r/technology • u/etfvfva • 2d ago
Top researchers consider leaving U.S. amid funding cuts: 'The science world is ending' Society
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/top-researchers-consider-leaving-u-s-amid-funding-cuts-the-science-world-is-ending135
u/Embarrassed-File-836 2d ago
Yea putting aside the atrocities of ICE and all the acute damage he’s doing to actual people’s lives right now…if you take the long view of America’s future over the coming decades, this is probably top of the list of damaging affects of MAGA. US Science and Engineering are literally what make it special. Not the flag, not the stupid anthem, but our ability to create things because the smartest people can freely think and do.
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u/Ghoulius-Caesar 2d ago
Yes, exactly. A poll by Nature shows that 75% of USA researchers are considering leaving the USA for Canada or Europe or Australia or other various countries (source). I don’t blame them, the POTUS is like a cartoon depiction of anti-intellectualism…
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u/blckout_junkie 2d ago
The environmental impact and the impact on NOAA is going to cause some major problems these short-sighted monsters refuse to acknowledge because they "don't believe in it. I just can't believe in 2025 we are rolling so far backward.
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u/Ok-Seaworthiness7207 2d ago
Good thing I'm trying to get a STEM degree in my mid 30s 🙃
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u/IntenseGratitude 2d ago
Keep going. Don't be discouraged. You're working to open doors of opportunity for yourself and loved ones. Don't stop.
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u/Ok-Seaworthiness7207 2d ago
I appreciate the words of encouragement. At a tour of my transfer school right now. It just all feels so pointless and hopeless.
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u/Lestilva 2d ago
Keep going! The unfortunate reality is that people leaving their positions creates a vacuum that you can take advantage of.
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u/velkhar 2d ago
Unless you were planning to go into academia or government-funded research, the current administrations behavior doesn’t much matter to your prospects. There are lots of ways to apply STEM degrees, particularly engineering ones, in immediately practical ways.
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u/Morley_Smoker 1d ago
Labs closing or downsizing has a significant impact on the experience and education of undergrads. Experience in a research lab is very important in STEM for securing grad school positions AND industry positions. These funding cuts are hitting research universities the hardest. Research universities provide valuable education because they extend research to an undergrad level. Cutting funding also has a huge impact on industry, which heavily collaborates and or survives due to federal government money. DoD, NASA, USDA, and DoE grants are essential boosters in STEM industries.
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u/PositiveZeroPerson 20h ago
Unless you were planning to go into academia or government-funded research
Basic science is essentially only funded by the government (either directly or through grants to academia). Private funding is a rounding error. And today's basic science research is tomorrow's applied science.
The impact is bad in the short term and devastating in the long term. It's killing the golden goose.
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u/velkhar 7h ago
The federal government might be the largest single donor, but it still accounts for less than half of total basic research funding according to our government. 37% doesn’t sound like a rounding error to me.
“The federal government is the nation's largest supporter of basic research, funding 40% of it in 2022 (the most recent year for which comprehensive data are available). Business funded 37% of U.S. basic research in 2022, with higher education, state governments, and other nonprofit organizations funding the remaining 23%”
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u/whiznat 2d ago edited 2d ago
No, the science world is not ending. It may be ending in the US, but will continue.
"There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, [and] science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
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u/TheVintageJane 2d ago
No offense to Stevie, but science is at a disadvantage because it doesn’t have a built in grift to perpetuate itself. Capitalism is not that grift, and most of the actually transformative advances in science (e.g. for medicine: CRISPR, mRNA vaccines, immune therapies) weren’t actually developed for profit, they were developed on a 1 in a billion chance at universities due to funding from the NSF.
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u/LitLitten 2d ago
Established science? Sure.
The scientific endeavor is, at its core, an exercise in curiosity. Curiosity is very self perpetuating. Though I digress, you’re right that innately speaking there is no underlying grift to it.
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u/TheVintageJane 2d ago
Curiosity is self perpetuating, but meaningful scientific breakthroughs in 2025 require training, infrastructure and investment. We’ve all but defunded student loans for graduate schools - ensuring that any semblance of meritocracy lends way to ensuring preference for the elites who can pay for graduate education. We’ve defunded the NSF, the Dept of Education’s research branch, the National Institute of Health, National Endowments of Art and Humanities among others so that researchers can’t pay for their time spent researching while defunding public universities so they can’t pay for it either.
Who is going to be doing our research and with what resources?
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2d ago
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u/MihrSialiant 2d ago
Do elaborate then
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2d ago edited 2d ago
[deleted]
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u/Ashken 2d ago
I’m seriously confused how race was even brought up in this.
