to everything is to pour money into it. And it seems that any cut, any type of cut at all, portends doom.
Military. We spend $1T a year. We have something like 1200 military bases, over half are international. We have massive cost and time overruns all the time. Yes, we may have the best military in the world, but it certainly feels like the taxpayers are being taken advantage of. You may feel differently. I do not think we need 1200 based. I do think that the military industrial complex profits way beyond what is reasonable.
Science research. We spend about $1T in R&D, almost triple of Europe. We pay our researchers 2X-3X what researchers make in Europe. Yet it seems that any type of cut to science budgets is met with the proclamation that we will lose all of our researchers to Europe. Our major research centers need a 70% incidental budget on top of their grants otherwise they will go out of business. CEO's of major non profit medical research centers need to make millions and millions of dollars per year. There is something wrong here.
Space. We spend 2X what China spends, and 4X what Europe spends. One example is the costs of space telescopes: China spends 9 figures, Europe spends 10 figures, and we spend 11 figures. NASA's SLS rocket is a case study in how to literally brun up billions and billions of taxpayers money. We can, and need to do better.
Corruption is not always the simple graft of the CEO and board. Corruption also comes in the form of a system where too many people make too much profit to want to make the system better.
> Corruption is not always the simple graft of the CEO and board. Corruption also comes in the form of a system where too many people make too much profit to want to make the system better.
if thats the case, how do we set that threshold? whats the criteria?
(i don't disagree per se, just curious on the thinking around this)
Similarly, overall spending patterns do not mean corruption or even excess. We get huge economic returns on science and space spending, for instance.
Look at the source you cited. Labor is expensive here and infrastructure projects often create public outrage that makes them take longer. That's a problem but it's not corruption and not something you fix by slashing spending.
To put that in context, CMB-S4 being a DOE project has many side effects to other CMB experiments in a lot of ways. For example, a few years ago the LiteBIRD mission led by JAXA from Japan has been gaining momentum, and many international CMB scientists got involved. European scientists got funded by ESA, and US scientists were expecting NASA to fund them too. In the end they denied the proposal (despite generally positive impressions when discussing with various people there), partly because they think the satellite based CMB experiment LiteBIRD has significant overlap with the goals of the ground based CMB experiment CMB-S4, deeming it unnecessary to support LiteBIRD.
And then CMB scientists used to get generous access to NERSC, a top 10 HPC system in the world. But as CMB-S4 becomes a DOE project, NERSC being DOE funded also, it becomes a bit of conflict there, in the sense that they feel they need to prioritize access for CMB-S4 to guarantee its success. There are many other factors in play but in the end it becomes much more difficult to even get access to the system, not to mention having any sizable allocation.
All these might not be so bad as CMB-S4 is supposed to be our endgame. It would benefits the CMB community as a whole so much. But now? It’s game over.
It also hurts particle physics progress as well. Long story short, the CMB B-mode holds a promising sensitivity to inflationary models, that its discovery may finally makes inflation falsifiable. At the very least, it involves an energy scale so high that no experiments on Earth can reach, and therefore is a good complement, to high energy physics experiments such as LHC.
There is a reason it is deemed so important in both the decadal survey and the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel.
Project like this has under heavy scrutiny from both the scientific community and the funding parties around feasibility, risks, costs, etc. It wasn’t a a light decision to have had happened in the beginning. Why would the end come so abruptly without explanation?
It’s pathetic, and 100% why we see the ongoing attack on science and education.
There's a pretty clear causal chain between the abuse of public trust and social influence from educational and scientific institutions in the last decade or so and the anti-intellectualism we're witnessing today, abuse which was and is driven by the same hubris you demonstrate by conflating intellectualism with All That Is Good. And needless to say since I am posting on HN, but I say that as an intellectualist.
The optimistic case is currently that China matures politically and becomes the leader of the technological world.
In my lifetime I never got the impression that any area was particularly the scientific leader.
How do you see that? Do you see an obvious tech leader in all fields somehow?
Today, China is playing Go with the world as their board. We have to start counting liberties on our groups; the late game is now.
> If anything, their knowledge leaked to the rest of the world as opposed to them leading it.
But we're #1 on social media!
A $1B cut for ΛCDM seems pragmatic as long as we focus on the economy. The cosmic background will still be waiting for us in four to ten years.
Unfortunately, it feels like the budget cuts being made are incredibly partisan and not actually helping pay down the debt spiral. Especially when the deficit is increasing.
Everything needs to be cut back, not just things one party doesn't care for.
Just to be clear about the new budget law. It does not attempt to reduce the deficit or debt at all. It sidesteps existing law to increase the deficit beyond what is actually allowed.
The rate of increase of the debt increased last Friday, even as we are told we can't afford things we could afford 10 years ago.
Put simply, we were doing a better job of managing our debts until last Friday when we decided that the national debt doesn't matter.
