> Then, some topics becoming political taboo where the unorthodox opinion would get you fired and canceled
This is garbage.
What you describe might be the case in some social-sciences circles but never has been the case in most STEMs fields.
If you have a (sensical) unorthodox idea that displease a research director, 10 other research directors will be very happy to dig up this exact idea in a slightly different context.
There is an other thing that should make America worry.
Research grants have been cut everywhere in the US. That cuts deep and terminated many scientific collaborations between USA and the EU Horizons projects in many STEMs research fields.
That created a void.... and sciences is like nature: it hates void (and the lack of money...)
My perception in the domain is that the resulting void is been fulfilled everywhere by new collaborations with China. Because China has the money, the infrastructures, the will to progress and a shit ton of smart engineers/PhDs.
There is today 10x more conferences in China... more exchange with China... more common projects with China than 10y ago.
So congratulations to the Trump team: your anti-intellectualism is actually directly fueling new technologies and research breakthroughs to the country you consider 'your enemy'.
You being an outside observer of my country, what do you think the mid-term (next ~decade) looks like if the US is somehow able to flush the toilet and do a complete 180 from a policy and administration perspective? I imagine even if people we need are welcomed back with open arms, they're not going to want to come. I sure wouldn't want to go back to a bar where the bouncer kicked the shit out of me!
Just curious, it's hard to see things clearly from inside the carnival.
As an outsider as well, I think the damage done will be hard to reverse in just a decade. You lost trust of your closest allies. Even after the current presidential term, why would we (Europeans, Canadians, ..) invest in ties with the US, when the _next next_ president can be an entire shitshow again?
The American people have shown that they are okay voting for the same nationalistic rhetoric twice. If it was just once, maybe it's a fluke. Now it seems more like a pattern hinting at the mindset of ~50% of Americans.
Also, if I want to be really pessimistic, I'd look at history, at some point Roman turned on Roman (Caesar crossing the Rubicon) after years/decades of political turmoil. The things happening today in Minnesota etc could be preludes a similar Rubicon crossing moment that will shatter the republic..
The problem is that America returned power to a doubly-impeached, 34x convicted felon, where there were circulated photos of the boxes of unlawfully retained government documents he's stored in his bathroom and on the stage of a ballroom, and who was already known to hate all useful international institutions and who was already distainful anyone else's sovreignty.
That he added to this after the second election with the tariffs, visible corruption, sucking up to murderers, endangering our (by which, as a non-American, I mean every other nation's) security both directly and indirectly with both suggestions of military force against allies and also of refusing to aid allies when called for, plus all the ICE stuff we can see… that costs the US a lot of trust even if you can't reasonably blame the US electorate directly for failing to see that so clearly ahead of the actual vote.
All the second paragraph stuff though? That the electorate should've know from before the reelection? That should've had him in prison for the rest of his life, possibly even due to the stuff we heard about selling state secrets and under 18 U.S.C. § 794 getting on death row (which I disaprove of as a principle and call for the abolition of, but you in the US do have it), not returned to the oval office.
Not an applicable quote to parent. Everyone made a choice, but not participating is definitionally a different choice than participating and going along with a specific option.
That was a great argument up until the guy who led an insurrection was allowed to run for president again. At that point, if you're apathetic, you're supporting what's coming.
Edit: The Royal You, not the person I'm replying to.
As an outsider not in academia, your system has poisoned your well.
We trusted in you to do the Right Thing, yet a significant sub-system of your culture has entirely successfully undermined your 'Checks and Balances' - a sub-system which has clearly been in action since at least the eighties.
Currently I wouldn't dare to enter the US, while I'm sure I would be relatively safe in China.
And: even before Trump the TSA had elements of despotism. All the while I never heard of Europeans being treated like shit in China -- simply the better hosts!
I keep mentioning that to people when they bring up a quite anti-China narrative (or paranoia). Most people in the western hemisphere are way more likely to be negatively impacted by the US than China.
Europeans, Canadians etc are less likely to travel to China so of course Chinese media spying would be less immediately detrimental than the spying of US companies. But even when traveling to China, it's less likely you'll be treated poorly than when traveling to the US.
