This could be understandable if some rationale was provided, but it's worse than that:
> Neither agency has publicly issued new formal guidance describing these requirements. Instead, officials are informing grantees individually, leaving researchers confused and concerned.
They've not even made it official. They're just randomly flagging.
This is a very common thing for corrupt governments. No rules are clear, so that those at the top can dictate whatever they want whenever they want. Which means that the only safe route is to always be on very very good terms with leadership.
Very sad to see the US fall away from the rule of law, into kleptocracy.
See also the way that grants are now being distributed at NCI and NSF. Only very large grants for many many years, to reward those who are in the favored status, and kill those who are disfavored. Decision making is random and capricious, just be sure to bribe those at the top with whatever favors you can.
> No rules are clear, so that those at the top can dictate whatever they want whenever they want. Which means that the only safe route is to always be on very very good terms with leadership.
Exactly. That’s why dictatorships are so adverse to the rule of law, despite many (notably the macho-nationalist ones) being ostensibly for "law and order".
> Very sad to see the US fall away from the rule of law, into kleptocracy.
Yes, it is sad. It’s Hungary all over again, just with a world-spanning blast radius.
> Very sad to see the US fall away from the rule of law, into kleptocracy.
This is what is so hard for me to handle, and it really feels like I'm grieving a death. Because no matter what happens, even if some things eventually get better, I feel like the US as I knew it is dead - there is simply no coming back from the fact that it's been laid bare how quickly and easily vast swaths of our political leadership would sell out to completely destroy our Constitutional principles.
I had to laugh when I read a title on the Washington Post today, "President Trump faced a wall of opposition from Senate G.O.P. lawmakers, in part over his plan to create a $1.8 billion fund to reward his allies", with of all people Susan Collins in the header image. Lol, I'm sure she'll release a statement saying how she's "very concerned" and end up doing nothing anyway.
> there is simply no coming back from the fact that it's been laid bare how quickly and easily vast swaths of our political leadership would sell out to completely destroy our Constitutional principles.
I think you are right. At the same time it’s also an opportunity to get rid of an outdated constitution and have another go, with the benefit of 250 more years of experience. Just don’t fall into complacency: this government was voted in, partly because of a toxic and polarised culture that sees compromise and consensus as weaknesses (and gerrymandering, and the electoral college, and disenfranchisement, fair enough), but also partly because a lot of people did not bother showing up. Republicans have had a grassroots strategy for decades, where they seized everything they could get, even very modest positions. That’s how they progressively ended up redrawing maps and steering politics at the state or county level. You need a long term plan and a good strategy to counter this. So don’t give up (I beg you, from the other side of the Atlantic). Even if things are bad now, they can get better tomorrow.
I think you would most certainly NOT prefer any Constitution, nor especially any Bill of Rights, that was rewritten by today's version of "We the People".
how quickly and easily vast swaths of our political leadership would sell out to completely destroy our Constitutional principles
This is not something done to us by leadership. This is a democracy; we voted for this.
We have another election coming up momentarily. We have the opportunity to put a stop to this. There's good reason to think that the election will not be entirely fair, but there are limits: if people are genuinely against this, they will turn out and say so.
We'll see what happens, but even in the best possible case, tens of millions of people will come out to say "Yes, destroying American science is exactly what I want". This is not a leadership problem. This is an us problem.
It is an information problem. A majority of voters believes in the nonsense that is spread on social media, and are not properly informed about important topics.
Proper information is readily available, and everyone on social media has been constantly exhorted to avoid scams.
At this point if people are being taken in by the really obvious and bald lies, the problem isn't a lack of information. They're just plain stupid.
Social media is allowing both views and the against is winning. But the mainstream media is under the thumb of fcc and too afraid to challenge so they keep neutral (or like Fox is a cheerleading) and that's where the disinformation is coming from.
The people are fairly irrelevant these days. We just saw this week how Israel and billionaires can just spam AI slop adverts to replace a popular candidate with a complete no one.
Boomers will see the ai generated video and believe it immediately.
> it really feels like I'm grieving a death.
Jimmy Carter's funeral a few days before Trump was inaugurated really felt like the funeral for America. The moral gulf between Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump is just so vast. To imagine that the US elected someone with the integrity of Jimmy Carter in 1976... and then elected someone who is as morally bankrupt as Trump is in 2024.
> there is simply no coming back from the fact that it's been laid bare how quickly and easily vast swaths of our political leadership would sell out to completely destroy our Constitutional principles.
Indeed. Well said. I doubt we'll ever see the likes of a Carter again in the Whitehouse.
But why was Carter elected? Partly it was disgust at Watergate. Could we see someone of integrity elected as a result of a backlash of disgust at Trump? Yes, we could.
Will the Democrats run such a person? I don't have much hope.
