Slashdot Mirror
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."
in Britain should be freaking out about the brexit.
As a convinced European I find it highly amusing that the main "leave" campaign guys are now running away and officially stating that they have no idea what they actually planned (Yeah, we heavily lied in order to get you to approve a plan which we don't have, because it does not make any deeper sense).
I hope that the EU gives them choice between coming back without any special status, joining the Euro and the Schengen zone or remaining in "splendid isolation". In case of the latter: not terrible for the rest of the EU - one competitor is gone, and in 30 years there will be a new developing country with cheap labor.
Please stick to talking about Brexit, if you know anything about it. It's clear that you know nothing about Y2K.
Y2K passed off with barely a whimper because millions of software engineers around the planet took it seriously and worked their asses off for a good 6 months to make their software cope with the year ticking over to 2000. Code that would break was found absolutely everywhere, and quite astounding budgets had to be mobilized to fix everything in time. Additional contractors were engaged almost around the clock at extortionate rates in the final months, because there was so much code to remedy.
So yeah, Y2K went off very quietly, but no thanks to you. The thanks go to all the engineers who worked ridiculous hours to keep the systems you rely on from falling apart.
Trade will continue on as it has - the EU sends more to UK than UK sends to EU, so the EU is net worse off if it starts implementing tarriffs
Only if you completely ignore the relative sizes of the UK & EU GDPs and overall exports. Guess what, absolute numbers need context. A simple way of looking at it is "who would be hit hardest if UK-EU trade stopped overnight".
In 2015, the UK exported 220 billion GBP to the EU, whereas it imported 290 billion GBP. That is 44% of the UK's exports went to the EU, whereas 8-17% of the EU's exports went to the UK, so the UK would be a bigger loser.
As a percentage of GDP, the UK's EU exports made up about 10% of its GDP (2 trillion GBP), whereas the EU's UK exports made up a mere 2% of its GDP (12 trillion GBP).
Source: https://fullfact.org/europe/uk...
"I assume everyone who disagrees with me is a racist. This makes it much easier for me to assume a moral high ground and dismiss their opinions and experiences out of hand without engaging." -everyone who voted to stay
I can see why you people do this. It's very easy and conveinient!
Virtually everything you read about Brexit in the media before and after the referendum has been FUD.
Britain was one of the world's most prosperous, safe, and culturally advanced nations for over a thousand years.
I'm sure they will do just fine as they watch the EU collapse under the weight of their open borders policies
Britain was one of the world's most prosperous, safe, and culturally advanced nations for over a thousand years.
That's no guarantee that it will remain so. The British Empire is a shadow of what it was just 100 years ago.
I'm sure they will do just fine as they watch the EU collapse under the weight of their open borders policies
If the EU collapses for any reason it won't be because of their border policies. The thing most likely to cause the EU to fail is the problem of fixed exchange rates within the currency union. In a single country like the US, capital and labor can flow relatively freely to where it is needed when there are imbalances between regions. But since the EU is comprised of sovereign countries when you get a region in financial distress (see Greece) they have the problem of effectively having fixed exchange rates between sovereign states with more limited labor and capital mobility.
If Greece was still on the drachma, their exchange rate would have adjusted in response to the economic problems. But since they effectively had a fixed exchange rate, they get the problems of a fixed exchange rate. It's not clear that the EU can manage this problem in the long term. Note the already tense and clumsy response to the Greek bailouts. If a bigger economy within the EU (say Spain or France), were to run into similar problems the problem might become too large to handle.
I'm not saying the EU will collapse but if anything causes it to, it most likely will be the failure of the monetary union rather than immigration policy.
Britain was one of the world's most prosperous, safe, and culturally advanced nations for over a thousand years.
So was Greece. And Rome. And Egypt.