agreed. America's attitude towards china has been absurd. instead of seeing it as an opportunity for us to step up, we deflect responsibility as if america was forced to offshore its manufacturing and venerate idiots over scientists.
I think a big part of it is that the admission that offshoring was a bad idea that has created a threat to American hegemony would require acknowledgement that neoliberalism has been an abject failure and a ruse by the upper class to suck up capital
and political power from the middle class.
That sort of discussion and the consequences from having it just isn't on the menu.
There isn't going to be a massive wealth redistribution in the other direction to offset the redistribution that has taken place over the last 40 years. There isn't going to be taxation reforms to prevent this from occuring again. There isn't going to be a focus on white collar crimes from the Justice department.
Things are just going to slowly get worse and worse in America.
Well, a peaceful one anyway. As much as it sickens me. We don't have to go back more than 200 years to see what happens when the wealth gap gets too large.
Is this comment a bit reductionist? Sure. Doesn't mean its more wrong than right.
What are you talking about? The current president was elected on the platform that offshoring was a bad idea that has created a threat to American hegemony. Free trade is politically dead now.
The current president has payed lip service to reshoring and revitalizing domestic industry but what have the results been?
There's been no significant antitrust actions or a focus on white-collar crimes. These are critical in stopping bad actors in American society from accruing more resources and power.
There's been no real investment in education or industrial capacity that would enable the US begin to compete with China in green technology and manufacturing automation.
There's no cohesive and consistent plan to encourage domestic manufacturing, it's just these nonsensical on again, off again tariff announcements that absolutely destroy the ability for anyone in industry to make long-term plans.
Talk is cheap. What's needed is a systemic, sustained effort and we’re not seeing it in America.
> Tariffs are not now, have never, and will never lead to an increase in domestic production.
I disagree. Its a pretty straightforward market force.
> The US has done this multiple times already and the result is always the same.
Personally, I don't buy the argument that "it didn't work 100 years ago, so it can't work today." The circumstances are entirely different. The global economy is entirely different. The US's role in the world is entirely different. We are also not in the middle of a great depression, which I imagine would also affect the outcome.
> The results, everywhere, every time, forever, are always the same.
In 2018 the US instituted steel tariffs and it increased domestic steel manufacturing.
> I disagree. Its [tariffs] a pretty straightforward market force.
By themselves, tariffs do not and cannot provide assurance of any outcome, they can only amplify the effects of the other economic policies in force at the moment.
As for the current policies, the effects are clear - further monopolization, inflation, lower standard of living and asset trickle up (more like waterfall to the sky), combined with circus politics, phony heroics, wars and empty promises.
That might be positive for some but certainly not for the majority.
I'd call the first part utterly counter-productive and stupid.
The fact that he just signed a bill utterly decimating the last important work done in this country also runs counter to the idea that he's doing fuck all about it.
And, the example completely ignores the conversation part of the OOP. The last 40-50 years of neoliberal drunken greed by the people at the top isn't going to be suddenly reversed for the next fifty years. There are few ways of reversing that. All, uncomfortable.
> I'd call the first part utterly counter-productive and stupid.
I don't think there is a better method of onshoring than tariffs, personally. You change the cost of offshoring and see what the market does. IMO its the least complicated and most capital efficient way of doing it. That being said, changing the tariffs every week kills most of the benefit of that simplicity.
> The fact that he just signed a bill utterly decimating the last important work done in this country
Tariffs are a demand-side change, there's also subsidies for supply-side.
But the manner in which they were done shows a lack of planning. Whatever it is you want to on-shore (or prevent from being off-shored), tariff that, but not the economic inputs to make that.
Want to make more EVs domestically? Don't tariff electric motors. Want to make more electric motors domestically? Don't tariff bolts, insulated wire, or high performance permanent magnets. Want to make more high performance permanent magnets domestically? Don't tariff neodymium.
If you tariff everything, you're putting off manufacturing that depends on anything.
> Tariffs are a demand-side change, there's also subsidies for supply-side.
Yes, but subsidies are typically more complex to implement than tariffs. Imports are already controlled via customs, so you're piggybacking off existing oversight. New subsidies require entirely new oversight.
> Whatever it is you want to on-shore (or prevent from being off-shored), tariff that, but not the economic inputs to make that.
Why? Its impossible to account for second order effects beforehand IMO. I think its way better just to put up flat tariff, see what's working and what isn't and adjust from there.
I don't think this admin is doing tariffs correctly, but I welcome the added incentive for domestic manufacturing and mining.
I’m not pleased with Trump’s trade policies either but your central claim was that nobody is willing to address the issue at all, and that’s simply not true. You, me, and Trump all probably mutually disagree with each other’s preferred solutions, but we aren’t in denial about the problem itself. It is one of the most widely discussed economic and national security issues we have if not the most.
It was not my intent to have a conversation about whether or not someone can believe Donald Trump and whether or not his rhetoric matches his intentions. That conversation is played out and not productive. You simply can't and it simply doesn't.
I am not optimistic that the systemic solutions to the problems that I'm talking about are going to come from anyone in American politics and it is obvious to me that American hegemony is waning with little hope of it returning.
I worry about what this means for the future of democracy if a country run by an autocrat becomes the dominant power.
> I am not optimistic that the systemic solutions to the problems that I'm talking about are going to come from anyone in American politics
As I said, I think we probably both disagree with each other and Trump about what those solutions are. But what you said was that no one in American politics is willing to even acknowledge the problem in the first place, and that was false.
Because let's be real here all the patriotism is just a facade the rich want to keep the money for themselves. Singing the national anthem on the fourth of July is cheap.
Yes, especially if you’re part of the CCP [1]. Well if they’re taxed at all. Can’t be taxed if you hide your wealth.
At least the wealth of the richest people in the US is made by people producing value and services. Bezos is rich because people like myself find Amazon and AWS to be quite good.
IMHO, the biggest wealth problem in the US is the rise of upper-middle class “elites” and management class. The one driving “mergers and acquisitions” to reduce competition between grocery stores or using rent control software to eke up rent costs.
> Intelligence community’s report on wealth and corruption of China’s rulers is overdue
> The truth is, the party is illegitimate. It is so for three reasons. First, it was formed and nurtured by the Communist International, a worldwide organization, and the Chinese Communist Party’s seizure of power in 1949 was made possible by Stalin and the Red Army.
Lol, this is the most obvious propaganda article I have seen in probably years. You should be embarrassed to post this in HN.
Not particularly, it's easy to read between the lines. Almost every news has propaganda in it, it's just a matter of degree. The comment I was replying to had obvious anti-US propaganda so why not reply in kind?
The actual report on CCP leaderships wealth is interesting to read though.
Nah, regardless of the source posted I would likely not have credibility with the sort of folks who can't read an opinion piece with a strong belief and stance on something and consider those opinions and points anyways.
Personally it's not surprising that the people most interested in exposing the mass illicit wealth of the CCP politburo would be those who believe the CCP is illegitimate and harmful to the Chinese people. However since pro-communist propaganda is in vogue these days perhaps reading a counter view will expand some people's thinking. The article I linked was interesting precisely because it accepted and believed that the obvious corruption of CCP leadership is bad and called for exposing that.
The article reads like it’s written by a boomer who had his worldview frozen in 1990. I can’t take that article or anyone who posts that article seriously lol.
I wish we could operate on the principle of data sharing in science. What a waste of resources to needlessly replicate and compete. Also, great, somebody else is doing it so we don’t have to! Less work for us.
This is already how astronomy, and specifically cosmology, research works in the US (and most other places). Data is made public within a short period of obtaining it on a schedule (usually less than a couple years) that is set before data is taken.
It is far from clear that the Chinese government supports this type of open data sharing.
Agreed. The US has squandered so much money over the decades that they're now over $300k/taxpayer in debt, with interest to that that being the fourth largest cost, and two of the top three being insufficiently funded programs that simply steal from the grandchildren.
It would be even more embarrassing if we didn't cut back on non-essential spending.
Yeah, let's cut back on the relatively small investments in science that actually grow the economy, particularly at a moment in time when our geopolitical competitors are making enormous investments, and when leadership and talent in science is more important than ever.
Just walk around the Boston area and look at how much of the economy is driven by federal research funding attracting global talent to universities, which then generates ideas and the next generation of talent, which feeds the biotech companies, which grow the economy.
Letting all of that happen in China instead of the US just to make a tiny dent in the deficit (and to punish progressive institutions and prevent cultural change from immigration) is unbelievably fucking stupid.
Trump just added 4 trillion more in debt funding tax cuts for billionaire. The amount of money science research gets in the US is pennies compared to that. Investments in science always returns on investment in the form of technology. The internet was a research project mind you.
Not to mention almost all the breakthroughs on top of the initial Web happened in the US: Mosiac, Netscape, Apache, Yahoo, Google, etc. Many of them started out as "non-essential" research projects.
That's the same company twice, Apache which was just another standard implementation of httpd (the cern thing) and one company that isn't and wasnt relevant outside of the us and surely isn't known as tech driver around here (Yahoo)
Actually a great summary of why the world does not actually blindly thinks USA! When they think about tech advancements
Apache was quickly spun off from its NCSA roots to become its own thing. There's a lot of history here that you're twisting around or ignoring. I'm not even American but, while lots of other countries made their own contributions, it's insane to argue that networked computing would have advanced anything like it did without the US's innovations borne of their (former) attitude of experimentation and exploration.
That doesn't defeat the point. It makes the point that research benefits all. That research can't happen in vacuum. It needs to be funded and culture and institutions build around it.
For a technology forum, the sheer volume of pettiness and anti-science and technology attitude is confounding.
People here sounds like the most mediocre managers I've ever worked with in my life.
This is a really interesting story. It's not the US pulling back so much as it is China's rapid and incredible growth. According to this graph, the only period of US scientific expenditure stagnation was during the 2008 housing crisis. Our expenditures over the last decade have been increasing at a pretty good growth rate too.
The data points for the forthcoming years will be interesting (sad) to see after all of these cuts.
This, and many other things in the area of science, is an embarrassment.
However, I feel that what is argued about, by all sides, misses the point.
The US spends 2X what China does on civilian space programs, and 4X what Europe spends. We spend 2X as much on health care, 1.5X as much on education, and 2X as much on science research.
Our systems are inefficient and corrupt, and that is what needs to be addressed.
Arguing for or against how much money we need to spend or to cut is just the modern day circus that distracts everyone from the real problems and provides everyone on both sides with feel good excuses.
The first few areas are easy,since budgets are known and there are actual comparative measurements that have been done.
Health. We spend $5T a year on our "health", which is 2X the per capita amounts spent by western European countries, yet we have poorer outcomes. We have poorer outcomes not just among lower income classes, but also poorer outcomes when comparing upper class incomes between the US/Europe
Education. We spend 1.5X per capita compared to western European nations, and we have poorer outcomes
If we would simply match the budgets for these two areas with European budgets, and even accept the fact that they would have better systems in place, we would save $3T a year. This is a fairly direct measure of how much more efficient Europe is with their resources. They are either that much better/smarter than we are, or we have a corrupt system, or a combination of the two.
Public construction costs. It costs 50% to 200% or even more to build public projects in the US than in Europe. That is, if we can even complete our projects. One of many reports and analysis: https://www.constructiondive.com/news/us-rail-projects-take-...
Other areas are difficult to have direct comparisons, and it is difficult to compare results. The US solution to everything is to pour money into it. And it seems that any cut, any type of cut at all, portends doom.
