I have friends that work in scientific agencies (NIH, etc), as well as for government contractors doing science stuff.
Am I correct to be worried for the sector? The best that can be hoped for is that the sector is simply ignored. The budget for it isn't even very large compared to DoD, but it is very hard to draw a line from R&D to profit. But we've seen with other agencies the violence is the point, and I don't expect them to treat Big Science any differently.
I'm in this space. Where I work we've already lost 10% of our staff with senior management looking for an additional 15% in budget cuts (anything else we can cut).
So this sector may be "ignored" so to speak (though I'm not even sure what that means). I also have a number of friends at agencies and government contractors that all think they will "feel" these possibly large federal budget cuts. They are all on edge, especially with eyes towards the end of summer and early fall.
Yes: the US administration is infested with anti-intellectuals who falsely believe that they're self-made ubermensch. So anyone else is obviously beta or worse.
Funniest thing I found out recently: the whole debacle of beta vs alphas was based on studies on wolfs on stressful conditions (i.e., cages).
Second funniest thing I found out not so recently: the whole debacle, which I believed and hurt me personally, in hindsight, is the whole study about "kids who wait for candies instead of eating it right away fare better in life" failed to take into account kids' social-economical status.
This, plus the no doubt institutionalization of Scientific Studies (tm) (e.g., salt causes cardio problems, as a way to steer focus away from sugar), makes me apply 50% in the doubt scale for every study less than 50 years old.
Additionally, I'm told the waterfall model was never prescribed as a good method, but it was the most prominent picture of a old study which affirmed waterfall as very flawed, and people failed to properly read the text.
PS: on topic, everyone believes that of the opposite team; I found very enlightening an article which said "Find allies in unlikely places. One of my most surprising sources of support during my trial(s) was hard-right Brexiter (...). Find threads of connection and work from there", by a Remain person.
Let's hope that may break the cycle of default (a few times undeserved) mistrust.
> the whole debacle of beta vs alphas was based on studies on wolfs on stressful conditions (i.e., cages).
The whole alpha/beta meme is a perfect microcosm of what we see today: ardent denial of the complexities of reality. It is a half-truth (some people fare better in the sexual marketplace) that gets elevated to the status of belief. When it becomes a belief, then intellectual heels are dug in. Conflicting information is downplayed, and no amount of reality seems to shift opinions. Perception is twisted to confirm pre-existing beliefs.
The belief must be held. It has been made to serve some psychological purpose for the holder, even if it just a subconscious justification for their own behavior.
You need humility to transcend the local maxima that every human falls into. It's the only way to counterbalance the prone-to-flaws hardware our brains run on. But a lot of our society tries to beat it out of people.
That’s because no amount of reality can make its way into someone’s algorithmic feed. On every social media platform I’ve been on with engagement algorithms, the algorithm creates an intellectual prison where bad ideas that speak to our emotions get reinforced. I see this in my own feeds where it decides, since I like video games and fitness, that I probably should check out these alt-right grifters and the manosphere. Once you click on one of those videos, you quickly get locked in to that content. And unfortunately, I don’t think people have a clue that it’s happening as it speaks to their pain, delusions, what have you.
It's one of those cases, "people should know better". I think targeted advertisement and social media must be regulated, if not for everything else only to dictate the amount of non-chronological events allowed per items.
The error in it is just.. yeah.. it's not shining a good light on you or the position you're taking. Especially in light of the subject being discussed.
Trump won the popular vote because people were nostalgic for Obama's economy that Trump got credit for which is what always happens when a Republican follows a Dem into office.
Its crazy that Dems don't run on policies like these.
Imagine if instead of an 80+ geezer or the most corporate woman in the world, they had someone credibly promising stimulus checks !! They'd win in a landslide.
Obama won huge on promising universal healthcare and then every dem after that decided to promise nothing.
It doesn’t work for Democrats. They were punished hard for that healthcare bill
> According to a report from the National Conference of State Legislatures, the Democratic Party has lost a net total of 13 Governorships and 816 state legislative seats since President Obama entered office, the most of any president since Dwight Eisenhower.
Republicans understand the power of appealing to emotion and "othering." They have spent decades training their voters to vote against their own interest because it will hurt people that Republicans say are preventing their great success. Trump said he had "concepts of a plan" on healthcare and voters think he had more of a platform than Harris because his main points were about getting even with the world. Make the world pay what it owes us and get these immigrants out of YOUR country.
