> she ruled that the court lacks jurisdiction to order "retrospective relief", forcing NSF to pay out previously cancelled funds, saying those claims should be brought in the Court of Federal Claims, which handles lawsuits seeking money from the federal government
So many times a court ruling will come down similar to this, where the judge, in correctly and impartially analyzing the situation, deems that whatever the plaintiff is seeking cannot be granted due to jurisdiction or some other basically administrative problem, but the mass media reports on in it in a way that makes it seem like it was because they thought the plaintiff “unworthy.”
It appears to me that administrative problems can be found any time you want. The court chooses whether or not they are sufficient to matter in this case.
As such, it is correct, but not impartial. They can choose their personal opinion and then retroactively find the justification.
It is incredibly clear in US Federal law that the ONlY court with jurisdiction in a contract dispute with the federal government is the Court of Federal Claims.
literally it would be breaking the law for this judge to adjudicate this case. That’s not judicial bias or finding a way to weasel out (as is done all the time with “standing”).
The reason Trump has been winning so much at the Supreme Court is because these lower courts have been breaking all the rules in their efforts to stop him. They keep getting struck down for breaking the rules.
Absolutely not true. Trump hasn't been "winning" at the Supreme Court.
The Trump administration has won exactly two cases at SCOTUS, which is Trump vs CASA and United States vs Skrmetti.
Every other "positive outcome" from SCOTUS has been the Supreme Court reaching down into lower court decisions and delaying/pausing lower courts' decisions in lieu of the Supreme Court actually hearing and deciding the case.
And in a growing number of these cases, there has been zero rationale provided for the reversal. None whatsoever. You cannot possibly make the claim they were for "breaking the rules." In fact, with the (very aberrational) lack of provided rationale, I'd suggest you can infer quite the opposite: SCOTUS's interventions are actually not readily defensible with any cogent legal argument.
In other words, you are a victim of the same ignorance discussed at the top of the thread. Trump's wins are not wins, they are SCOTUS using procedural tools to overturn lower decisions without having to hear evidence, consider arguments, or provide decisions themselves.
The legal system is too complex for your average reporter to understand. They operate at the level of stories rather than systems, rules, allocations of decision making power, etc.
I had a civil procedure professor once explain various federal court procedures in terms of the flow of cases through pipelines, and an evidence professor who explained the rules of evidence in terms of Bayesian statistics. But if you’re smart enough to understand that, you can make a lot more money doing something other than being a reporter.
Sometimes I agree, but in other cases a merely administrative problem ends up meaning there's no effective remedy. The judge also ruled that the plaintiffs can't get an injunction against the prospective claims the court does have jurisdiction over. If the government can illegally cancel your grants at any time for any reason, and months of court action isn't enough to get them restored, I think it's fair for a journalist to summarize that as "courts are letting the government break the law without consequence".
I've read the list of the canceled grants, so far it looks like an even mix of Biden-era stereotypical DEI sounding programs that are mostly STEM focused like:
2215554 EDU Pacific Resources for Education and Learning Investigating the impact of youth's inductive exploration of local technologies featured in Indigenous stories on their engagement, self-efficacy, and persistence in STEM $2,683,413
and mixed with it are specifically Harvard's grants for about everything, not even DEI related. like:
2426105 BIO Harvard University Understanding within-cell plasmid evolution with synthetic systems $1,100,000
> She also said that, while cancelled grants may cause serious disruption to labs, jobs and students, the plaintiffs hadn't met the high legal bar for proving "irreparable harm" needed to justify emergency relief.
Bit on the nose that American law does not seem to consider mass layoffs and the indefinite downsizing of an entire industry to be irreparable harm to those affected.
"irreparable harm" in this case is a legal term of art, which sort of translates to "cannot be fixed by *any* amount of money later". If you lose a job for 5 years, work a minimum wage burger flipper job, and then win a $100 million judgement, you're more or less made whole in the eyes of the court.
So losing a grant is probably more along those lines, in the context of "irreparable harm" for an injunction.
You could make the argument (and I'm guessing it was?) that for scientific grants specifically, if the goal isn't money in the first place, and the lack of grant makes a scientific career impossible to fix later even with any amount of money (say grants 10x as large), then maybe you meet "irreparable harm"? I don't know if the courts would buy that.
