Great initiative, and good to see that it has an effect. I'm a bit sceptical about the available funds. 1 million over 5 years is a nice starting package (4+ PhD students), but the availability of overall research grant money in the Netherlands has been under pressure for years and is difficult to acquire. Researchers moving here may find it difficult to acquire further grant money compared to US, at least in CS.
Any how much available funding is there in the EU?
One of the reasons that so many researchers come to the US, even with our decline in research funding over the last 30 years, is because the US makes available so much God damn funding in comparison to any western world. The reason China is starting to outstrip the US? Because they are starting to surpass the US in funding. The only downside I have heard from Chinese scientists is that you tend to get pigeon holed for the rest of your career into things the state wants/needs
Because there is less competition for jobs and grants. Europe spends more on academic research (as a fraction of GDP) than the US, but there are more people competing for the funding.
Are you sure about that? Most people miss the fact that a sizeable % of our military budget is slated for research grants/funding.
I'm a physicist in academia, and the amount of money we have gotten from DoD branches for things that have no immediate military applications is like 40-60% of our budget YoY. Like for straight fundamental physics research.
Most scientists I know who have gone to Europe have had to go into the private sector. And the famous ones I work with have gotten like blank check $10M offers from max planck and directorships with guaranteed $1m/yr funding, and still turned them down.
From a European perspective, the most noticeable sign of this is the scarcity of postdocs at American universities. Some fields and individual labs are better funded, but on the average, the universities lean heavily on students doing the actual research.
The more important US vs Europe difference is that in US there's much more funds for the research -> startup -> scaleup stages.
There's plenty of academics doing fundamental research in Europe. But somehow the ball is dropped on turning that research into successful businesses. So eg. uni graduates doing research in EU, then move to US & found a startup there, is sadly a common pattern.
As I understand it, mostly due to funding suppliers (gov, VCs, banks etc) being more risk-averse than in US. Regulation pressure doesn't help either.
China is not very immigration friendly to non-han folks, but I guess chinese researchers won't make it to the US and this already will have a great effect on the chinese economy.
Europe is in its own set of problems and it is not in the same situation that US used to be after WW2 (only major economy not affected by bombing).
Europe's problems:
* active major war in Ukraine (lasting longer than Axis/Soviet war in WW2)
* energy supply issues (unlike US it's not energy sufficient and the places that supply it with energy are involved with wars)
* a wall of people aging away from employment and into doctor's and hospital waiting rooms (forcing less investment into research and roads/bridges/railway, more towards stabilizing pensions, healthcare)
* major pieces of the european export economy are being replaced by China (eg chinese car brands eating the lunch of european car brands).
Europe is not immigration friendly as well if you don't speak the native language, of course one could live in an English speaking bubble, but I'm not sure how feasible it would be in Academia.
The keywords in the headline are "Nobel laureate". They are superstars in academia and are getting money, resources and convenience that a tenured US professor cannot dream of. These are extremely rare compared to the number of Chinese professors in US universities.
I doubt many of the researchers migrating even want Chinese citizenship and the chains that come along with it, so why do most people (presumably Americans) keep harping on and on about it?
Once you're invited by the CCP for your exceptional research background, you're literally given an open chequebook for both your personal compensation and your future research endeavors. You're allowed to take your family along with you too, and the language barrier doesn't translate in the professional setting. Racism is a non-issue since I doubt these researchers will even be interacting with elements of that segment of Chinese Han society, unless they choose to.
>I doubt many of the researchers migrating even want Chinese citizenship and the chains that come along with it, so why do most people (presumably Americans) keep harping on and on about it?
Because it's an important matter regarding immigration. If you want to live in a country, you might want to actually be a citizen of that country. Does that need explaining?
>Once you're invited by the CCP for your exceptional research background, you're literally given an open chequebook for both your personal compensation and your future research endeavors.
None of which is related to immigration.
>You're allowed to take your family along with you too, and the language barrier doesn't translate in the professional setting.
>Racism is a non-issue since I doubt these researchers will even be interacting with elements of that segment of Chinese Han society, unless they choose to.
Are you seriously suggesting that people can literally just not engage at all with the society they live in?
This just reads like deeply, deeply delusional reasoning attempting to paint China as a good alternative.
Have you ever lived overseas? Honestly you sound delusional. Do you think the USA makes it easy to become a citizen? Short of that, there is a wide spectrum on how countries treats immigrants. This is the most important factor for people actually living in a place. Acting like the bar for living somewhere is citizenship is nuts.
> Are you seriously suggesting that people can literally just not engage at all with the society they live in?
This pretty much confirms you have never lived overseas lol. Anyone who has will have met many people that achieve this. Like living anywhere immersing yourself in your surroundings (w/e that means to you) takes extra effort. Most people go overseas to work. It's not playtime. With that comes a built in community.
> None of which is related to immigration
How is getting money and support to live in a place not related to immigration?
Why are you so reactive about something you clearly know nothing about? Because China bad?
I have lived abroad, yes. Does the USA make it easy to become a citizen? If the comparison is China, yes, a thousand times yes. Does language and society matter a truckload? Absolutely.