Military. We spend $1T a year. We have something like 1200 military bases, over half are international. We have massive cost and time overruns all the time. Yes, we may have the best military in the world, but it certainly feels like the taxpayers are being taken advantage of. You may feel differently. I do not think we need 1200 based. I do think that the military industrial complex profits way beyond what is reasonable.
Science research. We spend about $1T in R&D, almost triple of Europe. We pay our researchers 2X-3X what researchers make in Europe. Yet it seems that any type of cut to science budgets is met with the proclamation that we will lose all of our researchers to Europe. Our major research centers need a 70% incidental budget on top of their grants otherwise they will go out of business. CEO's of major non profit medical research centers need to make millions and millions of dollars per year. There is something wrong here.
Space. We spend 2X what China spends, and 4X what Europe spends. One example is the costs of space telescopes: China spends 9 figures, Europe spends 10 figures, and we spend 11 figures. NASA's SLS rocket is a case study in how to literally brun up billions and billions of taxpayers money. We can, and need to do better.
Corruption is not always the simple graft of the CEO and board. Corruption also comes in the form of a system where too many people make too much profit to want to make the system better.
Saying things are expensive is not saying they are corrupt or inefficient. What specific problems and examples of corruption do you believe should be fixed?
Similarly, overall spending patterns do not mean corruption or even excess. We get huge economic returns on science and space spending, for instance.
Look at the source you cited. Labor is expensive here and infrastructure projects often create public outrage that makes them take longer. That's a problem but it's not corruption and not something you fix by slashing spending.
I wanted to give you an example of what I see is not just corruption, but an example of how feedback loops of self interest combine to create systemic issues that threaten our entire society.
It is "known" in the research industry that getting government grants, especially NIH grants, is "gold" in that they provide large sums of money, and, importantly, that a large part of these grants have little accountability and are not used directly for the research. Peoples careers are rewarded for successful at getting these grants, and there are societal mechanisms in place to insure these grants continue to flow. A lot of organizations are so dependent on these type of grants that when an attempt was made to reduce the unaccountable and "incidental" nature part of those grants to what is standard in non-governmental charities, there was fear that entire important research organizations would be brought down.
This is an example:
- My congressman has a public campaign to support the political and legal fight to preserve the ability of research organizations to carve out nearly half, or 42% of government research grants so that they can be used for general organizational needs, and not directly for the research projects they are awarded to. Part of this political and legal fight is about making these carve outs more accountable, as they currently are not. For comparison, non profit grants from non federal sources provide for 0% to 13% carve outs. The new proposal is to reduce the carve outs to 13%, in line with these other organizations, and to have stricter accounting rules. The more common name for this is the 69% indirect costs added to federal grants, as compared to the standard 0% to 15% added by non governmental grants.
- The former CEO of one of these nonprofit research institutes (Dana Farber) was making $3M to $4M per year. This is not unusual for the CEO's of many of these larger non profits.
- This CEO is the mother of this particular congressman.
- This former CEO had 50+ of her research papers called into question due to claims of fraud. These papers were called into question by an outside researcher.
- Six of these papers were retracted due to fraud, several dozen others were "updated". These papers are used directly or indirectly to acquire government grants, and are also used to justify making this person CEO.
- One of this former CEO's co-authors on some of these papers was also the Director of Research Integrity for the institution, who also investigated the allegations (though not the ones he was a co author on).
> Corruption is not always the simple graft of the CEO and board. Corruption also comes in the form of a system where too many people make too much profit to want to make the system better.
maybe i misinterpret, but are you saying but it seems your saying some profit from govt spending is ok, but too much crosses a threshold to corruption?
if thats the case, how do we set that threshold? whats the criteria?
(i don't disagree per se, just curious on the thinking around this)
What I should have said is that the system is corrupt, not that there is corruption in the system. There will always be profit to made in the system (there has to be for it to work), and there will always be corruption to some degree in the system, but having a system that is corrupt is a different type of thing.
I believe our health system itself is corrupt. There is no one person or group of people that are causing the problem, it is the way the entire system works that is the problem.
Looking at the amount of health spend as a percent of GDP, it has gone from 5% 60 years ago, to 12% 30 years ago, to 18% today. This is clearly a trend that is unsustainable. Compare this to the EU which is more like 10%-12% of GDP (not that they do not have problems)
This increase is bad enough, but we also have a system that is worse in all the ways that count - percent of population that is covered, outcomes at every class level, and the complexity of the system.
From a societal perspective, the health system is simply out of control - it continues to grow and profit in excess of what the economy can support while at the same time provides less and less value than what is clearly possible by looking at other countries.
The answer is not to simply cut spending and fire people in a random manner
The answer is also not to simply tax and spend more.
> I believe our health system itself is corrupt. There is no one person or group of people that are causing the problem, it is the way the entire system works that is the problem.
thanks for the clarification!
> The answer is not to simply cut spending and fire people in a random manner
> The answer is also not to simply tax and spend more.
yea, its a difficult problem, i'm guessing one issue is the cost of medicine and also insurance?
probably with such a system that is so messed up, it will take a multi-pronged approach (and a party to campaign on it) i'd guess...
It's funny, I'm told my whole adult life "We can't be like Europe! We're too different! We're too heterogenous/big/special/insert_excuse_here!"
And yet, we can point to a number on their balance sheet and say full stop "This is what we shall spend and nothing more, if it still sucks, skill issue."
WHY does America spend trillions more on healthcare than our peers? Is it because of welfare queens on Medicaid? Or is it the scumsuckers in the private health insurance industry, in a system that keeps most people in all but indentured servitude to their employer to even be able to afford the privilege of getting dropped by the insurance companies the second you get sick?
Is there waste? Sure.
Tell me how just going in like Ron Swanson and slashing the shit out of every budget while simultaneously blowing up the debt with tax cuts fixes any of that.
Slashing will not fix the problem. Nor will more taxing and spending fix it.
The problem is systemic. We have an out of control health system that is steadily growing as a percent of GDP while providing less and less value to less and less people.
On the other hand, the US is close to bankruptcy. And that's not all the current admin's fault.
And their cuts are trying to avoid that, although they have thrown out many babies with the bath water. It's hard to blame them for trying to avoid default, which would be far worse than anything.
The program apparently cost $900 million which is not a trivial cost.
The added bummer is that space funding cuts aren't just hurting public projects, they're also killing private companies that rely on the government as a customer.
its fine, with all the new contracts to open private prisons to house "illegals" that we're going to rent out to corporations for pennies on the dollar and weapons contracts so that we can gift israel with bombs to murder Palestinian babies, it should all even out. /s
Can you clarify? What does a better country look like after this transformation? Will they be doing more science or less? If they will be doing more science in this golden age, why would they need to give up their place as a leader in global science to get there?
Where truth is treated with scorn, scientists and other geeky professions have to scurry into the shadowy corners; where the wealthy rule over the rest due to the confusion of wealth with virtue and truth; where the best instincts of humanity, for curiosity, exploration, compassion, and rationality are mocked and cruelty, disdain for intelligence, disdain really for anyone not like the cookie cutter mainstream really, are lifted up at the cost of all groups that can't or won't fit in.
Very dramatic, but funding scientific studies is no antidote to groupthink, authoritarianism, and cruelty towards the non-conforming, in case you missed the last 5 years.
There's a pretty clear causal chain between the abuse of public trust and social influence from educational and scientific institutions in the last decade or so and the anti-intellectualism we're witnessing today, abuse which was and is driven by the same hubris you demonstrate by conflating intellectualism with All That Is Good. And needless to say since I am posting on HN, but I say that as an intellectualist.
You are blaming the cruelty of the homophobes and racists on the hubris of the smart people? Not blaming the victims exactly, but certainly not holding citizens responsible for their civic contributions.
The destination is Putin's Russia where truth does not matter, oligarchs loot the country, opposition is only a token and the most of the country is poor and stagnating.
Historically, the center of scientific innovation shifted from Europe to the United States approximately a century ago, and is currently showing signs of transitioning towards China.
it doesn't seem like they're having any issue with it in the past 5-10 really. its not that hard to go to the mainland if you have science or engineering creds these days.
Except historically, China didn't propagate technology. It was used at the discretion of the emperor and held as a secret. They had moveable type before Gutenberg, but had a culture, government, and language that were all factors against its propagation. They had a navy second to none, but found the rest of the world not interesting (Confucian Conservatism is one theory) and dismantled it, nearly a century before Magellan's voyages. If anything, their knowledge leaked to the rest of the world as opposed to them leading it.
Today, China is playing Go with the world as their board. We have to start counting liberties on our groups; the late game is now.
Didn’t JWST recently present confounding evidence against one of
of the core assumptions of big bang theory, thereby invalidating it?
Something about the faint, far off “redshift” background radiation from the beginning of time was actually coming from a much closet newer source , not what the theories held? I’ll repost paper if I can find it.
While the US needs to get spending under control, the cuts to science sting.
A $1B cut for ΛCDM seems pragmatic as long as we focus on the economy. The cosmic background will still be waiting for us in four to ten years.
Unfortunately, it feels like the budget cuts being made are incredibly partisan and not actually helping pay down the debt spiral. Especially when the deficit is increasing.
Everything needs to be cut back, not just things one party doesn't care for.
Just to be clear about the new budget law. It does not attempt to reduce the deficit or debt at all. It sidesteps existing law to increase the deficit beyond what is actually allowed.
The rate of increase of the debt increased last Friday, even as we are told we can't afford things we could afford 10 years ago.
Put simply, we were doing a better job of managing our debts until last Friday when we decided that the national debt doesn't matter.
There is no evidence of this need and every single cut feels like it hurts the citizens more and more.
What needs to be done is an increase on taxes on the wealthiest corporations and people instead of cutting science funding, food benefits, and kicking people off their health insurance.
Not sure I agree. Interest on our national debt is increasing (I believe it's third largest spending category, depending on how you break it down) and is expected to surpass defense spending this year.
Totally agree. My point is mainly that if we did destroy the national debt (as promised by this administration), we'd be able to spend significantly more on whatever we liked. We don't seem to be doing that, however.
Last time this admin was around, they inflated the money supply by creating 20% more money than had ever been made. They had zero intention of cutting debt, they just want to use debt to trap everyone else. They lied to you and there is historical evidence that should have made you think twice before supporting them.
Should taxes increase while we're on the brink of recession?
Shouldn't we do austerity now, then tax increases during periods of prosperity?
Tax increases will trickle down and morph into unemployment, under-investment, and de-growth. Just look what ZIRP / Section 174 did to software engineers. Imagine that across the entire economy.
The power of the US economy is in its consumer base. People need to stay employed and see job/salary growth. That means companies need to spend more money on headcount and not cut costs.
Piss trickles down, nothing else has trickled down since Reagan made that up.
Eggs were slightly up in price at the end of Biden's term, but the tariffs have done nothing except increase the price of everything by 10% across the board. The Trump bill just makes recession more likely. The tax cuts benefit nobody but companies and the most wealthy, which Trump used to pretend he was part of but now actually is.
> Piss trickles down, nothing else has trickled down since Reagan made that up.
When businesses face hardship, they lay off. That's demonstrable. Employees are a luxury.
When Section 174 tax code ended, that set off a tidal wave of layoffs. And that's not even a new tax -- that's just amortization. When real taxes are levied on businesses, it'll be a blood bath.