We in the US have been so propagandized against China that even relatively progressive people that are completely against the Trump admin think China is an authoritarian hellscape. And while China is obviously not a utopia, I'd be hard pressed to find a metric there that hasn't surpassed our own.
China has no free speech and will start flexing its imperial muscle more now that the US is climbing down from the world stage.
China is alright if you keep your head down and you're not of the wrong ethnicity, locked up in a work camp and not allowed to have kids, or too openly gay or trans and so on.
The history of civilization over the past 5,000 years proves that China has never been an empire of foreign aggression. On the contrary, look at the 300-year-old modern history of the United States. Take off the tinted glasses of racism and savor it for yourself!
China has literally has been an empire most of it's history. It's like the 3rd biggest country on the planet. Just Tibet itself is huge and was absorbed into China not so long ago.
US is regressing on trans rights, abortion, etc. Free speech is under threat with the president “attacking” media institutions. You have daylight murder by federal agents followed by propaganda campaigns to blame the victims themselves or on the Democratic Party to create more political friction.
No one is saying China is perfect in these threads, we’re just saying the US isn’t necessarily better. Two countries can be shitty simultaneously.
Two countries can be shitty but the US hasn’t yet put a million of its citizens in jail because of ethnicity. Maybe going there in the future. That won’t white wash what China is.
It would not be higher in total if you included the estimated number of Uyghurs detained in internment camps. Even considering that, there are a couple other factors that don't make the numbers you presented mean much.
One factor is that the U.S. is the 3rd largest by population and will always skew higher in total prisoners than many other countries.
The other factor which explains the relatively high incarceration rate within the country's population is the investment into policing and reporting. We can take a city like Shanghai for example. They had a population size of around ~24m+ in ~2018-2019 [1] but only had 50k cops [2] (I couldn't find citable numbers for today but the data isn't too outdated). New York City, in comparison, has a current current population size of around ~8m [3] with 33k cops [4].
The 2 countries bigger than the U.S., India and China, also historically have had less investment in law enforcement, especially in rural areas [5][6].
The point was that the US touts itself as a free country while having many perverse incentives and mechanisms oppressing part of its citizenry. There's a veneer on top of it of individual freedoms compared to a state like China but in reality it can be as brutal against its population as any totalitarian state, it's just that the power to subjugate and oppress isn't centralised and is more diffused through its institutions across history.
It's not too far in history that the US was deploying the National Guard to fire live ammo against protesters, American police has military-grade equipment deployed against their citizens, I think it makes it even harder that the oppressive power isn't centralised since to uproot this there are countless battles to be won for any change to happen. It's institutionalised, any big institution is really hard to change.
US is quickly heading the direction of China, but China is much much further along the path of authoritarian hellscape: no free speech at all, no freedom of the press, all social media is heavily censored, and the GFW allows government control of the Internet (yes, I know, VPNs exist, but they can be shut down and aren't even on the radar of the vast majority of the population.) All this was already the case in 2017 when I left China and it's even more controlled now (COVID only increased government controls). You don't see this as a foreigner, but as a Chinese you absolutely do. Trust me when I say it's still, even with the current wanna-be dictator and his white supremist minions, much worse than the US in terms of freedoms.
On the other hand, China doesn't suffer from the US' current bone-headed anti-Science and "climate change is a hoax" nonsense, and have a much clearer understanding of where they need to continue investing in order to become the world leader economically and even politically, which Trump in his stupidity is handing them on a silver platter. So in that sense they are far ahead.
China is also of course much smarter when it comes to foreign policy, though Trump has set such a low bar that even a monkey could do better.
I'd rather not live in either country, but if I had to choose, I'd pick the US and it's not even close.
> I never heard of Europeans being treated like shit in China -- simply the better hosts!
Yeah. Also lets not forget:
- Citizens from most EU countries can now enter China visa free. No ESTA and no other administrative crap. Generally no problem to enter and leave the country as long as you respect the law there.
- The Chinese authority are very cooperative when it is about granting some visting Visa to researchers. Most Chinese research centers and Universities have a some kind of direct link to an office that can bypass some of the procedures.