There is no evidence of this need and every single cut feels like it hurts the citizens more and more.
What needs to be done is an increase on taxes on the wealthiest corporations and people instead of cutting science funding, food benefits, and kicking people off their health insurance.
Not sure I agree. Interest on our national debt is increasing (I believe it's third largest spending category, depending on how you break it down) and is expected to surpass defense spending this year.
The rest I totally agree with.
Shouldn't we do austerity now, then tax increases during periods of prosperity?
Tax increases will trickle down and morph into unemployment, under-investment, and de-growth. Just look what ZIRP / Section 174 did to software engineers. Imagine that across the entire economy.
The power of the US economy is in its consumer base. People need to stay employed and see job/salary growth. That means companies need to spend more money on headcount and not cut costs.
Piss trickles down, nothing else has trickled down since Reagan made that up.
Eggs were slightly up in price at the end of Biden's term, but the tariffs have done nothing except increase the price of everything by 10% across the board. The Trump bill just makes recession more likely. The tax cuts benefit nobody but companies and the most wealthy, which Trump used to pretend he was part of but now actually is.
When businesses face hardship, they lay off. That's demonstrable. Employees are a luxury.
When Section 174 tax code ended, that set off a tidal wave of layoffs. And that's not even a new tax -- that's just amortization. When real taxes are levied on businesses, it'll be a blood bath.
> tariffs have done nothing except increase the price of everything by 10% across the board.
You're preaching to the choir. I'm not a fan of the administration or the tariffs. For a party that purports to be fiscally conservative, they're doing the opposite.
The recent legislative changes exploded the deficit. They didn’t reduce it.
Any concern by Conservatives about debt is fraudulent given their actual behaviour.
Whitey still on the moon
Can you point me to some specifics about the cuts to Medicare?
(Going on it in less than two years, so I want to know.)
Total 10 year cut: $~490 billion
Source: https://prospect.org/politics/2025-07-03-republicans-cutting...
The source is clearly biased (sorry), but I believe it's accurate on the numbers.
social services aren't a problem (sorry to be pedantic but i think it's really important to recognize that these things are necessary, and we can afford them).
> most of the spending is on social services nobody is willing to touch. If you even think about touching Medicare/medicaid or SS
but the BBBA passed, with massive cuts to medicare/medicaid (which will have some insane downstream cost effects on the broader healthcare/insurance industry as a whole, which will be passed on to insured individuals).
> your own party will get rid of you
that doesn't really appear to have happened to a degree that matters yet, because these orders are coming from the top of the GOP, but i suppose we'll see when the shit really hits the fan in the next couple of years.
Lowering inflation by cutting social services is like trying to free up disk space by deleting `/usr`. It will be devastating.
Meanwhile the wealthy have sequestered so much wealth for themselves that it makes any talk of "reducing inflation" by taking it out on the general population as the anti-democratic sham it is. Our government is purportedly Of the people, For the people, and By the people. For this to happen the government must function as an agent for the people, not just for the tiny minority of them who own the wealth.
However anything that is significant is things nobody will talk about.
Thankfully as soon as we stop measuring it, it will go away, because we as a society don’t have concepts like “object permanence” and “an objective underlying reality.”
Unless you're saying we should take extra-legal means to usurp the government. Then we'd be no better then the January 6 Capitol rioters.
As long as the American electorate is largely uneducated or mis-eeucated about politics, and continues to gullibly believe the words of wannabe dictators, we'll continue to slide into fascism.
Is this "a trillion dollars" in the room with us? The budget of the canceled project is not even 1B. You're off by not one order of magnitude, but by three.
The most useful kind of astronomy is searching our solar system for dangerous rocks so that we might avert disaster. Anything beyond our solar system is just useless stargazing, everything out there is too far away for us to do anything with or about. Theories about reality which can only be validated or ruled out by looking at things so far away cannot have local relevance to us, or else whatever local phenomenon they govern which might be useful to us could also be used to test that theory.
(For the record, I think this administration are a bunch of morons.)
Having said that I think that there are some practical benefits coming from this research that aren't commonly discussed. For example: adaptive optics - which is heavily used in astronomy - is also used in medical imaging and national defense. Astronomers also drive a lot of detector development. Previously this was the CCD, now things are moving into new, exotic devices like MKIDs. Maybe one of these new detectors will end up in a mobile phone camera in the future, and you'll be able to take excellent photos in low-light levels. There are many more examples I'm sure, but this is just what I have off the top of my head..
The final practical AND philosophical application I can think of, is that we are about 10-20 years away from putting direct constraints on life in the universe. A big proportion of astronomers are currently working on this. I think an answer to this question will dramatically change how society views itself.
The funny thing is: this science with few direct application to human affairs is one of the oldest sciences. Those few applications, as a standard of time and use in navigation, have had a far greater impact upon the establishment of human civilization than any other scientific discover.