> tariffs have done nothing except increase the price of everything by 10% across the board.
You're preaching to the choir. I'm not a fan of the administration or the tariffs. For a party that purports to be fiscally conservative, they're doing the opposite.
Or we need to increase revenues. Irresponsible tax cuts over the last decades have fueled the spiral. You need both responsible spending, and thoughtful revenue collecting.
This is about populism as a reaction to "elites", such as those who head universities and science. They are looking to eliminate or replace them. The reality is this has nothing to do with debt or deficit. I'm not sure why this isn't understood. They've done nothing to hide this fact. They've been clear that they are replacing the heads of both private and public institutions with those that are loyal to the party head.
You must be trolling. How does giving ICE $170 Billion, with a B, dollars have anything to do with curting spending? We are wathich the rise of a christian nationalist police state.
NDT made this clear like a generation ago: its absolute nonsense to cut science funding to get federal "spending under control". The amount that goes to all of this is a drop in the bucket compared to military and subsidies. hell, we spend 1/10th of the total federal science funding (~200bn) per year JUST giving free money to oil and gas companies. trying to "fix" spending this way, even if it was actually reasonable to try and do, is tantamount to trying to save to buy a house by eating two fewer avocado toasts per week.
Problem is most of the spending is on social services nobody is willing to touch. If you even think about touching Medicare/medicaid or SS: your own party will get rid of you. There are a lot of other things that are large budget items nobody can think touching.
Yes, Medicare too. Unless Congress intervenes, Medicare providers will see about a 4% cut every year starting next October. The new law's deficit boost triggers automatic sequestration cuts across the board each year for ten years.
Interestingly my representative just sent me a message assuring me that both were protected in the bill. Which proves my point, you don't touch them, or if you do you ensure it looks like you didn't.
Well, based on unbiased information out there (like GAO for example) your representative is clearly lying. Maybe you consider voting for someone other than your representative…
social services aren't a problem (sorry to be pedantic but i think it's really important to recognize that these things are necessary, and we can afford them).
> most of the spending is on social services nobody is willing to touch. If you even think about touching Medicare/medicaid or SS
but the BBBA passed, with massive cuts to medicare/medicaid (which will have some insane downstream cost effects on the broader healthcare/insurance industry as a whole, which will be passed on to insured individuals).
> your own party will get rid of you
that doesn't really appear to have happened to a degree that matters yet, because these orders are coming from the top of the GOP, but i suppose we'll see when the shit really hits the fan in the next couple of years.
I'm not a big fan of social security, but social security revenue is supposed to be "off books"... wanting to cut the payable, but still keep the receivable is more than a little dishonest. And if we look at what's happened, I didn't see much in the way of "social services" that escaped the axe other than social security. There are, of course, cuts that could make a difference (the DEA alone is $10bil/year... and there's another $5-10bil used for DEA shit in the state dept. budget), but those are the ones that no one's willing to touch. We don't even immediately have to go after the military, though there's half a trillion per year there (or more) that could easily be cut. And guess what? Just as things are about to get desperate, world events are unfolding that will even make the most cowardly pacifist hesitate to take slices out of that.
It really hurts to see this happening. CMB-S4, stands for stage 4, is a huge collaborative effort that units many CMB scientists and experiments, in a sense that stage 1 to 3 experiments are “converging” towards this.
To put that in context, CMB-S4 being a DOE project has many side effects to other CMB experiments in a lot of ways. For example, a few years ago the LiteBIRD mission led by JAXA from Japan has been gaining momentum, and many international CMB scientists got involved. European scientists got funded by ESA, and US scientists were expecting NASA to fund them too. In the end they denied the proposal (despite generally positive impressions when discussing with various people there), partly because they think the satellite based CMB experiment LiteBIRD has significant overlap with the goals of the ground based CMB experiment CMB-S4, deeming it unnecessary to support LiteBIRD.
And then CMB scientists used to get generous access to NERSC, a top 10 HPC system in the world. But as CMB-S4 becomes a DOE project, NERSC being DOE funded also, it becomes a bit of conflict there, in the sense that they feel they need to prioritize access for CMB-S4 to guarantee its success. There are many other factors in play but in the end it becomes much more difficult to even get access to the system, not to mention having any sizable allocation.
All these might not be so bad as CMB-S4 is supposed to be our endgame. It would benefits the CMB community as a whole so much. But now? It’s game over.
It also hurts particle physics progress as well. Long story short, the CMB B-mode holds a promising sensitivity to inflationary models, that its discovery may finally makes inflation falsifiable. At the very least, it involves an energy scale so high that no experiments on Earth can reach, and therefore is a good complement, to high energy physics experiments such as LHC.
There is a reason it is deemed so important in both the decadal survey and the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel.
Project like this has under heavy scrutiny from both the scientific community and the funding parties around feasibility, risks, costs, etc. It wasn’t a a light decision to have had happened in the beginning. Why would the end come so abruptly without explanation?
Hey another way to dumb down the country. Become second rate at particle physics (LHC), aerospace (Boeing), cut funding from universities, <TLDR list goes here>.
Boeing was self-inflicted with the takeover of management by the McDonnell-Douglas bozos. They destroyed Boeing's ability from within, all on their own.
A case study of the symptoms of neoliberal "profit at all costs" MBA mindset. Enshittify the services. Enshittify the planes. Enshittify the cars. Enshittify the food. Turn everything to shit, so that the line can go up one more quarter.
Can anybody steel man the practical value of this kind of research for me? It seems to me that almost all astronomy, particularly the sort studying very large scale phenomena like this, is essentially useless for humanity. The best it does is satisfy our curiosity about the nature of our reality, but when the subject of study is something so huge there's no chance of it ever having practical application to humanity (unlike quantum mechanics!) As for the argument that it "kills private companies" who are contracting for the government on projects like this, it seems very much like a broken windows fallacy. If the government went around breaking everybody's windows that would be great for the private companies that replace windows, but so what?
The most useful kind of astronomy is searching our solar system for dangerous rocks so that we might avert disaster. Anything beyond our solar system is just useless stargazing, everything out there is too far away for us to do anything with or about. Theories about reality which can only be validated or ruled out by looking at things so far away cannot have local relevance to us, or else whatever local phenomenon they govern which might be useful to us could also be used to test that theory.
(For the record, I think this administration are a bunch of morons.)
Most of the benefits of blue(dark?)-sky research are unpredictable almost by definition. We're exploring for the sake of finding answers about the universe, and in the process learning 'unknown unknowns' which may pay off later. Using your example - quantum mechanics wasn't invented with computer chips in mind.
Having said that I think that there are some practical benefits coming from this research that aren't commonly discussed. For example: adaptive optics - which is heavily used in astronomy - is also used in medical imaging and national defense. Astronomers also drive a lot of detector development. Previously this was the CCD, now things are moving into new, exotic devices like MKIDs. Maybe one of these new detectors will end up in a mobile phone camera in the future, and you'll be able to take excellent photos in low-light levels. There are many more examples I'm sure, but this is just what I have off the top of my head..
The final practical AND philosophical application I can think of, is that we are about 10-20 years away from putting direct constraints on life in the universe. A big proportion of astronomers are currently working on this. I think an answer to this question will dramatically change how society views itself.
Your list of more modern benefits reminded me of a more modern discovery, one that is directly relevant to this article: the CMB itself was discovered as background noise in microwave communications systems.
I mean that can be said of any research, couldn't it? 400 years back, nobody would have dreamed that studying why these dots in the night sky move will help us understand tides on earth. 200 years back no one would have imagined that the key to health and diseases are some invisible organisms in the air no one can see. A mere 100 years back it would've been impossible to conceive that these imaginary "atoms" will lead to reserves of immense energy. And yet here we are today living in a world only made possible because of what people did before.
The cosmic microwave background is not even something imaginary far away in time or space. It is radiation that surrounds us in the present. It is passing by the earth constantly, all the time. There's some research trying to use it for space navigation, but no one knew you could do that when they pointed antennas randomly in the sky. The amount of cross over some research has to a lot of other research and eventually to practical applications cannot be easily comprehended. Science builds upon science in very complex and convoluted ways with each step being that people simply tried to find more about something around them that they did not know. If you knew how to find it, then there's nothing to research in the first place, is there?
There must be so much information in cosmic microwave radiation about things we may not even know. Who knows if it could lead to uncovering information about dark matter or dark energy and who knows where that information would take human civilization. At this time, research simply indicates that you find out as much about it as you can, because it is there!
> Can anybody steel man the practical value of this kind of research for me? It seems to me that almost all astronomy, particularly the sort studying very large scale phenomena like this, is essentially useless for humanity.
The funny thing is: this science with few direct application to human affairs is one of the oldest sciences. Those few applications, as a standard of time and use in navigation, have had a far greater impact upon the establishment of human civilization than any other scientific discover.
It would be easy to argue that those are things of the distant past and that other branches of science have a more direct impact today. That's true. Yet it is also true that our curiosity of the heavens has been a constant. While our early notions were pure nonsense, they shaped society. While our initial discoveries of its true nature had little immediate impact upon everyday life, it formed the basis of future scientific development. For example: the Copernican model of the solar system was more true to the actual form of the solar system, but it was less accurate than the more refined Ptolemaic model. Kepler figured out the ellipses bit, through the extensive observations of Tycho Brahe. Observations of planetary motion provided evidence for Newton's theory of gravitation. Ironically, observations of planetary motion also lead to the refinement of the classical model by Einstein. The understanding of gravity has been fundamental to engineering. While it is plausible that much of that would have been discovered without astronomy, the development of special and general relativity depended upon astronomy. One of the most important applications of that is GPS.
Now it would be easy to argue almost all of these discoveries have their basis in the study of the solar system, but that's not really the point. In the times of Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton, the utility of studying the motions of the planets would appear to have about as much relevance as the study of the CMB does today. They certainly would not have been able to predict what we have discovered due to the foundations they laid. The same can be said of modern astrophysics. We can claim that it may help us detect and understand the nature of gravitation waves. We can claim that it is a handy tool since "the universe" is better at building particle accelerators than we are. Yet even if we made astounding discoveries along those line, people would still ask: what use is it? We can't really provide an honest answer for that since we have yet to travel that path through time (i.e. we don't know what the future holds).
If you ever have a chance, I suggest reading a book on the history of astronomy. You will find many names that you will probably know from other branches of science, and learn of the many discoveries that have been made or facilitated through astronomical research. (That's particularly true of physics and mathematics.)
Sorry, but that doesn't work. (Your argument, not GPS.)
Relativity was discovered after discrepancies were noticed in observations of Mercury, right in our solar system. Not through observations of distant galaxies. And suppose Mercury was never studied, or in fact never existed; would that make GPS impossible for humanity? Of course not. Relativity is relevant to GPS because it has effects on the scale of GPS, and can therefore be discovered and studied by simply putting very accurate clocks into orbit. Had it not already been known of when GPS was created, it would have been discovered soon after.
In fact, studying very large and very distant things, other galaxies namely, has revealed discrepancies that suggest general relativity might not be the whole story. But is that relevant to GPS? Not in the slightest.
I see what you're saying and agree that we probably would have noticed the discrepancies in GPS positioning pretty quickly if we had tried to make it work without knowing about general relativity (GR). But it took _Einstein_ the better part of a decade to develop GR. Even if he hadn't existed, GR still would have had to be discovered by scientists using public funding. What company would pay someone to work on this problem for 10 years without a guarantee of success?