Sometimes you have to die to get back stronger. Ask the chinese.
The primary system means that nobody with any principles is left in the Republican Party, unfortunately.
But not all is lost. Many are very eager for the reins of power to come back and for laws to be enforced. Sure, the Trump regime may tell itself that it's immune from tax audits ever again, but that's not legal and as soon as the force of law is back there are many eager attorneys with high principles that will be hired back into the DoJ and enforce the law.
We saw this after Nixon's lawlessness too. Those who abetted Nixon in breaking the law were disbarred.
Prosecutions will come. Trumps's key mistake is thinking that his popularity doesn't matter anymore. It does. It means that people with morals and ethics can legally gain power and legally enforce the law.
If Trump was at 60% popularity, I would be singing a different tune. But at 35% popularity and 60% unfavorable, there is appetite left in our democracy to remain a democracy and to go after the crooks. Even if a good 30% of that unfavorable opinion is just about people's own pocketbooks rather than the principles of law and democracy, that's enough for those who care to actually enforce law.
Be concerned, but be ready tk supppprt those who will correct the course of our ship.
I wish I could share your optimism. But just because a voter has an unfavorable opinion, it doesn't mean that they won't vote for them. Many will choose "the lesser of two evils", and the current administration has devoted a lot of effort to convincing supporters that their opponents are even worse.
The President is not in fact on the ballot this year, and quite a few will say "I don't like the President, but I like the local Republican candidate more than the local Democratic candidate". Except that the President should be on the ballot: the only serious question facing Congress is whether they will support his policies or take measures to oppose them. That's going to happen exclusively along party lines. Nothing else that either candidate promises actually matters.
It's all made worse by efforts to put a thumb on the scale. That, above all else, makes this feel like the last chance we'll have to fix this. I'm going to hold out hope that we'll take it.
I wonder, is there an appetite left to remain a democracy, or more like an appetite for an autocrat who pays a little more attention to the façade and doesn't go out of his way to offend even his most loyal followers?
Right now, there is a lot of support for candidates who do go out of their way to offend even their most loyal followers. They like the offense, even if it occasionally hurts their own feelings, because it hurts other people more.
Politicians have long understood that it's easier to get elected by being fearful of their opponents than with your own merits. We've just taken the next logical step: actively attacking them, in words and with restrictive actions. It hasn't yet proceeded to violence, for the most part, but that's only because people still haven't gotten bored with this level of harassment.
To be fair, this has been a long time coming, and a lot of forces have been committed over decades to finally make this kind of thing possible. You're just seeing the next phase of the plan unfolding.
After listening to way too much Rush Limbaugh 30-some years ago, little of what's happening has been surprising, although that doesn't stop it from being distressing all the same.
> always be on very very good terms with leadership
Not a guarantee either.. just a hope
We can go even further: One hallmark of fascist regimes is selective enforcement. They start with making laws and rules so opaque and convoluted that pretty much anyone will break them at one point. But they will be extremely selective on when they enforce them, and who they go after.
EDIT: But, as someone will probably point out, convoluted laws / bureaucracy does obviously not automatically mean fascism or corruption. Lots of weird laws are there to cover all sorts of edge cases.
Not sure if it matters, but that is at least not true for nazi-style fascism. In there, they had a very strong rule of law for most people. But, there was a dual, a parallel system where there was no law at all, it operated outside of the legal system. You could win a trial and be exhonorated, only to be taken away by the gestapo at the door of the courtroom.
It was important for the nazis to keep businesses running, and have most people continue their lives without noticing major changes. Most people would not come into contact with the second system, and barely knew it existed. But if you entered the second system, you often would not come out alive.
This way, they could transit into an authoritarian system without hurting the economy. They knew this and planned it, and it turned out to be correct.
If you can be whisked off to a separate system where you don't have legal rights, you by definition don't have rule of law. Literally the singular, most core principle of the concept is that all persons are equal under the law, whether they are royalty or Jewish. "Strong rule of law for most people" is an inherently contradictory phrase.
If you want to read more: the concept is called "the dual state" [1] after the eponymous book [0]
I agree that the phrase is somewhat contradictory, but it is the best way to describe what was going on. As long as you were within the confines of the normative state, you experienced a rule of law. But as soon as you stepped into the prerogative state, anything could happen. So a "rule of law", except that it didn't apply to everybody, but only to most people. And importantly, the existence of the prerogative state is mostly hidden when you're in the normative state (so unlike a king, which everybody knew was outside of the law)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dual_State
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_state_(model)
And of anyone is interested, but don't want to read a whole book, I found this article to be a good explanation https://archive.ph/ah2L0
This is not true. The judiciary was undermined then wholesale replaced and courtroom trials were a sham under the nazis.
There was no rule of law, just arbitrary decisions handed down by nazi party judges.
