#Office of Science and Technology Policy

[nationallawreview]

White House OSTP Releases PFAS Federal R&D Strategic Plan

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) announced on September 3, 2024, the release of its Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) Federal Research and Development Strategic Plan (Strategic Plan). Prepared by the Joint Subcommittee on Environment, Innovation, and Public Health PFAS Strategy Team (PFAS ST) of the National Science and Technology Council, the Strategic Plan…

[lexlawuk]

UK Global Talent Visa Extension

The UK Global Talent Visa offers highly skilled professionals a unique pathway to develop and work in the UK in fields such as science, arts, digital technology, and more. However, like all visas, it comes with a defined duration, requiring individuals to apply for an extension before their initial term expires. Whether you’re seeking to extend your own visa or that of a dependent, it’s crucial…

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Guy Parsons

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

October 17, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Oct 18, 2024

In a new rule released yesterday, the Federal Trade Commission requires sellers to make it as easy to cancel a subscription to a gym or a service as it is to sign up for one. In a statement, FTC chair Lina Khan explained the reasoning behind the “click-to-cancel” rule: “Too often, businesses make people jump through endless hoops just to cancel a subscription,” she said. “Nobody should be stuck paying for a service they no longer want.” Although most of the new requirements won’t take effect for about six months, David Dayen of The American Prospect noted that the stock price of Planet Fitness fell 8% after the announcement. 

When he took office in January 2021, with democracy under siege from autocratic governments abroad and an authoritarian movement at home, President Joe Biden set out to prove that democracy could deliver for the ordinary people who had lost faith in it. The click-to-cancel rule is an illustration of an obvious and long-overdue protection, but it is only one of many ways—$35 insulin, new bridges, loan forgiveness, higher wages, good jobs—in which policies designed to benefit ordinary people have demonstrated that a democratic government can improve lives.

When Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen spoke to the Council on Foreign Relations yesterday, she noted that the administration “has driven a historic economic recovery” with strong growth, very low unemployment rates, and inflation returning to normal. Now it is focused on lowering costs for families and expanding the economy while reducing inequality. That strong economy at home is helping to power the global economy, Yellen noted, and the U.S. has been working to strengthen that economy by reinforcing global policies, investments, and institutions that reinforce economic stability. 

“Over the past four years, the world has been through a lot,” Yellen said, “from a once-in-a-century pandemic, to the largest land war in Europe since World War II, to increasingly frequent and severe climate disasters. This has only underlined that we are all in it together. America’s economic well-being depends on the world’s, and America’s economic leadership is key to global prosperity and security.” She warned against isolationism that would undermine such prosperity both at home and abroad.

The numbers behind the proven experience that government protection of ordinary people is good for economic growth got the blessing of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on Monday, when it awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences to Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, both of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and to James Robinson of the University of Chicago. Their research explains why “[s]ocieties with a poor rule of law and institutions that exploit the population do not generate growth or change for the better,” while democracies do.   

Although democracy has been delivering for Americans, Donald Trump and MAGAs rose to power by convincing those left behind by 40 years of supply-side economics that their problem was not the people in charge of the government, but rather the government itself. 

Trump wants to get rid of the current government so that he can enrich himself, do whatever he wants to his enemies, and avoid answering to the law. The Christian nationalists who wrote Project 2025 want to destroy the federal government so they can put in place an authoritarian who will force Americans to live under religious rule. Tech elites like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel want to get rid of the federal government so they can control the future without having to worry about regulations. 

In place of what they insist is a democratic system that has failed, they are offering a strongman who, they claim, will take care of people more efficiently than a democratic government can. The focus on masculinity and portrayals of Trump as a muscled hero‚ much as Russian president Vladimir Putin portrays himself, fit the mold of an authoritarian leader.

But the argument that Americans need a strongman depends on the argument that democracy does not work. In the last three-and-a-half years, Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and the Democrats have proved that it can, so long as it operates with the best interests of ordinary people in mind. Trump and Vance’s outlandish lies about the federal response to Hurricane Helene are designed to override the reality of a competent administration addressing a crisis with all the tools it has. In its place, the lies provide a false narrative of federal officials ignoring people and trying to steal their property.  

Their attack on democracy has another problem, as well. In addition to the reality that democracy has been delivering for Americans for more than three years now—and pretty dramatically—Trump is no longer a strongman. Vice President Kamala Harris is outperforming  him in the theater of political dominance. And as she does so, his image is crumbling.

In an article in US News and World Report yesterday, NBC’s former chief marketer John D. Miller apologized to America for helping to “create a monster.” Miller led the team that marketed The Apprentice, the reality TV show that made Trump a household name. “To sell the show,” Miller wrote, “we created the narrative that Trump was a super-successful businessman who lived like royalty.” But the truth was that he declared bankruptcy six times, and “[t]he imposing board room where he famously fired contestants was a set, because his real boardroom was too old and shabby for TV,” Miller wrote. While Trump loved the attention the show provided, “more successful CEOs were too busy to get involved in reality TV.” 

Miller says they “promoted the show relentlessly,” blanketing the country with a “highly exaggerated” image of Trump as a successful businessman “like a heavy snowstorm.” “[W]e…did irreparable harm by creating the false image of Trump as a successful leader,” Miller wrote. “I deeply regret that. And I regret that it has taken me so long to go public.” 

Speaking as a “born-and-bred Republican,” Miller warned: “If you believe that Trump will be better for you or better for the country, that is an illusion, much like The Apprentice was.” He strongly urged people to vote for Kamala Harris. “The country will be better off and so will you.” 

A new video shown last night on Jimmy Kimmel Live even more powerfully illustrated the collapse of Trump’s tough guy image. Written by Jesse Joyce of Comedy Central, the two-minute video featured actor and retired professional wrestler Dave Bautista dominating his sparring partner in a boxing ring and then telling those who think Trump is “some sort of tough guy” that “he’s not.” 

Working out in a gym, Bautista insults Trump’s heavy makeup, out-of-shape body, draft dodging, and physical weakness, and notes that “he sells imaginary baseball cards pretending to be a cowboy fireman” when “he’s barely strong enough to hold an umbrella.” Bautista says Trump’s two-handed method of drinking water looks “like a little pink chickadee,” and goes on to make a raunchy observation about Trump’s stage dancing. “He’s moody, he pouts, he throws tantrums,” Bautista goes on. “He’s cattier on social media than a middle-school mean girl.”

Bautista ends by listing Trump’s fears of rain, dogs, windmills…and being laughed at.” “And mostly,” Bautista concludes, “he’s terrified that real, red-blooded American men will find out that he’s a weak, tubby toddler.” Calling Trump a “whiny b*tch,” Bautista walks away from the camera. 

The sketch was billed as comedy, but it was deadly serious in its takedown of the key element of Trump’s political power.

And he seems vulnerable. Forbes and Newsweek have recently questioned his mental health; yesterday the Boston Globe ran an op-ed saying, “Trump’s decline is too dangerous to ignore. We can see the decline in the former president’s ability to hold a train of thought, speak coherently, or demonstrate a command of the English language, to say nothing of policy.” 

Trump’s Fox News Channel town hall yesterday got 2.9 million viewers; Harris’s interview got 7.1 million. Today, Trump canceled yet another appearance, this one with the National Rifle Association in Savannah, Georgia, scheduled for October 22, where he was supposed to be the keynote speaker.

Meanwhile, Vice President Harris today held rallies in Milwaukee, Green Bay, and La Crosse, Wisconsin. In La Crosse, MAGA hecklers tried to interrupt her while she was speaking about the centrality of the three Trump-appointed Supreme Court justices to the overturning of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized the constitutional right to abortion. 

“Oh, you guys are at the wrong rally,” Harris called to them with a smile and a wave. As the crowd roared with approval, she added: “No, I think you meant to go to the smaller one down the street.” 

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[mbari-blog]

Monitoring ocean health with DNA 🧬

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[lostsneeze]

Cold Space (F/F)

Yila was counting the minutes until her shift in the medbay ended in hot anticipation. She was a startling sight inside her containment suit; one look through the window of her helmet would be enough to tell she was suffering from a particularly vicious cold. To make matters worse, her restriction to the inside of the suit meant she couldn’t even clean up her own nose, and it had been clearly running unrestricted down her face for some time.

Her infection would’ve normally been a surprise, here on a starcruiser with a clearly functioning medbay in the most technologically advanced period of human history to date. In fact, Yila herself was an accomplished physician and could’ve treated herself for the virus with ease. But, noticing her blue skin and the row of small ridges just beneath her jet-black hair, anyone familiar with the federation’s medical practices would realize that she was an Acrturian, and therefore purposefully remaining sick.

Through the manipulation of morphogenetic fields, Yila’s species has the ability to engage in pseudo-telepathic communication between herself and other living organisms, even non-sapient ones. Being such a useful boon on spacefaring journeys where a crew can expect to encounter lifeforms of all kinds that they may have no clear way of communicating with, Arcturians are a frequent sight on federation starships. 