>Short of that, there is a wide spectrum on how countries treats immigrants. This is the most important factor for people actually living in a place.
Yes. Does China treat immigrants better than the US? As I explained, no. There is no contest. The comparison borders on the absurd. The US is a remarkably flawed country in many aspects, but the vast majority of the stigma around its immigration comes from the fact that it's a matter that the US takes very, very seriously. The bar for living somewhere is not necessarily citizenship but it absolutely is a factor if someone is seriously planning to immigrate somewhere.
For an incredibly evident and very current example, the 14th amendment was very recently reaffirmed, with a whole lot of people being horrified it was even thrown into question at all.
>How is getting money and support to live in a place not related to immigration?
Because any quantity of money beyond a livable wage has barely any relation to integrating people into a culture. A model of immigration based on money is not immigration at all, that's just hiring foreign workers.
> China is not very immigration friendly to non-han folks
What do you mean? I've never been to China, but know quite a few non-han white Europeans who lived there for both shorter and longer periods of time. Some studied, others worked there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_China has a good summary (click through to its sources); as of 2020 there were about 1.5 million immigrants in China, just under 600K of which from Hong Kong/Macao/Taiwan; as of 2023 there's 12.000 people with permanent residency cards, which would be the expats that live and work there without nationalizing.
The relative population size of those countries likely plays a role there. Split China into 4 countries, each with a population about equal to that of the USA, and I bet that number for China goes up significantly. Split it into 75 countries each the size of the Netherlands, and it would go up even further (some people moving home within Beijing would emigrate)
100% becoming more closed. I have been trying to live in China for over 15 years… I finally managed the last 3 years, but its an forever struggle/gamble each year and each year the requirements get tougher (to get a work/residence permit). But yeah.. same goes for Europe
No, total immigration matters. Human progress is always subject to the law large numbers.
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 melting pot works well. It encourages enclaves that touch one another.
China is the opposite of that. You are hard hammered into the Han-ness, immediately. The language, the writing (which is a HUGE hurdle), the food, the way of life.
>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 melting pot works well. It encourages enclaves that touch one another.
The American melting pot works well (or worked well) because it was a nation made up from a blank canvas with no prior historically established dominant ethnicity or culture the kind other nations have had going for millenia.
And even at that was built on first disenfranchizing (to put it midly) the natives.
For what it's worth, this is the terminology I learned in school decades ago, but I don't think it's preferred anymore. My daughter has a book that calls it a "salad" instead (mixed but retaining their respective properties). I'm probably just old and crotchety but I like that way less.
In America there's a very sharp geographical distinction between which people oppose the melting pot and which see it as a core part of the American experience.
People from the big immigrant cities like NYC, SF, LA are more likely to hold the latter position.
People can feel how they want to feel, campaigns are run on feelings and not facts. Just because Trump says Haitians are eating cats and dogs doesn't make it true.
The Mormons of Utah, the Cajun/French of Louisiana, the Norwegians in the Dakotas, the Scotch Irish of everywhere, and the Amish are all (non-brown) examples of enclaves existing in the US. Nobody says that they are not assimilating well. We let them live their lives because personal liberty used to be a thing here.
I've never been to China either. It's a huge country and it probably depends on where you are (hong kong probably friendlier than a random place in the mainland), but from what I heard/read:
* language issues. Many chinese don't speak english. Also a problem in many european countries (esp latin and slavic speaking ones), but at least the european languages are easier to learn. Compare this to Amsterdam, Goteborg, Berlin-Mitte or Kopenhagen where everyone speaks english.
* citizenship is one of the hardest to get in the world.
* I heard complaints about onboarding into the chinese app/digital ID ecosystem.
On HK you can get permanent residence after I believe 5 years of working in there. That said… you will need a HIGH paying job to be able to achieve that. China mainland has a similar thing (‘green card’) but the requirements are kinda unobtainable for anyone below CEO of Starbucks level
Tangent, but I’m really curious what country you’re from that uses the endonym for Göteborg but then also spells the capital of Denmark like Kopenhagen?
I'm pretty certain all languages do that. It's fairly common to bastardize/assimilate the names of important cities and/or trade hubs into the local language, but leave smaller names unchanged. That's why it's Milano/Milan, Venezia/Venice but Cagliari doesn't have an americanized name; that's why it's Moskva/Moscow but still Irkutsk; Warszawa/Warsaw, Gdansk/Danzig (in German), Katowice/Kattowitz (in German), etc.
I'm born and raised German, and above I mostly used the German ways of writing the town names (stripping the umlaut). Which as it turns out are not the same way you'd write it in english, interesting!
Though it was years ago now, I did spend a couple of years frequently traveling to China for fairly long stays. I learned enough Mandarin to get by on my own. The "scariest" thing is realizing you might have to walk for an hour in a random direction to come across a landmark like a known metro station or a hotel where you can get a taxi and have the concierge translate your desired destination.
I was mostly in first tier cities, though I did travel through some more obscure places. The worst hostility I experienced was 5 foot tall grandma with sharp elbows determined to cut in line in front of the big stupid foreigner who is passive aggressively placing his wheelie bag in her way.