I also don't think there is a strong correlation between studying things close-by, e.g. in our solar system, and how useful the finding will be. Our next break through in particle physics may come from studying dark matter, black holes or quasars. Maybe that will help us build even better computers? Or faster than light communication? We don't know where the treasure is buried!
GPS requires satellites and rocketry as well and is built on centuries of curiosity about space, physics, and the universe. Curiosity by people who could not dream of something like GPS at the time. Your assertion that "ok, we've dobe enough curiosity and science, it's time to stop" is unnecessary and frivolous. Funding for projects like these are miniscule fractions of the budgets of large nations like the US and they also create jobs. There is no valid reason whatsoever to cancel this research except for the sole, actual reason, which is as always, "to own the Libs".
Lowering inflation by cutting scientific research is like trying to free up disk space by deleting the odd text file. (Some numbers, for context: 2024 National Science Foundation budget ~$10B, Musk annual compensation at Tesla, ~$45B, Defense spending 2024 ~$850B)
Lowering inflation by cutting social services is like trying to free up disk space by deleting `/usr`. It will be devastating.
Meanwhile the wealthy have sequestered so much wealth for themselves that it makes any talk of "reducing inflation" by taking it out on the general population as the anti-democratic sham it is. Our government is purportedly Of the people, For the people, and By the people. For this to happen the government must function as an agent for the people, not just for the tiny minority of them who own the wealth.
We're well past quantifiable statements. The meme "Government spending causes inflation" is entrenched now in some segments and will be used to justify nearly any spending cut.
We could probably measure it if you really want an accountant to do so. I don't think it is worthwhile getting a number. Lets go with very tiny effect.
However anything that is significant is things nobody will talk about.
The problem is that cosmic inflation is applied after domestic inflation, as a multiplier. So, we can’t say it is inconsequential in comparison.
Thankfully as soon as we stop measuring it, it will go away, because we as a society don’t have concepts like “object permanence” and “an objective underlying reality.”
Because they unfortunately largely have the law on their side.
Unless you're saying we should take extra-legal means to usurp the government. Then we'd be no better then the January 6 Capitol rioters.
As long as the American electorate is largely uneducated or mis-eeucated about politics, and continues to gullibly believe the words of wannabe dictators, we'll continue to slide into fascism.
> Almost a trillion dollars to increase the resolution of white noise.
Is this "a trillion dollars" in the room with us? The budget of the canceled project is not even 1B. You're off by not one order of magnitude, but by three.
Milne's model was a dead end
It doesn't match observed gravitational effects or the detailed anisotropies we've measured in the CMB
Higher resolution isn't just 'zooming in on noise', it tests inflation, neutrino physics, and quantum gravity
If you think it's vanity, read what the Planck mission accomplished
You sound like you stopped keeping up at a pop-sci summary from 1935
You know, we don't actually ever need to find out. We can just rest easy knowing that it's possible to find out in the future. That's basically as good as knowing.
I's certainly an interesting question; but what will we do differently if we find that the rate of cosmic inflation has been changing?
There's typically a lot of hidden value in exploring these kinds of things, and I get that, but there's not usually any particular urgency on any of them either.
Also, from the last paragraph of the article, it sounds like this was already on a path towards not getting funded; IMHO, it's not a major shift to get a final letter ending the project when construction was not approved a year ago.
These sorts of comments always get downvoted to hell because HN are true believers in science, especially space and NASA. The arguments for funding extremely time-insensitive research are usually de minimis (we spend so much more on X) or to beat the Russians/Chinese. Mass transit proponents have a similar relationship with opportunity cost. Yes, we can build California High Speed Rail, but would there be more net benefit by using the money to improve Bay Area and LA transit? You have to value these things against where the money would otherwise go.
Folks, let me tell you: nobody thought it could be done, but your favorite President (that's me, by the way) took on cosmic inflation and won, big league. We passed the spectacular Inflation Reduction Act - everybody's talking about it - and guess what? It didn't just tame rising prices here on Earth. No, no, we went ALL THE WAY. We ended cosmic inflation EVERYWHERE too. Incredible, right?
First of all, they said "not possible." Scientists, astrophysicists, even Big Foot was scratching his head! Nobody could figure out how to stop the universe from exponentially expanding faster than my rally crowds. But under my leadership, we negotiated the best cosmic deal. We deployed state-of-the-art interest-rate spinners on dark energy, put tariffs on runaway space-time, and - I'm not kidding - built the beautiful galactic wall to keep excess inflation out of the Milky Way!
The results? Beautiful. The universe has stabilized. No more exponential bloat! Stars remain at just the right distance, galaxies keep their perfect shape, and astronomers can finally retire their "Big Bang gone wild" theories! Our beautiful Inflation Reduction Act also saved trillions of light-years' worth of energy - making it green, making it lean, and letting us focus on what really matters: making America go WOW again!
Now the Fake News Media will try to discredit us: "Impossible!" they'll cry. But we know the truth. We have the best cosmic economists, the smartest black-hole negotiators, and let me tell you, they're all saying the same thing: "Sir, you've done what no one else could!" So join me in celebrating the greatest cosmic achievement in history. We've ELIMINATED inflation, not just here at home, but across the ENTIRE UNIVERSE. That's what winning looks like, folks!
If we stop doing this more people will start believing him. Perhaps it would be better to point out that a decade into his political career, he’s still doing this.
Obviously this administration has no interest in the homeless, but I'm personally a little tired of all the ivory tower elites getting upset that their intellectual play toys are in jeopardy, when millions of people struggle for food and healthcare.
And this isn't a matter of "you can do two things at once"; we should provide for our own people _before_ we worry about cosmic inflation.
It's worth keeping in mind that the budget for scientific funding in developed nations is typically ~1-2% of the total budget. Most of that money usually goes to medical research (as it should), which directly improves the quality of life for millions of people. The remainder goes into R&D which drives progress, yielding benefits across many different industries. Slashing the science budget and investing that money in homelessness instead would probably not fix homelessness in HCOL areas (issues are structural) and would end up being a major net negative for the rest of society.
The Big Beautiful Bill will add $4.5 trillion to the deficit in the next decade. If we hadn't passed it, we could have continued learning about cosmic inflation _and_ helped millions of people regarding food and healthcare and still saved trillions in the process. Of course, America would never do that, but our current issue is no longer "we should be helping people instead of doing unnecessary spending." Now we're squarely in "let's starve everyone of resources and give it all to the 1%."
The BBB will add $4.5T (this is the largest estimate) in addition to the $15T-$20T that would have happened without the BBB
The debt would have been about $52T+, now it will be $56T+, if projections are accurate.
While I do not agree with the BBB for many reasons, and I do agree that it increases the debt, it is not the primary driver of the debt.
The largest driver of our debt is our "health" system. We spend $5T a year on our "health" system, which is twice the amount per capita that western European nations spend, and we have outcomes that are, across the board, worse.
We spend $2.5T more per year than we "should" be spending on "health", which is by far the largest waste of our resources.
If we would "simply" find a way to spend as much as western Europe does (even keeping our poorer outcomes), we would save $25T over the next 10 years. Our entire national debt could be eliminated in 20 years by doing this, even with the BBB.
i agree ideologically, but the cuts are all coming from one ideological group of people bent on omnicidal domination of the planet. to them, healthcare and food for poor people is literally as unimportant as space exploration (unless it benefits the revolving-door relationship). we who oppose this should not cede ground on anything because those who propose this will not, either.
Yes, it is a matter of that you can do two things at once. There is nothibg preventing the US from doing both other than that the current government is actively opposed to both funding research and helping the homeless.
Meanwhile China is building it's own giant telescopes: https://www.science.org/content/article/china-quietly-prepar...
And will soon launch their own version of Hubble: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xuntian
Deeply embarrassing as a US citizen.
> Deeply embarrassing as a US citizen.
agreed. America's attitude towards china has been absurd. instead of seeing it as an opportunity for us to step up, we deflect responsibility as if america was forced to offshore its manufacturing and venerate idiots over scientists.
I think a big part of it is that the admission that offshoring was a bad idea that has created a threat to American hegemony would require acknowledgement that neoliberalism has been an abject failure and a ruse by the upper class to suck up capital and political power from the middle class.
That sort of discussion and the consequences from having it just isn't on the menu.
There isn't going to be a massive wealth redistribution in the other direction to offset the redistribution that has taken place over the last 40 years. There isn't going to be taxation reforms to prevent this from occuring again. There isn't going to be a focus on white collar crimes from the Justice department.
Things are just going to slowly get worse and worse in America.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sLSveRGmpIE&pp=0gcJCfwAo7VqN5t...
Well, a peaceful one anyway. As much as it sickens me. We don't have to go back more than 200 years to see what happens when the wealth gap gets too large.
Is this comment a bit reductionist? Sure. Doesn't mean its more wrong than right.
What are you talking about? The current president was elected on the platform that offshoring was a bad idea that has created a threat to American hegemony. Free trade is politically dead now.
The current president has payed lip service to reshoring and revitalizing domestic industry but what have the results been?
There's been no significant antitrust actions or a focus on white-collar crimes. These are critical in stopping bad actors in American society from accruing more resources and power.
There's been no real investment in education or industrial capacity that would enable the US begin to compete with China in green technology and manufacturing automation.
There's no cohesive and consistent plan to encourage domestic manufacturing, it's just these nonsensical on again, off again tariff announcements that absolutely destroy the ability for anyone in industry to make long-term plans.
Talk is cheap. What's needed is a systemic, sustained effort and we’re not seeing it in America.
I mean, i wouldn't call 300% increase in collected tariffs and a tax break for onshore capital investment lip service...
Tariffs are not now, have never, and will never lead to an increase in domestic production.
They only lead to higher costs and/or a festering, shambling corpse of domestic production that is a shell of its former self.
The US has done this multiple times already and the result is always the same.
Numerous countries have done this and the result is always the same.
The results, everywhere, every time, forever, are always the same.
Higher prices, stagnant markets, eroding capabilities, higher and higher tariffs and/or subsidies to keep it all propped up.
> Tariffs are not now, have never, and will never lead to an increase in domestic production.
I disagree. Its a pretty straightforward market force.
> The US has done this multiple times already and the result is always the same.
Personally, I don't buy the argument that "it didn't work 100 years ago, so it can't work today." The circumstances are entirely different. The global economy is entirely different. The US's role in the world is entirely different. We are also not in the middle of a great depression, which I imagine would also affect the outcome.
> The results, everywhere, every time, forever, are always the same.
In 2018 the US instituted steel tariffs and it increased domestic steel manufacturing.
> I disagree. Its [tariffs] a pretty straightforward market force.
By themselves, tariffs do not and cannot provide assurance of any outcome, they can only amplify the effects of the other economic policies in force at the moment.
As for the current policies, the effects are clear - further monopolization, inflation, lower standard of living and asset trickle up (more like waterfall to the sky), combined with circus politics, phony heroics, wars and empty promises.
That might be positive for some but certainly not for the majority.
I'd call the first part utterly counter-productive and stupid.
The fact that he just signed a bill utterly decimating the last important work done in this country also runs counter to the idea that he's doing fuck all about it.
And, the example completely ignores the conversation part of the OOP. The last 40-50 years of neoliberal drunken greed by the people at the top isn't going to be suddenly reversed for the next fifty years. There are few ways of reversing that. All, uncomfortable.