The US is trending towards a Russian style oligarchy and these latest moves are just one of a wider pattern of trying to suppress academia, freedom of speech, personal freedoms.
How long until Americans wake up to the fact that they are going down the slippery slope with 100 mph now.
> The US is a Russian style oligarchy
FTFY. From the outside, people can easily see it.
Even Russian people?
Anyway, I wonder what comes after the USAA.
As a Russian national: no, the USA is not yet at nearly the same level of corruption.
The main bulwark against Russianification is not the Congress or the SCOTUS, it's the true federative nature of the US. States have a lot of very real autonomy and they limit the amount of corrupt overreach.
This is also very foreseeable for an administrative state, and this slippery slope has been predicted for over a century. Rule by administrators (or bureaucrats) is just as opaque/unaccountable/corrupt, and as the extent of their power grew, it was inevitable that the political leadership would exploit the power (as has already happened many times before). It seems like nobody (at least on the liberal end of the spectrum) really cared about the arbitrary use of power when it was mostly left-liberals making the choices.
The way to fix this is to reduce the power of the administrative state, not to just complain about Trump, but I have little hope of a real solution.
Where do you imagine the power goes when you've taken it away from "the administrative state"?
I can totally understand an argument that says a certain administrative function was not working well and needed to be fixed. But if you're just suggesting destroying these institutions, what fills that power vacuum other than the far worse situation we're seeing unfolding now?
> Where do you imagine the power goes when you've taken it away from "the administrative state"?
Congress. The courts have clumsily dismantled the administrative state. But there are more options than an unchecked executive and unaccountable unelecteds.
Congress still has all the power granted to it by the constitution. They chose not to use those powers, because the republicans support the orange turd.
> Rule by administrators (or bureaucrats) is just as opaque/unaccountable/corrupt
I don't agree. The division of power is most likely preferable. Otherwise the politician also become the beurocrat but way more arbitrary.
When the administrators/bureaucrats (whatever your preferred terms are) have very limited and defined powers, I agree they are different. When the administrative powers become wide-sweeping and ill-defined, the powers are difficult to differentiate from those of the politicians.
What you’re seeing is the result of the USA voting in a party and president that made it clear beforehand that they were going to install puppet civil servants to do their will. Most other developed countries have avoided this scenario.
It’s important that most of the civil service is staffed by permanent employees hired through a fair and well-defined process and not appointed for political reasons.
The current path is replacing bureaucratic power with unchecked executive power which is the opposite of what you want. Bureaucrats who must follow the rule of law is what you want.
>Bureaucrats who must follow the rule of law is what you want.
Under Chevron we had the opposite of that: bureaucrats who had ridiculously wide latitude to make their own rules.
What we actually need is for congress to take back control instead of passing all power and authority to the executive branch.
Are you saying Congress should be domain experts every area they allocate funds to? From maritime safety to preschool nutrition, congress should be expert enough in everything to specify all important details, and then the agencies (staffed by actual domain experts in each area) are mere accountants to execute the policies?
I don’t think it’s workable. At best it just swaps lobbyists for civil servants.
More realistically you'd end up with an official advisory body where the exact same experts would write the regulations, they would be intermittently passed by congress between their regular bouts of systemic dysfunction, and the current crop of bureaucrats would be replaced by mindless pencil pushers. Add an official title for members of this government run advisory body such as "sage" and give them lifelong tenure and we've about completed the process.
On paper it's different but in practice congress would largely be rubber stamping things. I predict the differences would be largely negative. More room for non-experts to meddle, more room for lobbyists to insert themselves into the process, and more room for broad capture of the advisory body to go unnoticed.
Ostensibly, who's paying their salary is important. Lobbyists, paid for by corporations with a vested interest in things going their way, is far worse than civil servants who's salary comes from taxpayers, and who's responsibility is to them, and not corporate interests. Ostensibly.
Congress always had the power to remove delegated power from an institution if it didn't like how that institution was performing. It's also had the power to disband the executive branch regime at any point since January 20. Everything that is happening now is happening with the complete approval of Congress.
Correct, and congress hasn't been exercising that power for the better part of a century now. The War Powers Resolution was 1973, for example.
I don't know what the exact solution is, but something needs to change in the structure and incentives of congress to incentivize them to exercise power again. Eliminating the filibuster and drastically increasing the total number of representatives seem like the best ways to me, but I'm open yo other possibilities.
You would be bitching and moaning just as much if Congress directly made these rules and regulations.
Just be upfront that you’re a libertarian and are allergic to government.
Going for whataboutism in the same week trump establishes a $2B find to pay off his cronies and tries to permanently exempt himself from taxes is laughable.
My points are not whataboutism; I’m saying this was predictable, forecast, and inevitable. Whataboutism focuses on tangential (or unrelated) things.
