It's all well and good to suggest that each program receiving funding gets a thorough review. Of course, that review needs to be by experts, to ensure it gets a fair shake. Who are the experts in the field? The odds that you can be an expert in the field (by publication count, let's say) without having already been funded by the NIH is pretty slim. So now your experts are also insiders.
That's going to be a big problem as very few insiders are going to be willing to rock the boat. Even if it's necessary.
Maybe you've got a good idea of how to solve this "good review requires experts, experts are very likely insiders, insiders are unlikely to rock the boat" problem. It would be wonderful if there was some solution, even if it was hard.
> Maybe you've got a good idea of how to solve this "good review requires experts, experts are very likely insiders, insiders are unlikely to rock the boat" problem.
You're the one who has identified this as a problem, shouldn't you be the one to suggest an alternative?
The alternative being implemented is that insiders could not police themselves, so outsiders are doing it for them with far less precision.
It’s like a hoarders show where everyone is shocked (SHOCKED!) that things had gotten as bad as it is, the hoarder has lost the capability to determine what is valuable or necessary, so a third party with no attachment or sentiment comes in to clean house and throws out the good with the bad.
Couldn't at least part of the reviewing be done by foreign experts?
Having said that, this smells witch-hunty to me. The US can boast decades of excellence in medical and biological sciences, which in turn generates a massive windfall. Completely upending the architecture behind this dominance on the suspicion that a few hundred million bucks are less-than-optimally spent is a hell of a gambit, and even ignores all the higher-order effects that even that "spare change" bring about.
You've made at least 2-3 personal attacks against me while seemingly not even trying to address the problem that I highlighted. If that's your goal, OK. It definitely goes against the spirit of the rules here if not the letter.
Delaying the flu vaccine? Ok that's bad, sure.
It's also a real goalpost move and also doesn't address the technical problem "insiders going to inside" I raised in answer to the parent's paraphrased "I can't understand this, why is this necessary?"
I don't know that doing things this way is strictly necessary. But I also don't think it's reasonable to just hand-wave away or worse completely fail to even acknowledge much less actually address the insiders problem.
Q> Can you explain why the sledge hammer approach, removing funding for things wholesale and causing large amounts of destruction (both economic and health) is reasonable?
And your answer was
A> It looks like there is a problem with the current system, and changing something would be beneficial.
And, while I agree that the sentiment ("changing something would be beneficial") is fair... as an answer it falls squarely into "We should do something, this is something, so we should do this", which is categorically ridiculous. The way to approach these types of issues, where changing things can (and does) have real, significant impact on lots of people, is to come up with a plan and discuss what the impacts/tradeoffs are. It is _not_ to just do the first thing that comes to mind and then ignore the people who's lives your destroying.
We spend a large portion of the federal budget on human death prevention. It sounds like hyperbole, but anyone dying from administrative changes is literally “world ending” for them.
If a plan to cut bureaucracy was somehow analyzed to find that we could save 5% of the US budget in exchange for 10,000 lives, reasonable people might consider otherwise. To take these changes against life-saving organizations without first analysis of consequences is pretty reckless.
> But I also don't think it's reasonable to just hand-wave away or worse completely fail to even acknowledge much less actually address the insiders problem.
ok but burning down a house with a family in it because of a hypothetical burglar usually isn't a good solution.
It's simple, really. Make it so the experts have 0 leverage. Maybe have "the workers" make all the decisions! ??? Profit? :-) They tried this in Soviet Union...
I'm sure you have direct economic interests. Odds are good someone in your circle is type 1 diabetic, and helping that person will indirectly help you.
I was referring to the election of Trump and the people he's appointed. Everything was rotting from the inside out and infested, and like with everything that is rotted/rusting, you will have to carve it all out to clean it, and sometimes you unfortunately take out legitimate and healthy things.
