China Is Outspending the U.S. to Achieve the ‘Holy Grail’ of Clean Energy: Fusion See: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/13/climate/china-us-fusion-e...
America's lead in biotechnology is slipping, while China has made synthetic biology a national priority. In the iGEM international competition, only one American school finished in top 10, seven were from China. See: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/teens-may-have-come-up-with-new... Or watch video: https://youtu.be/VEj5I4CBbgU
I don’t think people all over Europe/Asia/Africa migrate to China.
If they succeed, it’s purely with their own talent. The US still has that advantage even if it has less of it, unless I am mistaken.
I have spent 5 years learning it part-time and have gotten to a level I can understand 30% of a TV show and 20% of a newspaper.
Unfortunately it's two different languages and both are unlike almost anywhere else. The spoken language is tonal and the consonants don't easily match English. If I have a heavy English accent, I just don't speak Chinese instead of sounding like a foreigner. And having to memorize the tones is brutal.
Meanwhile the written language has almost no correlation with the spoken language. You're just drawing a bunch of symbols on a paper in geometrical arrangements. Which is beautiful but difficult if you're used to being able to spell words based on how they sound.
Unless, of course, you're typing on a computer. In that case you must type the latinised spelling of the characters without tones, then scroll through all the homonyms that match the spelling. Which is still extremely difficult because the consonants don't match Latin languages. And you must still learn the characters to know which one to pick.
Once you get through that, every sentence structure is different as well. Instead of "whose book is this", you say 这本书是谁的 which is like saying "this book is his" but you replace "his/他" with a generic word who/谁 representing that you want to know the person the pronoun was referring to. I can even write 这个什么是谁的 where I have replaced the word "book/书" with "what/什么", meaning I am simultaneously asking what the object is and who it belongs to.
You can effectively do this with any sentence or object. It's a much better designed language since sentences don't magically change the order of everything but it means I cannot think words in English and translate them piecemeal to Chinese. I have to know the whole sentence immediately.
Of course, once you learn this, you have to learn the Chinese idioms. And then everything gets worse because there's so many homonyms everything's a pun, which is why I'm stuck. According to Deepseek, 这个什么是谁的 actually means "what is this thing" and you don't care what the thing is, so it's not really the question. You have to reorder it and ask 这是谁的什么 which glosses as "this is whose what" which is a compound question that's grammatically impossible.
Also, I'd be taking a 50% paycut. Otherwise I'd do it anyways.
The characters are indeed a nuisance, but can be overcome with Anki/SRS. Chinese learners struggle with its tonal nature due to a lack of exposure to speaking/listening because they have no experience with tones. English speakers always decry Chinese tones as insurmountable as if it’s the only tonal language, but half of all languages are tonal, so it’s doable with practice.
In fact, Chinese has become more similar to Indo-European languages over the past century. Chinese now has an odd form of hypotaxis (think: conjugation, inflection, etc.), whereas it previously only had parataxis (combine two characters to generate something new). For example, 药性 (medicinal) is OG Chinese (ish), but now you have words like 科学性 and 简化, which make a lot more sense to an English speaker because they were noun-ified. Modern Chinese does this (literally) everywhere: all you see is 是, 性, 化, 的, 被. This makes the language much more amicable to an Indo-European native speaker.
Perhaps your difficulty is due to modern Chinese’s verbose (almost bureaucratic) syntax? These examples you gave make sense to me if you follow their literal reading. They sound stupid if translated to English, but not necessarily nonsensical.
i can speak the language just enough to get by but once you get into technical terms, i'm once again completely lost. Unless they do a Singapore or Dubai and make business in English, i dont see any chance of them attracting talent
I have openly stated that it is a strictly less technical language and often draws teams in to vague specifications and much more verbose language to find specificity. I have billions of dollars in progress to back that up.
There is a lot about Chinese and American culture that will surprise you when the rubber meets the road.
So how is the language "strictly less technical and specific"? Can you give specific and technical examples?
Rote Surgery is not a good example compared to say writing a PRD about an unknown feature.
I am in no way saying Chinese people cannot do these things. I am saying in mandarin it is less specific and more circumspect ways of getting there.
I’m guessing you don’t really know what your talking about here though and are knee jerking a response.
I'm not sure why you're getting so defensive; I indeed don't speak Chinese, hence why I'm asking a question.
