The situation is dire. Here’s a good overview.
Zach is not being hysterical. Everything he said is objective fact and an accurate prediction.
It’s hitting me personally now. I was benefitting from an HHMI grant written with the hard work of two of my colleagues. It wasn’t big money, I was mainly part of an effort to improve teaching in the university, in a project that paired me with another faculty member for an exercise in peer evaluation.
It was part of a category titled “Inclusive Excellence“. Oops. Forbidden word.
I used the past tense there, because I learned just today that the funding had been pulled, thanks to Trump’s anti-DEI nonsense.
I also have a student trying to get into a graduate program for next year. I’m hoping she gets accepted somewhere — she’s an excellent student with a lot of promise for a research career — but so far, we’re waiting for something. In a normal year, I’d expect grad schools to jump at her, she’s that good. But either nobody has any money, or they’re waiting to hear if their funding has been annihilated, so who knows what will happen? Maybe I should encourage her to apply to Mexican or Canadian schools.
All it took was one election to demolish the American scientific enterprise.
One election and a Congress and Court unwilling to accept their responsibilities.
Which, yea, it’s one election.
that thumbnail… this is the face of a creature whose entire existence is a cruel joke, at the expense of the human race. makes sense he campaigned on shitposting and memes. there is nothing in the middle, just a gurning helium-filled puppet head.
Apparently the Max Planck Gesellschaft in Germany has already noticed an increase in applicants from the US.
( the article is paywalled but the summary says it all )
Anecdotal of course, but here at a major Canadian research university, people are already noticing.
We already have a lot of Americans, undergrad, grad, postdoc, faculty, every level. Many undergrads have commented that they are nervous about going back for grad school or work. If even a fraction of them actually do stay, its a signifcant number. The American-born faculty are getting A LOT of inquiries from their networks.
There isnt enough money to fund them all for grad school, of course. Canada has a population 1/9 that of the USA. The knockon effects has a lot of Canadians like myself nervous as well. If funding doesnt increase… We will do what we can, but we cant pull funding out of thin air.
In Brazil, we had much the same issue, but not as quickly. A lot of research workers found themselves out of money, and a lot of time and effor was wasted just because “universities are communist places”.
The shroud of the Dark Side has fallen. Begun, the brain drain has.
Three, really. 2016’s helped pave the way for this, and stacked the Supreme Court. 2020’s elected wishy-washies who failed to jail Trump and failed to fix the SC, even after the revelations of Harlan Crow bribing at least two of them came to light. They should have impeached the implicated “justices” but took no action. No impeachments, no court stacking, and ineffectual prosecutions of just Trump and the J6 crew, while leaving the rest alone. Nothing was done about voter suppression either.
Then 2024 put Trump back in, and a MAGA majority in the House of Representatives, while all three elections contributed to the current, ineffectual, composition of the Senate.
You can’t, but maybe your government can. The Canadian dollar is a fiat currency, the last time I checked.
Was this during Bolsonaro’s term? (And not short enough it was!)
P.S. The first time I tried to post this it wouldn’t work. The preview showed “Anonymous” instead of “Bekenstein Bound” and “Post Comment” produced a message saying “You have to be logged in to post”, despite the fact that I FUCKING WAS LOGGED IN, IT SAID SO RIGHT ABOVE THE COMMENT INPUT FIELD, IT SAID “Logged in as Bekenstein Bound. Log Out?”. And I had just logged in in, like, the last ten fucking minutes. It wouldn’t let me post until I logged out and then back in. And that after I had left it logged in last night, only to find that someone had logged me out without my permission while I was fucking sleeping.
I did nothing to deserve this frustration, nor the accompanying risk of losing the work I’d done.
FIX THIS.
Only you can fix that.
Problem is at your end.
Your setup is bad.
Already told you, multiple times, on more than one blog.
It’s YOUR problem, BB.
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<
blockquote>I did nothing to deserve this frustration [blah]
<
blockquote>
You didn’t deserve your evident level of intellect and competence, but there it is.
It’s what you have to work with
This frustration is a consequence of that.
(I do feel sorry for you for that)
BB probably has a lot of road rage.
