China Is Outspending the U.S. to Achieve the ‘Holy Grail’ of Clean Energy: Fusion See: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/13/climate/china-us-fusion-e...
America's lead in biotechnology is slipping, while China has made synthetic biology a national priority. In the iGEM international competition, only one American school finished in top 10, seven were from China. See: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/teens-may-have-come-up-with-new... Or watch video: https://youtu.be/VEj5I4CBbgU
I don’t think people all over Europe/Asia/Africa migrate to China.
If they succeed, it’s purely with their own talent. The US still has that advantage even if it has less of it, unless I am mistaken.
I have spent 5 years learning it part-time and have gotten to a level I can understand 30% of a TV show and 20% of a newspaper.
Unfortunately it's two different languages and both are unlike almost anywhere else. The spoken language is tonal and the consonants don't easily match English. If I have a heavy English accent, I just don't speak Chinese instead of sounding like a foreigner. And having to memorize the tones is brutal.
Meanwhile the written language has almost no correlation with the spoken language. You're just drawing a bunch of symbols on a paper in geometrical arrangements. Which is beautiful but difficult if you're used to being able to spell words based on how they sound.
Unless, of course, you're typing on a computer. In that case you must type the latinised spelling of the characters without tones, then scroll through all the homonyms that match the spelling. Which is still extremely difficult because the consonants don't match Latin languages. And you must still learn the characters to know which one to pick.
Once you get through that, every sentence structure is different as well. Instead of "whose book is this", you say 这本书是谁的 which is like saying "this book is his" but you replace "his/他" with a generic word who/谁 representing that you want to know the person the pronoun was referring to. I can even write 这个什么是谁的 where I have replaced the word "book/书" with "what/什么", meaning I am simultaneously asking what the object is and who it belongs to.
You can effectively do this with any sentence or object. It's a much better designed language since sentences don't magically change the order of everything but it means I cannot think words in English and translate them piecemeal to Chinese. I have to know the whole sentence immediately.
Of course, once you learn this, you have to learn the Chinese idioms. And then everything gets worse because there's so many homonyms everything's a pun, which is why I'm stuck. According to Deepseek, 这个什么是谁的 actually means "what is this thing" and you don't care what the thing is, so it's not really the question. You have to reorder it and ask 这是谁的什么 which glosses as "this is whose what" which is a compound question that's grammatically impossible.
Also, I'd be taking a 50% paycut. Otherwise I'd do it anyways.
The characters are indeed a nuisance, but can be overcome with Anki/SRS. Chinese learners struggle with its tonal nature due to a lack of exposure to speaking/listening because they have no experience with tones. English speakers always decry Chinese tones as insurmountable as if it’s the only tonal language, but half of all languages are tonal, so it’s doable with practice.
In fact, Chinese has become more similar to Indo-European languages over the past century. Chinese now has an odd form of hypotaxis (think: conjugation, inflection, etc.), whereas it previously only had parataxis (combine two characters to generate something new). For example, 药性 (medicinal) is OG Chinese (ish), but now you have words like 科学性 and 简化, which make a lot more sense to an English speaker because they were noun-ified. Modern Chinese does this (literally) everywhere: all you see is 是, 性, 化, 的, 被. This makes the language much more amicable to an Indo-European native speaker.
Perhaps your difficulty is due to modern Chinese’s verbose (almost bureaucratic) syntax? These examples you gave make sense to me if you follow their literal reading. They sound stupid if translated to English, but not necessarily nonsensical.
> Chinese is not too difficult a language, but it’s likely very different from your native language.
It is much easier for me, as a Canadian, to move to basically any European country and learn the language there than to move to China. I would also earn more money than in China. This is true for much of the world.
Chinese is a better language to learn initially but that's like APL being better than ALGOL. Most of the world doesn't want to learn "{⍵[⍋⍵]}X" to sort an array "X". The network effects are key.
I'm still learning Chinese because it is obvious that with the demographic crunch there will be heavy incentives to migrate in the near future. I also have to work with Chinese suppliers and colleagues on a regular basis; it is rapidly growing in %age of workforce.
But I'd have to earn American salaries to move there, because otherwise I would just move to the USA and speak English, a language I already know and can be highly productive in.
China is terrible at diversity. They don't look like it because they don't have a history of foreign colonialism or slavery like the West. It's not based on greed/hate. But look at how they treat indigenous minorities (Uyghurs, Tibetans, Mongols). Banning minority language instruction, banning religious texts, mass surveillance, etc. They have a very hard time even integrating their own rural Han population (hukou system)!
In the CCP's worldview, diversity is not a strength. Historically to them, diversity=fragmentation=weakness (Warlord Era, Century of Humiliation). In contrast, Unity+Homogeneity is real strength. They want everyone moving to the exact same beat. (And maybe they're right, what the fuck do I know about running a population of 1.4B people)
In much of America and Europe especially the large cities you can become a citizen, because that's a legal construct. In China you'll never become Chinese. Look at how Africans were targeted in Guangzhou during the early stages of Covid, regardless of visa status. Evicted from apartments/hotels/restaurants, etc.
They have the hardest permanent residency system in the world. Between 2004 and 2013, they issued only ~7000 green cards total (the US issuing ~1M per year!)
>>> CCP's worldview, diversity is not a strength
These two sentences are contradicting each other.
i can speak the language just enough to get by but once you get into technical terms, i'm once again completely lost. Unless they do a Singapore or Dubai and make business in English, i dont see any chance of them attracting talent
They don't do naturalisation of foreigners, that's true. You can only give that to your children.
Tech people need to reduce complexity to make it computable, that's our job. Our strong points are the weak points too. Again: no blame or shame. Just wanted to point out we are susceptible in these matters.
I would think for most people, you care about whether you can fit economically before you consider something that is unlikely to matter.
Obviously don't go and try to immigrate to China if you are planning to be a political commentator.
But for most people in most places, what will you notice? Are there jobs, how is tax, are the streets clean, are there homeless people, can I see a doctor, is there a lot of paperwork? Will I find friends?
I seem to recall that is a problem with Switzerland too; people can be refused citizenship by bureaucracy at the local level. Yet people still flock there (perhaps because of the money).
This creates real difficulties in daily life. Today, almost all routine activities—online shopping, digital payments, banking, ride-hailing—are conducted through smartphone apps. If you can’t read Chinese, even basic tasks become complicated. In recent years, the number of foreigners living in China has declined compared to a decade ago. While political and economic factors clearly play a role, I suspect that the language barrier has also become a more significant obstacle.
Many Chinese people, especially younger generations, can speak some basic English, since it is a mandatory subject in school. As a result, interpersonal communication is usually manageable, and traveling in China is relatively easy. However, living there long-term is a very different experience from visiting as a tourist.
> online shopping, digital payments, banking, ride-hailing
Surely pre-smartphone, all the offline equivalents of these were also Chinese-language only? Especially in that era, effectively no taxi drivers or shop assistants would've known English, and you didn't have a phone to translate for you.
Whenever I get lunch or dinner north of Toronto with colleagues, the restaurant has no English signage. But because the Chinese restaurants have no waiter and all orders are through a website I can translate the ordering interface on my phone.
> Chinese is too difficult of a language.
> I have spent 5 years learning it part-time and have gotten to a level I can understand 30% of a TV show and 20% of a newspaper.
> Unfortunately it's two different languages and both are unlike almost anywhere else. The spoken language is tonal and the consonants don't easily match English.
Do I wish I spoke English natively? Not really, but these anecdotals are... interesting.
Oh, just like English!
/s sorry I'm only half-joking but written English makes no sense
Or they write words incorrectly because it doesn't even closely match the pronunciation.