A claim like "Chinese as a language is less technical and specific than English and slows progress" seems pretty grand; and if Chinese people failed to launch satellites in orbit or do brain surgery you could point to that; but they don't seem to be held back by their language when it comes to making specific, technical achievements, so I'm curious to hear actual, concrete details or examples about what makes Chinese a "less technical and specific" language.
It sounds like your answer is "it simply just is, because it's a courtly language" - which is not a very satisfying answer, intellectually speaking.
At this point in time, I don't think people are lining up to get K visa to go live in China. But if the current trajectory continues in the US, who knows how things will be in 5 years?
[1] https://www.china-briefing.com/news/chinas-entry-exit-k-visa...
The US has a global reputational advantage that will take decades to fall behind China, regardless of what any US administration does.
Nobody sane is going to believe rhetoric claiming that the US is somehow worse than a country that keeps 1.5 million people in concentration camps, and where people work 70 hours per week, no matter how many times Reddit tells them so.
I have about a dozen friends spread across 8 different mid-to-high level universities around the country in biomed. Europe and Canada are definitely a preference but China is entering conversation and has been for the last few years.
The alternative is to abandon an entire career or field of interest because the funding is held up by irrational national political policy.
I don't think this is the case at all.
Do you want to go be an immigrant to a country where the media shows masked agents rounding up suspected immigrants to disappear them in vans?
Do you want to depend on research grants in a country where scientific institutions are being dismantled? Where the administration openly opposes established science? (Medicine, carbon, etc).
As a former academic at a top US university, no, the US no longer has that strong reputation. 10 years ago, if you were someone, you wanted to come to the US. The best students in the world came and stayed.
Things are radically different now. Much of the best talent no longer comes and when they do come they leave. It's night and day.
It's not a binary choice. It's not the US or China. It's the US or Canada/EU/etc. And if you're from China, you used to stay, now you leave.
This isn't reddit. I saw this first hand.
I find that hard to believe. Applications to top U.S. colleges and graduate schools are at an all-time high and acceptance rates keep falling.
No one that has an Ivy League offer or even a state school like UCLA or Michigan would go to Canada or Europe, except perhaps for Oxford and Cambridge.
This discussion thread is very specifically about the US vs China, however.
To put it bluntly, China quite literally doesn't need (nor wants) the average software dev on HN. The immigrants they would likely want are those with expertise in much harder technical disciplines (semiconductor R&D etc.)
Also, fun fact, the U.S. has a comparable number of college educated people compared to China: https://www.voronoiapp.com/education/The-Worlds-Most-Educate... (80 million versus 90 million).
But the flip side of that is that China’s talent pool is a lot smaller, in practice, than 1.4 billion. Because vast swaths of the country are still basically the third world. Tellingly, China does not participate in the international PISA assessment across the whole country: https://www.milkenreview.org/articles/are-chinas-students-re.... It released scores for four wealthy provinces back in 2018. They were very high, but there’s obviously a reason China doesn’t test and publish scores for the whole country.
Learning mandarin is the major blocker imo, more people would move if the language was easier.
But then, learning to read and write requires enormous additional effort. When I learned in Beijing, I'd spend a couple hours a day working on grammar/speaking/listening - and then like 6 hours a day of rote practice to get familiar with characters.
I wouldn't go that far, Chinese espionage is a very real thing, with industry secrets being some of the top targets.
Of course, the US epitomizes the stupidity, but we don't see the EU for instance picking up the slack much. If they were smart, they'd be doing everything they can to take advantage of a brain drain from the US to their own countries, but they aren't (but China is).
Is this true? Is there a link to the policy? Anything is possible, but this sounds fishy. German research funding isn't known for either generosity or particularly wide reach.
Chinas political stance more closely resembles right-wing policies than left leaning ones.
All the xenophobic notions you are talking about china has in spades.
I am not saying China is not doing things right here will lead to your described outcome, what I am saying you conflation with western politics is completely out of this world, and is a excellent example of why the outcome you describe may be a reality for China.
English has the advantage that it already had a lot of different ways of pronouncing it before becoming the world language, so the expectations for how perfect people's pronunciation should be was lower.
The real reason people learn English isn’t because it’s easy. It’s because they need to. As someone who is married to an immigrant, it’s not easy for them. They’ve just worked really hard over decades.
Americans will do fine learning Chinese if it ever becomes an economic necessity.
I think at least a few of the latin based languages are in the same ballpark but for inane historical reasons it's english that won out.
Compare with chinese where even if you sweep tones under the rug you've got a bunch of idioms (difficult) followed by one of the most difficult writing systems in existence. Don't get me wrong, I think the writing system is quite elegant and has a truly impressive history, but neither of those things has anything to do with ease of mastery.
