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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."
I'm still LOLing at the Europeans who have been mourning the Brexit since the vote was taken. Face it, the EU is a failed experiment that is full of failed states. The EU Is rapidly becoming economically irrelevant and a political laughingstock with its excessive liberalism and regulation. The United States will last a little longer, but they're following the lead of the EU down the road of debt, poverty, decadence, economic ruin, and total irrelevance. China is also collapsing as its economy grinds to a halt and they fall into a deep recession. Face it, Canada is rapidly rising to be the next dominant superpower, both politically and economically. We're also far smarter than the Europeans and Americans, so we won't repeat their mistakes and we'll be here to stay at the top.
How is it a problem when you start losing less money? Don't English scientists know math?
Well, perhaps we could find a better way to hand out grants to scientists, so we don't end up wasting it. I mean there's the Replication Crisis to consider, and the Decline Effect, and then somewhere north of 40,000 neurology papers that were a waste of time (not all British of course).
I think Ford are closing plants all over the place. Their sales are weaker in the USA and China too, which is absolutely nothing to do with Brexit, although Brexit is a wonderful excuse for useless executives to hang their poor performance on.
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.
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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).
Maybe next time walk the streets in time. If you can't be bothered with politics, politics can't be bothered with you. Britain dialed itself backwards one generation. Which is not the worst time to be in unless you want to be at the forefront of anything. Which would be the point of most scientific research. So obviously scientists had a world to lose but you would not have noticed it. And in absence of respectable input they could trust, the voters basically were back to gambling on buzzphrases.
Ford had already marked those plants for closure BEFORE the referendum date had even been set
Do some research ...
The scientists are losing money. They are also losing research and work opportunities. That is the problem. Sorry reality does not match your narrative but that's how it is.
It isn't as big a problem as some are making it out to be though. Moving to the EU from England is not such a big deal, they will be fine.
The EU will have less money to spend. The UK was a net contributor and due to its relative economic performance, was going to be an even bigger net contributor in future.
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.
Now if we could just cripple the UK even further as punishment for their stupidity, that would be great.
That doesn't mean shit to the science community. It is worth nothing.
Yeah I don't blame them; The education system in the UK is already starting to collapse with the spike in interest on Student Loans discouraging people from going to University if they don't want to be in debt for the rest of their lives, and the government selling off primary and secondary schools to private corporations.
And don't get me started on how they keep chopping and changing the curriculum so nobody knows what they are doing.
Things could get better or worse, but we may end up losing our dominance in the tertiary industry and going back to being primarily secondary industry...
But I guess I can't blame the idiots that believed the Leave campaign people when they were dangling all these golden carrots in front of their faces only to backtrack and disappear immediately after they'd done their damage.
Every brexiter knows that we don't need bankers and scientists? The sooner the move abroad the better. I saw an Iranian scientist on TV the other day and the sooner he has to go back to Europe the better
It is possible to take part in EU science programs and funding like Horizon 2020 without strictly being an EU member. For example, Switzerland used to participate in such programs almost the same way member states do (including receiving funding, but of course also by funding it itself).
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.
... the piece in the Washington Post is long on opinion and *very* short on fact.
For example, the piece makes much of comments by Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, that one third of the teaching staff in Edinburgh hold EU passports and are "very twitchy right now". Well, that's real science, right there, eh? I mean, that's an empirical survey if ever there was one.
What the British Government has said (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-36916836) is that it wants and expects to protect the rights of EU workers currently living in Britain, but that such protections would be conditional upon EU countries providing the same protections for UK citizens living in the EU. That doesn't seem reasonable, but it doesn't explain the scaremongering attempted by the Washington Post.
I guess it is worth pointing out that President Obama and the US Administration were very much in favour of the UK remaining within the EU. Washington saw the UK membership of the EU as a lever it could apply to get the EU to go along with things like TTIP and joint military participation with operations like those in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In other words, you have to treat this article in exactly the same way that a scientist would treat a claim that some random sub-atomic particle could travel faster than the speed of light: look for substantiating evidence; look for corroboration; examine the sources of evidence; look at the statistical significance of the sampled data, and so on.
This rather shoddy article contains a lot of supposition, suggestion and conjecture, but it has been very selective in it's reporting of "facts".
Nothing to see here. Move along, move along.