But there is one complication; Acrturians cannot interpret the thoughts, feelings or sensations of organisms they are totally unfamiliar with. A workaround to this was discovered in the form of using a mediating organism, until such a time as the familiarity could be achieved. After some research into the statistically least risky contagious illness, it became established policy for Acrturian science officers to voluntarily maintain an infection so they could be on standby not only for communicating with new intelligent lifeforms but also for diagnostic purposes on crewmembers in case of emergency, as they could even achieve low-level communication with alien illnesses.

Normally, volunteer infection is only done in shifts during the same timeframe as when encounters with new planetary or spacefaring bodies are anticipated. However, Yila had medically prolonged her infection for nearly 2 weeks, the maximum time permitted before recovery was policy mandated. This was because she had come to enjoy it. The cold virus, when rampaging through a host system, experiences something that morphogenetic empathy translates as, essentially, ecstasy. And thanks to the aid of her girlfriend, yeoman 3rd class Rebecca Wong, she had been doubly reveling in it.

Glancing at the time and frowning at how much longer remained for her standby call in medbay, Yila reflected on the joy of yesterday, the 2nd day in a row Rebecca had called out sick after having caught Yila’s cold. Rebecca was of course not restricted from getting it cured by an professional obligation or personal satisfaction, and she had done so after a night of indulging Yila several times in the past. But now she was granting Yila’s request to hang onto it for a while, let it develop, let her soak in the pleasure of not just one but two “healthy” colonies of germs.

She thought about their first night together, when Rebecca had started showing symptoms and, in a hoarse and husky voice, had seductively invited Yila to make them worse. Rebecca held Yila in a strikingly lustful gaze, despite (or because of, depending on perspective) the fatigue already showing in her eyes and a thin trail of snot hanging down her little round, slightly upturned nose from after she’d sneezed just moments before. Not her usual, girly, polite, partially stifled “Hh’NGTX-cheww~” kind of sneeze she would do around mixed company, but the uncovered, blasting “HAAKTCHEEW!” kind of sneeze that she only did around Yila.

The Arcturian had tackled lover into bed with an animalistic ferocity. Her own nose, which was broad and flat with an almost snoutlike quality, was dripping in two thick streams, and they kissed through a curtain of snot that Yila refused to fully break off even as a trio of sneezes overtook her. Instead, she released three fierce “Mmpht’SHUUH”s directly down her girlfriend’s sore throat before finally pulling away as Rebecca gasped for air through a series of coughs and reverse-snorts. Meanwhile Yila reeled her head back with a satisfied moan. After those sneezes she was streaming wet, both on top and bottom, and Rebecca let out an excited sigh as she felt that wetness spread over her.

As Yila began caressing Rebecca with her entire body, she reached out to pin her girlfriend’s hands up above her head and stretched to position her own generously sized breasts in front of the yeoman’s face. This wasn’t really a position of proper restraint; the medical officer was slender to an almost waifish degree, and the yeoman maintained athletic training actually a bit above what was regulation for crewmembers on call for away missions. Rather, it was a physical reminder for Rebecca to forgo ordinary etiquette in preventing or flinching away from the contagion which Yila was delighted in both giving and receiving. Every time Rebecca would turn from force of habit to redirect one of her little coughs or boisterous wet sneezes away, Yila would greedily nuzzle her own face into her lover’s or thrust her breasts towards her to catch the spray. 

“Hwah…Ha…HAAAHKSHEEW! HaaAH’TSHEW! Haah’kshew! Haaah…Hhh’KTCHEEW!”

And each time Rebecca saw Yila’s wide, horribly chapped and red nostrils flaring even wider in building a sneeze, Yila would gently squeeze her hands or wrists to stave off her instinct to cover herself.

“Heuhhh…Heuaht’SHUUH! Heah-Ah-AAARSHEUUH! EEUGHSHEUUH!”

Throughout the entire time she was sick, Rebecca adhered to a request from Yila to blow and wipe her nose only with her hands if at all. The sight of her well-worn nose now overflowing beneath eyelids fluttering in preparation for a sneeze excited Yila into a frenzy. Yila mushed her own ragged nose down against the yeoman’s, kissing her hungrily even as she swiped their snot back and forth across each other’s cheeks and lips. She finally released her grip on Rebecca’s hands and traced them down scattered black bangs to lovingly hold her love’s flush, snot-strewn face.

“Haah…Hah…AH!”

Seeing a powerful sneeze starting to build, Yila exhaled sharply in anticipation and traced her fingers lower down her chest, then lower, reaching them in to take hold of Rebecca just as she tightened to take hold of her back.

“HAAAHK’SHEEEUW!”

And as if in sympathy to her memory, at that moment Yila sneezed herself out of her recollection back to the present.

“HEEURGSHUUH!!”

As wetness dripped down both her nose and her thighs, she glanced at the time. She’d been lost in the memory for long enough that only a few minutes remained, easily within reason of her leaving her post early. Without any acknowledgment to the other staff, she left at just short of a sprint, struggling slightly for air between her completely clogged nose and prickly pained throat. When she reached the door to Rebecca’s cabin she didn’t even bother trying to catch her breath before opening the door. She was greeted by the sight of its occupant lying in her bed with the covers somewhat haphazardly over her, completely naked and shivering slightly just as she had been that morning when Rebecca had left, mucus absolutely soaking down the front of her face and bare chest.

“You gudda warb mbe ubp?” she asked, followed by a lengthy, soggy snuffle.

With a combination snuffle and squeak of pleasure, Yila literally tore her containment suit off, ripping it in several places that would have to be patched later. Rebeca blushed at Yila’s wild passion, staring with growing excitement at her naked body emerging from the suit as the door to the cabin quietly automatically slid shut behind her.

[toxinoire]

