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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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That’s interesting that dod scientists are still feds. I work in doe land as a contractor and was always a little jealous of earlier employees because of the pension (I think most doe scientists where transitioned to contractor status in the early 2000s).

I also agree that there are millions of ways we could save money, but that management explicitly prohibits for a combination of legal and protecting managements jobs reasons.

As for DEI stuff, I think it was a little worse (no where near as bad as what you got in universities), for example there was a grant program that would funds to get an intern (if the intern was a women or minority), while our normal internship program required (which doesn’t discriminate based on race or gender) required me to fund any interns I hired. A full time intern can easily cost 30-60k so this a huge inducement. As someone who recently came out of college (and worked hard to get internships), I acutely how it felt to be explicitly excluded from these and other opportunities.

Do Asians and Indians count as minorities? If so then by pure coincidence every intern I've worked with is a minority.

Not counting myself before graduating from college.

Yes they did. It was literally a program for basically everyone who wasn’t a white guy.