Democrats get punished for trying that too blatantly. Republicans and Democrats are playing different games when it comes to campaigning and propaganda.
Democrats want universal healthcare and nobody besides Obama has come close to delivering it. And Obama still failed with a supermajority thanks to the filibuster, and even if that passed it would have sucked compared to what voters wanted or what other countries have.
Democrats want universal healthcare but Republicans will cry socialism which will turn moderates against it. I saw this happen in 08 and again in 16 with Bernie Sanders.
Democrats(the voters) are not a monolith. Like I said, moderate and centrist Democrats are not entirely on board with universal healthcare. The more liberal left wing of Democrats are.
They wanted another stimulus check but didn't want other people to get a stimulus check. They love stimulus checks and the highly effective policies the US used to mitigate an unemployment spike and avoid a recession that did hit other countries but not the US, and then they turn around and blame the government for causing some temporary and modest inflation (modest in a historic context compared to other periods of much higher inflation in recent memory). The median voter is someone who cannot be pleased. And so much of our political decisionmaking is driven to incoherence by trying to please these swing voters who do not understand anything.
For someone like me who isn't very well versed with US politics, could someone explain like I'm a layperson what Obama's universal healthcare is like and what it was meant to do.
Was it anything like the universal free healthcare of Canada, UK, European countries? Or was it still paid healthcare but Obama wanted to integrate all of the healthcare in a universal system? Did it get implemented or is still in the works?
It was a requirement for everybody to get insurance, along with some protections (I forget exactly the mechanism) to prevent insurance companies from excluding people who had preexisting conditions (this is a big deal in the US, private insurance companies don’t want to insure you if they think you’ll be expensive), and a marketplace website thingy that made it easy to sign up for insurance.
There was a concern that if insurance companies can’t consider preexisting conditions, people might just wait until they get sick, and then sign up for insurance. So, there was a fine levied if you don’t get insurance.
There are also some subsidies for people who can’t afford insurance, but anecdotally the definition of “subsidy” and “can’t afford” vary from state to state.
Some states sued to try to get the uninsured fine removed. While the case was going through, the fine was set to $0. Ultimately, the fine was found to be allowed (IIRC), but by the time that happened political leadership had changed a couple times and fines are unpopular anyway, so it wasn’t reimplemented (some states do have their own implementation of the fine, though).
The system was implemented and remains. You can go to a government run portal and buy insurance in the US. Whether or not it is a good deal depends on what your state decided to do around subsidies and all that.
In conclusion, it was a market-driven compromise plan which still exists and is, in fact, highly compromised.
It wasn't anything like any of those. It was based on a right wing think tank plan and the one bonus is that now insurance companies can't reject you for already having a "pre existing condition"
He’s certainly a Republican and he was their presidential candidate against Obama. But, it is also the most conservative plan he could get by the very-Democratic-leaning Massachusetts populace and legislature.
Republicans would win and Democrat voters would stay home. Republicans spend tons of time trying to convince you whatever Dem they are running against is corrupt while their voters ignore the blatant corruption in their own party.
They have better outcomes actually. Higher economic growth, higher population growth, lower state debt, lower unemployment. Of course, exceptions apply but the overall data is pretty clear.
> If you want proof, look at the state with the highest GDP.
And your response is "left-wing" (we don't actually have a left wing in the US) propaganda. Raw GDP is irrelevant for 99.99% of people, because the gains are /very/ unevenly distributed. Reducing cost of living and cost of housing has a much bigger impact on the daily lives of people than increasing GDP, because most people don't benefit from increased GDP, in fact increased GDP is largely tied to increased cost, as it's determined by money flows. GDP is a very flawed metric that doesn't in any way reflect the quality of life of the people who live in the region the metric applies to. Some sort of PPP based metric is more reasonable and is a much more balanced look at life across different US states and is not nearly as rosy a picture for blue states, all of which are some of the most expensive places to live, in part due to political policies.
For a high earning person (say a software engineer), California has a higher effective all-in tax rate on income than most European countries but delivers /far less/. The fact it has such a high GDP is because the headquarters of some of the world's largest companies are there and it's /expensive/ which means there's significant money flows in California. That doesn't prove that California's policies are superior to say Texas. It's an entirely flawed comparison that does nothing to account for actual quality of life.
