Trump won the popular vote. America is trying very hard to become one big red state.
Red states have had the worst outcomes for generations but they keep going back to republicans. The reasons escape me.
Maybe China will motivate them to get their act together.
Imagine if instead of an 80+ geezer or the most corporate woman in the world, they had someone credibly promising stimulus checks !! They'd win in a landslide.
Obama won huge on promising universal healthcare and then every dem after that decided to promise nothing.
> According to a report from the National Conference of State Legislatures, the Democratic Party has lost a net total of 13 Governorships and 816 state legislative seats since President Obama entered office, the most of any president since Dwight Eisenhower.
https://www.quorum.us/data-driven-insights/under-obama-democ...
Kamala had a good platform - voters still think she “didnt promise anything” https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx924r4d5yno
Democrats get punished for trying that too blatantly. Republicans and Democrats are playing different games when it comes to campaigning and propaganda.
They are both funded by big buisiness and are on the same side against Socialism.
Democrats (the voters) are broadly on board in my experience.
I donated to her campaign! But as someone following fairly closely it really didn't seem like she promised anything.
Was it anything like the universal free healthcare of Canada, UK, European countries? Or was it still paid healthcare but Obama wanted to integrate all of the healthcare in a universal system? Did it get implemented or is still in the works?
It was a requirement for everybody to get insurance, along with some protections (I forget exactly the mechanism) to prevent insurance companies from excluding people who had preexisting conditions (this is a big deal in the US, private insurance companies don’t want to insure you if they think you’ll be expensive), and a marketplace website thingy that made it easy to sign up for insurance.
There was a concern that if insurance companies can’t consider preexisting conditions, people might just wait until they get sick, and then sign up for insurance. So, there was a fine levied if you don’t get insurance.
There are also some subsidies for people who can’t afford insurance, but anecdotally the definition of “subsidy” and “can’t afford” vary from state to state.
Some states sued to try to get the uninsured fine removed. While the case was going through, the fine was set to $0. Ultimately, the fine was found to be allowed (IIRC), but by the time that happened political leadership had changed a couple times and fines are unpopular anyway, so it wasn’t reimplemented (some states do have their own implementation of the fine, though).
The system was implemented and remains. You can go to a government run portal and buy insurance in the US. Whether or not it is a good deal depends on what your state decided to do around subsidies and all that.
In conclusion, it was a market-driven compromise plan which still exists and is, in fact, highly compromised.
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/forty-years-of-economic-fre...
It's not like all this money was going to authentic, well-intentioned pursuers of the truth.
"Mark Block, former chief of staff to Republican 2012 presidential candidate Herman Cain, alleges that a total of $884.38 given in his name and without his knowledge between May and October was designed to circumvent federal election law and may be part of a larger scam involving tens of thousands of unwitting donors." https://fedsoc.org/commentary/fedsoc-blog/is-actblue-in-lega...
"An 88-year-old retired Yale University professor, for example, supposedly made 7,539 donations for a total of $213,163, according to FEC records." https://www.dailysignal.com/2025/01/08/elderly-democrats-say...
Similarly, your second quote is from a different Republican activist. His data and methodology don't appear to have been independently reviewed, and it doesn’t sound like there’s been any independent review of what he told people to get them to sign affidavits or verification of their claims, all but the first of which are small (it would not be the first someone elderly forgot about clicking on a link or signing up for a recurring charge), much less establishing that ActBlue condoned that activity.
The underlying problem here is that there aren’t higher standards for donations and because we don’t have a national digital identity system and the super court has found that political spending is close to speech in terms of the protections it deserves, it’s not clear how much more could even possibly be required.
The complaint against Trump is that he's "solving" everything by just burning it down.
Conservative policies consistently "outsource" public services to the private sector, allowing corruption and greed to grow. When things are done publicly, they're very efficient. We don't do that here. We outsource steps A-X to private companies which outsource to other private companies which all essentially launder government funds. At each "hop", there is a massive loss, because each party needs to turn a healthy profit. In addition, each "hop" introduces communication barriers, which further drives inefficiency and even results in failures.
Doing it all under one roof is just good sense. The American Republicans are explicitly against this, and will dismantle it whenever possible. They're not actually "starving the beast". They're just taking the beast's food and giving it to their buddies, who have no intention of helping the public.
The unfortunate reality is that simply cutting funds doesn't do what we think it will. DOGE will cut funds to service X but service X still needs to be done. Now, it will be mostly conducted by the private sector at 10x the cost, and will be paid for by government contracts. Congratulations, everything is worse.
edit: ideologues already attaK! sad to see ><
> but I'd think if it were economically productive it would be able to make a self-sustaining feedback loop.
A "self-sustaining" feedback loop still has humans in the loop, deciding to reinvest money in future improvements. If those humans decide to shut the loop down then obviously the benefits will stop being realized.