> I'd call the first part utterly counter-productive and stupid.
I don't think there is a better method of onshoring than tariffs, personally. You change the cost of offshoring and see what the market does. IMO its the least complicated and most capital efficient way of doing it. That being said, changing the tariffs every week kills most of the benefit of that simplicity.
> The fact that he just signed a bill utterly decimating the last important work done in this country
What work is that?
Tariffs are a demand-side change, there's also subsidies for supply-side.
But the manner in which they were done shows a lack of planning. Whatever it is you want to on-shore (or prevent from being off-shored), tariff that, but not the economic inputs to make that.
Want to make more EVs domestically? Don't tariff electric motors. Want to make more electric motors domestically? Don't tariff bolts, insulated wire, or high performance permanent magnets. Want to make more high performance permanent magnets domestically? Don't tariff neodymium.
If you tariff everything, you're putting off manufacturing that depends on anything.
> Tariffs are a demand-side change, there's also subsidies for supply-side.
Yes, but subsidies are typically more complex to implement than tariffs. Imports are already controlled via customs, so you're piggybacking off existing oversight. New subsidies require entirely new oversight.
> Whatever it is you want to on-shore (or prevent from being off-shored), tariff that, but not the economic inputs to make that.
Why? Its impossible to account for second order effects beforehand IMO. I think its way better just to put up flat tariff, see what's working and what isn't and adjust from there.
I don't think this admin is doing tariffs correctly, but I welcome the added incentive for domestic manufacturing and mining.
I’m not pleased with Trump’s trade policies either but your central claim was that nobody is willing to address the issue at all, and that’s simply not true. You, me, and Trump all probably mutually disagree with each other’s preferred solutions, but we aren’t in denial about the problem itself. It is one of the most widely discussed economic and national security issues we have if not the most.
It was not my intent to have a conversation about whether or not someone can believe Donald Trump and whether or not his rhetoric matches his intentions. That conversation is played out and not productive. You simply can't and it simply doesn't.
I am not optimistic that the systemic solutions to the problems that I'm talking about are going to come from anyone in American politics and it is obvious to me that American hegemony is waning with little hope of it returning.
I worry about what this means for the future of democracy if a country run by an autocrat becomes the dominant power.
> I am not optimistic that the systemic solutions to the problems that I'm talking about are going to come from anyone in American politics
As I said, I think we probably both disagree with each other and Trump about what those solutions are. But what you said was that no one in American politics is willing to even acknowledge the problem in the first place, and that was false.
Meanwhile he's enacting policies to further entrench the issue.
Current president will onshore by making poor poorer and rich richer while weakening international position.
Yeah but does China have tax cuts for the rich?
Because let's be real here all the patriotism is just a facade the rich want to keep the money for themselves. Singing the national anthem on the fourth of July is cheap.
Yes, especially if you’re part of the CCP [1]. Well if they’re taxed at all. Can’t be taxed if you hide your wealth.
At least the wealth of the richest people in the US is made by people producing value and services. Bezos is rich because people like myself find Amazon and AWS to be quite good.
IMHO, the biggest wealth problem in the US is the rise of upper-middle class “elites” and management class. The one driving “mergers and acquisitions” to reduce competition between grocery stores or using rent control software to eke up rent costs.
1: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2024/oct/8/intelligence...
Quotes from the article:
> Intelligence community’s report on wealth and corruption of China’s rulers is overdue
> The truth is, the party is illegitimate. It is so for three reasons. First, it was formed and nurtured by the Communist International, a worldwide organization, and the Chinese Communist Party’s seizure of power in 1949 was made possible by Stalin and the Red Army.
Lol, this is the most obvious propaganda article I have seen in probably years. You should be embarrassed to post this in HN.
Not particularly, it's easy to read between the lines. Almost every news has propaganda in it, it's just a matter of degree. The comment I was replying to had obvious anti-US propaganda so why not reply in kind?
The actual report on CCP leaderships wealth is interesting to read though.
Why not respond in kind? Because you, the article, and the report loses all credibility.
Nah, regardless of the source posted I would likely not have credibility with the sort of folks who can't read an opinion piece with a strong belief and stance on something and consider those opinions and points anyways.
Personally it's not surprising that the people most interested in exposing the mass illicit wealth of the CCP politburo would be those who believe the CCP is illegitimate and harmful to the Chinese people. However since pro-communist propaganda is in vogue these days perhaps reading a counter view will expand some people's thinking. The article I linked was interesting precisely because it accepted and believed that the obvious corruption of CCP leadership is bad and called for exposing that.
The article reads like it’s written by a boomer who had his worldview frozen in 1990. I can’t take that article or anyone who posts that article seriously lol.
>At least the wealth of the richest people in the US is made by people producing value and services.
Citation needed. What value and service does a health insurance CEO provide?
"Nationalism is a bourgeois trick.” —Vladimir Lenin
I wish we could operate on the principle of data sharing in science. What a waste of resources to needlessly replicate and compete. Also, great, somebody else is doing it so we don’t have to! Less work for us.
This is already how astronomy, and specifically cosmology, research works in the US (and most other places). Data is made public within a short period of obtaining it on a schedule (usually less than a couple years) that is set before data is taken.
It is far from clear that the Chinese government supports this type of open data sharing.
"Deeply embarrassing as a US citizen."
Agreed. The US has squandered so much money over the decades that they're now over $300k/taxpayer in debt, with interest to that that being the fourth largest cost, and two of the top three being insufficiently funded programs that simply steal from the grandchildren.
It would be even more embarrassing if we didn't cut back on non-essential spending.
U.S. National Debt Clock : Real Time https://share.google/adgsGnl43Yk8S0zDq
Yeah, let's cut back on the relatively small investments in science that actually grow the economy, particularly at a moment in time when our geopolitical competitors are making enormous investments, and when leadership and talent in science is more important than ever.
Just walk around the Boston area and look at how much of the economy is driven by federal research funding attracting global talent to universities, which then generates ideas and the next generation of talent, which feeds the biotech companies, which grow the economy.
Letting all of that happen in China instead of the US just to make a tiny dent in the deficit (and to punish progressive institutions and prevent cultural change from immigration) is unbelievably fucking stupid.
Being at the forefront of science is not ~non-essential~.
It is literally one of the most important things to make a nation great.
This retroactive stuff is pointless. The US can't do anything right, but if it stops doing anything it's doing it's a catastrophe.
> It would be even more embarrassing if we didn't cut back on non-essential spending.
Boy are you going to feel bad as you watch what happens to the debt over the next few years.
Perhaps this pain would be worth it if we also cut back on non-essential tax-cuts for the rich.
Instead, we're cutting cheap scraps like this from the budget while the fattest fucks at the table get to gorge themselves for another two years.
Trump just added 4 trillion more in debt funding tax cuts for billionaire. The amount of money science research gets in the US is pennies compared to that. Investments in science always returns on investment in the form of technology. The internet was a research project mind you.
A research project from Cern in Switzerland mind you. And a English guy who created all the protocols there
HTTP is an Internet protocol; it is not the Internet. Moreover, it relies on other protocols such as TCP, which itself uses UDP.
TCP was invented in the US 20 years before HTTP.
That's like saying whoever invented the wheel also invented the car (For reference likely Iran & Germany)
VoIP and games and IM clients and non-web apps and "cloud storage" and all sorts of other things exist and evolve on the internet separate to the web.
It's not as though the rest of the non-web internet is a historical curio or abandoned obsolete technology.
Not to mention almost all the breakthroughs on top of the initial Web happened in the US: Mosiac, Netscape, Apache, Yahoo, Google, etc. Many of them started out as "non-essential" research projects.
That's the same company twice, Apache which was just another standard implementation of httpd (the cern thing) and one company that isn't and wasnt relevant outside of the us and surely isn't known as tech driver around here (Yahoo)
Actually a great summary of why the world does not actually blindly thinks USA! When they think about tech advancements
Apache was quickly spun off from its NCSA roots to become its own thing. There's a lot of history here that you're twisting around or ignoring. I'm not even American but, while lots of other countries made their own contributions, it's insane to argue that networked computing would have advanced anything like it did without the US's innovations borne of their (former) attitude of experimentation and exploration.
Your point is like saying whoever invented the car also invented the wheel.
That doesn't defeat the point. It makes the point that research benefits all. That research can't happen in vacuum. It needs to be funded and culture and institutions build around it.
For a technology forum, the sheer volume of pettiness and anti-science and technology attitude is confounding.
People here sounds like the most mediocre managers I've ever worked with in my life.
Can this be expressed on a graph?
Can we see expenditures, big equipment contributions, Nobel prizes, etc. on a graph?
Expenditures:
https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20246/cross-national-compariso...
Practically neck and neck! Wow.
I bet the graph of this over time would present a powerful story.
I updated the link, scroll down!
Thank you for sharing this!
This is a really interesting story. It's not the US pulling back so much as it is China's rapid and incredible growth. According to this graph, the only period of US scientific expenditure stagnation was during the 2008 housing crisis. Our expenditures over the last decade have been increasing at a pretty good growth rate too.
The data points for the forthcoming years will be interesting (sad) to see after all of these cuts.
Is there a glitch in sorting? Why is EU at #2?
Why? China will do the job, instead of US...
This, and many other things in the area of science, is an embarrassment.
However, I feel that what is argued about, by all sides, misses the point.
The US spends 2X what China does on civilian space programs, and 4X what Europe spends. We spend 2X as much on health care, 1.5X as much on education, and 2X as much on science research.
Our systems are inefficient and corrupt, and that is what needs to be addressed.
Arguing for or against how much money we need to spend or to cut is just the modern day circus that distracts everyone from the real problems and provides everyone on both sides with feel good excuses.
>Our systems are inefficient and corrupt, and that is what needs to be addressed.
Citation needed. Even Musk's DOGE trolls found no evidence of significant corruption/inefficiency.
The first few areas are easy,since budgets are known and there are actual comparative measurements that have been done.
Health. We spend $5T a year on our "health", which is 2X the per capita amounts spent by western European countries, yet we have poorer outcomes. We have poorer outcomes not just among lower income classes, but also poorer outcomes when comparing upper class incomes between the US/Europe
Education. We spend 1.5X per capita compared to western European nations, and we have poorer outcomes
If we would simply match the budgets for these two areas with European budgets, and even accept the fact that they would have better systems in place, we would save $3T a year. This is a fairly direct measure of how much more efficient Europe is with their resources. They are either that much better/smarter than we are, or we have a corrupt system, or a combination of the two.
Public construction costs. It costs 50% to 200% or even more to build public projects in the US than in Europe. That is, if we can even complete our projects. One of many reports and analysis: https://www.constructiondive.com/news/us-rail-projects-take-...
Other areas are difficult to have direct comparisons, and it is difficult to compare results. The US solution to everything is to pour money into it. And it seems that any cut, any type of cut at all, portends doom.
Military. We spend $1T a year. We have something like 1200 military bases, over half are international. We have massive cost and time overruns all the time. Yes, we may have the best military in the world, but it certainly feels like the taxpayers are being taken advantage of. You may feel differently. I do not think we need 1200 based. I do think that the military industrial complex profits way beyond what is reasonable.
Science research. We spend about $1T in R&D, almost triple of Europe. We pay our researchers 2X-3X what researchers make in Europe. Yet it seems that any type of cut to science budgets is met with the proclamation that we will lose all of our researchers to Europe. Our major research centers need a 70% incidental budget on top of their grants otherwise they will go out of business. CEO's of major non profit medical research centers need to make millions and millions of dollars per year. There is something wrong here.