I never said English was a superbly designed language, just that it does make sense when you look at the entire history and etymology. But yeah, it's a heavily-kludged mess, though it is pretty good at being accessible for new learners just because it's flexible and has a relatively simple grammar.
But I also spent over a decade learning Mandarin and am still trying to maintain it... the characters are just another level. My son at least can take a stab at reading words he hasn't seen before; having to look up basically every new character is quite a grind.
They put more emphasis on the meaning of the word than reading itself. As opposed to French where you know how to read it instantly–but you don't necessarily understand it.
In English, I realized that there are words I mispronounced/misread my entire life before hearing a native person say it outloud. That's because I only ever encountered the word in its written form.
I was driven to the store, so I drove to the store. The store drove me there.
My passenger was driven to the store so he asked me to drive him to the store. So since the store was driving us to the store, I drove us to the store. We've become good friends since he was driven to the store. I'm glad the store drove us to the store.
Even though I usually prefer to drive cattle.
I have openly stated that it is a strictly less technical language and often draws teams in to vague specifications and much more verbose language to find specificity. I have billions of dollars in progress to back that up.
There is a lot about Chinese and American culture that will surprise you when the rubber meets the road.
So how is the language "strictly less technical and specific"? Can you give specific and technical examples?
Rote Surgery is not a good example compared to say writing a PRD about an unknown feature.
I am in no way saying Chinese people cannot do these things. I am saying in mandarin it is less specific and more circumspect ways of getting there.
I’m guessing you don’t really know what your talking about here though and are knee jerking a response.
I'm not sure why you're getting so defensive; I indeed don't speak Chinese, hence why I'm asking a question.
A claim like "Chinese as a language is less technical and specific than English and slows progress" seems pretty grand; and if Chinese people failed to launch satellites in orbit or do brain surgery you could point to that; but they don't seem to be held back by their language when it comes to making specific, technical achievements, so I'm curious to hear actual, concrete details or examples about what makes Chinese a "less technical and specific" language.
It sounds like your answer is "it simply just is, because it's a courtly language" - which is not a very satisfying answer, intellectually speaking.
English has 26 characters you can put in a buttoned keyboard. You recurse upon these letters to create new words & meanings. Chinese has what, a thousand? And you'd have to create a stroke system first if you don't have hanyu pinyin. Recursing Chinese characters has problems too, the chinese word for 'good', when split to it's sub-characters represent different meanings.
There were also some Chinese historians that specifically pointed out the chinese language was part of the cause of their worst slices of history despite the chinese having invented gunpowder and whatnot first. They also noted chinese was confined to the elite, who made the language even more complex (in contrast to other civilizations), during certain dynastic periods. Today, the chinese government are trying to simplify the language.
I get that there is pride in people's native languages, but they'll repeat the same mistakes if they don't recognize the weaknesses. It's a bitter pill to swallow.
Was that Chinese text actually being ambiguous, or was that translations you were given being nonsensical/having so much context errors? The latter is kind of an expected behavior for translated technical texts, and that has nothing to do with whether Chinese are illogical bunches(why even bother contacting if that were ever the case...)
Chinese textbooks for University quantum physics are written in Chinese. They don't like, switch to English after high school or something. And they do in fact do brain surgeries and fly manned rockets. The language is obviously fine as it is.
The likely core of the problem you had encountered is that, languages are algorithms of thoughts, contrary to whatever Chomsky guy might have told you, and a language is only coherent within itself, and you weren't aware of that. A piece of Chinese text taken out of context and words displaced with that English used in similar manners, don't necessarily make sense. Rest assured you'd be far from alone with conflating lack of coherency of someone not from US trying to speak English with their lack of IQ, that's a common sight, but that doesn't mean a language you don't speak is inferior to yours.
Chinese is different, more contextual and metaphorical, requiring more 'fuzzy' linguistics to say the same thing.
Thats its... thats all. And I challenge anyone who works across china and US like I do to not agree. Beyond that you're just going off on your own made up missions of stupidity. Really re-read your train of thought and think about how wandering nonsense it becomes with assumed things I didn't say.
Language specificity and cultural encoding in those languages can have a pretty major impact on its clarity, especially in critical situation. Speaking a secondary language instead can avoid that sort of thing simply because being a non-native speaker, you'll be a good deal more blunt in that language.
English is the language of aviation because in 1951 the countries with the most living pilots and aircraft spoke English. It is not because of any trait particular to English.
There are few recordings of aircraft emergencies over Japan on YouTube. Two obvious things in those recordings are that local pilots drop pretense of speaking Engurish in almost any non-normal conditions, and that local ATCs are dangerously useless outside of normal conditions. There's nothing visibly helpful from using English in there.
My favourite example is Arabic, which is both an old and hard to extend language.
In Arabic you would have a hard time to express the concept of „a foreigner who is citizen but resides out of state“.
Not that we often speak about this concept in English, but the word used to refer to „citizens“ carries the connotation of „nation“ and the alternative word used for „inhabitants“ carries the connotation of being on site.
Speaking of a Yemeni citizen and than meeting an Asian person, would surprise people even if they new that the person they were meeting was named „Ho“.
Loan words do not easily slide into this. New words are less easily made up than e.g. in German, where you can just concatenate.
Lots of words have been around for a long time, since quranic Arabic influences the language still, and as a result have layers of meaning.
So identical to French then!
Nobody has any delusional ideas about it- xenophobia is a luxury the country cannot afford.
At this point in time, I don't think people are lining up to get K visa to go live in China. But if the current trajectory continues in the US, who knows how things will be in 5 years?
[1] https://www.china-briefing.com/news/chinas-entry-exit-k-visa...
Most replies at this point will shift the goal posts stating 'due process', again keeping on topic, not available in China either.
Say what you want about ICE, but the reason they wear masks is that the US citizenry still holds power (explicitly with firearms, implicitly with voting, and legally via the judicial system).
In China, they don't have to wear masks.
(And then a U-turn where anyone that doesn't wear a mask [even for participating volleyball matches or flute concerts] is an enemy of the state. And if you are a disabled elderly and lockdown yourself, refusing the state-mandated tests, you are an enemy of the state. And they knock down your apartment doors to gas your cats and dogs.)
I really hope the red necks tearing down the procedural system of justice, as well as the left network hosts that got bedazzeled just after a trip to china know what they're asking for. Beware the wishes you make.
As compared to that Irish guy who has been in the US concentration camp for 5 months now, the court ordered his release which ICE just ignored and they won't deport him either. Yeah, definitely sounds much better than what China is doing.
Unless they installed gas rooms and work until death requirements recently?
Concentration camps have a long history (you can start with the Wikipedia article on the topic). Nazi concentration camps in 30s and 40s, and the holocaust that they are linked to, happened over a relatively short time period in that history that continued even after. So Godwin's law indeed, brought about by yourself.
What the US does is bad, but somehow Americans think that means everywhere else is better.
Illegal immigration really isn’t a thing in China beyond a few North Koreans in Dongbei and a few Laotians in Yunnan. So they just won’t assume you are an illegal immigrant.
That does not seem to be all that related to the original post I was answering to. An average person / citizen / visitor has way less to worry about around (trained) Chinese police than they have to worry about around an (gangster) American ICE agent.
The US has a global reputational advantage that will take decades to fall behind China, regardless of what any US administration does.
Nobody sane is going to believe rhetoric claiming that the US is somehow worse than a country that keeps 1.5 million people in concentration camps, and where people work 70 hours per week, no matter how many times Reddit tells them so.
I have about a dozen friends spread across 8 different mid-to-high level universities around the country in biomed. Europe and Canada are definitely a preference but China is entering conversation and has been for the last few years.