That doesn't seem *unreasonable*. Doh.
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.
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.
The little bit we lost was more than made up for in trade. Silly little biscuit
No rational political actor would trigger article 50
43% of UK business happens with the EU.
UK industry requires the large inflow of people to feed the economic beast.
Research funding and participation.
The EU as an entity cannot give a departing UK a sweetheart deal.
Northern Ireland - the UK is party to a bilateral peace agreement in NI - with the Republic of Ireland - that is literally written into the Irish constitution - based on EU membership of both states - it cannot unilaterally rescind this agreement without breaking international law. The EU is not simply about the single market.
Scotland - whatever about a recent YouGov poll - actually invoking article 50 will most certainly precipitate a Scottish secession vote.
The Pound is at a 35 year low against the dollar and article 50 hasn't even been invoked - the pound would crater to parity (and everybody knows it).
The economic impact is only starting to take its toll on the UK - give it a year and the public WILL be ready to reverse the vote.
The city (name for London's financial sector) accounts for about 10% of UK GDP cannot effectively compete in the EU single market - with the UK on the outside (get serious).
Only a bunch of self-styled 'swashbuclking men of the world' in the Tory party and out-and-out racists in UKIP/BNP are really 'bought into' Brexit - for (largely) English nostalgist/nationalist reasons. The rest - are simply registering a protest vote.
Virtually every mainstream politician and business voice still supports the UK staying in the EU. Added to which many businesses are public stating that investment will not happen or has been redirected to other EU countries as a result of the Brexit vote. The only way to arrest the rot is to secure the UK's membership of the EU - triggering article 50 would simply pour rocket fuel on a economic fire that would blaze for a decade... and the political and bureaucratic establishment KNOWS it.
Bottom line - no responsible government would actually trigger article 50. The likely (though not guaranteed) outcome is some huffing and puffing over the next year or so, and then some mechanism that allows the UK to remain in the EU with some fudge on migration concocted by the EU (think temporary derogation on 2004 EU accession countries).
That they can't do science or that they can't do science and keep their 100k paycheck.
So a left wing publication (washington post) reports on the fear of people who might lose state funding (but probably won't), and another left wing outlet (npr) reports a negative impact on the currency, forgetting that if the market was going to crash over this it would have already.
Yay for false consensus and fear mongering. ..and before you left wing blow hards get your panties in wads, you know you'd be all over this if it was two right wing outlets misinterpreting one especially cold winter as 'proof' that climate change is bunk, and linking that to claims that coal is really a-ok to burn after all.
Well, the vote didn't come out the "correct" way this time. They'll just have to deal with it! In the same way that the rest of Britain has had to deal with increasing EU interference in their lives, the scientists now are the ones out of luck. Sorry! These things happen when the government represents the interests of its own people instead of the interests of the globalist elite. Better luck next time!
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
The trouble that Europe has is it is stuffed full of old people. That is why the place has the same level of visionary development as your grandparent's living room has had since the 1970s. Old people are at a different time in their life, and understandably care less for change and progress, but when they clog up the political system, they make life extremely grumpy and difficult.
The trouble is that not all of Europe is old, and those who are young are getting tired of the 'waiting for death' and 'back in my day' mentality that is gripping the West. Globalization might have it's problems, but most young people are no longer under the illusion that their problems are being caused by that Greek or Chinese person who they partied with in Ibiza last year.
The danger for the West is that there are other places with better demographics, and rapidly increasing standards of living. Europe should be busy trying to bring in young skilled workers from these places to offset the coming demographic cliff, and also encouraging young people to procreate. Instead they are closing off the borders, and making it harder and harder for young people to afford to start families by trying to extract all their earnings through rent seeking activities in the belief that storing fiat currency is a viable way to fund their pensions.
It is hard to see how it will not all crash and burn at some point. The global retirement asset bubble thing will burst when the inflow of new money to the ponzi scheme declines (either from prices simply becoming impossible to afford by new entrants, or old people having to cash out) which will wipe out the supposed retirement savings of millions, forcing them to have to rely on state pensions. This will then set up a direct political contest (as opposed to the proxy contest going on in the housing/debt market right now) between young workers and pensioners. Stripped of the housing capital gains illusion, I think any young person who is not debt enslaved will vote with their feet at this point, which will accelerate the dependency ratio shrinkage (a problem Japan didn't have to deal with due to its tight knit culture).
