941–950 of 1001 posts
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Canada and Australia are immigration nations. The UK definitely is not.
The national dish of England is chicken tikka masala, last time I checked.
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I hold the idea that brain drain, i.e. emigration of skilled people, is one of only a small handful of real methods to hold fascism to account. With that, as things start to get real bad it seems leaving is something of a moral duty for anyone who cares, has skills that hold real weight, and can still afford to do so. Obviously where this "real bad" point is is hard to say, and there's important tradeoffs to consider…
I am withdrawing my money from the US stock market. Other people might not give a shit, but I want to invest my money in a functional democracy.
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So you don't think being forced to include a statement on diversity in every single grant request reviewed by the NIH was "injecting dumb politics" but you do think that being forced to NOT include a statement on diversity in every single grant request is?
There’s a very big difference there between “including a statement in diversity” and “your funding gets pulled because you previously included a statement about diversity”. The new administration is essentially pulling funding from everyone who got grants previously based on those criteria. Who do you think benefits medium term from our best researchers getting less funding? The toll on our economy will only be visib…
These money shark guys that have got a hold of our government and economy since 2007 seem to have a long term plan that is specifically designed to destroy the US economy. Its counter intuitive, since their wealth is directly linked, but they have some kind of plan.
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Hiring people based on race (white) and gender (male) is what happened _before_ Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives. Do you know what is the original and ultimate identity politics? Enslaving people because you deem them inferior to your own race. The civil war, the civil rights movement, and modern social justice movements are a response to this, not the root of the conflict. I'm a white guy in academia - no…
> Enslaving people because you deem them inferior to your own race. This is irrelevant to the discussion of hiring in 2025, unless you believe your fellow “white” population harbors literal beliefs of a.) racial identity and b.) racial superiority, that c.) the “white” people making hiring decisions are actively excluding candidates based on these beliefs, and that d.) application of a nonwhite bias is just and measu…
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How do you reconcile these deeply basic facts with your point of view? 1. The US economy was the best in the world in 2024. 2. The NIH, USAID, and NSF budgets make up just a percentage point or two of US spending. 3. These programs consistently generate ROI >>1. In light of these painfully obvious facts, isn't it clear that the priorities of this administration have nothing to do with government finances? And that ev…
Although there are minor fluctuations in the US debt load, the mean is clearly going up without bounds. Interest creates an exponentially worsening problem with increasing competition for resources. Competition for resources breeds conflict. Congress' lack of will to compromise leads to winner-take-all scenarios with wild swings in policy. Language such as "deeply basic facts" and "blatantly irresponsible" is part of…
In that sense, you've committed three errors in your response, but the primary fourth error is in avoiding the actual subject at hand, which is still the fact that these governmental actions will not reduce spending, so your original claim was incorrect.
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I've been suspicious that the quality of life cut is distinct from the pay cut. Living in a dense European city, you do not need a car, healthcare is free, and you are generally afforded more time off and a stricter wlb compromise compared to the US. One doesn't need to eat takeout as often if there is time to cook. Depending on the country, rent/housing costs are more or less under control. On the other hand swiss/N…
To be competitive in academia in Europe, you’re not going to have as much free time as you expect. You’re unlikely to be able to afford to live in the center of a dense Western European city on researcher wages, and most of the jobs aren’t in the city center either, so you’ll probably still need a car. I think in the US people romanticise living and working in Europe to an unrealistic degree. There are good reasons w…
I do own a car, but I actually have to set a recurring reminder on my phone to take my car out for a ride every so often to avoid the battery draining empty. I think US people romanticise car ownership because they can't imagine how good the alternative can be.
That said, I don't work in academia and don't know what the median wage for that would be. But I don't see why a researcher wouldn't able to afford to live where I do currently, it's not wildly expensive here.
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But the scientific community identified this failure. They published the evidence against it. And shed light here. And heck, they did a lot of unrelated great science at the same time. Science is a process that will have failures, mistakes, errors, and these are subject to natural selection. We can work to make that process sharper, more rigorous, but that's obviously not what the administration is doing. They're att…
> "They" they did not . in the case of tessier-levigne, who was responsible for getting him out of there? not the NIH. it was a fucking Stanford undergrad journalism student. let that sink in. a heroically persistent undergrad had to do the job that the NIH was morally and legally obligated to do. this "science is self correcting" trope needs to stop being propagated right now. and you can claim eventual self consist…
Here's his original reporting where he describes this: https://www.editorandpublisher.com/stories/5-tips-for-using-...
Kudos to the kid for breaking the story before other media sources, but the actual scientific investigative work here was done by people with scientific training
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This is simply a delusion detached from reality. I am a white man in STEM academia. I've never been discriminated against once. None of my white male colleagues have either. They are all successful in academia. And my colleagues who aren't white men are in no way inferior. Just let us vote and ask if we feel discriminated against or oppressed because of DEI. We'll vote no. It's simply a delusion that DEI is some unme…
> This is simply a delusion detached from reality. I am a white man in STEM academia. I've never been discriminated against once. This is demonstrably false. Harvard and many other universities recently lost a Supreme Court case due to persistent racial discrimination over decades ( https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/jun/29/us-supreme-court... ). Whites and especially Asians were methodically discriminated against…
2. That court case is for undergraduate admissions - what does it have to do with hiring practices in the academic sciences?
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1. I don't think allocating funds to reproduce research would be worth the cost of displacing other new research. The current way of discovering that research is wrong by trying to build on it isn't perfect either, but it is still more efficient than systematically reproducing a lot of research. In my experience, scientific reproducibility has gotten substantially better in recent years- the standard of evidence, and…
The US select subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic, under Biden, concluded that the virus most likely originated from the Wuhan lab https://x.com/covidselect/status/1863637371624862163?s=46
It's a panel of politicians with an obvious political bias, and while some are MDs, none of have the technical background to have any type of informed opinion on virology or molecular biology related issues.
The virus is not closely related to any known wild viruses that have or were being studied by humans. The closest wild virus that has been identified branched off from whatever jumped to humans 40 years earlier[1]. The technology and knowledge to create a working virus like SARS-CoV-2 from known distantly related viruses does not exist- it simply could not be done accidentally or intentionally.
Evidence strongly supports the theory that a wild bat virus jumped through other non-bat species, and then was transmitted to Humans in the Huanan market sometime in November 2019[2].
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35137080/ [2] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8337
Another win for China. While the US guts its research capacity, China already dominates scientific research (according to Perplexity, 29% of the most highly cited peer reviewed articles are authored by Chinese scientists). Of course all those people who voted for this regime don't believe that there is any benefit to funding science. After all, what did science ever do for them? (OK, except for the science of pick-up…