891–900 of 1001 posts
All of the other despicable stuff by this administration is easily reversible since nothing except tax cuts for billionaires (aka big beautiful bill) was passed by Congress.
But this wanton destruction of the US scientific capability for at least a generation is next to impossible to overcome. As they say, trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback.
If there is a better way to hand the future to China on a platter, I honestly haven't seen it yet. All of the other despicable stuff by this administration is easily reversible since nothing except tax cuts for billionaires (aka big beautiful bill) was passed by Congress. But this wanton destruction of the US scientific capability for at least a generation is next to impossible to overcome. As they say, trust arrives…
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> Why not? Weird egos. I moved from academia to industry and constantly got told "In industry we just care that 'it works'". I thought that was a weird premise, given... you know... who doesn't? But the more time I spent in industry the more time I found that they in fact do not care if it actually works. What seems to matter more is the politics and about "working"[0] the right way using the right new buzzword[1] Tr…
>Fun fact, my boss also loved to tell me about how dumb academia is because they never do anything useful and how industry makes all the real advancements. He's not entirely wrong though. Industry makes the advancements that actually supposed to sell and be profitable on the free market. Academia is all over the place, as not everything being researched there can be used commercially, often it's just to get grant mon…
So weird argument. Academia isn't meant to be "profitable" because no one is measuring the indirect profits. But when you do it's comically large
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My family is looking at Missouri to Spain. Why Spain: Expat communities, cost of living, friendly visa options, beautiful climate. Why leave: Sick of U.S. politics and the way it directly and indirectly affects us and how difficult it is to escape from it - it’s a major point of conversations with family and friends, it’s on the local radio, local subreddit, local social media pages, etc. Also, I have over $7k in per…
Man Spain is mentioned as a top destination with expat influencers, youtubers and now even on hn. I get the feeling that something is going to crack at some point. You must be pricing out locals and they can't be happy about that.
Science is massively underfunded respect to what US was enjoying. Expect cuts in your salary. Physicians earn much, much, less, but students can follow public university studies without being put a crushing debt load around their necks.
Science is also being invaded lately with political and bureaucratic BS. Universities have less resources and are always scammed in the ranks that benefit Asian and US universities.
We expect one month of Holidays each year, by law, or to be compensated for it if we agree to spend this time working. Most researchers volunteer to work extra hours or weekends if needed to finish the experiments.
About cultural differences. There are not "white" people and "hispanic" people in Spain. Is either the same thing, or it does not really matter.
"Negro" means "black", and is just a color. Some people are racist, specially out of the big cities, and even more are classist, but if you are black and people describe you as a man negro or a woman negra they don't mean to insult you, they are just describing you. There is not such ridiculous term as an "Afro-spanish", if you have born in Spain or earned the nationality, you are as much 100% Spanish, as any other.
In fact, you are either Spanish, or foreign. If you learn the language well you "are honorary Spanish". If not, you will be always be the "Moroccan" or the "Gringo", but not the "black" or the "white". Europeans had mixed their bloods for ages and people here consider themselves as much "white" than you (if not more) and will find the distinction offensive by unnecessary.
As long as you act as a reasonably civilized person, only the extreme right idiots will care about your tan. Avoid this European MAGA like the dangerous plague that they are.
In restaurants, you need to call the waiter and say what you want. If you want the bill, you need to ask politely for the bill. Don't wait to be noticed or you will wait forever. You will not be chased off the table normally, that would be rude.
You will receive the amount of food expected traditionally in the area (not the humongous portions normal in US unless you visit the North).
Tips are fully voluntary. Unless you go to a very exclusive place you should tip between 0 and 2 dollars and don't need to argue why. (Forget about that X% of the service. We hate going out and being forced to do math).
People will benefit also of the environmental regulation. I assume that a big chunk of the morbid obesity epidemics in US came from unregulated contamination.
To end, a couple warnings, specific from the country:
In small populations near mountains and forests, wildfire crime is a recurrent problem. If there are cows or sheep roaming wild in the area, expect wildfire mafias. Assure to remove any flammable materials near your house and to have an escape route plan.
Dry riverbeds are dangerous. Engrave this in your brain. Locals use this places as parkings, but will run to remove the cars if there is rain expected. You shouldn't park in this areas, never, ever, try to cross a current of water or rescue your parked car if there is water, and should avoid buying any property in this areas. The place is called Rioseco for a motive. Each year a few expatriates die in the Mediterranean caught by flash floods.
