American science put on starvation diet To make America great again, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) aims to get by with less. The agency responsible for promoting scientific progress in the US and nurturing national STEM talent has proposed a budget of $3.9 billion, 61.7 percent less than the $10.183 billion sought in FY 2025. Actual budget appropriations …
Unless you played Civilization I, where you could pull off Despotic Conquest (city->chariot->settler->new city->chariot->settler until you had 30 or more chariots by 2000BC and simply zerged the planet even in Emperor mode), everybody knows that if you don't keep up Research in any of the games, you would fall behind and get stomped.
There is only one true good book! A tremendous, beautiful book. Collect them all!
(Dedicated to those who need further proof that God does not exist.)
Trump University, Trump Vodka, Trump Steaks, Trump Bible ... part of a long list of just very highly successful Trump ventures ... that Orange is an outright certified success-genius maaannnnn!
Here's a more complete list that I keep handy whenever the "he's a great business man" shows up:
The Trump Network - MLM scam
Trump University - Fraud
Trump foundation/charity Fraud
Trump Tampa - failure & fraud
Trump Soho - bankrupt
Trump golf Aberdeen - scam
Trump golf Puerto Rico - bankrupt
Trump Chicago - default 40 million
Trump Panama - lawsuit corruption
Trump Baja Mexico - Fraud & failure
Trump Fort Lauderdale - Scam & failure
Trump Vodka - business failure
Trump Wine - business failure
Trump Steaks - business failure
Trump Shuttle - loan default failure
Trump Air & Trump Pac - business failure
Trump Taj Mahal - 4 bankruptcies
Trump Marina/Trump Castle - bankrupt
Trump Plaza - bankrupt
Trump Indiana Riverboat Casino - bankrupt
Trump IPO ticker DJT - business failure
Trump Atlanta - business failure
Trump Jupiter - lawsuit
Trump Waikiki Hotel - scam lawsuit.
Given the trend I;m fairly certain there must be more.
“There is only one true good book! A tremendous, beautiful book. Collect them all!”
OMFG
At the start of this rollercoaster shit-show that the Orange Twat calls a presidency, I posted up that I was looking forward to getting the popcorn out and watching the car-crash of a show
But so far, it has exceeded all expectations many many times over
Well to a large segment of Trump voters the bible has all the science one needs. The strong undercurrent of anti-science thinking in the US has become the overcurrent. Rule by the thick for the thick, it'll turn out well. I'm thinking of learning Mandarin, it may stand me in good stead.
"I'm thinking of learning Mandarin, it may stand me in good stead."
The trouble with that is that all natural languages implicitly encoded the culture, biases, patterns of thought and world view of its native speakers; For good or ill.
Perhaps learning en-EN rather than us-US (a newspeak that pathologically masquerades as en-US ) will free your soul from the contraints of the "world" view of the thicker than the thickest. :)
But seriously, a truly cunning plan worthy of Baldrick; Defund US science so that all those foreign born scientists "undermining" the purity and strength of US values and enterprise will toddle off elsewhere. (And presumably also followed by a flood native born "fellow travellers.")
The current administration is so dense they would make a neutron star seem light and fluffy in comparison. Of course one step up from a neutron star is a black hole....
... or even a black orange hole of sun-don't-shine obscurantist spray-on cheezy foam that reeks symptomatically of narcissistic bowel-brain dementia induced by late stage syphilis.
Harvard, math? I'm surprised to hear that he hasn't been deported to the shit-hole of their choice. I am glad to hear he is still alive and kicking. I hope his spirit will inspire others to follow in his footsteps in these bizarre times. I would love to hear his take on the current president of the US.
I'm thinking just leave the US and get citizenship elsewhere, you could easily find a different English speaking country.
A few years ago I suggested trump was right and he should extend his wall around the entire US then all we need do is throw ammo over and wait for the gunshots to stop.
Now I'm even more convinced it's not a bad idea
Yep, it's my favorite Jethro Tull album. Followed closely by Aqualung. Ian Anderson was a very talented artist and the band he had around him was top notch too. There are at least a couple of very good live Thick as a Brick performances on Youtube but they always play only the first half of the album and I would prefer to hear the whole thing. I love watching their live performances because it shows just how good they really are.
This reminds me of my online dating days when one profile proudly and prominently stated "the only book I read is the Bible". Somehow, somehow, I swiped left on her.
Mind you, I kinda hope she was not being too literal, seeing as she was apparently a commercial jet pilot. AFAIK the Bible has little to say about aeronautics...
We have the best biggest beautiful science in the whole world. That along with everything else is getting flushed down the crapper by Moronodon I and his select group of moronic minions (total IQ of the whole group, -1). Luckily for the time being it takes a lot of flushes to get them all down which is probably why oh donnie boy (the pipes, the pipes) is so fixated on plumbing. What's really scary are the people that believed him when he said the best way to stop covid was to stop testing. And it fell of the cliff hill and in to the rabbit hole abyss from there. Again I am at a complete loss of words, even curse words are totally inadequate, to describe the current state of "mind" of ~77 million US citizens. Well at least we seem to have invented a working time dilation machine because it already seems like this has been dragging on forever.
We’ve seen how this story plays out in the UK with our national assets. Right wing government comes in, sells off national assets, enjoys a sugar high in the economy, economy eventually crashes, government blames immigrants, Brexit, country goes down the toilet. There are a few other steps in between of course, but the failure to invest in national assets, including scientific programs, is where is starts.
And yes, short term, a few billionaires will become even richer. But the money isn’t theirs to take - this is theft from a nation. And all it does is enable other nations to fill the vacuum. China springs to mind. Hopefully the EU too. But what we can be sure of is that it won’t be any nation in thrall to a far right government.