If you're curious, just go. The cities are amazing, the people are friendly. Even in Beijing you can easily avoid the tourist traps. While it's not as perfectly safe as Japan or Taiwan, I spent a lot of jet lag recovery time wandering the streets late at night. Once I spent half an hour in a taxi garage at 2am at some unknown location after a 45 minute misdirected taxi ride, arranging a ride to my intended hotel. I think that's about as lost as one can get and it was fine.
I think the concern is more along the lines of social integration than criminal hostility. Japan for instance has basically zero crime, and tons of tourists, but is notoriously impossible to ever become "Japanese" as an outsider.
Would it be silly to add "general lack of air conditioning" to that list? I imagine at some point it inevitably stops being a joke and starts being a real problem. Have we reached that point yet? [1] [2]
The finger-pointing by the US about lack of aircon in europe is just a stupid republican talking point. As everything that comes out of republicans these days it's misdirected and purely politically motivated. And it's none of their business anyway. They're just trying to stir up extreme-right sentiment here.
Yes many houses don't have AC. We didn't need it so much until climate change (of which the US is one of the largest contributors no less). But if you move here and care about it just pick a place that has it or where you can install it. It's available if you want it.
It's not a big thing that should be influencing any decision to move. It's just being blown up and politicised because of the current heatwave. Aircon is not prohibited nor frowned upon here, it's just that we didn't really need it so much before and people are still reluctant to invest in it. Especially in the more northern countries it's not really needed anyway, during a heatwave yes but that's a couple weeks a year. Also, it's not a complete solution. Most of us here live outdoor much more, we don't drive cars much so we need to deal with the heat outside anyway.
We also have nice community options like climate shelters here.
...what are you talking about? This was from my personal experience being in Europe many times, including in the middle of this very last heat wave. This one thing made it miserable. I couldn't even sleep and had to move to other buildings more than once. On more than one occasion locals themselves told me there were legal reasons certain buildings couldn't have A/C, despite them wanting to install it. And it from people there that I heard - several times - about the deaths when I complained about the lack of A/C, not from right-wing US media! I had no idea Republicans were even talking about this until your comment!
I'm not even blaming Europe for having so little A/C - more power to them for being able to handle the heat with less impact on climate change; they have my approval! I'm just saying if you're expecting Americans to immigrate there, this seems like a very real obstacle. That's all.
Maybe monumental buildings might have some regulatory concern but where I live it's not an issue. My neighbours in the same flat have 2 big condensers (the outside box of a split AC box) on their balcony. I just don't want to invest in it myself so I have only one of those stupid porta units, not great but it does the job when I need to cool down a bit. And our building is monumental from the 1800s. Also, every single hotel and commercial place has it.
But really in the netherlands which this article is about it should not be a barrier. The weather there in summer is extremely variable. Yes you get some hot days but they are few. And like I said, if you really want AC you are free to pick a place that has it. If you're a skilled migrant you will be well compensated anyway. You will have your pick. Viewing that as a barrier is just blowing things out of proportion.
The same way that American media is these days talking about Europe like it's overrun with migrants, it's just political.
Republicans aren't talking about it, people are making fun of Europe on X for their lack of AC, and how regulations are whats keeping them from having AC. This is coming from right wing Europeans. I think the parent is tilting at windmills.
That's literally what I heard from locals. I have no idea what 'wing' they were; they were just random locals I was asking about A/C. What I do know is everything I observed was consistent. Are you saying I should discredit all that based on an HN comment smearing them as "right-wing"?
Well I am very anti-right-wing yes but I saw one of the top dogs in the US administration complain about this recently, I think it was Vance or Hegseth.
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 when you are living in an apartment and the condominium council refuses AC installation for esthetical reasons, but it's something that can change (either by the vote of co-owners, or by law if needed). And if you are renting, you are stuck until the legislation changes and forces owners to provide summer comfort the same way they must provide heating in winter.
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 a window AC or even a box fan. You're forced to either install a mini split ($1000+) or central air. And neither options are available for renters. Really, the #1 priority should be trying to bring American style sliding windows to Europe. Then everything else can fall into place downstream of that.
That's exactly what I wrote though. You CAN install a normal split. You are blocked because as a renter you don't have the power to.
My point is that we are not in an AC crisis, we just need to change the laws so that owners are forced to provide, however they want, summer comfort in the same way they must provide winter comfort.
Unlike energy autonomy, green transition, or defense issues, the "AC issue" is actually easy to tackle for governments and I'm betting it will happen pretty soon because that's an easy win that costs nothing to governments and governments loves popular measures that cost nothing and and give them the good role.
Can sliding windows be properly insulated? In general cold is a bigger deal in Europe than warmth, and will continue to be so.
German style tilting windows close as tightly as the regular (or door-like as you say) do. UK has windows sliding up, but is also famous for being drafty as the windows are never tight. I suppose good sliding windows can exist though?
I have myself pondered the problem with regular windows and a movable AC. My apartment has old school 4-pane windows with 2 layers both having their own window handles, so 8 independent small windows for each opening. They do look great in an old building but I don't see any reasonable way to set up AC with these. Thankfully no need yet as the apartment has never reached 30C inside, but we'll see what the future brings.
That's pretty regional, countries that historically had warmer summers have them available on basically every house.