I think you'd be hard pressed to prove that someone earning a median tech income in California has a better quality of life than someone earning a median tech income in France, and yet California's effective tax rate is higher (combining state, local, and federal).
Ill generally start off by saying that it should be pretty clear that when Republicans are given free reign of all 3 branches of Government, US goes down the shitter. So there isn't even a real argument you could ever make in support of anything Republican, other than saying that you don't mean "those" Republicans. And this argument will hold until the entire party uniformly denounces Trump, Musk and their cronies.
But in the spirit of conversation, you are fully wrong. GDP is an indicator of economic activity. Its not irrelevant. It ties in things like jobs and COL (because you need people to actually be able to live normal lives to contribute to the economies). Likewise, higher taxation rates with high GDP also means that in general a lot of money is moving hands. If you look at population growth of Cali, the only time it dipped was during Covid, specifically because WFH. I.e you are still making California money, but now you don't have to pay taxes. And since then, its on its way up.
This effect also applies in general. You can't claim that Texas economy is growing because Republicans, when the economic powerhouses of the 4 major cities all uniformly vote blue, and start hiring for companies that started in very left leaning areas on the west coast. There is a reason why silicon valley started in Cali and not any other Republican states - Cali left leaning environment attracted more educated people, and the concentration of those people is what allowed tech companies to flourish. If Musk started Tesla in Texas, and asked the state for subsidies and grants, he would have gotten laughed at and Tesla would not be a thing.
The author conveniently ignores this, and Im not even going to mention the horrible statistical analysis of the plots.
Here is a good article comparing economies of Texas and California.
So no its not "leftist" propaganda - its reality. Whether or not you value that more than your ideological alignment, I don't know. Republicans generally don't have the critical thinking skills to parse reality from ideology - if they did they would be Democrats.
> So there isn't even a real argument you could ever make in support of anything Republican
I didn't make any arguments in support of anything Republican. The fact I put "left-wing" in quotes and pointed out that there is no left wing in US politics should have been an indication that I'm not supporting Republicans.
> But in the spirit of conversation, you are fully wrong. GDP is an indicator of economic activity.
Yes, it's what I described, it's economic activity in the frame of movement of money, it says nothing about the quality of life of any individual or how that GDP is distributed, this is why PPP is a much more reasonable metric. I am very much correct in my statements, you are intentionally misunderstanding or you don't understand how PPP vs GDP differ when making comparisons between regions/economies.
> You can't claim that Texas economy is growing because Republicans,
I don't think the Texas economy is growing due to Republicans. The Texas economy is growing because it's cheap to live there at the same quality of life that it's expensive to live in other states, so people move to Texas because they can't afford to live in other states due to the growing wealth disparity in this country, something that GDP conveniently ignores but that PPP doesn't.
> Republicans generally don't have the critical thinking skills to parse reality from ideology - if they did they would be Democrats.
If people in the US had strong critical thinking skills we wouldn't be stuck with first past the post elections causing us a false dichotomy between two shitty right-wing parties that are both run for the benefit of wealthy elites, but sure, we'd all vote Democrat, whatever floats your boat, given you've displayed a really sore lack of critical thinking in your response.
I'd nitpick the rest of your comment, but since you clearly didn't read and understand what I wrote, it's a wasted effort. You somehow bucketed me into the "Republican" bucket and replied to a strawman instead of acknowledging that GDP doesn't account for wealth disparity, which is why PPP (especially as a per capita metric) is superior for understand QoL differences vs GDP. Last I checked Republicans aren't lamenting the lack of a real left-wing party in the US and talking about the impact of wealth disparity, but go off I guess.
>I didn't make any arguments in support of anything Republican.
The article you linked is written by a prominent Republican blogger. You have to be pretty right wing to think its a good piece.
>GDP is distributed, this is why PPP is a much more reasonable metric.
Your original claim was that Republican run states "have Higher economic growth" among other things, which is just not true, because economic growth by definition implies more money being traded, which is GDP. Now that you realize you are wrong, you start running to derivative metrics like PPP, without doing the due diligence of proving how PPP is actually economic growth.