Spot on. And the inverse - forcing the govt to dispense the grant is not reversible. Once that money is spent in buying equipment, salaries etc. it's not coming back.
> You could make the argument (and I'm guessing it was?) that for scientific grants specifically, if the goal isn't money in the first place, and the lack of grant makes a scientific career impossible to fix later even with any amount of money (say grants 10x as large), then maybe you meet "irreparable harm"?
I think I'd agree with that, yes. I'd even go as far as to argue that you've caused irreparable harm to the public insofar as the grants specifically would have funded open-access publications.
Um, this seems ass-backwards to me. If some grant is denied when it should've been approved, the only harm that should be considered is "was this money allocated to the research?"... not "was this researcher's career harmed?". We do not allocate grant money to further the career goals of academics. The public and the government that represents it have zero interest in furthering anyone's careers.
In the US legal system in general, the interests of the government are not trump cards. If the law says that the government should pay you $1000, it doesn't matter whether the public or the government feel they have an interest in paying you, nor whether some executive official thinks the original purpose of that law is served by paying you.
In this case, the law does give the executive some discretion to decide based on their priorities whether they really owe you $1000, but the plaintiffs argue the NSF has exceeded that discretion.
> Um, this seems ass-backwards to me. If some grant is denied when it should've been approved, the only harm that should be considered is "was this money allocated to the research?"... not "was this researcher's career harmed?".
Right, exactly. And that seems to be exactly how the court ruled on this injunction. Since "just money" typically can't reach the bar of "irreparable harm", then an injunction that requires meeting the bar of "irreparable harm" is not granted.
The case itself still proceeds, there's just not an immediate injunction granted while the (slow as hell) court proceedings continue.
If destroy a department, money does not bring it back to life. It disposes of its materials, disperses its personnel, and loses its laboratory. Unless somebody volunteers to keep your data, it gets lost.
And if you're working in biology, samples and research animals will be literally dead.
The court does not have before it the administration’s policy decision writ large. What it has before it are organizations representing groups of individuals who say their government grants were terminated. Whether or not you had a legal right to be paid money by the government is within the jurisdiction of the Court of Federal Claims. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Federal...
More generally, in American law, a claim for money is quintessentially something that cannot be the basis for “irreparable harm” to support a preliminary injunction. The law presumes that, where the claim is for money, the injury can virtually always be redressed by a payment of money once the case has been fully decided.
Except jobs can't be just reinstated when people are out of them so long that the knowledge moves elsewhere or experiments expire. Irreparable harm also includes things like injury to reputation, goodwill, professional practice.
The impending harm here is explicit, immediate, and as demonstrated previously serious for these labs and research fields. It's unfortunate that Judge Cobb didn't find this to be sufficient, but hopefully on appeals some relief may be offered.
Temporary loss of income is I think not generally a basis for irreparable harm for more or less the argument you hint at.
> Except jobs can't be just reinstated when people are out of them so long that the knowledge moves elsewhere or experiments expire.
Experiments expiring seems like a more compelling argument than knowledge moving elsewhere. The theory behind irreparable seems to be "it can't be fixed with money," not "you don't have enough money to fix it." If someone goes to a competitor then presumably there is an amount of money that would bring them back - it just might be out of your reach.
The problem with this approach is that so many Americans live paycheck to paycheck that job interruptions quickly become irreparable even with infinite money as the eventual solution.
It’s not that extreme for someone to go from job loss to losing most everything else over the course of 6 to 12 months because there’s little to no safety net.
It's a bit odd that we have such a huge personal injury lawsuit industry then? As "pain and suffering" or wrongful death cannot be fixed with money either.
I don't necessarily disagree with your logic, but that's not what the legal term is referring to. Too many people on HN think law is what they want it to be--not what it is. That term is generally reserved for things that are totally irreparable. Nothing you mentioned can't be made up for later.
It is 100% clear that, yes, there is harm being done. It's not at all clear that the harm is irreparable. They usually apply the term to things that are actually irreparable like the death penalty (can't resuscitate the dead person).
When entire labs are shut down, work halted, experiments frozen, people move on because they need to eat, this is absolutely going to cause irreparable harm to those specific people and programs, as well as science in the United States. (Edited to reflect that the harm is both specific and general)
My wife works in science and is seeing some of the effects of all this, and it's going to be a generational hit to research and development in this country.
