Hi there for reference you said self funded PhDs are common in Japan. Would you hazard a guess what it would cost to fund your own PhD.
I have lived in Japan before during a half year of language school, and still want to at one point in the not so far future do my PhD. And Japan would be one of the potential places on the list.
Hmm, the tuition is extremely low relative to the US. On the order or $4-5k USD/year. I am not sure how many additional fees (like facilities, etc.) there are, but I guess not many. Being self funded was common for Japanese students. AFAIK no international students that I knew were self funded, up to the tail of their graduate program when their MEXT ran out.
Now that I think about it, one thing I am not sure about is if self-funded students' travel/conference fees were covered. I would guess they are covered through a grant and it is just the tuition that is self funded, but I do not know for certain. Going to >1 international conference a year would be far more than the tuition.
So, I would guess it would cost ~10k/year to be fully self funded. You can recoup some of that cost working (on a student visa this is limited though), and your lab may also have an RA stipend (but this is both very low [<$20/hr] and counts towards your 28 hour/week limit).
My advice though is to never do a self-funded PhD. Being a PhD "student" is a misnomer. You are a research employee and should be compensated as such.
I don't know, but people do buy cars so long their financial and parking situations allow. Many seem to be used for non-daily/non-daytime purposes(Home Depot/IKEA/Costco, kids/pets/luggage too loud/bulky/stinky for trains, had a bad day and must hit touge at 2AM, whatever). ICEs probably fit those use cases better than commuter EVs as they are, which are built around constant trickle charges and regular driving.
I’m hardly an expert, quite the opposite, but I imagine coordinating all those groups across multiple countries that don’t have a unified bureaucratic system would undo any disadvantages of just working on them independently and open sourcing at all. In theory they could all start borrowing from each other eventually.
It's not just a structure problem. The needs are different. And monoculture is always bad, so developing a plurality of solutions is a good idea.
I'm not saying every small administration of a 200-souls village needs to do this, but on the scale of a nation who has a GAFAM budget in the hundreds of millions of euros (probably, haven't made the calculation), it's not crazy to invest a few million on a side project like this to reduce dependency.
One of the things which for me is always going to be important is: "The best camera is the one you always have with you"
In recent times I have travelled some insanely hot places. And every extra thing that you carry with you feels like such a burden. But the phone you always have with you.
Oh you know what as someone who has used android from the start ever since i had a smartphone. You are 100% correct the only halfway decent calendar app is Google Calendar and even that is mostly meh.
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