Here’s a fantasy for you: a rich man uses his immense wealth to alleviate poverty, fund science that benefits all, or decides to distribute all of his money to worthy institutions. It never happens. Instead, we get the world’s richest man using his clout to get a job he isn’t qualified to do, who then uses his unwarranted power to do the opposite, and kill the research enterprise of the United States with one stupid stroke of his pen.
I’m not being dramatic. US research is the product of years of investment. There was a conscious decision to build up a more effective program of research and development after WWII, built upon the existing foundation of expertise in our universities (thanks, Vannevar Bush!). The government knew it would take long-term training and money and resources to create, and part of that was a system of federal grants to researchers with additional funds to the research institutions to build and maintain their infrastructure, which are called indirect costs. You don’t get anything for free! You want to encourage biologists to study the genome, well, you’re going to have to ask a university to maintain a large animal care facility, and hire people to keep an eye on the ethics of such research, and hire accountants to manage the expenses, and veterinarians to keep the animals healthy, and secretaries to help write up the work, and you’re going to have to pay publishers to disseminate it. It’s not cheap.
It’s true that there is some administrative bloat — Harvard is filthy rich, and I think they’ve been gaming the system to inflate those indirect costs — and the article at the link points out that there are a lot of regulations that could be streamlined, but to do that streamlining in a way that retains the useful necessities requires detailed analysis and careful pruning. Only an idiot would think you can just slash all indirect costs to the bone in one crude, extreme cut without totally disrupting all research at American universities.
Enter the idiot.
Musk doesn’t have the slightest clue what he is doing.
Yes, he is cutting funding for cancer research. He’s imposing a blanket, indiscriminate cut for all research. He’s going to gut a whole generation of scientists, a wound it would take decades to recover from, if there was any recovery possible. I suspect that instead of repair what’s going to happen is we’re going to replace universities with bible colleges, pandering to the populist idea that we can pray cancer away.
Elon Musk finally answers the Schrödinger’s Migrant Paradox of being about the only illegal immigrant* ever to actually both take away people’s jobs and collect govt welfare eg via SpaceX, Tesla subsidies… & being one illegal immigrant the US o A should’ve kicked out.
See : (Semi-paywall, limited number of free articles per ___.)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2024/10/27/what-elon-musk-working-illegally-says-about-the-immigration-system/
I am amused by a bill currently being drafted in Congress that would hold Musk personally responsible for financial damages experienced by recipients of federal funding that Musk has cut off. Not much chance of it passing in a Republican controlled congress and with Trump as president, but it sends a mssage.
It’s cool, AI will cure cancer, we just need to give all the money to… xAI.
The richest man on the planet enthusiastically cutting food aid to the poorest people on the planet. I think he enjoys watching the trauma his actions produce in others. The MAGA mindset in a nutshell.
John Watts, @ #4:
In a way, I think it’s maybe even worse… He doesn’t even know what he’s cutting, and he doesn’t care. I read a good post on Defector this morning that I think about sums it up:
Billionaire Dipshit And His Strike Team Of Greasy Beavises Are Stripping The Wires From The Federal Government
In the past, biomedical research has always been somewhat shielded from budget cuts and the general persecution of science.
This is because the ultra-rich oligarchies also benefit from medical research, in ways that they can see.
No matter how much money and power you have, you will get sick and die someday.
Advances in medicine benefit everyone, including the rich and powerful, and including all the politicians who vote to distribute the money.
And, of course, the oligarchies and politicians always have easy and first access to the latest advances in medicine. When the Covid-19 vaccines came out, guess who were first in line for those vaccines?
Not happening this time around.
I guess it is more important to them to wreck everything than invest in science that will ultimately benefit our society in general and them in particular.
Your predicted life span is proportional to your income and wealth.
Even if you are rich, you will still die. But you will on average live longer and healthier lives than most Americans. It’s worth another 10 years to you.
Which is one reason why our congress is so old now.
It is possible to be better. See Bill Gates and his focus on world health.
What Musk and his gang of college boys are doing takes zero talent or intelligence.
It is always far easier to tear things down than to create and build things up.
I could do what they are doing, easily.
A ten year old with a hammer could do what they are doing.
Not impressed.
They are not stopping research, they are pulling the money, and they will repurpose it towards things that they think are priorities. Stuff that benefits to wealthy and keeps them wealthy, and in control.
So easy to begin, yet impossible to end.
I suspect that people like Musk don’t want to see advances in medicine, because they take the view that it would be better for the most susceptible people to die and not reproduce. Musk is obviously influenced by Golden Age science fiction, promoted by overt eugenicists like John W. Campbell.
