Posted by yowzadave 3 days ago
If it’s COVID-related mandates like vaccines and lockdowns, then surely it’s obvious that NASA had nothing to do with that?
There is no single issue that I can see linking all of these science organizations together. Even if it’s about budget, there are bigger targets.
What is NASA’s mission in your mind? What is the point of what they’re doing if not to use science and the knowledge resulting from practicing science to benefit humanity? NASA’s web pages, for one, do happen to say exactly that in multiple ways. Is there some congressional funding agreement you’re aware of that limits or prevents NASA from engaging in certain scientific topics?
Also what problem do have with this paper? It seems like it’s saying something that’s widely known and non-controversial. It maybe adds new kinds of data and support to the thing we already knew, but it’s largely a meta review of many other papers that also demonstrate what we already know, that it’s common for poorer people to live in worse conditions than richer people.
Sure, I make more money here, but is it worth dealing with nonsensical immigration policies, haphazard funding cuts, crumbling infrastructure, completely random rulemaking, and demoralized colleagues facing severe and nonsensical budget cuts when various other countries with a good standard of living and competitive research labs make immigration very easy for skilled people like scientists?
It isn't specifically a Trump thing, but he's certainly proving to be the straw that broke the camel's back, and it's likely I'll go elsewhere once my postdoc appointment ends.
I can imagine that the decision is even easier for people from countries like China. Why deal with the stress of the government suddenly deciding that you aren't allowed to work at your institution anymore regardless of track record or background, (many chinese colleagues have been worried about the proposed legislation and it comes up often), when you can work at a similarly cutting edge institution back home? You just have to determine if the US being less authoritarian on certain things is valuable enough to put up with the awful treatment through the long immigration process.
AI is just an enabling of the the imagination of the now widened bracket of behavior.
As has been often remarked on. this is a really shit timeline to exist in.
[1] https://www.wipo.int/web/global-innovation-index/w/blogs/202...
But other countries don't need to increase funding to become competitive, since we are decreasing funding. All they have to do is nothing.
If one parent loses their job and cannot get a new one in their field, they have to either switch career (and start a new career at a lower point) or they take a longer-term view, assume that the other parent will also lose their job, and switch country.
The following is anecdotal and I don’t have any statistics. When I was a PhD student at UC Santa Cruz, roughly half of my classmates were foreigners, many from mainland China and India, but also from Iran, South Korea, Greece, Uruguay, and Mexico, to name a few. My first advisor was a German who became a naturalized American citizen, and while roughly half of my professors were native-born Americans, I also had professors from China, Ireland, Greece, Singapore, and Argentina. During my time in industry in Silicon Valley as a researcher, I’ve worked with many people who grew up abroad and moved to the United States for grad school.
The biggest issue I see with a brain drain in America isn’t necessarily Americans going abroad, since it would be a major sacrifice giving up family and friends to move to a place with an unfamiliar language and culture. The problem I see is when immigrants to America who have already made those sacrifices end up leaving America, either to return to their countries of origin or to different countries. If a significant number of immigrant scientists leave America, this will be a tremendous blow to American science, and this may also be a boon to countries that are willing and able to hire these talented people.
China, for example, has the money to fund science at levels competitive with the United States. I don’t foresee a lot of Americans moving to China, partly due to the language barrier, and also partly due to China’s political system. However, what if Chinese researchers in the United States return to China en masse? This is not good for us, though it would be great for China.
These are scary times in America.
So, all those people you met did exactly this.
> it would be hard for American scientists with spouses and children to relocate.
No harder than it was for any of those other people to relocate to the USA.
I know that Americans like to believe that everyone in the rest of the world really wants to live in the USA, but that's actually not true. There's a certain fascination, for sure, but (and especially recently) the USA is not the shining beacon on the hill that it once was.
> I don’t foresee a lot of Americans moving to China, partly due to the language barrier, and also partly due to China’s political system
I suspect that both these barriers are easily overcome with the simple realisation that the choice is "be a scientist in China, or not at all".
If the USA cuts funding for all science, then all scientists must move abroad. There's no option to stay in the USA and be a scientist, because science in the USA is government funded and the government stopped funding it. If the individual chooses to stay in the USA, then they must also choose to stop being a scientist.
Learning Spanish in high-school isn't quite the same as learning to function in a new culture and language.
The language thing is real, and shared with other anglophone countries. Though there is an upside; almost everyone else speaks English, so it's likely that when you get to your new home you'll be able to be understood while you learn their language.