Eventually we'll reach a sensible compromise where young people will have to pay a bit more tax to prevent poverty among old people, and old people will have to accept a reduced standard of living in their retirement. Unfortunately it will be a bumpy road getting there, but that is how populous democracies solve these sorts of problems.
of all legitimate personal rivalries not an7more. It's In eternity...Romeo you get distracted is the group that Usenet. In 1995, from one folder on
Importantly the EU distributed our money back to us in ways our own gov didn't - they recognise disadvantaged areas and have funded projects to improve the access to facilities that Londoners may take for granted.
... the piece in the Washington Post is long on opinion and *very* short on fact.
For example, the piece makes much of comments by Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, that one third of the teaching staff in Edinburgh hold EU passports and are "very twitchy right now". Well, that's real science, right there, eh? I mean, that's an empirical survey if ever there was one.
What the British Government has said (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-36916836) is that it wants and expects to protect the rights of EU workers currently living in Britain, but that such protections would be conditional upon EU countries providing the same protections for UK citizens living in the EU. That doesn't seem reasonable, but it doesn't explain the scaremongering attempted by the Washington Post.
I guess it is worth pointing out that President Obama and the US Administration were very much in favour of the UK remaining within the EU. Washington saw the UK membership of the EU as a lever it could apply to get the EU to go along with things like TTIP and joint military participation with operations like those in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In other words, you have to treat this article in exactly the same way that a scientist would treat a claim that some random sub-atomic particle could travel faster than the speed of light: look for substantiating evidence; look for corroboration; examine the sources of evidence; look at the statistical significance of the sampled data, and so on.
This rather shoddy article contains a lot of supposition, suggestion and conjecture, but it has been very selective in it's reporting of "facts".
Nothing to see here. Move along, move along.
It is exactly the Eastern European immigrant workers that the Leave voters wanted to throw out -- who else could it possible be? So for her to turn around and say that of course the Polish immigrant workers will be safe, while painting the whole thing as some kind of EU-initiated attack on the rights of British pensioners abroad, is disingenuous to say the least.
The Home Office is probably preparing systems for mass work visa applications for any and all EU nationals while the politicians wring their hands. And given the history of the Home Office under the leadership of Mrs. May, large numbers of those applications will be turned down.
And yet the areas that had benefitted most from this bought the lie that they'd be better off voting more power to the people who'd been screwing them for the last few decades.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The article is about sciences grant, collaborations. Let us say you had a lab in Frankfurt wanting to have a 5 year collab on a subject, and they have the choice between an UK lab and a swedisch one. Which one do you think would be safe form them to take ? Excately : not the UK one. And to add , let us say you are a researcher in UK getting an EU grant. What hapenned afterward ? *maybe* the rgant runs to tis end, but afterward ? Well here you go . no more EU grant and now the Uk has to give more grants to *keep* the same funding amount of science, and the collaboration is not as easy anymore. What this has to do with worker right ? Nothing whatsoever.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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'Freaking Out' is now newsworthy? Shame on you Slashdot.
I am a British scientist and am freaking out.
I am a British scientist and am not freaking out.
I have nothing to do with the EU and don't give a rat's ass about the whole matter.
I am from Scotland and the English can go shave the Queen's.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Most of our physical exports were import-based.
We can sure export cheaper now the pound crashed! Oh, wait.
We can't devalue our currency like China. We're fucking nothing. An ant. We don't have the sort of resources to compete internationally.
Brexit fuckwits that seriously think we can survive on the service sector are delusional.
Hope you didn't like any of those foods we imported, they are only going to get more expensive.
As is every other consumable.
Certainty.
Think about it, or read Anti-Fragile.
true around 10% of the contributions, but UK is ranked ninth sorted by % of GNI and fourth by share. For from the most generous relative to population.
Eh, not sure what you are saying. He HAD said that he would stand down in case of a Brexit. You are saying he didn't give them enough time? In any case, he is a complete douche for being the one who called for the referendum and then taking off like that. And yes, politicians are douches anyway, but he took it to another level.
On the other hand, the Brexit supporters spent their time spinning the actual facts (£350mill/week to NHS lol) instead of actually doing any work on what would really happen on a Brexit. Guess what, they didn't do any work on that because it's hard to impossible to come out ahead with a Brexit and they know it.
