I just don't understand why this is something people would want.
Unless we get economic progress more equally spread this will get worse and worse.
Inequality, as measured by GINI has been falling both for the EU as a whole and within most European countries for decades now. The last decade in particular has seen declines in nearly all EU countries.
Taking the EU on average the last time it increased was in 2014 - which is to be expected as the 2013 expansion allowed a number of relatively poor countries into the union.
For individual countries, you can check the statistics here: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI
A few examples, I looked at Ireland in particular, and inequality has never been lower - the earliest statistics I could find is from the mid-1980s. Inequality peaked around 2000 for the UK and has declined hugely since then. France is more equal than it was in 2000 although the fall is less dramatic than that for the UK. Admittedly Germany has seen a slight rise since 2000 but Germany has also absorbed millions of very poor refugees in that time.
The US is an outlier globally - with rising inequality over the last few decades.
Slightly off-topic, this untrue claim of rising inequality in Europe is often presented without challenge and then used to justify some radical political solution. To my mind, it's using the same political "mind hack" that the the MAGA/alt-right in the USA have used (in this case concerning race, immigrants, global multilateralism, or social tolerance - "wokism" - in general).
For both, the veracity of the claims is apparently unimportant and uninteresting as long as the claim aligns with one's political orientation. The goal of these oft repeated untruths is to provoke indignation or anger - in order to drum up support for some radical political "solution".
Here is a German podcast on the high quality "Deutschlandfunk".
Headline: "Only the top four percent make it to the top in Germany."
> Despite political upheavals over the past 150 years, Germany's elites have remained the same. Sociologist Michael Hartmann criticizes the fact that only four percent of the population shapes the country. He calls for a quota of working-class children on executive boards.
Same with Germany's schools, my country has one of the worst records when it comes to mixing it up. Those who come from well-educated parents will become well-educated. Society is quite static.
Next, Germany puts the majority of the financial burden of financing the country on incomes from work. Income from capital, or much worse, inheritances, are not even considered, whenever the government needs to plug holes it's going to come from working income.
Also, the number of bad jobs, especially those where even many engineers don't work for the actual employer, but for companies that lend them out, has only risen decade by decade to absurd heights. Employers may claim that is to work around the strict labor laws, that they cannot just fire somebody they don't want, but that is an incomplete statement at best. The entire economy has gone away from stable long-term, even life jobs, to ever more insecure employment. That is part of why our birth-rate has just dropped to new record lows too, there is just too little security and too much uncertainty in one's live these days.
We are also terrible at providing housing, which also depresses the labor market because moving has become risky and costly, there just is no housing no matter where you go, and if you find something it's likely to be much more expensive than what you had.
I forgot the actual URL! It's German though. And a podcast (19. July 2025, 29 minutes) But it's good and quite thorough and has a lot of details, so if you understand German, it is worth a listen.
They say the "elite" is about 4,000 people in Germany, defined as those having significant and real influence in politics, law, media (highly concentrated ownership), business.
https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/eliten-seit-dem-kaiserr...
Irish property prices are and have risen considerably - but "600%", I think, is a somewhat dramatic way to present the increases - on an average yearly basis, it's been about 3.5% per year for the last 2 or 3 decades. To put this into perspective, average household incomes have been rising at a rate closer to 9% (non-inflation adjusted) per year - see https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/ireland/annual-househo...
But if you count household wealth in houses in Ireland, household wealth in Ireland in 1986 used to be 3 average Irish houses, and now it's 1/3rd. This was, just like anywhere else, deliberate government policy, amongst others to allow banks to invest in housing stock, preferential tax treatment and guarantees for property ownership, government buying of specific (mostly politician owned) housing, non-enforcement of both Irish and non-Irish tax law ... the list goes on.
Ireland prides itself on creating prosperity by lying and cheating other EU countries out of their tax income. Surprise! A government that lies on international treaties (they promised to enforce minimum tax since 2008, then ... didn't, then claimed credit for the "unseen in history prosperity boom"). Surprise! A government that does that ALSO lied to it's constituents and instead of delivering prosperity took 2/3rd of every euro you own.
"Oops, who could have seen this coming"
For example, Ireland's redistribution of income from rich to poor does more to reduce inequality than any other country in the OECD. The numbers are here: https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality-before-and-afte... or look at Figure 1 on page 10 here: https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...
And in figure 3, page 11 of the above report, Ireland has seen the 3rd highest growth in income redistribution in the OECD with redistribution from wealthy to poor growing by 40% in the space of a decade
So as far as I can see the facts indicate that Irish government policy is the exact opposite of what you claim.
I don't know why the rich in Ireland are somehow not on that graph, but when you walk around in Dublin for 10 minutes you see that this just isn't the real situation. It absolutely isn't the case that there aren't very rich people in Ireland and obviously they're not getting their wealth redistributed ...
Looking at the CEIC data you linked, which is not inflation-adjusted, it shows household income increasing from just under $20k in 2003 to around $40k in 2023. Plugging that into the CAGR formula you get a 3.5% nominal annual return.
So house prices have increased at over 6.5% annually after inflation, while household incomes have increased at 3.5% before inflation.
And your other link makes it clear that the change in wealth distribution is really just a side effect of the housing bubble:
> The Gini coefficient fell from 0.78 in Q2 2013 to 0.70 as of Q4 2020, before declining sharply since 2021 (Chart 3). This steeper decline in 2021 is driven by increasing net wealth for the Bottom 50%, accounted for by a combination of a decline in this groups mortgage liabilities and, to a lesser extent, an upward appreciation in the value of housing assets. As a consequence, by Q1 2022 the Gini coefficient for Ireland stood at 0.68.
Your graph comes from BIS data - picking 1995 as starting point is a little unfair as that's exactly when house prices started to rise - if I measure from 1990, the rise (using BIS nominal nominal to make comparison easier) is 5.1% per annum.
But yes house prices have risen faster than household incomes. Like pretty much everywhere else in the world.
> And your other link makes it clear that the change in wealth distribution is really just a side effect of the housing bubble
The claim I was contesting was that wealth inequality had increased in the last few decades. It has not - it has decreased significantly.
The feel good explanations are just that - feel good euphemisms. Acting on them failed in the past repeatedly. Politicians who tried to improve situation of these people were punished, repeatedly. Meanwhile, politicians acting in offensive and harmful way were rewarding even when they made lifes of their voters worst.
We really should stop projecting these good faith falsehoods when the are and were clearly false.
If they believed Trump, they deserve everything they get. Sadly those who didn't believe didn't vote enough.
Is it a matter of "belief," or could it possibly be an optimal strategy to secure potentially two more Supreme Court nominations?
Unfortunately, consequences wont go only to people who voted for Trump, they will harm quite a lot of innocent people.
If I come here and tell you that I'm going to reduce expenses and debt while reducing taxes and also investing massive amounts of money to improve the military, healthcare, etc, something should go off in your head because it doesn't add up.
Voting for someone promising unrealistic things is no different from going into a dark alley in what you know is a rough neighborhood. A victim is still a victim, but grown ups must own up to their actions... and there's no other way of saying this: what you did was fucking dumb. It's even dumber if you do the same dumb thing twice.
Trump should have been a much simpler problem. Those who want to be stupid badly can't be helped.
All I know is that the 1990s until now have been a bonanza for some people but increasingly difficult for many others. I blame this on the financialization of our economy, with housing policy in America’s coastal metro areas definitely not helping (municipalities restrict supply through zoning and other mechanisms, and the financialization of our economy only exacerbated matters by pouring gasoline on the demand side). This is a failure of our leadership class; I’m not just talking about politicians, but I’m talking about our wealthy, our corporate executives, and even ourselves when we have positions of influence. Collectively the leadership of our country has chosen maximizing their own material benefit at the expense of maintaining a livable society. The result is anger due to Americans increasly having a harder time just getting by while our “leadership” keeps adding to their power and wealth.
Due to anger over establishment politicians, the Republican Party has been completely captured by MAGA, and the Democratic Party has a very vocal left wing that came close to winning the 2016 primary and was a serious contender in 2020.
Unfortunately Trump on a good day is far more destructive than Clinton, both Bushes, Obama, and Biden on their worst days. Trump’s neo-mercantilist economic policies won’t bring prosperity, but unfortunately his stance on “culture war” matters have resonated with large swaths of the American electorate; we’ve long had problems with racism, xenophobia, religious bigotry, anti-intellectualism, and other related issues since the colonial era.
Moreover, despite Trump’s promises in 2016 to “drain the swamp,” Trump is backed by many prominent billionaires and other influential and powerful people. Trump is not a one-man operation; he would have no power without an entire apparatus of GOP politicians and a stacked Supreme Court.
The only thing keeping Trump’s popularity afloat is his relentless attacks on “enemies” of MAGA, such as immigrants, scientists, universities, unflattering media outlets, Democratic politicians, etc. But eventually the fallout of his reckless policies will trickle down to Trump voters in the form of higher prices for goods and services, and either when Trump runs out of enemies or when the MAGA base gets crushed by the weight of high prices and are looking for answers, what are Trump and MAGA politicians going to do?
Unfortunately I don’t see any easy solutions. A return to the pre-2017 status quo ante is only going to lead to the same leadership that led to such anger in the first place. However, staying the course is definitely going to lead to a crash. The solution is going to need to come from the people, but it’s hard for average people in America to compete against systems that entrench the power of our two-party system and that require massive amounts of money to effectively compete. There are no easy ways out of this mess.
The con artists they vote for are plainly not going to help their interests (and often work against them), yet they reject understanding this and instead buy into simplistic emotional propaganda that validates their frustrations and absolves their responsibility. Then after some years go by when the mess has set in and Democrats have the nominal power, the Republican media machine goes to work highlighting everything they've broken and pinning it on the current administration. Rinse and repeat.
(context: I'm a libertarian and I have many criticisms of the Democrats as well, but at least they haven't been directly sabotaging the country for the past several decades, culminating in this)
There are no good outcomes until people stop voting for these grifters and con men.
Hell, it already has gotten worse in both France and Germany compared to the US. Imho Macron is more or less the same kind of politician as Trump (rich, and in it to make the rich richer), just a very different person (for one thing he's easily got 10x Trump's IQ, 10x Trump's looks, and doesn't look like an ancient golden retriever that got demummified for a presidential term). Obviously this guy failed to improve France's economic prospects, and every election cycle the actual Nazis, led by Le Pen, gain 5% extra of the vote. Germany differs a lot in the details, but something similar is happening.
The situation in (some parts of) Europe is like if you're hoping for 3rd Trump term, because Steve Bannon became a presidential candidate that polls over 50%. When Trump has just made immigration policy stricter in desperation, because even Trump realizes what a disaster that would be.
The image is that for every scientist at Nasa there are countless administrators, HR ladies and diversity hires
Not to mention - tariffs are essentially an inflation tax on _every_single_purchase_.
How exactly is Trump reducing the deficit by any significant margin?
It's really sad how our NASA funding is the lowest it's been since 1961.
https://www.planetary.org/articles/nasa-2026-budget-proposal...