Space. We spend 2X what China spends, and 4X what Europe spends. One example is the costs of space telescopes: China spends 9 figures, Europe spends 10 figures, and we spend 11 figures. NASA's SLS rocket is a case study in how to literally brun up billions and billions of taxpayers money. We can, and need to do better.
Corruption is not always the simple graft of the CEO and board. Corruption also comes in the form of a system where too many people make too much profit to want to make the system better.
Saying things are expensive is not saying they are corrupt or inefficient. What specific problems and examples of corruption do you believe should be fixed?
Similarly, overall spending patterns do not mean corruption or even excess. We get huge economic returns on science and space spending, for instance.
Look at the source you cited. Labor is expensive here and infrastructure projects often create public outrage that makes them take longer. That's a problem but it's not corruption and not something you fix by slashing spending.
I wanted to give you an example of what I see is not just corruption, but an example of how feedback loops of self interest combine to create systemic issues that threaten our entire society.
It is "known" in the research industry that getting government grants, especially NIH grants, is "gold" in that they provide large sums of money, and, importantly, that a large part of these grants have little accountability and are not used directly for the research. Peoples careers are rewarded for successful at getting these grants, and there are societal mechanisms in place to insure these grants continue to flow. A lot of organizations are so dependent on these type of grants that when an attempt was made to reduce the unaccountable and "incidental" nature part of those grants to what is standard in non-governmental charities, there was fear that entire important research organizations would be brought down.
This is an example:
- My congressman has a public campaign to support the political and legal fight to preserve the ability of research organizations to carve out nearly half, or 42% of government research grants so that they can be used for general organizational needs, and not directly for the research projects they are awarded to. Part of this political and legal fight is about making these carve outs more accountable, as they currently are not. For comparison, non profit grants from non federal sources provide for 0% to 13% carve outs. The new proposal is to reduce the carve outs to 13%, in line with these other organizations, and to have stricter accounting rules. The more common name for this is the 69% indirect costs added to federal grants, as compared to the standard 0% to 15% added by non governmental grants.
- The former CEO of one of these nonprofit research institutes (Dana Farber) was making $3M to $4M per year. This is not unusual for the CEO's of many of these larger non profits.
- This CEO is the mother of this particular congressman.
- This former CEO had 50+ of her research papers called into question due to claims of fraud. These papers were called into question by an outside researcher.
- Six of these papers were retracted due to fraud, several dozen others were "updated". These papers are used directly or indirectly to acquire government grants, and are also used to justify making this person CEO.
- One of this former CEO's co-authors on some of these papers was also the Director of Research Integrity for the institution, who also investigated the allegations (though not the ones he was a co author on).
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/4/21/dana-farber-pap... https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/01/top-harvard-cancer-r...
if thats the case, how do we set that threshold? whats the criteria?
(i don't disagree per se, just curious on the thinking around this)
What I should have said is that the system is corrupt, not that there is corruption in the system. There will always be profit to made in the system (there has to be for it to work), and there will always be corruption to some degree in the system, but having a system that is corrupt is a different type of thing.
I believe our health system itself is corrupt. There is no one person or group of people that are causing the problem, it is the way the entire system works that is the problem.
Looking at the amount of health spend as a percent of GDP, it has gone from 5% 60 years ago, to 12% 30 years ago, to 18% today. This is clearly a trend that is unsustainable. Compare this to the EU which is more like 10%-12% of GDP (not that they do not have problems)
This increase is bad enough, but we also have a system that is worse in all the ways that count - percent of population that is covered, outcomes at every class level, and the complexity of the system.
From a societal perspective, the health system is simply out of control - it continues to grow and profit in excess of what the economy can support while at the same time provides less and less value than what is clearly possible by looking at other countries.
The answer is not to simply cut spending and fire people in a random manner
The answer is also not to simply tax and spend more.
And, no, I do not know how to fix this.
probably with such a system that is so messed up, it will take a multi-pronged approach (and a party to campaign on it) i'd guess...
It's funny, I'm told my whole adult life "We can't be like Europe! We're too different! We're too heterogenous/big/special/insert_excuse_here!"
And yet, we can point to a number on their balance sheet and say full stop "This is what we shall spend and nothing more, if it still sucks, skill issue."
WHY does America spend trillions more on healthcare than our peers? Is it because of welfare queens on Medicaid? Or is it the scumsuckers in the private health insurance industry, in a system that keeps most people in all but indentured servitude to their employer to even be able to afford the privilege of getting dropped by the insurance companies the second you get sick?
Is there waste? Sure.
Tell me how just going in like Ron Swanson and slashing the shit out of every budget while simultaneously blowing up the debt with tax cuts fixes any of that.
Slashing will not fix the problem. Nor will more taxing and spending fix it.
The problem is systemic. We have an out of control health system that is steadily growing as a percent of GDP while providing less and less value to less and less people.
You are embarrassed because other countries can do things too?
Seems like it's more because other counties can do things we no longer can or are willing to.
On the other hand, the US is close to bankruptcy. And that's not all the current admin's fault.
And their cuts are trying to avoid that, although they have thrown out many babies with the bath water. It's hard to blame them for trying to avoid default, which would be far worse than anything.
The program apparently cost $900 million which is not a trivial cost.
Yeah, except for the tax cuts for the wealthy which created more debt than all of their other cuts combined, and then some.
The added bummer is that space funding cuts aren't just hurting public projects, they're also killing private companies that rely on the government as a customer.
its fine, with all the new contracts to open private prisons to house "illegals" that we're going to rent out to corporations for pennies on the dollar and weapons contracts so that we can gift israel with bombs to murder Palestinian babies, it should all even out. /s
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Who needs science, when you can have tax cuts for the rich ?
more than that, who needs science, when you can have a stressed, desperate and ignorant populace that's easily pliable ?
Who need science when you can sell and market pseudo science to the populous?
Who needs science when all your questions are answered by “gods will/gods plan”.
It’s pathetic, and 100% why we see the ongoing attack on science and education.
We keep winning don’t we? The winning doesn’t stop
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Can you clarify? What does a better country look like after this transformation? Will they be doing more science or less? If they will be doing more science in this golden age, why would they need to give up their place as a leader in global science to get there?
Pretty sure they are sarcastic.
Doubtful based on their post history.
We're hurtling toward the destination of scaring every single academic and researcher out of the country for the foreseeable future.
Impossible. Even the Nazis had some academics.
Like the ones that put the US on the moon ;)
The Nazi's didn't have the internet to live stream their genocides.
whats the destination?
Where truth is treated with scorn, scientists and other geeky professions have to scurry into the shadowy corners; where the wealthy rule over the rest due to the confusion of wealth with virtue and truth; where the best instincts of humanity, for curiosity, exploration, compassion, and rationality are mocked and cruelty, disdain for intelligence, disdain really for anyone not like the cookie cutter mainstream really, are lifted up at the cost of all groups that can't or won't fit in.
Very dramatic, but funding scientific studies is no antidote to groupthink, authoritarianism, and cruelty towards the non-conforming, in case you missed the last 5 years.
There's a pretty clear causal chain between the abuse of public trust and social influence from educational and scientific institutions in the last decade or so and the anti-intellectualism we're witnessing today, abuse which was and is driven by the same hubris you demonstrate by conflating intellectualism with All That Is Good. And needless to say since I am posting on HN, but I say that as an intellectualist.
You are blaming the cruelty of the homophobes and racists on the hubris of the smart people? Not blaming the victims exactly, but certainly not holding citizens responsible for their civic contributions.
> whats the destination?
The optimistic case is currently that China matures politically and becomes the leader of the technological world.
The destination is Putin's Russia where truth does not matter, oligarchs loot the country, opposition is only a token and the most of the country is poor and stagnating.
Project 2025 lays it all out.
Historically, the center of scientific innovation shifted from Europe to the United States approximately a century ago, and is currently showing signs of transitioning towards China.
Seems like every time I see a paper more than half the names on it are Chinese.
Is there any metric to quantify this as a fact or is it just one of these things US people keep telling themself?
In my lifetime I never got the impression that any area was particularly the scientific leader.
How many technological innovations do you remember from the past 20 years and from which areas did they come from?
Surely a few come to mind. Well distributed around the globe, kinda focused around my living area obviously as this is what I hear most.
How do you see that? Do you see an obvious tech leader in all fields somehow?
China is going to need to get a lot better about immigration and fraud for that to really happen.
it doesn't seem like they're having any issue with it in the past 5-10 really. its not that hard to go to the mainland if you have science or engineering creds these days.
Was wondering, how feasible is it to immigrate for a humble 老外?
It's very easy to be a 洋鬼子.
You obviously know jack shit about China.
ok
There are a lot of inflationary ways China grows their numbers. From sketchy journals owned by the government to made up stuff.
Satellites and telescopes can be easily verified.
Transitioning back towards China where it even more historically was.
Except historically, China didn't propagate technology. It was used at the discretion of the emperor and held as a secret. They had moveable type before Gutenberg, but had a culture, government, and language that were all factors against its propagation. They had a navy second to none, but found the rest of the world not interesting (Confucian Conservatism is one theory) and dismantled it, nearly a century before Magellan's voyages. If anything, their knowledge leaked to the rest of the world as opposed to them leading it.
Today, China is playing Go with the world as their board. We have to start counting liberties on our groups; the late game is now.
Didn’t JWST recently present confounding evidence against one of of the core assumptions of big bang theory, thereby invalidating it? Something about the faint, far off “redshift” background radiation from the beginning of time was actually coming from a much closet newer source , not what the theories held? I’ll repost paper if I can find it.
While the US needs to get spending under control, the cuts to science sting.
A $1B cut for ΛCDM seems pragmatic as long as we focus on the economy. The cosmic background will still be waiting for us in four to ten years.
Unfortunately, it feels like the budget cuts being made are incredibly partisan and not actually helping pay down the debt spiral. Especially when the deficit is increasing.
Everything needs to be cut back, not just things one party doesn't care for.
> not actually helping pay down the debt spiral
Just to be clear about the new budget law. It does not attempt to reduce the deficit or debt at all. It sidesteps existing law to increase the deficit beyond what is actually allowed.
The rate of increase of the debt increased last Friday, even as we are told we can't afford things we could afford 10 years ago.
Put simply, we were doing a better job of managing our debts until last Friday when we decided that the national debt doesn't matter.
>While the US needs to get spending under control
There is no evidence of this need and every single cut feels like it hurts the citizens more and more.
What needs to be done is an increase on taxes on the wealthiest corporations and people instead of cutting science funding, food benefits, and kicking people off their health insurance.
> There is no evidence of this need ...
Not sure I agree. Interest on our national debt is increasing (I believe it's third largest spending category, depending on how you break it down) and is expected to surpass defense spending this year.
The rest I totally agree with.
Due to tax cuts, not really do to science expenditures.
Totally agree. My point is mainly that if we did destroy the national debt (as promised by this administration), we'd be able to spend significantly more on whatever we liked. We don't seem to be doing that, however.
Last time this admin was around, they inflated the money supply by creating 20% more money than had ever been made. They had zero intention of cutting debt, they just want to use debt to trap everyone else. They lied to you and there is historical evidence that should have made you think twice before supporting them.
Pretty sure that poster isn’t supporting them.