If the Europeans were smart and faster moving they would have large scale programs to hire up people and move them over there, because there are tons of brilliant people doing important work that are being left high and dry.
> this is absolutely going to cause irreparable harm to science in the United States
Science isn't the plaintiff.
> If the Europeans were smart and faster moving they would have large scale programs to hire up people and move them over there, because there are tons of brilliant people doing important work that are being left high and dry.
Science often requires a lot of money, and generally Europe would rather wait for America to spend the money and make the discoveries while laughing at them for not spending the money on social niceties.
But scientists are and science is the industry that is being harmed.
> Europe would rather wait for America to spend the money and make the discoveries while laughing at them for not spending the money on social niceties.
And so now we’re not spending the money on discoveries and also cutting back on the social “niceties” we had spent whatever little amount of money on?
The US has been spending the most globally, in real terms per capita[0] and a percentage of GDP[1] on healthcare for a long time. How on earth can you justify the phrase "little amount of money"?
The problem wasn't the amount spent. The problem was the terrible hybrid of regulations that let the private sector down crazy rabbit-holes of false value to chase and be paid for, instead of just direct exposure to the real health market's needs.
Reading comprehension is important. Correct. The US as a country spends a lot more on health care than if there was a government-run single-payer system. I'm responding to this:
> while laughing at them for not spending the money on social niceties.
The US government doesn't pay for the "social nicety" of health care & in fact makes more money since that dues to private insurance industry generates even more tax revenue.
You can claim it's the regulations but all evidence I've read suggests it's the lack of single-payer system which removes the ability to negotiate + increases the complexity of the system because as a provider you have to pay more people to manage insurance payments with all the different providers vs 1 central provider.
> But scientists are and science is the industry that is being harmed
But the law doesn’t afford scientists any right to sue on the basis that they think the administration’s policy is bad for science writ large. That’s a policy determination outside the power of the courts to second guess. (Read *Marbury v. Madison and specifically the parts talking about ministerial actions. Courts can only enjoin executive officials to take ministerial actions the law clearly requires, not second guess the executive’s discretionary decisions.)
The actual legal rights the scientists can exercise are similar to those of any government contractor. If you have a contract to run a hotdog stand on a military base, the government has certain limitations on what it can and can’t do.
Europe spends more on academic research than the US, both in absolute terms and as a fraction of GDP. The US is ahead in business R&D.
But research funding is mostly used for hiring early-career researchers for fixed-term positions. If Europe wants to attract foreign academic talent, its universities need permanent increases in core funding for hiring additional faculty. And that's something European politicians largely don't support.
The rest of the world gets to benefit from the american brain drain, already in progress. The US is essentially going to turn into a similar shape as russia, a country with nukes but a shadow of its former prestige and soft power.
The problem with racism is it's not just immoral, it's also short-sighted. It's not like the US South is the richest. Newsflash: investing in your population yields huge dividends. China gets this.
Newsflash: China is conducting a ethnic genocide against the Uyghur Muslims [1], where they are held in concentration camps and likely harvest their organs.
If that's what population investment looks like, count me out.
They have explicit quota systems and affirmative action for the official 55 non-Han minorities, and also for people from less wealthy provinces. Sometimes people fake residency in a poorer province to game the system.
The affirmative action programs are largely inconsequential because non-Han only account for 9% of the population. In contrast to DEI in the U.S., where about 45% of the youngest generation belongs to groups that would qualify for racial preferences.
Also, the goal of the Chinese system is assimilation into the Han Chinese dominant culture. And they have reeducation camps for minorities that insist on cultural separatism.
Sociologists will tell you race is a “social construct”. People can wake up tomorrow and start discriminating on the smallest shades you and I wouldn’t care about - in China there’s already a preference for light skin. In the UK they discriminate on accent/location (just within London!), and in China there’s plenty of regional dialects to choose from. Or look at class in the UK.
The point is at the end of the day their govt will build trains to every little village because that’s the consensus, they just don’t call it DEI. Westerners call it “ghost towns”… which then fill up promptly.
