“An estimated 12 people die every day while waiting for a kidney transplant. At least some of those deaths are preventable, and monopoly government contractors shoulder most of the blame.
“Monopolies don’t work and government-funded monopolies are even worse,” says Jennifer Erickson, a former Obama White House staffer who now works as a senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists.”
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” All told, more than 17,000 kidneys (as well as thousands of other organs) are going to waste each year instead of finding their way to dialysis patients who need a replacement. That’s a tremendous opportunity cost. And because there’s no competition between OPOs, if you’re unlucky enough to need an organ and you live in an area where there’s a poor-performing OPO, you might never get one.”
“In the US, basic science research, studying how the world works for the sake of expanding knowledge, is mostly funded by the federal government. The NIH funds the vast majority of biomedical research, and the National Science Foundation (NSF) funds other sciences, like astrophysics, geology, and genetics. The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) also funds some biomedical research, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funds technology development for the military, some of which finds uses in the civilian world, like the internet.
The grant application system worked well a few decades ago, when over half of submitted grants were funded. But today, we have more scientists — especially young ones — and less money, once inflation is taken into account. Getting a grant is harder than ever, scientists I spoke with said. What ends up happening is that principal investigators are forced to spend more of their time writing grant applications — which often take dozens of hours each — than actually doing the science they were trained for. Because funding is so competitive, applicants increasingly have to twist their research proposals to align with whoever will give them money. A lab interested in studying how cells communicate with each other, for example, may spin it as a study of cancer, heart disease, or depression to convince the NIH that its project is worth funding.
Federal agencies generally fund specific projects, and require scientists to provide regular progress updates. Some of the best science happens when experiments lead researchers in unexpected directions, but grantees generally need to stick with the specific aims listed in their application or risk having their funding taken away — even if the first few days of an experiment suggest things won’t go as planned.
This system leaves principal investigators constantly scrambling to plug holes in their patchwork of funding. In her first year as a tenure-track professor, Jennifer Garrison, now a reproductive longevity researcher at the Buck Institute, applied for 45 grants to get her lab off the ground. “I’m so highly trained and specialized,” she told me. “The fact that I spend the majority of my time on administrative paperwork is ridiculous.””
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“The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) has a funding model worth replicating. It is driven by a “people, not projects” philosophy, granting scientists many years worth of money, without tying them down to specific projects. Grantees continue working at their home institution, but they — along with their postdocs — become employees of HHMI, which pays their salary and benefits.
HHMI reportedly provides enough funding to operate a small- to medium-sized lab without requiring any extra grants. The idea is that if investigators are simply given enough money to do their jobs, they can redirect all their wasted grant application time toward actually doing science. It’s no coincidence that over 30 HHMI-funded scientists have won Nobel Prizes in the past 50 years.”
“As a direct result of one-party misrule (there are zero Republicans on the 50-seat City Council), Chicago’s tax base is decreasing, not increasing. The population has declined for nine consecutive years, is shrinking by an annual rate of 1 percent, and is at its lowest point in more than a century.
Illinois, where Democrats control the governorship and a two-thirds majority of the legislature, lost “an estimated $3.6 billion in income tax revenue in 2022 alone, a year the net loss of 87,000 residents subtracted $9.8 billion in adjusted gross income,” syndicated columnist and Illinois native George Will observed last week. “In the past six years, $47.5 billion [adjusted gross income] has left….Illinois leads the nation in net losses of households making 200,000 or more.”
None of these or other grisly Windy City stats—including the murders and the pension liabilities—are obscure. As Illinois Policy Institute Vice President Austin Berg put it Saturday night at a live taping of the Fifth Column podcast, “I believe Chicago is the greatest American city, and the worst-governed American city.””
“Hasina’s exit on an India-bound military helicopter came after crowds broke a curfew and stormed the prime minister’s residence in the capital Dhaka, following weeks of bloody protest.
The movement that ultimately toppled her started with students frustrated at their lack of job prospects and snowballed to include ordinary Bangladeshis facing increasingly tough economic conditions. But the jubilant scenes in the capital Dhaka come at great cost; around 300 people have been killed since the protests started in June, and the country’s future remains uncertain as a military-backed caretaker government steps in.
After a decade and a half in power, Hasina’s legacy is complicated. On the one hand, her government built modern infrastructure and improved development opportunities, especially for the poor. But she also increasingly cracked down on the press, as well as the opposition, and as time went on, many forms of dissent.
Army General Waker-uz-Zaman announced Monday that the military had taken control of the government; parliament is being dissolved, and the government is formulating a plan for fresh elections.
“The country is going through a revolutionary period,” Zaman said in a national television address. “We request you to have faith in the army of the country. Please don’t go back to the path of violence and please return to nonviolent and peaceful ways.”
Though a people-power movement has won a victory in driving Hasina out, the young democracy is entering a period of major uncertainty; indeed, what happens next for Bangladesh is anyone’s guess.”
“the government of Hong Kong published the latest of a series of increasingly draconian national security laws. This one will target espionage, treason, and foreign political interference, and those found guilty of violating some of its tenets could be sentenced to life imprisonment.
This might sound niche or even well-intentioned; doesn’t the US have its own fears about foreign political interference in its elections? But this isn’t really about national security. It is, as Human Rights Watch put it, “Beijing’s latest effort to transform Hong Kong from a free society to an oppressed one where people live in fear.”
That effort has been underway at varying speeds since Hong Kong was returned to Beijing’s control in 1997. It is now all but complete.
Despite complaints from foreign governments, from what remains of Hong Kong civil society, and even from the city’s increasingly beleaguered international business community, Hong Kong’s now opposition-less legislature will almost assuredly fast-track it into law.
For Hong Kong’s 7.4 million citizens, the multi-year fight to maintain some semblance of self-government and political rights is all but over.”