Unlike companies, whose purpose is to earn profits for owners and shareholders.
Higher education institutions in North America often already have close financial relationships with private sector firms.
Many startups were founded in a lab on some campus. =3
For a couple concrete examples: Xerox-PARC did incredibly innovative computing research that turned Apple into a trillion dollar company. For a more modern take: DeepSeek literally used ChatGPT to build their own cheaper competitor.
So, R&D is incredibly societally useful and it's in the collective interest of companies to have access to research results to keep them innovative and competitive. But, it doesn't make sense for any one company to actually do R&D. It really only works as a public good.
Also, not to be glib, but it sounds like you’re describing a very wealthy investor willing to spend a lot of money to advance social good by broadly funding an individually unprofitable research goal. That's just a government right?
My belief is that the underlying issue is that most companies and their drive for quarterly results means that they won't front a bunch of the "we're not sure if this will result in anything but it's an interesting thing to look into" style of research on their own. The Bell Labs of the olden days are gone and publicly-funded R&D has essentially replaced it.
It's not all bad though, having all of that research published instead of tucked away in a private research facility can be beneficial.
In general, considering the government and public money to not be part of “the economy” will make your internal models less performant - the public is an actor in the economy and so is the government, and both make decisions on the basis of their needs, values, and resourcing. Those entities seeing higher rates of return for their investment than other actors like private companies is absolutely consistent with, for example, different companies seeing different rates of return for the same investment dependent on their needs, resourcing, and constraints.
Am I correct to be worried for the sector? The best that can be hoped for is that the sector is simply ignored. The budget for it isn't even very large compared to DoD, but it is very hard to draw a line from R&D to profit. But we've seen with other agencies the violence is the point, and I don't expect them to treat Big Science any differently.
And yes, people should be worried. =3
So this sector may be "ignored" so to speak (though I'm not even sure what that means). I also have a number of friends at agencies and government contractors that all think they will "feel" these possibly large federal budget cuts. They are all on edge, especially with eyes towards the end of summer and early fall.
On top of this, let's just look at the current private sector and what they spend R&D dollars in: can you really say that $1b spent by Google, Meta, Amazon etc. actually ends up being better worthwhile than $1b spent by NASA? see this list of inventions NASA has inadvertently created: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/20-inventions-we-would...
In general, public sector research is already so strapped for cash. Their budgets are not large. Their salaries are lower than the private sector. I agree that public R&D spending is likely not at a "theoretical optimal level", but would you argue that private sector R&D spending is?
On the other side of things, they're using an economic model based on keyword searches for woke language in grant descriptions, and yet you felt compelled to comment to urge skepticism and "just ask questions" only about this study?
luotuoshangdui•6h ago
SoftTalker•5h ago
iFire•5h ago
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nih-layoffs-budget-cuts-medical...
https://www.science.org/content/article/trump-proposes-massi...
markhahn•5h ago
or do you believe that universities should not do research?
bilbo0s•5h ago
The error in it is just.. yeah.. it's not shining a good light on you or the position you're taking. Especially in light of the subject being discussed.
markhahn•5h ago
fifteen1506•5h ago
Second funniest thing I found out not so recently: the whole debacle, which I believed and hurt me personally, in hindsight, is the whole study about "kids who wait for candies instead of eating it right away fare better in life" failed to take into account kids' social-economical status.
This, plus the no doubt institutionalization of Scientific Studies (tm) (e.g., salt causes cardio problems, as a way to steer focus away from sugar), makes me apply 50% in the doubt scale for every study less than 50 years old.
Additionally, I'm told the waterfall model was never prescribed as a good method, but it was the most prominent picture of a old study which affirmed waterfall as very flawed, and people failed to properly read the text.
PS: on topic, everyone believes that of the opposite team; I found very enlightening an article which said "Find allies in unlikely places. One of my most surprising sources of support during my trial(s) was hard-right Brexiter (...). Find threads of connection and work from there", by a Remain person.
Let's hope that may break the cycle of default (a few times undeserved) mistrust.
mattgreenrocks•4h ago
The whole alpha/beta meme is a perfect microcosm of what we see today: ardent denial of the complexities of reality. It is a half-truth (some people fare better in the sexual marketplace) that gets elevated to the status of belief. When it becomes a belief, then intellectual heels are dug in. Conflicting information is downplayed, and no amount of reality seems to shift opinions. Perception is twisted to confirm pre-existing beliefs.
The belief must be held. It has been made to serve some psychological purpose for the holder, even if it just a subconscious justification for their own behavior.
You need humility to transcend the local maxima that every human falls into. It's the only way to counterbalance the prone-to-flaws hardware our brains run on. But a lot of our society tries to beat it out of people.
spacemadness•4h ago