I meant "we" as in the US. I try not to be explicit about my political affiliations online. Or, frankly, in general.
"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist."
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/martin-nie...
For sure.
Should taxes increase while we're on the brink of recession?
Shouldn't we do austerity now, then tax increases during periods of prosperity?
Tax increases will trickle down and morph into unemployment, under-investment, and de-growth. Just look what ZIRP / Section 174 did to software engineers. Imagine that across the entire economy.
The power of the US economy is in its consumer base. People need to stay employed and see job/salary growth. That means companies need to spend more money on headcount and not cut costs.
If tax cuts don't trickle down, it is unlikely that tax increases will.
>Tax increases will trickle down
Piss trickles down, nothing else has trickled down since Reagan made that up.
Eggs were slightly up in price at the end of Biden's term, but the tariffs have done nothing except increase the price of everything by 10% across the board. The Trump bill just makes recession more likely. The tax cuts benefit nobody but companies and the most wealthy, which Trump used to pretend he was part of but now actually is.
> Piss trickles down, nothing else has trickled down since Reagan made that up.
When businesses face hardship, they lay off. That's demonstrable. Employees are a luxury.
When Section 174 tax code ended, that set off a tidal wave of layoffs. And that's not even a new tax -- that's just amortization. When real taxes are levied on businesses, it'll be a blood bath.
> tariffs have done nothing except increase the price of everything by 10% across the board.
You're preaching to the choir. I'm not a fan of the administration or the tariffs. For a party that purports to be fiscally conservative, they're doing the opposite.
Or we need to increase revenues. Irresponsible tax cuts over the last decades have fueled the spiral. You need both responsible spending, and thoughtful revenue collecting.
This is about populism as a reaction to "elites", such as those who head universities and science. They are looking to eliminate or replace them. The reality is this has nothing to do with debt or deficit. I'm not sure why this isn't understood. They've done nothing to hide this fact. They've been clear that they are replacing the heads of both private and public institutions with those that are loyal to the party head.
You must be trolling. How does giving ICE $170 Billion, with a B, dollars have anything to do with curting spending? We are wathich the rise of a christian nationalist police state.
Science funding is roughly 1% of the government budget "everything needs to be cut" is pure and utter hogwash.
What 'spending under control' you are talking about, when the recent big bill massively increased the deficit.
Or we could just raise taxes.
> it feels like the budget cuts being made are incredibly partisan and not actually helping pay down the debt spiral.
The recent legislative changes exploded the deficit. They didn’t reduce it.
Any concern by Conservatives about debt is fraudulent given their actual behaviour.
NDT made this clear like a generation ago: its absolute nonsense to cut science funding to get federal "spending under control". The amount that goes to all of this is a drop in the bucket compared to military and subsidies. hell, we spend 1/10th of the total federal science funding (~200bn) per year JUST giving free money to oil and gas companies. trying to "fix" spending this way, even if it was actually reasonable to try and do, is tantamount to trying to save to buy a house by eating two fewer avocado toasts per week.
Or we could undo the tax-cuts of the past 20 years to bring in revenue.
>not even noticing how ideological the "need" to cut is
Whitey still on the moon
Underrated reference.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitey_on_the_Moon
Problem is most of the spending is on social services nobody is willing to touch. If you even think about touching Medicare/medicaid or SS: your own party will get rid of you. There are a lot of other things that are large budget items nobody can think touching.
The bill that was recently passed has massive cuts to medicare and medicaid
Medicare too? I heard a lot about Medicaid being cut, but very little about Medicare.
Can you point me to some specifics about the cuts to Medicare?
(Going on it in less than two years, so I want to know.)
Yes, Medicare too. Unless Congress intervenes, Medicare providers will see about a 4% cut every year starting next October. The new law's deficit boost triggers automatic sequestration cuts across the board each year for ten years.
Total 10 year cut: $~490 billion
Source: https://prospect.org/politics/2025-07-03-republicans-cutting...
The source is clearly biased (sorry), but I believe it's accurate on the numbers.
Interestingly my representative just sent me a message assuring me that both were protected in the bill. Which proves my point, you don't touch them, or if you do you ensure it looks like you didn't.
Well, based on unbiased information out there (like GAO for example) your representative is clearly lying. Maybe you consider voting for someone other than your representative…
> Problem is
social services aren't a problem (sorry to be pedantic but i think it's really important to recognize that these things are necessary, and we can afford them).
> most of the spending is on social services nobody is willing to touch. If you even think about touching Medicare/medicaid or SS
but the BBBA passed, with massive cuts to medicare/medicaid (which will have some insane downstream cost effects on the broader healthcare/insurance industry as a whole, which will be passed on to insured individuals).
> your own party will get rid of you
that doesn't really appear to have happened to a degree that matters yet, because these orders are coming from the top of the GOP, but i suppose we'll see when the shit really hits the fan in the next couple of years.
I'm not a big fan of social security, but social security revenue is supposed to be "off books"... wanting to cut the payable, but still keep the receivable is more than a little dishonest. And if we look at what's happened, I didn't see much in the way of "social services" that escaped the axe other than social security. There are, of course, cuts that could make a difference (the DEA alone is $10bil/year... and there's another $5-10bil used for DEA shit in the state dept. budget), but those are the ones that no one's willing to touch. We don't even immediately have to go after the military, though there's half a trillion per year there (or more) that could easily be cut. And guess what? Just as things are about to get desperate, world events are unfolding that will even make the most cowardly pacifist hesitate to take slices out of that.
It really hurts to see this happening. CMB-S4, stands for stage 4, is a huge collaborative effort that units many CMB scientists and experiments, in a sense that stage 1 to 3 experiments are “converging” towards this.
To put that in context, CMB-S4 being a DOE project has many side effects to other CMB experiments in a lot of ways. For example, a few years ago the LiteBIRD mission led by JAXA from Japan has been gaining momentum, and many international CMB scientists got involved. European scientists got funded by ESA, and US scientists were expecting NASA to fund them too. In the end they denied the proposal (despite generally positive impressions when discussing with various people there), partly because they think the satellite based CMB experiment LiteBIRD has significant overlap with the goals of the ground based CMB experiment CMB-S4, deeming it unnecessary to support LiteBIRD.
And then CMB scientists used to get generous access to NERSC, a top 10 HPC system in the world. But as CMB-S4 becomes a DOE project, NERSC being DOE funded also, it becomes a bit of conflict there, in the sense that they feel they need to prioritize access for CMB-S4 to guarantee its success. There are many other factors in play but in the end it becomes much more difficult to even get access to the system, not to mention having any sizable allocation.
All these might not be so bad as CMB-S4 is supposed to be our endgame. It would benefits the CMB community as a whole so much. But now? It’s game over.
It also hurts particle physics progress as well. Long story short, the CMB B-mode holds a promising sensitivity to inflationary models, that its discovery may finally makes inflation falsifiable. At the very least, it involves an energy scale so high that no experiments on Earth can reach, and therefore is a good complement, to high energy physics experiments such as LHC.
There is a reason it is deemed so important in both the decadal survey and the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel.
Project like this has under heavy scrutiny from both the scientific community and the funding parties around feasibility, risks, costs, etc. It wasn’t a a light decision to have had happened in the beginning. Why would the end come so abruptly without explanation?
Hey another way to dumb down the country. Become second rate at particle physics (LHC), aerospace (Boeing), cut funding from universities, <TLDR list goes here>.
But we're #1 on social media!
Boeing was self-inflicted with the takeover of management by the McDonnell-Douglas bozos. They destroyed Boeing's ability from within, all on their own.
A case study of the symptoms of neoliberal "profit at all costs" MBA mindset. Enshittify the services. Enshittify the planes. Enshittify the cars. Enshittify the food. Turn everything to shit, so that the line can go up one more quarter.
China is actually #1 with social media at this point
This is pretty bizarre to cut US support for a project and still claim that the project is US-led.
If we do not detect after glow does this mean that cosmic inflation did not happen?
Papa did not like this. This toy doesn't make noise (or noise enough)!
Guth may never get a Nobel.
Can anybody steel man the practical value of this kind of research for me? It seems to me that almost all astronomy, particularly the sort studying very large scale phenomena like this, is essentially useless for humanity. The best it does is satisfy our curiosity about the nature of our reality, but when the subject of study is something so huge there's no chance of it ever having practical application to humanity (unlike quantum mechanics!) As for the argument that it "kills private companies" who are contracting for the government on projects like this, it seems very much like a broken windows fallacy. If the government went around breaking everybody's windows that would be great for the private companies that replace windows, but so what?
The most useful kind of astronomy is searching our solar system for dangerous rocks so that we might avert disaster. Anything beyond our solar system is just useless stargazing, everything out there is too far away for us to do anything with or about. Theories about reality which can only be validated or ruled out by looking at things so far away cannot have local relevance to us, or else whatever local phenomenon they govern which might be useful to us could also be used to test that theory.
(For the record, I think this administration are a bunch of morons.)
Most of the benefits of blue(dark?)-sky research are unpredictable almost by definition. We're exploring for the sake of finding answers about the universe, and in the process learning 'unknown unknowns' which may pay off later. Using your example - quantum mechanics wasn't invented with computer chips in mind.
Having said that I think that there are some practical benefits coming from this research that aren't commonly discussed. For example: adaptive optics - which is heavily used in astronomy - is also used in medical imaging and national defense. Astronomers also drive a lot of detector development. Previously this was the CCD, now things are moving into new, exotic devices like MKIDs. Maybe one of these new detectors will end up in a mobile phone camera in the future, and you'll be able to take excellent photos in low-light levels. There are many more examples I'm sure, but this is just what I have off the top of my head..
The final practical AND philosophical application I can think of, is that we are about 10-20 years away from putting direct constraints on life in the universe. A big proportion of astronomers are currently working on this. I think an answer to this question will dramatically change how society views itself.
Your list of more modern benefits reminded me of a more modern discovery, one that is directly relevant to this article: the CMB itself was discovered as background noise in microwave communications systems.
I mean that can be said of any research, couldn't it? 400 years back, nobody would have dreamed that studying why these dots in the night sky move will help us understand tides on earth. 200 years back no one would have imagined that the key to health and diseases are some invisible organisms in the air no one can see. A mere 100 years back it would've been impossible to conceive that these imaginary "atoms" will lead to reserves of immense energy. And yet here we are today living in a world only made possible because of what people did before.
The cosmic microwave background is not even something imaginary far away in time or space. It is radiation that surrounds us in the present. It is passing by the earth constantly, all the time. There's some research trying to use it for space navigation, but no one knew you could do that when they pointed antennas randomly in the sky. The amount of cross over some research has to a lot of other research and eventually to practical applications cannot be easily comprehended. Science builds upon science in very complex and convoluted ways with each step being that people simply tried to find more about something around them that they did not know. If you knew how to find it, then there's nothing to research in the first place, is there?
There must be so much information in cosmic microwave radiation about things we may not even know. Who knows if it could lead to uncovering information about dark matter or dark energy and who knows where that information would take human civilization. At this time, research simply indicates that you find out as much about it as you can, because it is there!
> Can anybody steel man the practical value of this kind of research for me? It seems to me that almost all astronomy, particularly the sort studying very large scale phenomena like this, is essentially useless for humanity.
The funny thing is: this science with few direct application to human affairs is one of the oldest sciences. Those few applications, as a standard of time and use in navigation, have had a far greater impact upon the establishment of human civilization than any other scientific discover.