I'm so sick of the not only incompetent leadership in the U.S., but the literal anti-science stance our government has taken. We're 6 months into this nightmare, I really can't see how it can get worse.
the only working part of cape canaveral was whatever spy satellites they needed to launch.
thankfully spaceX does a pretty good job and while I wish it was still nasa leading the globe in space travel, the main decline of our era is unwieldy bureaucracy and not even nasa could figure out how to run a profit despite a monopoly.
I think the thinking that government body is not for profit is misleading since you want a bit of independence in terms on financial budget
see what happen when government change stance, NASA hiring and firing depends on political mood at the point
having an profitable business wouldn't make NASA cut the job if government decide to cut the budget
There is no sense in trying to treat the government like a business.
china literally doing an opposite, they force buy company shares that turns that into "half" state company
I know china is bad and I agree with you but controlling business and billionaire is one they good at
if I get to choose where my money goes, I rather let the money goes to government budget than billionaire pocket
keeping taxes low because government not heavily dependant on TAX while keeping goverment body effecient and profitable
[0] https://spaceflightnow.com/2025/07/05/republican-backed-reco... ("Republican-backed reconciliation bill passes, includes funding for ISS, Artemis programs, Space Shuttle relocation")
> "The legislation earmarks $9.995 billion to be available until Sept. 30, 2032, for projects that have backing by politicians in states that have held key roles in NASA’s Artemis program."
> "The biggest chunk of that is $4.1 billion set aside “for the procurement, transportation, integration, operation and other necessary expenses of the Space Launch System for Artemis Mission 4 and 5.” The bill states that no less than $1.025 billion should be spent on the heavy lift rocket each year FY26-FY29."
> "It also includes $20 million to fund the Orion spacecraft “for use with the Space Launch System on the Artemis 4 Mission and reuse in subsequent Artemis Missions.”"
> "These two items run counter to the proposed NASA budget from the White House, which sought to end the SLS and Orion programs following the launch of the Artemis III mission."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System#Funding_2
I don't think it's correct to blame the NASA, the agency, for management decisions made by their overseer!
*(Imagine what SpaceX would look like if Starbase were split into 50 pieces in 50 states—nosecones from Alaska, winglets from Senator Shelby's district in Alabama... Imagine, if their senior executive wasn't breathing down everyone's necks to build things faster, but instead prioritized employee headcount as his objective function (maximizing–not minimizing). The way Congressional lawmakers run their pet projects is quite ridiculous).
You seem to be unaware that NASA does run a profit, and that SpaceX wouldn’t have been possible without NASA’s research and money. NASA has invested tens of billions in SpaceX.
https://www.planetary.org/articles/nasa-versus-spacex
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#Economic_impact...
https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/3721375-how-much-does...
Please, don't jinx us
I hope they did the math. The DRP is not a severance, and if they were laid off, they'd have been caught in a RIF and should have received an actual severance.
If there's a RIF, they get a severance of 1 week per year for the first 10 years of work, 2 weeks per year above that, and a bonus percent if over 40. It maxes at 52 weeks pay. If you have 18 years (at least 26 weeks of severance, more if over 40) with the fed, waiting for the RIF was always better than taking DRP unless you were going to retire or quit anyways. Under that, the choice should have been "Will a RIF happen before 30 September - my severance?". If you will get a 4 week severance, then will you get RIF'd before 2 September? If you think the answer is yes, taking the DRP makes sense, if no then the DRP costs you money. The only benefit to taking DRP if you're not going to get RIF'd is if you believe you can get another job before 30 September.
After 30 September, if they haven't found a new job they won't qualify for UEI since they voluntarily separated (true in most states, there may be some that would give them UEI but I've not heard of one that gives people unemployment for quitting).
Legally, they also have to ask NASA for approval for any second jobs until 30 September. If they don't and take an industry job (say with SpaceX), I wouldn't put it past this administration to fuck with them. The penalties are mostly administrative, but some ethics law violations can involve some steep penalties and prison time.
What is being cut is otherwise a symptom of the budget deficit (7%) and the fact that politically they cut areas where there are not republican votes, as politicians obviously try to maintain their voter base as a consideration in their decisions.
Note historically a criticism of the original lunar mission was that USA diverted funds from hospitals and other public programs to fund the mission. So some were bitter despite the triumph.
It goes back to the fundamental conundrum. You have a back of corn. Do you plant the corn, or eat the corn? If AI delivers for America (planting the corn) and USA lands on Mars, these 4k NASA employees will not dwell in the public imagination despite our respect for their commitment, skill and service.
> "This mirrors the political, prestige, and technology triumph of the Kennedy administration"
Trump may have said "before my term ends"; what JFK said was "before this decade is out".
IMHO, this is like a diametric opposite of Richard M. Nixon landing on the moon, two presidencies after Kennedy (and of opposite party); acting for Americans' obvious shared interests (not personal vanity); being the final link in an unbroken chain of sustained, stable governance. We've lost the capacity for greatness of that era. We don't have that, that chain of stable governance in service of national interests; what we have is an attention-deficient narcissist, capriciously destroying every great American thing that exists which doesn't have name attached.
(Ironically, the thing Kennedy so fervently competed against no longer exists today. That fearsome adversary, the triumph of Sputnik and Gagarin, was also demolished in this century by a Trump-like figure, spouting vapid promises of greatness as he vandaled and looted it to the ground).
Can't pinpoint who you are referring to. Gemini thinks Yeltsin? But neither it nor I remember any "greatness" promises from the guy.
Here's a generic example of the flavor of Russia's non-credible space propaganda—stuff their government says, like Trump, that's an enormous lie, that everyone knows is a lie:
https://web.archive.org/web/20120204103104/http://english.pr... (Pravda: "Russia to send cosmonauts to the Moon this decade" (2012))
Last time, USA was behind in space race and they didn’t just use what they already had to go to the moon, instead they started a huge movement that inspired and educated generations of scientist and engineers. this redeemed all the issues with cutting services from other places to go to the moon.
This time around, it looks like a desperate attempt to do something that worked in the past and looks impressive on face value, but it’s actually empty inside.
Last time, huge number of people were provided with resources and education that had outstanding impact on America, much much more than the act of landing on the moon did by itself.
This time you get resources directed to a generation of hateful people and sex offenders who use the already available technology to produce a show.
With both the cuts to NASA and Musk leaving the core inner circle of Trump, space exploration is going to be set back. Mars ain’t happening in our lifetimes, IMO.
I hope I’m wrong.
If nothing else, he's aware that there's a bit more involved in getting humans to Mars on any timeline than just rockets, and slashing the budget of the only entity working on those problems might not speed up getting there...
If course, he also knows enough to know nobody's sending manned missions to Mars in the next launch window regardless of whose in charge, and he's been quite fond of breaking stuff recently so I'm not sure we want Elon in charge either.
The problems are engineering at a cost which is politically acceptable.
If we wanted to, we could really go to Mars. It would just be really expensive - e.g. not a cost the public is current willing to bear.
Such as?
Falcon 9 regularly sends 17 Tons to LEO 2-3 times per week and is human rated. We could probably build a Mars shuttle in orbit, similar to how the ISS was constructed. We've already landed an SUV-sized robot on Mars. There are some open questions like orbital propellent transfer but it doesn't seem like it would be impossible to me.
From my perspective, the thing they're mostly waiting for is additional tech to make everything easier and lower risk, or for an aggressive administration that can push it and fund it.
This will literally not happen and anyone who thinks it will needs to seek professional help.
As a nation we need to figure out how you, probably a person who considers yourself a functioning adult member of society, came to believe and even repeat this.
The idea that the Trump administration could put a man on mars before the end of their term, even if this was a very top priority is ludicrous.
USAID was probably a stronghold of Dem voters, but what about the Dept. of Agriculture, or the Forest Service?
But what bothers me is that hypocrisy accusation avoids making a claim about what would actually be a good or bad policy.
Do you want federal cut backs or not?
The right-leaning people caught up in this would probably say "Yes, but not in my obviously highly efficient division."
There are still maybe one or two cool jobs left at NASA like controlling the Voyager software. But I imagine everyone else at NASA who respects themselves would have left for SpaceX a long time ago, rather than waiting for Trump to incentivize their retirement. Half of all revenue collected by the US federal government in 2024 (totaling $2565 billion) was given to retirees. Mostly middle class and government retirees. So this policy shift is very aligned with the US status quo, which is paying people to do nothing, rather than having them go through the motions of tilting at bureaucratic windmills trying to do something.
Even in this thread you see how pervasive the attitude is. I've seen several comments here so far talking about how the economic system isn't giving them enough money, but I've yet to see anyone here express a willingness to eat ramen, sleep in the trenches, get their hands dirty, and endure whatever pain and peril it takes if it grants the opportunity to help out getting things done with space exploration. Those are the kinds of people who create material abundance.
Did the budget balloon and delays rack up? Yup, and if you read about why you will see that it was basically unavoidable. A private business would have canceled it at the first roadblock (depriving us of an INCREDIBLE scientific tool).
And for the actual launch and deployment, the cost of the instrument meant that a very high success rate was very very important. Go ahead and look up the success rate of space X launches and tell me you would put a multi billion dollar tool on their rocket. You need someone who can spend more money, even a lot more money, and guarantee success.
For example, when I worked at Boeing, sinking a die for a forging cost $250,000. Stamping out a forging cost a few dollars. When I was putting together a stack of identical electronic circuit boards, the first one took 2 hours. The last one took 15 minutes.
there are a huge amount of one time costs associated with the design and engineering of a spacecraft or a satellite that could enable fairly cheap constellations compared to singular satellites, and the testing regimen becomes much more cheap when it’s done as part of a campaign.
I’m a proponent for the disaggregation of satellites from sensors using specified interfaces. Industry is definitely moving in this direction with their satellite buses you can buy fairly cheaply.
Will we want to stick a $3 billion sensor onto a $15 million satellite? I can’t answer that question
not everyone wants to work for a company that is well known for grinding 20-somethings into the dust with an extremely poor work-life balance.
That doesn't mean there are vacancies for NASA scientists studying other galaxies or asteroid petrology or the effects of orbit on bone health at SpaceX, or that moving to do comms links at SpaceX would necessarily represent career progression for the telescope designer.
Perhaps our coolest diplomacy program. I love that RU and USA have managed to cooperate in space through many decades of conflict.
Sending things to space is a small part of what NASA does. "Aeronautics" is not "space rocketry", and all federal agencies do more than what their name indicates.
Building spacecraft and space transportation systems like the shuttle came later and is a very different type of task.
Unfortunately, the more flamboyant manned space flight and science missions have gradually come to dominate NASA, and much of the fundamental tech research that made it possible in the first place has been deprioritized and defunded.
Maybe this DOGE approach of sledgehammering the bureaucracies is all there is left to do?
Look, I have family that works for the Feds. I have also collected money from federal programs. I know the pain that is coming and is here. It really really sucks, and it will suck for me too, though not as badly.
But the 'scalpel' approach where you go in, understand the system, take out the bad parts, leave the good, don't get rid of the best people and programs; yeah, it doesn't work very well either. I've seen it tried in a few organizations, some have had a little success, most have not. What usually happens is that the most politically connected programs and people stay and the least are cut, and only after years of twaddling and overspending anyway. THe people that are there to cut things get swamped in meetings and smoke blown up their ass from every direction; they are made incompetent by design, and so the cuts are incompetent too.
