Tri-Valley Cares needs to be on this if they aren't already. We need to make sure that NNSA and LLNL does not make good on promises to pursue such stupid ideas as doing Plutonium experiments on NIF. The stupidity arises from the fact that a huge population is placed at risk in the short and long term. Why do this kind of experiment in a heavily populated area? Only a moron would push that kind of imbecile area. Do it somewhere else in the god forsaken hills of Los Alamos. Why should the communities in the Bay Area be subjected to such increased risk just because the lab's NIF has failed twice and is trying the Hail Mary pass of doing an SNM experiment just to justify their existence? Those Laser EoS techniques and the people analyzing the raw data are all just BAD anyways. You know what comes next after they do the experiment. They'll figure out that they need larger samples. More risk for the local population. Stop this imbecilic pursuit. They wan...
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Not going to happen for many reasons. In fact the opposite is more likely. It was a bit of on odd analysis since it is based on passed recessions which occurred for very different reasons that our current situation so there is no reason to believe any of this is relevant to what we are going through now. Another thing is that we may be entering some harsher times with China and Russia which may mean military may ramp up in terms of spending. As for the NNSA well that is most certainly going to be ramping up so the labs are going to be in very good shape for the some time. I assume it is the later point that the poster is trying to make. Apparently the poster is utterly "out of the loop" so to speak. I would guess some ex LANL guy with an agenda against the lab. Look pal the lab will be fine all the people that work at the lab will be fine just like all our the people you worked with before. They will live well which I know drives you crazy but that is just the way live goes with you.
There will be no cuts.
Dumb article and a failure to understand some basics of economics.
I like to listen to NPR and Rachel Maddow.
4/07/2020 8:01 PM
RAND corporation has gotten many things completly wrong in the past. Sure they get some right but plenty wrong as well. To be fair I said the poster is "out of the loop" not the article nor the authors since the article said nothing about NNSA. I still think the analysis makes little sense precisely because of the numbers and comparing past recessions to the current one is rather problematic. Sure you can do the study and run the numbers but the fundamentals to how this epidemic induced economic downturn and its long term impact are likely to be very different from those of traditional recessions for a number of rather obvious reasons. Since it is an economic analysis it is not exactly as rigorous as a scientific study so how serious can you take these things anyway.
In any case as for as the NNSA is concerned that money is pretty much set in stone for some time now not to mention that in many cases NNSA can be rather different from the standard defense funding.
4/07/2020 7:36 PM
You are "out of the loop" but from that it does not follow that the authors or article is out of the loop. Now I had to make some assumptions (1) that you think this article is directly relevant to LANL, LLNL or Sandia and that is why you posted it. If you think that you are out of the loop. Is it reasonable for me to think you made this assumption, yes because why else wold you post on this blog. By the way "in the loop" is nothing special it is just a realization that the NNSA budget depends on different factors than the defense budget.
The article is about defense spending not NNSA work, and the two are actually weakly coupled. Could the authors be out of the loop on defense spending and future directions? They may or may not be, that is irrelevant to their study. They are simply looking at past data and drawing conclusions for the future. Nothing wrong with that but you have to ask is the past data actually relevant to the current situation. That is the big question, I suspect that it is not. They do not know either but they can still do the analysis.
You need to understand in most quantitive endeavors or models you need to make some assumptions and see where it takes you. Now how accurate those assumptions are strongly varies. How serious can you take this study, who knows but there is a very low probability that this is study is relevant to the NNSA labs in any case.
That is not actually what article said, it says that the drop in defense spending follows some time after. Again this the case for standard recessions that occur due to some internal economic reason. No now an epidemic can cause long time damage if you kill large number of young people, it will not happen if you kill a small percentage of older people. Heck I would guess even the cruise industry will come back.
But isn’t the NNSA decoupled from the DOE?
“The article is about defense spending not NNSA work, and the two are actually weakly coupled.”
Completely contradictory statements.
That would mean military spending was cut by the ending of the cold war not by an economic downturn. Now the end of the cold war could have also created an economic downturn but was not the cause of the defense spending cut.
4/08/2020 8:26 AM
That is a good point but it could easily go the other way where people could decide that China is a real threat to the world which would mean increased military spending in particular NNSA spending could go way up. No one knows how this will play out but one possibility is that the US will no longer be so dependent on global trade and become more nationalistic leading to more friction with China and Russia. We could even enter a new cold war. Also the rest of the world may side with us on this and want the US to increase its military. The US is already essentially the military for Europe.