Where the heatwave is only recent, there are some bureaucratic issues (like historic buildings should not get "defaced" by the external unit and whatnot), but I think this is way too exaggerated when talking about the whole of the EU.
> Europe is in its own set of problems and it is not in the same situation that US used to be after WW2 (only major economy not affected by bombing).
Both Japan and South Korea were equally devastated and yet they managed to build world-class technology industries in the subsequent decades. I think the problems with Europe and the EU are a lot deeper than that.
A lot deeper than active wars and energy supply issues???
Europe's economy has been slowing down since 2007, which is the peak of conventional oil. The problem of Europe is that is doesn't have access to abundant energy like the US does. The US likes to think that they have a better economy because they are smarter/work harder, but the reality is simple: abundant energy makes the economy.
If you measure economical performance with PIB per capita, yeah, for sure, US has a better economy.
If you measure with anything else useful like (healthy) life expectancy or happiness level, state of the democracy, etc... like if you think the the economy must serve the people and not the other way, I'd say Europe is way more successful despite the real issues.
Actually, I'm baffled at how US performs poorly for their people given they have abundant energy. Norway and Iceland also have abundant energy and their people are seeing the benefits.
>Actually, I'm baffled at how US performs poorly for their people given they have abundant energy.
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 <$40k per year each.
If you look at the higher brackets (you have to look because "Americans in the 75th percentile live great" is not a clickable story) America is a better place to live if you work a job that pays well.
> I'm baffled at how US performs poorly for their people given they have abundant energy. Norway and Iceland also have abundant energy and their people are seeing the benefits.
It's just a totally different scale of comparison that does not work - those Nordic countries are smaller than many counties in US states. It's like comparing Iceland to Santa Barbara, etc.
There are any number of smaller region/states that are already benefiting. Singapore comes to mind. Leading labs are all setting up in Singapore and both 1) internally-transferring their previously US-based talents on work visa to Singapore, and 2) using Singapore as a base for Asia hires, mostly notably from China.
For a lot of people it's easier to learn English than Chinese - you wouldn't get far if you don't speak the language in China. English gets you very far in Europe though, most research institutions, universities, high end professions, etc already have English as the going language because of the international character of these places.
I think you're missing my point. China does not need to or aim to attract any researcher from anywhere. Just attracting top tier ethnic Chinese researchers and technical talent from the US is already a big unequivocal win for them. That talent pool is big: any US Math/Physics Olympiad team of the past 10-20 years is >2/3rds ethnically Chinese. And for them, Europe is not necessarily a more attractive destination than China.
Chinese are far more open to working in foreign environments/contexts that Americans are, IMO. Just look at the foreign language learning statistics: most Americans tend to only know English, unless their family was fairly recently from a non-English speaking country. Meanwhile the Chinese landing in the US tend to already have decent English education, and dive right into doing what they're there to do.
Either they underestimate, which is ignorance, or they estimate properly and are anti-truth.
What use do propagandists and fascists have for research? It only stands to continually disprove their lies. They obviously hate science and truth and want it gone, to be replaced with cult of personality and Christian nationalism.
This title is such clickbait. All the article talks about is a Dutch fund created to recruit scientists and they have successfully recruited them. At 1 million euros per head.
They have the first 34 researchers, all from top universities and institutes. That’s a major achievement, because as the article says, every researcher brings new knowledge as well as a whole international network with them.
Exactly; 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. The US nuclear weapons and space programs were similarly built on top of researchers they got from Europe. This is very much NOT a numbers game, and I want to believe top researchers rate their work and the benefit of humanity higher than a country, especially if that country is backsliding.
> 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 permitted to acquire the company under a strict technology sharing and export control agreement with the US government. Additionally, a huge portion of the photolithography research is directly developed (and owned) by US companies and research organizations such as IBM, Albany NanoTech, and SEMATECH.
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.
Seems accurate enough to me. That’s not a ton of money to uproot your life over tbh. Shows there’s willingness to leave with a little bit of incentive.
Dutch researcher salaries are also pretty high (compared both to median Dutch salaries and academic salaries around the world), so it's still not like you're leaving USA to live in poverty
In the US we sometimes use the term “bribe” in morally neutral or even positive situations.
It just means giving someone money or a different incentive to convince them to do something they weren’t going to do or were undecided but considering doing and the extra incentive is the catalyst for making the decision.
We also have the legal concept of a bribe but the OP probably wasn’t using it in the legal sense - I.e. accusing the Netherlands of doing something illegal.
The money isn't really for the researchers personally, but for doing the research. They are merely offered a job at a time where their jobs are on the line in the USA. And not even that, they still have to apply and compete with top researchers from other parts of the world. Really hard to call that a bribe, even in a morally neutral way. At most you could say the Netherlands - and other European countries - are taking advantages of the situation where the USA is abandoning their top researchers.
But for years it has been the other way around. Top talent from the Netherlands has been moving to the US in order to get funding (and a bigger salary).
The OP is using the terms incentive and bribe interchangeably. People do that in the US all the time. I don't think anyone really thinks it is wrong or morally disagreeable what the Netherlands is doing nor are they using the term in the legal sense. I was just explaining why someone might have used that term, obviously the OP probably should speak for themselves though in case they did mean it in the legal sense or something.