Is the China model perfect? Absolutely not. But it makes some strong points
> The point is at the end of the day their govt will build trains to every little village because that’s the consensus, they just don’t call it DEI
“DEI” is the promotion of distinct identities with an emphasis on differences (the “D” means “diversity”). In contrast to assimilating into a common, dominant identity. Investing in underdeveloped geographic regions isn’t DEI at all. I agree the Chinese system is vastly better than what we call DEI.
The consensus in sociology and anthropology is that ethnicity is a social construct. At this point I'd say I'm done here, you need to go take classes ideally, or read a book or talk to a frontier LLM. This is why education is so important, and why republicans hate critical race theory.
It is also true that tens of millions of young adults would like to move to a Tier 1 city to increase their economic prospects, but Beijing does not let them.
I'm trying to figure out how your comment has any relevance to the the coment it's replying to and I can't find it. Is "Han Chinese" a political ideology instead of an ethnic identity and I was just unaware?
It's self-explanatory. People of very different backgrounds can come together to make fair political/economic/social decisions. If you don't get this, it's on you. I literally can't make it any simpler.
So you are in fact claiming that "Han Chinese" is a political ideology rather than an ethnicity? Because that is the only way your point makes any kind of sense.
Especially when ICE receives a $75B budget increase to do things that are blatantly unamerican and often illegal.
The annual deficit has massively increased this year, perhaps parent poster should be trying to apply the same rubric to the rest of the budget. Surely the ROI of spending money to commit crimes can't be good.
These cuts are ideologically driven and use the "saving taxpayers money" line as coverage.
As you noted, ICE just got billions more, as well as the military. Not a single cost cutting measure has been announced in those areas.
Being mindful of taxpayer dollars is not a bad thing, but it has to be across the board. And more so, some of those dollars spent are an investment that pays off (like scientific research) vs those that don't (like a lot of military spending).
If my wife suggested that we need to manage our budget by curbing just my spending on the occasional Steam sale, instead of figuring out a way to downsize our two SUVs, I would consider her a huge piece of shit.
[In comparison, the government just announced increasing funding to ICE by an order of magnitude more than 1B$]
> If my wife suggested that we need to manage our budget by curbing just my spending on the occasional Steam sale, instead of figuring out a way to downsize our two SUVs, I would consider her a huge piece of shit.
You might have a need for two SUVs, and those are investments that you likely have already made massive losses on. Making new investments on the other hand that are not strictly necessary, does not seem wise.
But ignoring that, the investment into reducing illegal immigration is like investing into an expensive tape to plug holes in the water storage. The tape costs far more than the lost water, but the real investment is preventing the damage from water to the surrounding area, the lost water over time, etc. The investment into ICE will likely be realised over several years.
Alternatively, the research that is being cut is largely not intended to increase economic output. If anything, the results will be used to justify opposition to growth measures.
> she ruled that the court lacks jurisdiction to order "retrospective relief", forcing NSF to pay out previously cancelled funds, saying those claims should be brought in the Court of Federal Claims, which handles lawsuits seeking money from the federal government
So many times a court ruling will come down similar to this, where the judge, in correctly and impartially analyzing the situation, deems that whatever the plaintiff is seeking cannot be granted due to jurisdiction or some other basically administrative problem, but the mass media reports on in it in a way that makes it seem like it was because they thought the plaintiff “unworthy.”
It appears to me that administrative problems can be found any time you want. The court chooses whether or not they are sufficient to matter in this case.
As such, it is correct, but not impartial. They can choose their personal opinion and then retroactively find the justification.
It is incredibly clear in US Federal law that the ONlY court with jurisdiction in a contract dispute with the federal government is the Court of Federal Claims.
literally it would be breaking the law for this judge to adjudicate this case. That’s not judicial bias or finding a way to weasel out (as is done all the time with “standing”).
The reason Trump has been winning so much at the Supreme Court is because these lower courts have been breaking all the rules in their efforts to stop him. They keep getting struck down for breaking the rules.
Absolutely not true. Trump hasn't been "winning" at the Supreme Court.
The Trump administration has won exactly two cases at SCOTUS, which is Trump vs CASA and United States vs Skrmetti.
Every other "positive outcome" from SCOTUS has been the Supreme Court reaching down into lower court decisions and delaying/pausing lower courts' decisions in lieu of the Supreme Court actually hearing and deciding the case.
