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."
Like Y2K Brexit is turning out to be a non-problem. Wiser heads have already made a killing out of buying the dip to profit from the over-reaction driven by hyperbolic media scare-mongering.
UK business and growth will get a great boost from fall in pound - as the article already mentions more people holidaying at home and tourists and other businesses seeking bargins in UK. This can only bump up employment and reduce welfare payments.
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
And UK has done themselves a huge favour getting out of EU before the PIGS economies go into default (inevitable over next 10 years given their high debt-to-GDP ratios and massive youth unemployment). They are too big to bail out, but EU's silly attempts to prop them up will inevitably hurt the stronger economies of the EU. Far better to be outside looking in than inside trying to prop up basket cases.
.
UK will inevitably have a stronger economy going forward than it would have within the EU, and this can only help investment in science and R&D within UK (as it will be wasting less money on subsidising poor performing EU economies).
Are you being sarcastic? Or do you really believe that Britain is losing money with the EU? Oh boy you are in for some cognitive dissonance.
entropy happens
Why? We still have no idea what kind of deal we are going to get when we invoke Article 50, so "Keep Calm and Carry On" seems to be a more sensible approach at this point; freaking out achieve nothing right now because there's nothing concrete to actually freak out about other than some vague thing known as "BrExit" that can't be defined. Longer term, likely at least a year away, once some details of negotiations start coming out (e.g. just how little slack the EU is prepared to cut in order to avoid other countries seeking similar deals, whether or not they insist on free travel as a condition of EEA access, Schengen as a requirement, and all the other stuff that have become mandatory membership conditions since 1975) and the markets, industry and other economic factors have had a chance to adjust, that's when it'll be time to start freaking out.
Or not. While I think Remain would have been the better choice, I don't think Leave has to be a terrible one either; just that it's probably not going to be as good in the long term and it's all down to the negotiations. Right now Germany seems to want a reasonable deal, France seems to want to stick the knife in, and the other 25 countries fall somewhere in betweeen or have yet to make their position clear, so it could easily go either way regarding the EU, and then there are deals to be struck with other countries, especially the Commonwealth, the US, and maybe even China if the delay on Hinckley Point hasn't soured the relationship.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Well, perhaps we could find a better way to hand out grants to scientists, so we don't end up wasting it.
Perhaps we could also farm unicorns and sell the sparkles that they poop.
I think your idea is lovely in theory (hey thinks we should waste more?), but very difficult in practice. It turns out that we're already doing about everything right in that the UK has about the best scientific output per unit of currency invested of any large country. Grants are already fiercely competitive, and standards for hiring are orders of magnitude higher than they were 20 or 30 years ago.
I've hashed over this topic many many times. I'm a former academic and it's a somewhat popular topic especially among younger academics (since we get fewer grants than the older ones), but despite many very long, earnest conversations, I've not encountered any ideas that aren't really easily shot down.
It's easy to come up with notions. It's a bit harder to come up with ideas, it's harder still to come up with a plan that isn't really easily shot down because it will fail in some way or be sufficiently more expensive that you may as well just spend the money on the old method and get better results overall.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Matt Ridley pointed out that most scientists are misinformed about how EU science funding works. You don't have to be in the EU.
And what does popularism get you? A deep and long depression, unemployment and no less immigrants.
Crystal ball ??
How long has that depression of the U.K.'s manufacturing sector been going on ?
I agree with the "keep calm and carry on" but - we have no idea what is going to happen, but because of the uncertainty some of us are making sure we'll continue to have funds to get us through any bumps.
For example, we just had the bathrooms in our office redone and the plan was to get the kitchen done next. Right after the referendum (when the bathrooms were completed) a colleague asked "when will the kitchen be done" - he couldn't get his head around the idea that we wanted to keep our cash reserves up for the time being, and that it wasn't scaremongering, just caution.
The problem is that we're not the only ones, and this drop in consumer confidence will have a detremental affedt on the economy - the UK (not our company surprisingly enough) is already seeing this.
Like you I don't actually think Brexit will destroy the country, just that the pain is unlikely to be worth it. And that's speaking as an Irish citizen living and working in the UK.
That is so tragic. Why even bother voting? Let's just go back to the good old days when rulers told us what to do and to shut the hell up. People DO become disillusioned by this sort of thing and it DOES have an effect. Countries have chosen to move away from a representative government before and it never goes well for them.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
On the plus side, we're now an even more attractive place for DARPA to fund - we were already cheap compared to most US institutions and just became 10% cheaper...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Not sure if all people that vote for Brexit were what you alleged i.e. uneducated, old racists. But I am sure there are surely solutions to this problem - some of them have been tried in the past - you can start with reeducation camps and see what you do next if that does not work.
