CharonY

One of the reasons for strange procurement in government is because they want tons of oversight and do not trust public servant to make judgement calls. The market understands and reacts to these constraints by basically skimming off the top. An issue with things like ghost employees (i.e. non-existent folks on payroll) is that they exist both in private and public sector. And there is the narrative that the public sector is always worse than the private, but in many cases that is not true or data is missing. But what the DOGE folks don't understand are a) the need critical/essential services b) how governments work and c) the fact that they are too effing inept to be able to make judgement calls.

On top of that, they have paused all NIH funding and are cutting all contracts that somehow in their syphilitic mind involves DEI (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00703-1). In cases where the activities are not related to DEI, but contain DEI-related words (who knows that that means as their search words also included for example "woman"). Ultimately they want to control language and how folks are allowed to think about things. This also demonstrates why they were so afraid of pronouns or related language. They were just projecting and thought that the progressives wanted to do the same. I actually think they do, but not deeply. They were made more afraid of immigrants, women, trans folks and whatever they could come up with, so that they eventually thought that fascism is a fair trade for security. Note that Trumps supporters here and elsewhere keep mentioning that that someone (usually the left or the elites) made them do it. Thereby, they can reject any accountability in the resulting consequences. It is pretty much textbook and incredibly well documented. But then, who reads nowadays anymore?

It got more diverse because of DEI. Prior to their efforts to increase diversity it was (as most other places) white male dominated and the efforts of the female scientist at work there was often overlooked or diminished. Especially in leadership positions, NASA is known to be less successful in increasing representation of women and minorities compared to some other agencies. To paraphrase Ginsburg, throwing out DEI when it has worked (to whatever degree) and is continuing to work to stop discrimination is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.

There are many, my general suggestion is to look for so-called reviews, i.e. articles that summarize past articles. A good exercise is to look for a few recent ones and then a few about a decade back. Understanding what has changed in that time frame should be helpful. In this area, the important aspects would be a potential change in long-term effects and especially association with cancer that are likely going to add more info.

I think red 3 was banned recently. In many areas I don't think that this is true as a whole, it depends on the specific article and the authors. Generally speaking, older studies have a better chance to be validated or invalidated. What you would do is to see which papers are citing the study and what their (updated) conclusions are. It is less of an issue in the field of toxicology (for the most part). But in other areas I have noticed that in newer papers folks only cite within the last 5 to maybe 10 years. These are often younger researchers and in more than one (or a dozen) occasions, I found that they kept re-inventing the wheel, because they were not aware of older findings where the same effect was already shown.

I actually thought that Apollo was lower, for some reason (maybe saw unadjusted values).. Very interesting.

Just to highlight the highly, incredibly intelligent decision-making and power takeover process: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/07/us/politics/trump-musk-doge-power.html

As mentioned above, the mission is different. It is like asking why yachts are so expensive. Kayaks were around for around 4000 years.

It is incredible to me that folks apparently collective forgot a minor event that happened between 2020-2023. Yeah, and while IIRC he was not charged for it he did try to hire folks to murder people and evidence for that was presented. Or as some would say he is "very fine people".

Dumber because folks now have access to all current and historic info. Still they chose this.

This silly. Rich elites are more often than not conservative (mostly in the fiscal sense, they like low taxes). Have you nit seen the many billionaires with Trump? Higher ed is associated with left leanings because it promotes critical thinking and associated questioning of the world and frequently own values. Clever kids realize that the world is complex and frequently beliefs they had crash against facts. That is why an authoritarian system wants an uneducated populace. I present the above post as evidence, especially the second paragraph.

For starters, it doesn't. I think the estimate are closer to a 100 billion. And one big driver of the cost is tech. In contrast to previous missions the idea is not just take a look and then buzz off, but to build something that can be the foundation of future exploration. Similar reason why ISS is markedly more expensive than Sputnik

Honestly, it does not look particularly sophisticated to me. Rather it seems that the standards of the electorate has slipped. I don't think it is worse. It is dumber. Well, perhaps that actually makes it worse.

Dude, the US has a military base in Greenland.

Well that happens when the Russian president and his puppet are running the show.

Also, there are occasionally application-based questions, which can be fairly open ended and are not merely graded by true/false parameters. They are also immensely disliked by students. True and in while it might be somewhat certain in assessing really low performance, it is often unclear what the correct parameters for high performance are. There are general correlations with productivity parameters for example, but there is little evidence that folks are able to even somewhat consistently pick the best in each given cohort. As such, any standard we set will be biased to various degree. This is why in some cases folks are stepping away from "hard" parameters in certain jobs. But frankly I still think that beyond a certain level of qualification all of this is really just rolling dice.

We forget things that are a few years (maybe months/weeks?) ago. I am also worried that there there is just so much going on that just the latest biggest thing erases everything else (considering e.g., the historic gains of the AfD). (Weidel is the current leader of the AfD, Estwaehler are folks who voted for the first time). There are politicians in Germany who called the holocaust a "Fliegenschiss" (literally, fly shit, meaning something insignificant), in German history. The world is shifting, powered by a never ending stream of idiocy. And I would be very angry, too, if I wasn't so tired.

Though Intel has multiple fabs in Arizona. They are under scrutiny for water use but have invested in water reclamation facilities. Not sure how well that works in practice, though. The idea is used and I think was heavily popularized in the last 5 years or so. But the thinking about its effectiveness has been evolving with different discussions happening in the political, academic and business spheres.

Based on reports in the first Trump term, this seems to be the usual modus operandi. I think while Trump is intellectually certainly not brilliant, he does have a sense for persons and loyalty. Or seemed to have. However, as a consequence a lot of his inner circle seem to be idiots.

Even if that was true, it would not have played out that way in front of Trump. Even in a normal administration, a VP would never jump in front of a negotiation between the President and the head of another state. Vance is not stupid enough to do that just because of his ego. Considering Trump's ego and capriciousness, it is very unlikely that Vance would have just jumped Zelensky without any coordination or agreement. Trump has repeatedly thrown Vance under the bus to diminish his role in the past.

No one except Russia wants it. And they are the invaders.

Especially a VP that has been emasculated repeatedly by the president. If he didn't have the marching order he would never have dared to make a noise.

There is little doubt that this was premeditated. The fact that the VP was allowed to do the attack made it pretty clear.

Plus there was the comment at the end that this was great television, clearly suggesting that this was a planned farce.

So what do you think would have been the right response to the US ambush?