It's the blight of the reprobate Orange vise, mercilessly squeezing on that government spending which is generally useful to all of We the People, to ensure select billionaires keep more of the meritoriously hard-inherited fortunes they oh so-deserve as loyalist buttkissing creeps and doormats.
When Canada's govt was finally convinced to increase its research funding last year after a 20 year hiatus, one reason mentioned was that every $ you invest in science, you get back 4-6 fold $ in GDP in a decade in the rest of the economy.
I don't think that, outside of Ponzi schemes, you can find other schemes that boost economy on that scale.
This is also true in the UK, but there the lack of productivity is explained by universities struggling the make ends meet, lack of regional integration and infrastructure, and devolvement.
The top k% of productive sectors in the UK are still doing well, it's the middle that's crippled and that offsets the overall number.
The US is doing great though, releasing the scientists they drained from the rest of the world, I'm sure few tears are shed outside of the US.
Inside, well, it's a nightmare, and it's set to continue for the next decade or so into his third term.
and beyond when Drumpf Jnr takes over from Daddy and Baron makes it three.
If that happens, I foresee at least CA leaving the union. They have a big enough economy to survive. The Red States? They may well become even worse basketcases than that are now when Drumpf Snr cuts all funding to them even after several hurricanes decimate them.
We are in deep shit on this side of the Atlantic with our own mini-Trump (Farage) promising the earth to get elected as PM. If that happens the flood of people heading across the channel will be reversed from what it is today.
Trump/Orban has a lot to answer for on the world stage.
I don't think that, outside of Ponzi schemes, you can find other schemes that boost economy on that scale.
In the UK and US, public transport infrastructure - but primarily because it's been ignored for decades and is now in a dire state, so every time you open a new station in the UK it blows it's passenger projections out the water.
e.g. "Year 3 ridership projected at 50k pax/yr, but actually hit 120k in year 2. Treasury had delayed it for a decade because they didn't think it'd see 40k/yr or generate a good ROI".
This weird and remarkable phenomena whereby making it easy for people1 to access employment and education improves economic output, improves tax receipts and lowers expenditure on benefits.
1. Including 16year old students/apprentices, people with heath conditions that preclude them from driving and low-income workers who can't afford a car thanks to wage stagnation. It's so strange how making it hard for people to join the workforce is bad for the economy. I just can't explain why that might be. /s
The same applies to new road schemes.
Well yes, induced demand occurs on all transit. But on roads it's a bad thing (increased maintenance, then people complain about potholes, and complain when you close the road to patch the potholes, and the scheme was usually conceived to "ease congestion", which it fails at - see America, "just one more lane bro"), whereas induced demand on Public Transport is a good thing - you want transit ridership approaching 100%, because that pays back your infrastructure overheads and minimises costs per-fare. And riders who represent modal share from car to transit mean there are fewer cars on the road - the best way to ease congestion is not to add more roads/lanes, but to improve public transport.
And of course, roads don't help apprentices, non-drivers, etc. They entrench a car-first society and make it marginally more convenient for people who already drive to get where they're going marginally quicker (until congestion makes it a wash).
Building roads through Stoke-on-Trent for instance won't improve traffic. No road scheme can save the city when the M6 is closed and all the blocked traffic is clogging the roads. Whereas urban rail or a tram network with dedicated running paths would be unaffected by road chaos.
Roads are important, and we must ensure those needs are met, but we've now built a very brittle society where the roads get clogged and the areas grinds to a halt, whereas in London a bad accident doesn't impact the Underground (or Overground).
There was a sandwich board outside a Cafe in Cannon Street:
"The USA and UK are having a competition to see who can mess up their country the most. The UK has made a strong start with Brexit, but the USA has a Trump card."
And recently, I have noted that while in WW1 we had Lions led by Donkeys, today we have Elephants led by a Donkey.
There is actually some logic behind this - from the point of view of Mr. President:
1. Knowledge is dangerous once in the hand of the enemy (especially if it is a personal or political enemy, or can become one)
2. The USA needs minions to populate the returning factories (cheap labour).
Me, sinical?
They voted for Trump and they got their very own pig pond now . He was there supposedly to drain the swamp but everyday he's expanding it with added stenches the likes we never smelled on the planet. If the science in the USA folds on itself and disappears into Trump's black hole i got no sympathy whatsoever. Next elections , maybe they will learn , maybe , just maybe , they will go out and vote the republicans out of office. Their appetite for misery seems endless. They keep repeating the same mistakes every few elections and vote for republicans who make a mess out of things and their lives everytime a little bit more miserable. .
I've seen it in done to professors, great thinkers, etc. The way for the leaders of the NSF to get their funding back is to put out research that comes to conclusions Trump is willing to pay for! Conclude scientifically that there are only two genders, fully funded! Conclude there are more than two, FIRED. You either put out conclusions that agree with the party in charge or you go dig ditches. The truth is whatever the people paying the bill says it is! You have a choice, conform or leave.
Remember that for decades smoking was considered beneficial and harmless, supported by innumerable scientific studies whose conclusion were dictated by the tobacco industry. On TV it was shown to be an ordinary part of social life by tobacco sponsors who owned the shows and dictated how many cigarettes must be smoked on each show.
And before you get too shocked think back to not so very long ago, when the party and ideology and the party in power were the opposite from what it is now. Who/what got funded and who/what got cancelled? Science funded by industry forces conclusions to maximize profit. Science funded by government supports whatever conclusions dictated by the party in power.
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