Posted by azhenley 7 hours ago
Also, I agree 100%. Some people don’t like foreigners at US schools, thinking that those foreigners are taking spots away from worthy Americans. I think the only thing worse is if the foreigners stop wanting to come to US schools because of the implications about how far the American education system has fallen.
You can deport illegal immigrants without taking away their dignity and without frightening the ever living shit out of everyone. But this isn't that. The intention is fear.
If the democratic party is going to win, they need to succinctly and stoically state a handful of memorable counterpoints to appeal to the common man. What we have had for the past decade is a ton of noise from the mainstream media explaining a million reasons why we should oppose Trump. The left wing does not equip it's supporters to argue against the right well.
Trump won in 2016 rattling on about Hillary's emails. Trump didn't give a million reasons for us to oppose Hillary, he had 1. He would have a single canned response and name for each of his opponents. The point is you have to agree on a couple of memorable weak points to attack.
Which 1? Building the wall? Draining the swamp? Locking her up? Making America great again? I may be missing more.
The most important thing is that these are points that are so simple even an idiot can understand them.
I can't even keep track of all of trump's controversies because they are so numerous and complex. But if I was a democrat I would just stick to one or two points that even moderates can resonate with like the "Epstein Files" or Palantir or the nuclear secrets or something.
That is how democratic party loose and I suspect people who push for it know exactly that.
Trumo won by being emotional, entertainingly toxic and sucking media attention. "Stoic" calm just makes you look like a weak sucker.
One my dad reliably latches on to is “they’re going to take your guns”. Trump used this, I’m pretty sure, all three races. Weirdly there were never even moves toward doing this the time he lost. It’s as if this was just bullshit. But, it gets voters fired up (getting people to show up for you is more important than swaying anyone to your side)
Lots of people voted for him this time for overtime and tips being tax-exempt. Some (especially on the overtime thing) have since come to regret it when the fine print didn’t include them, but it got their vote.
He ran on lots of issues. “Build the wall” echos what tons of Republican voters have been saying for decades. Their politicians wouldn’t do it—hell, Trump didn’t, he just half-assed a little bit of it and called it done—because it’s a really bad idea, but he sold people on the notion that he’d get it done, where “it” was something they’d long wanted done.
Many other issues like that, that did get him votes.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of democratic politicians are openly against outright bans and quite a few of them even mean it—Democrats managing to pass even some better version of the extremely-partial AWB is fantasy any time soon, and I very much doubt they’d get half their own people to vote to restrict firearms any more than that. (Setting aside that the courts have recently set perhaps the narrowest scope for allowable gun restrictions in the country’s history, so it might not matter even if they could pass any of this)
"A republic, if you can keep it" -- Ben Franklin
I believe there has long been a significant gap between what national-stage elected republicans say and do, and what Republican voters say and want them to do.
Frankly, what Republican voters say they want is often a lot meaner than anything their politicians were delivering. I’ve not only heard “why don’t they just build a wall?” from ordinary not-terminally-online R voters, I’ve heard, many times going back 20+ years, “they should just mine the border”. Kilmeade’s comment about just killing homeless people who wouldn’t accept aid (who cares why they don’t, I guess)? I’ve heard it, that’s not new, what’s new is people that prominent saying it.
R voter sentiment also veers far away from the (Republican-initiated) neoliberal (ex-)consensus on trade. (Incidentally, this also isn’t popular on the left, but both major parties agreed on it for more than 30 years, so it didn’t matter).
Dropping lots of foreign aid? Mass government worker firings? Sending the army in to cities to fight out-of-control crime or brutally quelling riots with the army (that one’s on the “we’ll see” list but if we get four full years, the smart money says we will see it)? Normal stuff to hear on a wishlist from an awful lot of R voters. They’ll just tell you this stuff.
I could go on.
Trump got where he is by exploiting a large gap between what voters want and what parties have been delivering. This gap was huge for the republicans, and there was a little overlap with own-voter dissatisfaction with Democrats. He was able to make voters believe he’d do many of the things they’d long wanted their elected officials to do, but that they weren’t doing, and often weren’t even talking about doing.
They learned that it doesn't matter if it's true, relevant, or hypocritical, as long as it feeds fear and anger in their constituents.
The left fails because the issues they support can require nuance and consideration and that's a lot to ask of a voter who just wants to be told who to vote for.