NCI and NSF recipients getting a taste of what EPA, DEA and ATF was doing to the plebs all along with random "interpretations" and bad-faith presentations of them to judge and jury. Maybe that whole "the academics and bureaucrats are so smart we totally need to cede power from congress to the executive" wasn't such a bright idea after all.
Of course, it's totally lost on the academic-bureaucratic class that the anti-intellectuals wouldn't hesitate to cut off their nose to spite their face by electing a president that would turn around and surprise pikachu the academics with the very machine they had helped build. Now that academics are losing their grips within the bureaucratic apparatus, suddenly they are deciding to rethink their strategy -- but it's not a coming to Jesus moment, but rather just a reactionary response.
Right! Naturally, our Congress is full of technical and administrative expertise and totally has the time, patience, and will to cleanly and carefully craft the wide body of regulation we've grown to require for a smooth and healthy and productive society. No reason for those awful technocrats to usurp such authority when we've got a capable and knowledgable legislative branch capable of doing the work just as well.
> the wide body of regulation we've grown to require for a smooth and healthy and productive society.
If you actually believe this is true, I have some sad news for you. Does the term "regulatory capture" mean anything to you?
> those awful technocrats
If you actually believe the "technocrats" have the knowledge required to craft regulations that actually are a net benefit, again, I have some sad news for you.
Your solution is?
Align congressional incentives with reduction in the size of the US code and regulations.
The current US code, printed as a book, could not be read in five lifetimes of daily 9-5 reading. Make reading the law aloud a requirement of their job -- they're not permitted to stop until they've completed it, except they may sleep at night and they may assemble to vote to remove laws which are no longer needed. Failure to read the laws at the start of their tenure results in being held in federal court for the duration of their time in office.
There is no magic solution to the "problem" of "how to dictate rules to a large society that will keep things smooth and productive". The problem is fundamentally intractable if you insist on looking at it that way.
There is another option, which is to not dictate rules at all, unless you absolutely have to in order to have a civil society in the first place. For example, we have laws against things like murder and theft and fraud, because you can't have a civil society if those things aren't deterred and punished.
But the vast majority of the laws and regulations we have in place now are not doing that. They're attempts to micromanage from the top something that fundamentally cannot be micromanaged from the top. Nobody has enough knowledge to do that. So we should stop doing it.
Giving up is not a strategy. Regulations are painful in that they obviously reduce economic productivity, but not having any at all is pretty much guaranteed to be a disaster.
For example, allowing poisonous chemicals in your food supply or drinking water is insane. Unless you are OK with the free market sorting all that out (after your family dies horribly).
FYI, poisonous chemicals are allowed in your drinking water.
The current federal limits include:
Dosis sola facit venenum https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dose_makes_the_poison> Giving up is not a strategy.
Nor is it what I advocated.
> Regulations are painful in that they obviously reduce economic productivity
That's usually true, but it's not the main problem. The main problem is that the regulations don't actually regulate, in the sense they need to. All they do is entrench the incumbent corporations that paid good money for them, by making it harder for competitors to enter their markets.
> allowing poisonous chemicals in your food supply or drinking water is insane.
Sure. And humans somehow managed to obtain food and water that didn't have those things for thousands of years, even though there were no government regulations prohibiting them. How do you suppose that happened?
> Unless you are OK with the free market sorting all that out (after your family dies horribly).
You're assuming that food and water providers would be able to do such things in a "free market". But doing such things is obviously bad for business, so providers would have a strong incentive not to do it in a free market, since in a free market, doing things that are bad for business makes you go out of business.
In our current regulatory environment, however, large corporations can do many things that are bad for business, as long as they can get government regulators to agree to let them. For an example from a few years ago, a major aicraft manufacturer got the FAA to approve a change to one of its oldest aircraft types that ended up killing two airplanes full of people. How? Because the FAA didn't even look at the change: the "regulation" had evolved to the point where the FAA just took the manufacturer's word for it that everything was OK.
In a free market, such an aircraft manufacturer would be out of business. But of course in our current regulatory environment that can't happen, because regulation has forced aircraft manufacturers to amalgamate to the point that neither of the two biggest ones can ever be allowed to go out of business--too many long chains of dominoes, including much of the US's military capability (and not just in airplanes), depend on them.
Tell me again how regulations make things better?
> > allowing poisonous chemicals in your food supply or drinking water is insane.
> humans somehow managed to obtain food and water that didn't have those things for thousands of years
You really can't compare pre and post industrial revolution like that. Large scale synthesis of toxic chemicals as a byproduct of some unrelated industry just wasn't a thing previously.
> In a free market, such an aircraft manufacturer would be out of business.
Extremely doubtful. Air travel has been intentionally pushed to a ridiculously high level of assurance by regulation. I don't think the free market would have selected for the current cost vs safety balance on its own.