I spent a few years in Berlin, and worked there for two different German companies while struggling to learn the language. Everyone smoothly switched to English, sometimes mid-sentence, when I entered the chat. A German moving to the USA (or any anglophone country) would not have this experience and would have to get fluent in English really quickly.
This is anecdotal, but I am currently in Japan as a visiting researcher at a Japanese university during my summer break; I'm a tenure-track computer science instructor at a Silicon Valley community college. This is my 13th time in Japan and my second-longest stay. I love being in Japan and it's a mission of mine to have ties to Japan for the rest of my life.
I'm in my mid-thirties, single with no children, and I'm knowledgeable of Japanese culture (including the work culture; I've interned in Japan for eight months and I've worked for a Silicon Valley branch of a Japanese company for six years) and I have the ability to have basic conversations in Japanese (I'm still studying with an aim for fluency), and so if push came to shove and I found myself with a bleak future in America, I could move to Japan long-term and adapt. In fact, it's a dream of mine to own a home in Japan.
However, it will still be a sacrifice. I would need to find a job either as a researcher or as a software engineer; a pure teaching career at the university level in Japan would be difficult for me until I become fluent in Japanese. Lower salaries plus the weak yen means it will be tough for me to pay off my dollar-denominated debts, including my student loans. In addition, I would like to get married and start a family one day, and while I'm treated well in Japan, I'm concerned about the treatment my children would face here (I'm a black American); it's one thing being a researcher at a Japanese institution, it's another thing being a child, especially a child with African ancestry.
Then again, the situation in America is deteriorating, with academia and science being under attack by our administration with breathtaking speed, and with anti-minority racism and xenophobia becoming normalized again in everyday society. Even if the Democrats win the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election, we still have a very large voter base who is completely on-board with MAGA. Barring a situation that leads to the complete repudiation of MAGA by the American public as a whole, MAGA is going to remain a force in politics for decades to come, which will be my entire working career, and there will probably be future MAGA presidents in the 2030s and 2040s. The idea of a liberal democratic republic with liberal institutions that respect diversity and have an international view is under attack in America, and if MAGA succeeds, life will be more difficult for academics and minorities in America. I just don't know if there are any countries out there that resemble this old vision of America; perhaps Canada and Australia are the closest things.
Job-wise, I'm at a community college where we are not as reliant on federal funding compared to research universities, but I'm monitoring the situation carefully, and I need to be prepared for a situation where circumstances force me into alternative employment, including moving abroad.
My thoughts are very similar regarding the future of things in the US. Though I feel that the situation may be a bit more bleak, because even if democrats win, I don't really see things changing. They have a penchant for talking a lot and doing very little. As you said, barring a complete repudiation of MAGA, it's going to remain awful for quite a while.
Aren't all the non-bankruptible tuition fees providing plenty of funding already? Where's that money going? The football team?
The minister has followed the recent developments in the United States closely:
"Academic freedom is under pressure in the United States, and it is an unpredictable situation for many researchers in what has been the world's leading research nation for many decades. We have had close dialogue with the Norwegian knowledge communities and my Nordic colleagues about the development. It has been important for me to find good measures that we can put in place quickly, and therefore I have asked the Research Council to prioritize grant funding schemes that we can implement rapidly," says Aasland.
The program is meant to last years, we'll see how it goes.
Now I know, $10m ain't much in the grand scheme of things, but we're just 5 million folks over here.
[1]: https://www.forskningsradet.no/en/news/2025/100-million-nok-...
[1]: https://www.politico.eu/article/meet-first-academic-refugees...
Kind of like the tariffs or the Tiktok ban that's totally going to go into effect after the most recent extended grace period ends.
So it makes sense that the current raises aren't big enough to make up the shortfall. They're aniticipatory in nature, with the assumption that the actual cuts will be a lot less crazy, and increases to take advantage of a talent exodus will take some time to ramp up.
Norway's overall science budget is $1 billion per year, or $200/person/year. US's was $200 billion/year or $600/person/year. So Norway isn't really pulling its weight.
[1]: https://www.fpol.no/det-norske-statsbudsjettet-2025-gir-en-n...
[2]: https://nifu.brage.unit.no/nifu-xmlui/handle/11250/3166076 (second page, first section)
This was my leading thought as well.
> Surprising if it's more per capita than the US though.
Well we do have these pipes in the ocean that spew money... Our oil fund is currently contributing 25% of the national budget, despite being below the somewhat stringent self-imposed spending rule[1].
You might want to say tuition should support research, but the reality is that it doesn't.