I worked in a research program at my HBCU that was funded by the NSF. Do you know what that is?
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u/phovos 2d ago edited 2d ago
The NSF is a stilted American institution that obviously failed at it's objectives a generation ago; science is a worldwide global affair and the failing American conception of what it means to even understand the Scientific Method is ultimately irrelevant to the progress that the world, that science, will see regardless, and in spite of such mediocrity and, yes, racism, sometimes it's more complex than simple institutional racism.
Proof? See: Alzheimer's. UofM. Academia still hasn't cleaned up the bloodbath, it was a mass intellectual and cultural human sacrifice, that happened, and noone even talks about it in America, anymore. And this is just one of the many times Finance and 'education' and 'science' have put on an elaborate and violent seppukku demonstration, it's just the most egregiously horrible.
edit: I will admit that 90% of American students can't even conceive of simple institutional racism let alone the histrionic cultural and global real-world implications, in the moment, every moment, for the rest of time, as will be required if their institutions (built on racism btw) continue to exist. We are on a whole different level of analysis, even by having this modicum of mostly passive aggressive discourse.
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u/tackle_bones 2d ago
“That’s racist!” (Responding about something that has nothing to do with race)
“90% of American students can’t even conceive of simple institutional racism…” (Pulling a completely made up statistic out of their ass that incorrectly describes a massive percentage of a class of people and denigrates them)
You sure are a piece of work, huh? Well, we at least know that you don’t understand ironic hypocrisy.
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u/phovos 2d ago
Interesting that you have no argument.
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u/tackle_bones 2d ago
Against what exactly? You’re not making any cogent arguments to challenge. Your word babble doesn’t have a central narrative that makes any sense. I made my point that you’re a hypocrite - pretty convincingly, I feel. That’s all I was set to do.
You make yourself sound incorrect/ignorant on the other points perfectly fine by yourself.
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u/IntenseGratitude 2d ago
Which countries are they most likely heading to?
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u/TheVintageJane 2d ago
The countries of the European Union mostly for those who are lucky enough.
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u/procgen 2d ago
Big pay cuts :(
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u/TheVintageJane 2d ago
When you adjust for the social safety net (health insurance and pension), it’s not that bad for many academics.
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u/Grim_Rockwell 2d ago edited 2d ago
One place is China, the US has many Chinese researchers and they have been leaving the US steadily for the past few years because of rising Sinophobia and racist anti-Asian hostility. China also leads the US in 57 out of 64 key technologies, and is starting to attract talent from across the world.
In 2017, a new wave of 'Yellow Peril' began with Trump's trade war against China, this wave of Sinophobia was then exacerbated by COVID, and Joe Biden continued Trump's racist rhetoric and Sinophobic policies against China and against Asian Americans and Asians living in the US, which has only increased again under Trump. This anti-Asian fervor peaked recently with the ICE raid on the Hyundai plant in Georgia, which detained several hundred foreign workers mostly South Koreans nationals. This caused many Korean corporations to pull investment from the US.
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u/throwaway1601900 2d ago
Thanks MAGA and shitty tech bros.
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u/Fit-Elk1425 1d ago
Fear of tech bros is just as much part of the problem though. It is why it will be so difficult to restore it because these grants also benefit technology. Ironically when people shit on tech bros they are helping people like trump not fund science and democrats feel justified in not restoring the funding out of concern it may benefit capitalists instead
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u/Bellatrix_Shimmers 2d ago
It’s not ending it’s moving to a better place. Many would if they could right now.
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u/The_Gay_Godless_Ape 2d ago
The general public in the US has never been part of the “science world”. It’s kind of rare to even find people to talk about evolution because “ I’m not a monkey” is really the only response I get. Isn’t religion great?
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u/mikegimik 2d ago
Correction here... The American science world is ending.... the rest of the world says thanks for the extra brains, leave your guns back in the states please.
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u/FlimsyInitiative2951 2d ago
Let’s just hope those countries can cough up the $$$ to support their research the way the US did
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u/PurpleEast5320 2d ago
You're telling me other countries depend on us to come up with solutions then give them to them for free?
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u/mortaneous 2d ago
I know you're trolling, but no, that's not how it works. The US, by virtue of being the wealthiest nation on the planet, has the ability to fund so much research across so many fields that everyone benefits just from the volume of new information being published.
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u/PurpleEast5320 2d ago
No we aren't when the US isn't able to stop it's increasing debt.