> In the US we sometimes use the term “bribe” in morally neutral or even positive situations.
I live here in the US. I've NEVER heard the term bribe in a neutral or even positive way. It might be used in a mocking way, as if to mock the idea of bribes, but never seriously.
So, unless you are confusing that mocking nature as morally neutral or even positive, this is incorrect.
"De Jonge Akademie, an association of young scientists, warned last year that the fund could end up recruiting academic stars who are not under threat, at a time when Dutch universities were cutting jobs because of government cutbacks. The new cabinet reversed those cuts last month, pledging up to €428 million a year extra for research."
The article has failed to prove that anybody has taken the bait and left.
> For the researcher, the qualities must, from an international perspective, far exceed what is customary within the international peer group. The institution receives a maximum of €1 million per researcher for the next five years.
Let's be generous and assume you are one of the chosen ones. Your institution will take 20% off the top leaving with you 1million×.80/5 or 160k EUR per year.
After income taxes, your take home pay is €90,868.00 or $103k USD. Not bad for the average man, but not good for a top researcher like they want.
EUR 160k works out to about $182,640. For that level of income in a top tier institution in a state with an income tax like Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, MD you would take home $121,565, or 15% more.
Academic pay is standardised in many EU countries. For example in the UK you can look up union rates of pay. At UCL (I'm still currently affiliated as I finish my PhD) the pay for a professor starts at £82,157 and goes up to a minimum of £139,882 for the top band. There is an additional £4,678 on top as a London allowance. This roughly lines up with your figure per year, so seems reasonable as an allocation of cost.
Also there are usually very very generous pension schemes here, so total pay is actually quite a lot higher than stated. In addition there is very generous holiday allowance, 41 days at UCL for instance, since you get extra holidays when the university is closed over certain holiday days.
From the article, it sounds more like these funds are the research budget (what you pay other people with). This is quite attractive, students are typically < 200k / PhD, so you can fund quite a few theses with this right off the bat. Basically max out the lab for the grant duration.
I don't know what their salaries would be exactly. This is probably most dependent on where they land, as salaries are very often standardized in Europe. There's usually salary grids per institution dependent on seniority with some milestones being merit-based. Quick google search indicates gross salaries for Professor level (mid/late career) researchers to be around 110-165k€ in NL.
That seems pretty sweet. It's comparable to what US professors make in the hard sciences, as far as I know, with lower CoL than most areas where professors make similar salaries.
And again, salary isn't everything to a researcher. If they can't hire, they're pretty strapped. At this career stage, they're managers, not so much individual contributors. I'd say a maxed out lab for 5 years off the bat is pretty enticing, which also gives time to get up to speed on European funding schemes like ERC grants.
I was a postdoc in the US during Trump's reelection and there were several months where my institution and others had completely cut off scientific staff (such as postdocs, research scientists and engineers) recruitment due to NSF defunding and other threats. Even now, they got taxed on endowment and lost basically 10% budget. This is considerable, and a source of stress for researchers and their current/prospective staff. You can't work properly if you're under the Damocles sword of being laid off / having to lay off your staff.
America is like a trust fund baby given all the advantages and then the baby goes "fuck it, life is too hard, I am just going to do coke and die early”.
No. It is for research that wouldn't be funded by companies, since it is either too risky or has too long of a time-horizon. If all academic research was removed from the world you would notice a vast stagnation in technological progress. This can be confirmed by looking at what technologies have come from this process, and what private research built upon public research.
Yea, exactly. You should send all your top scientists to Europe. Great idea to get rid of them. Totally just dragging down your country. Send them to Europe.
"Science work" is NOT doing nothing. All the modern conveniences we have today came through such work, which usually go for long stretches of time before payoff.
You presumably spent 15 or so years in school to learn things of which many only have very indirect applications, and at most a small minority directly applied to your career.
Should we similarly get rid of mandatory education? Most of it is useless after all.
One of the reasons that so many researchers come to the US, even with our decline in research funding over the last 30 years, is because the US makes available so much God damn funding in comparison to any western world. The reason China is starting to outstrip the US? Because they are starting to surpass the US in funding. The only downside I have heard from Chinese scientists is that you tend to get pigeon holed for the rest of your career into things the state wants/needs
I'm a physicist in academia, and the amount of money we have gotten from DoD branches for things that have no immediate military applications is like 40-60% of our budget YoY. Like for straight fundamental physics research.
Most scientists I know who have gone to Europe have had to go into the private sector. And the famous ones I work with have gotten like blank check $10M offers from max planck and directorships with guaranteed $1m/yr funding, and still turned them down.
From a European perspective, the most noticeable sign of this is the scarcity of postdocs at American universities. Some fields and individual labs are better funded, but on the average, the universities lean heavily on students doing the actual research.
There's plenty of academics doing fundamental research in Europe. But somehow the ball is dropped on turning that research into successful businesses. So eg. uni graduates doing research in EU, then move to US & found a startup there, is sadly a common pattern.
As I understand it, mostly due to funding suppliers (gov, VCs, banks etc) being more risk-averse than in US. Regulation pressure doesn't help either.