It would be easy to argue that those are things of the distant past and that other branches of science have a more direct impact today. That's true. Yet it is also true that our curiosity of the heavens has been a constant. While our early notions were pure nonsense, they shaped society. While our initial discoveries of its true nature had little immediate impact upon everyday life, it formed the basis of future scientific development. For example: the Copernican model of the solar system was more true to the actual form of the solar system, but it was less accurate than the more refined Ptolemaic model. Kepler figured out the ellipses bit, through the extensive observations of Tycho Brahe. Observations of planetary motion provided evidence for Newton's theory of gravitation. Ironically, observations of planetary motion also lead to the refinement of the classical model by Einstein. The understanding of gravity has been fundamental to engineering. While it is plausible that much of that would have been discovered without astronomy, the development of special and general relativity depended upon astronomy. One of the most important applications of that is GPS.
Now it would be easy to argue almost all of these discoveries have their basis in the study of the solar system, but that's not really the point. In the times of Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton, the utility of studying the motions of the planets would appear to have about as much relevance as the study of the CMB does today. They certainly would not have been able to predict what we have discovered due to the foundations they laid. The same can be said of modern astrophysics. We can claim that it may help us detect and understand the nature of gravitation waves. We can claim that it is a handy tool since "the universe" is better at building particle accelerators than we are. Yet even if we made astounding discoveries along those line, people would still ask: what use is it? We can't really provide an honest answer for that since we have yet to travel that path through time (i.e. we don't know what the future holds).
If you ever have a chance, I suggest reading a book on the history of astronomy. You will find many names that you will probably know from other branches of science, and learn of the many discoveries that have been made or facilitated through astronomical research. (That's particularly true of physics and mathematics.)
Relativity was discovered after discrepancies were noticed in observations of Mercury, right in our solar system. Not through observations of distant galaxies. And suppose Mercury was never studied, or in fact never existed; would that make GPS impossible for humanity? Of course not. Relativity is relevant to GPS because it has effects on the scale of GPS, and can therefore be discovered and studied by simply putting very accurate clocks into orbit. Had it not already been known of when GPS was created, it would have been discovered soon after.
In fact, studying very large and very distant things, other galaxies namely, has revealed discrepancies that suggest general relativity might not be the whole story. But is that relevant to GPS? Not in the slightest.
I also don't think there is a strong correlation between studying things close-by, e.g. in our solar system, and how useful the finding will be. Our next break through in particle physics may come from studying dark matter, black holes or quasars. Maybe that will help us build even better computers? Or faster than light communication? We don't know where the treasure is buried!
There's typically a lot of hidden value in exploring these kinds of things, and I get that, but there's not usually any particular urgency on any of them either.
Also, from the last paragraph of the article, it sounds like this was already on a path towards not getting funded; IMHO, it's not a major shift to get a final letter ending the project when construction was not approved a year ago.
First of all, they said "not possible." Scientists, astrophysicists, even Big Foot was scratching his head! Nobody could figure out how to stop the universe from exponentially expanding faster than my rally crowds. But under my leadership, we negotiated the best cosmic deal. We deployed state-of-the-art interest-rate spinners on dark energy, put tariffs on runaway space-time, and - I'm not kidding - built the beautiful galactic wall to keep excess inflation out of the Milky Way!
The results? Beautiful. The universe has stabilized. No more exponential bloat! Stars remain at just the right distance, galaxies keep their perfect shape, and astronomers can finally retire their "Big Bang gone wild" theories! Our beautiful Inflation Reduction Act also saved trillions of light-years' worth of energy - making it green, making it lean, and letting us focus on what really matters: making America go WOW again!
Now the Fake News Media will try to discredit us: "Impossible!" they'll cry. But we know the truth. We have the best cosmic economists, the smartest black-hole negotiators, and let me tell you, they're all saying the same thing: "Sir, you've done what no one else could!" So join me in celebrating the greatest cosmic achievement in history. We've ELIMINATED inflation, not just here at home, but across the ENTIRE UNIVERSE. That's what winning looks like, folks!
Satire? I think political satire has been around for a whole lot more than just one decade, friend.
And this isn't a matter of "you can do two things at once"; we should provide for our own people _before_ we worry about cosmic inflation.
The debt would have been about $52T+, now it will be $56T+, if projections are accurate.
While I do not agree with the BBB for many reasons, and I do agree that it increases the debt, it is not the primary driver of the debt.
The largest driver of our debt is our "health" system. We spend $5T a year on our "health" system, which is twice the amount per capita that western European nations spend, and we have outcomes that are, across the board, worse.
We spend $2.5T more per year than we "should" be spending on "health", which is by far the largest waste of our resources.
If we would "simply" find a way to spend as much as western Europe does (even keeping our poorer outcomes), we would save $25T over the next 10 years. Our entire national debt could be eliminated in 20 years by doing this, even with the BBB.