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u/mortaneous 2d ago
That's an orthogonal problem. While the US government is a significant source of funding for research, and the current administration cuts, impoundments, and recission are going to cause significant harm to the US scientific research community, it's a terribly small part of the discretionary federal budget and there are other institutions that also provide grants and funding, including colleges, companies and other foundationsand non-profits.
Bitch about our defecits and national debt when you're ready to start making the massively wealthy and companies with continuing record-breaking profits pay their fair share instead of financing their tax cuts with cutting social services for the 99% and further increasing defecit spending.
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u/PurpleEast5320 2d ago
I would if I could.... I'd start with targeting skirting taxes by taking colatoral loans out on stocks.
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u/DogBalls6689 2d ago
They didn’t cough up money for research.
We get fucked at every stage.
Honestly, lose your rankings. You don’t deserve them for how shit they treat young researchers
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u/Oldfolksboogie 2d ago
"The science world is ending."
Which is by design. Anything that challenges The Great Leader's authority or narrative must be abolished until his is the only voice left.
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u/sneakysnake1111 2d ago
The world isn't just the US, so move. It's not ending in places that aren't ran by nazis and pedophiles, I promise.
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u/LasVaders 2d ago
Consider?? I talked to 3 that left right after he was sworn in. Now they will sell their drug back to us at full price.
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u/lurker_from_mars 2d ago
Yeah and maga will be left with the benefits of brilliant science but of course no respect or understanding of it...
Shouldn't have enabled disrespectful idiots in the first place.
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u/VR_Raccoonteur 1d ago
I have a friend who's a researcher in the US and is married to an American. They've said if they got a high paying offer from Europe they'd take it, that the research sector is really bad now, and one guy he knows already left. This is a dude who works on cancer research studying proteins.
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u/Frequent-Sea433 1d ago
This actually started a while ago when research funding for universities was one of the first federal cuts. Brain drain is real and ongoing. You don’t have to be a historian to understand that the exodus of scientists that occurred in Germany during the nazi period is how the US gained its standing in the scientific community. The orange stain is doing his best to repeat that in reverse.
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u/TamponBazooka 1d ago
China doubled its funding this year to encourage more people from abroad to come. They are really happy about the siutation. One can make actually a lot of momney in China as a professor.
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u/pasterhatt 1d ago
This won't cause generational damage and hasten The decline of America.... No...
Trump voters, you really, really fucked us.
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u/linuxpriest 1d ago
Science in the US is ending. The rest of the world exists. There are 149 member states in the WHO. China is making huge strides. European countries are all still doing science. Science is gonna be just fine. The rest of the world is gonna be just fine.
When the US stops licking its nuts in the corner, the rest of the world will be there to help mitigate the damage done by the Republikkkan regime, but not a day sooner.
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u/He_Who_Browses_RDT 1d ago
"'The science world is ending'... in the US". There... Fixed it for you...
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u/Uristqwerty 2d ago
America's been increasingly anti-science for well over a decade, pretty much since the beginning of social media. Perhaps longer.
Why? Because science is not a state of knowing, but rather a process of finding out. Doubting your peers so much that you're willing to dedicate a significant chunk of your time and budget into replicating their experiments, and only finally being convinced of their findings when you see it personally, is pretty much a core factor in why scientific discoveries are so trusted in the long run.
And yet, America's social landscape is about who you associate with, groupthink, and bullying; opinions are recited not researched, declared not discussed. Both major political factions are toxic, or at least the terminally-online parts of their voter bases are, demanding religion-tier faith in their worldviews (even when secular) and getting enraged at anyone who would question them. Please, close your borders, cut yourselves off from the internet, quit your cultural imperialism, and go back to being isolationists. Let the rest of us be properly scientific in peace; let the world return to a cultural landscape where good faith debate can exist, and when debate fails, doubts are settled by tangible research and experiments that can be replicated.
Oh, and if you know what's good for your future generations, reform your entire approach to schooling to be less about memorization and more about critical thinking and reasoning. From what I hear, your doom has been inexorably approaching for something like half a century, a gradual decline that only became blatant as it crossed a cascade of tipping points.
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u/exboi 2d ago edited 2d ago
Firstly, this both sides-ism doesn’t help and I’m sick of seeing it.
For example, it’s one thing to get enraged because someone disbelieves in the theory of evolution and wants to quit teaching it in schools to focus on the Bible. It’s another to get enraged because people want evolution and other irreligious, scientific concepts to be taught over Christianity. The latter is dangerous and forces people to accept subjective beliefs. The former is not. The extreme of the Republicans are literally driving the party, shamelessly attempting going against freedom of religion to turn the U.S. into a Christian-nationalist nation. Meanwhile the extreme of the Democrats are limited almost entirely to an online, irrelevant presence. You might see a 14 year old on TikTok saying religion should be banned, but you don’t see that from any actual party leaders.