I'm not about to say that I have any idea of the history of NASA spending cuts or those of the US gov in general. I know SLS is a dumb program but only because I know people that say that.
But, again, Hot Take, maybe the only thing left to try is the sledgehammer?
It's several assumptions deep to get to that kind of statement which is even more.... Interesting.
First, you have to assume that all federal agencies are the same, so if one needs to be smaller or more efficient, clearly they all need to be. Or if you have experience with one agency, others must be the same. And that your personal experience is representative. This is hilarious for a category so broad that it includes homeland security and NASA.
Secondly, you have to get very reductive about the direction of these agencies. Big agencies? "Well we HAVE to do SOMETHING!" When of course "just leave it alone, go after the actually expensive and wasteful things in our economy like health insurance or the military" is ignored.
Thirdly you need to assume that anyone involved with actually managing this process gives a single shit about the issue at hand. And they don't. Nobody who gave a shit about efficiency, the size/budget of federal agencies, or the power of the federal government would vote to +265% the budget of ICE. that's year over year, by the way. Nor would they approve the largest deficit increase ever moved through congress.
These people are jangling keys in front of your face and taking the money out of your wallet. And by discussing these cuts in good faith at all, we are reaching for the keys.
The only thing left to do was the sledgehammer?
Cutting all probationary employees or recent promotions was just an awful strategy. For every department in the government.
The issue is, if you do small targeted cuts, you'll spare the very people you want to cut. Because they're the best at playing office politics and finding ways to justify why they shouldn't be cut.
If you can't find a way to bypass that, your options are few. One of those options is the sledgehammer approach. Axe entire agencies, fire everyone and never hire of the fired people back. Rebuild an organization from the ground up, with new people and less rot.
It's what was done in ex-USSR countries after the fall of USSR. It wasn't pretty. It worked.
hope the best for them
However, they want to do NASA work which is very R&D focused and has great opportunities for innovation, plenty of low TRL work, and a bro ad variety of missions.
Industry isn’t doing that much low TRL work
Friend of mine is a contractor for NASA who has been trained as a parts engineer for sourcing and testing electronic components that go into satellites and spacecrafts will be out of a job in a few months as her entire branch is eliminating all contractor positions.
Now she has a specialized skillset that isn't very readily transferable to other local companies and industries.
Sucks. Can't imagine she's the only one from NASA facing this crisis.
So....the same challenges that everyone working in the private sector has? What am I missing here?
Still - it appears to be a tremendously hurdle for her to find alternate employment with her skillset in parts engineering without physically relocating - which would necessitate selling her house and her husband finding employment at the new region as well.
What we do about it is educate the public and form institutions that are motivated to protect these people. We failed on the former and now it's disrupting the latter.
Deciding whether I should care about another group based on whether they care about my own predicament is a straight path to evil.
Great that you care? And what are you dong about it? Are you voluntarily paying more taxes to your local city/council/state?
In America we ostensibly participate in a representative democracy founded on the sentiment of no taxation without representation, and so our first duty is to be politically involved by educating ourselves holistically, voting appropriately for our local, state and federal representatives, participating in accompanying community building, wealth and knowledge dissemination in order to create and maintain the institutions which I mentioned in my previous comment.
Do doctors really belong on that list? In my personal experience-I’m not a doctor, but lots of people in my family are, including my mother and brother (and when she finishes med school, my sister too)-I really don’t get the impression doctors are poorly paid at all. If we talk about those with established careers (so not junior doctors), the poorly paid ones are still earning twice what the average person does, and the better paid ones are off the charts. On average, medicine pays better than software engineering.
Oh, and I’m in Australia-in the US, medical salaries are even better than they are in Australia. Like take what people get paid in Australia and add 50%. Yes, American doctors would owe more in student loans-but when you are on US$400K, and the average US medical school debt is under US$300K, how long is it going to take you to pay it off?
Someone ex-NASA may well have deep experience in certain specific areas which few other candidates could claim.
The thing about a voluntary "deferred resignation program" – the people most likely to take it are those who are confident they can find good opportunities somewhere else. If you didn't have that confidence, you'd be much less likely to sign on to it.
Similar sentiment is felt about any other organization run by people who are seen as having had a hand in kneecapping NASA - working for their companies is not appealing. Perhaps her views will change after she's had more time to process the sting of the layoff notice.
And her prior work for the DoD left her with an extraordinarily bad impression of the culture. Admittedly she'd only worked at a single Navy Yard and different branches in different services can have different cultures, but nevertheless - the DoD is not appealing either. Depending on the results of her job search, that might change.
For Amazon Kuiper - no relevant roles are available in the region and, as far as what's listed on the website, there's no jobs that allow for working remotely outside of relevant travel.
Blue Origin...same issue as with Kuiper - remote work doesn't seem to be a thing and they've no local presence with relevant jobs available.
Those companies are transportation companies when it comes to space.
Between Starlink, OneWeb, Kuiper, plus a gazillion startups like Astranis, K2 Space, etc, not to mention defense satellites, there has never been a time when more satellites have been launched by the U.S.
I think your friend will be fine. The real issue is the capability loss for NASA.
Is it typical for companies in the satellite design/manufacturing space for parts/electrical components engineers to be able to work remotely outside of travelling for inspections/supplier audits/component testing?
The bottom line is, she would be very likely to get a good salary, even better than she did in the US, in China, Russia, or India, which are desperately seeking space specialists with experience in more advanced technologies.
It is a shame that the US couldn't even keep their payroll, forcing them to leave the country and flow to its enemies.
However, China is now the country with the most potential to engage in a full-scale war with the US. It was Russia, but it is now stuck with Ukraine, and probably for years ahead.
And Russell Vought is holding the weapon.
And, on the topic of "extravagant luxury" - nobody is saving any money. Do you think you're gonna get a check in the mail with the "savings" we get from cutting NASA? Come on.
The reality is that we're cutting everything and our debt is skyrocketing. We're not saving anything, we're actually losing money at a more rapid pace. You're being robbed by republican fiscal policy.
It's a lose-lose. Maybe maaaaaaaaybe, if we were REALLY saving a TON of money these cuts could be justifiable. But, we're not. We're saving -2 Trillion dollars. Baby that's your tax money.
NASA needs an overhaul. This isn’t how I would do it, but that’s not how things work in the real world. SLS is the elephant in the room and is a complete disaster. It’s a jobs program limping along decades old technology when the commercial options are better. You can debate some of the specifics, sure, but if all this current state of uncertainty brings is a clean slate and new ways of thinking in 4 years, that’s better IMHO than looking back 4 years from now watching NASA brute force a token moon landing on the back of ancient technology. Which they may still do!
The entire space coast of Florida was built on this, from Kennedy Space Center down to Jupiter, FL.
The sad reality is in the US, too many towns were built around a very specific and niche business. Coal in the Appalachian mountains, NASA and the space coast, Pittsburgh Steel… it’s a community plan that failed and yet is still being used today. Woe to those that move/live there.
It’s more accurate to say that Congress needs an overhaul. Over the years NASA administrators have pushed back on SLS to the fullest extent you’d expect, but it’s not their call how Congress allocates money.
Losing career managers, scientists and engineers isn’t going to fix any of the things you want to see fixed.
My dream outcome would be that they shrink down the bureaucracy massively, retire a lot of the career middle managers who make sure nothing ever moves too fast and no project is allowed to run lean, and then raise pay for the remaining people to attract some of the private sector talent that could infuse some new knowledge. The few people I know with SpaceX experience are not at all happy with the work environment there, but the pay and pace of a place like NASA aren’t an option for them.
And the normalisation of the language of totalitarianism continues.
I don’t disagree, but it’s grim.
I think it's important to forget, to some extent, every once in a while. It forces a new traversal of the problem space, but in a modern context, with modern tools, fresh eyes, and a better understanding of what's needed. Thus we have Space X.
There are some great interviews with Jim Keller, who has a similar perspective: you need to restart every some years, to not stagnate.
From what I've seen, if you want to stamp out a young engineers creativity, start them working in a big org.
Fortunately other, more rational countries, will fill the gaps. They’ve just been complacent because the US was on its game for so long. Especially the ESA.
That is quite the absolute statement. Could you share some data to back this up?
I disagree, fundamentally. Institutional knowledge is a set of "truths" that are respected, so necessarily prune the solution space. The only way to get those pruned branches back is to disregard it, by reconsidering, and re-traversing that solution space.
My time working with some of the brightest minds in my industry taught me that they aren't necessaily some visionary, nor super genius, nor even some workaholic putting 20+ hours a day into their craft (though I have met a few I would describe as such). The gap between me and them wasn't over some raw intellect. It was many times a matter of me thinking of an idea and them talking about how that was tried 5-20 years ago and why that lead down a huge rabbit hole.
Yes, this is my point. It's pruning the solution space before traversing it. The diligent approach is to temporarily disregard that knowledge, and do a quick re-exploration to test if it's still true.
> to some extent
This was put in my first comment with severe intent, that many seemed to have missed.
As of now, this same mentality is used to push AI into everywhere. Not only is the intent bad, but the tech doesn't even work. That's not "resisting change". That's experimenting and realizing the hype was just that.
>This was put in my first comment with severe intent, that many seemed to have missed.
The comment itself definitely reveals more than a light suggestion.
This was precisely my point in [1]. It's fundamentally the same: a pruning of the solution space without re-traversal.
> why it's very similar to an old idea.
And, with diligence, you verify that the new context is exactly the same as the old. You do this by knowing that it might not be, in other words, you temporarily suspending your trust in that knowledge, and re-traverse it with the current context.
It's a thin line of wisdom and conservatism, but an important distinction. People in these positions work on billion dollar software, so they can't just try out every idea that comes to mind in prod. But that's exactly what tends to be proposed: big multi month initiatives, not some prototype to test over a sprint.
The important question I learned to ask was "what problem am I trying to solve". One aspect of this thin line tends to be a muddy answer to this question. When you can only suspect and make grand showings instead of showing pragmatic use case you may not in fact be iterating, but experimenting.
Exactly, the ability to innovate ceases. Risk is most easily avoided by leaning on the existing institutional knowledge to direct new decisions even though they may be in new contexts.
> you may not in fact be iterating, but experimenting.
By definition, iteration is not innovation. Innovation is new ideas. New ideas aren't possible without experimentation, otherwise they would be known ideas.
Most large companies move from innovation to acquisition for a reason: the risk of innovation is too great for a large company to stomach.
The standard phrase "institutional knowledge" merely refers to knowledge and skills that are carried by members of the organization. This is often much more than what is formally codified into the processes and training materials. As such, it can lead to loss of capability when there is too much turnover.
You seem to be conflating it with some other kind of bureaucratic conservatism or group-think. While that is a common dysfunction of long-running organizations, I think it is an orthogonal characteristic.
Yes, that't is my definition. But, that knowledge has very real practical effects and influence on the org, from the weight (those with it usually are in position of seniority/power) and momentum that knowledge carries, especially when approaching new problems, or reconsidering old problems. The mechanism for that can be anywhere from "this is industry standard" to "the director says we should focus on this approach", with the ever present "lets not risk it".
> While that is a common dysfunction of long-running organizations, I think it is an orthogonal characteristic.