I appreciate where you're coming from, that a large portion of existing regulation is gratuitous, being structured the way it is primarily for the benefit of the incumbent. But that doesn't mean that such regulation isn't doing anything useful at the same time.
The idea that being "bad for business" is a sufficient disincentive to dissuade commercial entities in a free market from harming and killing people is risible.
Even if you eliminated the immunity shield for corporate leadership so they couldn't skate after their company goes bankrupt, there would still be innumerable risk-takers willing to gamble with human lives to make more money.
I expect the argument you want to make is that having people harmed and killed is an acceptable sacrifice for greater economic efficiency, but you're aware that it doesn't play well — especially when the benefits of economic efficiency tend to flow to the people doing the killing rather than the people being killed.
Don't put words in my mouth. I have never said that people being harmed and killed is acceptable. My disagreement is about whether government regulations, on net, actually result in fewer people being harmed and killed, or more. That's a factual disagreement, not a disagreement about values. If I believed, factually, that government regulations actually did result in fewer people being harmed, on net, I would be in favor of them, no matter what libertarian beliefs I might have in the abstract. But my factual belief is the opposite.
To the extent it's true that being "bad for business" is no longer enough of a disincentive for corporations, as I've already said, one key reason is that the corporations have bought regulations that favor them and disfavor potential competitors.
It's true that that's not the only factor involved. Corporate governance is broken. A big part of that is also government regulation, which does to some extent prevent outright fraud (for example, the S&L debacle in the 1980s), but is perfectly fine with other practices, like golden parachutes for executives and corporate takeovers in which the buyer gets the assets but offloads the liabilities on the taxpayers, that do just as much damage, if not more. All of these things are regulated--but the regulations don't stop harm from being done.
There is one other factor that works against corporate governance which is not, in itself, a product of government regulation: the fact that most share ownership now is not individual stockholders but mutual funds. That means most people don't even know what corporations they own even small pieces of. But mutual funds are a big advantage for most people investing for their retirement, because they're an obvious hedge against risk, so they would exist even in a true free market without any government regulation. The problem is that, as far as the individual corporations are concerned, their time horizon is now much shorter. The mutual fund has to care about providing returns over a long time horizon, because it's holding people's retirement accounts, which might not be drawn on for decades. But the corporations only see short term trades being made, many of them by those same mutual funds, trying to increase their returns. So corporations have to focus much more on short term returns instead of long term planning.
That would be one area where a government ought to be able to improve things, because a government's time horizon ought to be long-term. But it isn't. Government's time horizon is the next election. So even in this area, governments are actually worse than corporations.
> > allowing poisonous chemicals in your food supply or drinking water is insane.
> Sure. And humans somehow managed to obtain food and water that didn't have those things for thousands of years, even though there were no government regulations prohibiting them. How do you suppose that happened?
Ok, so you just don’t know history. Many people died. Fuck have you never even heard of the Jungle?
Upon Sinclair wasn’t even trying to get food regulations to improve the quality, he was trying to improve workers rights but the public was so disgusted with what food companies were doing to their food that we as a society demanded the government regulate it.
Or superfund sites?
Getting rid of government regulations in their entirety just cedes all the decision making power to corporations.
I am sick and tired of these libertarian types who either want to repeat experiments that have never succeeded in their utopian outcome or that want to convince us that the corporate boot tastes so much better than the government one.
> Getting rid of government regulations in their entirety just cedes all the decision making power to corporations.
The massive power that corporations have, as compared to individuals, is itself a product of the fact that our society has evolved now for well over a century to have government regulations that are bought by corporations to favor them. So you are correct that we can't just instantly scrap every government regulation, but not change anything else.
That does not mean that the regulations, on net, are doing more good than harm. It just means we've gotten ourselves into a very deep hole, which we can't climb out of in a short time. But at the very least we could try to stop digging.
Indeed, I’m not sure what compels people to compare real regulatory systems from now or history to some imaginary free market where producers always act in their long-term interest and consumers always have perfect information.
Every functioning society on earth regulates food drugs and infrastructure. We lived through the unregulated version for centuries, and it took mountains of dead children and poisoned workers to win the rules we have now; tearing them down just means ordinary people will pay the price all over again.
Capture is a failure mode of every institution humans have ever built, including the courts we presumably still want. The answer is to design better institutions, not to get rid of them and hope things work out.
How do you suppose the conditions in the Chicago meat packing industry that Upton Sinclair wrote about, or those that produced superfund sites, came about? If you think it was a "free market" that did it, you are the one who doesn't know history.