The alternative is to abandon an entire career or field of interest because the funding is held up by irrational national political policy.
As a former academic at a top US university, no, the US no longer has that strong reputation. 10 years ago, if you were someone, you wanted to come to the US. The best students in the world came and stayed.
Things are radically different now. Much of the best talent no longer comes and when they do come they leave. It's night and day.
It's not a binary choice. It's not the US or China. It's the US or Canada/EU/etc. And if you're from China, you used to stay, now you leave.
This isn't reddit. I saw this first hand.
This discussion thread is very specifically about the US vs China, however.
I find that hard to believe. Applications to top U.S. colleges and graduate schools are at an all-time high and acceptance rates keep falling.
No one that has an Ivy League offer or even a state school like UCLA or Michigan would go to Canada or Europe, except perhaps for Oxford and Cambridge.
Whatever makes you sleep at night.
> no matter how many times Reddit tells them so.
Oh god, are we still stuck in that "Reddit is a niche US nerd cave" mindset? In most countries where the youth speaks good English you'll see more under 30s on Reddit than on Facebook or Twitter.
On both counts, you're too stuck in your ways. Times have changed, gotta keep up.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/facebook-...
Reddit has far fewer users in most countries outside the US than facebook.
Also, I don’t like the current US administration, but you cannot make the claim somehow China is better, especially to minorities.
> Also, I don’t like the current US administration, but you cannot make the claim somehow China is better, especially to minorities.
Luckily I didn't make such a claim, instead just rejecting the premise that "The US has a global reputational advantage that will take decades to fall behind China, regardless of what any US administration does.". That global reputational advantage has been cratering with no signs of stopping, and is indeed on pace to run out long before "decades".
I don't think this is the case at all.
Do you want to go be an immigrant to a country where the media shows masked agents rounding up suspected immigrants to disappear them in vans?
Do you want to depend on research grants in a country where scientific institutions are being dismantled? Where the administration openly opposes established science? (Medicine, carbon, etc).
Consider for example having the capacities to produce your own energy (food and electricity/heat) - these are core expenditures for most people besides a place to live. All these are direct consequences of productive land control (you can even live on the land you grow food and have solar panels on).
So if one owns and develops an environment to supply their fundamental needs autonomously and near-automatically - that would seem to be a deep value store that is about as long term as the environment can hold up.
Edit P.S. we've observed what industry has accomplished with vertical integration... why not apply it to our inputs, to increase autonomy of abundance in outputs?
Only if you ignore everything the US has done to the rest of the world.
The car that's actually been super-popular outside its own national borders for a long time now is the Toyota, not anything from the US. BYD is indeed changing this.
To put it bluntly, China quite literally doesn't need (nor wants) the average software dev on HN. The immigrants they would likely want are those with expertise in much harder technical disciplines (semiconductor R&D etc.)
China is working multiple technologies hard.
Taiwan doesn't have the people to match that breadth.
India isn't matching that investment.
But the flip side of that is that China’s talent pool is a lot smaller, in practice, than 1.4 billion. Because vast swaths of the country are still basically the third world. Tellingly, China does not participate in the international PISA assessment across the whole country: https://www.milkenreview.org/articles/are-chinas-students-re.... It released scores for four wealthy provinces back in 2018. They were very high, but there’s obviously a reason China doesn’t test and publish scores for the whole country.
Income disparities may have some impact on teacher quality, but the difference is often less significant than people assume. Broad access to education tends to matter more than whether a particular middle-school teacher is exceptional. In fact, students in some inland provinces frequently achieve very high scores on the national college entrance examination, driven in part by strong incentives to gain admission to top universities and pursue opportunities in more economically developed regions.
Among younger generations, illiteracy is virtually nonexistent. With nine years of compulsory education mandated nationwide, basic literacy rates are effectively at 100 percent.
So quantitatively, China’s pool is still very strong.
Having the people is important, the IS needed immigrants to have people, china already has enough people, it just needs to bring them up to par, which will only taoe a generation or two, and china is patient
But PRC's actual talent pool is their 20 year back log of 10-15m per year births (100m+) that hasn't gone through tertiary, i.e. about another 40m+ STEM assuming they don't increase tertiary enrollment (currently 60%) or tertiary (40%). The worse case scenario for PRC is they will have ~OCED combined in STEM (not including other tiers of technical talent), or 3x+ more than US, assuming US pre Trump immigration patterns.
E: sentence meant 60% tertiary enrollment of which 40% is STEM... aka they're "only" throwing 1/4 of cohort into STEM with 2 denominators to raise.
I wouldn't go that far, Chinese espionage is a very real thing, with industry secrets being some of the top targets.
Learning mandarin is the major blocker imo, more people would move if the language was easier.
But then, learning to read and write requires enormous additional effort. When I learned in Beijing, I'd spend a couple hours a day working on grammar/speaking/listening - and then like 6 hours a day of rote practice to get familiar with characters.
I moved to Singapore although it had nothing to do with my language skills.
All over? No. But I know several software engineers who went to China to work in tech and they can't stop raving about how good they have it there - one came back to work for a US company(remotely from his EU country) and is now desperate to find some more work in China again, he liked it that much. The language barrier is a problem sure, but then again I also know software engineers who went to work in Germany and after years they don't speak a lick of German. It's not an insurmountable problem.
You can ask Google for metrics:
- China produces about over 1.3 to 1.6 million new engineering graduates per year.
- The USA produces about 130,000–200,000, or about 1/10 of China, but has a population of about 1/4.
- Europe is hard to measure, but USA plus Europe combined is almost certainly less than China by a significant margin.
Contradicted by the research. You're just repeating misinformation. It doesn't matter if there's also a culture of striving because both things can be true at the same time.
They are just pacifically planning on invading Taiwan at the moment.
They also install secret police stations in foreign countries to chase and pressure Chinese citizens or people of Chinese decent into doing their bidding.
Oh hell yes they do. Chinese overfishing is wreaking havoc across the planet [1], not just near Asia, but the reach of Chinese fishing fleets goes as far as Africa and South America. In the case of Africa, this has been one of the contributing causes for people to flee to Europe.
Then you got the stealing. America certainly isn't innocent either when it comes to IP theft, but China takes that on yet another level.
And finally, you got artificial subsidies. Solar, batteries, cars - the CCP is engaged in insane pricing wars backed by practically infinite funds. They already managed to "outcompete" most solar production and are on their best way to screw up our automotive industries as well.
> They do want to expand their productive capacity by financing projects in foreign countries, but in a business-as-usual way not in a I-am-the-boss way.
Nope. They are just as vile loan sharks as the IMF, some say they go even further [2].
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/chinas-rampant-illegal-fishing-enda...
[2] https://www.news24.com/business/china-puts-aggressive-terms-...
While that is bad, it still is only a case of your typical piece of Balkan corruption - and actually being a Croatian citizen, I can only say one thing to these particular arseholes: jebo vam pas mater - and nowhere near comparable to what China is doing.
[1] https://asia.nikkei.com/politics/international-relations/ill...
> America certainly isn't innocent either when it comes to IP theft, but China takes that on yet another level
there you go with your bias. https://reason.com/2024/06/02/the-mirage-of-chinas-i-p-theft...
America itself was built on IP theft by the way. https://apnews.com/general-news-b40414d22f2248428ce11ff36b88...
>Nope. They are just as vile loan sharks as the IMF, some say they go even further [2].
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S246822762...
