Slashdot Mirror
US Federal Budget Proposal Cuts Science Funding (washingtonpost.com)
hey! writes: The U.S. Office of Management and Budget has released a budget "blueprint" which outlines substantial cuts in both basic research and applied technology funding. The proposal includes a whopping 18% reduction in National Institutes of Health medical research. NIH does get a new $500 million fund to track emerging infectious agents like Zika in the U.S., but loses its funding to monitor those agents overseas. The Department of Energy's research programs also get an 18% cut in research, potentially affecting basic physics research, high energy physics, fusion research, and supercomputing. Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-E) gets the ax, as does the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program, which enabled Tesla to manufacture its Model S sedan. EPA loses all climate research funding, and about half the research funding targeted at human health impacts of pollution. The Energy Star program is eliminated; Superfund funding is drastically reduced. The Chesapeake Bay and Great Lakes cleanup programs are also eliminated, as is all screening of pesticides for endocrine disruption. In the Department of Commerce, Sea Grant is eliminated, along with all coastal zone research funding. Existing weather satellites GOES and JPSS continue funding, but JPSS-3 and -4 appear to be getting the ax. Support for transfer of federally funded research and technology to small and mid-sized manufacturers is eliminated. NASA gets a slight trim, and a new focus on deep space exploration paid for by an elimination of Earth Science programs. You can read more about this "blueprint" in Nature, Science, and the Washington Post, which broke the story. The Environmental Protection Agency, the State Department and Agriculture Department took the hardest hits, while the Defense Department, Department of Homeland Security, and Department of Veterans Affairs have seen their budgets grow.
Total, utter morons.
THANKS, Trump voters.
After all, this, do you STILL have no fucking clue how important email management is to us?!?
(This is so-ooo going to fail the Poe's Law test, but it was worth it.)
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
If the arts and humanities people could find jobs instead of vandalizing Trump's and other's properties, both numbers could be reduced.
The U.S. isn't paying for the wall. Mexico will be covering the cost of it, either directly or indirectly. So it's actually a net win for the U.S., in that they get a value-producing (the wall produces safety and provides border security services) tangible asset without actually paying for it.
What you say about GMOs is incorrect. There is no kill switch; you are either thinking of terminator seeds, which were never implemented, or the nature of hybrid biology, which a more of a fact of genetics than any corporate money making plot. Your lawsuit your linked is about actuallyl says the exact opposite of what you claim. The judge asked the prosecuting organic group to prove their claim that farmers are sued for unintended cross pollination; they could not. Sure, farmers have been sued by Monsanto for knowingly and intentionally selecting for and mass propagating transgenic seed which were the result of cross pollination, but at that is very different from the anti-GMO narrative (which is ironic since the farmers who were sued were trying to get GMOs without paying for them). To use an analogy, if I throw a DVD on your lawn, you cannot be sued for that, but if you take that DVD, mass copy it, and use it in a for profit manner, you can be. Simple as that. Rule of thumb: if an article portrays genetic engineering as injecting an ear of corn with blue stuff, it's probably sensationalist nonsense.
If there's evidence that radio waves are damaging, it certainty hasn't made much in the way of a splash in any scientific circles I'm familiar with.
If you want to claim a scientific high ground, you've chosen some bad examples.
Americans will be damned if we'll pay for some lazy foreigner to sit around eating their food but they'll gladly pump 'em full of lead that costs 5x as much.
Feed a man a fish and he won't be hungry for a day. Feed a man lead and he'll never be hungry again.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Courts deciding local issues on a case by case basis sounds much better than politically motivated scientists setting rules from a 1,000 miles away, yes.
Back in the real world though, here's what's going to happen. EPA funding will be slashed. You're going to be buttmad. Nothing is really going to change in the environment, the water will be fine, the air will be fine. Fewer industries will be crushed by unnecessary regulation, the economy will grow, more people out in flyover country will have jobs and be generally happy with the state of the country, and Trump will be re-elected. You will continue to be assblasted. Eternally. Forever and ever and ever, absolutely shitter-shattered.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.