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> To be blunt, those freelancers wouldn't be doing this if they had better options Correct, this is what the article points out. Their options were squashed w

> To be blunt, those freelancers wouldn't be doing this if they had better options Correct, this is what the article points out. Their options were squashed when SV was praising DOGE and the cuts to national research grants based on keywords like “inequalities”. Nobody had the time to check that mathematicians also use the term. We wrecked our research and the vultures got cheap labor to put lipstick on their slop machines.

philwelch 6mo ago
The problem is much older than that. Academia didn’t start overproducing PhD’s and exploiting grad students and adjuncts in 2025.
alex43578 6mo ago
Yes, it’s much better to spend “$400,000 for a Research Project on Whether Ducks Enjoy Classical Music”, just to ensure not a single grant went unfulfilled. We have a $1.78T deficit. The ducks and the mathematicians will need to take a cut at this point.
- rrr_oh_man 6mo ago
  > We have a $1.78T deficit The fatal assumptions many people thinking about government spending from the outside make are that a) money is limited and b) money is redistributed (~to a cause of their choice) after funding for something else gets cut
  - alex43578 6mo ago
    Money isn’t limited, as in we can just print more, but it comes at an inflationary cost: see the last 5 years. MMT doesn’t work. Since money is limited, and we’re spending in a deficit, money shouldn’t be redistributed to another bad cause after something gets cut. Unfortunately, and all too often, it does. One side cuts taxes to spend on blowing up the world’s energy market, another side raises taxes to buy votes among the people who pay 0 in taxes (or fund a study on if ducks like Mozart). They’re both wrong, and people are too blinded by the sports-team nature of politics to recognize this.
- werrett 6mo ago
  Yes, let’s pay down the deficit by cutting funding to the sciences. While the latest war is running at ~1 billion a day (we’re in day 48 btw). https://iran-cost-ticker.com/ https://iran-cost-ticker.com/
  - renewiltord 6mo ago
    [flagged]
  - alex43578 6mo ago
    Cut the duck study and avoid blowing up the world’s energy markets for $1B a day. Nowhere in my comment did I argue for another trip to the sandbox. The US had a balanced budget as little as 30 years ago. This current state of fiscal profligacy isn’t inevitable, except for the fact that both parties realized they could buy votes with your children’s financial wellbeing.
- whatever1 6mo ago
  If the economy still has a pulse today it’s because of math. Literally linear algebra is what drives LLMs. On the question on music and ducks, music seems something that humans universally get, but it is not clear if animals do so. Why we should not research it? What if music is the secret to human consciousness?
christkv 6mo ago
PhD was always a fools errand. There are only so many possible professorships with tenure and the people there never seem to retire because obviously they like being paid that good money and being basically able to do what they want.

philwelch 6mo ago

The problem is much older than that. Academia didn’t start overproducing PhD’s and exploiting grad students and adjuncts in 2025.

alex43578 6mo ago

Yes, it’s much better to spend “$400,000 for a Research Project on Whether Ducks Enjoy Classical Music”, just to ensure not a single grant went unfulfilled. We have a $1.78T deficit. The ducks and the mathematicians will need to take a cut at this point.

rrr_oh_man 6mo ago
> We have a $1.78T deficit The fatal assumptions many people thinking about government spending from the outside make are that a) money is limited and b) money is redistributed (~to a cause of their choice) after funding for something else gets cut
- alex43578 6mo ago
  Money isn’t limited, as in we can just print more, but it comes at an inflationary cost: see the last 5 years. MMT doesn’t work. Since money is limited, and we’re spending in a deficit, money shouldn’t be redistributed to another bad cause after something gets cut. Unfortunately, and all too often, it does. One side cuts taxes to spend on blowing up the world’s energy market, another side raises taxes to buy votes among the people who pay 0 in taxes (or fund a study on if ducks like Mozart). They’re both wrong, and people are too blinded by the sports-team nature of politics to recognize this.
werrett 6mo ago
Yes, let’s pay down the deficit by cutting funding to the sciences. While the latest war is running at ~1 billion a day (we’re in day 48 btw). https://iran-cost-ticker.com/ https://iran-cost-ticker.com/
- renewiltord 6mo ago
  [flagged]
- alex43578 6mo ago
  Cut the duck study and avoid blowing up the world’s energy markets for $1B a day. Nowhere in my comment did I argue for another trip to the sandbox. The US had a balanced budget as little as 30 years ago. This current state of fiscal profligacy isn’t inevitable, except for the fact that both parties realized they could buy votes with your children’s financial wellbeing.
whatever1 6mo ago
If the economy still has a pulse today it’s because of math. Literally linear algebra is what drives LLMs. On the question on music and ducks, music seems something that humans universally get, but it is not clear if animals do so. Why we should not research it? What if music is the secret to human consciousness?

christkv 6mo ago

PhD was always a fools errand. There are only so many possible professorships with tenure and the people there never seem to retire because obviously they like being paid that good money and being basically able to do what they want.