Europe is in its own set of problems and it is not in the same situation that US used to be after WW2 (only major economy not affected by bombing).
Europe's problems:
* active major war in Ukraine (lasting longer than Axis/Soviet war in WW2)
* energy supply issues (unlike US it's not energy sufficient and the places that supply it with energy are involved with wars)
* a wall of people aging away from employment and into doctor's and hospital waiting rooms (forcing less investment into research and roads/bridges/railway, more towards stabilizing pensions, healthcare)
* major pieces of the european export economy are being replaced by China (eg chinese car brands eating the lunch of european car brands).
Nobel Laureate in Chemistry Omar M. Yaghi joins Tsinghua University full-time https://www.tsinghua.edu.cn/en/info/1244/14984.htm
most of the A.I researchers are already Chinese.
now imagine other talented researchers on their way to earn Nobels - they're already in China & other countries but not visible yet.
this corrupt US administration fxxked the US in ways that will be felt for decades.
Compared to the US or Europe? No it's not debatable.
No dual citizenship at all, most probably no citizenship. Harder residency. Good luck bringing family there.
Not going to even mention the obscene difference in racism OR the language barrier, both of which are enormous factors.
Once you're invited by the CCP for your exceptional research background, you're literally given an open chequebook for both your personal compensation and your future research endeavors. You're allowed to take your family along with you too, and the language barrier doesn't translate in the professional setting. Racism is a non-issue since I doubt these researchers will even be interacting with elements of that segment of Chinese Han society, unless they choose to.
(This is also true of Europeans in Dubai..)
Because it's an important matter regarding immigration. If you want to live in a country, you might want to actually be a citizen of that country. Does that need explaining?
>Once you're invited by the CCP for your exceptional research background, you're literally given an open chequebook for both your personal compensation and your future research endeavors.
None of which is related to immigration.
>You're allowed to take your family along with you too, and the language barrier doesn't translate in the professional setting. >Racism is a non-issue since I doubt these researchers will even be interacting with elements of that segment of Chinese Han society, unless they choose to.
Are you seriously suggesting that people can literally just not engage at all with the society they live in?
This just reads like deeply, deeply delusional reasoning attempting to paint China as a good alternative.
> Are you seriously suggesting that people can literally just not engage at all with the society they live in?
This pretty much confirms you have never lived overseas lol. Anyone who has will have met many people that achieve this. Like living anywhere immersing yourself in your surroundings (w/e that means to you) takes extra effort. Most people go overseas to work. It's not playtime. With that comes a built in community.
> None of which is related to immigration
How is getting money and support to live in a place not related to immigration?
Why are you so reactive about something you clearly know nothing about? Because China bad?
>Short of that, there is a wide spectrum on how countries treats immigrants. This is the most important factor for people actually living in a place.
Yes. Does China treat immigrants better than the US? As I explained, no. There is no contest. The comparison borders on the absurd. The US is a remarkably flawed country in many aspects, but the vast majority of the stigma around its immigration comes from the fact that it's a matter that the US takes very, very seriously. The bar for living somewhere is not necessarily citizenship but it absolutely is a factor if someone is seriously planning to immigrate somewhere.
For an incredibly evident and very current example, the 14th amendment was very recently reaffirmed, with a whole lot of people being horrified it was even thrown into question at all.
>How is getting money and support to live in a place not related to immigration?
Because any quantity of money beyond a livable wage has barely any relation to integrating people into a culture. A model of immigration based on money is not immigration at all, that's just hiring foreign workers.
What do you mean? I've never been to China, but know quite a few non-han white Europeans who lived there for both shorter and longer periods of time. Some studied, others worked there.
For comparsion, in the US as of 2023, nearly 48 million inhabitants (14.3% of total) are foreign-born (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_Stat...). Or the Netherlands, 4.4 million of its ~18 million inhabitants are from abroad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Netherland...).
The relative population size of those countries likely plays a role there. Split China into 4 countries, each with a population about equal to that of the USA, and I bet that number for China goes up significantly. Split it into 75 countries each the size of the Netherlands, and it would go up even further (some people moving home within Beijing would emigrate)
China is also objectively becoming more closed, not more open.
Not just the total amount including random people arriving at the coast.
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 melting pot works well. It encourages enclaves that touch one another.
China is the opposite of that. You are hard hammered into the Han-ness, immediately. The language, the writing (which is a HUGE hurdle), the food, the way of life.
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 melting pot works well. It encourages enclaves that touch one another.
The American melting pot works well (or worked well) because it was a nation made up from a blank canvas with no prior historically established dominant ethnicity or culture the kind other nations have had going for millenia.
And even at that was built on first disenfranchizing (to put it midly) the natives.
For what it's worth, this is the terminology I learned in school decades ago, but I don't think it's preferred anymore. My daughter has a book that calls it a "salad" instead (mixed but retaining their respective properties). I'm probably just old and crotchety but I like that way less.
I feel like a lot of Americans disagree on these nowadays though, no? Source: just look at recent campaigns and elections.
People from the big immigrant cities like NYC, SF, LA are more likely to hold the latter position.
