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I wonder if given the recent "moral" loss of US, we will see a post-WW2 Soviet vs USA style defection of scientists & engineers between USA and China? When you
by NalNezumi 2y ago
I wonder if given the recent "moral" loss of US, we will see a post-WW2 Soviet vs USA style defection of scientists & engineers between USA and China?
When you read the reasoning of people that defected from UK/US to soviet with nuclear secrets it's kinda hard to grasp now, but back then I can definitely understand that a mix of "the soviets are not that bad" and "are we really that good?" could've made people switch, vise-versa.
I feel like that have for the past decades mostly been a one-way street (China to US) but given the recent trends, (chiense scientist leaving US)[1] I could kinda see how some people might start to debate that question internally.
[1]https://youtu.be/voUcv7ydC9o?feature=shared https://youtu.be/voUcv7ydC9o?feature=shared
- scrollaway 2y agoAs an EU-based employer, I'm seeing a post-WW2 soviet vs usa style defection of engineers between USA and Europe. By the way, if anyone US-based is in this situation and wants to "defect" to an EU-job, send me a message, I can help you.
- rozenmd 2y agoMy hiring manager mates are seeing this in Australia too. Sydney's beaches and weather helps a bit too.
- AnotherGoodName 2y agoOTOH we’re educating engineers and then not letting them stay. Like chinas worried about having talent poached (or controlled in some way) and here’s Australia providing world class education and demanding they go back afterwards. https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/am/deepseek-engineer-studied-in-australia-/104908168 https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/am/deepseek-engineer-...
- tw1984 2y ago[flagged]
- katmannthree 2y agoWhat’s your take on near-term stability for American immigrants in Europe? I was looking at options for moving last year but the work visa situation seemed fairly precarious (although that’s a relative thing in comparison with what may end up happening here in the US).
- scrollaway 2y agoPersonally I’m pushing my (Belgian) government hard to provide a streamlined path for American immigrants, especially tech workers. In general, it’s easy, just highly bureaucratic. If you compare to what most other countries have to go through, getting a work visa as a skilled us citizen is quick.
- katmannthree 2y agoAs one of the many Americans who wants to contribute to a society whose values match their own, thank you. Is there somewhere to follow your efforts in that front?
- scrollaway 2y agoA lot of it is small-scale lobbying, so not much to follow :) If you want to support some of the efforts I'm pushing hard for, check out EU Inc: https://www.eu-inc.org/ https://www.eu-inc.org/ Many entrepreneurs here know what the advantages are in the US compared to EU when it comes to startups etc and understand what needs to change. There's real willingness to get it done and the trump election has been fast-forwarding through so many of the steps, giving the EU the kick it needed to wake up. All the momentum is there, now. I'm feeling super optimistic about Europe. But the recession will be hard to weather.
- selimthegrim 2y agoI would have loved to come work for imec but the only immediate internship budget they had was a studentship with accompanying stipend and visa. They told me it would have taken too long to sort out the employee route.
- nxm 2y agoNot many will take a massive pay cut only to pay more taxes
- realusername 2y agoThere's bigger problems in the US for a researcher than just the salary in the US nowadays. That salary comparison was valid pre-Trump.
- hansvm 2y ago> salary comparison was valid pre-Trump Is it not valid now?
- realusername 2y agoNot anymore no, the research environment is even more important than the salary itself.
- jltsiren 2y agoSalaries must be weighted by risk. Right now, there is a high risk that researchers funded by grants or working in government labs will lose their jobs and faculty will lose their grants and labs. Industry researchers are in a more stable situation, even though layoffs may be more common than on the average. And if we focus specifically on the academia, American salaries have never been that high. Sure the numbers in the paycheck are bigger than in most countries, but the cost of living is also high. Particularly because good universities are often in very expensive areas, such as California, New York, or Boston. I've worked at a foreign university where grad students on dual income could buy a starter home. Now I'm at an American university, where you need to be tenured faculty on dual income to afford a similar home.
- realusername 2y agoOn top of those issues there's also a wave of anti-intellectualism and xenophobia from the Trump government. When the US model used to be to attract top worldwide researchers, that's pretty much the targeted demographics.