By influenced, I don’t mean he has read any of it. I have no idea, but I doubt his attention span is that long these days. It’s more of a cultural echo that makes him say we “need to go to Mars” etc. without doing even a cursory cost/benefit estimate. (A city of a million on Mars, why not a city of a million in Wyoming?)
You could counter that these “techno-optimists” are all obsessed with immortality. Sure, but immortality for them, not everyone. (Imagine a world where everyone has 12 kids like Musk and nobody dies of old age.)
One thing Musk clearly lacks is even the remotest hint of empathy. This is a guy who bragged of “feeding USAID into the woodchipper” at the same time articles were coming out about people all over the world who were going to be left high and dry in the middle of medical trials, sometimes with implants that needed to be removed, and were very likely going to die as a result. He just doesn’t care.
“a rich man uses his immense wealth to alleviate poverty, fund science that benefits all, or decides to distribute all of his money to worthy institutions.”
I’m not a fan boi of his but that’s a pretty good description of Bill Gates
laurian@12 I consider Bill Gates’s predatory business practices unforgivable (see e.g. Borland or Netscape). But he does seem to have grown up since then. I don’t think Musk will ever grow up, and what has happened to Mark Zuckerberg is bizarre. Sure, have your midlife crisis, but please don’t drag the rest of the world’s population into it.
@laurian:
Admittedly, from what I’ve heard, Bill Gates’ more philanthropic work was pushed (at least at the start) mostly by his wife and a certain amount of shaming from some of the older ultra-rich families who had learned the utility of PR campaigns to make you look good. Once he got going with it, though (and when the Foundation was originally set up it had so much money he literally had to spend it in order to keep the charitable foundation status) he seems to have gone into full ‘this is a problem that can be solved’ mode with it and seems to be enjoying the results.
Not sure how much of it is actually wanting to do good and how much of it is more intellectual challenge of solving a problem, but at least he’s pointed in the right direction.
The funding model for academic research is challenging to get your head around if you are outside of it, and at first seems analogous to the modern health care billing practice of separate charges for the personnel and the facility (a practice I will not defend).
But the alternative–having the host institution charging out every line item for janitorial, utilities, core facility use, networking infrastructure, and a thousand other little things–would be massively inefficient and cost more both in dollars and in grant-writer time.
In the short term, the 15% cap will devastate ongoing research. In the longer term, universities will only provide a fraction of the services currently covered and individual research teams’ direct costs will balloon.
Wrt to Bill Gates, I don’t like any billionaire but a not Nazi one is obviously preferable to a Nazi one.
rwiess @ # 8: See Bill Gates and his focus on world health.
laurian @ # 12: … a pretty good description of Bill Gates
How much (if any) does that offset his attacks on US public schools?
A shitload, Pierce. Millions of lives saved, if nothing else.
cf. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/14/bill-gates-philanthropy-warren-buffett-vaccines-infant-mortality
—
Anyway, the subject at hand is obs Musk, not Gates.
And an anagram of his name: Sole Skum.
[boulanger, no ‘n’ there]
[Lone Skum would work, but]
Some lunk
https://new.wordsmith.org/anagram/anagram.cgi?anagram=elonmusk&t=500&a=nM
And this, https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/china-is-fast-outpacing-u-s-stem-phd-growth/
gc64, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce8nlpy2n1lo
“China’s overqualified youth taking jobs as drivers, labourers and film extras
4 January 2025”
Uh, that Guardian article is a dishonest puff piece (seriously atypical for the Guardian — but then the Gates Foundation pays for the Guardian’s global development site).
That graph showing the decline in child deaths starts ten years before the Gates Foundation even existed. If you go back even further, you can see that child mortality has been steadily declining since the 1850s, mostly due to developments in plumbing and food safety. It attributes the reduction in all child deaths in the world to the Gates Foundation while ignoring the work of the many other NGOs and government aid projects. (Also, the author does not know the difference between child and infant morality.) It fails to mention that the Gates Foundation’s contribution to GAVI, while sizable and laudable, is around half the contribution made by governments. It also fails to mention the significant flaws and criticisms of the Gates Foundation model.
Don’t get me wrong. The Gates Foundation overall is a positive, the most clear example being when it took over the WHO funding that Trump capriciously dumped in 2020. But it would have been much better if Gates had simply endowed it and handed it over to experienced scientists and global health specialists instead of running it himself to suit his arch-capitalist obsessions. Paeans from conflicted sources should not be taken at face value.
chrislawson, that piece is the very first search thingy I did.
But sure. Fluff it is.
So what?
