Kiwi Farms

So here's something I was actually quite surprised to stumble upon. Even more surprising is that nobody seems to be talking about it in the media. Apparently there's a bipartisan bill making it's way through congress called the Endless Frontier Act. The summary is short and sweet. Congress seems to have finally realized that China is rapidly outpacing us in the technology sector and it's causing real world problems for everybody. What follows is a remarkably sane bill from a democrat.


Some key takeaways here and from what I read from skimming the original bill text (included below):

• Investment in the top rather than the bottom -- not much emphasis on scholarships but a lot on high level research. We need to raise the skill ceiling and we need it right now.
• Substantial funding that could attract a lot of talent from private industry. Much of the private industry research ends up in companies that are in bed with China. As a result, much of the technology lands in their hands.
• Geographic diversity -- the idea seems to be to try to get more technology campuses into more parts of the country by establishing "hubs" outside of the largest cities. There's lots of very smart people that do not want to live in big cities, and they are by default disadvantaged from working on high level research.
• Moving manufacturing back to the US -- we gotta start unclamping those balls somehow.

The bill is 70 something pages, which is not unreasonable for a piece of legislation and the focus seems to remain pretty consistent throughout. It's currently set to pass the house and senate.

So what is likely going through your head is "Wow, a sensible, America-centric bill that wants to start repairing the country with an actual reasonable plan? Everyone voted yes on it? That sounds too good to be true!"

You would be correct!

The bill has now made it's way through the house. Because the vote to pass it was almost unanimous, it got multiple kitchen sinks attached to it and is now 1,420 pages in an almost unrecognizable form. Gems include "Chief Diversity officer", significant redirection of funds to black universities and "marginalized communities" (yes, I'm sure they're going to help a lot), racial diversity crackdowns at the aforementioned technology hubs, "Combatting sexual harassment in science".

There's a massive pile of riders now. Some seem more legitimate than others, but regardless, should not be in this bill.

The combined effect is cutting the original R&D funding proposal to 1/10th. The rest is now gibsmedat.

Also this



Quote from an article below:

But at least the NSF is getting a big boost, right? Wrong. The $54.9 billion to the NSF replaces their existing funding rather than being a supplement. That leaves only $12.9 billion in new NSF funding, of which $8.23 billion is tied to promoting STEM education. In short, what was sold as a ~$100 billion boost in federal support for R&D is now less than $40 billion in new spending, of which less than $10 billion is reserved for anything resembling research or development.

Click to expand...

This website seems to be left leaning, so they skip over all of the racial diversity stuff. Otherwise, the summary seems fairly accurate.
(archive)

I can't even be mad. This is fun to watch.