- sepositus 2y agoFunny, I’m literally seeing the opposite. Had two people move from the EU last year due to free speech concerns.
- gildas 2y agoOne doesn't preclude the other, but I have serious doubts about free speech concerns. There are moderate and extreme movements in Europe. They all express themselves freely within the law.
- jakeogh 2y agoblink... They outlawed silent prayer.
- refurb 2y agoAs a scientist I'm not going to handicap my career by going to Australia or EU when the US is doing science light years ahead of those countries. I've worked in Australia, Europe and Canada, and the ecosystem of scientists, funding and support for develop of science into products is far much further ahead in the US it's not even funny.
- enaaem 2y agoPeople can be become indifferent, which is a win for China.
- dluan 2y agoIt's already been happening for years. Award winning faculty and scientists are fleeing US universities and institutions and setting up shop in China, often with more funding and talent available, and no McCarthyism accusations of being spies. It started officially in 2018 with the US Department of Justice's "China Initiative", which basically just allowed anyone to go on a witch hunt of Chinese and Chinese American academics. Of course, the vast majority of those cases were bogus and was just a guise for racism. This isn't the first time. In the 1950s, the founder of Berkeley JPL, an MIT professor who was one of the forefathers of NASA and Manhattan Project contributor, and who Theodore von Karman called a generational genius, Chinese educated Qian Xuesen was humiliated with accusations of being a communist spy and given a multi-year house arrest where he couldn't work so that his knowledge would fall behind the state of the art. He was then deported, and went back to China where he created the Chinese space program entirely from scratch. In China today, he's widely known as a national hero and the "father of Chinese rocketry". If you really want your mind blown, look up his family tree and see how many Nobels and National Science Medals are related to him. The past few years alone has seen some really high profile scientists taking their knowledge and experience with them to China. These are people who've spent 30+ years building lives here in the US, and were initially being forced out, but now are actually being lured with better pay packages and working conditions since the first wave was treated so well. It's absolutely insane. https://www.justsecurity.org/82948/anti-asian-prejudice https://www.justsecurity.org/82948/anti-asian-prejudice
- throwaway48476 2y ago[flagged]
- dluan 2y agoHN comments trying to argue that the cold war red scare was righteous is very on brand for 2025.
- throwaway48476 2y agoYou know when the cold war ended the archives briefly opened up. It's not a moral case, merely a factual one.
- neilv 2y agoI'm thinking most of new and established STEM PhDs, who'll decide where in the world to settle in, or relocate to, to do research or R&D. We Web/app programmers are a dime a dozen, unique-skills-wise. But the loss of an individual with much more rare scientific knowledge/skill/ideas can be felt much more acutely by the country that alienates them. (Counterintuitive techbro salaries vs. academic salaries aside.)
- gunian 2y agoif only one side has nukes slavery will be much more widespread if everyone has them all the slave traders competing with each other will be at least mitigated kind of crazy they saw all the graffiti license plate games that early
- ipaddr 2y agoIf everyone has them they are more likely to be used over minor issues.
- gunian 2y agodon't believe everything the slavers tell you :) if everyone had a way to completely disintegrate the planet no one would be above another
- Nevermark 2y agoAll we need is nukes? I think you might be counting on way too many decision makers to remain rational and wise enough to avoid and defuse non-trivial situations that want to escalate. In the 8 billion times 8 billion potential nuclear exchanges that universal nuke would enable (64 quadrillion!), there is at least one scary bad one. At any time of day. That you are standing too near. Please acknowledge my wisdom here. (Hard unblinking stare. Wiggling finger wanders toward red button… “Kind person, I have no interest in harming you, but my sources inform me you have at most one nuke. So I must be prepared to be first. Please keep those hands where I can see them while I only, and with full peaceful intent, rest my finger here.”)
- gunian 2y agoyou my digital friend have never met slavers and it shows :) more than nukes one can survive nukes the ability to completely disintegrate the planet for everyone
- landryraccoon 2y agoSounds like a very strong incentive for us to find a way to leave the planet and settle elsewhere.