Mean Girls as Senior High School students of a private school

(I am currently a SHS student in a private school and a HUMSS student so here's what I think these characters would be if they were in SHS)

~~~

• Janis, Damian, and Karen are all in the Arts and Design strand

• Regina is in Accountancy, Business, and Management (ABM) strand

• Gretchen is in Humanities and Social Sciences (HUMSS) stand

• Cady is definitely in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) strand

• Their Practical Research teacher is their favorite teacher because their teacher here allows them to cuss in class but still scares them enough to work smart and hard

• Gretchen hates the Politcs, but she gets amazing grades at it out of spite

• Cady is generally just good at Math so everyone turns to her for help in Statistics and Probability and well, General Math.

• They still wear pink on Wednesdays, but like, maybe a jacket or a bracelet because, well, uniforms.

• Janis and Damian hate the uniforms

• Gretchen and Regina have no problem with it, but sometimes it's a bother. especially when it's cold

• Karen rocks it

• Damian hates the strict dress code. especially the haircut policy

• Regina, Janis, and Gretchen hate the "not too flashy jewellery/make up" thing too

• Cady sucks at presentations. But she gets better.

• Gretchen is that student during recitations that can say anything and everything so fast but is understood and makes sense. The other HUMSS students usually want her out of debates because they know she'll kill them all.

• Karen's charisma is everything. she's friends with literally every student and teacher and her performance skills are fire too

• They all share Homeroom

• They all get along and absolutely love the Academic Director because her office is just next to their homeroom classroom

• They all have this one shared teacher that they really fucking hate

• Regina and the Junior High School History teacher have beef

• Nothing serious, they just have history-offs everytime they see each other

• He is also Gretchen's politics teacher

• Janis is now besties with the Guidance Counselor

• She is also Gretchen's HUMSS teacher.

• The Math teacher doesn't know whether or not Cady is his favorite student or not because she participates the most, but she also finishes his examples before he can input it in the calculator, and she does it without a fucking calculator

• He's a nice dude though

• He's also everyone's Statistics teacher

• Damian is the school's favorite theatre kid

• The Prefect of Discipline is so done with their batch

• The Principal is Regina's Applied Economics teacher

• She took one look at Regina and thought "This kid is a lesbian, isn't she?"

• She would know, she has a wife

• Cady's calculus teacher adores her

• She mentally adopted Cady, actually

• The Arts and Design teacher is so done with Janis's bullshit

• "Welcome to the club, sir."

• He is a very supportive straight man

• He doesn't know whether to be impressed or scared of Karen

• Their homeroom teacher doesn't question their group dynamics anymore

• Their entire homeroom just one day subconsciously picked up wearing a hint or pink on Wednesdays

• So did the homeroom teacher.

• Every admin, students, and teachers all noticed this

• But they said nothing since it doesn't really break the dress code

• It annoys the Prefect of Discipline a little

• Why didn't she have this when she was still a teacher dammit

• They aren't exactly the popular kids, but if you ask anyone "Do you know (name of anyone from the group)" it's an automatic yes

• Regina's lacrosse coach is a wholesome 50 year old man that will throw crampled paper at someone that doesn't take the drills seriously

• He's the most respectful and in tune with his emotions Gen X man anyone's ever met

• Cady is obviously in the Math varsity which is run by the Calculus teacher

• If smart kids get bullied in canon, here, they cannot be bullied because your grade depends on them

• No seriously, they're usually the group leaders and they will be all "Give me the research design by Friday or you have no group anymore, and you'll do the entire research on your own."

" ⬆️ Cady, Janis, and Regina are part of these

• Overall, it's organized chaos

[kineticpenguin]

I've been poking away a bit more at Frostpunk 2, and I think my real problem with it is that, okay, fine, ultimately politics is a messy business, but as the Steward, you have to be completely passive in it. You have to take each faction as-is. You cannot build your own faction. You're just one guy in an office. You can make deals to pass laws, but these deals are always giving a faction what they want in exchange for their vote.

Your policies don't even seem to shape society much. Early on if you decide that children will attend school, and subsequently that they will focus on science, this has no bearing ten years later on the size and number of factions that think science is a bunch of nonsense and we need Ice Eating Training and Varsity Dick-Punching if we're going to have any education at all.

So for the best possible outcome, being a "shrewd negotiator" means keeping an Excel spreadsheet open and balancing all the kinds of buildings and policies that piss the different factions off, and finding a balance. I guess.

And ultimately the Story has one major problem: The Pilgrims are objectively correct. If you side with the Stalwarts and decide to "defeat the Frost", your lack of access to outposts with infinite resources to draw from will be the city's doom (if you don't beat the story before that particular chicken comes home to roost). The Stalwart technology allowing you to drill the meager infinite deposits in New London territory will not be enough.

Maybe they should, uh. Do something about that.

[mariacallous]

US president-elect Donald Trump has appointed venture capitalist and former PayPal executive David Sacks as White House AI & Crypto Czar, a newly created role meant to establish the country as the global leader in both fields.

Members of the cryptosphere have gathered to congratulate their new czar, a Trump loyalist from Silicon Valley who has previously expressed enthusiasm for crypto technologies and invested in crypto startups. The appointment is being celebrated by crypto executives and policy wonks as “bullish” for the industry, which under the previous administration was bombarded with lawsuits by US regulators. On X, Gemini chief legal officer Tyler Meader wrote, “At long last, a rational conversation about crypto can be had.”

Others have speculated that the dual-faceted nature of the role, covering both AI and crypto, could set the tone for experimentation around potential synergies between the two disciplines. Among VCs, Sacks “was very early in noting the importance of crypto to AI,” says Caitlin Long, CEO at crypto-focused bank Custodia. In his announcement, Trump wrote that the two areas were “critical to the future of American competitiveness.”

“There is no better person than David Sacks to help steer the future of crypto and AI innovation in America,” says John Robert Reed, partner at crypto-focused VC firm Multicoin Capital. “He's a principled entrepreneur and brilliant technologist that deeply understands each of these industries and where they intersect.”

“Initial reactions from the crypto industry on the Sacks appointment has been positive. Given his purview as a venture capitalist, he’s seen a lot of the innovation in crypto and AI that has been stunted in growth due to various political or regulatory issues the past few years,” says Ron Hammond, director of government relations at the Blockchain Association. “What remains to be seen is how much power the czar role will even have and if it will be more a policy driver position versus a policy coordinator role.”

In an X post, Sacks expressed his gratitude to Trump. “I am honored and grateful for the trust you have placed in me. I look forward to advancing American competitiveness in these critical technologies,” he wrote. “Under your leadership, the future is bright.”

In his role as czar, Sacks will lead a council of science and technology advisers responsible for making policy recommendations, Trump says. He will also develop a legal framework that sets out clear rules for crypto businesses to follow—something the industry has long demanded. That will reportedly involve working closely with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), two regulatory agencies that vied for jurisdiction over the crypto industry under the Biden administration. Earlier this week, Trump appointed crypto advocate Paul Atkins as SEC chair; members of the crypto industry contributed to the selection process, sources told WIRED in November.

Trump officials did not respond when asked to clarify whether the new position would be internal to the government, or whether Sacks would act as a “special government employee,” allowing him to continue in other private-sector roles. Sacks did not respond to a request for comment.

Sacks first made his name as one of the earliest employees at payments technology firm PayPal, which he built alongside Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, and others. Like other members of the so-called “PayPal Mafia,” Sacks went on to set up multiple other business ventures. In 2012, he sold workplace software company Yammer to Microsoft in a deal worth $1.2 billion. Now he runs his own venture capital firm, Craft Ventures, which has previously invested in companies including AirBnb, Palantir, and Slack—as well as crypto firms BitGo and Bitwise.

Sacks also cohosts the popular All In podcast where he’s used the platform to boost Trump. He’s also shared a host of right-wing takes: At the podcast’s summit this September, Sacks questioned the effectiveness of the Covid vaccine.

Like Musk, Sacks was a vocal proponent of Trump during the presidential race. In an X post in June, he laid out his very Silicon Valley rationale: “The voters have experienced four years of President Trump and four years of President Biden. In tech, we call this an A/B test,” he wrote. “With respect to economic policy, foreign policy, border policy, and legal fairness, Trump performed better. He is the President who deserves a second term.”

That same month, Sacks hosted an exclusive fundraiser for the Trump campaign, reportedly generating as much as $12 million. Attendees reportedly included vice-president-elect JD Vance—who has previously described Sacks as “one of my closest friends in the tech world”—and Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, cofounders of crypto exchange Gemini.

In the weeks since Trump won back the Oval Office, crypto markets have been on a tear. During the race, the president-elect made a host of crypto-friendly pledges, including a promise to set up a national “bitcoin stockpile.” In Sacks, Trump has picked a czar that the crypto industry believes will deliver on his campaign pledges.

On December 6, the price of bitcoin vaulted beyond $100,000 for the first time. “YOU”RE WELCOME!!! [sic]” Trump posted on Truth Social.

[texasdreamer01]

Atlantis Expedition - Science Division: Chief Science Officer

So I've gone through all of my proposed headcanons on how the Science Division would break down into different departments, the roles of each departments, and the personnel composition (original post here, which contains links to posts on individual departments). But what is a division without its division leader? Thus, a post on the Chief Science Officer (AKA Rodney McKay).

Below is a brief list, in the same style as the department posts, which I will articulate further under the read-more:

> Head: Rodney McKay, Radek Zelenka (extra-canonical) > Contains: 1 person > Function: Implements department policies, decides upon division and department priorities, disseminates tasks according to expedition needs, reviews employee performances, manages employment of each department, secures and approves all procurement requirements for operations, reviews ethical and legal boundaries on research and resource requests, prepares documentation for review on research progress and results, estimates research project requirements and demands, gives/receives recommendations and feedback to expedition leader and military commander according to mission parameters > Examples of function: Hiring and firing of employees, dispute arbitration between employees, disciplinary measures, creating purchase orders for equipment and department supplies, reviewing research proposals and giving feedback on proposals > Personnel quantity: 1 person > A/N: Technically speaking, the department heads fall under this "department" as sub-administrators (and produce the paperwork that will give Rodney headaches)

