Despotism does not lead to greatness. Instead we will have big Corps (oil, pharma...) owning, benefiting, and hiding public knowledge. Even China does better these days
"Big corp" will be massively harmed in the medium term, like everyone else. The NIH is critical for the pharma industry, and the USGS is critical for natural resource extraction industries (etc.). Blowing up federal agencies might juice profits for a quarter or two, but even that is pretty questionable/risky. If the whole economy goes into recession, many basic resources obtained from overseas get taxed, retaliatory tariffs slam US exports, many Americans lose jobs and whole regions lose industries, etc., it's generally bad for companies selling things.
Biggest potential winners are anyone willing to directly pay the President a kickback for massive corrupt payments from the government, anyone facing severe legal liability for past illegal actions who can buy a get-out-of-jail card, and foreign autocrats who want the US to stop protecting its own interests.
There are no vibrant monarchys or aristocracys or oligarchys. What do these people think everyone fled from Europe to the us for? In a monarchy everything fouls and rots.. look a trumps buianesses, the us is his last casino to bankrupt..
Are you sure the NIH is critical for the pharma industry? Pharma companies generally conclude that replication rates of academic grant funded medical research are so low as to not be worth bothering with. From Amgen:
"Over the past decade, before pursuing a particular line of research, scientists (including C.G.B.) in the haematology and oncology department at the biotechnology firm Amgen in Thousand Oaks, California, tried to confirm published findings ... scientific findings were confirmed in only 6 (11%) cases. Even knowing the limitations of preclinical research, this was a shocking result." [1]
and from Bayer:
"To mitigate some of the risks of such investments ultimately being wasted, most pharmaceutical companies run in-house target validation programmes. However, validation projects that were started in our company based on exciting published data have often resulted in disillusionment when key data could not be reproduced.
only in ∼20–25% of the projects were the relevant published data completely in line with our in-house findings
Surprisingly, even publications in prestigious journals or from several independent groups did not ensure reproducibility
Our observations indicate that literature data on potential drug targets should be viewed with caution
If the stream of research that came out of NIH-grant funded work was genuinely useful, venture capitalists would be falling over themselves to commercialize it. In reality [3]
[Atlas Venture partner] Booth said that the “unspoken rule” among early stage VCs is that at least 50% of published studies, even those in top-tier academic journals, “can’t be repeated with the same conclusions by an industrial lab. Atlas now insists on external validation studies of a new company’s basic science as a precondition to further investment.”
He went on to say that the NIH should have higher standards and do more to vet the data. That never happened. He also said that due to the low quality of NIH output, "there’s such a scarcity of venture firms willing to take
on early work, you rarely find yourself having to jump in quickly."
That was 15 years ago. There was no serious effort to improve, and VCs are still much more interested in computing startups than biotech.
> That was 15 years ago. There was no serious effort to improve, and VCs are still much more interested in computing startups than biotech.
No, they’re not. Biotech VC has been bigger than tech VC in terms of absolute funding for decades (based on annual data from the Venture Capital Association). Most years its not even close.
Pharmaceutical companies do depend on NIH funding but indirectly: most of their products are now acquired rather than developed in house. Universities spin off their NIH funded projects as biotech startups that are funded by VCs and public investors (biotech startups usually IPO long before they have any revenue, which is one of the reasons there’s so much money in biotech VC) and the small fraction that are most successful in clinical trials are acquired by the pharmaceutical industry.
Could you show me where you're getting that data? Not saying you're wrong, it's just that this contradicts everything I've heard before and I can't find counter-evidence. I checked the NVCA's latest data pack (which is excellent) and it seems to agree with me that tech dwarfs pharma.
If you go to "Deals x Sector" and then scroll down they split out deals by dollar value by sector and software alone is $89.2B vs $25.3B for pharma last year. But software isn't all of the tech industry, they also have a row for IT hardware startups which is $8.2B. Adding it up the tech industry sees 4x more money flowing into it than pharma despite that most tech startups are selling optional nice-to-haves to people who buy from their own pocket, vs pharma who sells stuff that might be life-critical to people who socialize the costs via insurance.
In theory, pharma should dwarf tech. You can't say no to a life saving drug if you need it: it should be easy money. In practice, the VCs interviewed in my source seem to have it right - pharma VC is much less competitive overall.
I'm not well enough versed in the level of commercialization of NIH research. But even assuming it was all trash, currently that's where all of the commercial researchers come from - NIH funds research at universities, that funds grad students through their practicum, and provides a candidate pool for Pharma. whether or not the current system for producing researchers is optimal, there doesn't seem to be another candidate lying around.
Plenty of industries train in house, and there's no specific reason why teaching and research have to go hand in hand. Actually rather the opposite, the connection between these things is rather artificial and you don't find it outside of grant-funded universities.
It’s rare to find someone argue that confirming only 25% of a massive amount of output enabled only because of the in place system is a good reason to eliminate the system.
It’s kind of like saying “solar panels are only 20% efficient, so are you sure the sun is critical for the solar energy industry?”
That's not what the stat says. It says only 25% of findings selected specifically for sounding important replicated for that particular company, not that 25% of output overall does. And replicable doesn't mean correct or useful, it's just the first step. There are lots of ways for a study to replicate yet be wrong.
25% is crazy low, but 11% is even lower. If someone told you things and 90% of the time they were wrong, you'd stop listening.
