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Scientists Boycott NASA Conference Because of Ban On Chinese Participants
New submitter Eunuchswear writes "Congress has passed laws forbidding NASA from allowing Chinese nationals on its premises, so NASA was forced to reject applications from Chinese scientists to attend the upcoming meeting on the Kepler space telescope next month. This ban extends even to Chinese scientists and students working in the USA, angering many American scientists. Geoff Marcy, known for his work on exoplanets, is reported to be boycotting the conference. 'In good conscience, I cannot attend a meeting that discriminates in this way. The meeting is about planets located trillions of miles away, with no national security implications.' he said in an email to the conference organisers."
Instead of having it at NASA, can't they just have it at the local Holiday Inn?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
From TFA:
The recent Congressional action refers to a broader law passed in July which prohibits Nasa funds from being used to participate or collaborate with China in any way. The law has raised fears among some Nasa-funded scientists that they will have to sever ties with their Chinese collaborators, and no longer take on Chinese students. weve embraced this schitzophrenic notion that theyre both an ally as well as an enemy. our Frienemy manufacture entire lifestyles for americans, from phones to computers and even the next great bridge to replace the golden gate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_span_replacement_of_the_San_Francisco%E2%80%93Oakland_Bay_Bridge
To insist your second largest trading partner is so prone to espionage as to warrant eviction from, historically, a great font of collaborative international scientific research of the modern era, misses the point entirely. to insist somehow they might glean some kernel of knowledge from NASA that they would not otherwise discover as a nation that manufactures supercomputers, high speed maglev transportation, and the worlds largest power plant ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Gorges_Dam ) is laughable.
this legislation was concocted by the republican party. Any woman or man of science should remember this as "the party that cant." In the past we hosted 7 astronauts aboard the russian space station MIR. Yet somehow today, the country that hasnt moved missiles into cuba, hasnt started proxy wars, and hasnt ginned up anti-american rhetoric is now so dangerous as to be inadmissable in the eyes of a party that as far as i can tell, stopped researching China after the cold war.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I still don't understand how that behavior is legal. Sneaking extra laws inside things into irrelevant laws should not be possible. This package deal all-or-nothing bunk needs to be rid of.
American universities ... are profiting from those students working for them for a pittance here.
True - what industry doesn't like cheap labor? That doesn't mean other Americans necessarily benefit from it.
Trust me, if American citizens were clogging up the system of doctoral programs in STEM then no university would be going through the strenuous process of getting foreign students to do the drudgework for their research standing glory.
Perhaps Americans aren't clogging the system because it doesn't pay for them to. For decades plenty of Americans got STEM Ph.D.'s. The problem was that, due to the high demand for them, they got paid decently. Fortunately the National Science Foundation (a trade association for academia paid for by the US government) recognized this problem in the 1980's, and discussed how a vast increase in student visas could lower the price of employing Ph.D.'s. Unsurprisingly, it worked!
Our company on average pays about $40K to get a foreigner like me into the country.
You think $40k is a lot of money? That (hopefully) represents only a fraction of the burdened labor cost for employing someone for a year.
Do you nitwits really think they would ever do that if they could find Americans who were capable of doing the same thing?
What does "capable" mean? If you mean have the mental ability, oddly there was an adequate supply of Americans before the flood of students visas. I doubt you're calling Americans dumb though, so I presume you mean obtained their Ph.D.'s. There was also an adequate supply. Why that's no longer the case was explained above.
sometimes go for months without finding the right candidates
Since you're looking for highly educated and specialized people, something would be wrong if it didn't take months to find them. The typical attitude of someone involved in hiring today is that they should be able to get highly qualified people as quickly and easily as you can hire burger flippers. At one point, before other options opened up, American companies understood that talent was something you had to look hard for, and they both invested in and made an effort to retain such people. Such people didn't get canned because business is down this quarter, and the Great Minds of the stock analysts want to see expenses trimmed by almost as much as the CEO's salary. Thinking beyond the next quarter, companies didn't can such people because they knew it would be difficult to find comparable talent when business turned up the next quarter.
P.S. How is it that attacks such as yours are usually posted AC?
It's because of all the money that Hong Kong makes. The "one country, two systems" slogan really means "those guys make a lot of money and we don't want to disturb them too much" which is why Hong Kong and Macau are Special Administrative Regions but Tibet is left in the dark.
Although I don't believe the Chinese government charges Hong Kong any tax, so they're not directly benefiting from it directly. I suspect they're trying to use Hong Kong as a gateway investment vehicle for foreign investment and then try to lure them into mainland China with lower labor costs once they learn all the secrets.
Nowadays, you never see anything stamped with "made in Hong Kong" anymore; it's all financial and technical/logistical services now.