I agree that it's logically orthogonal, but not practically. I think the actual killer of orgs is the sum of all the small scale risk avoidance. I think risk is most easily avoided by adhering to the institutional knowledge (what was done and what is known). Innovation eventually becomes a completely foreign concept.
There's more to life than "innovation", but what you say tracks, I was part of an organization that became extremely innovative but went bust in the process.
> we have Space X.
Which is amazing for earth-orbit commercial launches, but doesn't move the needle for the many other things NASA concerns itself with, like research as mentioned elsewhere.
Jim Keller’s own biography kind of dispels this notion. He worked at DEC for 16 years when he was a young engineer (24-40 years old).
No need to keep going back and forth on this as you seem to have dug in your heels.
But, I don't think DEC, a company working through the beginning of computer through peak dot com era, where every aspect was doubling or completely changing every year, is a context where holding onto ideas formed in an old context was viable or possible. You would, necessarily, have to temporarily suspend your trust in the institutional knowledge, with every new problem, since the whole compute world that the institutional knowledge was built on would have shifted under you.
Is the future going to be completely defunding science for 4 (or 8) years and then whipsawing back to normal levels once the republicans lose power?
It seems like as long as the parties are close to popularity of each other and one party is explicitly anti science there is no way to build anything sustainable. This is no way to run a country.
They don't call it the Senate Launch System for nothing
> It’s more accurate to say that Congress needs an overhaul.
But there's a few programs that have these types of problems, not just NASA. IMO, there's probably more efficient ways to meet each goal, by decoupling the problem. But either way, we can't solve "the problem" unless we actually recognize what it is (and there's a lot more than what I've just mentioned)
SLS isn't great but it does.. you know.. work.
> Early on, SLS designers made the catastrophic decision to reuse Shuttle hardware
The law that mandated that NASA built the SLS also required that they re-use that hardware. This wasn't a choice made by NASA designers but by a bipartisan congress and it wasn't designed so much to advance our space program so much as a way to keep funneling money to space contractors with the end of the Shuttle program.
Any article that proposed to discuss the "lunacy" of Artemis without ever mentioning Congress's role in that lunacy is pretty clearly rage bait.
Which it was capable of doing all along—Congress and NASA lied about this, misled the public, to make it appear that their jobs-creating, pork-barrel project was serving some genuine need NASA had. It wasn't! They had alternatives all along—they were pretending they didn't.
When you read about these things, you have to know all the actors you're getting information from, and what motives they have to mislead you.
There's not a single real mission in NASA's budget, or conceivable future budget, that needs an SLS—full stop. Sole exception being the moon project, which was created with the express purpose of finding a problem SLS would be the only answer for (and even that's now in doubt, what with Starship).
I honestly wonder why we didn't just stick with the Saturn V. 13 launches and only one (non-catastrophic) failure. If it aint broke don't fix it.
If you want to go beyond planting a flag, you need to be thinking of how to land hundreds of tons of equipment and industrial infrastructure on the Moon.
Saturn V isn't a very good fit for that. But SLS is much worse.
Had that happened on a crewed mission, they could have returned astronauts safely. Which is probably why they went ahead with Apollo 8
Consequently, it can't do a Moon mission like the Saturn V could, it requires the idiotic nonsense that is the NHRO, which will endanger astronauts because it can't get Orion (which is a whole other can of pork) into a low lunar orbit. It also can't handle the lander, so now Artemis has to count on SpaceX and/or Blue Origin for that, which is probably what you're alluding to not working. But if those don't work, then neither does Artemis and then how can you say SLS works?
Another problem with SLS is it's expensive AF and has a terrible launch cadence. Maybe you think that doesn't really matter, but it is for those reasons that NASA isn't going to test Orion again before putting astronauts on it. The last time they tested Orion, to verify the design and modelling, the heat shield started to come apart. But NASA can't do another test flight, because SLS sucks so hard, so instead they're going to fly Orion on an untested trajectory and trust their modeling to keep astronauts safe. Their same modeling which failed to predict Orion performance the first time. It's homicidally reckless. There is a real risk of this becoming yet another instance of NASA management's "go culture" getting people killed. Apollo 1, Challenger, Columbia, each time they say they've learned their lesson and will make changes to ensure it doesn't happen again, but either those changes are only superficial or they decay over time. We're now on the precipice of NASA management flying astronauts around the Moon with a heat shield which may quite possibly disintegrate during reentry, because SLS is too expensive for NASA to test it but NASA management wants to move forward anyway.
Well we don't have that. SLS isn't it and never will be. The most SLS can be is a heavy lift rocket that can be used once every few years with a lot of upfront notice. Certainly not "launch capable" at "any given time".
Maybe I'm missing some details but I thought the entire purpose of first-stage rockets was to get a certain payload with certain max dimensions (what can fit inside a cylinder of a certain height and radius) to LEO, or the equivalent delta-V. At that point first stage is discarded anyway. So what exactly the payload is (beyond its dimensions) and you do with your payload after getting to LEO (or equiv delta V) that shouldn't really make a difference, and you can't blame the first stage (which SLS is) for that if it did its job.
In the case of SLS, Block I can get 95 metric tons, Block I-B can get 105 tons and Block II 130 tons.
The Falcon Heavy in comparison can only get max 64 tons to LEO, less if you want to recover boosters and the core to save money
The real winner is the Saturn V which could get 140 tons to LEO. I know it was expensive per launch (about $1 billion in 2025 dollars) but given all the billions we've blown on trying to develop cheaper tech it seemed like we could have just stuck with what we know worked
It makes a difference because if you're designing a rocket for a mission then you'll have a rocket that's as close to optimal for the mission, given mission requirements, timelines and budgets as you can reasonably get it. That's not SLS, the Moon mission wasn't planned when SLS was designed and instead SLS is optimized to reuse Shuttle hardware.
Being stuck with a rocket that wasn't designed for the mission, as well as the political decision to use Orion, severely compromise the planning of Artemis. SLS lacks the power to get Orion into a proper lunar orbit, so instead they're going to use a highly elliptical NHRO lunar orbit with an orbital period of 7 days. This is extremely dangerous, it means that if there is any sort of emergency on the moon the astronauts may have to wait as long as a week to get back to Orion; which is probably a death sentence. It also means the lander has to be huge to make up for SLS's inadequacy, which means the Artemis program now relies on the success of Starship HLS and/or Blue Origin's HLS. This is going to delay Artemis and the entire reason this dependency exists is because Congress wanted a shuttle-derived rocket foremost, and then made the situation even worse by saddling it with their Boeing pork capsule.
What it comes down to is SLS is a rocket that ""works"" but isn't actually good at anything and therefore never should have been built.
Money for SLS is separate part of the budget, its mismanagement causes reputational damage - MSR budget is part of NASA probe budget, mismanagement there causes stall, worse performances and cancellations for AWFUL amount of other projects
MSR is a fine enough concept though, I think Rocket Lab's proposal to get it done is sound and the government should take them up on the offer. If nothing else, the money to Rocket Lab for MSR development would help to make Rocket Lab a more viable SpaceX competitor, which should pay off for the US government in the long run.
Anyhoo, NASA letting so many people resign is good if your opinion is such that lowering government expenditure is a good thing. So long as the exit package is comparable to retirement package these government employees would have got otherwise. My guess is the resignation package has great near term performance but low long term (retirement) performance, making it a great option for younger workers able to pivot to new careers.
Are they 1% as inspiring as what the DoD does with their budget? I don't mean to be snarky, but level of inspiration is pretty subjective and difficult to put a price tag on. Honestly, I feel like the NASA budget needs to be considered in context relative to the DoD budget and then these cuts look much less convincing as being necessary.
It would be closer to 2%, but we could measure it by engagement. Ask people what their last positive interaction was with NASA vs the military. The military does all sorts of outreach with things like the Blue Angels, stadium flyovers, competitions at fairs, etc. Ask them what NASA has done over the past year vs what the military has done over the past year. Chances are many people couldn't name something NASA achieved in the past year. Would it be at the 2% number? I don't know.
I'm not saying one is better than the other. I think both should look for budget inefficiency, but until those are identified I wouldn't propose budget cuts. But it does seem that the NASA missions could be more inspiring recently.
US Military FY 2024 enacted budget: ≈ $842 billion
VS
NASA FY 2024 enacted budget: ≈ $24.9 billion
That is a ~35x multiplier. By bog-standard logical implication your question answers itself.
I dare say a great many people are very inspired by what the DoD does with their budget. Inspired to what... well, that's another subject. And the most inspired people are not the ones living in the US.
People aren't inspired by safe shipping lanes. But quite a few are alive because of what global shipping enables.
Captain Phillips was a pretty good movie.
"Slicing at random" could actually outperform most other methods, as long as it's truly random. You can weasel your way out of a firing based on vibes or performance reviews - but you can't convince an RNG that its roll was wrong.
SLS. Orion. Gateway. Ambitionless Artemis. JPL's disaster of an MSR proposal. NASA reeks of rot and decay. It's not in a good place, and hasn't been in a long time now.
If you "just continue operating", it's only going to get worse.
Randomly firing and cutting funding isn’t a solution. Especially not to a perceived problem. If you think the spending is excessive you have to do the hard work of explaining why and then the even harder work of fixing it. If that seems too hard then yeah, it’s fine.
I’ve worked with a few former NASA employees now.
They all said the same thing: There were some amazing, passionate people at NASA but they were all surrounded by people who were only there to attend meetings and collect paychecks. Getting anything done was impossible because you had to navigate webs of org structure and process that had been designed to make work and jobs for people, not to deliver results.
My one ex-NASA coworker got a lot of mileage out of telling people he worked for NASA, putting it on his LinkedIn, and mentioning it when he introduced himself to new people. People respect the name. It was a stark contrast to how he described his actual time there.
The national labs are also a lot like this.
Which do you think takes a severance package?
Americans seem to expect lots of flag waving and spaceships. Less fundamental science.
Isn't the greater likelihood that delivery of service will drop as a result of the cuts and they'll point to this to justify nullifying the entire programme?
Science is great but launch vehicle innovation is where the problem is so that’s why I focused on SLS. We could easily have 100 JWSTs today if something like starship were operational. NASA dragging its feet for decades, building silly things likes SLS, trying to find token uses to justify it, doesn’t inspire me anymore.
Putting people on the moon today is a lot less substantive, and doing it with decades old technology makes it even less so.
I see the correlation you're trying to draw: "neither is of any practical use", but I think even that ignores the very deliberate effects the first space race had on the USSR.
Budget and schedule overruns are expected with any large project - it's just the nature of contracting. But there are limits, and SLS blew past them quite a while ago. I'm not sure how much of it is NASA's fault given how much congressional meddling has gone on, though.
Happens all the time.
Europe vs us east vs us west.
The bottleneck is actual manufacturing of JWST - the folding mirror was especially fraught; I think the sunshield as well.
NASA's science missions have been incredible.
The James Webb Space Telescope, a 6.5-meter-diameter infrared telescope at Lagrange Point 2 that can measure the atmospheric chemistry of planets orbiting other stars and measure the spectra of galaxies that were around 10 billion years ago.
