In addition there's a severe "passion tax" for these sorts of jobs, the salary difference for a "Data Scientist, Computational Biology", and "Computational Biologist" is pretty big, and hiring is also brutal.
I know a ton of extremely talented people who have been locked out of employment for a long time now. The high interest environment means that biotech investing has been hit extremely hard, as biotech is even higher risk than most software and AI spending (thanks for the correction, Schlagbohrer). Pharma companiees with big hits, like Lilly with GLP1 agonists, are hiring a bit as they try to move into the modern era of pharma with lots of AI tools, but it's still brutal.
There's quite a lot of people skills involved in surviving as an academic in today's environment. Imagine if you had to teach calculus to 150 random, uninterested teenagers (barely adults) every 12 weeks. There's some serious people skills involved in doing a good job at that (most people do actually try to teach well, I've known multiple people this year refused tenure based on rate-my-teacher ratings).
It's a different set of skills for sure, but being an academic isn't as socially challenged as the zeitgeist appears to believe.
i like academics, don't misunderstand me.
yes, or at least largely overlapping circles
what i am saying is, having people skills are the answers "yes" to all those questions. you can cynically call getting a job nepotism, or you can call it, well people like to work with their friends at the cost of measures of competency. and maybe, the core competency is being pleasant to work with or work for.
another place people struggle with this is executive compensation. if i told every DoD employee they could get a 10x better boss for only $20/y, every single one would, which is $58m in executive compensation. but the DoD CAN'T do that, and its leadership is TERRIBLE, so... do you see?
I've had worse. Mostly much better, but I've had worse.
There is no communication there. No concepts for them to communicate. It is just math.
I'm not sure that models are complex enough to have a consistent internal representation of a concept the same way that organic brains can to communicate. I'm not sure of any quantitative science backing this up though. Models don't know anything across iterations yet.
Can you expand. They have both context and memory?
I'm sure there are research prototypes that work differently from this but I haven't seen any enter the mainstream yet.
Also, diffusion language models have a different evaluation order but I think they also do not really have internal thoughts or feelings because they also do not seem to have any sort of hidden state that encodes anything like that.
You cannot share (effectively) if you cannot communicate in a way that others can understand.
Further the entire ecosystem that academics rely on to get what they need to do for their research (grants, and other funding, resources, and so on) necessitate them to convince people who control those, who do not necessarily understand the purpose of the work
I don't think this reasoning can work. To the extent these things are directly related, the relationship would have to be: returns on investment are at an all-time high --> more investing than usual.
When interest rates are high, capital shifts to yield-generating, interest-bearing investments. They give higher returns with less risk.
So basically the ROI of biotech becomes less competitive compared to alternatives. You have the same number of people/firms chasing a smaller supply of investment dollars.
Suppose the ROI of biotech becomes more competitive compared to alternatives, because there's an ongoing series of technological breakthroughs.
The return on investing goes up (by assumption) and this means interest rates go up (by definition; they are the return on investing).
Is this bad for biotech? Does it shift capital out of biotech? Obviously not.
Everyone else is using it to mean "the Federal Reserve has set the interest rate high right now"
Very different situations.
High fed rates means the ‘tide’ is different. For biotech to get more interest, it has to have a higher roi than comparable other risk investments.
High ROI != high interest rates.
Tech investments don't come with interest payments usually, so if interest rates go up it pulls money into government and corporate bonds which are much lower risk. Why take a gamble on new tech that might lose you everything to get 10% ROI, if you can get 6% "risk free" in bonds?
Why not?
> Why not?
Truth is that the work and complexity is not that divorced. Honestly, the work in academia felt harder, though more fulfilling. Industry work hasn't made me have to really think deeply. If anything, I've heard most of my coworkers (at multiple companies) say something along the lines of "we have to move so fast that there's no time to think." Given that (multiple) managers tell me I'm "too slow" just because I'm not producing tons of lines of code (I'm neck and neck with everyone on milestones), I understand what they're talking about. Industry has a working mode of "do first, think second" while academia often thinks first. The reason is really because it is a lot cheaper to think first.