Chinese have actually been investing into infrastructure and helping build Africa out. What are you smoking? Do you need a reminder who ran Transatlantic Slave Trade and what IMF represents? There are no good guys in the lending world. Are you assigning a moral value to loans and repayments now? If someone gives you money they expect interest. Doesn't matter if they're Chinese or American.
P.S. judging from your other comments, you're European, not American, and so at this point of Trump presidency (and listening to Carney's speech), you should realize that "The West" isn't about moral hegemony. This isn't America good, China bad. It's a calculus of power. Trump just laid that bare by showing that might makes right, which is why he's renegotiating our already dominant position, and showing how this hegemony and loan structure was built. The liberal veneer was there as a pretty varnish. The fact that you're still out here pretending like we're the good guys is strange to me, unless you're one of those NAFO guys that are kind of going extinct because US is screwing itself over by hurting its allies.
----------------
Scientists go where science is funded. A large proportion of U.S. scientists are also immigrants, who will tend to go where immigrants are welcomed.
BBB slashed funding for cutting edge medical research which would not only save, or at least prolong lives, but also generate revenue for this country -- when we export our IP, or when people come here for some of the most advanced medical procedures. To say nothing of immigration policies which actively repel some of the best and brightest and may be leading us to an actual population decline.
Sure we weren't perfect by an stretch before, but it feels like we're getting drowned in a toilet at the moment.
I have difficulty believing a medical professional would say that.
Whereas the simpler and more obvious explanation is that the US President shares the general outlook and values of America’s enemies and thus naturally acts in their interests without persuasion needed.
Or maybe the rots are within? It's tempting to trivially assume it's outside. I'd say they are mostly come from within and beyond Trump admin.
The avarice and narcissism of our leader, along with all the yes-people, grifters and people devoid of ethics and morals he has assembled around him have led to the current situation. Also, it appears a lot of people in the administration are not very smart, but think they are. We can never underestimate the damage that can be done by a stupid person that thinks they are smart. In this case, these people have incredible amounts of power.
I get the angle, and I'm not even ruling out that some of the BS is sabotage, but in the big picture it's too easy for me to believe the current admin really is that stupid.
China or Saudi Arabia can wave their money around, but at least some people will be repulsed by the obligation to keep their mouths shut and praise the Dear Leader.
Their cultural insularity does not help either. You can live in China, but you will never be accepted as Chinese. The US was quite unique (together with Canada, Australia etc.) that it was able and willing to accept you as an American even with a funny accent, as long as you wanted to be one.
Of course, both of these are in the crosshairs for “revision”.
Also, the green card process very much depends on your nationality.
I don't think you would find a Lithuanian or Finnish language test quite so easy.
Are you also implying that in the US anyone is free to speak negatively of “dear leader”?
There are a multitude of current examples to the contrary.
Whether you're born in Moscow and named Sergey Mikhailovich Brin, or born in Pretoria and named Elon Reeve Musk, or born in Hyderabad and named Satya Narayana Nadella, born in Frankfurt and named Peter Andreas Thiel - America has a place for you. Maybe even your own government department.
In America a man can find acceptance regardless of the circumstances of his birth, and irrespective of race, creed and colour, so long as he has a billion dollars.
And yeah, used to. Past tense.
Not any more with der fuhrer.
I see negative opinions of government officials constantly.
It's basically all I see whenever I have the misfortune of turning on the TV.
The only difference between channels is which government official is criticized.
Well, based on the current admin and supporters, only part of the US was unique
Big cities and metropolitan areas are very progressive and welcoming to well educated foreigners, and the countryside is filled with racist idiots who live in fear of something they only know from the television
I still don’t quite understand why. The contact hypothesis makes some sense but can that explain the whole urban rural divergence?
Rural populations will even vote hard against their own interests in other areas over culture war stuff.
Dump a few hundred foreigners in a town of 5000 and that’s very noticeable and some people will find it jarring. Dump ten thousand foreigners in a metro of three million and nobody will notice.
The point about conformism and exile cost is good too. Cities present endless options for social circles and employment. Little towns not so much.
Somewhat related recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46989124
One Nation are flat racist rather than xenophobe, I think.
And it's being pushed by our billionaires for some reason. You'd think Gina would want cheap immigrant workers on her mines
Ok It probably matters during elections and the policies that lead up to them (must appease the rural vote with mostly symbolic and emotionally wretching anti-immigrant rhetoric) but cities need skilled (and unskilled) labour and when they get what they need they stand to generate a lot of money (re taxes to the policy makers from earlier).
Well, using Texas as an example, it's those people 50km away that win elections. Of course, gerrymandering helps, but even with large metro areas leaning left, there's enough of those 50km away that swings that lean to the right.
Ignore the people in the rural areas as your own peril
When the part of the country that was less unique took power, they immediately did what everyone else that was not unique did and became unwelcoming of foreigners.
I guess to you other countries that the US is becoming more like would also not be of a hive mind by having people that are welcoming of foreigners. Where's your hive mind comment about that part of the original comment?
Yeah, it used to be the that the US only committed ethnic cleansing against people that were here first, not foreigners, and was so welcoming to foreigners that it would expend resources to have them shipped here as property.
Very select parts of the US. Would've thought that the last 9 years taught you that for huge swathes of it, this was never true.
Acadia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acadia
Wanted to save other people time searching it up too
I mean we are literally putting people in concentration camps right now. Kinda hard to take the moral high ground at the moment. Scientists are fleeing the United States for their safety, just like they did from 1930s Germany.
Because people understand that people don't get to choose their government or culture and that everyone deserves better healthcare. Every child who is at risk from the rise of anti-vax 100% deserves better vaccines and ought to bear 0% responsibility for what the adults do.
It is when researchers can't make enough money to eat and live, which is an actual reality in the US right now.
Researchers at top institutions often make less than Uber drivers.
There are other countries where you can live on less and the government isn't dipping their hands into your pockets every 5 seconds.
this is a very shortsighted view. america's only real competitor technologically right now is china, because america has typically attracted the top talent from everywhere else.
if america is no longer capable of attracting top talent from everywhere else in the world, and other countries can start attracting american talent, it won't be long before america has a whole lot of real competitors.
And that was despite putting an emphasis on education, and the 1930s and 1940s having a lot of science funding. Remove the people and the flywheel stops
The American education system has major and important challenges, such as how to educate the large share of kids whose parents are economic migrants from non-English speaking countries. But those challenges aren’t relevant to the question of whether the U.S. can produce sufficient highly educated people domestically. China, meanwhile, doesn’t even participate in PISA outside four wealthy provinces.
I'm pretty sure that poverty is the issue here. Kids who don't get enough to eat, don't get enough time (or perhaps too much time in some sad cases) with their parents, kids who don't have many opportunities tend to do worse at standardised testing.
This is entirely fixable, but it's not (unfortunately) just a matter of funding schools more.
Look at NAEP scores: https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/some-racial... (Table 1). Asians average 312 in 8th grade math, compared to 293 for whites and 269 for Hispanics. The gap between asians and whites is almost the same size as the gap between whites and hispanics. But the poverty metrics for asians and whites is the same: 8% below the federal poverty line. (While asians are richer than whites on average, the subset of both groups who have kids is more similar. There’s a lot of high poverty asian families in places like NYC.)
Why is there such a big gap in test scores between whites and asians when economically the two groups are similar? There must be some additional sociological factor at play behind poverty in and of itself. One might hypothesize that selective immigration plays a role. The majority of the U.S. asian population is foreign born, and is in the U.S. as a result of skilled immigration. That might have an effect on their kids test scores that’s not accounted for by household income alone. That’s the kind of additional sociological factor that countries like Japan and Korea don’t have.