If you dig into my comment history, i've been pretty pro China (despite a ding i will do every time: China rural areas are decaying faster than in the west. I think the main contributor is the difference between contryside/rural pay (80-100€ when i was there) and city/industrial pay (700-800€ with no qualification at the time)).
I will still add a caveat with what you've said: China make/unmake rules pretty fast, and while not hidden, those are not easy to find and understand (especially when you take into account enforcement). When those rules touch on immigration policy or on societal stuff change, it can surprise you. As a westerner you should always be OK, but this is a country with no rule of law, you should always keep that in mind.
> As a westerner you should always be OK, but this is a country with no rule of law.
Let's be clear: I am not discussing nor defend China internal policies here. I honestly do not care and I am not pro China.
I am pointing a single fact: As a EU researcher, it is easier now to go to China than to go the US for conferences and collaboration. And we do feel more welcome there.
That single fact alone should terrify any US politician with a brain.
Sorry, it wasn't a criticism of what you said, i wanted to add a caveat because what you said was true in 99.9999% of cases, but as China laws application are arbitrary (and their laws change all the time), you still ought to be careful when going there.
I'm guessing my flawed use of an asterisk, resulting in a weird highlighting out of context, confused your interpretation of what I was saying, because I believe we're suggesting the same thing.
> what do you think the mid-term (next ~decade) looks like if the US is somehow able to flush the toilet and do a complete 180 from a policy and administration perspective?
I honestly do not know.
Academia works with networking between peers and moves where the money is.
In Academia, the relation between researchers and the 'names' in the domain matters a lot. But the money stream matters even more.
When relations are created, I do not see them 'ending' just because US decided to play the good guys again and open the money stream again.
It will help to restore some links yes, but will probably not cut any ties created with other countries.
Regarding general politics / economics, the damage has been done. The western world has now started to create a western world that's not centered around the US as it was the case before. It is yet to be seen if the US will again be or remain being part of the western world.
It's a bad development but necessary, sadly. We can only hope that Europe rises and comes out as a new strong center eventually, because we need one to counter all those powerful and evil actors in the world.
Something ironclad that can't be changed by an "executive order" in 30 minutes.
It has to make sure nothing like this will ever happen again, there can't be public officials who can just NOT show up to congressional hearings and if they do they can just blatantly, provably, lie - because there is no penalty for lying except a honour system.
Your supreme court has to have term limits with no reelection like the German equivalent and be comprised of different strata of folks, so that all of them aren't politically nominated.
The trust is gone and not easily fixed without something really drastic happening - barring a brutal civil war, I can't see a quick way out of this. Sorry.
The problem is that separating from the USA as idea has been floating around for some time. Thinking they have jurisprudence over allies, forcing allies into supporting stupid wars and operating global surveillance companies are not things that started with Trump.
Whenever the last maga dies will be the beginning of your country being trusted again. So at least a few decades. Just another administration won't do.
After the 2016 election, my advisor's entire research lab relocated to Europe except for two candidates who were nearly finished with a PhD and got co-advised.
The majority of us who moved became proficient in a foreign language. Some got permanent EU/UK/Swiss residency or even citizenship. This lab continues to attract researchers from the U.S. and then place them mostly into European and Asian universities or businesses. These folks are largely not going back to America short of forceful expulsion via European anti-immigration policy. I know other research group leaders who have done this same thing.
Someone I know in the U.S. has a PhD/grants/awards and wants to stay close to family/home (in a mid-sized city of a Republican-leaning state) yet hasn't been able to find a job or academic position in biological engineering after a few years of actively looking. The longer they work outside of their major, the harder it will be to secure an engineering/academic career later.
For too many in the U.S. (particularly where I grew up; a farm town) politics is a team sport and the hatred of the other team only intensifies as the government invests in higher education and research. They're willfully blind to the fact that cancer treatments, major agricultural advances (crop resilience, production efficiency, genetic modification), smartphones and fast internet access, trucking, and nearly every aspect of their lives which has vastly improved comes from social spending. Instead, it's stickers on gas pumps and chants at NASCAR races. Leftist voters are not as decisive at the voting booth as Republicans, and there's still right-wing momentum in many states across all levels of government, the judicial system, and the leadership of the largest companies.
