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Reuters:
Trump orders sweeping freeze for federal grants and loans
Trump order set to halt supply of HIV, malaria drugs to poor countries, sources say
Apparently based on this memo (pdf).
This seems very... crude. The question is if it's purposefully crude, if there's some structural reason it can't be better implemented, or if the person in charge is incompetent.
Also, impoundment? We'll see?
Sure is fun being a grad student in STEM and pouring every waking moment into a grant proposal due in the next few weeks to see this news today!
We’ll see if the United States decides to continue being a scientific powerhouse or if we’ll all get chased away to other countries..
Chinese value excellence. No politics in universities either, they make students take an hour or two of political theory at universities, but that's about it. Activism is not tolerated at all.
Between the demographics and all, it's quite likely at least half of cutting edge research is going to happen there.
These days you can evaluate that quite fast. The idea no doubt is to starve the beast of left-wing NGOs that infests so much of the West.
It's depressing that in Europe, the Comission of Retards funds 'climate' NGOs which are then used to justify these policies and lobby for more of it. The end result is, insofar climate is concerned dismal. Once the truly impactful policies like banning ICE in cars or banning all heating that's not a heat pump, politicians balk because it's political suicide and activists howl in outrage how they're dooming the planet.
In the US you have the same thing. Veritas, ever ready to ruin someone's horny time sent some hunk at an EPA official who then proceeded to blab about how they're throwing 'gold bricks off the Titanic' to fund the NGO complex. Of course, the funniest part is that a lot of this was happening under the "Inflation Reduction Act".
I went to American grad school. I have reviewed Chinese research papers. I can't exaggerate the sneering contempt American researchers have for them. In every way trivial and not worth publishing. People around here keep calling things "slop". This is the real slop we need not concern ourselves with.
I've worked in China a bit. I married a Chinese woman. I understand that they are smart and hardworking. If this were a computer game then their high stats would make them win. But they just don't. The factory workers can't follow instructions without a taskmaster standing over them. The researchers publish large numbers of papers worth nothing at all. Something is missing. I blame culture. Chinese people in America working as engineers are productive. Participating in our work culture cures them.
How do we square this with real world happenings? Deepseek, DF-21, Chinese batteries, the fact that they're now selling basic everything at competitive prices etc?
I am aware there's shitty research and Chinese are unusually good at gaming systems, but they deliver.
Or, you know, they operate the world's biggest HSR system without incurring massive casualties.
Their high speed trains derail sometimes and some have been slowed down to make them less likely to derail. They also have high ticket costs and low ridership. The system is propped up by government spending and could not sustain itself on ticket costs. I know some people really like high speed rail, but I'm not too hot on it in general and Chinese HSR in particular.
I have worked in Chinese factories. I know they can make stuff. I also know Chinese factory workers need constant monitoring and correction. There's something off with their work culture. They are not lazy. But if they have to be careful rather than fast they can't do it without someone like me watching them. And when I leave they start doing the work really sloppy and fast.
I don't see any contradiction between Chinese research publications being trash and also they make batteries and electric cars and DJI drones. They just need good factory supervision and quality control.
I have seen exact opposite claim: that ridership is sufficient and there aren't really any new serious crashes. Wasn't the last one in '17?
Fining them for off tolerance parts didn't work?
This was not a supplier, it was our own factory. Scrapping or reworking parts is burning our own money.
In that sense we had more leverage over external suppliers in that they had to be in spec or we could reject their parts and it is their problem if that makes them lose money.
We had a major customer reject a large order of a part due to it being out of spec. It was a disaster. I was on a plane within a few days.
A bit of googling claims Chinese HSR is not financially sustainable and survives on taxpayer funding and hundreds of billions of dollars in debt. But that's true for other HSR projects and not a particularly Chinese issue. Planes are just too fast and cheap and HSR way too expensive for HSR to make financial sense.
The issue with Chinese HSR is that it became a sort of flagship national pride / soft power / foreign influence vector during the post-2008 stimulus period.
For various (mostly American-adjacent) geopolitical-meets-green reasons, high speed rail became an international symbol of being a 'modern' and 'advanced' country, particularly because the Americans weren't into it. (For pretty sound economic reasons, but that doesn't stop good propaganda.) Building more and more HSR was not only a quote-unquote 'easy' way to beat the US at a metric of global prestige, but it was a complimentary infrastructure investment with the construction boom and the early Belt-and-Road infrastructure project wave (and thus a Chinese jobs program / influence investment overseas). China was a Train Power who could spare trains and track for a reasonable price and no strings attached* (*terms and conditions apply), and all that.
The issue on the domestic front was that the construction boom was a bubble, and the dynamics of the Chinese system that led to ghost cities also led to high speed rail to those sort of ghost city projects, even though the fundamental issue- like in a lot of places- is the human geography dispersion. People need movement within cities, or from suburbs to cities, more than they need movement between cities.
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