I have occasional posting issues requiring me to log out then back in. I learned to copy my text before attempting to “Post Comment” because there is a less frequent network error that wipes my text. I’ve just chalked it up to gremlins. Doubt PZ can do anything to resolve it. Might be browser related or more global than FTB. Not high on my first world priority list of things to fret over.
As with your mangled blockquote? Your need to take potshots at others keeps rearing its ugly head.
Nope. My mangled blockquote was because I was lazy and copypasted the <blockquote> but forgot to add the closing slash after that to close the tag, that is, </blockquote>
In utter contrast, BB is just clueless. No idea of what is going on.
Can’t fix it anytime they want, can they? It’s a mystery.
(Keep sniping like that, Mr Gecko, and I’ll start treating you like the unsilentBub)
[usually, I type all my markup. Like David used to, back when]
Me too. A total triviality, for the non-clueless.
I don’t recall you whinging about it, hitherto.
Or anyone else.
In contrast, BB has multiple times now CAPITAL excitedly requested the “admins” to fix it.
(And the mods to do this and that, because, you know, customer is always right or something)
Did it in Mano’s blog, has done it here.
I tried to explain the circumstances of this site to BB.
A labour of love, an avocation.
I was ignored. Of course of course. The concept was too alien.
BB somehow is under the impression this is a commercial site of some sort.
A professional site with code monkeys on a string, or something.
And so, yet again.
The sense of entitlement is palpable.
@PZ:
All it took was one election
C’mon, you have to realize this has been decades in the making. This has been cooking since Reagan of not longer.
of=if
And how the heck does the bb-codes work on this site? I can never get it right and for some reason nobody want’s to explain it either.
[OT]
Erlend, no BB codes, just a rather restricted subset of HTML, with a few tweaks by PZ from way back in the day. He used to do code (I did too, but Delphi was the latest I used), so for example the <q> tag puts the quotation in Sans Serif. Back in SB there was a fullish set, but of course some of us (ahemd) abused it, what with weird fonts and images and suchlike.
Also, a limited set of markdown is enabled here; so asterisks become italics etc.
(Which explains why people who try to enumerate with asterisks or use them as references have probs; easy enough to avoid with escape characters, but one needs to be aware of it).
Um, . :|
Thanks, but the question still remains: Exactly which tags are permitted? I’ve tried searching WordPress for documentation but my search-fu is weak.
You can do emphasis <b>
You can do italics <i>
You can’t do underline <u>
You can do hyperlinks <a href=”[URL]”>
You can’t do images <img src=”…”>
You can do line breaks <br>
You can do
unordered lists
<ul>
You can do
ordered lists
<ol>
You can’t do list items <li>
You can do
divisions
<div>
You can do
strikeout<s>—
Markdown is even more limited.
Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown
(That was quite a bit of typing and copypasting, but I do try to be helpful)
[and yeah, I stuffed up a couple. You can clearly see what doesn’t work; such as lists]
Oh, and there’s LaTeX support, e.g.:
($latex i\hbar\frac{\partial}{\partial t}\left|\Psi(t)\right>=H\left|\Psi(t)\right>$)
Oh, and
monospaced textvia <code>Thanks, that helps a lot. I still wonder about the lack of documentation from WordPress though. Is this an unofficial mod or part of basic WordPress functionality? Because next time I need this I won’t find your post…
Well, just remember, markup and markdown. I prefer the former.
Preview itself is a tad bad, but mostly it works.
Certainly for formatting and whatnot.
(Oh, right. And the <abbr> tag.)
Thanks John.
Two asterisks become bold I think…
The question that occurs to me – and I have no answer to hand – is how long-lasting this disruption will be. Will the old science funding regime spring back upon the ousting of the Trump administration? Obviously there will be huge damage done, but can the systems wrecked be re-established? The damage is being done by unaccountable executive orders and self-appointed bureaucrats, not by fundamental laws passing through the legislature. It may be that it is easily remedied when the will emerges. Maybe.
@ ^ cartomancer : you think the Trump regime will be ousted anytime soon? That TruMusk hasn’t put the Project2025 Christian Taliban & Tech bro Feudalists in charge indefinitely? Of every branch of govt incl the newly created utterly unelected and unaccountable Musk one?
Its Trump, Musk then JD Vance and the Repugs in charge now.. unless, well, unless what now?