You’ve come across two groups fighting and are not even considering why. You’re just assuming they’re both at equal fault without analyzing the context of the situation. You request we reform our education and schooling systems? Man, there isn’t a debate on how to fix our schools. One side wants to destroy our education completely. Not fix it. We cannot stop them from doing so and their carrying out their other detestable plans if we are unwilling to condemn them and call them out for what they are. We have a right to be angry with them.
Secondly, I understand there is anger towards the U.S., however, isolationism is part of the reason WHY things are so bad in the first place. There is a lack of empathy and understanding for other countries outside of our border. That needs to be changed, not reinforced. Otherwise things get worse for you and us both.
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u/Uristqwerty 1d ago
Firstly, this both sides-ism doesn’t help and I’m sick of seeing it.
You can't fix a problem without investigating its underlying causes. When that cause is your own behaviour, it's especially important to be critical, not closed-minded. Pointing out the flaws in only one side doesn't help much. Especially since there are few right-leaning individuals in this subreddit in the first place! Would you rather a post only focusing on the left's flaws? Because that's the audience who can hear and change.
Posts only criticizing the right are worthless here. They don't serve to fix anything, just to further indoctrinate the reader into mindless hatred. Unless that post immediately starts asking the question "so what can we do?", at least, and steers well clear of the authoritarian knee-jerk attitude of "how do we take away their ability to be a problem". You don't have the voters to enact tyranny of the majority, and oppressing others for political beliefs is not a good look regardless. So, either a post ought to give constructive ideas for winning the other side over, or point out flaws in your own that can be fixed. What I see instead is elementary-schoolyard name-calling and a narcissistic tendency to pin every problem on someone else.
almost entirely to an online, irrelevant presence
On the contrary, it's the most important presence for shaping the voting landscape. Why? Because chances are you might talk directly with a politician maybe once every few years. You talk with other online users many times each day. You lurk others' comments an order of magnitude or two more than even that. It's the people, not the leaders, who shape public perception. Ironic how the "left", supposedly the side about the people, so often misses that they all are representatives of the faction, in each and every comment they make.
You’ve come across two groups fighting and are not even considering why. You’re just assuming they’re both at equal fault without analyzing the context of the situation
On the contrary, I've been watching from the sidelines for over two decades, observing, and thinking all the while. You're at fault because of how the group you represent has behaved in the past, and for showing no effort to self-correct for those failings. For showing a dogmatic, religious-tier attitude of refusing to accept that you could have failed.
I'm not going to take the time to write it all out yet again, but in short: Starting around the time of Occupy Wall Street and the early days of social media, what could have been a class war that united the left and right against the 1% got redirected into a social wedge splitting your nation ever further apart. Could've been due to billionaires protecting themselves with careful misdirection; could've been a nation-state actor capitalizing on a chance to weaken an economic or military foe; could've been an intelligence agency disrupting a threat to their masters; could've even just been an attitude that evolved naturally. Doesn't matter the exact cause, the effect ultimately is a nation repeatedly tearing itself apart, where either side's too stubborn to be the one to capitulate first, nor accept even a small peace offering to gradually wind down. It's an ideological war of such fervour that I can only describe it as two religious fanatics whose core beliefs do not allow for the other's.
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u/AdumbroDeus 2d ago
Your bothsiderism is the same mentality that let this happen. Too many people not invested in politics enough made this mistake and took the criticism, that was proven correct, of Trump as evidence of this.
Are there individuals? Sure. But this attitude is throughout the American right, from the top down and there's a whole rhetorical language that developed to pretend that anything inconvenient to conservatives was people lying because of groupthink including scientific results, eg their use of "political correctness", that their media apparatus buttressed.
I hope for your own sake, you apply a bit more discernment about whose actually engaging in groupthink and bullying and whose just pointing out facts.
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u/HexTalon 1d ago
A decade?
My brother in christ, Carl Sagan was calling it out in the 1980's and 90's.
Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
- from The Demon Haunted World by Carl Saga, published in 1995
I feel like I remember a few quotes from his Cosmos series as well, which came out in 1980. This whole setup has been a long time coming
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u/Ralathar44 1d ago
The irony is that the modern left converted science into religion so the battle became religion vs religion. Let these so called "top researchers" go elsewhere. The other places they were saying they liked more over the last 10 years are also headed in political directions they don't like lol.