[0] It works enough for some demo to some person
[1] One example is I beat a company's fancy giant transformer based image detector with a scrappy CNN that took only a few hours to train. They were excited for all of 1 day and then wouldn't let me do the same thing to the transformer model (which would have had a bigger impact). Fun fact, my boss also loved to tell me about how dumb academia is because they never do anything useful and how industry makes all the real advancements.
He's not entirely wrong though. Industry makes the advancements that actually supposed to sell and be profitable on the free market. Academia is all over the place, as not everything being researched there can be used commercially, often it's just to get grant money, push papers and raise their egos amongst their peers.
So weird argument. Academia isn't meant to be "profitable" because no one is measuring the indirect profits. But when you do it's comically large
Depends on the industry. All the researchers I know in academia are just wasting grant money not delivering anything useful, their words, not mine.
There are many areas of research where profit is not a goal, and cannot be one. Understanding how and why climate changes is extremely important and useful, but cannot turn a profit. Researching different education methods, same. Hell, the researchers who won the 2024 Nobel prize in economics, who helped us understand how to build economically successful nations, something incredibly useful, cannot turn a profit with their research.
It's frankly absurd to expect everything useful to be profitable.
That definitely is for profit. They aren't researching climate change for the love of the game, but because agriculture, oil futures, real estate development, insurance policies, all depend on predicting climate developments.
To make an analogy, let's pretend we're a company selling water. We measure profit by how many bottles of water we sell. But people like the gp are complaining that building aqueducts, water purifiers, weather machines, or even improving the bottling process "isn't profitable". It's a weird claim and I'm not sure why it's so prolific. It's incredibly myopic
> Fun fact, my boss also loved to tell me about how dumb academia is because they never do anything useful and how industry makes all the real advancements.
1. "Thinkers", those extraordinarily brilliant people who spend lots of time on a single problem, discovering the optimal and most performance theoretical solution
2. "Hackers", who assemble tools by implementing designs from "Thinkers"
Without Thinkers the Hacker could not possibly solve all required problems well a single tool/product requires
Without Hackers the Thinkers work would languish in the ivory tower it was conceived in
Anecdotally, the tide on this is changing—all the low-hanging fruit has been picked and I see/hear many of my older colleagues regret not having gone the whole way with a PhD. This on top of AI being able to answer many of the engineering questions you might have learned the answers to in a masters/bachelors.
Business moves incredibly fast; academia, not so much.
Instead you’ll just whine until they let you import a billion more Indians
I happily had a job in academia in the US. Probably what most would call “successful” after exiting a startup and getting a PhD I was US engineering faculty for 8 years.
We picked up our keys to our new house in another country a few days ago and I start next month with a faculty promotion. Many of my colleagues are or are looking to follow.
does that get you a new fed administration that isn't idiotically anti-science?
Why Spain: Expat communities, cost of living, friendly visa options, beautiful climate.
Why leave: Sick of U.S. politics and the way it directly and indirectly affects us and how difficult it is to escape from it - it’s a major point of conversations with family and friends, it’s on the local radio, local subreddit, local social media pages, etc.
Also, I have over $7k in personal medical costs annually (out of pocket). That’s just me, not my family cumulatively. For Ostomy supplies, iron infusions, and more.
Historically American's have benefited from income asymmetry and a fairly wide-spread desire by foreign nations not to cause too much legal trouble for US nationals abroad.
I have quite a few friends that do live, quite happily, abroad. But the common pattern for them is a.) fluency in the native language b.) historical association with the country c.) fairly large cash reserves so they can ignore any economic problems these countries are facing.
What people often mean by a "true expat" is something completely different: someone sent abroad by their employer, usually with a generous expatriate package (home-country salary, local allowances, housing, private schooling for children, etc.)
More broadly, though, expatriate simply means someone living outside their native country. Ex means "out of", and patria means "native country" or "homeland". It's that simple.
So the word itself isn't limited to wealthy retirees or corporate transfers. All immigrants are expatriates, although not every expatriate is necessarily an immigrant.
EDIT: Don't get me wrong, my European nation did a lot of bad shit, but don't put the idea of an "expat" on us.
People also embed themselves in different communities when they move anywhere, even to a different city or state in the same country. It's a clean reset.
