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Canada Has Pulled Off a Brain Heist (axios.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Seoul-born Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, a professor at Brown University known for her work on fake news, is moving to Canada. So is Alan Aspuru-Guzik, a Harvard chemistry professor working on quantum computing and artificial intelligence. They are among 24 top academic minds around the world wooed to Canada by an aggressive recruitment effort offering ultra-attractive sinecures, seven-year funding arrangements -- and, Chun and Aspuru-Guzik said in separate interviews with Axios, a different political environment from the U.S. The "Canada 150 Research Chairs Program" is spending $117 million on seven-year grants of either $350,000 a year or $1 million a year. It's part of a campaign by numerous countries to attract scholars unhappy with Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and other political trends, sweetened with unusually generous research conditions.
I know this place has been going downhill for awhile but this is an especially shitty submission even by msmash standards. A handful of academics get a boatload of money to move to canada is proof of a net braindrain in canada's direction and somehow this extends to proof that this is all trump's fault based upon one random comment?
More money spent on science is always a good thing, and discoveries made in any country help us all.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Perhaps you forgot how the economy did just fine in the beginning of the Dubya years, and only imploded somewhere near the end. It kept on doing bad in the beginning of the Obama years, and only started improving somewhere near the end. I wouldn't be so quick to laud Trump's excuses for economic policy...
Xenophobia is the new wave in Europe, but the French nipped the racist "National Front" in the bud with the election of Macron.
#fakenews
The far-right "Front National" reached the second round of the presidential elections - only the second time ever that they've managed this - and recorded their best ever score - 33.90%.
Seriously, guys, wake up. I live in France. I was not born here. My wife was not born here. The rise of the Front National is a real concern for us. Their popularity is slowly but relentlessly on the rise. Yet I constantly read this rubbish "Woop-woop, high fives, we beat the fascists!". Erm, no, buddy. Pretending that the problem has been solved, does not actually solve it.
The pattern goes even further back. It conclusively disproves the myth that progressive governments would somehow be worse for the economy than conservative ones; in fact, the evidence points in the opposite direction (once you factor in the time it takes before you see the results).
That's not surprising, since he became president in full subprime mortgage crisis, and long term trends point to a permanent slowdown in economic growth in the developed world.
FTFY.
Also, how backward do you have to be to think that coal is still a pillar of the economy? You (and Trump) are stuck in the 1800s, and while you can stand on the brakes of your own country's progress all you want, it won't stop the rest of the world from getting ahead of you. Even less so if you're squandering all your international political capital.
Amusingly, one of the arguments given for voting leave (and the reason that a lot of Indian and Pakistani immigrants voted) was the preferential treatment of Europeans over Asians by the UK immigration system. It's amusing how even the racism in the leave campaign wasn't self consistent, let alone their economic arguments.
There were many reasons why individuals would choose to leave EU, and many for wanting to stay too. Many of the reasons did not follow party lines at all.
It's easy for Americans who are used to polarization to think of it as right versus left and party lines, but that is seldom the case in European politics. Things are far more nuanced, and especially in referendums. A left-leaning English man might have voted for leaving because he felt he paid too much to the EU compared to what England got back, while a right-leaning Scot might think that EU subsidies and incentives for his region were needed for his business, while another Scot might be fed up of London controlling their oil income. It's all varied, and I would guess that only a minority of the votes had anything to do with xenophobia.
Britain is used to high immigration, and people around the world who have Commonwealth passports and rights already. Integration is much better in the UK than in the US, although certainly not perfect. The parts that have immigration fears are quite often left-leaning, not almost all right-leaning like in the US. Sure, you'll find skinhead right-wing supremacists, but they are hardly numerous enough to influence a referendum. Religion plays a much smaller part, and if anything, the Christians are more welcoming, not less like in the US. It's a very different playing field.
Trump's done wonders for the stock markets.
The economy is doing well coincidentally. It takes years for the economy as a whole to react to changes, so Tump's economy is floating on Obama's legacy.
But the stock market is a bellwether. Trump's ridiculous trade war with China is eventually going to tank the economy.