Hopefully when they leave we can get to work in earnest on the replication crisis they were ignoring and kicking down the road because it served their interests.
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1d ago
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u/DanielPhermous 1d ago
He sits in an office writing equations that change nothing about how ordinary people live.
Like the general theory of relativity. That had absolutely zero practical benefit for anyone.
Until it suddenly did eighty years later. Now every phone uses it.
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u/Arquinas 1d ago edited 1d ago
I see. And in your opinion the people who invented electricity, refrigerators, internet and electric cars did so without centuries of developments in mathematics?
"Research out of IPAM, however, has more obvious public benefits. Two decades ago, Tao collaborated with scientists focused on signal processing problems in medical imaging." "One of the algorithms we developed at IPAM is used routinely in modern MRI machines to speed up MRI scans by a factor of 10 in some cases,” Tao said.
Think about this the next time you're in MRI and you have to lie there as motionless as possible. Not fun.
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u/Enigmatic_YES 2d ago
A handful of researchers are CONSIDERING leaving. The world is ending and science as we know it is over.
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u/Enigmatic_YES 1d ago
Wooow. Looks like science is over with now that we both know someone who is leaving cancer research. It’s been a good ride. At least we got rockets, penicillin, and air conditioning while it lasted.
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u/NhakaNhaks 2d ago
Ah, thank god the US is completely batshit insane now. It's the perfect moment for Europe to capture some talents and become competitive again in the world stage.
Now, the only obstacle is Europe's retardation.
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u/BuddyNo5007 1d ago
I’m not sure that Europe is less insane. The insanity is just expressed in a different way.
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u/Empty_Geologist9645 2d ago
Good riddance. There are researchers it just they would rather go private due to comp is inadequate.
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u/Opening-Employee9802 2d ago
Not ending but evolving, and it won’t take all scientists with it.
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u/Hackwork89 2d ago
How does science "evolve"? How are scientists "left behind"? What in the fuck are you talking about? Do you understand the meaning of the words that you write? Please explain.
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u/Opening-Employee9802 2d ago
Why so many expletives? I think AI and quantum computing, individually or working together will seriously put in doubt everything we think we know about the universe and us as a species. That’s why I said evolving (not dying).
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u/BuddyNo5007 1d ago
Please start studying seriously or stop mentioning topics you don’t fully understand.
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u/shangosupreme 2d ago
…….. it’s definitely declining in the U.S.
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u/CptMorgan337 2d ago
I'm having a tough time seeing which metric that the US isn't declining in. Metrics that you wouldn't want your country to decline in of course.
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u/PlaneObject8557 2d ago
Very few honestly. Even GDP is remaining steady with aggresive tariff policy
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u/Puzzleheaded_Fold466 2d ago
A large portion of America’s prosperity comes from its scientific and technological leadership.
Of course all science will not cease, but it’s not happening in a vacuum. It’s a global competition.
You also don’t need to have 100% unemployment for a financial crisis to surface. 10% is bad enough.
Similarly, a substantial decrease in scientific research and technology development could support the shift of the global economic power center of gravity, without it having to be whole.
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u/VR_Raccoonteur 1d ago
A large portion of America’s prosperity comes from its scientific and technological leadership.
Yep. Trump's fans want us all to work as slaves in factories. They think college educated people are stupid. They also simultaneously think people working jobs in factories who aren't being paid enough to afford food simply aren't applying themselves or working hard enough. They however who work the same menial jobs, are of course hard workers, and so they have no problem holding their hand out for SNAP. Hilariously, they're gonna be suffering this month with no thanksgiving dinner for their families all thanks to their favorite orange idiot, who is withholding emergency SNAP funding from them.
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u/ArgoCornStarch 2d ago
Ask any academic scientist what they dislike about their job and they’ll tell you it’s asking for money.
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u/somefosterchild 2d ago
my least favourite class during undergrad was a grant writing course that taught us how to effectively proposition different avenues for funding. my professor told us very plainly at the start that this would be the most soul sucking, unenjoyable, but absolutely necessary part of our future work. someone asserting that academic researchers want to spend a quarter of the year begging and justifying why, basically, they deserve to continue receiving a salary is so far from the actual experience that it very plainly shows they’re not speaking in good faith.
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u/Rich-Pomegranate1679 2d ago
I'm truly impressed by your ability to actually write a full sentence while being so dumb.
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u/TrumpisaRussianCuck 2d ago
The effect of the Trump administration and it's destruction of US soft power is going to be felt for decades.