Do you care to quantify (one or two orders of magnitude will do) how many lives have been saved by the Foundation? Your own estimation. Don’t even need to justify it, just interested whether it exceeds zero.
(I trust you are aware of its history and activities; that much I give you)
[just lives. Quality of life, vision, mobility, whatever. Non-amputations. Vaccines, workshops are incidentals, but still funded. Mosquito netting, lights, that sort of stuff ain’t lives. Not directly]
It annoys me a bit when people shit on Gates.
Good and bad, sure. No Musk, quite as sure.
John Morales@28
It annoyed the management of Borland a lot more when Microsoft was literally sending limos to Scotts Valley to poach their software engineers. https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/borland-sues-microsoft-over-brain-drain/ and that’s just one example of many. Sorry, but Bill Gates was a predatory menace and monopolist for decades before he became a philanthropist. His actions cannot even be justified as helping to advance tech and may have hindered it. Microsoft’s entirely strategy was FUD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt Find a company doing something new, announce that Microsoft was going to do it, put them out of business and on to the next victim.
Fine, Gates “contains multitudes” but there are plenty of reasons to “shit on” him and that’s just one. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has done great things. Can Gates be praised for that and condemned for some of the practices that made it possible for him to create such a foundation in the first place?
Righto.
So what?
Do you care to quantify (one or two orders of magnitude will do) how many lives have been saved by the Foundation? Your own estimation. Don’t even need to justify it, just interested whether it exceeds zero.
(I trust you are aware of its history and activities; that much I give you)
Clean water. Contraception. Many other things.
(Billions upon billions spent, no matter how mismanaged, are gonna do something)
—
But sure, PaulBC.
Hey, how many lives has Taylor Swift saved?
(Just checking)
To John Morales
Sorry! Of course you are right! It should be “Lone” but I was half asleep when I wrote that.
He’s still Skum though:-)
[boulanger, no worries. I obs got your vibe, and do not disapprove!]
Righto. Quietude, so I address this point:
“Fine, Gates “contains multitudes” but there are plenty of reasons to “shit on” him and that’s just one”
Context.
Now, I did not do the obvious move about categories (you know, apples and oranges stuff), but I did respond:
“A shitload, Pierce. Millions of lives saved, if nothing else.”
John Morales@31 I don’t think my point is that complicated. Deeds good or bad are not additive. You can continue to condemn the bad and praise the good in the same person. I intend to.
In practice, I have somewhat warm feelings towards Bill Gates these days, but mainly by comparison to the younger batch of billionaires.
I still like Larry Page, not out of any utilitarian accomplishments, just that the last time I saw him (over 10 years ago at a Google TGIF) he seemed like a normal human being who never bought into his own hype. I’m probably wrong. He seems to be laying low these days.
That was the very premise of the (supposedly rhetorical) question that I addressed.
Here, again:
(How else could they be supposedly offset?)
—
Look, I shall spare you more, um, pedantry. ;)
Just be aware that my responses are sui generis, not generic, and bespoke to whomever I address.
I answered the supposedly rhetorical question within its own universes of discourse.
I took its implicit premise literally.
“I still like Larry Page”
Offhand, I have zero idea of who that person may be.
I mean, I could clickety-click and quickly know, but it means nothing to me right now.
(I’m comfortable with that)
me@35 continued… and no, I don’t know the number of lives saved by the Gates foundation even to an order of magnitude. But I also was not making a utilitarian argument. If I were trying to make some kind of quantitative argument about impact, I suppose I could justify Microsoft’s destruction of a lot of entrepreneurial dreams as building a concentration of wealth that was later applied in part to help people. But this was certainly not his intent at the time. He’s also not unique in establishing a philanthropy (Carnegie is the archetype at least in the US).
If I could reverse time, would I rather have a world in which Microsoft was not terrorizing the rest of the tech industry from the late 80s through the early 00s? Maybe. I am willing to take the blame for the non-existence of the Gates foundation. Something else might have filled that gap. It would also have been a healthier market overall and might have led to a greater, ahem, diversity of platforms and solutions.
It’s a silly question because I can’t reverse time, but neither can Bill Gates erase past transgressions with good deeds. I haven’t seen him begging for forgiveness either. So I judge him a mixed bag. He’s not a sadistic man-child like Elon Musk, but this is a very low bar.
John Morales@36
Right, and the clickety-click would probably using some form of the result ranking system he invented along with Sergey Brin. Hope that helps.
“…and no, I don’t know the number of lives saved by the Gates foundation even to an order of magnitude.”
Might it be zero? Who can know, with such an evasive answer?
