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Britain's Scientists Are 'Freaking Out' Over Brexit (washingtonpost.com)
"To use a nonscientific term, the scientists in the country are freaking out," reports the Washington Post. An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes their report:
The researchers worry that Britain will not replace funding it loses when it leaves the E.U., which has supplied about $1.2 billion a year to support British science, approximately 10 percent of the total spent by government-funded research councils. There is a whiff of panic in the labs.
Worse than a possible dip in funding is the research community's fear that collaborators abroad will slink away and the country's universities will find themselves isolated. British research today is networked, expensive, competitive and global. Being part of a pan-European consortium has helped put Britain in the top handful of countries, based on the frequency of citations of its scientific papers... Anecdotal evidence suggests that headhunters may already be circling.
Meanwhile, NPR reports that Britain's vote to leave the EU "has depressed the value of the British pound," prompting many Britons to vacation at home rather than abroad -- while "Americans will find their dollars go further in Britain these days." And an anonymous Slashdot reader quotes a report from CNBC that Ford "is considering closing plants in the UK and across Europe in response to Britain's vote to leave the EU, as it forecast a $1 billion hit to its business over the next two years."
Worse than a possible dip in funding is the research community's fear that collaborators abroad will slink away and the country's universities will find themselves isolated. British research today is networked, expensive, competitive and global. Being part of a pan-European consortium has helped put Britain in the top handful of countries, based on the frequency of citations of its scientific papers... Anecdotal evidence suggests that headhunters may already be circling.
Meanwhile, NPR reports that Britain's vote to leave the EU "has depressed the value of the British pound," prompting many Britons to vacation at home rather than abroad -- while "Americans will find their dollars go further in Britain these days." And an anonymous Slashdot reader quotes a report from CNBC that Ford "is considering closing plants in the UK and across Europe in response to Britain's vote to leave the EU, as it forecast a $1 billion hit to its business over the next two years."
Ford had already identified those plants for closure BEFORE the date of the referendum was set.
This is all spin trying to attribute these closures to BREXIT when its due to a general downturn...
Unfortunately, the EU really likes using such programs to put pressure to non-member states for completely unrelated negotiations, and as a result has recently excluded Switzerland from Horizon 2020. I wouldn't be surprised if they used the same tactics also against the UK in the future.
It was Switzerland's choice. They voted to restrict immigration and what you outline was the result. Maybe one shouldn't be tied to the other, but they knew what they were getting themselves into when they voted. Don't forget it barely got through. As is often the case with these motions pushed by Switzerland's right-wing party, it's the more rural cantons that vote for them and the urban areas that vote against them. i.e. it's the people who actually interact with foreigners that want them in Switzerland.
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The paperwork is really not that bad.
As a former Framework Warrior, the hell it ain't!
Other research project would generate a similar amount of paper trail.
No they don't. Compare, for example the reporting requirements of RCUK to the EU framework projects.
These reporting requirements relative to the amount of actual work of these projects are legedary. It's what grizzled old postdocs talk about in the pub.
Nonetheless, the money is still good, and you get to keep the equipment after and keep researching with it. Not to mention the inevitable side projects that the postdocs and students work on. I think the indirect impact of the work is actually more than the direct impact sometimes. I did my best work while moonlighting on an FP7 project.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Yes, but you need to be a third-world county or an associated country; source here. Essentially, you can get funding if you are outside the EU if you are:
Developed countries like US, Canada, Russia and China are excluded, and that's the set in which the UK will land after Brexit. Their only option is to join as an Associated Country, but that is more expensive than staying in as an EU member. Otherwise, they can wait until their economy tanks bad enough to join the other list.
I am coordinator for two EU projects, each with 6 partners over 5 countries, and I know the system fairly well. And I have a proposal with one UK partner in processing, damnit.
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If the UK voted to leave the EU, there is little chance that it will vote to join the U.S.
The last time we tried to acquire Canada, Washington DC burned down.
At the moment the U.S. has plenty to worry about than trying to expand it property. An election of two rather unpopular candidates (With one being batshit crazy, who seems to have conned much of the uneducated portion of the population). In a world that wants us to get more involved and less involved at the same time. While trying to maintain the growth and prosperity it achieved after it was the only major country that didn't have its infrastructure knocked out from WWII.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
You do realize that in single countries like the US they have nothing but fixed exchange rates? Texas dollars are the same as California dollars.
The US also has free movement of labor and capital within the country which is how economic imbalances get solved. If New Jersey has economic troubles, the labor and capital can (relatively) easily move to another state. If labor costs in Michigan get out of line, the business moves to Georgia and the people as well. The Federal government controls the currency and acts to help allocate it where needed. Some states effectively subsidize others. Workers can become a citizen of another state simply by moving there. A Greek citizen cannot become a French citizen nearly so easily and the EU has the single currency but they do not have the ability to move capital and labor around as easily to deal with imbalances in local economic conditions.
They also have similar problems to the Greek bailouts (for example, problems with solvency of some of the states/territories in higher debt such as Illinois or Puerto Rico).
The problems in various US states bear little resemblance to the Greek bailout unless you squint really hard and don't go any deeper than the fact that they are related to debt service. The problems in Puerto Rico are solvable if Congress and/or the Executive branch could be bothered to give the island any attention and they are much easier problems to solve than the Greek ones. Interestingly many of the problems in Puerto Rico are challenging precisely because it is not a State. If it were there would be more tools available to them.
The important difference is that taxes in states like Texas and California are moved by the Federal government to states with weaker economies. This helps to ensure that the difference in purchasing power between a dollar in Texas and a dollar in Alaska is not too great. The Germans vetoed such a mechanism in the Eurozone, which economists at the time said was required to prevent exactly the kind of crisis that we've seen over the last few years.
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Over a thousand years? You really think that Britain in, say, the 13th or 14th C was advanced compared to China, Korea, Japan, the Fatmid Empire, India, or Ghana? You probably didn't even realize Ghana was once a major world power because of the parochialism of history as taught in European schools, but it was the world's largest producer of gold. Ghanian gold in trans-Saharan trade caused inflation in medieval Egypt, and high prices spurred the development of Venetian trade. That brought wealth and knowledge into Italy, making the Renaissance possible. So no Ghana, no European civilization as we know it.
Until the Enlightenment, Europe was the most backward shit-hole in the world, intellectually, culturally and technologically. Why do you think Columbus and everyone else was so anxious to get to China? Because that's where all the good stuff was; amazing stuff like paper, chimneys, dental fillings,cast iron and a merit-based civil service system. The one thing Europe was advanced in, though was fighting. Europeans were unruly, uncivilized barbarians who fought each other all the time, so naturally they got very good at it.
If you were sentenced to be sent back by time machine to live in the 1200s, Europe would be low on the list of places you'd want to end up. China probably wins based on the availability of toilet paper alone. Britain was relatively peaceful and advanced for Northern Europe, but it's hard to think of places in Asia or Africa that suffered multiple decades-spanning civil wars that Britain did.
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