Radek being the CSO is part of the Legacy book series, which is a pseduo season six (I don't listen to it, for various reasons), but he's mentioned here as a nod to the books.

As for that big block of text about a CSO's function, it helps to separate things into a few categories. Below is that, with commentary:

> IOA/SGC requirements  » Prepares documentation for review on research progress and results  » Reviews ethical and legal boundaries on research and resource requests  » Maintains documentation of projects for auditing purposes   ⇛ Such as project results, allocation and defense thereof of resources, pertinent stopping and starting points  » Maintains documentation of division personnel usage and other important events   ⇛ Such as field assignments, project assignments, etc  » Maintains documentation of field science research   ⇛ Such as first contact missions, cultural research, etc > Expedition administration  » Gives/receives recommendations and feedback to expedition leader according to mission parameters   ⇛ Such as resource allocation in terms of division personnel, technology, and physical resources (i.e. consumable lab resources, such as testing equipment, reagents, medical resources, etc) > Military relations  » Gives military commander feedback and advice on mixed-context situations   ⇛ Such as situations when expedition leader is unable to perform duties, or when needing to defend critical components, spaces, or personnel    ⟹ i.e. When personally in the field (AR-1, other field assignments), attacks on Atlantis, non-military critical situations on Atlantis  » Gives assessments on non-expedition personnel in regards to permissions on division resources   ⇛ i.e. lab access, database access, critical systems access, etc   ⇛ Functionally makes the CSO a super-user and systems administrator of the digital architecture that comprise the expedition    ⟹ The head administrator and military commander will have their own logins with similar, but not identical, privileges > Division administration  » Implements department policies   ⇛ Such as safety protocols, proposal formats, project documentation formats, etc  » Decides upon division and department priorities   ⇛ Based upon IOA/SGC, expedition leader, and military commander priorities (in that order, unless under a military context)  » Disseminates tasks according to expedition needs   ⇛ May contain separate categories of priorities, according to the needs of varying timelines (i.e. long term, short term, etc)  » Reviews employee performances   ⇛ Ideally according to a rubric of IOA/SGC requirements, department policies, and expedition needs   ⇛ Can mark an employee for a review period, limit access based on negative incidents, recommend merit-based pay increases and pay bonuses, etc  » Manages employment of each department   ⇛ Hiring, firing, inter-department reassignments  » Estimates research project requirements   ⇛ Based upon proposals submitted, expedition mission parameters, resources available for allocation, and IOA/SGC requirements  » Secures and approves all procurement requirements for operations   ⇛ Creates, reviews, and submits documentation to expedition head   ⇛ Items such as equipment (i.e. computers), consumable materials (i.e. pens, cotton swabs), and miscellaneous (i.e. lab coats, uniforms, chocolate for morale)

These main categories, as you can see, are IOA/SGC requirements of the CSO, expedition administration, military relations, and division administration. They are, to the best of my assumptions, listed in order of importance - division administration is necessarily at the bottom because the CSO, ideally, ought to be able to trust the department heads to make sure the division runs well. The main job of the CSO is to liase between the division and the overlords people who make the expedition run.

A lot of this ends up rather convoluted due to competing priorities. The IOA pays the expeditions bills and supports its somewhat dubious legality on the international stage, but the SGC does as well, and to boot is also the group that creates and maintains the supplies and supply lines (see: the Daedalus, primarily, and also the Apollo). As this is a civilian expedition, more weight will be put on the CSO than the Military Officer for a return on investment.

What this results in is a lot of paperwork. Every employee, petri dish, and scribble on a whiteboard must be recorded, accounted for, and justified. This would then be forwarded to the expedition leader, who collates it nicely and gives it to the SGC and IOA for a general accounting, but it's up to the CSO to prepare this documentation.

Accordingly, this means that if there's a request from either side (top-down or bottom-up), the CSO must process the paperwork for that. Requests to perform experiments, usage of employees on things like field assignments, requests for materials to perform the experiments within adequate parameters are the work du jour. And, crucially, it must be legal (as much as one can with something like a Stargate program, at any rate). There's a lot more wiggle room for the expedition, given its project background, but not very much with the introduction of international oversight.

In a practical, daily sense, department requests for experiment/research and expedition leader and military commander requests for the same or for personnel must be balanced by the CSO. If, say, Carson Beckett wants to work with the Life Sciences department to develop a hydrogel infused with Pegasus plant extracts for IFAK use that requires many iterations of testing but would then require less supplies procured from the SGC, and Elizabeth Weir wants Carson Beckett to join an away team to help some recently-culled village with their injuries or a persistent illness that had left them originally vulnerable to a culling, Rodney McKay will be the one to weigh in on priorities for the division and devise a compromise on his employee's time based upon what can be done and what ought to be done. (Elizabeth will likely already think of this conundrum, but as she was not the only expedition leader, the ability to say no is a critical tool in Rodney's arsenal for properly fulfilling his duties.)

Likewise, the CSO has obligations to the military contingent of the expedition. While the Wraith were not an expected enemy, the SGC probably assumed something of the Goa'uld caliber was statistically likely, and thus the CSO is there to also offer technical advice to the military commander.  This is important because nobody had any confirmation on what they would find regarding Atlantis, only that the Ancients had abandoned their city and didn't seem to pack much up with them. Mixed-context situations like a technical emergency on Atlantis, or field missions, will require CSO input on technological expertise and personnel assignments from the Science Division.

A working relationship with the military commander will also mean some back and forth, particularly for instances of assessing who ought to have access to critical systems, and whether such previously-given permissions ought to be revoked. Teyla, the Athosians, and Ronon are popular examples, but also situations like Doppelganger where members of the expedition might be compromised and require a change, however temporary or permanent, in security.

In order for the CSO to assist in maintaining expedition security, being a super-user and systems administrator is a pre-requisite of the position. This means such things as inherent back-door access to all expedition systems, ability to manage user login profiles for all systems, screening of technologies that are inputted as peripherals or adoptions of infrastructure, and the design of the infrastructure systems that make up the overall architecture. As the military commander would be in charge of the physical security of the expedition, the CSO would be in charge of its digital security.

Management of the division itself rests upon the above listed duties, and will influence how the division and its various departments are handled. This is very much a daily, intensive part of the job, but if things with the departments are set up well, typically they would be the least worrisome of the duties.

Based upon the various institutional and situational demands upon the expedition, personnel movement and research projects will be delegated accordingly, with the CSO creating the division policies on things like research parameters, experiment ethics, and the minutiae of funding and resource allocations.

Long-term projects, such as the inherent reasons why the expedition exists at all (figuring out Atlantis and developing technologies and knowledge bases from the information they prise from Atlantis), will generally receive priority outside of some form of emergency, and will get the most resources.  Short-term projects, which might run for a few months or a year at a time of active experimentation, are dependent upon spare resources, time, and personnel that aren't already assigned to work of a higher priority.

For example, documenting the plants of a particular planet in the Pegasus galaxy would rank lower than decoding and documenting extant examples of Wraith language, based upon the multiple variables of military commander demands on the safety of the expedition, diplomatic demands from the expedition leader for the safety of the expedition, and if there are similar plants already being studied that were cultivated from other planets.

An inherent part of the management of a division is the personnel, which includes performance reviews, hiring of employees, firing of employees, disciplining of employees (if the department head requires CSO assistance or it is the department head which requires disciplining), and re-assignment of employees based upon expedition or other needs. Part of the personnel is the work the personnel do, which wraps back around to paperwork - if someone wants to do research on attempting to duplicate a particular alloy, then those materials need to be purchased or otherwise required, which means the CSO must fill out all the purchase request forms and other pertinent documentation (even if it only amounts to "found on the ground because AR-1 crashed the Wraith Dart, put alloy samples into backpack").

I imagine a CSO in this sort of position would probably be running a rough calculation in the background of how many cups of coffee to substitute for hours of sleep, because there will not be a lot of sleep to be had, even without all the various emergencies happening because Atlantis is Atlantis. A little bit of stress-induced yelling from time to time is to be expected, I think.

Total Overall Science Division Personnel

> Chief Science Officer: 1 > Medical Department: 23 > Life Sciences: 13 > Field Sciences: 12 > Applied Sciences: 16 > Total total: 65

Due to the revisions made in some of the department headcanon posts, the personnel estimations rose from the original post's 58 to the current 65, a difference of 7 people and also a nice, easy to calculate number. If we keep to the assumption of 200 expedition members, this would make for 135 leftover for the rest of the expedition, and the Science Division at 32.5% of the expedition.

A CMO post will be written and posted at some point, as I forgot about it, and additionally canonical character headcanon posts will also be posted at some point in the future in an undetermined order. After this will be headcanons on the Military Division, Gate Teams, and the Expedition Leader/Civilian Division (currently undecided what that will be).

[meret118]

Today, President Joe Biden laid out very clearly the argument behind the economic policies his administration has put into place. “When I took office, the pandemic was raging and the economy was reeling,” he wrote. “From Day One, I was determined to not only deliver economic relief, but to invest in America and grow the economy from the middle out and bottom up, not the top down.”