The Curiosity rover landed on Mars by being lowered to the ground from a rocket-powered "sky-crane." It was powered by a radioactive battery, has been driving around and taking measurements for more than a decade, and has shown that Mars was likely habitable billions of years ago.
What kind of inspiration do you feel is lacking there?
https://qz.com/emails/space-business/2172377/an-oxford-case-...
How is that working out with the US Health Care System?
Great system...
In both cases, I don't think the system works well without assuming spherical cows or something like that.
Edit: ah, I see it's "hurtling." Although I guess in both cases you have to dodge larger and larger geographic regions to claim success, so a bit like hurdling. :)
I couldn't find a comparison of the number of launch failures between the two, my recollection is that this happened a lot more often in SpaceX rockets. But maybe that's included in the cost overrun figures and still puts SpaceX ahead by an order of magnitude.
I agree with the thesis of the paper, that platforms and incremental advances are more efficient and more economical. I don't quite agree that an incremental approach would have worked well for the NASA efforts in the 60s and 70s. Perhaps it should be considered as an option for these large organizations, but I'm not convinced it's always better.
Also, to do this study fairly, you would have to set up SpaceX to not benefit from any of the advances made by NASA for the decades beforehand. Some step-function style advances did happen under NASA supervision that benefitted the entire scientific community.
Also, if you're doing a fair comparison between public and private sector you've got to consider all the launch startups that aren't SpaceX, including the ones that haven't successfully launched...
NASA does a lot more than space launches, and they do use private sector (including SpaceX) for most of their launches.
The fact that Elon's DOGE suggested these cuts lines up
Defunding NASA is about the tax cuts. NOAA is different.
All these discussions about efficiency, even more so the debt given they just blew up the debt to never before seen levels just shows that sincerity is not deserved when talking to Rs.
... I'll vote for you again!
Seems to be how that saying goes these days; and here I thought Bush had the dumbest possible ending for it.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES9091000001
Unfortunately the two choices are expansion and haphazard reduction
Politics has become a sports game. I lack confidence in a good chunk of the population to vote in their best interests, perhaps democracy isn't the right way. Or voting on something should require an exam on the subject.
That's because for a long time the political system in the US insulated people from the consequences of their decisions. A dum-dum state government from Idaho could vote to slash education and healthcare spending, but the Federal government had always been there to provide a backstop. Whatever the local idiots decide, Social Security, SNAP, Medicare were always there to provide at least _some_ safety net. (and the easy migration within the US helped a lot to alleviate local issues, which is now also gone)
The political system in the US has also always been biased towards conservatism, making any changes difficult. For better or worse. That's how the extremely toxic meme that "both parties are the same" was born.
That's also how political orientation became a part of the identity for many people: "My family has always been voting for Republicans/Democrats".
Now it's all gone. Dum-dum Republicans are destroying the safety net at the Federal level, and they are doing it in a way that will start hurting people within years. Not decades down the line. For once, people will get to experience direct consequences of their vote. And this is the silver lining in this whole mess.
They may experience consequences, but they sure won't care about any consequences so long as they still believe that "demonrats" are systematically raping babies. They'll endure any consequence as long as they think their team is punishing the libs.
also, in the US, taking exams in order to vote is a massively sensitive issue as it was one of the ways that blacks were restricted from voting even when they legally had the right
more technically, where do you draw the line? if it's too easy, you're going to insult people without even getting the desired effect. if it's too hard, then the demographic will skew towards people who work in the industries affected by the policy. for a second that sounds good, and when it comes to something like culture or maybe health, then sure, but there are many industries that would burn the world to the ground if it ensured them 20% annual growth. can you imagine if the only people able to vote on financial regulations were people who know a lot about finance? there'd be famines within the year
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/030515/which-united...
"The U.S. budget deficit exploded in fiscal year 2009, ultimately reaching $1.4 trillion under President George W. Bush...The deficit would remain above $1 trillion throughout the 2012 fiscal year, but it was slashed to as low as $440 billion in the later years of Obama's presidency."
Comparing Biden to GWB doesn't make any sense. Their presidencies were 12 years apart and in very different circumstances.
I presume we’ll be paying up to $576,000 for a senior engineer (GS15) equivalent from SpaceX
1. Reboot (“full-power start”) Suspend or bypass existing constitutional limits; concentrate absolute sovereignty in one new organization—analogous to Allied occupation powers in post-1945 Japan/Germany. Eliminate checks and balances that block rapid change.
2. CEO-Monarch model A single executive (chosen like a corporate CEO) rules; the former president becomes a figurehead “chairman of the board.” Treat the state as a firm run for efficiency, not democratic representation.
3. RAGE strategy “Retire All Government Employees” by mass-firing the civil service and replacing it with loyal appointees. Remove institutional resistance (“the Cathedral”) and ensure obedience.
4. Parallel regime Build a fully staffed shadow government in exile before inauguration; unveil it on Day 1 to take over agencies at once. Prevent the bureaucratic slow-rolling that stymied Trump’s first term.
5. Media & academia clampdown Defund or shutter universities and independent press seen as hostile. Break what Yarvin calls the Cathedral’s cultural dominance.
Resources:
"The Straussian Moment", https://www.hoover.org/research/peter-thiel-straussian-momen...
Freedom Cities in Trumps presser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJA_GBhCGgE
Billionaire example: https://www.praxisnation.com
Apocalypse Now? Peter Thiel on Ancient Prophecies and Modern Tec, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqHueZNEzig
A.I., Mars and Immortality: Are We Dreaming Big Enough? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vV7YgnPUxcU&t=404s
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/magazine/curtis-yarvin-in...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RpPTRcz1no
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/11/patchwork-p...
At least in past when people wanted to burn everything down they had a good reason. This is truly the dumbest period in human history.
“You’re losing the managerial and core technical expertise of the agency,” said Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at The Planetary Society.
If we want a more efficient and inspiring NASA, we need to give it a mandate that we can all rally around the same way. "Pioneering the future of..." is just too generic for anyone to grade them against. As long as that's the case, congress is free to run it into the ground as a pork barrel repository.
IMO, several smaller, more focused, more measurable, organizations would serve the American public far better.
If you want the full argument it’s here: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/federal-reserve-independe...
I also don't think that bailing out SVB is a sign that Dodd-Frank was just symbolic, since not doing so would have pretty significantly hurt the USA's tech sector, which is is strategic nationally for the economy.
But I can see an argument for limiting the Fed's purview to mostly be about monetary policy and less about enforcement of legislation, as it's done in other countries.
It's also fully independent of the government and thus not affected by all this Trump/Musk/DOGE stupidity, as much as Trump tries.
There were so many options to improve efficiency with technology and then simply not refilling some of the jobs (apparently there's a 5-6% yearly attrition in government jobs anyway.) But nooo... And obviously this was never what this was about.
A friend of mine worked for the White House under the Obama administration, with the first goal to digitize the VAs information. One of the Trump's first actions in 2016 was to end that. Shameful.
Until this year, NASA was the world leader in space science. We’re pushing out the experts who build and operate astrophysics missions like Hubble, Chandra, JWST, Kepler, TESS, Swift, and many more in planetary and heliophysics. This is a loss of capacity that will set the US back a generation.
The private sector is irrelevant here: SpaceX and friends don’t do scientific research.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/07/trump-administration-m...
True for academic institutions. No evidence this is the motivation at NASA. Simpler: science costs money and leadership believes that money is better spent giving folks like me a tax cut than paying for poor folks' healthcare or basic research.
Fortunately, it looks like Beijing is ready to pick up the torch [1].
[1] https://www.fdd.org/analysis/policy_briefs/2025/03/19/aiming...
The federal government now accepts donations if you don't want the money.
This is silly. I prefer the money be spent on things that have a larger ROI, collectively, than I can attain individually. Destroying the money doesn't achieve that aim.
Irrelevant to the silliness of suggesting destroying money as a solution.
So no, I don't want to Venmo cash to somebody who doesn't need it.
I won't make any assumptions about your politics, but I'm assuming that doesn't move the needle for you.
Maybe "smashing things and ruining people's lives and work is fun per se" is a better explanation than anything more complicated. Pretty shitty for the rest of us though.
Meanwhile the USDA, FWS, and DOE do those pesky regulatory things, like making it so you can't torture animals quite as much in the pursuit of profits, can't build coal power plants in the center of national parks, and can't dump raw chemical waste into your local wetlands. Utter killjoys they are.
Like, not meaning to be shitty to you in specific, but it's no secret why these agencies are getting targeted. If you say anything the admin doesn't like, or dare to tell people with money that they can't do literally anything they want at all times irrespective of it's effects on broader society, you've got a target on your back.
I listened to way too much Rush Limbaugh in the 90s and none of this stuff is a surprise. Distressing, but exactly what this particular segment of Republicans have been working towards.
True and that’s awesome. However to put up some of a counter those agencies also over-regulate. Bureaucracy tends to over-expand.
Musks example of SpaceX having to calculate the likelihood of a rocket hitting a shark in the pacific. Musk is certainly exaggerating a bit, but is speaking to a real issue for many businesses struggling to keep up with absurd regulations.
My grandfather fought for years with USFWS to be able to re-build infrastructure for a small town near a popular wilderness area. A small bridge upstream washed away one year and they refused to allow rebuilding it.
The claim was that rebuilding the small bridge would disturb some endangered fish species. So instead hundreds or thousands of vehicles every summer would drive through that small river instead to get to the wilderness area beyond. That created a lot more destruction and impact on the fish. Trucks and vehicles wash off a lot of oil and chemicals like that.
Musk and DOGE had a wonderful opportunity to analyze these issues and address them and improve government efficiency. Instead they opted to cut whatever they didn’t like or couldn’t understand within five minutes. Musk should be deeply ashamed.
Personally I’d hope for competent staff to be creating thoughtful valuable environmental impact surveys. Hence why the pushback on these agencies is valuable. Bureaucracies generally need some sort of pressure to, you know, do a competent job.
> The cuts to [...] are not really saving that much money, but are destroying literally trillions of dollars of future economic value
The real issue is essentially: which would you rather have, $1 now or $10 tomorrow?[1]
People see it as savings because they have that money now. That's the way JumpCrisscross used it (and I very much don't think they agree that this is how the gov should be working). But the way you're using it is "I'd rather have the $10 tomorrow".
I'm pointing this out because now people are talking past one another. I'm pointing this out because it is a really common pattern ("now" vs "later") that is used and frequently causes miscommunication due to different assumptions about what we want (e.g. "maximize money now" or "maximize money during x period of time"). Though it doesn't always have to do with money.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44705004
[1] Be careful to not trivialize this. The numbers are abstract as well as the points in time. Also consider that $1 now might be far more valuable than $10 tomorrow. For example, if you get $1 now you might be able to afford a bus ticket to a location where you can get $1m, but only if you get there today. That's worth a lot more than $10 tomorrow. So we have to be mindful of what conditions actually exist if we want to actually communicate. Unfortunately, these are usually assumed and not communicated... The people that want to just take the money are well aware of this tendency...
> This apologia for the cut
Sometimes better amounts to "still bad" as in here, but it is still a bunch of claims that make Conservatives lead by Trump sound much better then what they actually are.