A tangential thought is that if you intentionally set out to come up with a rule following yet maximally difficult language I think a reasonable approach would be to fuse the equivalent of latin grammar with chinese tones and then fuse a chinese style writing system with arabic style contextually sensitive ligatures.
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Scientists go where science is funded. A large proportion of U.S. scientists are also immigrants, who will tend to go where immigrants are welcomed.
BBB slashed funding for cutting edge medical research which would not only save, or at least prolong lives, but also generate revenue for this country -- when we export our IP, or when people come here for some of the most advanced medical procedures. To say nothing of immigration policies which actively repel some of the best and brightest and may be leading us to an actual population decline.
Sure we weren't perfect by an stretch before, but it feels like we're getting drowned in a toilet at the moment.
When people living otherwise-blameless lives begin getting accosted, beaten, or killed on suspicion of the legal equivalent of unpaid parking tickets, then yes, the new enforcement occurring is indeed "evil."
When they start willfully breaking all sorts of other major laws and violating court-orders to enforce the minor law, yes, that's usually evil.
When rationales last-used to jail innocent Japanese-Americans into US "internment" camps during World War II are being resurrected to declare entire nationalities as foreign invaders, yes, that sure looks a lot like the evil it was before.
When people are being snatched off the streets and then shuffled constantly between prisons purely so that their own lawyers cannot find them to challenge their detention, that is evil.
When you're not just normally deporting people under US law, but start sending them--without trial or even charges--to rot for the rest of their lives in an El Salvador torture-prison run by a paid dictator accomplice, YES, that's f***ing evil!
____
I could continue, but I won't, because those should be ample examples for normal Americans who've had over a year to watch all these well-documented things happen... and there is no amount will be enough for someone that secretly likes the evil when it happens to others.
Still, I appreciate you making the effort to engage in Good Faith!
Histrionics over normal law enforcement that is tame and well-regulated by global standards is embarrassing — it makes Americans look uneducated and childish.
I live in the US. Why should I have to accept the comparatively poor standards of some "shithole country"? (Be sure to recall whose phrase that is.)
Alternatively, you're engaging in willful ignorance.
Yes, it's reasonable to want to enforce immigration laws, but ICE has been engaging in outright criminal behavior. Arresting and imprisoning US citizens, denying due process, then ignoring court orders to release them.
Meanwhile, ICE and DHS are lying constantly on their social media pages.
Sure, ICE does have the authority to perform arrests for some crimes unrelated to immigration, that's not what I'm referring to. ICE is arresting US citizens based on immigration charges.
Actually, hold up for a second... What kind of self-described "lawyer" could possibly ignore that portion... except by operating in bad-faith?:
> denying due process, then ignoring court orders to release them.
Right, even if ICE/CBP were somehow only grabbing non-citizens and only for reasons vaguely within their legal mandate, that other behavior is still criminal. Those constitutional rights, and protections from the court system, apply to everyone in US jurisdiction regardless of their immigration status.
For anyone interested in more detail: "How ICE defies judges’ orders to release detainees, step by step" [0].
[0] https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/10/ice-immigration-det...
Let's start with abandoning science funding, abandoning investments in and tax credits for renewable energy sources that are the future. Then there's applying political pressure to academic institutions to drive even more researchers away, abandoning the civil service and science/reason-based governance. Move over to the medical sector and put a dangerous anti-science nut in charge, kill off funding and research.
You pull out of international organizations, trade deals, and treaties. You throw temper tantrums and tariffs around, flip flopping day to day and making it impossible to predict the costs of doing business. You antagonize the rest of the world and give them a constant stream of reasons to stop doing business with you, leaving you isolated, weaker, and poorer.
Then, sure, let's go briefly to immigration. America has been great because it has been where all the smartest people want to be. Our political and academic environment caused the smartest people around the world to want to be here, and the US benefited massively from their contributions and inventions.
So you build a culture demonizing anyone not a specific shade of white. You destroy visa programs. You send thugs to universities to harass people and make them unwelcome. You tell students and researchers who went home to see family that they can't come back to the US. Then you send thugs into cities to terrorize and murder people. So you give all those brilliant scientists even more reason to leave the US, take their contributions with them, and never return.
That's how you kill America.
That would cause far more destruction than merely telling people you were doing that without actually doing it.
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/ice-detainees-succe...