The Chicago meat packing industry, for example, did much the same kind of bullying of their supply chains that Amazon and Walmart are now infamous for. And governments that were supposed to be preventing that sort of thing (since much of it was illegal even then--the tactics are basically the same ones organized crime has used for centuries, after all) did absolutely nothing to stop it. The Federal government finally stepping in and passing laws and regulations was not a case of government reining in a free market; it was a case of a bigger government stomping on a smaller government.
It did improve things, at least for a time, but what's the condition of the Chicago meat packing industry now? Or for that matter our food supply chain in general in the US, which has been regulated up one side and down the other for more than a century? We have beef full of antibiotics, vegetables full of pesticides, ethanol from corn in our gasoline while other food crops can't be grown profitably because the government doesn't subsidize them the same way, and a massive epidemic of obesity. So how is government regulation helping, exactly?
The federal bureaucracy is dictating[1] a lot of minutia on the square centimeter level that should be getting done at the square kilometer level. We could probably give up on a lot of detailed stuff without any negative effect.
Like for example the amount of water a toilet flush can has been federally regulated since the 90s. Sure, that might be important if you need to keep some schmucks in the desert from bickering over aquifer depletion and whatnot. But the majority of jurisdictions in the east "we take surface water and give it back to the same watershed" jurisdictions who can use all the water they want and only impact the required size of the hardware at the treatment plant. So why are we even regulating this? And any issue you look into there's a plethora of stuff like that. Theoretically it's all justifiable in abstract but that's like littering, it doesn't scale.
[1] via "states shall adopt in order to qualify for this grant" type rules which the states then roll downhill
> Naturally, our Congress is full of technical and administrative expertise…
Congress knew of that issue; for decades, Congress has delegated the nitty gritty to regulatory agencies, who employ said experts.
SCOTUS, on the other hand, are the idiots you seek. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loper_Bright_Enterprises_v._Ra...
Don't worry, we're going to enjoy the fruits of your thought process real well and good -- the very last guy left in the House with any constitutional focus just got blasted out with the most expensive outside funding campaign against a rep in the entire history of the USA. It looks like the bureaucratic state is just getting on its next level roll, so enjoy the ride. A few of you may even realize in the coming years why the 10th amendment wasn't meant to just be an inconvenience to ignore.
But I'm not dumb enough to think you'll believe my words, you'll only learn by experience.
I've been where you are. In your coming years you will realize that the bureaucracy had at least brought us stability, prosperity, and a modicum of protection against abuse from big business, the rough edges for small businesses and individuals near the edge of the law notwithstanding. Characterizing Massie's loss as an aspect of that bureaucracy is a mistake - Trumpism is a repudiation of the bureaucracy in favor of autocracy, while the all of the authoritarianism sticks around (or even grows!). Expect those rough edges to become much more arbitrary and capricious. And no, accelerationism or "I told you so" won't save you.
>This is a very common thing for corrupt governments.
Seriously, is there any other kind?
The article mentions, oddly enough at literally the very bottom, that one of the main laws being used is the 'Wolf Amendment' [1], passed in 2011. It's what prevented Chinese from working on the ISS and arguably is why China now has its own space station. It's an extremely dumb law that's been passed and reauthorized repeatedly by every single administration and Congress since Obama who it was passed under.
Just quoting Wiki since it's quite succinct and accurate on this: "[The Wolf Amendment] prohibits the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) from using government funds to engage in direct, bilateral cooperation with the Chinese government and China-affiliated organizations from its activities without explicit authorization from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Congress."
For another consequence of this law, when China relatively recently carried out a sample return from the Moon, they sought to share the resultant rocks/material with countries worldwide, much like NASA did in the 60s. Except Americans couldn't accept them, at least not without jumping through a million hoops first, due to this law. It's one of the ever more frequent 'I'm going to punch myself in the face because I don't like you' acts by governments.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Amendment
Unclear arbitrary rules are the best way to rapidly induce a chilling effect.
If the enemy is the science happening then a lack of clarity is a highly effective tactic.
I genuinely don't understand how the titans of industry who support the Republican party don't understand that science is the foundation on which their entire fortunes are built.
Their fortunes are already built. They have shifted into defensive posture. They don't care about enabling more people to do discovery, that actually puts their position at great risk of disruption. What they want is to have very little innovation, and be able to capture the innovation that squeaks through.
I don't think it's true that they want little innovation. This is a political move. It's a setup for an environment where only politically approved research can happen. So the innovation machine eventually restarts, but without all the side effects of things like unbiased public policy research and social justice movements that are politically misaligned with the ultimate goal of corporate autocracy presiding over techno-serfdom.
But eventually, this always fails as history has shown over and over again. It might take 40-50 years, but it will fail with devastating effects.
Yes, and one reason the US has been so successful is because in the past 1) it was generally agreed that family dynasties should have limited ability to pass wealth generation to generation, and 2) that governance should be separated from wealth.
That's all being abandoned.