Are the poor little fears going to have to join the large number of the British population that have suffered cutback after cutback for almost ten years since the last big crash,you know,the ones who don't get houseing benefit or any other benefit because their to ill or damaged to work,the folk who don't get their operations because of the cutbacks in the nhs,etc etc etc.
It must be awful having to face the reality of the world they live in,or do they expect to be cocooned for their entire life while everybody else suffers but still have to contribute through taxes to keep usless hobby followers in cushty jobs and lifestyles..
Pull yer heads out of yer arses and look at what's going on around you,if so many of you are meant to be so bloody brilliant,go into private industry and come up with something very useful that people will pay you for..
You have had crusty protected lives for decades,now join the real world...
Me,I can think of dozens of projects etc that I would love to 've able to study,especially if the public's tax money is going to pay me to follow hobby interests,get it through your supposedly smart heads that the country can not afford even basic benefits for large numbers of people,benefits they have helped contribute to for decades with taxes etc,how are we meant to pay FOR you lot as well ?
Europe is a competitor not a supermarket. Trade deficit is a net loss due to trade. Pretending a deficit isn't a loss is just words. It's not a "cost of doing business", other countries in the EU trade at a profit.
"...if we could source the goods we import from the EU more cheaply elsewhere"
That's a false dichotomy. You can also source the goods and services domestically, or not import optional goods at all. Both those reduce the trade loss.
Your argument is really the classic : "make up the losses in the volume" that loss-making companies make. You really cannot do this, you need to keep borrowing and borrowing to cover those losses. In Britains case it's been privatizing to keep the inflow of cash into the UK. e.g. China building a nuclear power plant. But that cash has not resulted in a net trade gain. It's not productive investment into the UK as it is false presented as.
And how does that invalidate any point you made? From the perspective of an EU national in the UK there is an admittedly small risk your right to work won't be protected. Even if it is then you have no idea how your residence in the UK will be supported. Will you be able to return to a different EU nation and return freely to the UK again afterwards, will you be entitled to all the same benefits and services as a UK national, will family members/partners who joined you in the UK after the referendum date be able to stay etc etc? Even if all the answers are almost certainly it's still a big concern.
Regardless of your view overall of the referendum it doesn't take much empathy to be able to realise that this result was bound to lead to a lot of EU nationals working in the UK being very worried.
The Doctor and Clara find themselves under attack by a robot/computer/whatever still fighting a war that was lost thousands of years ago.
Actually, I think I saw that on Gilligan's Island too, but with a Japanese submarine.
Anyhow, the Brexit vote is in the past, but parts of Project Fear were damaged in the fighting and are now unable to comprehend that the war is over. Meanwhile, reality is turning out to be the exact opposite of most of the doom and gloom predictions.
See that "Preview" button?
The science was always going to be the first one to be hit from brexit. Basically the system is based on funding collaborations across the EU, and rightly or wrongly, collaboration groups are dropping UK based research institutes as a high risk to the projects funding prospects. There has been no real impact yet as very few grants have been awarded since the vote, but as we see the next few rounds of various Horizon 2020 EU grant scheme go through we will see a drop in funding going to the UK.
Next that will be obvious is the decrease in funding for regional development, and that will be when it starts to impact the people that actually voted to leave. That is going to take a year or so to become obvious.
My frustration with the referendum is that the leave side of the vote wasn't actually had no specific actions assigned to it in the law that set it up, in the end it was a very expensive nation wide opinion poll on EU membership. In a way, people who voted leave didn't actually vote for anything concrete.
The vote should have had article 50 legislatively tied to the vote when the referendum was first setup, with an automatic and immediate invocation of it outside the control of the UK parliament and prime minister. It would have dramatically curtailed the leave campaigns ability to basically come up with contradictory and fanciful scenarios of what voting leave would mean, it would have been a much starker and obvious choice.
Weren't they cutting funding anyway despite the vote?
Dude, get over it. We brexited. Deal with it.
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.
Much of that work was frankly unnecessary. Not all the code was fixed on time and some countries spent very little on Y2K remediation (South Korea, Italyand yet they experienced very few problems. Millions of small businesses did virtually zero remediation and yet they experienced virtually zero problems. 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.