You also mentioned higher population growth, which is a false narrative (see below), lower state debt, which you have to go in depth to prove how thats actually good, and lower unemployment, which is not only not generally true, but again, you have to prove that unemployment is bad (as opposed to having people between jobs relying on social safety nets due to higher GDP, which creates favorable conditions for economy as history shows)
> The Texas economy is growing because it's cheap to live there at the same quality of life that it's expensive to live in other states, so people move to Texas because they can't afford to live in other states
If you are actually going to respond, please take the time to a) read what I wrote previously, and b) think what you are typing. The population of Cali is currently growing. It can't grow without all sectors down to the lower income service workers also willing to stay in Cali.
The people that move are a) firstly in a financial position to move, which requires funds, and b) moving to optimize salary vs cost of living. But they are also not moving to deep red areas.
>If people in the US had strong critical thinking skills we wouldn't be stuck with first past the post elections causing us a false dichotomy between two shitty right-wing parties that are both run for the benefit of wealthy elites
Funny you mention strong thinking skills, but equivocating what Trump is doing now to anything the Democrats ever did in the past decade is quite funny. Mentally this is pretty much the Republican cope, you can never admit that your side is horrible, you basically have to say "Democrats are just as bad" and point to some obscure things and make up fantastical projections to try to match what Republicans are doing.
>You clearly didn't read and understand what I wrote
You don't understand it either. You first posted an article that has horrible stats, then you use PPP to prove your point because GDP doesn't fit the narrative. I doubt you understand what PPP is. Because if you did, you realize that PPP is a very derivative measure, and its used to compare economies across countries, not states that often have very intertwined economies with lots of market forces (i.e same companies in every state controlling prices nation wide).
>You somehow bucketed me into the "Republican" bucket
You are not fooling anyone anymore. Centrist or libertarian = republican.
> The article you linked is written by a prominent Republican blogger. You have to be pretty right wing to think its a good piece.
My dude, you have me confused with someone else. I didn't link any article in this subthread.
> Your original claim was that Republican run states "have Higher economic growth" among other things
I never made that claim. I made the claim that PPP is a better quality of life metric than GDP when comparing between regions/economies, because of wealth and income inequality. Which it is. In fact, nothing I've said has been disproven by anything you've responded with, you are just trying to bucket me because you have mistaken me for someone else and decided to apply the most uncharitable strawman lens to my entire commentary.
> but equivocating what Trump is doing now to anything the Democrats ever did
It's super rich to spend hours deprogramming my Boomer father from being a Trump supporter to come online and get accused of being a Trump supporter by people too dumb to read what I actually wrote.
> You are not fooling anyone anymore. Centrist or libertarian = republican.
You continue to fail to have any reading comprehension, inappropriately bucketing me as a Republican, which is frankly insulting. Be better. I'm done with you.
The reality is that US AID money went to any NGO that had mechanisms to pipe some percentage back to Act Blue as cash and hidden through donors like my mom that donated once and had her record in there 20 times. Mostly facilitated by corrupt lawyers there.
Not sure about the USAID part, but ActBlue has been suspected of illegal fundrasing activities for a long time. Googling will find a lot of stories similar to the one above.
"Mark Block, former chief of staff to Republican 2012 presidential candidate Herman Cain, alleges that a total of $884.38 given in his name and without his knowledge between May and October was designed to circumvent federal election law and may be part of a larger scam involving tens of thousands of unwitting donors."
https://fedsoc.org/commentary/fedsoc-blog/is-actblue-in-lega...
Your first quote isn’t on the page you referenced but the New York Post’s coverage of a lawsuit brought by a Republican activist – not exactly a neutral party – and he didn’t include ActBlue in his lawsuit which is going after a specific person identified only by their American Express card number, no doubt recognizing that the burden would be much higher to prove that ActBlue was colluding with rather than being victimized by whoever that was.
Similarly, your second quote is from a different Republican activist. His data and methodology don't appear to have been independently reviewed, and it doesn’t sound like there’s been any independent review of what he told people to get them to sign affidavits or verification of their claims, all but the first of which are small (it would not be the first someone elderly forgot about clicking on a link or signing up for a recurring charge), much less establishing that ActBlue condoned that activity.
The underlying problem here is that there aren’t higher standards for donations and because we don’t have a national digital identity system and the super court has found that political spending is close to speech in terms of the protections it deserves, it’s not clear how much more could even possibly be required.