“Over the last four years, that’s exactly what we’ve done,” he wrote. “We passed legislation to rebuild our infrastructure, build a clean energy economy, and bring manufacturing back to the United States after decades of offshoring.” Investing in America included the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that is rebuilding our roads, bridges, water systems, ports, and airports, as well as making high-speed broadband available in underserved areas; the CHIPS and Science Act that invested in bringing the manufacture of silicon chips back to the U.S. and promoting research; and the Inflation Reduction Act, which invested in technologies to combat climate change.

. . .

But the incoming Trump administration will advance a different economic vision. Instead of trying to expand the economy through investment in infrastructure and manufacturing, Trump’s team has emphasized cutting taxes for the wealthy and corporations and slashing regulations.

. . .

It is becoming clear what Trump’s economic policy will look like at the national level. Super wealthy donors funded Trump’s 2024 campaign, and in a departure from every previous incoming president, Trump is refusing to sign the documents required as part of a presidential transition at least in part because those documents mandate that he disclose who is funding his transition and limit those donations to $5,000 per donor. Without that disclosure, it is impossible to see who is funding him. For all we know, that list could include foreign governments. 

-----

Trump will of course take credit for Biden policies as they do things.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Aaron Sibarium

Published: May 14, 2024

In dissertation titled 'Cite a Sista,' Tracie Jones-Barrett stole an entire passage on 'ethical considerations' from her classmate

In June 2021, a year into the cultural aftershocks of George Floyd's death, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology set out to meet the moment, as so many other schools had, by hiring more diversity officers.

MIT welcomed six new deans of diversity, equity, and inclusion, one for each of the institute's main schools, as part of a "DEI Strategic Action Plan" launched the previous year. Aimed at boosting the representation of women and minorities, in part by developing DEI criteria for staff performance reviews, the plan pledged to "make equity central" to the university "while ensuring the highest standards of excellence."

But according to a 71-page complaint filed with the university on Saturday, at least two of the six DEI officials may not be living up to those standards. The complaint alleges that Tracie Jones-Barrett and Alana Anderson are serial plagiarists, copying entire pages of text without attribution and riding roughshod over MIT's academic integrity policies.

In her 2023 dissertation titled "Cite a Sista," which explored how black women in the Ivy League "make meaning of thriving," Jones-Barrett, MIT’s deputy "equity officer," lifts a whole section on "ethical considerations" from Emmitt Wyche III, her classmate in Northeastern University's Graduate School of Education, without any sort of citation.

The section is one of several long passages taken from Wyche's 2020 thesis, "Boyz in the Hoods: (Re) Defining the Narratives of Black Male Doctoral Degree Completers," which does not appear in Jones-Barrett's bibliography. Wyche and Jones-Barrett did not respond to requests for comment.

Anderson, who served as the diversity czar for MIT's computer science college until last year, when she left to become Boston Beer Company's inclusion and belonging program manager, likewise copied copious material from other scholars. Her 2017 dissertation, "#BLACKONCAMPUS: A Critical Examination of Racial and Gender Performances of Black College Women on Social Media," lifts over a page of material from Mark Chae, a professor of counseling at Pillar College, who is not cited anywhere in her dissertation.

"It would have been nice to at least get a citation!" Chae told the Washington Free Beacon in an email. "Anderson seems quite comfortable in taking credit for large portions of another writer's scholarly work."

Anderson, who held DEI posts at Boston University and Babson College before coming to MIT, lifts another long passage from Jarvis Givens, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, without an in-text citation. The omissions appear to violate MIT's plagiarism policy, which states that scholars must cite their sources any time they "use the words, ideas, or phrasing of another person."

MIT did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

In total, the two diversity deans lifted about 10 full pages of material without attribution, according to the complaint, as well as dozens of shorter passages sprinkled throughout their theses.

Like former Harvard University president Claudine Gay, who resigned in January amid her own plagiarism scandal, Anderson even stole language from another scholar's acknowledgments, copying phrases and sentences used by Khalilah Shabazz, now a diversity official at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, to thank her dissertation advisers.

Anderson's acknowledgments contain several typos not seen in Shabbaz's, including missing words and commas and a lack of subject-verb agreement.

Givens and Shabbaz did not respond to requests for comment. Anderson, who received her Ph.D. from Boston College's school of education, did not respond to a request for comment. Boston Beer Company did not respond to a request for comment.

Saturday's complaint, which was submitted to Boston College and Northeastern University alongside MIT, is the latest in a string of plagiarism allegations against campus diversity officials. Since Gay's resignation, DEI officers at Harvard, Columbia, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of California, Los Angeles, have been accused of research misconduct. Some, such as Columbia medical school's Alade McKen and UCLA medical school's Natalie Perry, copied pages of material from various sources—including Wikipedia—while others passed off old studies as new work.

The accused administrators have not been publicly sanctioned by their universities, which have either declined to comment on the allegations or issued statements in support of the officials. The complaint against Anderson and Jones-Barrett may be harder for MIT to brush aside, however, given the school's high-profile efforts to distance itself from DEI in the post-October 7 era.

The institute said this month that it would no longer require diversity statements from candidates applying to faculty positions, making it the first elite university to jettison the practice. It also led the way in restoring SAT requirements after many colleges went test-optional in an effort to boost diversity.

The pushback has come largely from MIT faculty and been driven, in part, by a sense that DEI programs excuse and even encourage anti-Semitism. An April article in MIT's faculty newsletter noted that an event on "Jewish inclusion" had whitewashed the rhetoric of the school's pro-Palestinian protesters, who have occupied campus buildings, called for "Intifada revolution," and allegedly chanted "death to Zionists."

"Jewish students," a blurb for the DEI event read, "are encountering much of the same discomfort that other minorities face on campus and in the world, in that they don't feel heard or acknowledged."

The two dissertations at issue are strikingly derivative, cobbled together from classmates, online sources, and even a book's dust jacket, and at times read like replicas of their unattributed source material.

Jones-Barrett's summary of her dissertation, for example, is nearly identical to the summary Wyche provides of his own. Both papers use "semi-structured interviews" to "gather insights" from black graduates of Ph.D. programs about their "subjective experiences" of "meaning-making," or, as Wyche misspells it, "mean-making." The primary difference is that Wyche's study deals with black men, while Jones-Barrett's deals with black women.

"This study, the first of its kind[,] uses Black Feminist Thought as a framework to explore and investigate how Black women at Ivy League graduate schools of education make meaning of thriving," reads the first sentence of Jones-Barrett's dissertation, which is missing a comma. "There are limited studies that center the voices of Black women at Ivy League graduate schools and there are no studies that look specifically at Ivy League graduate schools of education."

Jones-Barrett, who has taught courses at Harvard Extension School and was initially hired as the assistant dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion for MIT's humanities school, also poached a passage on "potential research bias" from Wyche—now a DEI consultant who describes himself on LinkedIn as a "status quo disrupter"—which asserts that "it is nearly impossible for the researcher to isolate their experiences from the investigative process."

He's not the only classmate Jones-Barrett appears to have plagiarized: On the first page of her dissertation, she lifts an entire paragraph from Scott Fitzsimmons, who earned his Ph.D. in education from Northeastern in 2021, without attribution, swapping out "rural EMS leaders" for "Black women in graduate programs." Fitzsimmons declined to comment.

Anderson, meanwhile, lifts several paragraphs from a 2016 ThinkProgress article about her alma mater, Boston College, from which some of her study's interview subjects were drawn. That plagiarism undercuts her effort to prevent the school, to which she refers with a pseudonym, from being identified—a possible violation of the study's consent form, which promised participants that no "identifying information" would be disclosed.

Boston College and Northeastern University did not to requests for comment.

Anderson—who runs her own consultancy that offers "scientifically-based" DEI programming—also borrows three sentences from the dust jacket of Ebony and Ivy, a 2013 book by MIT historian Craig Wilder, who is only cited in one of the sentences and whose words do not appear in quotation marks.

Like many of the authors plagiarized by Gay, Wilder defended Anderson's decision to copy his work, writing in an email that he didn't think a citation was necessary.

"I cannot imagine why anyone would cite a dust jacket, nor do I see the urgency of criminalizing the failure to do so," Wilder told the Free Beacon. "I'm honored," he added, when other scholars "find inspiration from my publications."

==

It's safest to assume all DEI apparatchiks and commissars are plagiarists, frauds and liars until proven otherwise.

[dailyanarchistposts]

Topics: health care, monopoly

In a recent article for Tikkun, Dr. Arnold Relman argued that the versions of health care reform currently proposed by “progressives” all primarily involve financing health care and expanding coverage to the uninsured rather than addressing the way current models of service delivery make it so expensive. Editing out all the pro forma tut-tutting of “private markets,” the substance that’s left is considerable:

What are those inflationary forces? . . . [M]ost important among them are the incentives in the payment and organization of medical care that cause physicians, hospitals and other medical care facilities to focus at least as much on income and profit as on meeting the needs of patients. . . . The incentives in such a system reward and stimulate the delivery of more services. That is why medical expenditures in the U.S. are so much higher than in any other country, and are rising more rapidly. . . . Physicians, who supply the services, control most of the decisions to use medical resources. . . . The economic incentives in the medical market are attracting the great majority of physicians into specialty practice, and these incentives, combined with the continued introduction of new and more expensive technology, are a major factor in causing inflation of medical expenditures. Physicians and ambulatory care and diagnostic facilities are largely paid on a piecework basis for each item of service provided.