I'm not excusing anyone. But you are picking fights with people on your own team. So maybe pay closer attention to what people say and not just signaling. Personally I want to fix things, not pick random needless fights. I want to stop chaos, not create more. Picking fights is just what Trump wants you to do
I think that if you project wrong motivations on them, you wont understand how they "deluded" themselves nor prevent yourself to fall for the same trap. If their motivation is "scientists are liberals and I want to hurt them" or "I want actually Christian conservative religious state and these institutions are threat to that goal", no amount of theorizing about money saving will get you to the understanding.
If you want to start with understanding someone's motivation, you can not start by projecting best most palatable motivations on them. Nor should you start be projecting worst ones ... but that is NOT where we are or were for years.
For years, conservatives and especially Trump had best possible motivations projected on them. And it only served to their benefit. The whole center ended up not believing their goals, even as they stated or wrote about them regularly. The whole center was busy policing those who actually listened to conservatives and very accurately predicted what they will do. Again and again.
> Personally I want to fix things, not pick random needless fights. I want to stop chaos, not create more.
You are not stopping the chaos by making what is going on more palatable by sane washing it. It just empowers the chaos.
> Picking fights is just what Trump wants you to do
No, Trump want us all to act like republicans do. Never argue with him, enable enable enable. Praise him and kiss his behind.
If you hate Trump so much I highly suggest not supporting him
That’s it! That’s the strategy!
> This administration
>> The people that want to just take the money are well aware of this tendency...
If you can't differentiate then we'll only be able to talk past one another
Is MAGA messaging on these NASA cuts?
My impression is these cuts are being done in the background. The beasts being fed are the military-industrial complex (specifically, its rotation from legacy providers to Silicon Valley) and ICE.
> The cuts to NASA as well as NOAA, NIH, USGS, USDA, FWS, DOE, etc. are not really saving that much money, but are destroying literally trillions of dollars of future economic value
You, in reply, wrote:
> The real issue is essentially: which would you rather have, $1 now or $10 tomorrow?[1]
I'm saying you're wrong. There is not a choice to be made. We want the $10 tomorrow. No rational person can disagree with this if the person making the choice is the US federal government, who can spend money into existence. If we have some use for $1 now, just spend that $1 into existence too! Then, tomorrow, we'll have the $10 too!
If you agree with the cuts, you must logically agree that they are a bad investment: that $1 today will net us 75 cents tomorrow.
> We want the $10 tomorrow.
> No rational person can disagree with this
Actually, you really should read my whole comment and be careful to not read things my comment doesn't say.
To circle back,
>> miscommunication due to different assumptions about what we want
I understand now that you are just making a semi-wanky abstract point about the nature of rhetoric and descisionmaking for its own sake, and I apologize for misunderstanding this.
That's a simple explanation but not a good one. All government salaries across all jobs everywhere in the federal government are about 4% of the federal budget.
The DRPs going on are 100% about "draining the swamp", not saving money. This is literally what the administrators of these agencies are saying on TV news. They think science is biased against their worldviews and they want to replace them.
Sounds like ye olde Sowell quote[1] about organizational priorities and budget cuts in action.
[1]https://www.pennlive.com/opinion/2013/03/thomas_sowell_budge...
[citation needed]
Private companies these days just buy all their competitors to minimize accountability and maximize shareholder returns.
> the world leader in space science.
There is this common belief of "I just want to make things work" and that science is really unimportant here and are concerned with things that don't matter. The truth is that science builds the foundation for that other stuff. It is the very ground you stand on. Engineering without science is like trying to run without ground.
In a lot of ways, science is just like engineering (I say this having been both, professionally). Any good engineer knows it is important to find problems. Then you fix those problems. Well... that's really what science does too. When doing science you're just working at the next level of abstraction. It is all about "making things work." Everyone is on the same team here and I'm not sure why we draw these divisions. I mean what would science even be about if it wasn't "making things work?"
So I hear people say that engineering is where we get the real value (especially monetarily), but I'd disagree. It matters, but I think it is framing things weirdly. I'd be willing to wager that the economic impact of Newton and Leibniz's invention of Calculus[0] is larger than the economic impact of any engineering product, ever. I'd make a slightly less confident wager that the economic value of calculus is more valuable than all inventions post 1700. That's just one thing too... even if it was the only Science/Math "investment" then it seems like a pretty good ROI
[0] Yes, math, but I'm throwing under science. Nitpick if you want but you're missing the thesis
That doesn't mean that government investment in science is necessarily a good idea.
> I'd be willing to wager that the economic impact of Newton and Leibniz's invention of Calculus[0] is larger than the economic impact of any engineering product, ever.
Where they financed by the government? Btw, I can also look at winning lottery tickets and say that their return-on-investment was awesome, but that doesn't mean buying lottery tickets is a good idea.
> That doesn't mean that government investment in science is necessarily a good idea.
> Where they financed by the government?
> Btw, I can also look at winning lottery tickets
You're not making an argument, you're just intentionally misunderstanding. Sorry, I'm not going to respond if all you want to do is troll
A lot of his work occurred while he was what we'd now call a tenured professor of mathematics, again at a universe with an impressive amount of money being donated directly by the British government.
In general, the history of higher learning is the history of governments (or the wealthy people who constitute them) funding research and facilities. You may not like it, but you shouldn't misrepresent history just to make your preferences sound more normal.
(Leibniz had a more complex web of patrons over the course of the decades, including parts of German and French governments and even briefly being a Royal Society fellow. Some of Leibniz's patrons did include private [rich] donors, but it is said that Leibniz was the last scientist/mathematician to find patronage in that way/the last time in history that private donors had shown much interest in direct science/math patronage.)
Not to mention that smart people generally prefer to live in places that value and protect science, so it's _also_ an indirect form of geopolitical talent recruitment. (See brain drain + brain gain impacts of science policy, for instance. There's a strong argument to be made that US mid-20th-century dominance in science and engineering was largely driven by a lot of very smart people fleeing Nazi Germany.)
Basic science isn't so much a lottery ticket as a bond with unknown maturity measured in decades, a _very_ high rate of return, a high minimum investment, and dividend-like payouts created by adding skilled scientists, engineers, etc. to your tax base.
[1] https://marianamazzucato.com/books/the-entrepreneurial-state...
> a high minimum investment
Science is incredibly cheap. It can have a long time to mature but interestingly that is dependent on the number of "bonds", with quicker returns when there's more "bonds" issued.
I'd say there's 4 common classes of misinterpretation:
Perception bias:
----------------
I'd say 80+% of research is being done at this scale. A few hundred grand per year, if even that.
Amortization (time bias):
-------------------------
Distribution:
-------------
Scale:
------
===
Maybe I'm wrong, and if so I apologise! But as soon as I saw the essay like format, I knew I wasn't going to spend time on it. I think shorter points that provoke discussion may work better here.
> I feel your post is too long
It’s about 700 words.
It’s thought through, well-written, neatly organized, and it’s a fine set up for further discussion.
If that’s too long for you on this forum, then I’d probably take a look in the mirror and ask some tough questions.
I think the long content is fine as it stands, but it isn't necessarily a good seed for discussion in a comment thread (as opposed to an underlying article).
> provoke responses selectively nitpicking about one thing
I'll at least say I sometimes downvote opinions I agree with and upvote opinions I disagree with. That's because I don't see the upvote and downvote as a signal of my personal feeling about the comment but rather about how I feel the comment should be placed in ordering. Sometimes I downvote a comment I agree with because it is a bad argument and I want to discourage that behavior. Or because it is just signaling or ignores the parent. Sometimes I upvote bad comments because there's a conversation I want highlighted. Sometimes because despite it being bad I think they bring up good points others are ignoring.
But I think we can have more in depth conversations on HN. That comment was much longer than I usually write (and I'm wordy) but I think it is a matter of what we want as a community. For example, I always downvote oneliners, memes, or when someone is just trying to dunk on the other person.
What does the community want?
But also, this is HN. I wouldn't have this conversation on Twitter and I hope we can have more nuanced conversations here, as well as I hope the average user has a bit more intelligence/attention than a place like Reddit. Maybe I'm assuming incorrectly
For instance, in 2023 the US spent ~$190B in federal funding on R&D [1], compared to a budget of ~$6T [2] - i.e. about 3%. It's really really not a lot when you consider the aggregate impact over decades.
But it is still a lot in an absolute sense. This funding supports an entire ecosystem across both academia and industry that directly creates hundreds of thousands of jobs, many of which require highly specialized skills. I mention this not to create a sense of sticker shock, but to drive home the point that making this investment is a big and complex task - and one that takes a long time to rebuild. I firmly believe that the current chaos in the US will take at least a generation to repair.
[1] https://ncses.nsf.gov/surveys/federal-funds-research-develop... [2] https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59727
Can you back that up? Be sure to only include examples of private industry that wasn't supported or backed by the government and didn't depend on prior government advancements to make their advancements
And that's Eru (and perhaps you) here. Pubic science continues to make fantastic moves forward, with one notable example being nearly ALL the meaningful research and engineering moving us towards nuclear fusion being based on public research. Historically, major contributors to research almost universally had significant government funding.
It's true that we can gesture to AI research recently as a fruitful place for private research, but even orgs like Deepmind took government grants. Deepmind's publicly called for governments to fund AI research, as have many other (private) researchers.
In any event, taking tax money and giving it back to the betterment of society as a whole is one of the most uniformly good things that could be done with tax dollars. Science consistently betters society as a whole, and it's almost impossible to identify in advance what theoretical or practical breakthroughs in any given field are about to become significant.
> In any event, taking tax money and giving it back to the betterment of society as a whole is one of the most uniformly good things that could be done with tax dollars.
Have you considered taxing less in the first place? So that there's more money for eg private research?
> Deepmind's publicly called for governments to fund AI research, as have many other (private) researchers.
Company in sector X calling for more government spending on sector X seems hardly like news?
You really think that if the government axed the NSF/NIH, and cut taxes but corresponding amount, the private sector would somehow take all those tax cuts and invest in scientific research?
And the other factor is that private research is going to be geared towards that which is 1) less risky and 2) has some eventual commercial application. Many areas of scientific research are not like this. e.g. basically all of astronomy, and a good chunk of particle physics. The commercial applications have been pretty much zero.
AI is getting a ton of investment by the private sector now, because it is expected to have commercial application.
> basically all of astronomy, and a good chunk of particle physics. The commercial applications have been pretty much zero.
We must point this out because it's critical to the argument of funding science, basic research, and mathematics. It's easy to lose sight of the time frame or where inspiration was drawn from but it's easier to see with silly examples.
Like who would think studying origami would have ever been useful. The people originally studying it had no direct applications in mind. Yet it is now one of the most powerful tools in engineering. Not just used in satellites but also plays a role in additive manufacturing, robotics, and more.
Or look at Markov. Dude had no interest in applications whatsoever. He invented Markov Chains and revolutionized science purely to spite a rival. It took time for people to see the utility but we wouldn't have our modern AI system without it or even search or even the internet.
Private research is great, don't get me wrong. But they're too focused on right now. You don't get revolutions that way. You get revolutions by thinking outside the box. You get revolutions by straying away from the path that everyone else is doing, which is much more risky. You get revolutions because you do things just for fun. Just for curiosity's sake.