“A gang is a group or society of associates, friends, or members of a family with a defined leadership and internal organization that identifies with or claims control over territory in a community and engages, either individually or collectively, in illegal, and possibly violent, behavior, with such behavior often constituting a form of organized crime.”
I’d say that fits some law enforcement pretty well.
It always has been in America. Literally, the history of policing starts with armed gangs looking for escaped slaves, and never went away from those roots. You can see this in their "us or them" combative mentalities, their utter refusal to hold officers accountable even when obviously guilty, their tactics when governments try to impose rules on them, and everything else they do.
In China they put people to death for corruption, here they just get a well-paid lobbying job.
That said, I would agree to "may soon become if we don't stop it." We aren't there yet, but we're on a bad trajectory.
Nah we’re not playing this game.
Try asking the CCP officials in person about Uyghur internment camps, or Tiananmen Square, and see if your family isn’t all arrested.
Ask Olympian Alysa Liu how the CCP targeted her father to try to coerce her to skate for China.
this is a very shortsighted view. america's only real competitor technologically right now is china, because america has typically attracted the top talent from everywhere else.
if america is no longer capable of attracting top talent from everywhere else in the world, and other countries can start attracting american talent, it won't be long before america has a whole lot of real competitors.
The American education system has major and important challenges, such as how to educate the large share of kids whose parents are economic migrants from non-English speaking countries. But those challenges aren’t relevant to the question of whether the U.S. can produce sufficient highly educated people domestically. China, meanwhile, doesn’t even participate in PISA outside four wealthy provinces.
Also - less financialization. In US, a statistician goes to work for any 3-letter agency or high finance. In a less financialized economy they might devote themselves to crystallography instead.
The whole point of no child left behind was to actually measure student performance instead of relying on feelings: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/no-child-left-behind-wo...
If you try to disaggregate the effects of e.g. immigration, you can see that American education is actually good: https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/18bzkle/2022_pi....
White students in the U.S. do comparably to students in Korea in the international PISA test, and better than students from western europe (excluding the immigrants in those countries).
You have to compare like with like. A huge fraction of American kids grow up to parents who are not native speakers of English. That’s not true in Japan or Korea.
That is consistent with other international measurements: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=1. For example, the U.S. is one of the top performers in the world in the 4th grade literacy--behind Hong Kong but ahead of Macau. In 4th grade math, the U.S. isn't as good, well behind Hong Kong, Singapore, and Japan. But still comfortably ahead of Germany, Italy, Spain, and France.
China or Saudi Arabia can wave their money around, but at least some people will be repulsed by the obligation to keep their mouths shut and praise the Dear Leader.
Their cultural insularity does not help either. You can live in China, but you will never be accepted as Chinese. The US was quite unique (together with Canada, Australia etc.) that it was able and willing to accept you as an American even with a funny accent, as long as you wanted to be one.
Of course, both of these are in the crosshairs for “revision”.
Also, the green card process very much depends on your nationality.
Well, based on the current admin and supporters, only part of the US was unique
Big cities and metropolitan areas are very progressive and welcoming to well educated foreigners, and the countryside is filled with racist idiots who live in fear of something they only know from the television
One Nation are flat racist rather than xenophobe, I think.
And it's being pushed by our billionaires for some reason. You'd think Gina would want cheap immigrant workers on her mines
I still don’t quite understand why. The contact hypothesis makes some sense but can that explain the whole urban rural divergence?
Rural populations will even vote hard against their own interests in other areas over culture war stuff.
Dump a few hundred foreigners in a town of 5000 and that’s very noticeable and some people will find it jarring. Dump ten thousand foreigners in a metro of three million and nobody will notice.
The point about conformism and exile cost is good too. Cities present endless options for social circles and employment. Little towns not so much.
Somewhat related recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46989124
Ok It probably matters during elections and the policies that lead up to them (must appease the rural vote with mostly symbolic and emotionally wretching anti-immigrant rhetoric) but cities need skilled (and unskilled) labour and when they get what they need they stand to generate a lot of money (re taxes to the policy makers from earlier).
Well, using Texas as an example, it's those people 50km away that win elections. Of course, gerrymandering helps, but even with large metro areas leaning left, there's enough of those 50km away that swings that lean to the right.
Ignore the people in the rural areas as your own peril
When the part of the country that was less unique took power, they immediately did what everyone else that was not unique did and became unwelcoming of foreigners.
I guess to you other countries that the US is becoming more like would also not be of a hive mind by having people that are welcoming of foreigners. Where's your hive mind comment about that part of the original comment?
