Actual post from Dec. 15 from one of the streams. This is a real topic. As far as promoting women and minorities even if their qualifications are not as good as the white male scientists, I am all for it. We need diversity at the lab and if that is what it takes, so be it. Quit your whining. Look around the lab, what do you see? White male geezers. How many African Americans do you see at the lab? Virtually none. LLNL is one of the MOST undiverse places you will see. Face it folks, LLNL is an institution of white male privilege and they don't want to give up their privileged positions. California, a state of majority Hispanics has the "crown jewel" LLNL nestled in the middle of it with very FEW Hispanics at all!
Comments
Does Sandia or LANL really need 17% of the workforce with a doctorate? The NNSA labs are not doing cutting edge science anymore and have not for some time.
2/15/2020 11:52 AM
Exactly. In many cases you don't need a degree for this work simply a certificate, AA degree or some training, heck just having previous experience as an admin can give you the know how to do the job.
This by the way is one argument that too many people are going to college getting useless degrees when all you really need is some skill that is actually in demand, and it just so happens that more and more jobs are going to be technical in nature. Even doing admin work at the labs often means knowing how to use a computer and do data entry. Your degree in French Lit and Woymans studies from a private college on the east coast may sound fun but it could cost 200k and all you end up with is the "college experience" a year abroad where just got drunk in Europe, leaning that you are privileged scum, and that socialism is good as opposed to any kind of real skill. Hopefully Bernie can get elected erase all your student debt so you can still look down on someone with only a technical certificate from their time in the navy who now makes 100k a year as tech, while you work in Starbucks with pink hair wearing shirt saying "F" capitalism. Get woke and go broke.
You are factually incorrect. But believe whatever you want.
You are factually incorrect. But believe whatever you want.
2/15/2020 4:37 PM
How is this incorrect? Also if you have any familiarity with the labs you would know that they do not even want to do science much less cutting edge science. To be clear yes there is some science at the labs but there have numerous studies showing the rankings of the labs has been slipping when compared to the DOE labs and Universities. 15-20 years ago LANL was the top DOE lab in terms of science. Remember how in 2000 LANL was said to be the Crown Jewel of the DOE complex. Now, LBNL, Argonne, ORNL and Brookhaven have all surpassed LANL in terms of yearly publications and citations. The only other labs that have declined faster are LLNL and Sandia. Also 15-20 years ago LANL was ranked 10th in terms of publications of all the institutes in the US
and now it is like 75 in the US and 150th in terms of the world. Just 25 years ago LANL was the top 5. At LLNL the drop has been even faster. It is no secret to anyone in the academic world and the other DOE labs that LANL, LLNL and Sandia have all be declining as scientific and engineering facilities for some time. Yet every year when they do the evaluations of the labs science is always like 99%. Another thing is that 15-20 years ago you had something like 30% of the postdocs coming from the top 10 schools, now it is 2-5%. In fact at the labs it seems that they want to move even further away from science since there is simply no upside in terms of the yearly evaluation of them. If half the science at the labs vanished the score would be 96%. Since science is essentially irrelevant to the scores it will continue to be neglected and continue to decline.
Your hatred of the labs and hatred of scientists and science in general has been noted on this blog for many years. It never gets old to you, does it? You'll never get over whatever grievance you think you suffered. But, it really gets old to those of us who try to trade real information here. Look, we get it, you hate the labs and scientists and science. Try to get help for your PTSD.
Just out of curiosity how is that you can conclude that 7:44 PM hates the labs and scientists? I could argue that the person actually cares about the labs and wants them go back to being the premier institutions they use to be. I would lab scientists or scientists in general would want that. You also never address a simple point. Do you think the labs have declined in terms of science and technical know how in the last 20 years? This is a yes or no question and it has nothing to do with hating the labs or hating scientists. I will give you little wiggle room, have the labs "significantly declined" in the last 20 years. There are numerous reports out there, plenty of evidence, and all you have to do is count the papers at LANL and compare that to a few other places in 2019 and compare it the same places in 1999 and you will see a clear and very pronounced trend.
2/17/2020 10:29 AM"
So basically we are counting on the high quality of the expertise of the past. Well I am glad they where brilliant. What I don't get is the anti excellence bent at the labs now. Is this just a way to protect themselves, keep a good thing going? Maybe I am naive but I always assumed that people want to be in the best place possible sot of like wanting to go to the best school you get into ect.
What I don’t get is evidence of any ‘anti excellence bent’ at LLNL.
2/19/2020 9:41 PM
Yeah, he is talking about LANL of course.