Additional contractors were engaged almost around the clock at extortionate rates in the final months, because there was so much code to remedy.
That was because large companies were worried about liability if by some chance something should go wrong. Consulting companies made a ton of money selling Y2K remediation to credulous executives for several years before the actual year 2000 arrived. Basically they were buying expensive insurance for a problem that they didn't fully understand.
The thanks go to all the engineers who worked ridiculous hours to keep the systems you rely on from falling apart.
Those engineers got paid to work those hours. You make it sound as if it was some heroic sacrifice on their part. Never mind that it was (mostly other) software engineers that created the problem in the first place by utilizing bad programming practices over the preceding decades.
of course we can devalue the pound if we want to, that was the purpose of not joining the euro
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
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.
I mean there's the Replication Crisis to consider, and the Decline Effect, and then somewhere north of 40,000 neurology papers that were a waste of time
Actually your examples point to the problem which is not how the grants are assigned within a field but the level of funding between different fields. The effects you point to are all predominantly (but not exclusively) related to medical sciences. This is an area where politicians, corporations and the public love to pour huge quantities of money into because of the intense personal connection medicine has to all of us.
A perfect grant allocation system will give the most promising research ideas the highest priority for funding until all the funds are allocated. This means that the more funds you have the lower the quality of research that will be funded even if you have a perfect allocation system. This is what I believe we are seeing today with a good, but obviously not perfect, allocation system.
The solution is to redirect research funding away from medicine to other areas of science. This will have the effect of increasing the output of other fields which will lead to discoveries some of which will in turn help advance medicine as well as advance productivity so we can pay for all the new medical techniques being developed. However this is hard to do because while we all have a strong personal connection directly or through loved ones to curing things like cancer or heart disease very few people have a strong personal connection to making a better battery, understanding superconductivity, finding the nature of Dark Matter or solving quantum gravity etc.
Most of this is a cynical exercise by companies using Brexit as a pretext to engage in mass lay off and withdraw from their commitments despite receiving massive subsidies from the local governments.
how Britain will look after Brexit
I'm really tired of hearing of people "Freaking Out" over anything. That phrase has become so overused that it not only doesn't mean what it used to mean, it barely means anything at all any more. It used to be reserved for something that was nearly a complete psychotic breakdown, now it means any time someone has to find another box of kleenex, finds their pen is out of ink, or that their favorite starbucks barista is out sick.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
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.
Someone learned what a fallacy was and now claims everything is a fallacy.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
As a 'remainer' I seriously didn't want this course of events.
Now however it seems to me that our best bet would be to join the EEA (which is basically 'Soft Brexit'), since this gets us out of the customs union. It'll also minimise the damage overall. This means renegotiating all the curent EU trade deals again, so thats rather alot of work to do in any case.
The only silver lining to this would be the ability to negotiate trade deals where the EU feared to tread. Whether this would be affective, and not disastrous, does depend on the agendas of the UK negotiators. With Liam Fox in charge of this process I am NOT confident. He'll be doing deals for the benefit of his corporate chums, not the UK as a whole.
Full USAian TTIP with the ISCS supranational secret court screwing UK small business and industry as well as UK people is a nightmare waiting to happen. We'll see a depression like the worst in the US Rust belt. (This was due to unrestricted globalisation with no thought paid to the damage it would do to those businesses and people in the Rust belt, and no mitigation in place to help).
Didn't France say that the TTIP was dead because of this?
Time to order your 3D printer, hotend or extruder from E3D!
Never mind that it was (mostly other) software engineers that created the problem in the first place by utilizing bad programming practices over the preceding decades.
Actually it was the penny pinching companies that ignored/refused or delayed fixing the Y2K bug that are at the root of the problem.
Its like blaming the plumbers fixing the clog you made by stuffing tampons down the drain.
Now that the industries are retreating, science funding is dwindling and the pound is lowering there is a great future in Britain for amusement parks and recreation facilities. All those mansions, ruins, battle sites, castles and grown jewels should all get a shot of funding for the new facilities necessary to host the masses of tourists interested for the new, cheap Britain!
Centuries of history have proved quite categorically is you threaten the UK people or put their backs to the wall they will lash out.
Yeah - when you still had an empire buddy. Look around, not so much now.
No money, redistributed from other countries, kill of the Political Religion of Climate Science.
