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Top researchers leave USA for the Netherlands (in Dutch)

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Re: Top researchers leave USA for the Netherlands (in Dutch)

#251

Post by coldtea »

John23832 wrote: post #202
coldtea wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, total immigration matters. Human progress is always subject to the law large numbers. Human change can be subject to the law of large numbers, but nothing necessitates any particular change being towards progress. > Skilled polish engineers don't want to be the only polish person in the entire country. They want food, culture, community that reminds them of home. Even as they assimilate. That's why the American…

> Human change can be subject to the law of large numbers, but nothing necessitates any particular change being towards progress. The same can be said of the "Great Man Theory" (or its adaptation by selecting immigrants based on some selected set of skills). You don't know that you're making society better, you're just selecting for a certain set of skills. > The American melting pot works well (or worked well) becau…

>This isn't true and it ignores the cultural differences amongst all of the original colonists (religious, language, political, and country of origin).

You got it backwards. This is BASED on the "cultural differences amongst all of the original colonists (religious, language, political, and country of origin)". That was what made the place have no "prior historically established dominant ethnicity or culture the kind other nations have had going for millenia".

>That's before you even consider the stark differences in culture between the Native Americans and the European colonist.

Those would be relevant for explaining the "American melting pot", if the latter wasn't established after erasing both their culture and, to a large degree, them.

Re: Top researchers leave USA for the Netherlands (in Dutch)

#252

Post by petcat »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #249
petcat wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the biggest company in the Netherlands and its products (ASML and high end lithography machines), is built on top of the works of only a handful of researchers. This is... wildly wrong. ASML is a multi-national company that licenses IP largely from USA and Japan, but also Taiwan and Germany. The actual EUV light source is developed and produced in California by Cymer, which ASML acquired in 2013. But ASML was only…

> There is a reason why ASML's next-generation research photolithography machine is currently being installed and developed in upstate New York, and not somewhere in the Netherlands. The same reason that Cymer is still in San Diego instead of being relocated to Europe. What is the reason?

Because it's American tech funded by the USA CHIPS Act and the Department of Energy. Tightly controlled by the US government.

Re: Top researchers leave USA for the Netherlands (in Dutch)

#253

Post by MITSardine »

daedrdev wrote: post #203
mnky9800n wrote: post #146

I apologise if this is overly negative. It is based on my experience working as a soft money researcher (my own grants) at a Dutch university. My opinions may not be shared. In my experience The Netherlands is a rather unsupportive place to do research. There is essentially no money from the government that will pay salaries in full, especially early career salaries (vini, vidi, vici). I have had friends win ERC gran…

> that were fired as a result because there was not a space in the department to hire them full time (Dutch work law requires contracts to become permanent after a certain number of years of working). This is a very common law in european companies and is killing economic growth. Idk why they do this.

It's just labor law, these are countries where job security is considered very important. As a result, a lot hinges on having an indefinite duration contract.

The same rule exists in France and you'll have a hard time getting a loan or even a rental if you don't have the sacrosanct CDI (Indefinite Duration Contract), or legal guarantors with one.

It may seem absurd in these edge cases, but it's a way of putting pressure on employers to either hire people for the long term, or let them go.

In this case, it's not necessarily a bad thing in 90% of cases either (because those that don't get permanent employment despite scoring ERCs are certainly very rare), it prevents people from being stringed along in a lab where they're not really building up a career, but rather setting themselves up to be 40 and unemployable, when they're eventually not given the job security the lab would have given 5+ years earlier if they ever intended to/could do so.

Re: Top researchers leave USA for the Netherlands (in Dutch)

#254

Post by AngryData »

weberer wrote: post #101
pjerem wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe is lacking AC because we never had to deal with 30°C at night before the last 5-10 years. And for the regions where we needed to (like, around the Mediterranean), guess what, AC is everywhere there. You know what, me, an European, just received this morning ? The AC unit I ordered. It's not hard to install AC in Europe, it's just that until a few years ago, we never needed it. The only real blocker today is wh…

>It's not hard to install AC in Europe Its orders of magnitude harder. When I lived in the USA, I could just pick up a $200 window unit and have it installed within minutes. Every single person had air conditioning. Now I live in Finland where the windows are the worst designed windows I've ever seen. They are thin, tall windows that open vertically on hinges like doors. So rain gets in, and its impossible to install…

My house in the US has windows like that. I have a cut and painted board to replace the window with in the summer because of it. I hate these windows because of that though.

Re: Top researchers leave USA for the Netherlands (in Dutch)

#255

Post by palata »

RandomLensman wrote: post #247
palata wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand that sentence.

GFC = Great Financial Crisis. I'd look at that first rather than some peak oil for Europe's underperformance.

