Really, "billionaire", that's what you're going with (emphasis mine)?! Isn't it more relevant that he founded and runs 2 biggest startups (as in, high velocity, high growth companies) in the world (Tesla & SpaceX) that run circles around both legacy companies and government agencies? So, yeah, if you want things to radically improve fast, of course you call someone like Elon.
It's sad that "unbiased news" basically no longer exists.
It's obvious if you see measures like web pages getting deleted because they contain the word "privilege". You know, as in "privilege escalation". I'm sure the people at NSA who wrote these pages are happy about their work being in vain.
The answer would be, any description that doesn't lean right nor left. Maybe "technologist", "entrepreneur", "startup founder", "industrialist" etc.
As a professor working in AI, I'll probably be fine, but if I cannot get funding it will be challenging to stay in academia. Then again, both of my last major NSF proposals (which are in review) had either a required Institutional DEI Commitment Statement (that was for an NSF MRI proposal), and the other was a major AI proposal which required about 1/3 of the proposal to be aimed at broader impacts that were largely aimed at increasing diversity in AI. I do care about increasing the number of women, black, and Hispanic people in AI research, although I also had a section about how we need to increase our domestic production of AI scientists given that 70%+ of the PhDs produced in AI in the USA are non-citizens.
Both are still in review. I'm not optimistic, but the work required hundreds of hours to create those proposals....
I assume this is the goal
HN has had a huge number of political threads in recent months, including quite a few about funding cuts along the lines of the present story. These submissions don't end up with specific discussions about the specifics of a given story; they end up with generic discussions repeating how people feel about the larger topics. Those topics, and those feelings, are certainly important—but it makes the threads largely interchangeable, and therefore even more repetitive.
Since frontpage space is the scarcest resource on HN (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), we can't have too many of these, or HN would turn into a current affairs site, which is definitely not what it's supposed to be (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
Btw I took a look at the users who flagged the current submission and I didn't see any evidence of political motivation.
Political articles are accepted, ignored or there is a redirect to duplicate discussion
Everyday my paranoia increases, every day I become more of a conspiracy theorist. It's us vs. the people who can outspend us a million times over and we can't fight back. Why should any news organization tell the truth if lying gets them a fat paycheck. Why should anyone in charge of any public forum allow controversial topics to get posted when they can make a fat paycheck by blocking them?
These people will burn down their own house and wealth to make sure others don't feel welcome. How hard is it to just learn to live with people that don't agree with you?
They need to continue to feed the republican base stories such as "We're fixing SCIENCE which the Dirty Liberal's have been RUINING for DECADES! CHINA!"
biod iversity
I'm left wondering if this administration and its henchmen will manage to do the opposite of what the Apollo program left the US in its wake: A giant leap for the U.S. economy. It sure is creating a lot of long-lasting damage.
The NIH, which accounts for nearly all biomedical research, had a budget of $48B.
Lockheed Martin, a single defense contractor, received more than $60B in government contracts in 2024.
I can tell you most scientists are just trying to do their jobs, studying hard stuff. Unfortunately, we do not really have the resources to fight anything.
Tough situation, and lots of scientists are pretty frightened. Many junior scientists (myself included) are looking at leaving the country.