My assessment isn't meant to be tribal, there's plenty to critique on the left from DNC leadership to "overexubernt" members whose excess is used to define the left as a whole (wokism).
It's heartbreaking that the divide is now complete and is not likely to change without some unfortunate actions.
I'm sorry, but "the left" hardly has a monopoly on that.
But I think the right generally appeals to people with a more tyrannical personality, and vice versa.
it really is a "first they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist..."-esque program at this point
Countries like India, Vietnam, and South Korea have begun replicating the Chinese Thousand Talents program to attract their diasporas back to domestic academia.
Significant domains of CS such as HPC/Systems, Networking, OS internals, etc are heavily dependent on faculty, graduate students, and post-docs who are all on some sort of visa. And increasingly, at least amongst Indians, becuase the backlogs for US citizenship are insane, a number of those people have been taking sweetheart positions at INIs like the new IITs with almost US$100k in public-private lab startup grants on top of a $20k salary (tax free due to the income tax changes) with free housing and car and complete autonomy to consult with private sector players without IP entanglement (one of the biggest headaches for public private STEM R&D partnerships in the US).
Vietnam is doing something similar as well to attract Vietnamese diaspora in SK and Japan, along with Viet Kieu in America and Australia.
A nativist academic culture in STEM in the US would completely destroy any R&D capacity that even exists today.
Well, considering all other countries mentioned here are just hiring native people who worked in US. Indians are not hiring Chinese, or Europeans or any other than natively Indians. Same for Chinese or others. So nativist policy can for those countries but not US is strange.
If one sees crowd at US embassy or consulates in India, US has nothing to worry about talent not trying hard to come to US.
All this analysis about US downfall seems kind of assuming that rest of the world is doing lot better. Traveling to India in last few years and experiencing first hand tells me believing even 1% of these hype generators of India is believing too much.
Since tech wages in the US are the highest anywhere in the world, with the possible exception of Monaco or something, I would imagine Americans don't see a lot of recruiters from elsewhere in the world. I would also imagine that's because it's harder to recruit someone who's earning American wages.
The cost of living in the Bay Area creeps ever upward and absorbs just enough salary to keep the worker bees coming back to the office the next day. It's really not that different of a life than elsewhere in materialistic terms. Except there is also nothing to do other than work or go hiking. More and more people are cluing in.
Furthermore, Indians in America face a 20-80 year permanent residency backlog depending on when they arrived in the US. The majority of Indians nationals in America will eventually return to India as a result.
The US is increasingly viewed as a temporary posting instead of as a naturalization destination becuase of the backlog, and most other Western countries don't provide lucrative offers for the cream of the crop compared to what they can demand in India.
For example, the average new grad salary at IIT Kanpur was around US$30K for the class of 2024 [0], and a mid-career TC of US$60k-70K is realistic for INI grads (as one of the other posters in this thread is an example of).
Most of India's R&D is overwhelmingly generated by alumni of these INIs, and the majority of investment is placed in these programs. These are also the kinds of programs that previously used to represent the bulk of the brain drain 15-20 years ago, but their grads overwhelmingly remain in India unless doing graduate school like a PhD or an MBA (these aren't the kinds of people doing an MSc in Business Analytics at Wollongong in order to get an Australian permanent residency), let alone accepting decades of indentured servitude due to the EB2 processing backlog.
[0] - https://m.economictimes.com/jobs/fresher/iit-kanpur-class-of...
It is true that the govt institutions themselves have less IIT representation, mostly due to low salaries. However, what matters to the private sector is sources of capital. Tech investors in india usually went to IITs themselves, and so the ecosystem always remains close to IITs, allowing professors easy access. Lot of the startups (even YC ones!) by IIT students actually involved one of their professors in the ideation stage, and they even have equity % sometimes. Similar to Rajeev Motwani holding a stake in Google, they get really rich sometimes.
Yep! The University of Waterloo back in Ontario did the same thing in the 1960s, which helped catapult the program into a Tier 1 CSE program comparable to older more established programs like UToronto and UMich.
> Lot of the startups (even YC ones!) by IIT students actually involved one of their professors in the ideation stage, and they even have equity % sometimes
Yep! There are also some NIT, BITS Pilani, IIT, and other program specific networks made by their alumnis in academia and VC. I think Foundation Capital (Netflix, Cerebras, Fortanix) is running one such program.