If the courts quickly declare those executive orders illegal, we could bounce back.
If the suppression continues for four years, even if the next administration tries to repair the damage, we’re toast. Universities will die, scientists will flee the country, students will decide they need to follow different careers, publishers will give up on American science. We will have dammed the progression of science, and science will divert around the damage and dig new channels.
On the issue of posting, and thing… Yeah, its always been buggy, and its the fault of the freaking wordpress system the site uses. The same system that I had to start using Google to get into, because it, for a while, a) didn’t remember me, or b) refused to actual work right to try to fix things, so I could log back in at all, fix passwords, etc. This isn’t something PZ can “fix”, its some mess in the server software hosting the site. And… its literally the only one that I have seen that ever has this problem. But, even trying to transition to another service, due also to the fact that they likely use a screwy database, with no options to export and transfer content, etc….
Sometimes you get stuck with something that worked fine for 10 years, suddenly breaks in weird ways, no one actually responsible for the code seem able, or to care about, fixing, and you are bloody stuck with it, because you can’t easily move all the stuff from that span of time to something that isn’t broken. And, if it mostly still works, with a few minor annoyances anyway, it may simply not be worth it, especially if its the backend of hundreds of blogs being that you are associated with (or worse, partly help administer).
But, yeah, on the main subject of the post… Bloody hell. Anyone that still thinks Musk is some sort of genius is themselves and idiot at this point, because anyone that knew what the F they where doing wouldn’t be “solving problems”, by just cutting funds right and left, and assuming that it will fix itself. Its stupid for two reasons – 1) if the system is filled with corrupt people, there is no way in hell, by definition, that they care more about the science than their own corruption, and they will still find ways to line their pockets, instead of passing the money on to scientists and 2) when you are wrong about the existence of wide spread corruption, all you are doing is shredding the whole system, making people run to other countries (including possibly China), to find jobs, and devastating the very thing you imagine you are “saving”.
You are right that Musk isn’t any sort of genius.
Look what he managed to do to Twitter in a very short period of time.
But his goal isn’t to fix anythng.
It’s simply to wreck everything. Tear it down. Destroy it.
As I mentioned yesterday, it is very easy.
It’s always easy to tear things down and wreck them. It takes zero talent or intelligence.
It’s a lot harder to create and build things up.
It took us generations and billions of dollars to build the world class and world leading biomedical and scientific establishments we have today.
Which are largely responsible for the modern world we live in.
While we’re engaged in this national hara-kiri, China is plowing ahead in science and technology. Their universities crank out ten times more scientists and engineers than we do. While it takes the U.S. years to plan and approve one next generation nuke power station, China has actually built 5 with more in the pipeline. Renewable energy projects are everywhere. Chinese streets are filled high quality EVs, charging them is not the game of chance the way it is here. Their shipyards have made the PLAN navy the largest and newest in the world. Western intelligence services have been shocked by the advanced nature of their most recent stealth military aircraft. When the Taiwan war comes, and it will, we’ll be beaten badly. Our navy will be pushed back beyond the First Island Chain. It won’t be able to operate safely within 300 miles of the Chinese coast. I’d rather this happens sooner, rather than later. It will be on Trump and Hegseth. They won’t be able to blame the worst naval defeat in our history on Biden. In the end, competence matters.
The US is draping an iron curtain over its own head.
America is already dumb, they elected Trump to a second term, and now they will become even dumber. Difficult to imagine, but here we are with three years and eleven months to go.
You should very definitely encourage her to apply to schools around the world, as you should always have been advising your students. Canada is next door. Europe, Australia, Japan all will have spots. People everywhere should study in foreign countries. Then maybe come back, go to yet another country, or stay in the new country. Mobility is key to the scientific endeavour.
This is all part of the MUMP cult billionaires ‘anti-intellectual movement’. The dumbing down of the sheople to make them easier to abuse and control. Yes, ‘we’re cooked’.
Technology is a tool. It can be used to make important helpful things. But, the techno-billionaires control it (almost) completely and they will use it like a hammer to beat the crap out of society.
@27 PZ wrote: If the courts quickly declare those executive orders illegal, we could bounce back.
I reply: The courts are being completely ignored by the miscreants. Their words fall to the ground like dead butterflies and the miscreants are laughing at them.