OK, So I've just actually read your fordham institute link, and you realise that it doesn't argue for this point, instead arguing that it's two parent households and expectations around college that create the gap (which is pretty small, to be fair). This is basically the point that I'm trying to make here, in that parental and broader cultural expectations drive these differences, not selective immigration.
Additionally, for your point to be true, you'd need to observe these kinds of effects for 3-4th generation Asian immigrants, which both seems pretty unlikely to me and difficult to collect data around (as there probably aren't enough Asian americans in this group).
I really think that cultural expectations and poverty provide a more parsimonious account of this data, tbh.
> The majority of the U.S. asian population is foreign born, and is in the U.S. as a result of skilled immigration.
On this point specifically, the percentage for ESL (which normally correlates with 1st generation immigrants) is about 12, which means 88% of the Asians in your sample speak English natively. Again, this article really doesn't support your point.
Culture is a thing, as I'm sure you know (we discussed it some time ago here). Like, in general, (many) Irish people value education above and beyond what would be expected of similar socio-economic groups, which lead to their descendants doing better than might naively be expected. The Asian thing is almost certainly similar, given all the memes that exist around demanding Asian parents. Jewish people have similar cultural beliefs.
However, you can't really aggregate up to an White level, as these factors will vary massively. Same with Asians, you'd need to control for a lot of factors.
Fundamentally though, it's better for society if everyone gets a chance to develop their potential, and my argument is that this doesn't happen to the same extent in the US as it might elsewhere, because of large gaps in income inequality and social forcing functions (if everyone you know drops out of school early, or doesn't take it seriously then most people will too).
> “Poverty” might be the cause, but it’s not just poverty by itself. Every country has rich people and poor people. The U.S., however, has that normal spectrum, plus subpopulations that have unique circumstances that aren't accounted for just by income level.
I get that you're more familar with US society, but this is a thing basically everywhere. Like, African descendants in the UK are probably one of the most successful immigrant populations, rather than less succesful than the average in the US. I honestly think that the US "unique circumstances" are cope for the lack of decent income mobility and social safety nets that prevent a larger proportion of people from realising their potential.
For example, Asian Americans outscore Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese students in PISA, including math. That's not a cultural difference. That's because Asian Americans aren't a random sample of Asians. The vast majority are within one generation of a very tough selection filter that screens for high skill, high intelligence, and high motivation. If the point is comparing schools, it doesn't make sense to include Asian Americans in the average.
> I get that you're more familar with US society, but this is a thing basically everywhere.
It's not a thing in the east Asian countries that top the educational charts, like Japan and Korea. Poor Japanese and Koreans still belong to the majority ethnic group, speak the national language at home, etc.
Say you transplanted Japanese or Korean schools into one of the many majority-Hispanic school districts in the U.S. where most of the kids are children of low-skill, non-English-speaking immigrants (often illegal immigrants). Would those Japanese or Korean schools have higher test scores than the American ones? I suspect they'd actually be worse, because they'd be totally unequipped to deal with a large student population from a non-native language background.
My wife's aunt's kids go to a school in a more rural part of Oregon. Many of the kids are children of agricultural workers. Many of these kids don't even speak Spanish at home. They speak one of dozens of different indigenous Latin American languages. Japanese and Korean schools educate the children of poor agricultural workers too, but those kids still speak Japanese and Korean at home! If the goal is to measure school quality, is it really fair to just put those kids into the average and fault American schools for doing worse than Japanese or Korean schools?
> I honestly think that the US "unique circumstances" are cope for the lack of decent income mobility and social safety nets that prevent a larger proportion of people from realising their potential.
Even if that were true, that would be more a point about the fairness of U.S. society rather than the quality of the educational system. I don't think it makes sense to conflate those two questions in a discussion of the U.S.'s competitiveness against China.
Moreover, income mobility in the U.S. doesn't break down by sub-population the way you might think. For example, while Hispanics have lower incomes because most are immigrants or children of immigrants, they have higher income mobility: https://economics.princeton.edu/working-papers/intergenerati.... Children of Guatemalan immigrants in the U.S. have higher income mobility than children of native-born Americans. Household incomes for Hispanics converges on the household income for whites within a few generations: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353
So focusing on PISA scores for "whites" isn't really about race or culture. It's just a proxy for "people whose families have been in the U.S. long enough to dispel the effect of immigration filters." If you were conducting the same analysis 100 years ago, you might try to exclude Italians or Irish from the analysis. Again, the point is to compare schools, not all the other sociological factors that are involved when dealing with immigrant populations.
Translation: rich kids have better access to top education in America. Got it.
For example, 71% of hispanics speak Spanish at home. That reflects a group that’s comprised mostly of immigrants and their children. That poses additional challenges to education, beyond the economic differences. Poor whites in the U.S. and poor Koreans in Korea may have educational challenges from being poor. But that poverty isn’t layered with being raised in a household with immigrant parents who are in an unfamiliar country and probably don’t speak English fluently. That’s an additional layer of challenges that needs to be accounted for in comparing across countries.
National competitiveness and distributional equity don’t go hand in hand. China has made tremendous achievements by focusing investment on key provinces instead of trying to bring everyone up together.
Also - less financialization. In US, a statistician goes to work for any 3-letter agency or high finance. In a less financialized economy they might devote themselves to crystallography instead.
The whole point of no child left behind was to actually measure student performance instead of relying on feelings: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/no-child-left-behind-wo...
If you try to disaggregate the effects of e.g. immigration, you can see that American education is actually good: https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/18bzkle/2022_pi....
White students in the U.S. do comparably to students in Korea in the international PISA test, and better than students from western europe (excluding the immigrants in those countries).
You have to compare like with like. A huge fraction of American kids grow up to parents who are not native speakers of English. That’s not true in Japan or Korea.
That is consistent with other international measurements: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=1. For example, the U.S. is one of the top performers in the world in the 4th grade literacy--behind Hong Kong but ahead of Macau. In 4th grade math, the U.S. isn't as good, well behind Hong Kong, Singapore, and Japan. But still comfortably ahead of Germany, Italy, Spain, and France.
That’s why sober and clear-eyed countries like Germany conventionally sort students into tracks starting around age 10.
It really isn't. Every student should have access to quality education that meets them at their level and challenges them. Money spent doing that is not wasted on the vast majority of students. We do not need to have trash tier schools for the majority of the population so that a select few can get better ones.
Identifying where students are at and what their needs are is a good idea that would enable kids to be moved to classes where teachers can work with them at their level. It doesn't necessitate refusing a quality education to anyone. Even students with special educational needs and disabilities deserve a good education.
When students are placed in classrooms according to their level it means that no teacher is pulled away from gifted kids, because those gifted kids have their own teacher working with them. It doesn't mean that children who aren't gifted can't get a high quality education. Putting kids in a class too far above or below their level is not delivering a quality education to them.
Giving every child an environment where they can learn to the best of their ability is expensive, but it's nowhere near as costly as not doing it. Uneducated illiterate children become uneducated illiterate adults and voters. It's not a coincidence that most prison inmates are functionally illiterate. Having a good education enables more children to have a successful future.
There’s a real question of how many resources and what kind of ROI you’d get from trying to educate that bottom 20% to the same level.
I saw this play out when I was in school: profoundly intellectually disabled students getting 1:1 or even 2:1 teaching, trying to get an 18 year old to be able to read 3 letter words, while AP classes were bloated to 30+ students.
The US is the richest nation on Earth. It can easily afford to educate its people. If you really think we'd need to find new sources of tax dollars to fund that, I have a whole lot of suggestions for where to start and I'd bet that you can easily think of a few low hanging fruit yourself.