> It is true that the govt institutions themselves have less IIT representation, mostly due to low salaries
Ministry affiliated universities are a major reason why. For example, ISRO overwhelmingly recruits from IIST, ONGC from IIPE, and other SOEs or R&D programs will recruit from universities specialized in that specific disciple instead of an IIT or NIT now.
Ooh, didn't know that. Interesting.
The obvious overlap with military technology aside, it's a way to retain and increase the institutional knowledge within India across a lot of areas.
The bulk of recruitment at ISRO has always been happening at the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology (IIST) and the Indian Institute of Sciences (IISc) - not IITs.
Even getting into an IIST or IISc is almost as difficult as getting into an old IIT based on the JEE cutoffs.
Both India and China have specialized institutions dedicated to subfields that end up getting the bulk of R&D funding in said subfields, for example, Petroleum Engineering and the China University of Petroleum and the Indian Institute of Petroleum Engineering, or in mining enigneeing, the China University of Mining and Technology and the Indian School of Mines (now IIT Dhanbad).
> Unlike china Indian colleges are really backward due to lack of research funding and a coaching industry which have gamified the entrance exams
China also bases acceptance on entrance exams - the Gaokao is equally as competitive as the JEE Advanced. The exact same gamification of entrance exams and coaching centers is sadly the norm in China as well, despite the Xi admin's initial attempts to crack down on it.
Additonally, Chinese R&D funding is also stratified the same way Indian R&D funding is.
The equivalent of a government engineering college in both China and India would be receiving relatively limited funding or autonomy, but a Double First Class University in China or an INI in India well get the first pick of research grants and subsidizes.
If there is a promising professor at a mid-tier program, they are likely affiliated and getting their funding via affiliation to a national academy like the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Really? I'm yet to meet a single diaspora (i.e. born/raised abroad) professor here in Korea and I interact with universities quite a bit.
Unless diaspora here includes those who did their full university education abroad though, lots of those indeed.
Yes. By definition these are diaspora members as well.
It is not.
The vast majority of English speakers do not live in the US or the UK. English is the most widely spoken language in the world. If you are at dinner with people from several countries, the "Lingua Franca" will almost certainly be English.
The popularity of Mandarin relies on the sheer mass of native speakers in China. That population is shrinking and that shrinking is expected to accelerate. The cultural export of China is inherently limited by its ideology - there's a reason we have (had, really) "Hong Kong Cinema" not "Peking Cinema".
All Japanese people learn English at school; few learn Chinese as you can verify by reading about the Japanese school system from various sources including Wikipedia.
Similarly in China, English is the only mandatory foreign language taught at school.
Frequently, Chinese or Japanese. For example companies in these countries employ translators. Are you suggesting they rely on primary school-level English to negotiate?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_education_in_...
Instead we are seeing increased siloing of scientific domains. The EU is cracking down on EU-Chinese research cooperation (as recent arrests and deportations in France have shown), India still has a de facto freeze on Chinese R&D and China is still enforcing export controls on IP to India, and South Korea and Japan are still controlling any IP generated from their industrial research fusion programs.
We're instead seeing at least 6-7 different scientific and capital ecosystems forming, and with collaboration being tightly controlled by governments.
The EU continues to use English as the lingua franca for scientific communication due to the diversity within the EU.
On the India side, research done as part of the pact with Japan [0], Taiwan [1], South Korea [2], the EU [3], and the US [4] is done in English.
And on the Vietnam side (based on my SO's experience), all of her ASEAN-Japan and ASEAN-SK collaboration was done in English as well.
[0] - https://www.jst.go.jp/inter/english/project/country/india.ht...
[1] - https://www.iitrpr.ac.in/indo-taiwan/
[2] - https://www.ikst.res.in/ikst-en/index.do
[3] - https://research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/news/all-resear...
[4] - https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2024/10/the-us-india-...
But China is not going to be the dominant superpower (except maybe if they manage to beat the rest of the world in AI). Their labor force is already in decline, which means they must gradually shift their focus from building the future to maintaining the society. Like Europe and Japan are already doing.
"Tories in England long imagined that they were enthusiastic about monarchy, the church, and the beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about ground rent."
That feels like it could have been written today, doesn't it? When push comes to shove, things like Christianity, constitutional order or "fiscal restraint" seem to always take second seat to the yield from owning things, especially real estate.