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I wonder what discoveries that could've helped people are now pushed back years if not decades.
Given the reproducibility crisis and perverse incentives of the past several decades, it may be less significant than you think. There’s no philosopher stone that turns money into impactful research. Fewer people in it for the love of the game focused on fewer problems may actually be a good thing.
I also think you're wrong in how this would shape incentives and the "reproducibility crisis". It certainly doesn't help that random things get axed and people can't survive in academics.
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What's a better way, that's not the Chinese way? What I mean is more centralized oversight over research priorities, metric-driven rewards, and preference for political favorites?
What made places like Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, IBM Research, etc thrive? What happened to that mechanism, and can we have it back?
That meant the optimum for corporations was to invest the money in R&D. The cost of paying dividends was too large, so the advantage gained from developing competitive products was actually worth it.
As a bonus, high capital gains taxes also fill the state's coffers, which can also be used to fund research.
But as the western world has cut taxes down down down, the behaviour of big companies shifted to short term gains: dividends and stock buybacks.
Private equity is also to blame, because they set short term performance targets that remove the incentive for long term planning. The MBAs that have been installed as executives that follow PEs favorite playbook are another issue.
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I think this is an offensive and self fulfilling view. Americans are too dumb to do science so we need to rely almost entirely on foreigners from almost entirely the same two countries to do it for us. There's lots of holes in this scheme. I don't really want politicians to control funding for science but then again we've become somewhat of a degree mill and there's a lot of useless careerism in academia. I will give…
A story Steven Kotkin recently told in an interview: "And so the anecdote goes that Xi Jinping bragged that they were going to — China - was going to win the competition because they had 1.3 billion people to choose talent from. They had the biggest talent supply. And the elder statesman, Lee Kuan Yew, said, 'You're wrong. You have 1.3 billion to draw from, but the United States has 8 billion to draw from, and so the…
1. Invest in propaganda to ensure the US becomes hostile to immigrants.
2. Invest in opening yourself up to immigration.
China is openly doing 2. It would be foolish to assume they are are not also investing in 1 and secretly cheering on the current administrations hateful stupidity.
Immigration is the US superpower, and everyone who wants to knock them off the number 1 spot is eroding it.
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When interest rates are low, capital is willing to go to riskier enterprises like biotech in order to get a larger return compared to the alternatives. When interest rates are high, capital shifts to yield-generating, interest-bearing investments. They give higher returns with less risk. So basically the ROI of biotech becomes less competitive compared to alternatives. You have the same number of people/firms chasing…
This doesn't work the way you imagine. Suppose the ROI of biotech becomes more competitive compared to alternatives, because there's an ongoing series of technological breakthroughs. The return on investing goes up (by assumption) and this means interest rates go up (by definition; they are the return on investing). Is this bad for biotech? Does it shift capital out of biotech? Obviously not.
Tech investments don't come with interest payments usually, so if interest rates go up it pulls money into government and corporate bonds which are much lower risk. Why take a gamble on new tech that might lose you everything to get 10% ROI, if you can get 6% "risk free" in bonds?
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We need people to be less racist and stop voting for politicians they hope will hurt the right people.
Less motivation for people to be racist if they have their needs met.
They are turning to racism because of their wants and fears.
the recent drama about science funding to me highlights one of the main problems with our grant-based distribution system: which is that it is unsurprisingly very frail to fast-moving changes in government and society at large. science as an apparatus often works on timescales that are decades, not 4 year political cycles. so rapid pendulum swings are particularly dangerous to the pursuit of science as a whole. you c…
You either get a slow moving multi party democracy or you get winner-takes-all presidential mechanics that can reshape the country every four years. You can't have both.
Second of all, winner-take-all presidential mechanics don’t imply a four-year cycle of funding instability for research. That only happens if the president has sufficient control of funding. Which, through the administrative state (which is supposed to basically be a delegate of congressional authority), really is supposed to be insulated in large part from presidential, partisan politics. With increased centralization of power in the president (which, imo, is largely just an ~evolutionary response to Congress’ sclerosis), this insulation is lost, exposing research more to the four-year cycle of heavily partisan presidential politics.