And in a growing number of these cases, there has been zero rationale provided for the reversal. None whatsoever. You cannot possibly make the claim they were for "breaking the rules." In fact, with the (very aberrational) lack of provided rationale, I'd suggest you can infer quite the opposite: SCOTUS's interventions are actually not readily defensible with any cogent legal argument.
In other words, you are a victim of the same ignorance discussed at the top of the thread. Trump's wins are not wins, they are SCOTUS using procedural tools to overturn lower decisions without having to hear evidence, consider arguments, or provide decisions themselves.
The legal system is too complex for your average reporter to understand. They operate at the level of stories rather than systems, rules, allocations of decision making power, etc.
I had a civil procedure professor once explain various federal court procedures in terms of the flow of cases through pipelines, and an evidence professor who explained the rules of evidence in terms of Bayesian statistics. But if you’re smart enough to understand that, you can make a lot more money doing something other than being a reporter.
>But if you’re smart enough to understand that, you can make a lot more money doing something other than being a reporter.
And if you're smart enough to convey it to laymen in a useful way you're making money hand over fist doing something better still.
Sometimes I agree, but in other cases a merely administrative problem ends up meaning there's no effective remedy. The judge also ruled that the plaintiffs can't get an injunction against the prospective claims the court does have jurisdiction over. If the government can illegally cancel your grants at any time for any reason, and months of court action isn't enough to get them restored, I think it's fair for a journalist to summarize that as "courts are letting the government break the law without consequence".
Even when reversed, this is going to have a huge impact of the scientific standing of the US for a great long time.
These grants are the water, sun and food for all the PhDs in the US. We will now see the world flocking to Asia and Europe as the center of research.
>These grants are the water, sun and food for all the PhDs in the US
Not just PhDs. R&D in general.
The big secret is the US government has been subsidizing corporate R&D for 70 years and people seem to have forgotten that fact.
Love to gamble my whole economy on the premise that we've been wrong about Keynesianism for a hundred years.
I've read the list of the canceled grants, so far it looks like an even mix of Biden-era stereotypical DEI sounding programs that are mostly STEM focused like:
2215554 EDU Pacific Resources for Education and Learning Investigating the impact of youth's inductive exploration of local technologies featured in Indigenous stories on their engagement, self-efficacy, and persistence in STEM $2,683,413
and mixed with it are specifically Harvard's grants for about everything, not even DEI related. like:
2426105 BIO Harvard University Understanding within-cell plasmid evolution with synthetic systems $1,100,000
Is this related to the Trump-Harvard beef?
> She also said that, while cancelled grants may cause serious disruption to labs, jobs and students, the plaintiffs hadn't met the high legal bar for proving "irreparable harm" needed to justify emergency relief.
Bit on the nose that American law does not seem to consider mass layoffs and the indefinite downsizing of an entire industry to be irreparable harm to those affected.
"irreparable harm" in this case is a legal term of art, which sort of translates to "cannot be fixed by *any* amount of money later". If you lose a job for 5 years, work a minimum wage burger flipper job, and then win a $100 million judgement, you're more or less made whole in the eyes of the court.
So losing a grant is probably more along those lines, in the context of "irreparable harm" for an injunction.
You could make the argument (and I'm guessing it was?) that for scientific grants specifically, if the goal isn't money in the first place, and the lack of grant makes a scientific career impossible to fix later even with any amount of money (say grants 10x as large), then maybe you meet "irreparable harm"? I don't know if the courts would buy that.
Spot on. And the inverse - forcing the govt to dispense the grant is not reversible. Once that money is spent in buying equipment, salaries etc. it's not coming back.
> You could make the argument (and I'm guessing it was?) that for scientific grants specifically, if the goal isn't money in the first place, and the lack of grant makes a scientific career impossible to fix later even with any amount of money (say grants 10x as large), then maybe you meet "irreparable harm"?
I think I'd agree with that, yes. I'd even go as far as to argue that you've caused irreparable harm to the public insofar as the grants specifically would have funded open-access publications.
Um, this seems ass-backwards to me. If some grant is denied when it should've been approved, the only harm that should be considered is "was this money allocated to the research?"... not "was this researcher's career harmed?". We do not allocate grant money to further the career goals of academics. The public and the government that represents it have zero interest in furthering anyone's careers.