Are you also implying that in the US anyone is free to speak negatively of “dear leader”?
There are a multitude of current examples to the contrary.
Whether you're born in Moscow and named Sergey Mikhailovich Brin, or born in Pretoria and named Elon Reeve Musk, or born in Hyderabad and named Satya Narayana Nadella, born in Frankfurt and named Peter Andreas Thiel - America has a place for you. Maybe even your own government department.
In America a man can find acceptance regardless of the circumstances of his birth, and irrespective of race, creed and colour, so long as he has a billion dollars.
I see negative opinions of government officials constantly.
It's basically all I see whenever I have the misfortune of turning on the TV.
The only difference between channels is which government official is criticized.
I mean we are literally putting people in concentration camps right now. Kinda hard to take the moral high ground at the moment. Scientists are fleeing the United States for their safety, just like they did from 1930s Germany.
And then comparing that to genocidal camps for Germans and conquered subjects?
Just making sure I'm reading this correctly here.
Though concentration camps are almost always part of systematic, ethnically-targetted abuse, even when they aren't part of genocide campaigns.
But these are not like the concentration camps of the 1940s.
"Detention camps" are a more accurate descriptor -- both technically and connotatively -- when they are holding foreign nationals prior to repatriation.
I also don’t know who told you that they’re only putting illegal migrants in Alligator Alcatraz. It’s not hard to find examples of people who had legal visas being rounded up because of the Trump administration’s idiotic quota policy.
They are quite literally opposites.
Because people understand that people don't get to choose their government or culture and that everyone deserves better healthcare. Every child who is at risk from the rise of anti-vax 100% deserves better vaccines and ought to bear 0% responsibility for what the adults do.
It is when researchers can't make enough money to eat and live, which is an actual reality in the US right now.
Researchers at top institutions often make less than Uber drivers.
There are other countries where you can live on less and the government isn't dipping their hands into your pockets every 5 seconds.
Yeah, it used to be the that the US only committed ethnic cleansing against people that were here first, not foreigners, and was so welcoming to foreigners that it would expend resources to have them shipped here as property.
DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic pay quite well for research and have better "labs" than most places on Earth. I don't believe they're struggling to hire either.
This article is using a relatively outdated definition, functionally speaking, of "research institute".
Traditional research institutions, especially academia, have been declining for decades and current funding problems are just another one of many problems thrown into the mix.
I remember well a world where most serious research happened in universities and was publicly funded. I personally think that was a better world, but that is not the world we live in today and I don't see us going back. Even China's most impressive research is not coming from publicly controlled research institutes or universities but from VCs and large corporations.
To be fair, the time of open public science was a relatively brief in it's long history.
In software San Francisco is still the top for AI research: even when Peter Steinberger didn't know what he will do with OpenClaw, it was clear to him that the only place to move to was USA.
Terrence Tao was a good example of what happens when an exceptionally smart person stops getting funded by an American University: not moving to another country, but got VC money and created a new company.
USA politics is looked at so closely, because it matters and changes and still more democratic than most countries in the world even though democracy is a mess (as it's supposed to be).
You make it sound like Europe was not a leader in any area of science until this one thing which they led in for a few years.
> Terrence Tao was a good example of what happens when an exceptionally smart person stops getting funded by an American University: not moving to another country, but got VC money and created a new company
No, he's an example of what can happen when a Fields medalist gets funding cut. 99% of exceptionally smart university mathematicians and scientists will not be able to get VC money.
With the US both cutting research funding and becoming unfriendly to foreign students many future Tao's that would have chosen a US school for grad school will likely look elsewhere.
What was the last thing that a major US Lab published? It's all trade secrets.
Chinese labs are the only ones publishing results as they happen.
The US is in the position it was for semiconductor manufacturing, first it was labs and open science. Then by the 80s fabs started costing millions and universities stopped being able to contribute and nothing got published.
Now it's getting to trillions and if Intel goes under there is no one in the US who knows how to make any semiconductor generation newer than 2010.
>Chinese labs are the only ones publishing results as they happen.
Google published the transformer architecture. Facebook published llama.
We don't know how much OpenAI offered him, but I would bet big that it was enough to get most people to relocate across country lines. [To level-set: we know Meta was offering $100m pay packages to researchers who had not already released something like OpenClaw.]
He’s moving from London after all, arguably the global AI research hub.
(Also likely SA told him the offer was contingent on him relocating)
But capital structures and politicians are still too close to old European companies from the second world war and don't allow venture capital to florish.