There are many who have looked behind the curtain and the Felon muskrat’s little aholes are ignoring the courts with impunity. Tech pubs are in agreement that they have stolen and copied massive amounts of our personal data to private databases and may have installed backdoors in gov’t systems and locked out the legitimate admin’s. There are even a few who say they may be altering code in gov’t systems, too.
Congress has rolled over like a puppy and peed on itself. The main slime media is useless pablum and are ignoring or whitewashing this massive destruction.
Anyone using the word ‘normal’ is braindead.
No one can rationally deny we are in a ‘death spiral’ now.
John Watts:
China can’t win a Taiwan war. It would likely be able to seize the lump of rocks in the sea, but the value of the island would be basically destroyed and China would lose a lot of global influence.
And, unlike you, I’d rather a mass death incident happens later rather than earlier, because as long as it hasn’t happened yet, there’s a chance it won’t.
The thing that worries and angers me and all those I know who are cognizant is: As of yet, we can find no person, organization or power that can pull us out of this death spiral.
Yeah, the Trump reich is ignoring the courts.
The courts have no enforcement mechanisms!!!
The FBI/DHS etc.. are all controlled by the president, Trump.
Ironically, the GOP might have signed their own death warrant.
Since Trump is ruling by decree like a hard core dictator, the courts are powerless, That means that…congress is also powerless.
The GOP no longer has any power of their own.
Right now, since the GOP gave their legal, constitutional power to Trump, they have no real reason to even exist any more.
Trump might keep them around as long as they rubber stamp whatever he wants.
That is all they’ve got left.
Actually there are.
.1. The states, mainly the Blue states could get together and secede or otherwise block the Federal government.
I explained this yesterday and I’m not going to repeat it here.
It is part of what happened to the old USSR.
.2. The US people could stop it.
Even in a dictatorship, the government to some extent depends on the consent of the governed people.
When they’ve had enough, they can get rid of even dictatorships.
Examples.
The old USSR disappeared with almost no violence. The people just didn’t buy that system any more.
East Germany and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
All the Eastern European captive nations after the USSR failed.
Yugoslavia.
Syria and Basher al-Saad.
South Africa and Rhodesia and Apartheid.
The French Revolution.
I don’t see any of this happening right now but it has only been 3 weeks.
It might take a generation or two so don’t wait up.
I’m not going to spend a lot of time explaining these. It’s complicated and Freethoughtblogs comment boxes don’t lend themselves to longer form essays.
Besides, I’ve had to step back from the gruesome politics of today for self care reasons.
reposted once again.
BTW, this doesn’t require violence and in fact, violence probably wouldn’t work.The Red states hate us anyway so we are just in their way to their dictatorship.
They might even be ecstatic and throw us a farewell party.
If anyone has a better idea, post it.
We passed that point long ago, probably at least a decade ago.
The Blue states have a lot of power, most of the economy and roughly half the population with 173 million people.
Yeah, I’ve been thinking about this exact scenario for days.
.1. The USA is over with. Done. Dead.
.2. The Red states have won and taken over.
Out and loud white racists and misogynists now rule over us as dictators.
.3. So why should the Blue states remain part of the USA?
I can’t see any reason to.
.4. The Blue states could just get together and say, we are leaving, bye now.
We will keep our tax money for ourselves.
We won’t join you in reversing history and living in the 1800s before the first Civil War.
This is a win-win situation.
The Red states hate us anyway, so they get rid of a bunch of democracy loving, over educated white and nonwhite people.
The Blue states get to skip the Fascist stage and whatever dark places they are going to.
If the USA is over with, why should we remain a part of a Fascist dictatorship that doesn’t like us and we don’t want them either?
This is taxation without representation.
California sends $700 billion in taxes to the Federal government every year.
Now, why should we bother?
Raven, I respect and appreciate your suggestions. However, due to the ignorance and apathy of most sheople, I don’t think your suggestions would succeed. I really wish they would. Jamie Raskin posed a possibility of a nationwide class action suite against the MUMP (MUsk+truMP) devastation. I don’t think that would work for the same reason.
I understand why you are taking a step back from the precipice. I feel the same way too much of the time.
The decay started when Nixon was pardoned and continued with Bush v Gore. The end was made all but certain with citizens united. This has been a long road.