I firmly disbelieve the U.S. can reverse course even after a decade. In my opinion, it would require immense structural and cultural change: breaking up the two-party system, rejecting money in politics, political/judicial age limits, a major push to disrupt clandestine foreign meddling, shifting the partisan balance of courts in a way that cannot later be weaponized, heavy investment in infrastructure and high-visibility patriotic (ideally non-partisan) programs similar to Eisenhower's, the sort of intense media regulation that would restore local journalism in small towns, paying teachers significantly more plus developing more public trust in the educational system, public research investment, high taxes, strong social programs, a rejection of the propaganda that America is the greatest country in the world; basically a shift toward being more like the countries that actually(*) have a high standard of living.
Who has the power to implement these sweeping changes? Would it be a conflict of their personal interests?
Hi, I looked into joint collaborations between many countries and EU, but honestly I didn't really find anything EU-China that was interesting, most funding agencies do not fund collaborative projects EU-China, or maybe I'm missing something, in any cases it didn't strike me. If you have some examples I would be curious.
There are way more opportunities with other countries that I'm aware of, mostly EU-EU.
You are not going to find much because China is not yet part officially of Horizons (South Korea and Japan are but not China).
Most of these collaborations happens under the hood and are peer-to-peer and project based.
I can speak for the fields that I am close to:
- For Astrophysics, China already provide both hardware and computing resources to some projects. Conferences in China are in common and exchange are frequents. Rumors of collaborations on Space and scientific satellites are also on the way.
- For nuclear physics, China is actively participating in several software stack used for nuclear fusion. There is also mutual collaborations on some nuclear fusion reactors and they regularly host conferences where EU researchers are invited. They progressed tremendously compared to 10y ago.
- For particle physics, China was historically playing alone and was planning to create and operate their own particle collider similar to the LHC in size. This is not on the table anymore. There is a deeper collaborations with several EU institutes including CERN, they also voiced their interest in the FCC project.
- For Neurosciences, their labs has permissions to execute wet experiments on animals that are forbidden on most EU territories and that I will not describe. A lot of data are shared both way between China and several EU labs. Many neurosciences related conferences have emerged in China, exchanges are much more common that they were.
- For HPC and A.I, this is by far the most active and pushed research domain actually. Alibaba, Tencent and others are even proposing computing resources for free on some projects in exchange of conference attendance in China and collaborations. There is not much collaboration on hardware (due to embargos and NDAs) but a lot of collaborations on software.
China is definitely the big winner of the second Trump administration here. America alienating its friends like Canada just pushes them closer to China, and retreating from the stage of world science means China can fill the gap.
I guess it is actually going to happen, in 10 years, 20 years max, no one will think the world super power is America anymore, it will clearly be behind China by then.
I certainly believe you, but you're missing the point of the
current administration goals. Trump wont be around in 10 years
when the consequences of their actions become clear. In fact, he is gone in 3 years, and the admin is only concerned
within that timeframe. Their strategy is quite
clear: please their base while simultaneously positioning the
family for influence on a global scale.
Scientific collaborations are built on trust, not on an election mandate. And the trust is undeniably damaged.
Which funding agency will accept to bring money to the table if the other partner is likely to run home and abandoned everything on the next election 2y later ?
This was already a problem with long term collaboration with NASA and the back and forth of Congress funding, Trump just extended the same issue to all other STEMs fields.
Creating huge inequalities among people as opposed to highlighting them? Seriously? That doesn't sound like something derived from reasoning, it sounds like rationalization from feelings first.
> So congratulations to the Trump team: your stupidity and your hate for intellectualism is directly fueling new technologies to the country you consider 'your enemy'.
Do we have any evidence that they actually consider China (or Russia) to be "the enemy"? They are fellow authoritarians, with a shared goal of normalizing domestic political suppression.