In the US legal system in general, the interests of the government are not trump cards. If the law says that the government should pay you $1000, it doesn't matter whether the public or the government feel they have an interest in paying you, nor whether some executive official thinks the original purpose of that law is served by paying you.
In this case, the law does give the executive some discretion to decide based on their priorities whether they really owe you $1000, but the plaintiffs argue the NSF has exceeded that discretion.
> Um, this seems ass-backwards to me. If some grant is denied when it should've been approved, the only harm that should be considered is "was this money allocated to the research?"... not "was this researcher's career harmed?".
Right, exactly. And that seems to be exactly how the court ruled on this injunction. Since "just money" typically can't reach the bar of "irreparable harm", then an injunction that requires meeting the bar of "irreparable harm" is not granted.
The case itself still proceeds, there's just not an immediate injunction granted while the (slow as hell) court proceedings continue.
In the court's opinion, if I deprive them of oxygen for one hour, and then give them pure oxygen for the next 10 years, have they been made whole?
Justice delayed is justice denied.
Death is a perfect example of something that would reach the "irreparable harm" bar.
Money is typically not.
Money is not. But your job is.
If destroy a department, money does not bring it back to life. It disposes of its materials, disperses its personnel, and loses its laboratory. Unless somebody volunteers to keep your data, it gets lost.
And if you're working in biology, samples and research animals will be literally dead.
It is "irreparable harm" in the legal sense.
Right and hence the last paragraph of my initial response.
Doesn't look like the court agreed though
The court does not have before it the administration’s policy decision writ large. What it has before it are organizations representing groups of individuals who say their government grants were terminated. Whether or not you had a legal right to be paid money by the government is within the jurisdiction of the Court of Federal Claims. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Federal...
More generally, in American law, a claim for money is quintessentially something that cannot be the basis for “irreparable harm” to support a preliminary injunction. The law presumes that, where the claim is for money, the injury can virtually always be redressed by a payment of money once the case has been fully decided.
Generally, no, because jobs can be reinstated and money recompensated. Irreparable harm is harm that is... well... not reparable.
Except jobs can't be just reinstated when people are out of them so long that the knowledge moves elsewhere or experiments expire. Irreparable harm also includes things like injury to reputation, goodwill, professional practice.
The impending harm here is explicit, immediate, and as demonstrated previously serious for these labs and research fields. It's unfortunate that Judge Cobb didn't find this to be sufficient, but hopefully on appeals some relief may be offered.
Temporary loss of income is I think not generally a basis for irreparable harm for more or less the argument you hint at.
> Except jobs can't be just reinstated when people are out of them so long that the knowledge moves elsewhere or experiments expire.
Experiments expiring seems like a more compelling argument than knowledge moving elsewhere. The theory behind irreparable seems to be "it can't be fixed with money," not "you don't have enough money to fix it." If someone goes to a competitor then presumably there is an amount of money that would bring them back - it just might be out of your reach.
The problem with this approach is that so many Americans live paycheck to paycheck that job interruptions quickly become irreparable even with infinite money as the eventual solution.
It’s not that extreme for someone to go from job loss to losing most everything else over the course of 6 to 12 months because there’s little to no safety net.
It's a bit odd that we have such a huge personal injury lawsuit industry then? As "pain and suffering" or wrongful death cannot be fixed with money either.
I don't necessarily disagree with your logic, but that's not what the legal term is referring to. Too many people on HN think law is what they want it to be--not what it is. That term is generally reserved for things that are totally irreparable. Nothing you mentioned can't be made up for later.
It is 100% clear that, yes, there is harm being done. It's not at all clear that the harm is irreparable. They usually apply the term to things that are actually irreparable like the death penalty (can't resuscitate the dead person).
When entire labs are shut down, work halted, experiments frozen, people move on because they need to eat, this is absolutely going to cause irreparable harm to those specific people and programs, as well as science in the United States. (Edited to reflect that the harm is both specific and general)
My wife works in science and is seeing some of the effects of all this, and it's going to be a generational hit to research and development in this country.
If the Europeans were smart and faster moving they would have large scale programs to hire up people and move them over there, because there are tons of brilliant people doing important work that are being left high and dry.
> this is absolutely going to cause irreparable harm to science in the United States
Science isn't the plaintiff.