It would be easy to argue that those are things of the distant past and that other branches of science have a more direct impact today. That's true. Yet it is also true that our curiosity of the heavens has been a constant. While our early notions were pure nonsense, they shaped society. While our initial discoveries of its true nature had little immediate impact upon everyday life, it formed the basis of future scientific development. For example: the Copernican model of the solar system was more true to the actual form of the solar system, but it was less accurate than the more refined Ptolemaic model. Kepler figured out the ellipses bit, through the extensive observations of Tycho Brahe. Observations of planetary motion provided evidence for Newton's theory of gravitation. Ironically, observations of planetary motion also lead to the refinement of the classical model by Einstein. The understanding of gravity has been fundamental to engineering. While it is plausible that much of that would have been discovered without astronomy, the development of special and general relativity depended upon astronomy. One of the most important applications of that is GPS.
Now it would be easy to argue almost all of these discoveries have their basis in the study of the solar system, but that's not really the point. In the times of Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton, the utility of studying the motions of the planets would appear to have about as much relevance as the study of the CMB does today. They certainly would not have been able to predict what we have discovered due to the foundations they laid. The same can be said of modern astrophysics. We can claim that it may help us detect and understand the nature of gravitation waves. We can claim that it is a handy tool since "the universe" is better at building particle accelerators than we are. Yet even if we made astounding discoveries along those line, people would still ask: what use is it? We can't really provide an honest answer for that since we have yet to travel that path through time (i.e. we don't know what the future holds).
If you ever have a chance, I suggest reading a book on the history of astronomy. You will find many names that you will probably know from other branches of science, and learn of the many discoveries that have been made or facilitated through astronomical research. (That's particularly true of physics and mathematics.)
do you ever use GPS? is it handy? Where's the society that has never done astronomy yet has GPS ?
Sorry, but that doesn't work. (Your argument, not GPS.)
Relativity was discovered after discrepancies were noticed in observations of Mercury, right in our solar system. Not through observations of distant galaxies. And suppose Mercury was never studied, or in fact never existed; would that make GPS impossible for humanity? Of course not. Relativity is relevant to GPS because it has effects on the scale of GPS, and can therefore be discovered and studied by simply putting very accurate clocks into orbit. Had it not already been known of when GPS was created, it would have been discovered soon after.
In fact, studying very large and very distant things, other galaxies namely, has revealed discrepancies that suggest general relativity might not be the whole story. But is that relevant to GPS? Not in the slightest.
I see what you're saying and agree that we probably would have noticed the discrepancies in GPS positioning pretty quickly if we had tried to make it work without knowing about general relativity (GR). But it took _Einstein_ the better part of a decade to develop GR. Even if he hadn't existed, GR still would have had to be discovered by scientists using public funding. What company would pay someone to work on this problem for 10 years without a guarantee of success?
I also don't think there is a strong correlation between studying things close-by, e.g. in our solar system, and how useful the finding will be. Our next break through in particle physics may come from studying dark matter, black holes or quasars. Maybe that will help us build even better computers? Or faster than light communication? We don't know where the treasure is buried!
GPS requires satellites and rocketry as well and is built on centuries of curiosity about space, physics, and the universe. Curiosity by people who could not dream of something like GPS at the time. Your assertion that "ok, we've dobe enough curiosity and science, it's time to stop" is unnecessary and frivolous. Funding for projects like these are miniscule fractions of the budgets of large nations like the US and they also create jobs. There is no valid reason whatsoever to cancel this research except for the sole, actual reason, which is as always, "to own the Libs".
best country ever
We have enough inflation domestically thank you
Lowering inflation by cutting scientific research is like trying to free up disk space by deleting the odd text file. (Some numbers, for context: 2024 National Science Foundation budget ~$10B, Musk annual compensation at Tesla, ~$45B, Defense spending 2024 ~$850B)
Lowering inflation by cutting social services is like trying to free up disk space by deleting `/usr`. It will be devastating.
Meanwhile the wealthy have sequestered so much wealth for themselves that it makes any talk of "reducing inflation" by taking it out on the general population as the anti-democratic sham it is. Our government is purportedly Of the people, For the people, and By the people. For this to happen the government must function as an agent for the people, not just for the tiny minority of them who own the wealth.
How much does searching for signals of cosmic inflation affect domestic inflation?
We're well past quantifiable statements. The meme "Government spending causes inflation" is entrenched now in some segments and will be used to justify nearly any spending cut.
Roughly what Elon has [both possesses and performed]. I kid, sorry to see the science go
We could probably measure it if you really want an accountant to do so. I don't think it is worthwhile getting a number. Lets go with very tiny effect.
However anything that is significant is things nobody will talk about.
The problem is that cosmic inflation is applied after domestic inflation, as a multiplier. So, we can’t say it is inconsequential in comparison.
Thankfully as soon as we stop measuring it, it will go away, because we as a society don’t have concepts like “object permanence” and “an objective underlying reality.”
cant tell if you really believe funding science creates inflation lmao
It’s a play on the double meaning of the word thanks
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Because they unfortunately largely have the law on their side.
Unless you're saying we should take extra-legal means to usurp the government. Then we'd be no better then the January 6 Capitol rioters.
As long as the American electorate is largely uneducated or mis-eeucated about politics, and continues to gullibly believe the words of wannabe dictators, we'll continue to slide into fascism.
american exceptionalism is a drug and the majority of people (certainly the majority of voters) are hopelessly addicted to it
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> Almost a trillion dollars to increase the resolution of white noise.
Is this "a trillion dollars" in the room with us? The budget of the canceled project is not even 1B. You're off by not one order of magnitude, but by three.
Milne's model was a dead end It doesn't match observed gravitational effects or the detailed anisotropies we've measured in the CMB Higher resolution isn't just 'zooming in on noise', it tests inflation, neutrino physics, and quantum gravity If you think it's vanity, read what the Planck mission accomplished You sound like you stopped keeping up at a pop-sci summary from 1935
Gotta save the money for the neo-con's coming war with China. False flag in three, two, one...
This kinda sucks but on the other hand, it's not like we won't figure this out eventually in humanitys history. There's no rush
You know, we don't actually ever need to find out. We can just rest easy knowing that it's possible to find out in the future. That's basically as good as knowing.
Frankly I don't care if we figure it out after I'm dead, and I'm not sure why you would either. I want to know now
I's certainly an interesting question; but what will we do differently if we find that the rate of cosmic inflation has been changing?
There's typically a lot of hidden value in exploring these kinds of things, and I get that, but there's not usually any particular urgency on any of them either.
Also, from the last paragraph of the article, it sounds like this was already on a path towards not getting funded; IMHO, it's not a major shift to get a final letter ending the project when construction was not approved a year ago.
Then feel free to donate to organizations to fund it now, and the rest of us that don't care just won't.
These sorts of comments always get downvoted to hell because HN are true believers in science, especially space and NASA. The arguments for funding extremely time-insensitive research are usually de minimis (we spend so much more on X) or to beat the Russians/Chinese. Mass transit proponents have a similar relationship with opportunity cost. Yes, we can build California High Speed Rail, but would there be more net benefit by using the money to improve Bay Area and LA transit? You have to value these things against where the money would otherwise go.
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Folks, let me tell you: nobody thought it could be done, but your favorite President (that's me, by the way) took on cosmic inflation and won, big league. We passed the spectacular Inflation Reduction Act - everybody's talking about it - and guess what? It didn't just tame rising prices here on Earth. No, no, we went ALL THE WAY. We ended cosmic inflation EVERYWHERE too. Incredible, right?
First of all, they said "not possible." Scientists, astrophysicists, even Big Foot was scratching his head! Nobody could figure out how to stop the universe from exponentially expanding faster than my rally crowds. But under my leadership, we negotiated the best cosmic deal. We deployed state-of-the-art interest-rate spinners on dark energy, put tariffs on runaway space-time, and - I'm not kidding - built the beautiful galactic wall to keep excess inflation out of the Milky Way!
The results? Beautiful. The universe has stabilized. No more exponential bloat! Stars remain at just the right distance, galaxies keep their perfect shape, and astronomers can finally retire their "Big Bang gone wild" theories! Our beautiful Inflation Reduction Act also saved trillions of light-years' worth of energy - making it green, making it lean, and letting us focus on what really matters: making America go WOW again!
Now the Fake News Media will try to discredit us: "Impossible!" they'll cry. But we know the truth. We have the best cosmic economists, the smartest black-hole negotiators, and let me tell you, they're all saying the same thing: "Sir, you've done what no one else could!" So join me in celebrating the greatest cosmic achievement in history. We've ELIMINATED inflation, not just here at home, but across the ENTIRE UNIVERSE. That's what winning looks like, folks!
Even the satire is too depressing at this point.
Especially since it’s AI generated.
That was way too coherent to be the current president.
A decade into his political career and we're still doing this.
If we stop doing this more people will start believing him. Perhaps it would be better to point out that a decade into his political career, he’s still doing this.
Is there a reason to stop? He still speaks this way.
Like a 3rd grader.
Actually, 1st grader. Sorry for the offense, 3rd graders.
> A decade into his political career and we're still doing this.
Satire? I think political satire has been around for a whole lot more than just one decade, friend.
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Obviously this administration has no interest in the homeless, but I'm personally a little tired of all the ivory tower elites getting upset that their intellectual play toys are in jeopardy, when millions of people struggle for food and healthcare.
And this isn't a matter of "you can do two things at once"; we should provide for our own people _before_ we worry about cosmic inflation.
It's worth keeping in mind that the budget for scientific funding in developed nations is typically ~1-2% of the total budget. Most of that money usually goes to medical research (as it should), which directly improves the quality of life for millions of people. The remainder goes into R&D which drives progress, yielding benefits across many different industries. Slashing the science budget and investing that money in homelessness instead would probably not fix homelessness in HCOL areas (issues are structural) and would end up being a major net negative for the rest of society.
The Big Beautiful Bill will add $4.5 trillion to the deficit in the next decade. If we hadn't passed it, we could have continued learning about cosmic inflation _and_ helped millions of people regarding food and healthcare and still saved trillions in the process. Of course, America would never do that, but our current issue is no longer "we should be helping people instead of doing unnecessary spending." Now we're squarely in "let's starve everyone of resources and give it all to the 1%."
The BBB will add $4.5T (this is the largest estimate) in addition to the $15T-$20T that would have happened without the BBB
The debt would have been about $52T+, now it will be $56T+, if projections are accurate.
While I do not agree with the BBB for many reasons, and I do agree that it increases the debt, it is not the primary driver of the debt.
The largest driver of our debt is our "health" system. We spend $5T a year on our "health" system, which is twice the amount per capita that western European nations spend, and we have outcomes that are, across the board, worse.
We spend $2.5T more per year than we "should" be spending on "health", which is by far the largest waste of our resources.
If we would "simply" find a way to spend as much as western Europe does (even keeping our poorer outcomes), we would save $25T over the next 10 years. Our entire national debt could be eliminated in 20 years by doing this, even with the BBB.
i agree ideologically, but the cuts are all coming from one ideological group of people bent on omnicidal domination of the planet. to them, healthcare and food for poor people is literally as unimportant as space exploration (unless it benefits the revolving-door relationship). we who oppose this should not cede ground on anything because those who propose this will not, either.
Yes, it is a matter of that you can do two things at once. There is nothibg preventing the US from doing both other than that the current government is actively opposed to both funding research and helping the homeless.