Every authoritarian country thrives on “we’re surrounded by enemies, enemies everywhere” trope.
But, of course, all those glorious leaders happily shake hands and dine with each other, patting their backs and sharing ideas on how to keep peasants in check and themselves in power.
> It’s like if children were forbidden to drink a soda at a bar because they also sell alcohol
The comparison is wrong.
It would be more "It is like if children were forbidden to be in a smoker room, just because they are not the one consuming".
Yes they should be forbidden, because they do not need to smoke themselves to feel the negative effects.
Even without "porn", "murdering/violence" or other controversial content that can be found on social medias, just the negative effects of doomscrolling on the brain are harmful enough.
Their is plenty of studies that describe the effect it has on attention span, memory and cognitive capacity of kids.
My comparison is about the alarmism and you are doing the same by equivaliting chatting with friends online to smoking which can give cancer.
We are ourselves now on a sort of social media platform which shows it’s possible to be responsible and use it wisely with a better design and more rules. Framing the decision in France like a fight against a nocive substance is lazy and avoid talking about nuanced regulation and digital literacy which are more effective approaches. There are studies showing that regulating adolescent social media use is better than a ban for example.
> There are studies showing that regulating adolescent social media use is better than a ban for example.
Not in disagreement. I believe that the ban is not even strictly applicable.
It will just lead to the redirection to a new platform that avoid the restrictions or any jurisdiction, which is worst.
The complete lack of will to tackle the problem by the main Mega networks (Meta, X, Tiktok, Snapchat, Telegram and even Youtube) is currently the main issues here.
For instance, enforcing a "report" to the consummer weekly with the effective time spend on scrolling to promote awareness and help to prevent addiction would already be a first good move. None of them implemented that effectively.
> Meanwhile in Europe ? Take your time job hunting a new job, healthcare is still free.
Currently, healthcare coverage tend to be better in several European countries when you are jobless... because the system try to compensate the fact you do not have income anymore.
Don't get me wrong, their is many 'flaws' in several European healthcare systems and it is far from perfect. but it tends to be more "human" and less "for profit".
> The LGPL is a product of a very specific moment: European legalism meeting American corporate compromise
If I tend to agree with the general message of the post, this specific point does not make any sense.
The LGPL and the GPL are 100% American products. They are originally issued from the the American Academic world with the explicit goal of twisting the arm of the (American) copyright system for ideological reasons.
Decades ago I was a Fortran developer and encountered a very odd bug in which the wrong values were being calculated. After a lot of investigation I tracked it down to a subroutine call in which a hard-coded zero was being passed as an argument. It turned out that in the body of that subroutine the value 4 was being assigned to that parameter for some reason. The side effect was that the value of zero because 4 for the rest of the program execution because Fortran aliases all parameters since it passes by descriptor (or at least DEC FORTRAN IV did so on RSX/11). As you can imagine, hilarity ensued.
In old school FORTRAN (I only recall WATFOR/F77, my uni's computers were quite ancient) subroutine (aka "subprogram") parameters are call-by-reference. If you passed a literal constant it would be treated as a variable in order to be aliased/passed by reference. Due to "constant pooling", modifications to a variable that aliased a constant could then propagate throughout the rest of the program where that constant[sic] was used.
Yes. That is the main solution and it is not a good one.
1- `restrict` need to be used carefully. Putting it everywhere in large codebase can lead to pretty tricky bugs if aliasing does occurs under the hood.
1- Restrict is not an official keyword in C++. C++ always has refused to standardize it because it plays terribly with almost any object model.
Regarding "restrict", I don't think one puts it everywhere, just for certain numerical loops which otherwise are not vectorized should be sufficient. FORTRAN seems even more dangerous to me. IMHO a better solution would be to have explicit notation for vectorized operations. Hopefully we will get this in C. Otherwise, I am very happy with C for numerics, especially with variably modified typs.
This is garbage.
What you describe might be the case in some social-sciences circles but never has been the case in most STEMs fields.
If you have a (sensical) unorthodox idea that displease a research director, 10 other research directors will be very happy to dig up this exact idea in a slightly different context.
This is how sciences progress.
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