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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.
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)