What sort of financial situation are you in that 40$/month is sufficient?

I think you are severely underestimating the level of influence the US government already has. NIST is a US Agency. Much of research in the US is done at the behest of the government. My local university had to comply* with anti-DEI policy to continue receiving federal funds ( it’s primary source of income).

Influencing the foundation of a, quite frankly bad, programming language is not really that impactful, especially considering that the foundation apparently only has 14 employees.

*In case you were wondering the only change they had to make was discontinuing LGBT work anniversaries. So you can probably see why I view this anti-anti-DEI fear mongering with some skepticism. The reality is that racial bias in an organization is very difficult to actually prove, regardless of whether it is pro or anti minority, so anti-DEI constraints simply prohibit explicit biasing.

That’s just my steelman. You are correct that it would require a readjustment at some point, i.e DEI practices can’t exist forever.

“Unqualified people get promoted inspire excellence”. I think at the very top, advanced work isn’t done to get promotions but rather the work itself. I imagine that people don’t take years of schooling and work with the goal of becoming a senior dev. There’s something about the work and producing good work that motivated them.

Note that I don’t work in tech but rather mathematics research. So our incentives are different, but I think the main ideas hold.

The US government needs to buy influence? And they are doing that by giving grants that organizations apply for?

No. It’s called earmarking. It’s super common. I can do it at my local university.

I’m on the fence about this. I think that it’s true the most hiring decisions aren’t merit-based, nor do they necessarily need to be. Most jobs can be sufficiently done by the average-skilled person, it’s only the most skilled positions were you can argue that one person is just simply the best (and sufficiently that it matters). I think DEI practices would be fine in the former case since it’s just another biasing metric like nepotism.

As for highly skilled positions, most people in those positions grow up saturated in the culture from a young age, typically from parents in that field themselves. I think there is arguments to be made that DEI practices now can produce a larger skilled pool in the next generation.

The questions are 1. How much does it help the next generation? 2. Is it worth the cost of lower standards now?

I don’t believe that NSF had any ability to fire people from PSF.

Even if they will take the money back, isn’t that just a interest-free loan? It doesn’t seem like there is any drawback in your hypothetical.

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Any embarrassingly parallel program can max out your CPU. You should probably run some useful problem instead.

Israel was going for a death toll, they said it explicitly themselves.

AI “errors” had nothing to do with the outcome in Gaza. The IDF would have used another sloppier metric for targeting, they flat out don’t care as long as they still get money and US troops defending them.

Your solution is worse.

As is, it is the responsibility of the content provider to make sure that they are distributing only to people who are legally allowed to have it.

With age-verification the user has to prove that they are allowed to access the content, then the site can distribute it to them.

Your approach is to distribute the content by default and only deny it to ChildDevices. In order for this to work at all, you have to mandate that children can only use ChildDevices. This is soooo much worse than simply requiring that adults who want to see certain content have to prove that they can legally access it. If adults have reservations about providing ID for pornography, the loss of such content seems to be much less than denying children Internet access. (Although, I’m sure that Lemmings would disagree for obvious reasons).