As a health care worker, I have personally witnessed this kind of mutual log-rolling between specialists and the never-ending addition of tests to the bill without any explanation to the patient. The patient simply lies in bed and watches an endless parade of unknown doctors poking their heads in the door for a microsecond, along with an endless series of lab techs drawing body fluids for one test after another that’s “been ordered,” with no further explanation. The post-discharge avalanche of bills includes duns from two or three dozen doctors, most of whom the patient couldn’t pick out of a police lineup. It’s the same kind of quid pro quo that takes place in academia, with professors assigning each other’s (extremely expensive and copyrighted) texts and systematically citing each other’s works in order to game their stats in the Social Sciences Citation Index. (I was also a grad assistant once.) You might also consider Dilbert creator Scott Adams’s account of what happens when you pay programmers for the number of bugs they fix.

One solution to this particular problem is to have a one-to-one relationship between the patient and a general practitioner on retainer. That’s how the old “lodge practice” worked. (See David Beito’s “Lodge Doctors and the Poor,” The Freeman, May 1994).

But that’s illegal, you know. In New York City, John Muney recently introduced an updated version of lodge practice: the AMG Medical Group, which for a monthly premium of $79 and a flat office fee of $10 per visit provides a wide range of services (limited to what its own practitioners can perform in-house). But because AMG is a fixed-rate plan and doesn’t charge more for “unplanned procedures,” the New York Department of Insurance considers it an unlicensed insurance policy. Muney may agree, unwillingly, to a settlement arranged by his lawyer in which he charges more for unplanned procedures like treatment for a sudden ear infection. So the State is forcing a modern-day lodge practitioner to charge more, thereby keeping the medical and insurance cartels happy—all in the name of “protecting the public.” How’s that for irony?

Regarding expensive machinery, I wonder how much of the cost is embedded rent on patents or regulatorily mandated overhead. I’ll bet if you removed all the legal barriers that prevent a bunch of open-source hardware hackers from reverse-engineering a homebrew version of it, you could get an MRI machine with a twentyfold reduction in cost. I know that’s the case in an area I’m more familiar with: micromanufacturing technology. For example, the RepRap—a homebrew, open-source 3-D printer—costs roughly $500 in materials to make, compared to tens of thousands for proprietary commercial versions.

More generally, the system is racked by artificial scarcity, as editor Sheldon Richman observed in an interview a few months back. For example, licensing systems limit the number of practitioners and arbitrarily impose levels of educational overhead beyond the requirements of the procedures actually being performed.

Libertarians sometimes—and rightly—use “grocery insurance” as an analogy to explain medical price inflation: If there were such a thing as grocery insurance, with low deductibles, to provide third-party payments at the checkout register, people would be buying a lot more rib-eye and porterhouse steaks and a lot less hamburger.

The problem is we’ve got a regulatory system that outlaws hamburger and compels you to buy porterhouse if you’re going to buy anything at all. It’s a multiple-tier finance system with one tier of service. Dental hygienists can’t set up independent teeth-cleaning practices in most states, and nurse-practitioners are required to operate under a physician’s “supervision” (when he’s out golfing). No matter how simple and straightforward the procedure, you can’t hire someone who’s adequately trained just to perform the service you need; you’ve got to pay amortization on a full med school education and residency.

Drug patents have the same effect, increasing the cost per pill by up to 2,000 percent. They also have a perverse effect on drug development, diverting R&D money primarily into developing “me, too” drugs that tweak the formulas of drugs whose patents are about to expire just enough to allow repatenting. Drug-company propaganda about high R&D costs, as a justification for patents to recoup capital outlays, is highly misleading. A major part of the basic research for identifying therapeutic pathways is done in small biotech startups, or at taxpayer expense in university laboratories, and then bought up by big drug companies. The main expense of the drug companies is the FDA-imposed testing regimen—and most of that is not to test the version actually marketed, but to secure patent lockdown on other possible variants of the marketed version. In other words, gaming the patent system grossly inflates R&D spending.

The prescription medicine system, along with state licensing of pharmacists and Drug Enforcement Administration licensing of pharmacies, is another severe restraint on competition. At the local natural-foods cooperative I can buy foods in bulk, at a generic commodity price; even organic flour, sugar, and other items are usually cheaper than the name-brand conventional equivalent at the supermarket. Such food cooperatives have their origins in the food-buying clubs of the 1970s, which applied the principle of bulk purchasing. The pharmaceutical licensing system obviously prohibits such bulk purchasing (unless you can get a licensed pharmacist to cooperate).

I work with a nurse from a farming background who frequently buys veterinary-grade drugs to treat her family for common illnesses without paying either Big Pharma’s markup or the price of an office visit. Veterinary supply catalogs are also quite popular in the homesteading and survivalist movements, as I understand. Two years ago I had a bad case of poison ivy and made an expensive office visit to get a prescription for prednisone. The next year the poison ivy came back; I’d been weeding the same area on the edge of my garden and had exactly the same symptoms as before. But the doctor’s office refused to give me a new prescription without my first coming in for an office visit, at full price—for my own safety, of course. So I ordered prednisone from a foreign online pharmacy and got enough of the drug for half a dozen bouts of poison ivy—all for less money than that office visit would have cost me.

Of course people who resort to these kinds of measures are putting themselves at serious risk of harassment from law enforcement. But until 1914, as Sheldon Richman pointed out (“The Right to Self-Treatment,” Freedom Daily, January 1995), “adult citizens could enter a pharmacy and buy any drug they wished, from headache powders to opium.”

The main impetus to creating the licensing systems on which artificial scarcity depends came from the medical profession early in the twentieth century. As described by Richman:

Accreditation of medical schools regulated how many doctors would graduate each year. Licensing similarly metered the number of practitioners and prohibited competitors, such as nurses and paramedics, from performing services they were perfectly capable of performing. Finally, prescription laws guaranteed that people would have to see a doctor to obtain medicines they had previously been able to get on their own.

The medical licensing cartels were also the primary force behind the move to shut down lodge practice, mentioned above.

In the case of all these forms of artificial scarcity, the government creates a “honey pot” by making some forms of practice artificially lucrative. It’s only natural, under those circumstances, that health care business models gravitate to where the money is.

Health care is a classic example of what Ivan Illich, in Tools for Conviviality, called a “radical monopoly.” State-sponsored crowding out makes other, cheaper (but often more appropriate) forms of treatment less usable, and renders cheaper (but adequate) treatments artificially scarce. Artificially centralized, high-tech, and skill-intensive ways of doing things make it harder for ordinary people to translate their skills and knowledge into use-value. The State’s regulations put an artificial floor beneath overhead cost, so that there’s a markup of several hundred percent to do anything; decent, comfortable poverty becomes impossible.

A good analogy is subsidies to freeways and urban sprawl, which make our feet less usable and raise living expenses by enforcing artificial dependence on cars. Local building codes primarily reflect the influence of building contractors, so competition from low-cost unconventional techniques (T-slot and other modular designs, vernacular materials like bales and papercrete, and so on) is artificially locked out of the market. Charles Johnson described the way governments erect barriers to people meeting their own needs and make comfortable subsistence artificially costly, in the specific case of homelessness, in “Scratching By: How the Government Creates Poverty as We Know It” (The Freeman, December 2007).

The major proposals for health care “reform” that went before Congress would do little or nothing to address the institutional sources of high cost. As Jesse Walker argued at Reason.com, a 100 percent single-payer system, far from being a “radical” solution,

would still accept the institutional premises of the present medical system. Consider the typical American health care transaction. On one side of the exchange you’ll have one of an artificially limited number of providers, many of them concentrated in those enormous, faceless institutions called hospitals. On the other side, making the purchase, is not a patient but one of those enormous, faceless institutions called insurers. The insurers, some of which are actual arms of the government and some of which merely owe their customers to the government’s tax incentives and shape their coverage to fit the government’s mandates, are expected to pay all or a share of even routine medical expenses. The result is higher costs, less competition, less transparency, and, in general, a system where the consumer gets about as much autonomy and respect as the stethoscope. Radical reform would restore power to the patient. Instead, the issue on the table is whether the behemoths we answer to will be purely public or public-private partnerships. [“Obama is No Radical,” September 30, 2009]

I’m a strong advocate of cooperative models of health care finance, like the Ithaca Health Alliance (created by the same people, including Paul Glover, who created the Ithaca Hours local currency system), or the friendly societies and mutuals of the nineteenth century described by writers like Pyotr Kropotkin and E. P. Thompson. But far more important than reforming finance is reforming the way delivery of service is organized.

Consider the libertarian alternatives that might exist. A neighborhood cooperative clinic might keep a doctor of family medicine or a nurse practitioner on retainer, along the lines of the lodge-practice system. The doctor might have his med school debt and his malpractice premiums assumed by the clinic in return for accepting a reasonable upper middle-class salary.

As an alternative to arbitrarily inflated educational mandates, on the other hand, there might be many competing tiers of professional training depending on the patient’s needs and ability to pay. There might be a free-market equivalent of the Chinese “barefoot doctors.” Such practitioners might attend school for a year and learn enough to identify and treat common infectious diseases, simple traumas, and so on. For example, the “barefoot doctor” at the neighborhood cooperative clinic might listen to your chest, do a sputum culture, and give you a round of Zithro for your pneumonia; he might stitch up a laceration or set a simple fracture. His training would include recognizing cases that were clearly beyond his competence and calling in a doctor for backup when necessary. He might provide most services at the cooperative clinic, with several clinics keeping a common M.D. on retainer for more serious cases. He would be certified by a professional association or guild of his choice, chosen from among competing guilds based on its market reputation for enforcing high standards. (That’s how competing kosher certification bodies work today, without any government-defined standards). Such voluntary licensing bodies, unlike state licensing boards, would face competition—and hence, unlike state boards, would have a strong market incentive to police their memberships in order to maintain a reputation for quality.