It's easier to earn money by winning a fake EU tender and giving back half of the money to a politician than doing something innovative.
> The U.S. used to be sort of the default, the no brainer, option. If you got an offer from a top U.S. university, this was like almost the best thing that could happen to you as an academic ... If it's just a less welcoming, atmosphere for science in general here, the best and brightest may not automatically come to the US as they have for decades.
Also in the USA you just wait 4 (or 8) years and you have a new president. In many other countries you don't have that luxury.
That is the intent of these government policies: Shift power and resources to powerful, wealthy private individuals (and their companies). Is Tao doing research?
That seems a bit too optimistic to be a valid argument.
The hiring freeze stops everyone not just that one specific person. A 4 year pause on new researchers is meaningful even if this specific person wasn’t going to start a lab.
I think you misunderstood, since that's not about optimism. Years ago, smart students from all over the world could hope for a successful career in American research. Now, in the USA many doors are closing in most academic domains, and few (potential) researchers dare plan any success story.
There is a tremendous glut of talented biomedical researchers. We have been overproducing them for decades. Even before the cuts, it was incredibly hard to go from a PhD to a tenured professorship. 5-15% would achieve that, depending how you measured.
The cuts have made things worse, but European/RoW funding is even stingier. It's not like there's a firehose of funding drawing away researchers. There may be a few high-profile departures, but the US is still the least-bad place to find research money.
We need to produce fewer PhDs and provide better support for those we do produce.
Secondly, it's about more than funding. The US is also no longer safe for a great many of the scientists that would normally choose come to the US to work. And even for those that aren't too worried about ICE, scientists tend to be very liberal and value freedom and democracy a great deal. The US has suddenly become a very undesirable place to live if you value these things.
Third, scientific freedom is under attack in the US. And there is nothing scientists value more than the freedom to pursue their research.
My take is that most Americans can't imagine a world where they are not number one. But that is a very naive idea.
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/innovation-science-economic-develop...
Research money in Canada is harder to come by; a basic research grant is roughly ~5x-10x lower than a comparable American grant (students are cheaper here, so its not completely proportional, but equipment, travel, etc doesn't scale).
The example for money for poaching international researchers also comes with the asterisk that while they found ~$2B for this, they also are cutting the base funding of the federal granting agencies by a few percent at the same time, atop of that funding being anemic for decades at this point. A big "fuck you" to the Canadian research community in my opinion.
What is the alternative? Canada and Europe don't even have free speech.
This illustrates exactly my point. Canada is planning on spending up to CAD$1.7B over 12 years. That is equivalent to USD$100M per year, or 0.3% of the NIH 2026 budget. Maybe if Europe does something similar they can get to 2%!
> The US is also no longer safe
I agree that Trump's regime has made the US a less welcoming place for foreign scientists, and that budget cuts mean less research will be done. What I disagree with is the idea that "brain drain" is a significant threat to US science. We simply have such an incredible oversupply of biomed PhDs that we should welcome the prospect of other countries absorbing the supply.
As others have pointed out, presumably the outcome is that higher value scientists are favored, and higher impact research is demanded. When industry demands certain research, the funding appears because private entities will fund those positions and those grants. The widespread funding of all avenues of science is a great feature of American intellectual culture and hopefully it doesn't vanish. But it was a remarkably uneconomical arrangement and a total aberration of history, so I wouldn't hold my breath about it sticking around through the tides of history, it was more of a fluke, and many in academia wishing to regenerate that fluke are a bit delusional and a bit tied to the idea of a golden era like the boomers dreaming of the 1950s suburbs. A great deal of research is important science, but totally worthless for the foreseeable future on an economic basis. We might not yet conceive of why this research does have economic value, but it's so abstracted that as it stands, the value isn't tangible and it's thus impossible to defend reasonably.
Scientific freedom doesn't mean the freedom to expect a subsidized career on the basis of non-lucrative research. It's more of a privilege to have such a lifestyle that is downstream of a wealthy empire. Since America is going bankrupt, the dollar-reaper is coming for the superfluous. So, there goes your funding for conure breeding or the health benefits of community gardens and expect more stability if you're researching crop diseases or livestock vector research.
Nor does he or ever did have the support of "(over) half the country". His maximum approval level in 2025 was at the beginning of his term at 47% "approve" and is currently around 36%, according to the Gallup poll.
The popular vote does not matter in the US. The electoral college matters.
