I am not optimistic. When I look back in history, “worse is better” won every time. And vibecoding is the current epitome of “worse is better”. There are many places where code is a necessary evil, just a means to an end. And when the resulting software has never been particularly good anyway, then vibe-coded slop might just be good enough. Eventually, the economics will decide. There is a small chance that rising costs of LLM usage might save a segment or two from being devoured altogether.
Still, Microslop has repeatedly proven their ability to slow everything down to a crawl no matter how powerful the hardware. If you want it to be fast, don’t use Windows.
Emigrate where? And why do you assume that the country you're gonna emigrate to will have the funds necessay to fund the research? US grants are the biggest and most generous in the world. I think the USG spends over $900 Billion every year. Europe spends about 1/10th of that. Other option is China but as a foreigner, you will never get a grant there unless you work for someone else.
> I think the USG spends over $900 Billion every year. Europe spends about 1/10th of that
Do you mean that the EU spends 1/10th that, rather than Europe? Because France, Germany and the UK all spend €100-150bn each in grants depending on how you set your definition, and that’s atop the EU’s grant money.
Just eyeballing the figures across different countries, it looks like the USG distributes approximately the same amount in grants per capita as the EU & UK. Certainly not a 90% diff.
You're comparing the sum of those European countries to the US.
Scientists have two easy avenues if they are currently in the US, the US or their home country. Immigration to work in a foreign nation is not always easy and takes time.
Likewise, immigration to work in the US is "is not always easy and takes time." There's no difference; if you disallow immigration to other countries at all "because it's not easy", then there's no point in discussing where scientists won't go - you believe they won't ever move, no matter what.
I know scientists who want to move back home but can't because where they are from doesn't have funding for the research they do. Even with the uncertain federal funding it's still more viable than many places around the world.
Any country that doesn't openly say that it will bar funding to grant applications that include any word from a given list of words. Which, of the countries on this planet, is quite a few.
Interestingly, if the US stopped spending you’d need the top 17 remaining countries to double their spending to absorb the American science industry. Doubling is a tall order and seventeen is a large number. Most likely fewer scientists will find employment in government funded academia if this came to be.
Europe is the obvious answer. As others have posted, your numbers here are way off. And on the flip side, there's now some major programs actively encouraging this with special grants, support, relocation bonuses: e.g. ATRAE in Spain, EURAXESS, "Choose Europe For Science", Max Planck Transatlantic Programme.
Funny that your take away from protecting science was “where are you going, we have all the money so just dance with the devil and pray your research doesn’t conflict or debunk any political views”.
Generally, academia has always had a measure of bias to it. However the bias was never so blatant and never so against producing an environment where good research could feasibly be created. The vast majority of research is non political increments of existing non political increments where the main conflicts are personal beefs among flawed individual PIs and maybe being asked what fig leaf one offers to ensure that the funding doesn’t just go to a bunch of white wealthy straight men. Once you have funding you can be set for years to focus on your work, assuming you don’t do something dumb like make sexist or racist remarks, and even then your funding is generally secure you just might not get a new round 3 years later(probably will though because controversies die pretty fast).
I know a lot of hay and media exists about how academia is yadda yadda biased and anti intellectual. But of course a lot of that is cherry picked examples of controversial figures or individual missteps among individual institutions. This is a bit like taking a classroom with one rowdy asshole and then declaring the whole school must use physical violence as discipline from now on.
The chaos is affecting pretty much all areas of science, not just the controversial ones. I work in non-controversial, pretty run-of-the-mill chemistry research and the attacks on the NSF have certainly impacted our funding situation. Very long delays in proposal review, complete pivoting to AI, etc. I have co-workers panicking over the green card changes. And the overall morale is pretty grim everywhere.
Edit: don’t forget how he’s forcing NSF headquarters to move. All the NSF, not just the “bad” research.
Almost everyone has entertained the idea of leaving the US for more stability, which is required for research.
I work for an org that makes research software for chemistry and other branches of science and it's definitely hit us in sales. No one wants to spend money if they don't know if they're going to get or keep the grants they petitioned for.
Oh I’m sure we could commiserate about that. I think we work in vaguely the same area.
Unfortunately, getting money from industry isn’t much easier in my opinion.
We have some software projects we want to spin out into a small business or non-profit (because federal funding…), but industry is absolutely cold right now. Had a few very promising partners lined up, but it all evaporated last spring. Between tariffs, AI spending, and now oil, everyone is reluctant to spend.
Well if they want to stop all improvements to their electric car industry that is letting them out compete European, Japanese and US manufacturers, solar panels have clearly not been important to them, and their rocket programs don’t need anyone working on transfer orbits and god forbid anyone describes the materials they test as “diverse”…
The first item on the list is 44M for quantum materials. Can you please explain why cancelling it is in the national interest of the US? Other than the fact that Harvard didn't admit Daddy's favorite boy?
Appears it didn't receive any funds since 2022 after being extended for years (so your "daddy" is Biden) and wouldn't get any more money so was canceled to get it off the books.
If anything this shows the list includes regular grants that were canceled for normal reasons, which further demonstrates the cuts were not of real science.
Getting the government together is absolutely something we should do. If you are serious about science and technology then there are funds available and moving to Europe is not necessarily the only strategy. Do you really think that scientists who move to Europe to practice will be the people who turn America back around?
I’m glad my ad blocker works well enough to trigger this, performing its intended operation. When ads are the intended operation of that site, it needs to be blocked.
My biggest gripe with Netflix is that they only have like 3 languages and no auto translation. And even bigger gripe is that it's because of the union racket. They apparently need to pay hundreds of thousands for something computers do for free. Insanity.
It's licensing and/or product decision, not union labor.
I guarantee you for most (if not literally all) titles you see, they actually have more subtitles, they just don't / won't show them to _you_.
Netflix has gotten pretty good at VPN detection, but you used to be able to see this _very_ clearly by VPNing to a different country in the EU, and the available audio and subtitle languages changed dramatically.
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