VIPER rover banished to storage as moonshot plan sputters NASA has quietly scrapped a plea for third parties to take its VIPER rover to the lunar surface. The US space agency stated that it is canceling the Lunar Volatiles Science Partnership solicitation, which was aimed at getting VIPER to the Moon at no cost to government. The original plan was to deposit the Volatiles …
How many times has a MAGE diehard said publicly, 'I don't believe in Science'? (that applies to the likes of MTG)
I guess it only applies to things like vaccines, space research, NOAA and a host of other sciences. It does NOT apply to the projects run by the likes of Bezos and Musk. Strange that.... (not)
If Chump and VD Vance carry on, the US brain drain will become a flood and all that research money that they want to take away from places like Harvard will be irrelevant. There will be no one left to carry out the research.
The USA is on the fast track to become a 4th world nation.
Next, there will be a move to replace the USD with the Yuan as the world's trading currency. Bye bye USA. You will most certainly not be No 1 anymore.
"If Chump and VD Vance carry on, the US brain drain will become a flood and all that research money that they want to take away from places like Harvard will be irrelevant. There will be no one left to carry out the research."
And that, of course will be a real shame, the leadership and contributions to science made by US institutions has been profound over the last century or so.
I am reminded of the testimony of RR Wilson, the then Director of Fermilab who was appearing before a congressional committee to request the funding for the, then 'state of the art' accelerator. To paraphrase, he was asked by a Senator what such a device contributes to the defense of the United States, his reply was along the lines that it didn't, except the existence of such an institution made the United States more worthy of being defended!
https://history.fnal.gov/historical/people/wilson_testimony.html
Of course, in the great scheme of things, it doesn't really matter long term, the thirst for knowledge is part and parcel of being human, others will step in, probably the Chinese, or Europe. The human race will stumble slightly in trying to understand reality, but we will move on and get there eventually.
And maybe this is normal, maybe the time of US dominance is over, maybe it has simply run its course, all empires, eventually fall. 150, 160 years ago, Great Britain, wasn't just a superpower, it was a hyper power. It literally controlled a quarter of the surface area of the planet, it dominated the seas completely, it was untouchable, all powerful; now all gone, all in the space of a few decades.
Oh, but I will disagree over the replacement of the USD with the Yuan, it'll be the Euro.
Next, there will be a move to replace the USD with the Yuan as the world's trading currency
That won't happen, trust the US may be declining precipitously, but that doesn't imply trust in China is increasing. China will use this tariff chaos to get more countries who trade with them to trade in yuan, but the strength of the dollar in trade is that it is used between countries trading amongst themselves. i.e. Germany buys oil from Saudi Arabia. The dollar is a good "neutral" currency for them to use, switching to the yuan would not benefit either.
Since China maintains a fairly tight trading range on the yuan vs the dollar trade in yuan is (for now at least) not really different in principle than trade in dollars. In order to make the yuan usable for say Germany to Saudi Arabia type of third party trade they'd have to break that link and let it float, and eliminate restrictions on offshore holdings of yuan. China's authoritarian government isn't likely to do so.
China might be able to get some other Asian countries interested in trading in yuan rather than dollars amongst themselves, so you might see for example Indonesia and Vietnam trade with each other in yuan rather than dollars in the future. So the dollar's influence will decline, but it will remain on top unless things go far worse over here than they already are.
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