In other words by calling all Brexiters old uneducated xenophobes you slur at educated tolerant people that did not believe all the lies, think there are ways around problems and value democracy more than the undemocratic bunch in Brussels. Now I do not live in UK but in Germany and in German press there was a lot of calls for ignoring referendum results - to save democracy not less. With such a bunch it is maybe better to keep out, I do not know. In any case I have uneasy feeling when I look, for instance, at how we were all forced in an alliance with Turkey - something that has not been discussed with anybody besides some head of states i.e. something that lacked legitimacy while at the same time some alternative solutions were at hand (which Austria used together with Macedonia). Then there are other arguments - the policies of EU left huge groups of people in each country without benefits - the local governments helped of course and Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece have much to blame there too but EU stance was not ideal to say the least. Then take any of the common policies - common agricultural or fisheries policies - they are failures and there is no sign of improvement there. The list of negatives is long, at least as long as the least of positives. EU HQ refuses to address any of these problems and I do not mean curvature of cucumbers and banana and other some nonsense which by the way would not be possible if EU regulations did not provoke blatant exaggeration and the EU authorities bothered to explain these things to dumb folk of EU.
There is unfortunate part of Brexiters that are xenophobes are uneducated and have generally problems with the rest of the society. If you are going to single out a small London minority as the only Brits than I am afraid you are on a good way to political area where most of us do not want to be. The same process is seen in almost any other country. In Germany the propaganda machine works efficiently and people still believe what they are fed. Not sure if that is all that good. Sometimes you have to give up few good things together with the ones you cannot tolerate. Maybe that is what Brits did. Calling the Brexiters od uneducated and xenophobic means that you gave up quite big chunk of population - what are you going to do with them?
Btw - I personally profited greatly from open borders in EU. I did live better when the borders existed tho. I accepted the decrease of life quality but only because I considered it worthwhile. When I look at likes of Juncker or Merkel or great democrats in Spain that cannot calm down their own separatism movements but are already salivating at the possibility for continental blockade to get the Rock back, when I look at all this, I start to have justified doubts. Maybe UK will suffer short term. In long term they will be as good as others. And as for EU - if we have problems because of brexit we can always let Turkey in - that will surely strengthen our democracy.
While I'm not arguing that all the remediation was useless (much was definitely necessary) the problem was definitely blown out of proportion and there is copious evidence to support that assertion.
Says someone who has no clue about the problem. As the rest of your post shows.
I fixed about 1.5 millin lines of code written in COBOL and PL1. (Two different projects, the PL1 Job was only a quallity assurance as the original code was already fixed: "manually by the consultants you hate", while my company used a kind of specialized compiler)
The company where I fixed the close to 1 Million lines COBOL code woke up regarding the Y2K problem very late. They just got bought by an american company. And the new directors went ape shit when they realized the Y2K problem was not even tackled yet (that was mid 1998).
The company would have been out of business now, if we had not fixed ist software. And so would beall the customers of said company!!!
While we worked on such projects we had a partner company, a spin off from IBM basically but based on the Software Tool Chain that was developed by a Belgium/Dutch Company in an Erasmus project. (European EU wide distributed research Projects, mainly done in universities, partly in spin offs)
We had a joined venture with the Netherlands branch of "TriLoc Software Engineering, Milwaukee".
Basically every Company whee we fixed the code for would not have survived if we had not (or if we had made majour mistakes).
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Was it? I thought it was through the ECHR which is NOT an EU institution.
We'll see how much they really want to prevent war.
Not for my vote, leave campaign had nothing to do with why I voted leave (I actually didn't listen to them, but I did listen to the remain campaigners), and I live in county Antrim.
You know, when people move from here to somewhere else in the UK, they rarely move to Scotland for a reason. I think people's own personal interests will outweigh unionism with Scotland alone.
I personally don't see it as two faced, I see it as being reasonably prepared for all eventualities.
That's a nicely done list.
I honestly think the common man does not give a crap about nationalism in the UK, but I do think they care about living a happy life and the expectation is that your government should make it possible for you, this is the EU's failing because if the EU provided it, then I truly believe this wouldn't have happened. If the EU sought to resolve issues in a timely fashion, I genuinely think that the referendum would have even been a political agenda.
Thanks to the CFP, it's believed that over 100,000 jobs have been lost to it and growth is a negative number. You can find similar comparisons with the CAP or policies implemented by the IEEP etc. Not to mention events like the EU's ERM that caused industries to topple over and recessions.
Provided that the UK does away with related legislation, I see no reason why the UK wouldn't be in a better position to give the poor better opportunities. Sure, we wouldn't have these large subsidies from the EU, but then in my view, long term, we wouldn't need them anyway.
I am certain that in the short term, there will be some hardships, but long term, I expect the UK to be stronger for it and be capable of having a sustainable economy, living, trade, immigration, housing, healthcare etc.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
We will fix the EU, but the only language it understands is this one. Here's to my country leaving as well!
The correct way to build the EU would have been to grow it slowly, over a period of generations. Forcing it in a few years, using immigration as a weapon against the identity of the people of Europe, for no better reasons than power, money, and glory for a handful of unelected bureaucrats, is shameful and doomed to fail.
Once the coming civil war is over and the guilty have been sentenced, then we can consider a new union. One that actually respects the people and cultures it unifies.
Not even that - a narrow majority of the votes cast, which on a 70% turnout approximates to 36% of the electorate. There is (or soon will be) a 40% threshold for strikes in health, education and transport to be valid. So a level of support that cannot even validate a one-day strike by, say, teachers, is sufficient to jeopardise Britain's prosperity, territorial integrity and foreign relations?