The clinic would use generic medicines (of course, since that’s all that would exist in a free market). Since local juries or arbitration bodies would likely take a much more common-sense view of the standards for reasonable care, there would be far less pressure for expensive CYA testing and far lower malpractice premiums.

Basic care could be financed by monthly membership dues, with additional catastrophic-care insurance (cheap and with a high deductible) available to those who wanted it. The monthly dues might be as cheap as or even cheaper than Dr. Muney’s. It would be a no-frills, bare-bones system, true enough—but to the 40 million or so people who are currently uninsured, it would be a pretty damned good deal.

[yourreddancer]

Heather Cox Richardson 11.25.24

Today, President Joe Biden laid out very clearly the argument behind the economic policies his administration has put into place. “When I took office, the pandemic was raging and the economy was reeling,” he wrote. “From Day One, I was determined to not only deliver economic relief, but to invest in America and grow the economy from the middle out and bottom up, not the top down.”

“Over the last four years, that’s exactly what we’ve done,” he wrote. “We passed legislation to rebuild our infrastructure, build a clean energy economy, and bring manufacturing back to the United States after decades of offshoring.” Investing in America included the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that is rebuilding our roads, bridges, water systems, ports, and airports, as well as making high-speed broadband available in underserved areas; the CHIPS and Science Act that invested in bringing the manufacture of silicon chips back to the U.S. and promoting research; and the Inflation Reduction Act, which invested in technologies to combat climate change.

Today the White House announced that this federal investment has attracted more than $1 trillion in private-sector investments. “These investments in industries of the future,” Biden wrote, “are ensuring the future is made in America, by American workers.” 

He noted that more than 1.6 million construction and manufacturing jobs have been created over the last four years and that “our investments are making America a leader in clean energy and semiconductor technologies that will protect our economic and national security, while expanding opportunities in red states and blue states.”

In a White House memo, White House deputy chief of staff Natalie Quillian wrote: “The progress we've made...represents only a fraction of the full impact of this agenda. If future Administrations continue to implement at the pace we have, people across the country will enjoy the benefits of safer water, cleaner air, faster internet, and smoother commutes.”

But the incoming Trump administration will advance a different economic vision. Instead of trying to expand the economy through investment in infrastructure and manufacturing, Trump’s team has emphasized cutting taxes for the wealthy and corporations and slashing regulations.

The argument behind this approach to the economy is that concentrating wealth in the hands of investors will spur more investment, while creating an environment that’s “friendly” to business will create jobs. Jack Brook of the Associated Press reported that earlier this month, the state of Louisiana illustrated what this policy looks like to ordinary people when it cut income taxes to a flat 3% rate, reducing revenue by about $1.3 billion. They made up that revenue by increasing the sales tax to 5%, thus shifting the burden of taxation to lower- and middle-class families. “Louisiana just became a much more attractive place to do business,” Louisiana economic development secretary Susan Bourgeois told Brook.

It is becoming clear what Trump’s economic policy will look like at the national level. Super wealthy donors funded Trump’s 2024 campaign, and in a departure from every previous incoming president, Trump is refusing to sign the documents required as part of a presidential transition at least in part because those documents mandate that he disclose who is funding his transition and limit those donations to $5,000 per donor. Without that disclosure, it is impossible to see who is funding him. For all we know, that list could include foreign governments. 

As activist Melanie D’Arrigo put it on Bluesky: “‘Secret donations’ are bribes. The hundreds of millions he received from Elon Musk and other billionaires are also bribes. There’s a reason Donald Trump isn’t signing ethics pledges.” Indeed, after his first term, the watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington concluded that “there is absolutely no doubt that Trump tried at every turn to use the presidency to benefit his bottom line,” and noted that those who spent money at Trump’s properties often received favorable policy decisions from the administration. 

During the campaign, Trump promised to fight for ordinary Americans, but many of Trump’s picks to fill offices in his administration are notable for their extreme wealth. His pick for treasury secretary is billionaire Scott Bessent, a hedge fund executive who invested money for philanthropist George Soros for more than ten years. To head the Commerce Department, Trump has tapped billionaire Howard Lutnick, the chief executive officer of financial giant Cantor Fitzgerald.

Trump’s choice for education secretary, Linda McMahon, and his choice for Interior Secretary, North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, are both billionaires. And then there are the two men Trump tapped for his Department of Government Efficiency. Former pharmaceutical executive Vivek Ramaswamy is worth around a billion dollars, but Elon Musk is usually at the top of the list of the richest people in the world. He’s worth about $332.6 billion. Trump is expected to tap donor Kelly Loeffler, who is married to billionaire Jeff Sprecher, the chair of the New York Stock Exchange, as Secretary of Agriculture. 

Laura Mannweiler of U.S. News and World Report today estimated the worth of Trump’s current roster of appointees to be at least $344.4 billion, more than the gross domestic product of 169 countries. That number does not include Bessent, whose net worth is hard to find. In comparison, Mannweiler notes, the total net worth of the officials in Biden’s Cabinet was about $118 million. 

Economist Robert Reich noted yesterday that the wealth of America’s 815 billionaires grew by nearly $280 billion after Trump’s reelection, and the president-elect is promising to extend the 2017 tax cuts that are set to expire in 2025. Now, after all their complaints about the budget deficits under Biden as he invested in the country, Republicans are, according to Andrew Duehren of the New York Times, considering rejiggering the government’s accounting so that extending the tax cuts, which will create about $4 trillion in deficits, shows up as not costing anything. 

Deregulation, too, is on the agenda. It’s a cause close to the heart of Elon Musk, who frequently complains that unnecessary regulations are making it impossible for visionary entrepreneurs to develop the technological sector as quickly and efficiently as they could otherwise. 

In the Wall Street Journal yesterday, Susan Pulliam, Emily Glazer, and Becky Peterson noted that although Musk says his goal is to “protect life on Earth,” his companies “show a pattern of breaking environmental rules again and again.” The authors report that Tesla’s facility in Fremont, California, has received “more warnings for violations of air pollution rules over the past five years than almost any other company’s plant in California,” 112 of them. Federal regulators recently fined SpaceX for dumping about 262,000 gallons of wastewater into protected wetlands in Texas. Tesla, too, has dumped contaminated water into public sewer systems.  

One staffer for environmental compliance told the Environmental Protection Agency that ““Tesla repeatedly asked me to lie to the government so that they could operate without paying for proper environmental controls.”   

People who have worked with Musk “for years” told Pulliam, Glazer, and Peterson that they expect Musk will try to cut environmental regulations, especially the ones that affect his companies. After Trump announced that he was creating DOGE and putting Musk in charge of it, Musk posted: “We finally have a mandate to delete the mountain of choking regulations that do not serve the greater good.” 

Musk’s companies have brought in at least $15.4 billion in federal contracts over the past decade, and his companies have been targeted in at least 20 government investigations recently. Eric Lipton, David A. Fahrenthold, Aaron Krolik, and Kristen Grind of the New York Times note that Trump’s victory and his appointment of Musk to an oversight role in the government “essentially give[s] the world’s richest man and a major government contractor the power to regulate the regulators who hold sway over his companies, amounting to a potentially enormous conflict of interest.”

Today, Sara Murray, Kristen Holmes, and Kate Sullivan of CNN reported that Trump’s lawyers have conducted an investigation into whether top Trump advisor Boris Epshteyn has been selling access to Trump. Payments for his promotion of candidates for administration positions or access to administration officials were as much as $100,000 a month. The lawyers recommended that the Trump team should jettison Epshteyn, but it has apparently decided not to. 

“I am honored to work for President Trump and with his team,” Epshteyn said in a statement to CNN. “These fake claims are false and defamatory and will not distract us from Making America Great Again.”

Today, special prosecutor Jack Smith moved to drop both federal cases against Trump: the federal election case for his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, and the case concerning Trump’s retention of highly classified documents after he left office in 2021. Trump had said he would break the usual norms around special counsels when he returns to office—Biden retained the special counsel investigating his son, Hunter—and fire Smith. 

But Smith pointed to the position of the Department of Justice that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted as a reason for the cases’ dismissal. “This outcome is not based on the merits or strength of the case against the defendant,” he wrote. “The Government’s position on the merits of the defendant’s prosecution has not changed.” Smith left open the possibility that the charges could be brought again in the future after Trump leaves office.

Trump’s approach to the cases was to delay and delay and delay in hopes voters would return him to the White House, and it appears his strategy worked.

As democracy lawyer Marc Elias wrote: “Justice delayed was justice denied.”

—

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Kevin Siers :: @KevinSiers

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

November 25, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Nov 25, 2024

Today, President Joe Biden laid out very clearly the argument behind the economic policies his administration has put into place. “When I took office, the pandemic was raging and the economy was reeling,” he wrote. “From Day One, I was determined to not only deliver economic relief, but to invest in America and grow the economy from the middle out and bottom up, not the top down.”

“Over the last four years, that’s exactly what we’ve done,” he wrote. “We passed legislation to rebuild our infrastructure, build a clean energy economy, and bring manufacturing back to the United States after decades of offshoring.” Investing in America included the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that is rebuilding our roads, bridges, water systems, ports, and airports, as well as making high-speed broadband available in underserved areas; the CHIPS and Science Act that invested in bringing the manufacture of silicon chips back to the U.S. and promoting research; and the Inflation Reduction Act, which invested in technologies to combat climate change.

Today the White House announced that this federal investment has attracted more than $1 trillion in private-sector investments. “These investments in industries of the future,” Biden wrote, “are ensuring the future is made in America, by American workers.” 