Since Leibniz basically the only funding for this kind of work has come through governments. It's also been declining as we are demanding more and more for people to show the value of their research, which just makes government funds like private ones. I'd warn against taking that path. It's a reasonable one, it makes perfect sense, and it is well intentioned, but it is also ignorant of history.
You're either wrong or lying about the idea that famous mathematical discoveries have not been financed by governments historically.
You're either wrong or lying about the idea that this is, at scale, lottery ticket mentality. The modern scientific apparatus has flaws, but despite those it's a marvel of modern distributed resource allocation and cooperation rarely rivaled in human culture.
> Have you considered taxing less in the first place? So that there's more money for eg private research?
Sure, but this wouldn't obviously lead to outcomes for the public good. Even if we handwaved away IP and secrecy expectations in your scenario (is the abolishment of IP in your calculus? If not your task is even harder), there are obvious challenges you'd need to overcome:
1. How will non-experts vet the meaning or potential of research to select allocation? How will they even learn the option space to choose from? This is an incredible knowledge burden on the market that has profound implications on what can be researched. I see very little evidence that the public at large can do this, and I ask for an existence proof.
2. Even if you can get past #1, what then keeps outcomes aligned with the public interest? This is the same general objection most people have to Hayek's "the noble purpose of the rich is to have their tastes direct society" idea: the outcomes are mostly around consolidating power.
More broadly, everyone accepts this pooled resource methodology is superior. Even many anarchists[1] don't oppose collectivist resource pooling and management so long as it's voluntary and done in ways tha minimizes hierarchical extent and implications
What you're suggesting is that wealth redistribution is somehow morally wrong for the wealthy, but many of the wealthiest people are wealthy in appreciable part because of the way their endeavors have interacted with redistributive endeavors. Musk and Thiel, as living examples, both have benefitted enormously from redistribution. So why was it good for them, but now it's bad? Why isn't having an explicit force to counter economic attraction bad, given that we can provide and measure its existence?
American science supremacy is not a thing I'm interested in defending. However, it's undeniable that America's redistributive methodology has lead it to be the science capital of the world for generations, and Americans have definitely benefitted from this status more than the infinitesimal sum of money committed relative to their budget. What value are you offering in return? It seems like a "trust me" story at a time when we see not just an attack on science funding but an attack on the idea of a consensus reality contradicting corporate profit motives (e.g., Climate change, RFKs attack on medicine).
I don't know how you get around these objections. I don't even know where you go to find an example of all this working in a purely private methodology that's not counterfactual. It seems like a lot of moral grandstanding and "trust me bro" from out here. You should make these arguments somewhere we can find them if you want us to believe the conclusions.
> Company in sector X calling for more government spending on sector X seems hardly like news?
Indeed! You're the one trying to paint it as bad, misguided, incorrect, or immoral? Even private companies benefit from public research grants. Whatever the pejorative you want to attach, the burden is on you to suggest something better.
[1] Please note we're using the historical definition here in the tradition of Goldman, Bakunin, Malatesta, Chomsky and Carson, etc.
With the US becoming a fascist state in record time, I do not foresee people following your thinking, unfortunately...
The claim that SpaceX does not do science is false. Not only do they launch most of NASA's science missions, which counts, they also do independent science, including the Polaris Dawn and FRAM 2. Along with Axiom, they put science missions on the ISS, and all the NASA science done on ISS is facilitated by SpaceX putting humans there. Finally, literally everything that SpaceX has done or built is a result of science that SpaceX has had to do, including colder than ever propellants, and life support systems, etc. The Polaris Dawn spacewalk was not a replication of the 1960s spacewalks, as it was based on new suit science, etc.
Somehow, people like to pretend that probes landing on other planets is the only form of science that is done.
And the reality is that new entrants from RKLB, SpaceX, Firefly, and a lot of smaller companies are doing exactly this kind of science as well--- but at vastly lower cost.
The inescapable reality-- and this will always be the case with political organizations like NASA-- is no matter how well meaning they cannot do science as effectively as private organizations. NASA slows science down in large part because they are hamstrung by congress.
Yes, it looks like some way too expensive projects are getting cancelled and that means some waste of money. It's not the choice I would make.
But in the next 10 years, nearly %100 of all science will be done outside of NASA.... because the NASA overhead is too much, makes things too expensive, and less reliable.
For example, it's better to blow up 1 falcon one, and 2 falcon 9s, to get 500 successful falcon 9 launches at 1/100th the cost per kilogram of mass to orbit than to have a completely successful SLS system that launches only 2-3 times a decade.
The former accelerates science, lowers the cost of all science and more science gets done per dollar than the latter.
That transition is happening whether government, the senate and congress is aboard.... or not.
Exactly. Like if I am an uber driver and I bring a surgeon to a hospital, it counts as me doing surgery since the most important part of surgery is the process of driving to the place where it happens
This is exactly how anyone would describe your reply. Your claim is so bizzare and its logic so convoluted that the only reason I can imagine for it is political motivation. But I could be wrong and don't want to get into a flamewar. So let's ignore the reasons and reassess the logic instead. Most of the counter I can come up with are variations of what the other commenter replied, so I will leave that to them. Instead, let's look at why your argument never pans out.
Private companies always look for short to medium term profits, since it affects their balance sheets and ultimately their survival. That constraint isn't favorable for scientific research and science missions, because there is a long lead time for the research results to be converted into a commercially viable products. Some companies with a large product portfolio and steady profits still do some research, as long as it isn't too costly or time consuming. An example is the pharma industry.
But science involving the biosphere, atmosphere, astronomy/astrophysics, space, interplanetary missions etc are on the other end of that spectrum - extremely costly and no commercialization for the foreseeable future. The only way private industries are going to do it is if the government funds them with short term profits - in which case, it's the government's program, not the industry's. Even Musk's Mars dream is dependent on government funding in that manner, though his intent isn't science either. What makes you think the private industry will take it upon themselves to fund and conduct research that makes no economic sense?
Many people grossly underestimate restarting a stopped process which took tremendous inertia to get rolling at the first place.
For all practical purposes its almost like you permanently lose the ability.
But entitlements and defense are the biggest costs to the nation and the consequences of cutting everything else are not worth it until these other things are addressed - or the nations finds a way to collect more revenues
On a more serious note, the administration's NASA budget is just completely nonsensical. I'm biased as a grantee, but the budget request called out our balloon experiment as should happen this year but refunded the balloon program (?!?). The congressional markups keep it so that's hopeful but there's still substantial uncertainty if we're actually going to Antarctica in ~3 months to fly our $20M experiment.
Even if all funding is ultimately secured will so many good people leave from the NASA balloon contractor that it will be difficult to have an Antarctic balloon campaign?
Only a devils advocate would believe that with this administration still giving his companies massive government contracts [1] and regulation win falls [2]
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/grok-elon-musk-xai-pentagon-con...
[2] https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-musk-spacex-rocket-...
Jared Isaacman is out, and what we're seeing actually happen now is the opposite of that. All the pork barrels are getting funded, and the brunt of budget cuts seems to be stated to be born by science missions like Roman Space Telescope.
I have read third party commentary on the SLS/Orion stuff that agrees. And actually, IIRC, Gateway requires multiple launches contracted out to Boeing and SpaceX, so this would be cutting off musks nose a little.
The rhetoric around cost cutting is something I can’t figure out how to deal with. The media makes it sound like the sky is falling with every cut. But having worked in enormous organizations myself, I also know that teams can and do lose headcount all the time, and somehow manage to carry on.
I guess the issue I wrestle with the most is how we can spend tax dollars on programs, but also have the ability to reduce those programs when needed, without it seeming like the end of the world.
We can’t have government agencies and programs that go on forever, expanding, growing in headcount and budget, for eternity. But the rhetoric around these events would have you believe that is the only path forward.
A friend of mine had her division's headcount cut by >80% that was all research focused and building instruments for deep space observation. No one is hiring people to do that in the private sector. Dozens of astrophysics PhDs in that division alone are now without work and with no real prospects doing anything related to what they've dedicated their entire lives to (and accepted modest salaries as civil servants to do).
(Or the lawsuit could be a hail-mary on its merits, hoping the employer will settle rather than air dirty laundry in court.)
There may be state-specific laws (in a small number of states for limited circumstances) and there is the WARN Act (but any court payout there would be a penalty on the employer and much delayed for the workers, while it only requires advance notice rather than being like severance -- and also limited by more conditions), but still "no general entitlement to severance" for the vast majority of workers no matter the reason for their separation.
The issue is now trust in your funding. Say in a few years NASA suddenly had money to rehire, who would trust that enough to orient your life around it?
1. Only Israel ($3,400) spends more per capita on R&D than the U.S. ($2,800) on R&D
2. The U.S. spent around $900 billion on R&D, with China estimated at $800 billion and the EU at $381 billion.
3. The per capita spending for other major economies:
- EU $850 per person - China around $700 per person (estimated) - South Korea $2,800 per person - Japan $1600 per person
(all roughly PPP adjusted)
Please check my estimates.
The point is that the U.S. spends a lot on R&D, so a haircut may not be bad for the health of U.S. R&D programs (new priorities) let alone the temporary reduction in expenses. The R&D output is still going to be enormous relative to the rest of the world and probably on par with China.
repeated explosions?
The thing that's exploding is Starship, which is still under development. Their production vehicles are among the most reliable in history. Falcon has a 99% mission success rate a 95% landing success rate and Falcon Heavy has a 100% mission success rate.
https://www.planetary.org/articles/nasa-2026-budget-proposal...
What? These two do two separate things, do you mean ULA?
Which people?
NASA's mission statement is "explore the unknown in air and space, innovate for the benefit of humanity, and inspire the world through discovery".
SpaceX is a p̶u̶b̶l̶i̶c̶l̶y̶ ̶t̶r̶a̶d̶e̶d̶ privately held company whose mission is to increase shareholder value.
The mission is mars and the money making endeavors (starlink) are to bring in the cash to do that.
It's hard to believe that by now Musk still hasn't realized what a ridiculous idea this is.
That realization could explain his weird pivot into e.g. buying Twitter and far-right politics. A midlife crisis triggered by discovering that his childhood dream was just a fantasy.
Maybe one day Elon Musk will understand space as well as you do.
I’d note SpaceX is by far the most successful but by far not the only player in that space.
The brain drain and funding attack is on non military goals of NASA as well as on college and specifically graduate level people in the United States because they don’t ideologically align to the president. It’s a cultural revolution America style.
SpaceX, which has been awarded tens of billions in government contracts from NASA, is making leaps and bounds over NASA? I think in 2022 almost 50% of SpaceX revenue was NASA contracts. All those leaps and bounds over NASA are literally NASA funded.
In some ways, this isn't wrong. It's easier to get a private company to do that than to get NASA to do it, because there's not some congresscritter from Alabama or wherever constantly trying to direct aspects of the project into their state, or to make the project serve their patrons' interests.
Of course, you could also say that up until recently, Elon himself was just as much of a patron, but still.
I still don't understand this. NASA funded the development of dragon and a few other companies through their Commercial Resupply Services (CRS 1 and 2) contracts. It's right in the name, Commercial Resupply. NASA isn't building anything in these contracts, just defining requirements and overseeing execution and spending.