Solar panels having low effectiveness would actually be a good argument against them, because although the solar industry needs solar panels the correct comparison is with the energy industry overall, which doesn't.
To take one single simple example, the mRNA vaccines that saved tens of millions of lives during the Covid pandemic (earning a lot of money for the companies that produced them), and are one of the most promising technologies for many other vaccines, cancer treatments, etc. would have been completely impossible without decades of NIH funding.
Bayer might find individual academic studies to be poor basis for starting new drug development trials, or whatever, but they certainly wouldn't pretend that they can independently replace the entirety of American academic biomedical research, which is substantially dependent on public funding. It's much too large and expensive a task for industry to take on, especially since industry would have to pay much higher salaries to attract the same talent.
You'll see similar in most fields: basic research into interesting curiosities in academic labs does not instantly and immediately lead to new commercial products. But immediate productization is neither the purpose nor motivation of scientific research, and effectively all new product development is completely dependent on having open research as a part of the same global social system: non-commercial labs, substantially funded by public money, find and explore most of the novel phenomena, train nearly all of the researchers including the ones who end up in industry, provide the structure for knowledge sharing like journals and conferences, and so on.
Funding scientific research is among the highest leverage things the US government can do. While many research grants go to projects that fail or don't lead anywhere promising (which is why they rarely get funded by industry), occasionally one of those projects ends up creating huge (sometimes literally trillions of dollars) benefits down the line, with little if any reward accruing to the researcher who did the work, but massive improvement for the whole society.
Industry already pays higher salaries, the purpose of funding scientific research IS in fact productization even if not immediate, and new product development can't be said to be dependent on open research if 90% of the time the claims don't replicate. If anything it's the opposite, product development would depend on not wasting all your budget on replicating false claims.
> Funding scientific research is among the highest leverage things the US government can do.
A deeply subjective claim asserted as obvious fact. It can just as easily be argued that governments could spend nothing on scientific research and progress would occur at the same rate or even faster.
As for the mRNA vaccines, just be aware that this is a bad example to use for the wonders of government science. Lots of people who carefully checked the data and studies at the time realized the mRNA vaccines didn't work and public health agencies were lying about their effectiveness, as they lied about so many other things. Later on many other people realized this too, usually after taking several boosters and still getting infected repeatedly.
There are better and less controversial examples to cite if you want examples of government funded science with high impact (e.g. AlexNet), but it's not enough to point to a handful of examples. You have to show that they'd have never happened otherwise, which is impossible to show as usually it's clear that they would.
The issue is not with Medicaid: it's with the Big Pharma, their lobbies, and the corruption they generate. For-profit companies can't be in control as something as critical and universal like human health.
He will actually use his position in the government to take down his competitors (by, for example, stopping the tax benefit of EV). Elon has grown into the biggest corrupt guy
At least the media and public are aware.
The oil industry: not so much: they are destroying the whole planet, and their lobbying is so much more secret and politically motivated
One has to wonder if we are truly aware. How much is AI ruining the environment via its constant demands for electricity and water? I'd expect more harms will come to light way down the line, as was true with big oil, tobacco, etc.
I question the very framework of judging harms at the tool instead of at the user in the first place. Under that twisted logic of attributing the morality of all users to the creator so much as sharpening an axe is a moral wrong.
That's called Colonial looting. They didn't ask anyone to steal from all the slaved African nations, and whatever war they won. And you're right, a lot of countries did the same: it doesn't make it right
CHIPS act, IR act (infrastructure, jobs...), student loans effort, better social nets for seniors, millions of jobs, much better handling of inflation than the rest of the world, pushing for democracy and freedom.
We can't go back to misogyny, racism, removing freedoms from women, teachers, different people, giving money only to the rich and connected, non-sense diplomacy...
The second sentence makes me not trust the first sentence btw.
The first sentence is basically just signing normal budget agreements? The chips decision sounds like the best decision that was actually pushed after Covid.
Israel is the culprit .
In that case, let's look at the millions more of people who died under Trump.
Trump was unable to stop the war in Afghanistan, and triggered the invasion of Ukraine (by weakening NATO)
Invasion of Ukraine started under Obama in 2014. Not that I care from the outside who the head of the US military industrial complex is while things happen, but let's be a bit more precise.
Funny how people can't even accept a simple truth and rather flag it and instead bicker over inconsequential bullshit, like whether Biden stubled twice or thrice during a stupid debate, or whether he was tired or is simply getting ever more demented, like many people over certain age.
But at least it explains how US can fund so much brutality against children overseas. Americans just close their eyes, and go lalalalala, while raking in profits.
> The public had clearly voted against immigration and free trade. At that point, the job of the federal bureaucracy was to put aside their own views about whether immigration and free trade were good things, and use their skills to implement the agenda of their duly elected new boss.
You mean a new boss put in place by an Electoral college, which didn't represent the majority of the people?
Majority of the country didn't vote for the 2016 President
You mean the guy who won the only contest that anyone was trying to win? You can complain that San Francisco would have won the Super Bowl if field goals were only two points but we have no idea who would have won under different rules.
Trump won the vote that determines who represents the people in the federal government. There is no separate election where the candidates campaign to win the most absolute number of votes. You can add up the state-by-state vote totals, but that’s a meaningless number because nobody is trying to win that.
Fun fact: if you want to talk about different ways in which we don’t select the executive, it’s interesting you overlook the most common one in advanced democracies: the number of party votes or seats in the legislature. Trump would have won that too, both in seats and by 2 million total votes.