(Also, "non-negative" is carrying a lot of weight, since both Trump in his first term and George W. Bush in his first lost the popular vote. The idea that a wide majority of the country is conservative, let alone MAGA, is risible.)
It was under half of the voters in the election itself as well. He won with a plurality, not a majority.
two election results in the past ten years have apparently failed to teach y'all wholesome folx that many people around you are secretly unwholesome.
That is happening right now, all the time! Especially in the biomed field! Many, many PhDs spend 5-8 years getting their degree and receiving minimal pay, then 4+ years being nomadic postdocs, also making terrible money, only to eventually arrive at the end of the road and realize they have to do something completely different.
It is unsustainable for every professor to train 10 PhDs in their career, because there aren't going to be 10 professorships (or even 3) for those PhDs to fill. Funding has to grow at the same exponential rate as the number of researchers. It did, from roughly 1950s to 1980s, as the university system expanded to accommodate the Boomer generation. It has slowed since, and the PhD to professorship pipeline got longer and leakier. It's doing a tremendous disservice to the bright, well-intentioned young people who join PhD programs.
Also, those scientists already exist. If the US decides not to fund them, they will go produce patents and grow the economies of other places. Many countries wish they could attract the talent that the US does.
In most of the world, most humans have to move within the realm of available resources. One could easily say that if a manager of US sees too many PhDs, it is natural to conclude that since there is not enough resources to go around, adding more resource consumers is silly. We can argue all over whether it is a good policy, or whether the allocation makes sense, or whether the resources are really not there, but, how is is this a difficult logic gate?
Further, reduction in funds for public resources or increase in misery for scientists are not in and of themselves evidence that those resources were over-funded or too cushy. For the research discussed in the article it is quite clearly a political decision, not directly grounded in a need for less medical research.
It invariably always is.
<< The need for things exists independent of the standalone economic viability of those things.
Sure, but there is only so long that can go on funding studying of rather pointless stuff[1] ( added UK example to not be accused of hating on anything in particular US-wise ).
[1]https://web-archive.southampton.ac.uk/cogprints.org/5272/1/g...
<< Further, reduction in funds for public resources or increase in misery for scientists are not in and of themselves evidence that those resources were over-funded or too cushy.
I am not suggesting that. I am literally saying: there is only so much money. That is it. And if push comes to shove, studies of whether chicken finds humans pretty take a back seat to more pressing matters.
After seeing the motor, the politician asked “what good is it?” and based on what I can find Faraday either said “what use is a newborn baby” or “one day you’ll be able to tax it”.
So two points: One, you don’t always know things will have a high ROI from the start. Sometimes you just have to be curious. And two, politicians care about the next election in two/four years, not planting trees that won’t bear fruit for 30 years.
The US is currently choosing to divert absolutely staggering amounts of those resources away from things we have traditionally valued—science, art, infrastructure, taking care of the least fortunate among us, etc—and using them instead to enrich the already-wealthy, in the most blatant and cruel ways.
There is no possible way this can be spun as being about "available resources". The grift is utterly, 100% transparent.
Eh, I mean if you put it that way, I suppose all those budgets are just a show and not at all an indication of how utterly fucked we are as a country unless we both:
a) massively reduce spending b) massively raise taxes
In very real terms, there is only so much money. Some additional money can be borrowed, but we a slowly ( but surely ) reaching a breaking point on that as well.
The issue is: no one is willing to sacrifice anything. And I am sympathetic, but if hard choices are not made now, they will be kinda made for us anyway.
We need to claw back billions and billions and billions of dollars from people for whom it will make zero difference in their daily lives, so that we can spend it on people for whom $100 can change their month, and $10000 can change their life.
Ultimately I don't think even the billionaires would be unhappy.
All of this was by design so that big corporate interests could get cheap labor and increase profits. Since the US government is for sale to the highest bidder, and the corporations have no loyalty to the country, they will feed off the host until it can no longer sustain itself and then look for another host to feed off of.
Americans really put up with low standards in a lot of areas, and it becomes obvious the more you travel.
The claim that you get thrown in jail in London "just for sharing your opinion" is a myth, unless your opinion is, "round up everyone of race X, put them in a hotel, and burn the hotel down."
otherwise, your incredulity to such a belief is why the far-right continues to gain a constituency in Europe and elsewhere. so instead of dismissing the concern, which fuels the far-right, you could just acknowledge it is a real thing people are experiencing, and that it doesn't help a liberal free society to criminalize thoughts that are unsavory to the political elite.
https://x.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/1050391663552671744?lang...
