Hacker News

Its not just what makes the news. There is a cooling effect happening in recruiting international talent.

Science is heavily international, and if people feel like they won't get funding/wont be safe here, they won't come.

It'll be on top of any other grants and funding available for research though.

That gave me a bad idea to feed to the right AI:

An idyllic open prairie, with swarming butterflies

Every chair of the Federal Reserve, from inception to present, holding hands. Mile-wide smiles and shiny teeth, breeze blown hair and dragonflies, and a few actual flies

They traipse (stop motion style, Primus style) through fields of vibrant tulips, as far as an eyeball can see

In the background, a Sinatra-esque voice, with intermittent tones of Nick Cave and dissonant interruptions of Les Claypool sings Tiptoe Through the Tulips, with a scintillating chorus of mewing female voices

The wake of trampled flowers spells the national debt.

A storm brewing in the background.

Next Up: Come to Daddy, by AphexTwin

> that were fired as a result because there was not a space in the department to hire them full time (Dutch work law requires contracts to become permanent after a certain number of years of working).

This is a very common law in european companies and is killing economic growth. Idk why they do this.

> It’s nice to live here but I’m leaving to go to greener pastures.

May I ask where you're looking? What countries have the best support for you to do your best work?

I see a lot of complaining from small companies and startups. The taxing system is slowly becoming communism (I have no better word). And they also are stopping farming, based on bad ideas.

I tried to get into fundamental research, but disliked the burocratic approach in Dutch universities.

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.

> At 1 million euros per head.

Over 5 years...

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.

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).

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.

Probably Europe. Seems more attractive for researchers. China is probably too different to be attractive for most Americans.

Not sure if accidentally is the correct term, given the anti-intellectual platform

Is it an accident though? This seems very deliberate

why do you call paying someone legally a "bribe" ?

Then the US used to bribe our researchers. It's tit-for-tat in this case.

I for one am still waiting for US tech companies to bribe me to come work for them.

From what I can tell

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.

Top. Men.

The last paragraph has some important context:

"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."

Why hopefully?

I can post on the Internet whatever I want without providing any ID whatsover.

This assumes the 1 million is all they get or can use to pay them with. The 1 million is a subsidy, not their salary.

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.

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.

Assume you are correct, and the Dutch offer a terrible proposition. Yet still they come.

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.

You mean the thing that held Screwworm at bay for decades and kept our beef prices low? That we will now need to spend $Billions re-curtailing because we don't have as much of the capability to do that anymore?

The US once was proud of its scientific achievements, now parts of it replaced that with being very proud of their ignorance

I think you meant to write "boomers."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1trcILsBHkE

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.

Hacker News really isn't what it used to be, huh.

"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.

It's not for doing nothing, it's for fooling around at the edge of knowledge. Sometimes, very useful stuff emerges.

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.

For real. How much more do we need to spend to learn that plants crave Brawndo?

You are motivating me to get enough reputation points to be allowed to downvote.