Government waste has been known for decades and people want it cleaned up. However the same people we have trusted to clean it up are part of the very system that has allowed it to continue. Take a close look at something like funding for the homeless in big cities like LA or Portland and you will find the $ amount per homeless person to be way higher than it should be. You have companies that insert themselves into the government system that do nothing but drain the money that should be going to help the people it's suppose to serve, like the homeless, and every year the problem gets worse and they need more money. People are tired of the lack of accountability for results and ever constant requests for more money.
While this is all true, you've sort of pointed out what the problem is here: the private sector.
Conservative policies consistently "outsource" public services to the private sector, allowing corruption and greed to grow. When things are done publicly, they're very efficient. We don't do that here. We outsource steps A-X to private companies which outsource to other private companies which all essentially launder government funds. At each "hop", there is a massive loss, because each party needs to turn a healthy profit. In addition, each "hop" introduces communication barriers, which further drives inefficiency and even results in failures.
Doing it all under one roof is just good sense. The American Republicans are explicitly against this, and will dismantle it whenever possible. They're not actually "starving the beast". They're just taking the beast's food and giving it to their buddies, who have no intention of helping the public.
The unfortunate reality is that simply cutting funds doesn't do what we think it will. DOGE will cut funds to service X but service X still needs to be done. Now, it will be mostly conducted by the private sector at 10x the cost, and will be paid for by government contracts. Congratulations, everything is worse.
Private sector can make it more efficient for some things...but what I'm referencing is the use of NGOs for public services and the most wasteful I've seen are in the "Large Blue Cities". CEOs of relatively small firms that get millions of dollars in funding but also give themselves 6 figure salaries for "charity work".
I saw a recent article about an NGO that was going to not be able to help immigrants learn how to navigate the path to citizenship. Big story about losing $300K a year in federal grants. However they also took in $2-3M a year in other funding and spent most of it on lobbying for immigrant law changes, as well as paying their CEO a decent 6 figure salary. However the sob story about cutting services to immigrants was the only thing they talked about cutting.
The use cases for outsourcing to the private sector are few and far between. Only if the product or service is extremely difficult, complex, and one-off. Other than that, you save money in the long-run doing it in house, and long-run is MUCH more important for governments than companies.
I'm no fan of Trump, but it's important to approach studies like this with a healthy dose of skepticism. Macroeconomics isn’t an exact science, and studies like these often rely on dubious assumptions and extrapolations. For example, what are the odds that current public R&D spending is really at an optimal theoretical level? Do these models account for potential substitution by private industry if government funding is reduced? etc.
Private industries are not incentivized to pursue the same kind of research as the public sector. An excellent example of this is antibiotics (or antifungal drugs). Pharma companies do not put forth a large budget for research like this, because it isn't profitable. But, if we were to see a super bug crop up in the next 10 years (unfortunately this is not a crazy "if" due to trends in antibiotic resistance), then you would quickly see the public sector's research paying enormous dividends in terms of missed economic hardship. These economic benefits would not affect the private sector in the same way, because a pharma company would not see, let's say, $50b in profits from helping ease an equivalent $50b in economic hardship caused by hospital bills/suffering/lost productivity.
On top of this, let's just look at the current private sector and what they spend R&D dollars in: can you really say that $1b spent by Google, Meta, Amazon etc. actually ends up being better worthwhile than $1b spent by NASA? see this list of inventions NASA has inadvertently created: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/20-inventions-we-would...
In general, public sector research is already so strapped for cash. Their budgets are not large. Their salaries are lower than the private sector. I agree that public R&D spending is likely not at a "theoretical optimal level", but would you argue that private sector R&D spending is?
We probably want even more R&D than we have now. Private companies frequently spend much less than the optimal level because it's a tossup on whether it will amount to anything, government can fund a wide range of R&D and society picks up the benefits of it even if half the projects don't turn out.
Something doesn’t need to be “optimal” for it to highly net positive.
But even if you don’t want to believe all the research and all the very obvious examples that suggest the tremendous benefits of public research even from a purely monetary perspective, maybe just consider that nearly every other country is trying to rebuild what the U.S. has in terms of public research.
China, Europe, etc.
And countries in the Middle East are using their oil money to essentially pay for these universities to build campuses in their nations.
> For example, what are the odds that current public R&D spending is really at an optimal theoretical level? Do these models account for potential substitution by private industry if government funding is reduced? etc.