> There’s a real question of how many resources and what kind of ROI you’d get from trying to educate that bottom 20% to the same level.
The ROI is massive. As I've said elsewhere, uneducated children become uneducated adults. Adults who vote. Adults who, if they lack the education needed to live successful lives, end up costing society in many ways over far more years than they spend in school.
I don't know about you, but I want to live and work with people who are educated and literate. If I were looking to move to another country for work, I'd want to move somewhere where the people were educated and literate. Especially if those people were going to be my boss, or my neighbor, or handling my food, or in charge of my visa application. Having a well educated population is pure win. The cost of ignorance and a lack of the kinds of skills a good school teaches is staggering.
The question is whether anyone actually expects the outcomes to change if we throw even more money at the problem, or if it'll just get gobbled up by teacher's unions, administration, and silly things like non-phonic instruction or DEI programs.
Isn't it funny how nobody ever worries about how much that's going to cost, no matter how unnecessary there's never any effort to make sure that our warmongering is funded before burdening taxpayers with it. Seems like a ripe target for some tax savings.
Longer/better educator training both increases skills/outcomes and is a gate for the poorly-suited. Higher pay makes the training seem worthwhile and increases stickiness/tenure.
Values reproduce as the people who hold them reproduce, plus as others adopt those values, minus as those who hold those values drop them.
But the US was supposed to be a country where values mattered more than tribe. "We hold these truths to be self evident", and all that, and if you accepted the values, you belonged. That was an imperfect ideal, but it was the ideal until rather recently. I'm not sure to what degree it still is.
And we are of course allowed to change that, if that is what the people want, but a minority should not make that decision on behalf of the whole.
DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic pay quite well for research and have better "labs" than most places on Earth. I don't believe they're struggling to hire either.
This article is using a relatively outdated definition, functionally speaking, of "research institute".
Traditional research institutions, especially academia, have been declining for decades and current funding problems are just another one of many problems thrown into the mix.
I remember well a world where most serious research happened in universities and was publicly funded. I personally think that was a better world, but that is not the world we live in today and I don't see us going back. Even China's most impressive research is not coming from publicly controlled research institutes or universities but from VCs and large corporations.
To be fair, the time of open public science was a relatively brief in it's long history.
In software San Francisco is still the top for AI research: even when Peter Steinberger didn't know what he will do with OpenClaw, it was clear to him that the only place to move to was USA.
Terrence Tao was a good example of what happens when an exceptionally smart person stops getting funded by an American University: not moving to another country, but got VC money and created a new company.
USA politics is looked at so closely, because it matters and changes and still more democratic than most countries in the world even though democracy is a mess (as it's supposed to be).
You make it sound like Europe was not a leader in any area of science until this one thing which they led in for a few years.
> Terrence Tao was a good example of what happens when an exceptionally smart person stops getting funded by an American University: not moving to another country, but got VC money and created a new company
No, he's an example of what can happen when a Fields medalist gets funding cut. 99% of exceptionally smart university mathematicians and scientists will not be able to get VC money.
With the US both cutting research funding and becoming unfriendly to foreign students many future Tao's that would have chosen a US school for grad school will likely look elsewhere.
> The U.S. used to be sort of the default, the no brainer, option. If you got an offer from a top U.S. university, this was like almost the best thing that could happen to you as an academic ... If it's just a less welcoming, atmosphere for science in general here, the best and brightest may not automatically come to the US as they have for decades.
Hard disagree. They are on a road to totalitarianism. Unless there's a quite violent change of course, it's just going to get much worse.
Have you not seen the president and his people go after: Political opponents, Attorneys, Leaders and workers in the government who dare to disagree, Immigrants and tourists with the wrong opinions, Journalists (because they power and can expose some of the lies and corruption).
Have you not seen the Trump family and friends becoming very rich, and giving out contracts to their friends?
Have you not seen the government being weaponist against the maga "enemies" ?
This is what fascism looks like.
And again, I'm not really seeing Europe staying democratic for long after the fall of the USA
Sorry, but that is just extremely naive. Just look at how this usually works. Or look at what the orange fuckhead tried the last time. Now, repeat, but with much more power and influence in all the right places, from government to big tech.
I have no idea, but many keep supporting him through all of the above. So what would make them stop?
I hope you're right, but it's not looking good so far :/
Incarceration without process is not normal in the US or in any functioning democracy.
Also in the USA you just wait 4 (or 8) years and you have a new president. In many other countries you don't have that luxury.
What was the last thing that a major US Lab published? It's all trade secrets.
Chinese labs are the only ones publishing results as they happen.
The US is in the position it was for semiconductor manufacturing, first it was labs and open science. Then by the 80s fabs started costing millions and universities stopped being able to contribute and nothing got published.
Now it's getting to trillions and if Intel goes under there is no one in the US who knows how to make any semiconductor generation newer than 2010.
>Chinese labs are the only ones publishing results as they happen.
Google published the transformer architecture. Facebook published llama.
In 2017. Then sat on it for five years.
The first GLP-1 was exenatide, invented in America and released in collaboration with Eli Lilly.
In addition tirzepatide and retatrutide are not “just” GLP-1s. You frankly do not know what you are talking about.
That is the intent of these government policies: Shift power and resources to powerful, wealthy private individuals (and their companies). Is Tao doing research?
He’s moving from London after all, arguably the global AI research hub.
(Also likely SA told him the offer was contingent on him relocating)
But capital structures and politicians are still too close to old European companies from the second world war and don't allow venture capital to florish.
It's easier to earn money by winning a fake EU tender and giving back half of the money to a politician than doing something innovative.
I don't think USA is a bad place, probably the best for your career but I don't see myself enjoying living there too much, although maybe I am generalizing because I only visited New York and SF.
What company did Tao fund with VC money?
Dodging work regulations is also not really "attracting talent". SF is an insane bubble and views itself as a much more intelletually important than it actually is.
We don't know how much OpenAI offered him, but I would bet big that it was enough to get most people to relocate across country lines. [To level-set: we know Meta was offering $100m pay packages to researchers who had not already released something like OpenClaw.]
There is a tremendous glut of talented biomedical researchers. We have been overproducing them for decades. Even before the cuts, it was incredibly hard to go from a PhD to a tenured professorship. 5-15% would achieve that, depending how you measured.
The cuts have made things worse, but European/RoW funding is even stingier. It's not like there's a firehose of funding drawing away researchers. There may be a few high-profile departures, but the US is still the least-bad place to find research money.
We need to produce fewer PhDs and provide better support for those we do produce.
Secondly, it's about more than funding. The US is also no longer safe for a great many of the scientists that would normally choose come to the US to work. And even for those that aren't too worried about ICE, scientists tend to be very liberal and value freedom and democracy a great deal. The US has suddenly become a very undesirable place to live if you value these things.
Third, scientific freedom is under attack in the US. And there is nothing scientists value more than the freedom to pursue their research.
My take is that most Americans can't imagine a world where they are not number one. But that is a very naive idea.
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/innovation-science-economic-develop...
Research money in Canada is harder to come by; a basic research grant is roughly ~5x-10x lower than a comparable American grant (students are cheaper here, so its not completely proportional, but equipment, travel, etc doesn't scale).
The example for money for poaching international researchers also comes with the asterisk that while they found ~$2B for this, they also are cutting the base funding of the federal granting agencies by a few percent at the same time, atop of that funding being anemic for decades at this point. A big "fuck you" to the Canadian research community in my opinion.
This illustrates exactly my point. Canada is planning on spending up to CAD$1.7B over 12 years. That is equivalent to USD$100M per year, or 0.3% of the NIH 2026 budget. Maybe if Europe does something similar they can get to 2%!