Is "GFC" the subprimes crisis? Because that one, in 2008, may well be a consequence of the peak of conventional oil. It's not "some peak for Europe", it is THE peak for the world of, well, conventional oil, which means anything that is not the shale oil in North America.

Re: Top researchers leave USA for the Netherlands (in Dutch)

#256

Post by AngryData »

dataflow wrote: post #221
bialpio wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just moved to Portugal and had zero issues installing a portable unit to help me survive the heatwave. For the hinged windows you just grab an installation kit that works with them and you're good to go. The only problem is that the portable AC I got is not a window unit (& it's single-hose), but I wanted to have it before the heatwave started and don't care too much about few percentage points in lost efficiency a…

I'm actually surprised you were fine with single-hose. I've never seen a single-hose portable A/C unit that did an adequate job. AIUC, the laws of physics make that rather difficult. In fact I've sometimes seen them actively make things worse. Whereas I have seen dual-hose do an adequate job. Also note, "survive" is a rather low bar. We're talking about encouraging some of the world's top researchers to move from the…

Ive seen a few single hose AC units that worked okay. I still don't understand why they exist though. The window installment at its minimum span is still putting the ends quite far apart and would increase efficiency.

Re: Top researchers leave USA for the Netherlands (in Dutch)

#257

Post by hashstring »

voxl wrote: post #236
amoshebb wrote: post #157

I could only find 4 names: 1 full prof at Vanderbilt with a real research program who has been listed as PI on a bunch of grants. "Top researcher" may be generous, but based on nothing I'd say reasonable description. The other 3: 1 is a VU Amsterdam PhD who was on a Netherlands Government funded 24-month postdoc in Harvard who's been at VU Amsterdam since 2017. 1 is an adjunct (on leave) prof from Israel who has work…

Researchers _would_ leave in droves if they could. But it turns out the entire world doesn't actually care much for research. The US was actually unique in that regard.

That’s not true and uninformed. What even makes you believe this?

Europe has tons of top research universities. Both EU and China are competing with the US [0].

And this news is not an isolated event. The majority of Americans rank US higher education research and innovation as: poor [1]. US top universities are shrinking PhD programs [2.

The thing that makes the US unique is that they are really dropping the ball in a lot of areas, because of bad leadership of the financial and political “elite”.

[0] https://sciencebusiness.net/news/universities/how-eu-researc... [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/10/15/growing-s... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/06/us/research-universities-...

Re: Top researchers leave USA for the Netherlands (in Dutch)

#258

Post by Shocka1 »

searine wrote: post #189
amoshebb wrote: post #157

I could only find 4 names: 1 full prof at Vanderbilt with a real research program who has been listed as PI on a bunch of grants. "Top researcher" may be generous, but based on nothing I'd say reasonable description. The other 3: 1 is a VU Amsterdam PhD who was on a Netherlands Government funded 24-month postdoc in Harvard who's been at VU Amsterdam since 2017. 1 is an adjunct (on leave) prof from Israel who has work…

Its not just what makes the news. There is a cooling effect happening in recruiting international talent. Science is heavily international, and if people feel like they won't get funding/wont be safe here, they won't come.

I know this is anecdotal, but my engineering graduate program at a well known private university in the NE had roughly 300 graduates, more than half of them on student visas. I feel it's more popular than ever to act as though one has ideals, but there is an endless supply of talent waiting for a spot at these prestigious American universities.

Re: Top researchers leave USA for the Netherlands (in Dutch)

#259

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

WarmWash wrote: post #233
0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You feel that way because the media (and the internet) is hyper focused on the bottom 50% of Americans. The households with 2 people earning Poverty in the US is similar to poverty in Sweden, according to this dataset: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/poverty-share-on-less-tha... But the median American earns far higher wages than the median Swede: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income I think the…

I mean the real unspeakeable secret is how the American mid-high-middle-class/upper-class has so effectively turned financially transparent despite being the wealthiest group in the country. The 65% to 99% are just an absolute hulking bag of cash. The battle in the US is between the mid-low-middle-class/lower-class and the 1%. Which is just so incredibly effective at diverting attention from where all the actual mone…

https://xcancel.com/cafreiman/status/2074453764761641240

Re: Top researchers leave USA for the Netherlands (in Dutch)

#260

Post by tasuki »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #48
coldtea wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of skilled immigrants, researchers and engineers, matters for this comparison. Not just the total amount including random people arriving at the coast.

This is a hugely loaded statement, but that aside, China is not open to immigrants, that was the original thesis and that hasn't been disproven yet.

Likewise you haven't disproven my thesis that China is not closed to immigrants.

A good friend of mine (white European) was approached by a Chinese company and now works in China. I'll ask him how hard the paperwork was the next time I meet him, but I have a feeling his employer did the bulk of it.

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