There is actually a question about how if this is really going to be any kind of long term economic downturn since the economy could simply come back after this, opportunities could arise as well. It could even strengthen certain aspects of the economy.
4/08/2020 10:54 AM
No it is not. For example, any nuclear weapon information the NNSA classifies is based solely on DOE classification rules.
Completely contradictory statements.
How are on earth does that work? Think about this real hard, troops on the ground, destroyers, planes, guns, tanks...hmm something is missing. Look I assume some level of thinking on the blog before I spend the 2 seconds which I throw a post on it, do I need to spell out everything before I post? If that is the case than this blog is hopeless as I thought it was read by people from the NNSA labs.
In any case Scooby will shut this this thread since too many people seem interested in it and defense spending has no relation to the labs and violates the blog rules.
4/08/2020 4:18 PM
The Rand article said nothing about the stockpile. It said defense funding but NNSA work and general defense money are not the same. In any case the Rand article could be wrong about defense funding as well. It is just a possible scenario which is not that well motivated by their own assumptions. Rand gets lots of things wrong. To be fair they are just running one possibility.
Why not? Seems like pretty good especially when you look at Chinas defense budget which just keeps going up and up. One has to ask why would that be? Cold war era thinking maybe very relevant today.
"An example is the Huawei 5G threat that was fabricated by the US intelligence community(IC).For years the IC told everyone, including our allies, that Huawei was putting backdoors in their equipment to allow spying by the Chinese military. That was shown to be false by independent studies and other intelligence agencies. Britain finally had to agree to use Huawei 5G equipment as have other allies of the US. Now the IC surrogates that try to cry wolf about Huawei are laughed at when they suggest their backdoor nonsense."
I am not sure why this relevant but this is still a concern. Is it really fabricated? Who knows but the fact that it could be credible kind tells you how much the Chinese can be trusted. You may not like it but China as world wide threat is a very real possibility and that threat is going to grow which is one of the reasons defense budgets are going to grow. As for NNSA it will grow no matter what.
Scooby can you please shut down this thread as people are posting to it.
If a the economic downturn last for some time than large cuts could be coming to many programs. The people at LLNL and LANL could be in for a real shock when it is realized that these institutions add little value in terms of current situation of the world. The issues we face are in order of importance #1 Global Warming, #2 Pandemics, #3 Social unrest under increasing inequality. #4 Domestic terrorism as certain states like Texas and Montana start to become more liberal. #5 International Terrorism. #6 which is related to #1 is the great migrations of people due climate change.
Not a single of these issue require anything from an NNSA lab. If economics is the order of the day, expect that the sooner rather than latter that huge cuts will becoming, a lab or two will close, and there will be gnashing of teeth. Also the people that dismiss the RAND report do not realize what RAND is. They have PH.Ds from top schools and university professors as consultants. The percent of people with a PH.D at RAND may be 60%, what is the percent of PH.Ds at LANL or LLNL, maybe 17%. RAND is place that one needs outstanding qualifications to work at as they have to compete in the open market place of ideas and be at the cutting edge.
I think I will stick with the opinion of people at RAND who have the academic bonafides as opposed to some NNSA larpers who have visited at most 3 states.
History is not a linear extrapolation, so we’ll see what comes next.
4/10/2020 7:06 A
Agreed Scooby shut this thread down, no one is posting to it anyway.
4/09/2020 10:38 PM
Even if China is a threat we will not beat them with NNSA labs. We beat them with Katy Perry and Miley Cyrus, in other words we infect them with our culture. Once they start going down the route of ego, selfishness and antiintellectualism they will be doomed. In America we have over the last 120 years have leaned to liv in a world of contradictions, it will be too much of a shock for China. We have cultural weapons of mass destruction. Imagine if Katy Perry went back in time and started singing and dancing with little cloths in the middle of Leipzig in 1740, what would happen is that Bach would vanish from history. That is just how powerful we are. So LAN and LLNL are not going to save us from China. As this blog has shown stupidity is a weapon and we have plenty of it which we can harness and use.
4/10/2020 9:57 AM
You missed all the RIFs in the 90's, huh?
A lot of people believed your theory until January 2020, when the brutal, bloodthirsty Chinese dictatorship began killing doctors warning about the coronavirus and dragging isolation resisters out of their homes, and lying to the rest of the world, thus causing a worldwide pandemic and hundreds of thousands of lives. The "rehabilitation" of communist China is now officially dead, failed, gone.