> The US is also no longer safe
I agree that Trump's regime has made the US a less welcoming place for foreign scientists, and that budget cuts mean less research will be done. What I disagree with is the idea that "brain drain" is a significant threat to US science. We simply have such an incredible oversupply of biomed PhDs that we should welcome the prospect of other countries absorbing the supply.
As others have pointed out, presumably the outcome is that higher value scientists are favored, and higher impact research is demanded. When industry demands certain research, the funding appears because private entities will fund those positions and those grants. The widespread funding of all avenues of science is a great feature of American intellectual culture and hopefully it doesn't vanish. But it was a remarkably uneconomical arrangement and a total aberration of history, so I wouldn't hold my breath about it sticking around through the tides of history, it was more of a fluke, and many in academia wishing to regenerate that fluke are a bit delusional and a bit tied to the idea of a golden era like the boomers dreaming of the 1950s suburbs. A great deal of research is important science, but totally worthless for the foreseeable future on an economic basis. We might not yet conceive of why this research does have economic value, but it's so abstracted that as it stands, the value isn't tangible and it's thus impossible to defend reasonably.
Scientific freedom doesn't mean the freedom to expect a subsidized career on the basis of non-lucrative research. It's more of a privilege to have such a lifestyle that is downstream of a wealthy empire. Since America is going bankrupt, the dollar-reaper is coming for the superfluous. So, there goes your funding for conure breeding or the health benefits of community gardens and expect more stability if you're researching crop diseases or livestock vector research.
What is the alternative? Canada and Europe don't even have free speech.
Only in ways that don't matter to scientists. Not many of them denying the holocaust.
two election results in the past ten years have apparently failed to teach y'all wholesome folx that many people around you are secretly unwholesome.
That is happening right now, all the time! Especially in the biomed field! Many, many PhDs spend 5-8 years getting their degree and receiving minimal pay, then 4+ years being nomadic postdocs, also making terrible money, only to eventually arrive at the end of the road and realize they have to do something completely different.
It is unsustainable for every professor to train 10 PhDs in their career, because there aren't going to be 10 professorships (or even 3) for those PhDs to fill. Funding has to grow at the same exponential rate as the number of researchers. It did, from roughly 1950s to 1980s, as the university system expanded to accommodate the Boomer generation. It has slowed since, and the PhD to professorship pipeline got longer and leakier. It's doing a tremendous disservice to the bright, well-intentioned young people who join PhD programs.
Also, those scientists already exist. If the US decides not to fund them, they will go produce patents and grow the economies of other places. Many countries wish they could attract the talent that the US does.
In most of the world, most humans have to move within the realm of available resources. One could easily say that if a manager of US sees too many PhDs, it is natural to conclude that since there is not enough resources to go around, adding more resource consumers is silly. We can argue all over whether it is a good policy, or whether the allocation makes sense, or whether the resources are really not there, but, how is is this a difficult logic gate?
Further, reduction in funds for public resources or increase in misery for scientists are not in and of themselves evidence that those resources were over-funded or too cushy. For the research discussed in the article it is quite clearly a political decision, not directly grounded in a need for less medical research.
It invariably always is.
<< The need for things exists independent of the standalone economic viability of those things.
Sure, but there is only so long that can go on funding studying of rather pointless stuff[1] ( added UK example to not be accused of hating on anything in particular US-wise ).
[1]https://web-archive.southampton.ac.uk/cogprints.org/5272/1/g...
<< Further, reduction in funds for public resources or increase in misery for scientists are not in and of themselves evidence that those resources were over-funded or too cushy.
I am not suggesting that. I am literally saying: there is only so much money. That is it. And if push comes to shove, studies of whether chicken finds humans pretty take a back seat to more pressing matters.
After seeing the motor, the politician asked “what good is it?” and based on what I can find Faraday either said “what use is a newborn baby” or “one day you’ll be able to tax it”.
So two points: One, you don’t always know things will have a high ROI from the start. Sometimes you just have to be curious. And two, politicians care about the next election in two/four years, not planting trees that won’t bear fruit for 30 years.
The US is currently choosing to divert absolutely staggering amounts of those resources away from things we have traditionally valued—science, art, infrastructure, taking care of the least fortunate among us, etc—and using them instead to enrich the already-wealthy, in the most blatant and cruel ways.
There is no possible way this can be spun as being about "available resources". The grift is utterly, 100% transparent.
Eh, I mean if you put it that way, I suppose all those budgets are just a show and not at all an indication of how utterly fucked we are as a country unless we both:
a) massively reduce spending b) massively raise taxes
In very real terms, there is only so much money. Some additional money can be borrowed, but we a slowly ( but surely ) reaching a breaking point on that as well.
The issue is: no one is willing to sacrifice anything. And I am sympathetic, but if hard choices are not made now, they will be kinda made for us anyway.
We need to claw back billions and billions and billions of dollars from people for whom it will make zero difference in their daily lives, so that we can spend it on people for whom $100 can change their month, and $10000 can change their life.
On the other hand, your advice, at best, is happy clappy populist advice that will, temporarily make some people happy, but will not change the trajectory of the country resulting in the exact same spot only few years from implementation; and that is assuming it can be done in a way that is not immediately subverted..
If anything, I am giving you a real good reason for not just being a cynic, but being a cynic, who can make a change that lasts.
You'll have gluts of Masters then and so on.
Ultimately I don't think even the billionaires would be unhappy.
That seems a bit too optimistic to be a valid argument.
The hiring freeze stops everyone not just that one specific person. A 4 year pause on new researchers is meaningful even if this specific person wasn’t going to start a lab.
I think you misunderstood, since that's not about optimism. Years ago, smart students from all over the world could hope for a successful career in American research. Now, in the USA many doors are closing in most academic domains, and few (potential) researchers dare plan any success story.
All of this was by design so that big corporate interests could get cheap labor and increase profits. Since the US government is for sale to the highest bidder, and the corporations have no loyalty to the country, they will feed off the host until it can no longer sustain itself and then look for another host to feed off of.
And identity is mostly upbringing... You don't get mostly neutral people moving around to the best system, you get opinionated people trying to bring their preferred system to the better opportunity.
Americans really put up with low standards in a lot of areas, and it becomes obvious the more you travel.
It’s mainly because income isn’t keeping up with rent/mortgages/healthcare/inflation etc. But there’s no collective will to solve it, the solutions are all individual, like “work harder”. But lots of people are already working 2 jobs.
It sucks to live in a society that doesn’t care about you, and many are angry, but they don’t know what to do because they were trained to hate socialism. Half this country won’t even wear a simple mask to save your life, nevermind pay Europe-style taxes.
The claim that you get thrown in jail in London "just for sharing your opinion" is a myth, unless your opinion is, "round up everyone of race X, put them in a hotel, and burn the hotel down."
otherwise, your incredulity to such a belief is why the far-right continues to gain a constituency in Europe and elsewhere. so instead of dismissing the concern, which fuels the far-right, you could just acknowledge it is a real thing people are experiencing, and that it doesn't help a liberal free society to criminalize thoughts that are unsavory to the political elite.
https://x.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/1050391663552671744?lang...
Conservative: I have been censored for my conservative views
Me: Holy shit! You were censored for wanting lower taxes?
Con: LOL no...no not those views
Me: So....deregulation?
Con: Haha no not those views either
Me: Which views, exactly?
Con: Oh, you know the ones
A bunch of dunces.
Or perhaps they are so far up their own assholes that they think AI is going to do research by itself with no funding from now on.
Ironically enough, the guy that coined the term "soft power" recently died. He did his doctorate with Henry Kissinger.
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/07/us/trump-fede...
