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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."
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.
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.
Says the guy that buys a litre of milk in a fucking plastic bag.
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...
... 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.
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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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.
As a whole, the country paid more than it got back. Scientists, on the other hand, got a "good" deal.
Though it certainly did come with a lot of strings attached. Leaving aside the fact that all scientists became paid lobbyists for the EU, much of that "research" money had to be spent on specific things, such as travel and meetings, and all of the "research" that was actually carried out had to be done in accordance with the EU's rules, which were mainly focused on the production of detailed status reports known as "work packages". An EU-funded research project would produce a tonne of paperwork, lots of office politics, and very little actual science.
Sort of like most bureaucratic organizations. It's not surprising the same thing happens on this side of the pond.
I will make an observation, those at the top of the food chain on both sides aren't the best at advancing science but rather navigating the politics of their respective funding bodies and insuring compliance with minutiae of bureaucracy.
Those are the same people that will be out in the cold with Brexit. Not surprising they would be upset.
Both staying and leaving were awful options, but those are the only two options that were given by people that only wanted to use it as a pressure tool, not expecting leave to actually win.
The "actually fix EU" option was never on the table.
It might result in fewer immigrants. Or, at least, fewer immigrants with marketable skills. We saw this a decade or so back when the Polish economy improved and a load of Polish plumbers decided to go back there, leaving the UK with a skills shortage. There still aren't enough British plumbers to make up the shortfall, but we've benefitted from importing them from other countries so plumbing work is now only very expensive to get done and not totally extortionate.
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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...
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.
Your facts are fear mongering. I don't want to hear them. I'm tired of experts and I don't like immigrants. And we won a big war a long time ago so there.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
It is common courtesy to write some text around your links, or at least make them clickable via some basic html.
But nevermind that. The point of your links is that the UK does send about 8 billion pounds to the EU every year (much less than the 18 billion claimed by the Leavers), which is true. But the question to ask is whether this is just money burned, or is it an investment that pays off. In other words, is the extra money the UK makes from being in the EU more than 8 billion an year?
Well, given that the UK's GDP is about 1800 billion pounds, and that the pounds lost about 10% of its value since the Brexit referendum, the UK is already 180 billion bounds poorer. France has immediately overtaken it as the 5th largest economy in the aftermath of the referendum. This suggests that the contribution to the EU budget is just chump change compared to the value of being in the EU.
entropy happens
"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!
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!
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.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
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
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.
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.
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.
And what does popularism get you? A deep and long depression, unemployment and no less immigrants.
Absolutely. The biggest worry is that the government maintains the same level of immigration to keep business costs (i.e. wages) low, but that without the preference to European countries that means more Muslims - with the consequent increase of child rape gangs, terrorist acts, "honour" killings, no-go-areas etc.
Or worse; more Australians.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
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.
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.
no its really not racist
Nationalist , but not racist. That word literally has no meaning after the past decade
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
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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