Now Brits can go back to mining and burning coal like the rest and buy air conditioners for the summer and heaters for the winter.
Looks like Al Gore will have a bit of trouble paying for his "sex ranch" in Thailand outside of "Bang Cock".
Ha ha
Says someone who has no clue about the problem. As the rest of your post shows.
You have no idea what my background is so you're not really in a position to judge. Furthermore the public facts are that there is a ton of evidence that Y2K simply wasn't as big a problem as it was made out to be. There were a few bits that definitely needed some serious fixing but the hype around the problem exceeded the reality of the problem for most companies.
I fixed about 1.5 millin lines of code written in COBOL and PL1.
Good job. Your personal experience doesn't change the facts though. Most companies had nothing close to that amount of code to fix if they had any at all and the core operations of most weren't ever at substantial risk. The only real risk to many was that their bank or Microsoft wouldn't deal with the problem adequately. As long as that happened most other problems weren't too serious.
The company would have been out of business now, if we had not fixed ist software.
That is the exception that proves the rule. Not a single company I have worked for or consulted to or worked with (which is many) would have been put out of business by Y2K. Most companies exposure to the Y2K problem was minimal. A typical restaurant or a manufacturing company simply were not in substantial danger from the problem. A few companies had serious exposure to the problem and needed substantial mitigation. Most did not.
Basically every Company whee we fixed the code for would not have survived if we had not (or if we had made majour mistakes).
Are you familiar with the concept of selection bias? You worked on some of the few companies that actually had major problems. Some unquestionably did and no one should minimize the seriousness of what they dealt with. Most however demonstrably did not have serious problems with Y2K and had minimal to no mitigation required. It wasn't clear at the time how serious Y2K would be but we we have the advantage of hindsight and data about those who did little to deal with the problem. Turns out it just wasn't as bad as we feared for the most part.
I worked with several myself that did basically nothing in regards to the problem. My primary employer just before and during Y2K was a large manufacturing concern (Fortune 500 at the time) and while they did a systemic review (which I was involved in), there was very little they needed to do and the only potential significant risks to them were things that were entirely out of their control. None of the companies I consulted with in the 5 years before and after Y2K were in any substantial danger either. I think if you were to look around objectively you'd see the same thing in most places.
Democracy will not work unless the people making the decisions are well informed about the issues.
Verily.
This referendum was an unnecessary and unmitigated disaster. Too many people had no real idea of the benefits and costs of the EU.
Ah, there it is, the good ol' liberal answer of, "Everyone who doesn't believe exactly what I believe is DUMB!"
Hey, who wants a double caramel latte chocca mocca made by someone who isn't a graduate? /s
It'd obviously taste terrible!
Let me guess: if it hadn't been done, something would have broken, and you'd complain that despite all this money and time and effort, programmers fucked it up.
Damned if we do, damned if we don't.
Because you get to choose AFTER the event what you wish to assert.
If we got such a bad deal from EU, is that because
a) we're shit at negotiating
or
b) EU has much better negotiators
?
In EITHER case, we're fucked. Either we do a bad job negotiating because (a) is the case, or we have to renegotiate without the help of the better negotiators if (b) is true.
The ONLY way we're better off out is if we got a bloody fantastic deal in the EU, but that rather scuppers the "argument" made to leave.
And since each EU regulation had to be written by UK legislators into UK law to apply, where is the list of regulations we'll be removing?
And if our output isn't specced to EU regulations, they can't be accepted by the EU and this isn't a tarriff or embargo. But if we work it specced to EU regulations, we haven't removed ANY of these ephemeral regulations you're so worried about existing.
Yet here they are killing jobs, and "everyone knows" that this was what they were working for.
Maybe companies aren't "job creators" at all, and it is all just fluff to get wealthy people working in high management or on executive boards (Like, for example, Farage) preferential terms sold past people under a comforting lie about jobs.
"Of course, in Linux you can also middle-click to paste, much easier than the Windows Control-C, Control-V maneuver. " (correct spelling the word to a US and most of the world centric version is for my benefit).
It is much easier to cut and paste using the traditional keyboard shortcuts than it is to remove your hands from the KB and position the mouse then return to the keyboard again. Whether you are using *nix or Windows. I can't say for OSX as I've never really been a big user. The use of a mouse is slow and inefficient if you are typing any length of text. That is why the 'tab' functions the way it does.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
...where the rest of us private sector workers are concerned with our employment status constantly.