They are also attacking Harvard, the number 1 science university in the US. There's a scandal at Harvard last month where the Dean of Science was fired because he was protesting against eliminating graduate students in the sciences (they eventually settled for something like firing him and 50% cuts to my knowledge). I have no love for Harvard by the way, I never thought I would be defending them.
Some things are more important than grant money, and don't necessarily improve with larger budgets. =3
Germany is not even an attractive country to work in at the moment, so I assume it’s even more pronounced elsewhere.
I’ve also heard that meetings are conducted in English, but that all private discussions happen in Chinese, so managers have no idea what they’re talking about.
That said, Chinese really is hard… In contrast, English is simple enough, so it’s more efficient to learn, and it’s easier to attract talent.
As for whether this “stifles” anything, I think China mainly relies on its own people. Most of the talent who go to China still speak English anyway.
On top of that, China’s speech control is genuinely annoying. Though I also find it annoying that Threads arbitrarily suppresses speech, too.
In areas like energy, semiconductors (Taiwan—although some production/deployment is currently in China, but it’s hard to say what might happen and when), and AI, China does feel unsettlingly powerful right now.
In democratic countries, just getting approval for a new energy facility can turn into years of arguing; in China, they can build several in the same time.
By the way, I’m Taiwanese.
But actually China and India may be retracting some of their talents back. Unlikely many go back to EU/UK socialism.
Political goals and what's good for the average person are completely disconnected at this point.
There is an obvious plausible reason why there might not be much brain drain to Europe: salaries are much lower there, because Europe is poorer.
Academics love to believe they don’t care about money, and Guardian readers love to believe that the US is doomed by its moral failings. I’ll believe both those things when I see evidence for them.
Maybe somebody closed all public scientific databases, all government science webs, and harassed or fired thousands of scientists. That would explain the lack of public scientific data.
> salaries are much lower there, because Europe is poorer.
Salaries are just a number and should be always taken in the context of coast of living. Europe is diverse, with poor places and rich places. You can live like a king with a worse salary in many places. In the more expensive ones you will pay more taxes, but receive more services in exchange. You will enjoy 30 days of paid holidays a year, and a very diverse continent to roam free on that time. You will enjoy also universal healthcare, affordable groceries, a near to zero expectation of your children being murdered at the school, and much more options to choose a political party that suits your own interests if you don't like the current situation.
Europe has many problems and lots of idiomatic and cultural walls, of course; but at this moment US just looks like a terrible place to live or even visit. The government is purposely doing all that they can to fleece every citizen and burn down the entire place.
There are no actual numbers for emigree PhDs. Government losses across all agencies are some 10900 scientists [0] or ~14%. Whether they retire, emigrate or no longer do science doesn't matter for the outcome.
[0]https://www.science.org/content/article/u-s-government-has-l...
Most of all they hate intelligent people as they see their schemes for what they are.
Other countries need to take up the mantle of research and they can't do that if all of them go to the US. I think this is overall good for the rest of the world, because relying on the US and the sociopathic companies that exploit public research for personal gain is bad for the entire world.
Well the Swiss are not in EU either, but both are still in Europe
On federal level they are still at about 25% without an option to come into power. It is bad, but it is not hopeless, yet.
I made the leap this year. No regrets.
Apparently I was initially rejected for that reason, but my boss dug me out of the file for a potential discussion about a US based role. He told me that 6 months later over pints.
Once you've got an offer the critical skills employment permit (CSEP) is quick and painless.
All in all it was basically a lateral move lifestyle-wise. "Federal" income taxes are high-ish, but there isn't another level of state and local taxes eating away more; and property taxes are practically nonexistent (€280/year I think?). There are a handful of schemes which will shield a decent chunk of income from the highest tax rates, and the company benefits are fantastic (medical 100% paid for for my entire family, good bonus, 2:1 "401k" match).
As mentioned, housing is absolutely horrible right now, especially for renters. Luckily home prices are still somewhat reasonable compared to the US - we made enough selling our US home that we could buy an Irish property outright. Can't get a mortgage or any sort of credit until you've been in the country for 6 months. Probably won't stay in this place more than 2 years (when I get permanent residence on the CSEP route) but its a comfortable enough spot to get settled.
I wish it was a bit less car-focused, but there will be a train that drops me off basically at my office door in ~2 years, so they're trying and improving pretty quickly.
(Like seriously, it turns out to be pretty useful in practice. :) )
And just in case you truly believe it's something like "Russian bots" - and I hope you don't - you need to check out the change in the bigger public's opinion on big tech companies, and why it has changed. It's far from just HN.
The US having a dogshit healthcare delivery system but so much research means that good vertical integration is not possible.
Conversely a more integrated EU — continent scale welfare state — could do really interesting "integrated OpEx and CapEx" medical research in ways that are simply impossible in the US.
Remember the Danes making Ozempic is making something that is fundamentally far more useful for Americans than Danes (of course the money is good for Danes). Most non-American drug research today probably chases the lucrative American market, but ideally that would change.
I'm sure the system you want would exist if healthcare providers had one customer to worry about: the US government. I can't think of a single doctor, the ones that actually want to help people and not cash a phat check, that likes the current system of filling out paperwork or begging to do surgeries for patients from insurance companies.
Most actually want to just provide care.
Get rid of the middle man, get rid of the profit motive, and you'll get a system that society can actually shape.
Oh no. We might lose the largest most expensive medical system in the world. I would sure hate to have an affordable lightweight medical system. I mean, aren't we doomed if we can't spend another five trillion dollars on a covid shot. Think of the poor pharma companies.
Also, if the US restores their democracy and also decides to value science again, will the salaries for scientists abroad compete enough to prevent scientists moving back.
To maintain a sustainable lead the money and investment has to be substantial and long term.
China also has been playing the long game with the build out of it's technology capabilities. I could very easily see them doing the same for medicine. They aren't afraid of losing money on investment for a particularly long period of time. They are currently thinking in decades and not quarters.
We don’t have elections anymore? When did this happen?
It is fair to say that the USA is still a democracy, but not because of elections. Elections have little to do with democracy. In fact, if the majority of the population hold the view that elections equate to democracy, you don't have a democracy.
Elections are a useful tool, but not strictly necessary. Obviously in the small scale the people in a democracy can simply communicate directly. As things scale up you do need to, for all practical purposes, introduce a messenger[1] to carry what the people at the local level have decided upon, to compile with all the other local levels. But that does not require elections either, only trust that the message will be delivered accurately and in good faith. Elections are a really good way to select who you trust, which is why it is the norm in a representative democracy, but if in some hypothetical world where someone naturally became trusted by the people and became the messenger out of simple happenstance, that would be just as democratic. The only signifiant feature of a democracy is that the people hold control[2].
[1] Now that you no longer need to travel thousands of miles to talk to another person it is questionable how necessary that remains. However, we've never successfully developed a trust model without face-to-face interaction. As such, we willingly retain a trusted messenger to offer the face-to-face presence.
[2] Which is why the USA is oft said to not be a democracy. Few people in the USA actually get involved in democracy, which then makes it look like a small group hold control over everyone else. However, there is nothing to suggest that anyone is prevented from getting involved if they want to. Choosing to not participate is quite different from not being able to participate. And thus it is rightfully still considered a democracy.
Plenty of places called China have or have had elections. Taiwan, Hong Kong, etc.
Oh, you mean the mainland? You can vote for The Party, or vote for The Party. I see nothing undemocratic about that!
On a more serious note any of the freedoms people are talking about disappearing in the USA were either already long gone or a decade further down the road of dying in Europe. Hell they are routinely jailing people for speech now.