> If the Europeans were smart and faster moving they would have large scale programs to hire up people and move them over there, because there are tons of brilliant people doing important work that are being left high and dry.
Science often requires a lot of money, and generally Europe would rather wait for America to spend the money and make the discoveries while laughing at them for not spending the money on social niceties.
> Science isn't the plaintiff.
But scientists are and science is the industry that is being harmed.
> Europe would rather wait for America to spend the money and make the discoveries while laughing at them for not spending the money on social niceties.
And so now we’re not spending the money on discoveries and also cutting back on the social “niceties” we had spent whatever little amount of money on?
> whatever little amount of money on
The US has been spending the most globally, in real terms per capita[0] and a percentage of GDP[1] on healthcare for a long time. How on earth can you justify the phrase "little amount of money"?
The problem wasn't the amount spent. The problem was the terrible hybrid of regulations that let the private sector down crazy rabbit-holes of false value to chase and be paid for, instead of just direct exposure to the real health market's needs.
[0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.PC.CD?end=2...
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.GD.ZS?most_... (technically three massively smaller economies contribute more as a % of GDP, but that's off a crazily lower base)
Reading comprehension is important. Correct. The US as a country spends a lot more on health care than if there was a government-run single-payer system. I'm responding to this:
> while laughing at them for not spending the money on social niceties.
The US government doesn't pay for the "social nicety" of health care & in fact makes more money since that dues to private insurance industry generates even more tax revenue.
You can claim it's the regulations but all evidence I've read suggests it's the lack of single-payer system which removes the ability to negotiate + increases the complexity of the system because as a provider you have to pay more people to manage insurance payments with all the different providers vs 1 central provider.
> But scientists are and science is the industry that is being harmed
But the law doesn’t afford scientists any right to sue on the basis that they think the administration’s policy is bad for science writ large. That’s a policy determination outside the power of the courts to second guess. (Read *Marbury v. Madison and specifically the parts talking about ministerial actions. Courts can only enjoin executive officials to take ministerial actions the law clearly requires, not second guess the executive’s discretionary decisions.)
The actual legal rights the scientists can exercise are similar to those of any government contractor. If you have a contract to run a hotdog stand on a military base, the government has certain limitations on what it can and can’t do.
Europe spends more on academic research than the US, both in absolute terms and as a fraction of GDP. The US is ahead in business R&D.
But research funding is mostly used for hiring early-career researchers for fixed-term positions. If Europe wants to attract foreign academic talent, its universities need permanent increases in core funding for hiring additional faculty. And that's something European politicians largely don't support.
Europe is not a country, and individual European countries have orders of magnitude smaller budgets than the US does.
Glad to hear you'll be implementing universal healthcare with the savings from the NSF.
*eyeroll*
The rest of the world gets to benefit from the american brain drain, already in progress. The US is essentially going to turn into a similar shape as russia, a country with nukes but a shadow of its former prestige and soft power.
[flagged]
The problem with racism is it's not just immoral, it's also short-sighted. It's not like the US South is the richest. Newsflash: investing in your population yields huge dividends. China gets this.
Newsflash: China is conducting a ethnic genocide against the Uyghur Muslims [1], where they are held in concentration camps and likely harvest their organs.
If that's what population investment looks like, count me out.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-22278037
China does the opposite of DEI. It’s a country where dozens of different ethnic groups all pretend to be “Han Chinese” to facilitate social harmony.
They have explicit quota systems and affirmative action for the official 55 non-Han minorities, and also for people from less wealthy provinces. Sometimes people fake residency in a poorer province to game the system.
The affirmative action programs are largely inconsequential because non-Han only account for 9% of the population. In contrast to DEI in the U.S., where about 45% of the youngest generation belongs to groups that would qualify for racial preferences.
Also, the goal of the Chinese system is assimilation into the Han Chinese dominant culture. And they have reeducation camps for minorities that insist on cultural separatism.
Sociologists will tell you race is a “social construct”. People can wake up tomorrow and start discriminating on the smallest shades you and I wouldn’t care about - in China there’s already a preference for light skin. In the UK they discriminate on accent/location (just within London!), and in China there’s plenty of regional dialects to choose from. Or look at class in the UK.