My company is actually expanding operations with two British companies we do business with. Much of this is possible by the weakened pound and knowing that their EU membership tax (which was shockingly large we found out) will be lifted. I'm starting to think all this fear mongering in the media is being orchestrated by the big fish so they can have first dibs at the best pieces.
Isn't that karma? The Scottish Executive has an official policy of having "a fresh talent initiative" for decades. Given the choice between a native graduate and a foreign graduate being considered for a post, the foreign graduate would automatically take priority, forcing natives graduates to emigrate. To achieve this goal, they would even drag someone's PhD thesis out for four years or more while blocking them from publishing papers in that field, forcing them to emigrate.
Of all the money e'er I had,
I spent it in good company.
And all the harm I've ever done,
Alas! it was to none but me.
And all I've done for want of wit
To mem'ry now I can't recall
So fill to me the parting glass
Good night and joy be with you all!
blamed on BREXIT.
This is Slashdot - surely most people here have dealt with managers, right?? It's just a normal blame-avoidance mechanism they apparently teach when they hand out MBA degreees. There must be a class called "Opportunistic Blame shifting 101"
Everybody is supposed to forget that the UK existed, and was even the most powerful nation on Earth, long before the EU was even a twinkle in the eye of any eager Eurocrat.
should be celebrating that all the people in their government and other big institutions who have been slowly sliding downhill into the most-classic form of treason have been outed. "Treason" is NOT some political candidate saying that if a foreign leader has stolen some documents he ought to hand them back (which on Slashdot has recently been portrayed as "treason"). "Treason" has generally been recognized as a citizen taking actions to help a foreign government overthrow, make war against, or seriously injure his nation. That is EXACTLY what the EU has gradually led government officials and many other citizens of the UK to sleepwalk into: they've been helping a foreign government to overthrown the UK government, nibble by nibble, and inch by inch.
There should be fireworks every year on the anniversary of the BREXIT vote to remember the day the voters stopped the underhanded and dishonest boiling-frog-style sell-out of the UK.
There is nothing worse in governance than people within a government slowly selling out their own nation to foreign interests and planning to gradually transfer the sovereignty of the people to foreign leaders on foreign soil, all without the explicit consent of the people themselves. It's shocking that the sellout of the UK went so rapidly from the Battle of Britain to the Queen having a passport that makes HER (who as queen is supposed to be the sovereign of the nation) a citizen of that foreign government (and therefore no longer the legitimate monarch). This is the destruction of centuries of UK history and struggles for hard-won freedom in only 70+ years.
The "remainers" in the UK should simply get it over with and move to the EU; they'll be happier there and the UK would be far better off without all these people who have no concern for their nation, their laws, their courts, their traditions, their fellow citizens, etc and are so willing to sellout anything and everything for the chance to be ruled by Germans and live under constantly changing rules churned out by nameless faceless unaccountable bureaucrats in Brussels.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Yes. The company I work for also exports all over the world, much less to the EU, so it's good for us too.
I can't tell you how many British scientists are looking for positions in North America or the rest of the EU, but it's pretty large. Some are staying in Scotland, betting they will stay in the EU after Scexit (or Indyref2) happens, some are betting on Northern Ireland for the same reason, but it's a sad state of affairs.
Decisions have consequences, just like Maggie Thatcher's actions caused a brain drain from Britain for more than a decade.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
"The Establishment" is "Freaking Out" Over Brexit.
There, fixed the title.
They're using the media to promote that freak out.
When president trump takes over science will be illegal, so the uk will be ahead of us at least.
Every time I think of British scientists I think of the Monty Python sketch of Upperclass Twit of the Year.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
A trend against science and research and education has been seen in the US. Why not also in the EU and UK?
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
We've long known that most Scientist follow the money and the results they return more often than not follow the opinions of those who write the checks. I wonder what they'll do now that they are no longer bought and paid for? I'm sure they'll find a new "John" before long.
Closing plants is nothing new, and certainly not because of brexit. It's because american manufacturers insist on producing shit the rest of the world don't want. Ford may have revolutionised the process of making cars, but that's no excuse for making shit.
Mod up, informative.