We should be attracting and retaining the world’s top researchers, not driving them away with dysfunction and xenophobia.
In the past it’d be hard for Chinese labs to retain researchers. Now the upside to the US isn’t there.
what I see is a chronically corrupt set of Bay Area companies who stole open source software, pretended there was an AI god around the corner, and wanted to be regulated so the federal government could backstop their failed gambit.
In other words, Tuesday in San Francisco.
it's one at the top like 'maybe you guys shouldn't have built a network to launder chuds huh' followed by like 50 chuds defending the funding cuts because of DEI keywords in the grants
Russell Vought
everyone knows who Stephen Miller is but Russell Vought is the real monster
for perspective, he got rid of the very programs that developed a drug to keep his child alive from a rare genetically inherited disease
now you get what we are dealing with
and here's the thing, Vance is the handpicked successor by Heritage Foundation so even if Trump goes away someday, the nightmare will continue if not get even worse
might take a century to recover, I don't see how this is overcome in a mere decade
Damage is done, we'll forever be behind, this isn't the place to go to research anymore.
that would seem logical but it has nothing to do with logic
this happened because 50% of latinos (natural born, naturalized) voted for the Orange Infant because THEY DONT CARE about anything else except they thought it would give them an economic edge and pull up the ladder behind them
they aren't going to go vote Democratic this election, at best they might stay home because they don't want ICE disappearing them for weeks while they pointlessly argue they are citizens
if the Democrats don't get the Senate, country is done, and I don't think they can get the Senate even if gas was $5
elections are now won by 1% or 2% and people staying home is not enough to change things, they'd have to vote Democrat which they are too spiteful to do
just imagine the damage by 2029 if the Democrats don't get the Senate
remember even with full impeachment, Vance becomes President and that would be a NIGHTMARE even worse than what we have now, they will double-down in spite
winning the House is just going to be a puppet-show for two years
Vance has no popularity or support. Right now Trump is able to destroy the country because congress is doing nothing, and they're doing nothing because they're afraid of Trump. I don't think they'll be afraid of Vance.
That said Congress can and does sometimes make the funding less discretionary. They can mandate expenditures. And make withholding legal funds personally painful for OMB. They also haven’t don’t this yet.
See https://www.science.org/content/article/exclusive-nsf-slashe...
(Long story short, the administration is slashing the budgets of various NSF divisions to make room X-Labs, despite the Congressional budget stating that is not allowed)
The places I worked were essentially white collar welfare.
One could do nothing and collect a paycheck.
Not saying all federally finded places are like this but this system is ripe for abuse and I dont know how you elimiate the abuse while still giving the deserving scientists the funding they need.
> One could do nothing and collect a paycheck.
Outside of startups this accurately describes almost the entirety of private entities I've seen, at least this past decade (from my impression it's getting a lot worse). Bullshit jobs upon bullshit jobs.
This is not a public-sector-only problem; in fact from personal impression I'd say private entities are slightly worse in that respect.
It's the science-ish equivalent of saying: my Uncle got a vaccination, then walked outside and was hit by a car; thus...
And of course, go look up one of the authors: https://nicolashulscher.com/. I hate to do the _ad hominem_ thing, but in this case it is warranted - he is a dangerous MAHA idiot.
Let me pick one thing: their main (we-found-alien-life-level) claim that they detected vaccine-derived mRNA and non-functional fragments of the artificial plasmid DNA used in vaccine manufacturing in this person's circulating cells, 3+ years after vaccination. This DNA is supposed to be carefully filtered out BTW before packaging into vaccines, but OK, it's worth thinking about. This DNA would also be degraded quickly if injected - it's linearized before use, but OK let's say multiple processes failed somehow, and some voodoo magic keeps it from being gobbled up. Even they don't outright claim to know how it got there, because any concrete proposed mechanism would either sound extremely implausible or impossible - as it turns out it probably doesn't matter either way (see below.)
On p. 16 of the paper they claim to detect the actual vaccine mRNA only in exosomes. They could not detect it at all in peripheral blood mononuclear cells, where, even more extraordinarily they claim to have found and sequenced the ori1 and ori2 plasmid backbone used in Pfizer vaccine manufacturing (but crucially, none of the three spike protein sequences that would actually cause immune system problems if transcribed into a protein.) So I don't know what to make of the ori1/2 artifacts, except that I'd check that these sequences were truly unique to the Pfizer process (often these are conserved sequences that many labs use.) Even if they are somehow from the vaccine, and somehow active, they lack the spike sequences so would not produce mRNA in exosomes and thus spike proteins (so irrelevant to their other measurements of spike protein.)
So where do they think the mRNA in the exosomes come from? Well, if it ISN'T in the PBMC's (which it would be if it was being expressed there), then it has to be in "extracellular vessels" from the original injections. For 3+ years. At detectable concentrations. Mmmm hmmm. They could check this of course because the Pfizer vaccines use specially modified RNA's - that would be a smoking gun, but of course they didn't check this. You know why. You know where else one gets mRNA for spike proteins, that could end up in exosomes? Covid. Or maybe just a recent vaccine injection. Interestingly, they didn't bother to sequence the amplicons of the mRNA that they banded out on a gel - that also would be a pretty convincing indication it was from Pfizer, as any Covid in the wild today would have enough mutations to be identifiable. They did this exact thing for the ori1/2 bands, hmm I wonder why they didn't do this? You know why.
I could go on, but I have done enough public service for one morning.