Which situation did Elon Musk put us in to? Can you elaborate? When did this situation start? What happened? What did he personally do that put us in the situation?
Are you being serious? Are you actually not aware that Elon Musk ran the federal government department tasked with cancelling federal grants and firing government employees in 2025? How is it possible that you are not aware of this?
I looked at maybe a dozen at random, and only one seemed to have anything about scientific research. Of course, that is not a complete survey, but none of them looked important. I'm sure there are a few that are important.
I might be biased, but everything under the Division of Mathematical Sciences in the MPS directorate is important. Math is one of those weird fields that tends to touch everything else even if not directly, and it's impossible to know prima facie which areas of research will be useful downstream to the sciences and engineering.
Most of the important maths research is funded by the Department of War. NSF is a good chunk, I'd have to look it up, but I wouldn't be concerned about this at all. Math is important for the war planners, always has been always will be.
No worries. Sufficient encryption, or encryption breaking, technology trends toward behavior as a weapon. As such, the military is highly, highly interested in mathematics generally, and cryptography specifically. There's a ton of really fun and riveting history there, if you're interested. For a long time, "encryption" to a certain degree was export controlled, but that's not really how it works today. The point is, you cannot have effective cyberweapons without extremely sophisticated ... math.
Oh, I mean, I'm fully aware of the emphasis on codebreaking and on areas like operations research that provide optimization tools for tacticians, not to mention the ITAR restrictions on crypto export.
(I was there when only 40-bit SSL was unrestricted! I very much remember those days! They sucked!)
I guess the hangup I have is that my forays into areas like differential geometry and algebraic topology are extremely abstract, and I cannot control anyone who isn't me who misuses those tools in decidedly not-sober ways. I can only make sure that I don't have a direct hand in that kind of misuse.
The stuff in Airtable seems to be. The lion's share of what's there is research that has applications to, like, sensors and robotics and AI, even if the abstracts themselves don't state that, likely because the PIs behind those proposals aren't aware of those applications of their work.
(Just to illustrate how mathematicians can sometimes embody the archetype of Hans Guck-in-die-Luft: I had someone tell me once that there were no applications of ODEs or PDEs to the sciences or engineering.)
Are we looking at the same link? I scrolled through a bunch of them and I could not find a single one that was NOT related to scientific research. The UI is horrible so I can't link anything on that page, but here's what I see when I click that link:
Research: Process and consequences of social partner choice revealed by multilayer network analysis
Collaborative Research: Towards the Foundation of Approximate Sampling-Based Exploration in Sequential Decision Making
Travel Grant: International School/Symposium for Space Simulations (ISSS) and Interrelationship between Plasma Experiments in the Laboratory and in Space (IPELS)
RAPID: Measuring Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC) Composition During and After the Los Angeles Wildland-Urban Interface Fires
GEM: Fundamental Properties of Dawnside Auroral Polarization Streams and Their Role in Magnetosphere-Ionosphere Instabilities and Dramatic Events
PFI-TT: A Rapid Multiplexed Diagnostic Tool for Serology of Tick-Borne Diseases
I'm not sure what situation we're in (can someone describe it please?), but did that situation only start the day Trump took office again after being elected by the American people?
Predictability is extremely important for markets and planning and general welfare. He doesn’t have to randomly declare things on a Thursday that haven’t changed for decades and create anxiety among (you name it community or industry) just to stay in the headlines.
Donald Trump has destroyed predictability, as well as any semblance of functioning, predictable government. Trump is an extremely influential and powerful unilateral executive - in all the wrong ways.
Evidence you say? I guess tariff policy and a completely arbitrary war with Iran that roiled markets, just to name a couple from this year.
And Musks money and twitter takeover did a lot of work to convince Americans vote for Trump. Then Musk joined the administration and continued digging the hole
> You're being down-voted (and so shall I) but I think you're right. Despite all the animosity towards him, Musk is doing things that are economically meaningful for our nation.
In the context of the US building big things, ramping up manufacturing, doing Space exploration, &c. and the person I replied to wrote:
> Musk has done a huge amount to put us INTO this situation
What situation did he put us in to in this context? Did he put us in to the situation where we are building bigger things now? Are you saying that there was a situation that we were put in to and that situation only started when Trump was elected and prior to that we were... what? Building big things and trying to restore manufacturing and now we're also doing that under Trump?
Someone here should be specific about what they're talking about instead of just "Musk bad Trump bad". Yea they're both morons or whatever but what exactly are we supposedly criticizing here? Just that Trump got elected? Ok that's a boring conversation let's switch back to talking about manufacturing and building big projects in America.
I'll bite. Things we had in December 2024 that we no longer have today, all of which contribute to the success or failure of major initiatives:
- 2.9% inflation
- Billions of dollars of grants for state-run energy projects
- NATCAST
- Healthy & stable funding for the sciences
- Competent leaders at the federal and military levels to oversee large complex projects
- Healthy partnerships with allies
Specific actions that have been taken by Trump (backed by Musk) that caused us to lose the above:
- Starting an unnecessary war with Iran
- Cancelling grants for energy projects specifically in blue states
- Imposing nonsensical tariffs on trade partners
- Starting a full-blown trade war with Canada
- Alienating other allies, ex. starting a middle-east conflict without any alliances (excl. Israel)
- Specifically closing NATCAST because "illegal"
- Gutting of science funding by DOGE & others
- Removal of competent leaders & prioritization of loyalty over competence when choosing staff
I have a hard time taking anyone seriously when they bring up anything about Trump having a positive impact on manufacturing in America. For 4+ years he's been lying to the American public about how tariffs work and claiming that US consumers paying more taxes to the US gov't in the form of tariffs is going to 'return' manufacturing to the US. We have almost half a million unfilled manufacturing jobs in the US - explain to me again why this is a capacity problem?
There's nothing to really bite on here - the OP said Elon Musk put us "in this situation" - I'm still looking for a definition or answer on what exactly this situation is. Is it a situation in which Trump is simply president? OK but Trump himself nor Musk are responsible for the previous decades of manufacturing capability destruction in the US, as an example.
If it's just complaining about Trump/Musk then yea sure let's complain about them in a different topic, but the OP was talking about Musk building big things and he undeniably has (or his companies have, rather).
You are claiming (or pretending) that spend (ie, marketing spend) isn't one of, if not _the_, biggest factors in which of a set of options ends up being the winner?
In this case you don't get to try the options first. You made a decision based on what you've seen and heard.
And you think the advertising budget isn't the key thing?
One such example - he's using his massive wealth and influence to support fascist political movements that promise mass deportation and "remigration", and even supporting these policies explicitly himself.
In the US, his political beneficiaries have managed to "achieve" net negative migration to the US for the first time in 50 years, and the first decline in overall population in US history.
If this becomes the new trend (and if Musk gets his political desires fulfilled, it might), the hole is getting much, much deeper while our capacity to climb out is being severely impaired.
And oh yea, he killed hundreds of thousands of kids, mostly under 5.