That's one of the things I like about teaching at a community college; whether or not I get tenure is based largely on my teaching performance, with service to the college and community making up the remainder of my evaluation. While I don't have upper-division undergrads, grad students, or postdocs, I have no research pressures whatsoever, which, interestingly enough, is the ultimate form of research freedom. I don't have a lot of time during the school year since I teach a 4-4 load, but I'm officially off duty during my one-month winter break and my 2.5-month summer break, which means I could do whatever I want during my breaks, including research (I'm actually in Japan right now as a visiting researcher at a Japanese university).
There are some teaching-oriented universities that have different balances regarding the importance of teaching and research in making tenure/promotion decisions, ranging from comprehensive masters-focused universities like those in the California State University system to private liberal arts colleges such as Swarthmore.
I personally think undergraduate at a big (research) university is bad for most students. But the prestige ain't nothing.
But, if university is going to be so expensive, then we the people, and especially the students are being double-taxed - first for the education, and then to support research.
The irony of ironies is that all that research is going to put all those students that paid for it out of a job!
Let’s say you go to Ohio State. The out of state (unsubsidized) tuition comes out to about $37,000 for full time tuition. That’s around 108 hours of instruction per year by my estimation.
Students are paying $342 per lecture hour, which means each professor is bringing in between $3000-30,000 per hour.
Sure they have to grade papers but…come on, right?
How is this not wildly profitable?
This does not include room and board, which has to be even more wildly profitable. Imagine being able to charge $1200 a month for a shared room with no kitchen or private bathroom with some cafeteria slop as included food.
I finished a formal university degree recently and probably only 1/4 of my professors were actually actively decent and all the lessons were heavily recycled copy paste jobs that get passed around the department.
Online school makes this an even worse value since the professor just grades electronic work and spends one hour a week on chat hours, with the rest of the lectures being pre-recorded or pre-written.
To be clear, I personally believe the government of wealthy nations should fully cover the cost of higher education to anyone who wants it because it’s a no-brainer obvious investment that pay off in positive societal ROI. My commentary simply concerns the status quo where costs are high despite subsidy and endowments still existing.
And most universities don't have any significant endowment and they don't work like what you think. Most of these are money for specific goal. i.e as rich alumni of CS program I can donate $100m and ask the university to invest them or put them in a bank and then pay grants for CS students. The university is legally bounded to not use the money for anything else. But this will be counted as +$100m endowment money for my university.
Planet fitness can make a killing on $20/month gym memberships but supposedly the campus recreation center is the bleeding me dry?
This also doesn’t explain how my online state school only had a slight discount over in-person instruction to take classes online. Like I said in my first comment, my professors only performed live instruction for an hour a week and taught with recycled and off-the-shelf materials.
Unsubsidized tuition room and board is higher than the median individual salary.
I think that if there was some kind of mandate or incentive to reduce costs that we would suddenly see cost reduction with very little compromise. But as it stands, everyone involved is incentivized to keep prices as high as possible.
Using taxes is different, as public money and how it is used is the result of either consensus or some authority’s judgement that some public money should be invested in research for the sake of the common good. Even here, the privatization of profits and socialization of losses is criminal, not to mention the gatekeeping of research results funded by public money.
No. Having worked in academia for years, most of my funding came from the NSF. Sometimes it was from the state government, or private organizations partnering with us instead. Usually the university took a 50%+ cut of the grants we got as "overhead" too...
Thankfully, since grants started putting caps on how much the university is allowed to take I haven't seen a 50% overhead cut in a long time. It's still a pretty significant chunk though.
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/38843335-64cd-4c03-bdbc-a77...
Look at them now.
https://www.history.com/articles/slavery-profitable-southern...
But the deep irrationality driving artificial opportunistic ideological divides (this time less raw white supremacy, but still a lot of xenophobia, party loyalty propaganda, cult of personality, and fear and backlash with respect to minorities), drives sub-cultures like lemmings, off the cliff of reality. Taking the rest of us with them.
Obvious even as it becomes unstoppable.
A lot of times the effects are invisible. I doubt everyday Mississippians even think about how slavers stole their future from them. Americans barely ever think about the trillions of dollars that the Iraq war wasted/stole.
The continually incrementally enslaved majority is told that each thing they give up is just a temporary sacrifice until they have lost all their freedoms. Even then, their hardships are blamed on scapegoats, to maintain their “leader’s” grip on their minds and loyalty.
Anyone raising alarms is a traiter.
Watching the Republican Party metamorphose into group think, hero worship, the last couple decades has been deeply troubling.
Seeing the inability of any effective opposition or remedy, has been equally troubling.
That’s a massive accomplishment, and kinda proves that a whole bunch of people there were victims of circumstance, a do or die situation.
Never underestimate the ability of a small percentage of malevolent people to upend society.