Again, back to my original point. We've been "trying" this "surgical" approach for decades, and a lot of people believe that it wasn't working with things getting objectively and subjectively worse. Why? I'd argue it's because people's concerns and sincere requests for debate or voicing of their concerns has been met with derision, dismissal, gaslighting and downright cancellation. I'm not trying to debate it here, but my overall point is that people's concerns, criticisms and request for genuine debate have not been listened to, and now the pendulum has arguably swung way too far in response. Perhaps next time around we won't be so dismissive and hostile, and actually meet in the middle.
As a personal aside, the scientific/medical community (overlapping heavily with NIH) has not been able to 'surgically' prevent the advent of crazy child-mutilation and sterilization in the supposedly-enlightened West, so how do you expect average people that disagree with it to try approach it with civility? We've reached absolute peak madness, so of course debate and "surgical" type approaches are out of the window at this point. We must do better next time around.
Ah yes. Trying to have a civil and productive conversation with people who insist we're at "absolute peak madness" of "crazy child-mutilation".
Those aren't sincere people; they're living in an alternate reality warped by propaganda.
Of course I realize this is a deliberately created wedge issue precisely so those folks can claim the burden is on the rest of us to engage properly. And when we're exhausted by debunking bullshit they can claim we're being elitist and dismissive. Brilliant strategy that's taken our country to an illustrious and proud moment...
I could just as well argue that your explanation of this is also a "brilliant strategy" to dismiss any potentially valid concerns the other side may have.
If we can't even get this dynamic right, and both sides have convoluted and elaborate ways to dismiss the other, then surely we can all agree that there will absolutely never be any reconciliation or meeting of the minds of the two groups? Leaving only forced indoctrination, silencing of opinions and plain separation of the two groups into physically different governments/countries.
Your question can be answered without giving away control and access to unauthorised and inexperienced auditors.
Governance, Risk, and Compliance has been missing. Too many decades of nepotism, insider trading, corruption ( starting with lobbying ), have led to the lack of transparency. The movie “The Big Short” has explained some of these issues.
FWIW, I liked your suggestion, the author’s explanation, And your follow on written understanding.
If someone’s technical article is submitted and they are themselves participating in a discussion out feeling insulted, then accusations of unsolicited advice are unfounded.
Modifying the existing journal really sounds like the wrong solution. Just "journalctl --rotate" the file and throw out the one with accidental PII. Journal files are not great for long-term storage or search. You can export the old file and filter out manually if you really want to preserve that one https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/export/
In what situations is it a harder problem than this?
> I once typed an SSH password in the username field, and the only way to erase that was to erase all the logs. So this has some significant downsides.
I hope this was a personal system. Changing logs in this manner would have almost certainly led to your dismissal anywhere I ever worked. This anecdote just re-enforces the need for Forward Secure Sealing.
We were awarded our legal fees. However, these the legal fees are only a part of the total cost, which includes lost income from the time expended, disruption of our personal lives, alienation from our passions and professions, damage to our reputations from false claims spread by Wright in furtherance of his fraud, etc. At least one of Wright's targets were hospitalized over stress induced cardiac problems due to the litigation.
We can bring separate fraud charges for some of these damages, though they're not likely to be entirely recoverable. However, Wright appears to be a lifelong grifter with little to no personal means to pay any judgement and attaching his sponsors for this litigation would be an extra level of difficulty. Even ignoring the potential of non-recovery, doing so would mean years of additional mud wrestling with this pig ("and the pig likes it!"), and a further impact on our lives which we'd just like to continue. We might be forced to however, because he and his conspirators seem to be showing little sign of stopping and going on the offensive might be necessary because simply losing and paying costs may not be enough to stop them.
Not wise to generalise - I'm an HN reader and I do not think "Greenpeace is omnipotent".
I used to be a Greenpeace supporter and would donate to them, even. Then I started to get harassed by their "premium donation agents" and stopped. Over the years, I have realised that they have taken up certain good causes (anti-oil, anti-whaling) but have also been rather misguided (e.g. stop all nuclear rather than argue for realistic-safe nuclear).
Note: I am pro-vaccination and I’m vaccinated against measles as well.