- yieldcrv 2y agoA lot of developed countries like across Europe and Singapore dont have the same geopolitical history with China as the US does, as such the Sinophobia isn’t really there Many people really enjoyed Shanghai and other cities and are recipients of expansive social safety nets of China If you’re middle class and in a big city or some of the planned cities, China is fine, not without its difficulty of adjusting to, some people sour on etiquette and difficulty founding entrepreneurial things. But an academic or programmer would be fine. So people in the US often try to focus on political edge cases to write off an entire country but its easy to see that focus going away
- roca 2y agoSure, just don't practice Falun Gong or be a Christian or an Uyghur.
- yieldcrv 2y agoExhibit A And yes, that’s correct. Regarding Christianity, religious people have the choice of being in the registered religious practices there. Sometimes the registration requirements are incompatible woth the religion, such as a religious leader sent by the state, as opposed to someone chosen or independentally wants to lead/control people. and unregistered religious practices are cracked down on. western society chooses to masquerade the unregistered issues as the state of religious practices in china. the unregistered population is just as large as the registered one.
- throwawaymaths 2y ago> expansive social safety nets of China can you provide more detail on what you mean by this? Are there labor laws preventing 996, for example? what kind of medical care is there?
- j7ake 2y agoExcellent medical and dental care for ridiculously cheap. On par with countries like Germany If you work, you contribute to a fund that you have access to if you lose your job.
- gamblor956 2y agoI wonder if given the recent "moral" loss of US, we will see a post-WW2 Soviet vs USA style defection of scientists & engineers between USA and China? No. The US will experience a brain drain to Europe, Canada, and Australia, but not to China. Trump still has a ways to go to match the excesses of the Xi regime.
- ideashower 2y agoYeah this feels right, Americans will choose leveraging their English before seeking out needing to learn a non-Romance language, I feel.
- tensor 2y agoLanguage? What about principles of freedom, democracy, and science? I would think that those things would be why US scientists choose Canada and Europe first. I doubt language is really high on the list.
- LPisGood 2y agoLanguage and ease of immigration are going to be very important to the decision of where to move. Naturally, those things you mentioned are important, but so is language.
- redserk 2y agoWhat freedoms would they lose?
- ty6853 2y agoRight to bear arms (only Yemen and Idlib is stronger here) and some of the loosest regulations on non commercial speech.
- throwaway2037 2y agoRight to bear arms? How about Finland or Switzerland? It is pretty easy to own guns in both places.
- immibis 2y agoRemember though, China is still a totalitarian dictatorship at least as bad as the USA. It's not the same situation.
- rcpt 2y agoI don't think we'll see born-in-the-USA Americans moving to Shenzhen anytime soon. But a huge fraction of our workforce is immigrants who have given up their homeland and distanced themselves from their families and communities in search of opportunities here. The fact that we're driving them away now does not bode well for our future economy.
- whynotminot 2y agoA lot of immigrant communities actually voted for Donald Trump this time though. I don’t understand it. But it happened.
- andsoitis 2y agoAnalysis: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/americas-immigrant-voters-and-the-2024-presidential-election/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/americas-immigrant-voters...
- milesrout 2y agoIt is very simple. Nobody hates queue jumpers more than the people that stood in line.
- walthamstow 2y agoThose who stood in line as you say also want to take people out of today's queue. Legality doesn't have much to do with it. In Britain it's called pulling up the drawbridge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drawbridge_mentality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drawbridge_mentality
- riehwvfbk 2y agoIf someone said "Americans do X", there would be some pushback about "not all Americans". But somehow it's normal (expected even) to bunch all immigrants together into the "they were all desperate and decided to jump the fence" pile. It's actually surprising that this point is so hard to understand.
- fennecbutt 2y agoWhy would a moral loss cause a defection to China, that's fucking hilarious bro. China, the place with a national firewall, subjects you can't speak about, try asking questions about certain things to a taxi driver and they'll call the ccp police on ya. Absolutely hilarious opinion man, why not suggest the UK or hell, a defection to New Zealand. China on a moral basis? Comedy.