Conservative: I have been censored for my conservative views
Me: Holy shit! You were censored for wanting lower taxes?
Con: LOL no...no not those views
Me: So....deregulation?
Con: Haha no not those views either
Me: Which views, exactly?
Con: Oh, you know the ones
A bunch of dunces.
Or perhaps they are so far up their own assholes that they think AI is going to do research by itself with no funding from now on.
Ironically enough, the guy that coined the term "soft power" recently died. He did his doctorate with Henry Kissinger.
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/07/us/trump-fede...
They are also attacking Harvard, the number 1 science university in the US. There's a scandal at Harvard last month where the Dean of Science was fired because he was protesting against eliminating graduate students in the sciences (they eventually settled for something like firing him and 50% cuts to my knowledge). I have no love for Harvard by the way, I never thought I would be defending them.
Most of all they hate intelligent people as they see their schemes for what they are.
The US having a dogshit healthcare delivery system but so much research means that good vertical integration is not possible.
Conversely a more integrated EU — continent scale welfare state — could do really interesting "integrated OpEx and CapEx" medical research in ways that are simply impossible in the US.
Remember the Danes making Ozempic is making something that is fundamentally far more useful for Americans than Danes (of course the money is good for Danes). Most non-American drug research today probably chases the lucrative American market, but ideally that would change.
I'm sure the system you want would exist if healthcare providers had one customer to worry about: the US government. I can't think of a single doctor, the ones that actually want to help people and not cash a phat check, that likes the current system of filling out paperwork or begging to do surgeries for patients from insurance companies.
Most actually want to just provide care.
Get rid of the middle man, get rid of the profit motive, and you'll get a system that society can actually shape.
Other countries need to take up the mantle of research and they can't do that if all of them go to the US. I think this is overall good for the rest of the world, because relying on the US and the sociopathic companies that exploit public research for personal gain is bad for the entire world.
Political goals and what's good for the average person are completely disconnected at this point.
Oh no. We might lose the largest most expensive medical system in the world. I would sure hate to have an affordable lightweight medical system. I mean, aren't we doomed if we can't spend another five trillion dollars on a covid shot. Think of the poor pharma companies.
Well the Swiss are not in EU either, but both are still in Europe
On federal level they are still at about 25% without an option to come into power. It is bad, but it is not hopeless, yet.
I made the leap this year. No regrets.
(Like seriously, it turns out to be pretty useful in practice. :) )
But I'm not going to move to a country if I know that every quarterly dividend would leave me with 25-50% less money on my bank account.
1. you have a solid pension
2. you should care about capital gains taxes
3. you're REALLY rich and don't care.
No, you don't. You still have to file but you get "Federal Tax Credits" for income tax paid abroad and seeing how a EU country's income tax will almost certainly be higher than the US', you'll end up paying nothing. There's also tax treaties to avoid double taxation in other ways.
"Expats" living in Europe? I ask because "expat" usually refers to someone who moved to a lower cost of living country that may also have significantly lower income tax compared to the EU.
> It looks like the Federal Tax Credit only covers up to $130,000 per year of income.
$130k/yr is absolute bank in Europe. From a quick Google search, that would put you well in the top 5% of earners in Berlin, just as an example. So, this shouldn't be much of an issue.
The country must have a tax treaty with US, so they exchange the info about your taxes in background. But many countries in EU has higher tax rates than US, then you owe $0.
Also, if the US restores their democracy and also decides to value science again, will the salaries for scientists abroad compete enough to prevent scientists moving back.
To maintain a sustainable lead the money and investment has to be substantial and long term.
China also has been playing the long game with the build out of it's technology capabilities. I could very easily see them doing the same for medicine. They aren't afraid of losing money on investment for a particularly long period of time. They are currently thinking in decades and not quarters.
We don’t have elections anymore? When did this happen?
It is fair to say that the USA is still a democracy, but not because of elections. Elections have little to do with democracy. In fact, if the majority of the population hold the view that elections equate to democracy, you don't have a democracy.
On a more serious note any of the freedoms people are talking about disappearing in the USA were either already long gone or a decade further down the road of dying in Europe. Hell they are routinely jailing people for speech now.
We've been building Bio-Twin (biotwin.io) partly for exactly this reason -- AI pre-screening that externalizes the safety logic so it's not dependent on which scientist is still employed. Not pitching, just -- this is a real downstream consequence of the brain drain that seems underdiscussed here.