Yeah, well… beware of such temporal tamperings… you know, a number of cautionary tales about that.
(I recall Stephen King did a pretty good one)
—
This is rather disappointing.
The question I addressed was, for the fucking third time!, about offsetting the bad with the good.
It had nothing to do with erasure. That’s just you.
I addressed it within its premise.
(How is that conceptual framework so confusing to you?)
—
But sure.
“The moving finger writes; and, having writ, moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.”
It might have, were I to have claimed (or insinuated, or connoted, or suggested, or whatever) that I had more than zero interest in it. I did the opposite of that.
(How is that supposed to help? What part of ‘zero’ was confusing for you?)
Me: “how many lives do ya reckon he’s maybe saved?”
You: “I don’t know”
—
Kinda rest my case, Paul.
John Morales@39 I never said I was trying to answer your question. I was addressing
You’re entitled to be annoyed if you want, but my only point was that there are plenty of good reasons to condemn Bill Gates.
You want a number. OK, 122 million lives. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/14/bill-gates-philanthropy-warren-buffett-vaccines-infant-mortality Can this really be confirmed? Would literally no other organization have stepped in to do that same? For that matter, Warren Buffett might have found someone else to convince to establish such a foundation. But this is explicitly a rabbit hole I was uninterested in going down.
Again, there is good and bad and I can still say “Bill Gates is an asshole.” thereby annoying you. The actions of the Gates foundation just aren’t relevant.
John Morales@41 “I don’t know.” is my legitimate and honest answer, particularly as the amount whether it’s 0 or over a billion has no bearing on whether I think it’s appropriate to talk shit about Bill Gates. He has a lot to answer for. But as you see, I eventually did a quick search.
I mean, the calculus is simple as, no?
If [(no. of lives saved worldwide) > (fuckup of US student’s education)], then the bad bits are more than offset.
(≥ would be more proper, but far be it for me to be pedantic!)
BTW, I can read between the lines.
“John Morales@41 “I don’t know.” is my legitimate and honest answer [blah]”
I know.
Because you could not be fucked to look it up.
Already told you I could summarise whatsisname did I but care to look, which I don’t becuse of the zero interest in name-droppings. Not exactly hard, now in the last bit of the first quarter of C21.
So, you are saying you don’t know, and I’m hearing you don’t care to know.
(Because, did you do so, you’d actually get my point. Or so I reckon)
John Morales@44 Again, it wasn’t even the question I was interested in, only “Is it appropriate to ‘shit on’ Bill Gates?” to which I answer “Yes,” enthusiastically. The offset question only makes sense if you assume utilitarian ethics. Sorry if I gave any impression that I was interested in a addressing it.
Yes, I understood the exchange John Morales@18 to Pierce R. Butler@17 at the time and accepted your point provisionally without having numbers at my disposal. I disagreed with your later suggestion that it somehow means Bill Gates is above criticism, or at least that it annoys you a bit to see him criticized.
“Again, it wasn’t even the question I was interested in, only “Is it appropriate to ‘shit on’ Bill Gates?” to which I answer “Yes,” enthusiastically.”
Me: “It annoys me a bit when people shit on Gates.”
↓
You: “Is it appropriate to ‘shit on’ Bill Gates?”
Neither a putative paraphrase nor a quotation.
(Your caricature)
—
Obs, anything I noted about context and specificity and universe of discourse and bespokeness flew over your head.
(No worries, Paul. You sure are showing me up!)
“I disagreed with your later suggestion that it somehow means Bill Gates is above criticism, or at least that it annoys you a bit to see him criticized.”
I have no problem with proper, warranted criticism.
I do have a problem when people want to know whether saving lives (however many) offsets failures at educational reform in the USA. If you don’t, well, fine. But I do.
[Sorry for then pedantry, but I feel I am perhaps still unclear so some.
“Shitting” on someone, in my estimation, is making unwarranted insinuations and badmouthings.
Proper criticism is never that.
To be clear]
… says the person best known for his unfortunate penchant for shitting on everyone else who comments here.
… says the person best known for his unfortunate penchant for shitting on everyone else who comments here.”
Purest example of argumentum ad hominem one could find.
An exemplar.
“If you can’t be a good example, then you’ll just have to be a horrible warning.”
(Dorothy Parker)
[erratum]
I misremembered.
Catherine Aird was the person with the pithy witticism that I quoted.
My bad.
… says the horrible warning.
Only 1 day and 24 hours and 25 minutes for that (ahem) rejoinder, BB.
(You excelled, that time! By your standards. Well done!)
Source : https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-possible-long-term-impact-of-trumps-cuts-to-medical-research-funding