>In some ways, this isn't wrong. It's easier to get a private company to do that than to get NASA to do it
But this is wrong. NASA came up with requirements and awarded money to multiple companies (which is how high-risk contacting works -- hedging development by funding multiple companies), one of the companies they funded has been pretty successful, some of them unsuccessful, some are still in development.
The whole argument and perception that NASA and Spacex are somehow competitors just makes no sense to me. It's like saying something like, "The US Navy needed a new frigate and funded the development of it from HII and NASSCO. HII made an amazing new frigate, and NASSCO failed. OMG HII is so amazing why don't we just pay them to be the US Navy?"
Exactly. They're not building anything. When NASA builds something you get a bunch of agencies also trying to hitch on. Requirements get diluted and less focused. Senator Hypertension from Alabama or Louisiana or wherever won't let the funding get through committee until they build the facility for testing it in a swamp.
The thing about Senator Hypertension, though, is that he completely lacks a sense of irony, and thus, also thinks government is inherently wasteful and that some private business can do anything government can do, better, no matter what the task is. So he's also okay with letting some well-capitalized company owned by a billionaire - I mean, a scrappy underdog of a company built with good-ol' American know-how - get a contract to do it instead of NASA.
And in doing that, he's willing to forego his swamp facility.
Of course this is assuming they actually want these agencies to be more efficient and not just die, which is a big assumption.
I mean if you were tasked with "government efficiency" don't you think the lowest hanging fruit would be the Pentagon budget? But, sure, go after air traffic control instead.
They are in demand and moving will get them higher pay and a more stable life.
For a long time Trump has been repeating Russian talking points like he invented them. The best asset is the one who never sees how he’s being played.
Only recently Trump has realized that Putin doesn’t actually do what he says, and you can tell he is genuinely surprised by this revelation.
In this case, all of the downsizing that has been happening is right out of the Heritage Foundation playbook, literally.
And those plans are largely a manifestation of Kevin Roberts' political beliefs. He, in his book, has said things such as:
> "many of America's institutions...need to be burned"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawn%27s_Early_Light:_Taking_B...
This executive has been criticized as using a hatchet and not a scalpel in their downsizing options precisely because their fundamental driving belief is that all of it is waste and abuse. They don't want any of it.
He's just so stupid that's equivalent to that.
I bet plenty have that useful "unwritten institutional knowledge" that could help newer programs. (F.ex. instructions for a nuclear waste storage said to use kitty litter, but didn't say it was because it was a cheap source of bentonite clay; someone substituted some modern paper variant and caused a small nuclear incident).
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-63293582
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/17/world/europe/china-recrui...
https://asiatimes.com/2024/12/what-uk-fighter-pilots-did-and...
And finally, the official response: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/former-armed-forces-perso...
It comes down to money and private interests dominating Western politics. It has bad but also good sides. Human conflict used to be about extermination a few thousand years ago, that is what I think of when I read such headlines, such things can actually also be seen as progress. We now have priorities other than our tribe or nation, that has good sides too. I like the Napoleonic war story where Napoleon gave a medal to a British scientist, Humphry Davy.
While bad for the nation, I try to see it as a mixed bag that people from the top down are... flexible.
The price we pay is, possibly, worse outcomes in conflicts. What we gain is that after conflicts end we get back to normal life - with one another - very quickly and relatively easily.
That puts you in a uniquely disadvantageous position.
And having worked on some classified systems doesn't preclude employment in related fields. It does restrict what you can share, of course.
People work at NASA because they believe in the mission. So if they are leaving now they either stopped believing in the future of NASA because of this or they were money motivated and sucked.
And what exactly is left of the mission now? Not much to keep working for in that regard
They do though. That's the premise of xAI and even on their website is that they have all this 'research' and are feeding it to that 'grok' to establish even more scientific 'discoveries'
I use quotes because I value the human side of things and like to enjoy the excitement and joy of collaboration and people coming up with new stuff.
> SpaceX and friends don’t do scientific research.
They do though. That's the premise of xAI and even on their website is that they have all this 'research' and are feeding it to that 'grok' to establish even more scientific 'discoveries'
I use quotes because I value the human side of things and like to enjoy the excitement and joy of collaboration and people coming up with new stuff.
Do we survive this? Are you sure? Because this is just the first six months, imagine by summer 2028 what things are going to be like with every single thing defunded, homeless and car-living exploding, etc.
So, uh, the camps will be funded and there will no longer be homeless... Man, sure glad the libs got owned.
One way to understand the election is a rejection of complexity - political complexity, social complexity, scientific complexity, economic complexity, moral complexity - these are all out of style. People seem very happy to ditch all of these in favor of kayfabe [0].
Of course, an empty narratives doesn't last; but once people get used to an empty narrative, they sometimes just move on to the next one. Just give them a face and a heel - things are much easier to understand that way.
Anyway, I feel like things might stay this way for a while.
It's definitely a real human experience to say "I know MY job is complicated, but that thing over there ought to be simple"
arghandugh•6mo ago
jewelry•6mo ago
oc1•6mo ago
butterlettuce•6mo ago
sokoloff•6mo ago
The tech industry certainly has its flaws and things to criticize, but this doesn’t seem part of it, unless I’m missing a connection somehow.
ddos27•6mo ago
aisenik•6mo ago
Imagine becoming wealthy and powerful in an age of abundance off of NCSA Mosaic and throwing it all away because you feel threatened by black people and think that government funded research is now bad. That's the level of "advanced thought" in these guys' group chats.
hansmayer•6mo ago
bluealienpie•6mo ago
jakubmazanec•6mo ago
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40562399
isoprophlex•6mo ago
Technology made all of this possible. From amazon (destruction of local shops) to uber (not saying the old system was good, but who needs transit concentrated into the hands of a few) to google (monopolizing and stifling search and adtech). And who knows what role large scale manipulation by stochastic propaganda parrots will play.
prpl•6mo ago
isodev•6mo ago
croes•6mo ago
Or Social networks as an easy way of spreading misinformation.
New to the club AI that delivers convincing sound, photo and video „proofs“ for any fake news they want including elaborated texts fitting to their target audience
kortilla•6mo ago
mittensc•6mo ago
derektank•6mo ago
sour-taste•6mo ago
kortilla•6mo ago
watwut•6mo ago
ivewonyoung•6mo ago
They did, but such information is not brought up due to political bias here. For example, how many people here know that Uber donated $1 million(the max amount possible) to Biden's inauguration? Google, Amazon and Microsoft donated too.
watwut•6mo ago
Google and Microsoft and Uber were paying both parties, that part is right.
Ygg2•6mo ago
Which one?
If you want to blame anyone, try the financial sector and financialization of everything. They fed the conflagration and created perfect condition for Trump-like figure to rise.
t0lo•6mo ago
crinkly•6mo ago
Shit education leads to pliable humans leads to social manipulation leads to desired outcomes from marketing efforts.
tonyhart7•6mo ago
I know they all one to blame even they control government
crinkly•6mo ago
t0lo•6mo ago
Ygg2•6mo ago
At the end of the day it's what capitalism is best at maximizing efficiency, and externalizing the risks to someone else.
smokel•6mo ago
kbrkbr•6mo ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner_emigration
actualwitch•6mo ago
thowaway7564902•6mo ago
- Randy Marsh
oc1•6mo ago
pi-err•6mo ago
> the crown jewels of America’s last century
Including Nasa in this pure idealization of the past. Nasa had many flaws that enabled a catastrophic Shuttle program and then the slow loss of US go-to-LEO capability.
There's probably more to expect of US investment in space without incompetent or contradictory military and political oversight than the current nasa zombie programs.
And it's unclear that Nasa can ever be without that oversight.
exe34•6mo ago
pydry•6mo ago
It's ironic that you'd blame them for the thing they didnt want to do.
If theyd kept their budget and autonomy after the moon landing it looked like they wouldve been building reusable rockets like the ones elon is building now, except in like, 1980.
pi-err•6mo ago
> it's unclear that Nasa can ever be without that (military and political) oversight
By design, Nasa is probably doomed to get interference.
> If theyd kept their budget and autonomy after the moon landing it looked like they wouldve been building reusable rockets
Pure fantasy. Nasa's interest for reusable vehicles led them to the Shuttle. Even without all the design changes, it would have been a dud.
Due to its nature, Nasa can't freely explore and commit to a design like SpaceX does/did. It draws a concept and freezes it after contractor review, only to find after an already massive investment if it works. Then there's public accountability instead of executive risk taking.
I'd bet the proper way to have protected Nasa would have been to keep it focused on key scientific missions with limited financial exposure. Mars rovers are a perfect case, or most James Webb.
Using Nasa to go back to the Moon or reach Mars was doomed to fail (sort of like it failed post Apollo).
pydry•6mo ago
The shuttle was a result of budget cuts they had no control over, military pressure they had no control over AND an interest in reusable spacecraft. The latter wasnt the problem.
The way I see it you are either blaming the organization for something it had no control over or are making an incoherent point in order to disparage the organization. Perhaps you could illuminate a 3rd interpretation of your comment.
jimbo808•6mo ago
Do you remember when a Republican presidential nominee defended his opponent from a racist question at a Republican Rally, calling him a "decent family man?"
--
Then, can you think of a time when a POTUS committed a pump a security he was selling, only to dump it immediately after his inauguration, and it it was barely talked about at at all?
Yeul•6mo ago
To understand America do not listen to what they say but watch what they do...
hopelite•6mo ago
Think of it like trying to understand the true origins and nature of the Soviet Union while being in the Soviet Union. Only a few people will even be able to achieve such an understanding and only under immense pressures and significant dangers even without speaking out, just alone for having sought out the truth. You cannot understand the Matrix while being plugged into it.
IAmGraydon•6mo ago
hopelite•6mo ago
dennis_jeeves2•6mo ago
Or for most people to absorb.
anigbrowl•6mo ago
h4ck_th3_pl4n3t•6mo ago
Kind of fits the current administration's strategy.
enraged_camel•6mo ago
zoklet-enjoyer•6mo ago
fdorzhensky•6mo ago
Similarly we could use random phrase associations like:
The episode with golden rain -> facebook manipulation done by private office in St. P. -> elected
It sounds non-factual until you know the story, then you see its extrapolation.
h4ck_th3_pl4n3t•6mo ago
And he fired the people that did their job at the FBI to investigate him. Out of pure retaliation.
john-h-k•6mo ago
h4ck_th3_pl4n3t•6mo ago
hopelite•6mo ago
Which one? *blank stare*
America has a deeply rooted problem with a parasitic and evil, lying, conniving, devious ruling class and their treasonous, accomplice enablers… to clarify what may be dismissed by some because you call them “crackheads”.
amanaplanacanal•6mo ago
hopelite•6mo ago
What do you do when/if you have everything else, you have done everything else, and normal things everyone else does bore you and you essentially have unlimited money/resources; you do things that most people cannot even imagine anyone would think of doing, let alone do them. It is why certain elements of our society have worked so hard to corrupt society in all kinds of ways, including through desensitization through all kinds of media and even things like essentially taking capital punishment off the table, even for the ver people who it is most effective for, deliberate, intentional "white collar" criminals like the very kinds that do perverse things. You can't pardon perverts and con artists and traitors if they are dead.
_proofs•6mo ago
Robotbeat•6mo ago