The point is at the end of the day their govt will build trains to every little village because that’s the consensus, they just don’t call it DEI. Westerners call it “ghost towns”… which then fill up promptly.
Is the China model perfect? Absolutely not. But it makes some strong points
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/08/the-china-models-...
Ethnicity is a biological construct. You can see my ethnic group as a tight cluster in a genetic chart: https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2018/07/09/the-main-interesti....
> The point is at the end of the day their govt will build trains to every little village because that’s the consensus, they just don’t call it DEI
“DEI” is the promotion of distinct identities with an emphasis on differences (the “D” means “diversity”). In contrast to assimilating into a common, dominant identity. Investing in underdeveloped geographic regions isn’t DEI at all. I agree the Chinese system is vastly better than what we call DEI.
The consensus in sociology and anthropology is that ethnicity is a social construct. At this point I'd say I'm done here, you need to go take classes ideally, or read a book or talk to a frontier LLM. This is why education is so important, and why republicans hate critical race theory.
> The consensus in sociology and anthropology is that ethnicity is a social construct
Biologists meanwhile know that it’s in your DNA: https://customercare.23andme.com/hc/en-us/articles/212169298.... You can take a DNA sample of me and have a very good idea about my ancestors going back tens of thousands of years.
> why education is so important, and why republicans hate critical race theory.
Or because of appeals to fake authority like you just did here.
It is also true that tens of millions of young adults would like to move to a Tier 1 city to increase their economic prospects, but Beijing does not let them.
Whenever things like that have been tried in the US certain folks have refused to pretend and put up walls instead...
That's like saying "lots of different ethnic groups pretend to be Democrats". No, they just don't have that entrenched legacy of slavery.
I'm trying to figure out how your comment has any relevance to the the coment it's replying to and I can't find it. Is "Han Chinese" a political ideology instead of an ethnic identity and I was just unaware?
It's self-explanatory. People of very different backgrounds can come together to make fair political/economic/social decisions. If you don't get this, it's on you. I literally can't make it any simpler.
So you are in fact claiming that "Han Chinese" is a political ideology rather than an ethnicity? Because that is the only way your point makes any kind of sense.
This is quite the canard. How many actual spoken languages does PRC have on its currency vs USA?
> How can squeezing tax-payers to the brink be justified?
You're right it's unjustified. Labor is taxed too heavily considering most of the growth is in productivity. Tax the capital, cut income taxes.
Capital is typically invested itself into growth. Smart people are not holding billions in cash because inflation would quickly erode it.
You want to growth-hack your economy so that the best investment opportunity is the people themselves, then you see serious growth.
Tax payers are not going to be helped by cutting a mere 1B in science funding.
You're right, but making savings is a process of a thousand cuts.
Especially when ICE receives a $75B budget increase to do things that are blatantly unamerican and often illegal.
The annual deficit has massively increased this year, perhaps parent poster should be trying to apply the same rubric to the rest of the budget. Surely the ROI of spending money to commit crimes can't be good.
These cuts are ideologically driven and use the "saving taxpayers money" line as coverage.
As you noted, ICE just got billions more, as well as the military. Not a single cost cutting measure has been announced in those areas.
Being mindful of taxpayer dollars is not a bad thing, but it has to be across the board. And more so, some of those dollars spent are an investment that pays off (like scientific research) vs those that don't (like a lot of military spending).
If my wife suggested that we need to manage our budget by curbing just my spending on the occasional Steam sale, instead of figuring out a way to downsize our two SUVs, I would consider her a huge piece of shit.
[In comparison, the government just announced increasing funding to ICE by an order of magnitude more than 1B$]
> If my wife suggested that we need to manage our budget by curbing just my spending on the occasional Steam sale, instead of figuring out a way to downsize our two SUVs, I would consider her a huge piece of shit.
You might have a need for two SUVs, and those are investments that you likely have already made massive losses on. Making new investments on the other hand that are not strictly necessary, does not seem wise.
But ignoring that, the investment into reducing illegal immigration is like investing into an expensive tape to plug holes in the water storage. The tape costs far more than the lost water, but the real investment is preventing the damage from water to the surrounding area, the lost water over time, etc. The investment into ICE will likely be realised over several years.
Alternatively, the research that is being cut is largely not intended to increase economic output. If anything, the results will be used to justify opposition to growth measures.