That makes no sense if the thing they are malcontent about is removed. Why would they remain unhappy when they get to move to a better country and earn loads of money?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Obama really does deserve credit for powering the US economy out of the financial crisis. The UK went the opposite way and lost a decade, just the same as Japan did in the 90s. Frustrating as bail-outs are, the alternative is worse.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Dubya was a well-meaning but simple man who was lead astray by some truly evil men (Rumsfeld & Cheney). Trump is evil and stupid but most of all egocentric, which has thus far mostly prevented him from getting the assistance he needs to accomplish very much.
We're only 17 months into the Trump era. At this point in Dubya's reign he hadn't even invaded Iraq yet. Spanky's trade war with China is already slowing the economy. If we make it to 2020 (or God forbid 2024) without invading both Iran and North Korea, THEN I'll agree that he's a better president than Dubya (though still not a better person).
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Yea, if you live in a country where a legal vote has been held, you stay there! I mean, it's not like anyone has ever been moved to a ghetto, thrown out of the country, died, or has had any other horrible thing happen to them as a result of a legal vote... Legal votes are safe!
But, if you are a true believer in democracy . . . it should be right of UK voters to decide to kick out foreigners . . . correct . . . ?
If you are a true believer in democracy then you should have a lot of trouble with the Brexit vote. Several million British citizens living outside the UK, many inside the rest of the EU, were denied the right to vote in the referendum. It is extremely likely that many of them would have voted to remain, especially those in the EU!
There is no doubt that this exclusion was legal. But you cannot exclude several million of your adult citizens from voting on an issue which directly affects them and then pretend that the result is democratic. As someone who has lived in Europe working at the CERN particle physics lab I always felt of myself as an EU citizen first and foremost and this is now being stripped away from me without my having any vote.
Fortunately, I had already moved to Canada before it was fashionable and I have now done my own personal Brexit and am a proud, new Canadian citizen. However, it is still sad to see the country you grew up in having names that are becoming increasingly ironic: "Great" Britain and the "United" Kingdom.
Anybody stupid enough to move because of a legal vote- well, that's somebody who isn't likely going to be doing any original research anyway, just derived politically correct bullshit like climate science, string theory, and Women's Studies.
Stuff that the Trump Great America is not interested in funding because there is no profit in it.
The man wen bankrupt running a casino. You know, the place where the odds are always stacked in favor of the house.
Is profit really all we should be interested in? Is breathing clean air and drinking clean water profitable? Is understanding our world and environment profitable? Is understanding the building blocks and mechanisms that underpin our physical reality profitable?
Theses things, among many others, have value that cannot be expressed monetarily. You might consider how many things enable and enrich your life that do not make money for anybody. Or not!
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Wow, this post is amazing! The historical parallels are beautiful! Bravo, mod parent Interesting!
Now it's PC/SJW science instead of Jewish Science, and this time it's climate science, string theory and women's studies instead of Einstein's theories of relativity, Heisenberg's theories of quantum mechanics, and Freud's organized psychoanalysis. And now likewise, those scientists are taking refuge in other countries.
This is amazing, it's almost like being able to use a time machine to visit Germany in the '30s.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
That word...I do not think it means what you think it means.
Providing stable, long-term funding so that established, high-profile researchers can bring their projects and research programs to Canada doesn't really look like a sinecure; they're not getting paid to do nothing. The $350,000 or $1 million per year funding for these positions isn't handed over as a lavish salary; it's support to allow researchers to hire staff, buy equipment, and maintain their labs. It's a fairly long-term arrangement as these things go - the NIH's R01 grants contemplate up to 5 years, and many sources of money are 3 or fewer years, or one-offs - but it's not ludicrous.
~Idarubicin
Agreed. How do I put this succinctly? America has gone too far down the road of "instant gratification" and a LOT of people don't understand that shit doesn't happen instantly. Like the entire US economy. Sure, the stock markets "react" to policy changes, but the "economy" is a machine and it takes a long time to feel the effects of changes to the policies that drive it.
So the dumbasses that seem to make up the majority of the population, fed on decades of TV ads promising them that their life will be fantastic instantly if they only bought {whatever} think that a president can alter the economy instantly and that if something good or bad happens then the person in charge must be 100% responsible for it.
Worse? These fuckwits are now often seen in senior positions in US corporations and believe that knee-jerk reactions trump long-term strategy. This does not bode well for US competitiveness long-term.
As a colleague of mine has put it multiple times: The Chinese are playing chess. Trump is playing Donkey Kong. Thing is it is not just Trump. He is just symptomatic of the larger problem of a country that has lost its way.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.