The Mormons of Utah, the Cajun/French of Louisiana, the Norwegians in the Dakotas, the Scotch Irish of everywhere, and the Amish are all (non-brown) examples of enclaves existing in the US. Nobody says that they are not assimilating well. We let them live their lives because personal liberty used to be a thing here.
The idea that they're at a disadvantage to Ireland in that aspect because the latter has more numbers-wise was what was addressed.
They might very well not be open. Or they might be open in a selective and cautious way, which would be more prudent than merely being open for all.
* language issues. Many chinese don't speak english. Also a problem in many european countries (esp latin and slavic speaking ones), but at least the european languages are easier to learn. Compare this to Amsterdam, Goteborg, Berlin-Mitte or Kopenhagen where everyone speaks english.
* citizenship is one of the hardest to get in the world.
* I heard complaints about onboarding into the chinese app/digital ID ecosystem.
I was mostly in first tier cities, though I did travel through some more obscure places. The worst hostility I experienced was 5 foot tall grandma with sharp elbows determined to cut in line in front of the big stupid foreigner who is passive aggressively placing his wheelie bag in her way.
If you're curious, just go. The cities are amazing, the people are friendly. Even in Beijing you can easily avoid the tourist traps. While it's not as perfectly safe as Japan or Taiwan, I spent a lot of jet lag recovery time wandering the streets late at night. Once I spent half an hour in a taxi garage at 2am at some unknown location after a 45 minute misdirected taxi ride, arranging a ride to my intended hotel. I think that's about as lost as one can get and it was fine.
Would it be silly to add "general lack of air conditioning" to that list? I imagine at some point it inevitably stops being a joke and starts being a real problem. Have we reached that point yet? [1] [2]
[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-frances-june-heatwave...
[2] https://www.dw.com/en/heat-wave-european-countries-report-37...
Yes many houses don't have AC. We didn't need it so much until climate change (of which the US is one of the largest contributors no less). But if you move here and care about it just pick a place that has it or where you can install it. It's available if you want it.
It's not a big thing that should be influencing any decision to move. It's just being blown up and politicised because of the current heatwave. Aircon is not prohibited nor frowned upon here, it's just that we didn't really need it so much before and people are still reluctant to invest in it. Especially in the more northern countries it's not really needed anyway, during a heatwave yes but that's a couple weeks a year. Also, it's not a complete solution. Most of us here live outdoor much more, we don't drive cars much so we need to deal with the heat outside anyway.
We also have nice community options like climate shelters here.
I'm not even blaming Europe for having so little A/C - more power to them for being able to handle the heat with less impact on climate change; they have my approval! I'm just saying if you're expecting Americans to immigrate there, this seems like a very real obstacle. That's all.
But really in the netherlands which this article is about it should not be a barrier. The weather there in summer is extremely variable. Yes you get some hot days but they are few. And like I said, if you really want AC you are free to pick a place that has it. If you're a skilled migrant you will be well compensated anyway. You will have your pick. Viewing that as a barrier is just blowing things out of proportion.
The same way that American media is these days talking about Europe like it's overrun with migrants, it's just political.
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 when you are living in an apartment and the condominium council refuses AC installation for esthetical reasons, but it's something that can change (either by the vote of co-owners, or by law if needed). And if you are renting, you are stuck until the legislation changes and forces owners to provide summer comfort the same way they must provide heating in winter.
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 a window AC or even a box fan. You're forced to either install a mini split ($1000+) or central air. And neither options are available for renters. Really, the #1 priority should be trying to bring American style sliding windows to Europe. Then everything else can fall into place downstream of that.
My point is that we are not in an AC crisis, we just need to change the laws so that owners are forced to provide, however they want, summer comfort in the same way they must provide winter comfort.
Unlike energy autonomy, green transition, or defense issues, the "AC issue" is actually easy to tackle for governments and I'm betting it will happen pretty soon because that's an easy win that costs nothing to governments and governments loves popular measures that cost nothing and and give them the good role.
German style tilting windows close as tightly as the regular (or door-like as you say) do. UK has windows sliding up, but is also famous for being drafty as the windows are never tight. I suppose good sliding windows can exist though?
I have myself pondered the problem with regular windows and a movable AC. My apartment has old school 4-pane windows with 2 layers both having their own window handles, so 8 independent small windows for each opening. They do look great in an old building but I don't see any reasonable way to set up AC with these. Thankfully no need yet as the apartment has never reached 30C inside, but we'll see what the future brings.
Where the heatwave is only recent, there are some bureaucratic issues (like historic buildings should not get "defaced" by the external unit and whatnot), but I think this is way too exaggerated when talking about the whole of the EU.
Both Japan and South Korea were equally devastated and yet they managed to build world-class technology industries in the subsequent decades. I think the problems with Europe and the EU are a lot deeper than that.
Europe's economy has been slowing down since 2007, which is the peak of conventional oil. The problem of Europe is that is doesn't have access to abundant energy like the US does. The US likes to think that they have a better economy because they are smarter/work harder, but the reality is simple: abundant energy makes the economy.
If you measure with anything else useful like (healthy) life expectancy or happiness level, state of the democracy, etc... like if you think the the economy must serve the people and not the other way, I'd say Europe is way more successful despite the real issues.