It became necessary.
I went out to lunch with my friend a few days ago. She has long Covid. It has been getting a lot worse lately. I’m also physically not doing so well either right now.
We both agreed that we have to take a big step back and watch what happens from a distance.
shermanj, @ #34:
The question I’ve been going over in my mind for the last few days is this: do these children not realise that they’ve made themselves about the hottest intelligence targets in the world right now? They have asserted the right to a level of access that many foreign intelligence services would quite literally kill for. Every intelligence service in the world (including those in the US) must be falling over themselves compromise these kids or their equipment. And the organised cybercriminals will be right behind them.
Unless they have the best operations security the world has ever seen, they are going to get compromised – and everything I’ve heard so far leads me to suspect that their operations security is likely to be slapdash at best.
Bad enough Musk and his cronies having access to all of this… Just wait until it all hits the dark web!
Dunc@43
Good point. Now I’m having flashbacks to Alex Rider, which I watched recently (kind of silly but entertaining). It’s possible they do realize it and think it’s a big adventure. These aren’t normal tech kids. They’re Musk groupies. Who knows what goes through their minds?
There are so many ways that this is going to collapse into a burning pile of shit that it will be amazing if the damage can even be reduced within the next two years let alone minimized.
1) Elump is hoping to drastically reduce gov’t spending in a way that will send a shock to the economy – especially if a large fraction of the federal workforce gets laid off, but also in the many other federally supported programs. There are no where near enough private sector jobs to absorb the cuts they want. High unemployment causes wage stagnation.
2) A crackdown on foreign workers will drive up costs for many basic items, and for construction, and create shortages of workers in agriculture and construction that don’t help with the unemployment rate. Consumer prices rise
3) Tariffs will increase prices across the board, and also make building new factories more expensive, which, in combination with a lack of construction workers will ensure new production int he US is slow at best. Tariffs on raw materials also slow supply chains.
4) Seeing increased inflationary pressure, the US reserve will either increase rates – slowing the economy further, or decrease rates, leading to increased inflation as more money competes for no new supply.
5) The US economy has the worst year since the great depression.
6) Mass protest and potential breakdown of the US.
How long to complete all these steps I wonder?
And that doesn’t even get into all the damage that could be done by the kids inserting AI code into the US payment systems….
@30. John Watts : “When the Taiwan war comes, and it will, we’ll be beaten badly. Our navy will be pushed back beyond the First Island Chain. It won’t be able to operate safely within 300 miles of the Chinese coast. I’d rather this happens sooner, rather than later. It will be on Trump and Hegseth.”
I’m sure that will be a great consolation for the Taiwanese people for them being invaded and losing their freedome and in many cases homes and lives. But, hey, at least they’ll blame the right people. Huh, maybe it’ll even be possible to blame, er, the PRC for their govts choice of invading and attacking another land.
Peronally, I hope that war never comes and Taiwan remains independent and gets recognise das the nation it is.
John Watts is not really with it, StevoR.
China is a fading power, and a demographic disaster, and Ukraine has kinda blunted that shit.
As for their puissance at warring, well… Russia was supposedly puissant itself.
Now it’s the 2nd best fighting force in Ukraine, and is utterly fucked long-term.
War-time economies do that. I mean, fucked.
(you like videos, check out ‘Joe Blogs’ if you care to)
—
Anyway, this has nothing to do with the topic at hand.
The concept is an old one: “Brain drain”
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital_flight
(Russia got that in spades; not nice at all)
@46 Can AI even work with Fortran & Cobol? Because that’s what the Treasury runs on. Kind of like how the US nuclear missile launch sequence is all stored & runs on… floppy disks. 18 of the vaunted 20 minute launch time is getting the floppies to boot up.
That said, it does render the systems largely unhackable.
Do Muskrat’s basement dwellers even know what Fortran and Cobol are?
“@46 Can AI even work with Fortran & Cobol?”
Yes, but chatbots aren’t the go for that sort of thing.
(You do know AI is quite a wide field, not restricted to LLMs, right?)
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“Kind of like how the US nuclear missile launch sequence is all stored & runs on… floppy disks.”
Oh, yes, exactly like that. (!)
Do they have to know? Why so?