I don't think either your assertions (1) and (2) have been particularly consistent throughout US history. Leave aside the difficulty of defining what "successful" means, or should mean.
Just look at the (first) Gilded Age. It's pretty much you claim we didn't have in the past: Family dynasties and government sympathetic to the interests of wealthy business stakeholders. It took the better part of a century of hard fighting (including literal combat in some cases) to bring that to an end, and then we had what, 40 years? before the accumulated momentum of conservatism brought on the Reagan era.
And it's not a matter of just unions fighting it out in the textile mills and coal mines and railcar assembly plants either. After the Civil War the US Army was engaged in a widespread program of what would today be categorized as genocide, in service of business interests that thought they could make more money if you didn't have a pre-existing civilization in the Great Plains.
Go back a few decades further and you have the Civil War itself. Slavery was first and foremost profitable for cash crop plantation owners; everything follows from that.
Sure it wasn't universal, and when we didn't have those things the US was worse off, I'm talking about the times when the US has been a world leader.
Agreed, that's a better way to phrase my own thoughts than I was able to express.
I imagine some of them think that the industrial sector could replace academic sector for foundational scientific researcher ("the free market solves all known problems"). I imagine others believe we are headed for a huge crash that affects the whole world, in a way that having a large academic scientific establishment will not help. Just go live in a bunker in NZ until society rebuilds itself, or whatever (Altman). I suspect a few of the folks are just looney, and don't think rationally (Thiel).
>some of them think that the industrial sector could replace academic sector for foundational scientific researcher
Probably can't happen without huge changes to the tax code IMO.
That said, I think bringing the amount of research science we have under the umbrella of academia has been bad because it's basically introduced a plausible deniability and reputation laundering layer that furthers the 3-way revolving door between academia, government and industry.
I don't think industry can replace academic research for a more fundamental reason. It is rare for industry to willingly research things that are not on a direct path for profitability. Profitibility is calculated in a very local manner (direct cost and revenue); it doesn't consider indirect benefits, such as a basic biology research team discovering some fundamental new detail of biology which allows another team to do a better job discovering a new pharmaceutical drug. It does happen sometimes; my employer is a biotech/pharma that does a huge amount of basic research in addition to its focused pharma research, because they know that the basic research occasionally makes discoveries that greatly improve the pharma process.
IIUC, industry does get R&D tax credits- but that's probably not a good incentive system for basic research in industry.
What's happening now is that a small number of science-friendly rich people are making foundations/institutes that carry out basic research (Zuckerberg/Chan, Schmidt, and a few others) but it's unlikely those will completely supplant academic research at universities funded by NIH/NSF/DOE.
It benefited them in the past, that allowed them to build up their fortunes. Bill Gates, for example, is now a big holder of farmland. Science allows others to build up fortunes that challenge theirs, and hurts the stasis in which they become gilded aristocracy.
Lowering their taxes while burning everything to the ground benefits them now.
I'd argue that it doesn't actually benefit them now since they have more access to comfort than they could ever conceivably consume in their lifetime but I do absolutely agree that they think it benefits them because people who have accumulated wealth to that degree are highly fixated on making the number go up.
A less just, less stable society is far more likely to demonize and destroy billionaires. If you have such a high level of wealth the most rational action is charitability to insure the wealth of people who surround you to prevent instability and lower the chances you'll be the victim of a crime carried out due to desperation.
They want a less just, more stable society.
Allowing others to build wealth just makes society less stable from their point of view. Better to keep the poor poor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
Step 1. Exploit the commons.
Step 2. Shut the door.
if you "genuinely" want to understand, start considering the opposite - what is the easiest way to defend policy like this?
"science with outside helps the other side" - done.
Current administration sees US as losing its positions, so the main answer is to close the leaks that feed its opponents with US effort
I don't understand the argument. Imagine flipping positions. You're saying that if an American researcher goes to China, gets employed by a Chinese university, and do research funded by China which is then commercialized by Chinese companies, the researcher is actually aiding America in expense of China.
The missing piece is an ethnic and political identity which gives allegiance to the US in that “tables turned” analogy.
Fine, imagine that the researcher is a black American then.
Yes, if a Saudi went to Chinese university, worked in china, sent money home to his family, and then returned to consult for Saudi government or business, that would indeed be beneficial for Saudia Arabia.
It would also be beneficial even if he didn’t do that, but helped others do that.
I don't think I said "Saudi". Why aren't you engaging with the hypothetical as presented?
Yeah you made up a completely irrelevant case. Why are you not engaging the following aspects:
- ethnic identity tying one to country of origin (Chinese people identify as Chinese and see their country of origin as their people, Americans rarely hold the same view)
- asymmetry (America is best for education and business)
- strong national government which pursues its interests
I chose a black American specifically because they are as closely identified with America as any other group. The natives were here before them, but they don't have the same relationship with the state or the abstract national project.