Actually, I'm baffled at how US performs poorly for their people given they have abundant energy. Norway and Iceland also have abundant energy and their people are seeing the benefits.
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 <$40k per year each.
If you look at the higher brackets (you have to look because "Americans in the 75th percentile live great" is not a clickable story) America is a better place to live if you work a job that pays well.
It's just a totally different scale of comparison that does not work - those Nordic countries are smaller than many counties in US states. It's like comparing Iceland to Santa Barbara, etc.
What use do propagandists and fascists have for research? It only stands to continually disprove their lies. They obviously hate science and truth and want it gone, to be replaced with cult of personality and Christian nationalism.
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 permitted to acquire the company under a strict technology sharing and export control agreement with the US government. Additionally, a huge portion of the photolithography research is directly developed (and owned) by US companies and research organizations such as IBM, Albany NanoTech, and SEMATECH.
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.
[0] https://www.eetimes.com/asml-to-build-400-million-us-researc...
[1] https://www.eetimes.com/asml-sematech-team-on-manufacturing-...
[2] https://research.ibm.com/blog/euv-center-albany-nstc
Over 5 years...
More correct would be "First international scientists to the Netherlands via the Tulip Fund", which is a far cry from the title as submitted.
Paying mandatory but arbitrary amount to a restaurant on top of your bill – tips (not a hidden fee).
Paying someone an official salary – a bribe.
American logic
It just means giving someone money or a different incentive to convince them to do something they weren’t going to do or were undecided but considering doing and the extra incentive is the catalyst for making the decision.
We also have the legal concept of a bribe but the OP probably wasn’t using it in the legal sense - I.e. accusing the Netherlands of doing something illegal.
But for years it has been the other way around. Top talent from the Netherlands has been moving to the US in order to get funding (and a bigger salary).
I live here in the US. I've NEVER heard the term bribe in a neutral or even positive way. It might be used in a mocking way, as if to mock the idea of bribes, but never seriously.
So, unless you are confusing that mocking nature as morally neutral or even positive, this is incorrect.
AI, quantum, vaccines, cancer, Alzheimer's, mental health, nuclear energy, climate, food security, astrophysics, democratic resilience
There isn't a full list of fields or researchers because of privacy or not all researchers have told their current institutions about the change.
Cancer researchers, climatechange, food production, astrophysics, democracy, mental health, Alzheimers, ...
Basically all over the board. But don't worry - you folks still have a president that understands sports really..... REALLY well. /s
"De Jonge Akademie, an association of young scientists, warned last year that the fund could end up recruiting academic stars who are not under threat, at a time when Dutch universities were cutting jobs because of government cutbacks. The new cabinet reversed those cuts last month, pledging up to €428 million a year extra for research."
Maybe Europe will engage the top American intellectual power into ejecting the real estate prices into orbit.
> For the researcher, the qualities must, from an international perspective, far exceed what is customary within the international peer group. The institution receives a maximum of €1 million per researcher for the next five years.
Let's be generous and assume you are one of the chosen ones. Your institution will take 20% off the top leaving with you 1million×.80/5 or 160k EUR per year.
After income taxes, your take home pay is €90,868.00 or $103k USD. Not bad for the average man, but not good for a top researcher like they want.
EUR 160k works out to about $182,640. For that level of income in a top tier institution in a state with an income tax like Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, MD you would take home $121,565, or 15% more.
https://thetax.nl/?income=160000&startFrom=Year&selectedYear...
Besides, 90K after taxes is upper middle class. 160K / year is 13K / month which is nearly twice the average income of the richest country in Europe (Switzerland) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_...), or top 0.1% according to https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/how-rich-am-i.
And that's just salary based on that number, it doesn't include other income sources.
Also there are usually very very generous pension schemes here, so total pay is actually quite a lot higher than stated. In addition there is very generous holiday allowance, 41 days at UCL for instance, since you get extra holidays when the university is closed over certain holiday days.
I don't know what their salaries would be exactly. This is probably most dependent on where they land, as salaries are very often standardized in Europe. There's usually salary grids per institution dependent on seniority with some milestones being merit-based. Quick google search indicates gross salaries for Professor level (mid/late career) researchers to be around 110-165k€ in NL.
That seems pretty sweet. It's comparable to what US professors make in the hard sciences, as far as I know, with lower CoL than most areas where professors make similar salaries.
And again, salary isn't everything to a researcher. If they can't hire, they're pretty strapped. At this career stage, they're managers, not so much individual contributors. I'd say a maxed out lab for 5 years off the bat is pretty enticing, which also gives time to get up to speed on European funding schemes like ERC grants.
I was a postdoc in the US during Trump's reelection and there were several months where my institution and others had completely cut off scientific staff (such as postdocs, research scientists and engineers) recruitment due to NSF defunding and other threats. Even now, they got taxed on endowment and lost basically 10% budget. This is considerable, and a source of stress for researchers and their current/prospective staff. You can't work properly if you're under the Damocles sword of being laid off / having to lay off your staff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1trcILsBHkE
Got it.
Should we similarly get rid of mandatory education? Most of it is useless after all.