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Posted (edited)
2 hours ago, Tigeraholic1 said:

What a great time to be alive!

 

 

2 hours ago, Tigeraholic1 said:

What a great time to be alive!

 

Be careful what you wish for.  

Edited by Tiger337
Posted
5 minutes ago, CMRivdogs said:

There goes all hopes for a possible lung transplant. Thanks MAGA, I hope to haunt your dreams in the future

 

It's a greattime to be alive though!  We just won't live as long.  

  • Like 1
Posted
15 hours ago, Tiger337 said:

But what they are doing now goes way beyond an audit.  

The audits are all mandated by some law or directive. A colleague of mine just participated in an audit of a sister site; they get to return the favor later this year. There's other professional accreditation type audits, ISO and the bunch. All to make sure things are up to code.

 

Honestly, there are some things that are inefficient, but I'm not sure how slashing the budget will help address those inefficiencies.

Posted (edited)

I've mentioned my mom's dementia, or maybe I haven't. I don't know. But the charity that I've donated to and have gotten some help from sent out a blast that they are losing significant funding as a result of recent actions, funding that will stop research in its tracks.

Edited by Edman85
  • Like 2
Posted
1 minute ago, Edman85 said:

The audits are all mandated by some law or directive. A colleague of mine just participated in an audit of a sister site; they get to return the favor later this year. There's other professional accreditation type audits, ISO and the bunch. All to make sure things are up to code.

 

Honestly, there are some things that are inefficient, but I'm not sure how slashing the budget will help address those inefficiencies.

I understand that there are audits and there should be audits. What Musk is doing goes way beyond an audit.  Slashing the budget is not an audit and should never be decided unilaterally.   

Posted (edited)
43 minutes ago, Edman85 said:

I've mentioned my mom's dementia, or maybe I haven't. I don't know. But the charity that I've donated to and have gotten some help from sent out a blast that they are losing significant funding as a result of recent actions, funding that will stop research in its tracks.

Health research is not going to be able to function at all if the NIH cuts don't get reversed or substantially mitigated.  I think people don't understand the difference between direct costs (not being cut)  and indirect costs (severely cut).  In my  understanding, indirect costs are not in place to make profits, they are things that are essential to research  (like equipment and labs) that are not allowed to be part of direct costs.    

Edited by Tiger337
Posted (edited)
30 minutes ago, Tiger337 said:

Health research is not going to be able to function at all if the NIH cuts don't get reversed or substantially mitigated.  I think people don't understand the difference between direct costs (not being cut)  and indirect costs (severely cut).  In my  understanding, direct costs are not in place to make profits, they are things that are essential to research  (like equipment and labs) that are not allowed to be part of direct costs.    

I assume in the 2nd you meant 'indirect'. Indirect cost are generally allowed for administrative and overhead. For instance you can put the salary of your research in direct costs, but not the cost of paying his salary (office overhead) or providing his supervision. Those costs are all quite real and no org can function without them. I've never worked under an NIH grant but the one firm I worked for that did do work on government grants (mostly DOEnergy), the amount of G&A chargeable was already strictly limited as a percentage of direct expenses. IIRC we could put equipment purchases in direct costs but the equip reverted to the government at the end of the program. Then the dumb thing was that the government would maybe try to sell it or surplus and usually fail because the grantee was the one party prohibited from buying it back from the gov. One can see that they set it up that way to prevent feather-bedding, but it was still frustrating to see equipment you were will to pay a fair price for go to scrap because the law often didn't allow the only people that wanted it to buy it.

Edited by gehringer_2
  • Like 1
Posted
3 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

I assume in the 2nd you meant 'indirect'. Indirect cost are generally allowed for administrative and overhead. For instance you can put the salary of your research in direct costs, but not the cost of paying his salary (office overhead) or providing his supervision. Those costs are all quite real and no org can function without them. I've never worked under an NIH grant but the one firm I worked for that did do work on government grants (mostly DOEnergy), the amount of G&A chargeable was already strictly limited as a percentage of direct expenses.

Yes, I meant indirect.  

Posted
4 hours ago, Edman85 said:

The audits are all mandated by some law or directive. A colleague of mine just participated in an audit of a sister site; they get to return the favor later this year. There's other professional accreditation type audits, ISO and the bunch. All to make sure things are up to code.

 

Honestly, there are some things that are inefficient, but I'm not sure how slashing the budget will help address those inefficiencies.

and people have to understand the reality of the 5% rule, which is that wringing the last segment of inefficiency out of any org or process invariable costs more money and effort than the cost of that last segment of inefficiency. When you mix that truth with the law of large numbers (i.e. when given huge budgets, even tiny pieces sound like a big deal) it's a recipe for political grandstanding and counter productive outcomes.

Posted

We had huge budget slashes as part of the 2013 reconciliation, and that led to falling way behind our work and a massive massive hiring spree 2014-2019 or so.

Posted
12 hours ago, Tiger337 said:

Businesses too? The MAGA cult is hopeless,but I think real conservatives won't like this.   

They think what we refer to as "real conservatives" are hopeless, spineless leftist running dogs.

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