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!
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On the positive side we are failing to take advantage of our positive aspects as a society. Creativity and freedom of thought breeds new ideas. Those characteristics are being crushed by caution, lack of risk taking, and bureaucratic overreach. China is winning because we have allowed ourselves to be defeated. We have failed to do the things that gave us supremacy in the first place. Chief among this is any sense of civic or societal responsibility on the part of the institutions, the corporations and ultimately the individual. The only thing that matters now is money. No other value or principle is managed or prized. Money vetos everything.
We need to stop coddling scientists in their taxpayer-funded "factory farms" and finally liberate them. True innovation, like "free-range" chicken, is just better when it has to scratch and peck for its own survival. We must remember that Albert Einstein wasn't on some cushy grant; he was a patent clerk, a true free-range mind doing world-changing physics on the side just to make rent. Once we defund the whole system, we'll have thousands of new, hungry Einsteins driving for Uber and serving lattes, their minds sharpened by the bracing air of competition. The scientific "meat" they produce will be so much leaner and more flavorful.
For decades we have been strangling the source of our scientific and technical advantage as a society. Trump walked in and shot it in the head. We were in slow decline. The system needed to be fixed. There are huge problems. If you worked at the Labs this is obvious. The change to corporate governance only accelerated the decline. The acts of the last year haven't fixed anything.
I have noticed that some young people are using AI so much that they start using the same language in everyday conversations. They keep asking variations on the same question over and over and I keep giving them the same answer and they seem confused. It is like they are changing the prompt until they get the answer they want and get frustrated when they told the same thing.