The bigger problem is that schools like MIT, Stanford, UCB, UCI throw (or threw?) lots of resources at students that Chinese schools didn't really do (and maybe still don't? My info is 10 years out of date). Even the lower ranked schools have ample resources and fairly well paying TA/RA-ships available. In China, you would have to work for your professor's side company to get money, and the professor might not let you graduate if you were doing a good job (again, 10 years ago, I have no idea what its like today, China is changing quickly).
India has been opening campuses abroad like IIT Madras in Tanzania [0] and IIT Delhi in Abu Dhabi [1] to cater specifically to building that kind of relationship in Africa and MENA. The majority of seats allocated (66%) are for foreign nationals.
Top Indian programs like IIT Delhi have been very active giving fellowships and subsidises for students and researchers from ASEAN [2], the African Union [3], Pacific Island nations [4], and Afghanistan [5]
And Vietnam would do similar programs as well for poorer ASEAN nations and a number of African countries (notably Angola and Mozambique) as well as Cuba
Japan has been running a multi-decade long international student and R&D collaboration program that helped jumpstart South Korea and China's R&D capacity in the 1980s and 1990s, along with much of ASEAN's more recently (my SO is a product of that). Same with South Korea as well.
[0] - https://www.iitmz.ac.in/
[1] - https://abudhabi.iitd.ac.in/
[2] - https://asean.iitd.ac.in/
[3] - https://www.itecgoi.in/index
[4] - https://www.itecgoi.in/Sagaramrut
[5] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-14/india-off...
Otherwise as dual citizens it's overblown. There is a lot of hot air in Canada that doesn't match the on the boots on the ground reality of life in the USA (for citizens / green card holders) because Canada is pissed off that America caused a downturn in Canada's economy and Canadians feel the pinch because the downturn is about 25% worse in Canada as a result.
But IMO it's self inflicted wound and has been a very, very long time coming. Canada has kept on kicking the economic can down the road for decades now and it's toll is collecting interest more and more.
The political worker class in DC is also very pissed off because the administration there initiated the equivalent of extreme mass layoffs in a sector that is not used to that.
In the USA, people are kind of mopey about the downturn, but in democratic areas the level of emotion is far less than it was with trump was the first time, while in Canada, it seems like it's more intense than it was in California with trump for the first time.
Take this with a grain of salt because I'm very independent, individualist and progressive. I think that was already clear from the above :)
I live in a big city now and I love it so much. Excellent public transport so I don't need a car anymore (haven't driven in 7 years), always new things to do and see. New initiatives that actually go somewhere instead of dying out like in the small town.
I can imagine people that like to think outside the box and build stuff like me often like to live in bigger places. That's not even education related as such (you can also be self taught) though it does tend to correlate of course.
And no I wouldn't think of visiting the US in the current situation, let alone move there to study or work (I'm not in the studying age anymore anyway). I do agree with the author that the current politics would deter skilled people.
If you’re young and want to get out, get out. Don’t take my path of studying and working until a path emerges. If I could do it again I don’t think I’d even finish secondary education and just pack my bags at 17.
One of the biggest problems though is just the poverty, options are limited and wages are shit and like you mentioned innovations don't make their way into rural areas until like 10+ years later. And if you don't move away to a big city the majority of people are never going to make a lot of money and will often be ignored for most everything except as a source of revenue for podunk courts and cops. Of the highly intelligent and aspirational few that are left, most end up severely stifled by lack of financial opportunity even if they are doing great work because most of their potential customer base are poor too.
The author worries about the brain drain that could affect places like Pittsburgh, but on the other hand, people is already living it, as my kids just see grandparents once per year, since we live in another country, but there is people who can't even do it on an annual base, because they live far away or in countries considered at risk.
Yeah and they just shot a man in the neck for speaking.
Oh you meant the guy that was speaking is the dark force.
BOOOOOOOOOOO
Although, for grandkids, I guess that when you are far you are also more intentional with making sure you spend time with their grandparents when they are far.
Just in the western countries:
Toronto, Cambridge, ENS in France, the many max Planck institutes in Germany (eg Tubingen), the two federal institutes in Switzerland.
Faculty positions in any of those are likely to be better than CMU (in terms of start up package, funding, quality of students, quality of faculty, and ability to hire people).