He noted that more than 1.6 million construction and manufacturing jobs have been created over the last four years and that “our investments are making America a leader in clean energy and semiconductor technologies that will protect our economic and national security, while expanding opportunities in red states and blue states.”

In a White House memo, White House deputy chief of staff Natalie Quillian wrote: “The progress we've made...represents only a fraction of the full impact of this agenda. If future Administrations continue to implement at the pace we have, people across the country will enjoy the benefits of safer water, cleaner air, faster internet, and smoother commutes.”

But the incoming Trump administration will advance a different economic vision. Instead of trying to expand the economy through investment in infrastructure and manufacturing, Trump’s team has emphasized cutting taxes for the wealthy and corporations and slashing regulations.

The argument behind this approach to the economy is that concentrating wealth in the hands of investors will spur more investment, while creating an environment that’s “friendly” to business will create jobs. Jack Brook of the Associated Press reported that earlier this month, the state of Louisiana illustrated what this policy looks like to ordinary people when it cut income taxes to a flat 3% rate, reducing revenue by about $1.3 billion. They made up that revenue by increasing the sales tax to 5%, thus shifting the burden of taxation to lower- and middle-class families. “Louisiana just became a much more attractive place to do business,” Louisiana economic development secretary Susan Bourgeois told Brook.

It is becoming clear what Trump’s economic policy will look like at the national level. Super wealthy donors funded Trump’s 2024 campaign, and in a departure from every previous incoming president, Trump is refusing to sign the documents required as part of a presidential transition at least in part because those documents mandate that he disclose who is funding his transition and limit those donations to $5,000 per donor. Without that disclosure, it is impossible to see who is funding him. For all we know, that list could include foreign governments. 

As activist Melanie D’Arrigo put it on Bluesky: “‘Secret donations’ are bribes. The hundreds of millions he received from Elon Musk and other billionaires are also bribes. There’s a reason Donald Trump isn’t signing ethics pledges.” Indeed, after his first term, the watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington concluded that “there is absolutely no doubt that Trump tried at every turn to use the presidency to benefit his bottom line,” and noted that those who spent money at Trump’s properties often received favorable policy decisions from the administration. 

During the campaign, Trump promised to fight for ordinary Americans, but many of Trump’s picks to fill offices in his administration are notable for their extreme wealth. His pick for treasury secretary is billionaire Scott Bessent, a hedge fund executive who invested money for philanthropist George Soros for more than ten years. To head the Commerce Department, Trump has tapped billionaire Howard Lutnick, the chief executive officer of financial giant Cantor Fitzgerald.

Trump’s choice for education secretary, Linda McMahon, and his choice for Interior Secretary, North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, are both billionaires. And then there are the two men Trump tapped for his Department of Government Efficiency. Former pharmaceutical executive Vivek Ramaswamy is worth around a billion dollars, but Elon Musk is usually at the top of the list of the richest people in the world. He’s worth about $332.6 billion.

Laura Mannweiler of U.S. News and World Report today estimated the worth of Trump’s current roster of appointees to be at least $344.4 billion, more than the gross domestic product of 169 countries. That number does not include Bessent, whose net worth is hard to find. In comparison, Mannweiler notes, the total net worth of the officials in Biden’s Cabinet was about $118 million. 

Economist Robert Reich noted yesterday that the wealth of America’s 815 billionaires grew by nearly $280 billion after Trump’s reelection, and the president-elect is promising to extend the 2017 tax cuts that are set to expire in 2025. Now, after all their complaints about the budget deficits under Biden as he invested in the country, Republicans are, according to Andrew Duehren of the New York Times, considering rejiggering the government’s accounting so that extending the tax cuts, which will create about $4 trillion in deficits, shows up as not costing anything. 

Deregulation, too, is on the agenda. It’s a cause close to the heart of Elon Musk, who frequently complains that unnecessary regulations are making it impossible for visionary entrepreneurs to develop the technological sector as quickly and efficiently as they could otherwise. 

In the Wall Street Journal yesterday, Susan Pulliam, Emily Glazer, and Becky Peterson noted that although Musk says his goal is to “protect life on Earth,” his companies “show a pattern of breaking environmental rules again and again.” The authors report that Tesla’s facility in Fremont, California, has received “more warnings for violations of air pollution rules over the past five years than almost any other company’s plant in California,” 112 of them. Federal regulators recently fined SpaceX for dumping about 262,000 gallons of wastewater into protected wetlands in Texas. Tesla, too, has dumped contaminated water into public sewer systems.  

One staffer for environmental compliance told the Environmental Protection Agency that ““Tesla repeatedly asked me to lie to the government so that they could operate without paying for proper environmental controls.”   

People who have worked with Musk “for years” told Pulliam, Glazer, and Peterson that they expect Musk will try to cut environmental regulations, especially the ones that affect his companies. After Trump announced that he was creating DOGE and putting Musk in charge of it, Musk posted: “We finally have a mandate to delete the mountain of choking regulations that do not serve the greater good.” 

Musk’s companies have brought in at least $15.4 billion in federal contracts over the past decade, and his companies have been targeted in at least 20 government investigations recently. Eric Lipton, David A. Fahrenthold, Aaron Krolik, and Kristen Grind of the New York Times note that Trump’s victory and his appointment of Musk to an oversight role in the government “essentially give[s] the world’s richest man and a major government contractor the power to regulate the regulators who hold sway over his companies, amounting to a potentially enormous conflict of interest.”

Today, Sara Murray, Kristen Holmes, and Kate Sullivan of CNN reported that Trump’s lawyers have conducted an investigation into whether top Trump advisor Boris Epshteyn has been selling access to Trump. Payments for his promotion of candidates for administration positions or access to administration officials were as much as $100,000 a month. The lawyers recommended that the Trump team should jettison Epshteyn, but it has apparently decided not to. 

“I am honored to work for President Trump and with his team,” Epshteyn said in a statement to CNN. “These fake claims are false and defamatory and will not distract us from Making America Great Again.”

Today, special prosecutor Jack Smith moved to drop both federal cases against Trump: the federal election case for his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, and the case concerning Trump’s retention of highly classified documents after he left office in 2021. Trump had said he would break the usual norms around special counsels when he returns to office—Biden retained the special counsel investigating his son, Hunter—and fire Smith. 

But Smith pointed to the position of the Department of Justice that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted as a reason for the cases’ dismissal. “This outcome is not based on the merits or strength of the case against the defendant,” he wrote. “The Government’s position on the merits of the defendant’s prosecution has not changed.” Smith left open the possibility that the charges could be brought again in the future after Trump leaves office.

Trump’s approach to the cases was to delay and delay and delay in hopes voters would return him to the White House, and it appears his strategy worked. As democracy lawyer Marc Elias wrote: “Justice delayed was justice denied.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[darkmaga-returns]

Another “fine” story about what is known as the Big Tech-Big Government revolving door is coming from the UK, where a former Facebook vice president has just joined the Ofcom (Office of Communications) regulator.

Handpicked by Secretary of State for Science, Innovation, and Technology (DSIT) Peter Kyle, Lord Richard Allan – previously Facebook vice president of public policy, or, as some reports put it, “Facebook lobbyist in the EU” – is now a member of the Ofcom Board as a non-executive director.

The most obvious problem: Ofcom is supposed to regulate Facebook as well as the rest of the industry, and now the question of a possible conflict of interest is arising. After all, Allan spent a full decade as Facebook’s vice president. And coming up with a “strategic direction” for Ofcom is among the regulator’s Board’s tasks.

But DSIT reassured the public that in picking Allan for the role, “an open process in line with the Governance Code on Appointments” had been observed.

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Grist:

As delegates arrived at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee earlier this week to officially nominate former president Donald Trump as their 2024 candidate, a right-wing policy think tank held an all-day event nearby. The Heritage Foundation, a key sponsor of the convention and a group that has been influencing Republican presidential policy since the 1980s, gathered its supporters to tout Project 2025, a 900-plus-page policy blueprint that seeks to fundamentally restructure the federal government. 

Broadly speaking, Project 2025 proposals aim to scale down the federal government and empower states. The document calls for “unleashing all of America’s energy resources” by eliminating federal restrictions on fossil fuel drilling on public lands, curtailing federal investments in renewable energy technologies, and easing environmental permitting restrictions and procedures for new fossil fuel projects such as power plants. “What’s been designed here is a project that ensures a fossil fuel agenda, both in the literal and figurative sense,” said Craig Segall, the vice president of the climate-oriented political advocacy group Evergreen Action. 

Within the Department of Energy, offices dedicated to clean energy research and implementation would be eliminated, and energy efficiency guidelines and requirements for household appliances would be scrapped. The environmental oversight capacities of the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency would be curbed significantly or eliminated altogether, preventing these agencies from tracking methane emissions, managing environmental pollutants and chemicals, and conducting climate change research. 

In addition to these major overhauls, Project 2025 advocates for getting rid of smaller and lesser-known federal programs and statutes that safeguard public health and environmental justice. It recommends eliminating the Endangerment Finding — the legal mechanism that requires the EPA to curb emissions and air pollutants from vehicles and power plants, among other industries, under the Clean Air Act. It also recommends axing government efforts to assess the social cost of carbon, or the damage each additional ton of carbon emitted causes. And it seeks to prevent agencies from assessing the “co-benefits,” or the knock-on positive health impacts, of their policies, such as better air quality. 

“When you think about who is going to be hit the hardest by pollution, whether it’s conventional air water and soil pollution or climate change, it is very often low-income communities and communities of color,” said Rachel Cleetus, the policy director with the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit science advocacy organization. “The undercutting of these kinds of protections is going to have a disproportionate impact on these very same communities.”