Saudi Arabia is a bizarre choice because it isn't exactly a research powerhouse. America might be ahead, but China is the clear runner up and is catching up thanks to what might as well be an intentional effort to undermine American science.
I am genuinely unable to understand because even if the United States is descending into fascism or whatever, research is the last thing that an effective state wants to disrupt and scientists are one of the last groups that an effective state wants to alienate.
I'm not just referring to restrictions on collaborations with foreign researchers, although I frankly do not see how that meaningfully reduces the ability of opponents to benefit from US research unless we kill open publishing as well. I'm talking about the last year and a half of destroying the ability of every basic researcher I know to work in a stable and predictable environment.
1. Much of US policy toward science is backlash to Covid vaccinations. Being anti-Science is a way of preventing Science from inflicting itself on the populace again in the future.
2. Science trends toward meritocracy, which is bad if your goal is to promote a particular social hierarchy.
It's been there so much longer, even Carl Sagan talked about it, and its inherently tied to religion.
We just did a 30 year run of “religious people are dumb and holding bus back” and it didn’t start a science boom and just made people more unhappy and disaffected.
And 2020 further revealed that science is not immune from politics or its own religious ideals.
Do you imply that last 30 years lacked significant science progress? Even if I ignore the tech ones (simpler to associate with the US), there were quite some impressive progress I heard of in other fields (in which US was significantly involved).
When did this ever happen?
After your formative years when you were done adopting new ideas.
They are concerned with their first objective which is consolidate power. Running an "effective state" is not their goal at this point in time. Infact it helps them as thingn get worse, because every bad thing that happens they spin into being their oppositions fault, which helps with objective no 1
Because science is an abstraction for ann incredibly wide range of human activity some of which benefits industrial applications and some that doesn’t.
In my opinion, it’s been a problem for a long time. Sure, the titans of industry are very interested in the profitable applications of science, but they are generally less interested in investing in science, let alone the science itself. Science is seen as a cost center, and research is inherently risky. Even in the glory days of Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, both were backed by monopolies (the Bell System was the phone monopoly, and Xerox had patents in xerography). The former was subject to special government rules due to AT&T’s constant anti-trust troubles, and the latter’s culture was heavily influenced by ARPA due to ex-ARPA people like Bob Taylor.
I am reminded by this quote from an email exchange between Bret Taylor and Alan Kay, published in 2017:
“As I pointed out in a previous email, Engelbart couldn't get funding from the very people who made fortunes from his inventions.
“It strikes me that many of the tech billionaires have already gotten their "upside" many times over from people like Engelbart and other researchers who were supported by ARPA, Parc, ONR, etc. Why would they insist on more upside, and that their money should be an "investment"? That isn't how the great inventions and fundamental technologies were created that eventually gave rise to the wealth that they tapped into after the fact.
“It would be really worth the while of people who do want to make money -- they think in terms of millions and billions -- to understand how the trillions -- those 3 and 4 extra zeros came about that they have tapped into. And to support that process.”
https://worrydream.com/2017-12-30-alan/
The titans of industry not understanding the importance of science beyond its profitable applications doesn’t surprise me at all.
But it isn't required in order for them to get richer at this point.
That's just the political division. Scientists and academic types tend to lean left, the republicans are a right leaning party so they oppose them. It's not even a Trump thing, it's been like this for decades, though Trump is obviously more aggressive than previous Republican leaders.
heres a bit of a fringe view, from me, and others.
governments need influence, and yellow the truth,so as to manage the overall situation, thats a first assumption.
now we see a lot of actions that in the end seemlike footgunning, basically derailing the foundations of civilization.
perhaps this is not megalomania, greed, or sickness.
perhaps, as is often portrayed in popular scifi, we are all doomed to face a terrible challange, there are only few very closed mouth individuals that absolutely know. [remember this is a fringe conspiracy hypothesis]
we are being distracted and kept on the dark about impending catastrophe,so as to stave off absolute chaos,little hope of influencing anyone except by overwhelming show of force. perhaps "they" know its a matter of years, not decades until we experience that thing that suddenly, seemingly cyclically clears the board and the whole assembly begins again from square 2,or 3,not quite square one. [Re fringe;conspiracy]
"they" are behaving in an all bets are off manner, keeping thier hand hidden, playing an endgame rather than making a benign effort.
They already have that fortune. So, they dont care and dont have to care. Moreover, someone else using science to create fortune is just another competitor and a threat to said fortune.
> They're just randomly flagging
What is the purported legal authority they’re acting under? Some of the housekeeping in the next years will involve pulling those statutes.
See my top-level comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48238900
US seems to be learning from China very quick. Congrats.
The USA isn’t learning from China. The USA is learning from Russia…