On the other side of things, they're using an economic model based on keyword searches for woke language in grant descriptions, and yet you felt compelled to comment to urge skepticism and "just ask questions" only about this study?
I'm not sure where all of us would be without R&D - no mobile phones, no internet, no... unless the plan is to stay forever where we are today, then yes R&D needs funding.
Just musing don't be angry with me, but seems rather circular that R&D needs public money in order to benefit the economy. Over-simplistic I suppose, but I'd think if it were economically productive it would be able to make a self-sustaining feedback loop.
The problem with private R&D is that it's quite difficult for any individual company to fully capture the benefits of research. There are lots of ways this happens. Company does innovative research then gets copied by other firms. Or, they don't recognize an idea's potential but another company does. Or, the research is useful twenty or fifty years in the future. Or, the research is very useful both for them and for many, many other fields and they're only able to capture a tiny sliver of the total value.
For a couple concrete examples: Xerox-PARC did incredibly innovative computing research that turned Apple into a trillion dollar company. For a more modern take: DeepSeek literally used ChatGPT to build their own cheaper competitor.
So, R&D is incredibly societally useful and it's in the collective interest of companies to have access to research results to keep them innovative and competitive. But, it doesn't make sense for any one company to actually do R&D. It really only works as a public good.
In this scenario would it not be attractive for investors to fund multiple (all, even) companies conducting the research into a given field/advancement knowing they will loose money on most but one will capture the benefit? (which, per the premise, is greater than the cost)
I think this happens to some degree with venture firms taking multiple bets on multiple companies working in the same area. The individual companies are still hamstrung, though. Why would ten companies all take the same bet on a speculative technology, especially if they know that other companies are already working on the same ideas?
Also, not to be glib, but it sounds like you’re describing a very wealthy investor willing to spend a lot of money to advance social good by broadly funding an individually unprofitable research goal. That's just a government right?
I'm not angry and I totally get your point of view. I don't think you're wrong.
My belief is that the underlying issue is that most companies and their drive for quarterly results means that they won't front a bunch of the "we're not sure if this will result in anything but it's an interesting thing to look into" style of research on their own. The Bell Labs of the olden days are gone and publicly-funded R&D has essentially replaced it.
It's not all bad though, having all of that research published instead of tucked away in a private research facility can be beneficial.
Which makes sense and also prompts the question: Why is research funded by public money published in journals that are not freely available to the public?
There’s a couple factors - one is the payoff time and risk levels make basic research difficult for even businesses with long time horizons to engage with, and American businesses are notoriously short term. The other is that there’s a large public benefit to making the fruits of that research widely available by way of risk mitigation - it’s commercial companies that take the research over the line, but making the research public allows multiple companies to take a shot at commercializing the results,
In general, considering the government and public money to not be part of “the economy” will make your internal models less performant - the public is an actor in the economy and so is the government, and both make decisions on the basis of their needs, values, and resourcing. Those entities seeing higher rates of return for their investment than other actors like private companies is absolutely consistent with, for example, different companies seeing different rates of return for the same investment dependent on their needs, resourcing, and constraints.
It's no more circular than spending money on education to get a high-paying job, or spending money on changing your A/C filters so that your air conditioner doesn't prematurely fail.
> but I'd think if it were economically productive it would be able to make a self-sustaining feedback loop.
A "self-sustaining" feedback loop still has humans in the loop, deciding to reinvest money in future improvements. If those humans decide to shut the loop down then obviously the benefits will stop being realized.
For the same reason government in general (e.g. the US military) isn't funded by one big GoFundMe. The marginal value any individual actor gains from their investment in public research or services is almost zero. It only works when it's prescriptive on a large scale. See: the tragedy of the commons.
Yeah, that’s an oversimplification and short-sighted. Do you really think even a small fraction of the AI research that led to LLMs and trillions in corporate market capitalization was funded purely by private money? No, it was largely driven by public funding. Even more, not just from the US, but from governments and academic institutions around the world over several decades.
Am I correct to be worried for the sector? The best that can be hoped for is that the sector is simply ignored. The budget for it isn't even very large compared to DoD, but it is very hard to draw a line from R&D to profit. But we've seen with other agencies the violence is the point, and I don't expect them to treat Big Science any differently.