jordanpg

"Professor Dave" interviews 6 physicists regarding Hossenfelder including one guy whose name you particle physicists in particular might recognize.

The stated reasons, such as to "coerce universities to change their internal policies to align with the administration's priorities," understate things.

The real objective is to strip independent scientific institutions of their authority and to subordinate knowledge production to political and religious ideology.

Yes, religious ideology. If this sounds crazy; if you do not think this is happening; or if this sounds scary to you -- then you should go read up on Russell Vought and what his publicly stated objectives are. He is behind all of this. I doubt that Donald Trump knows or cares about any of it.

What is happening is absolute, complete insanity. And it has nothing to do with wokeness, antisemitism, DEI, waste, fraud, and abuse, or any of the other pretexts the Administration is using today.

Sounds exhausting.

> It has been brought to our attention that some sections of Article 1 are missing from the Constitution Annotated (constitution.congress.gov) website. We’ve learned that this is due to a coding error. We have been working to correct this and expect it to be resolved soon.

All free.

Donate. Recurring is better.

It is breathtaking to consider how the members of the Administration and their children, parents, and grandparents have benefited from NIH-funded research in innumerable ways that they are shamefully unaware of, every time they visit the doctor or the ER.

https://www.google.com/search?q=computer+security+human+natu...

It's not just this. Security involves compromises and trade-offs. Humans will be stupid humans and re-use passwords, install better but insecure software, not ever update, etc. It's an old story.

In the year 2025, if communication with any other human on the globe isn't as simple as opening and app and typing, then people will find another way because there are about a thousand better ways.

So I doubt they are trying to get away with anything. They're just preferring the trivial option over the option that probably involves a physical token or slow biometrics or 15-second logout or whatever arduous security features the government comms probably have. Just like any human would.

Perhaps this will force the government COMSEC people to re-evaluate their practices.

Updated to add: I'm not defending their practices, just giving a likely explanation. Blaming the users is not always the best way to evaluate a security failure.

This is precisely why Ted Cruz, etc. go on TV and read out the titles of silly-sounding research about beehives and condoms. Because they know that most Americans have no sense of very low-N statistics. A few examples out of hundreds of thousands proves the point!

Of course it doesn't.

Do you understand that? If so, then why are you casually throwing around those talking points that are contributing to the destruction of scientific infrastructure and human livelihoods? This isn't a game.

You're going to need more that 2 examples (one of which has nothing to do with NIH) to substantiate this claim.

Have you been to the doctor recently? One of your loved ones?

See if you can find something important to your family in this chart: https://report.nih.gov/funding/categorical-spending#/

Take a look at what was funded recently.

Putting aside how you or your family has personally benefited from items on the list, please point out the "fake, useless research".

Do not mean to downplay the mistake (at a minimum, the SecDef should suffer the same fate a lower ranking member of the DoD would for reasons of military order), but humans will be humans. Dealing with security sucks and involves trade offs and compromises.

If you're in the US, it's time to start asking yourself what you are going to want to be able to say to your kids or grandkids when they ask what you did about it when the constitutional republic was falling.

And this isn’t an interesting thought experiment. It’s the whole ballgame. This is the focus of right wing propaganda.

And also consider whether you will change your mind if the actual fraction is <<<1%.

Please. It’s an emergency. No one is coming to save us.

Don’t forget it. He’s just getting started.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/10/who-is-russe...

Every. Single. One. of these firings is a story involving human beings, with families, with ongoing concerns like mortgages, medical problems, deaths in the family, school problems, and all the other things that happen during life. Things many of the DOGE staffers are too young to have experienced yet.

Whatever else you might think about what is going on, the Administration could have done this humanely, carefully, methodically -- but they chose to do it carelessly and cruelly instead. In my opinion, this alone is unforgiveable.

These organizations can and will adapt. But as I said in my OP, the real, lasting damage is in prestige. In the meantime, scientists all over the world thinking about working in the US will think twice. Young adults thinking about becoming research physicians and doing biomedical research will think twice. Researchers making peanuts working at universities doing this research will go work in pharma on more lucrative projects.

You can just add subs that are of interest that lack the torrent of bad news and only ever visit that custom feed. It doesn't ever algorithmically add posts from subs you don't manually include, as far as I've seen.

I would be very surprised to learn that there are not teams working in every state to weaken the integrity of the electoral process.