It doesn't always last forever. I know several people who tried to move somewhere, including internationally, when politics got heated in 2016. Most of them came back eventually with a realization that politics is everywhere, it's just a matter of how much you're embedded into the places it's discussed.
In that sense most EU countries are a positive upgrade.
Pros: Great food, interesting cultural past, only one language to deal with and not complicated accents to grasp (more important that most people think), gorgeous wild areas, uncomplicated people, maybe a little on the introverted side at first, but solid gold after a while.
Cons: Risk of poverty sadly high, bigger than many US states (but with better government support and healthcare). Harsh continental climate very hot and very cold. Not for everybody (but US has plenty of places with similar or worse weather). The trains and communication roads are also under-average for the country and many people don't really speak English.
In many of the non highly touristic places you can live well if you can adapt to the cons. Housing prices are lower, life expenses cheaper and buying a house should be affordable with a decent job (Don't try this in Barcelona or Madrid). Portugal is close, and is even cheaper, to the point of some people living there and working in Spain. To support the same standard of living in Barcelona, Valencia or Madrid you need to plan in advance, to stomach the stress that unavoidably come with big cities, and earn much more.
In Spain if you can speak English well you will be seen yet as a big researcher.
More cons: You will eventually have to shift to a very different customer service climate and hours. The development levels can vary quite a bit, especially "modern" infrastructure like internet outside of the major cities (maybe that's gotten better in the last 5 years). Bureaucracy of some institutions (government/finance) can be extremely frustrating.
Regarding bureaucracy I'm afraid that there has been no such progress. Extremely frustrating that even when I do everything right, I get told to come back another day for my trámite because they just...haven't done it! Sorry!
Some of my non-Spanish European colleagues also have commented that the education system is kind of "good not great" especially compared with other Western/Central European countries. However, I understand the Spanish system to be somewhat federated; perhaps the difference between Extremadura and Andalusia would explain the difference in opinion.
So doing better than that isn't too hard.
Technically of course you are right.
Practically, they barely pay anything significant.
The lower net salary in Europe / Asia associated with rather high local tax means that most Americans citizens oversea barely own anything significant back to the state.
However it does remain an annoyance to fill the tax declaration every year: I know several American who chose to give up their citizenahip just to avoid this specific issue.
If you are normal wage slave with limited savings then yes the exclusions mostly work.
The 2026 Foreign Earned Income Exclusion (FEIE) allows qualifying U.S. expats to exclude up to $132,900 of foreign-earned income from their U.S. federal income taxes. Married couples can exclude up to $265,800 if both spouses work abroad and each meets the eligibility requirements.
Most Americans that live overseas tend to be expats rather than immigrants. Those two terms don't convey the same meaning.
Cheaper than 120k?
It'll be 350k for a 100m2 apartment or even more expensive in the popular neighbourhoods.
Something in the city centre is more like 4800 euro/sqmt (https://www.idealista.com/sala-de-prensa/informes-precio-viv...).
Just browse idealista in the city you want and you'll see its not such a bargain as people might think. Mid-sized cities I've checked (Vigo, Valencia, Granada) all have similar prices, around 400k for a 2-3 bed older apartment, or twice as much for a newer one.
The question was asked if some US person might be called racist for having an opinion about gentrification that seemingly has little to do with race, and the answer is yes, yes they have been.
That said, there can be some "Oh yeah - well if you're insinuating that white people are displacing black people then YOU are the racist" which is just... not the same thing. One view of the world may incorporate a significant accommodation and acknowledgement of historical discrimination, enslavement, red-lining, you name it. The other is... technically correct I suppose, but complete horseshit on the merits until we start to see significant, systemic harm going the other direction as a result of race.
But that's just, like, my opinion man.
Science is massively underfunded respect to what US was enjoying. Expect cuts in your salary. Physicians earn much, much, less, but students can follow public university studies without being put a crushing debt load around their necks.
Science is also being invaded lately with political and bureaucratic BS. Universities have less resources and are always scammed in the ranks that benefit Asian and US universities.
We expect one month of Holidays each year, by law, or to be compensated for it if we agree to spend this time working. Most researchers volunteer to work extra hours or weekends if needed to finish the experiments.
About cultural differences. There are not "white" people and "hispanic" people in Spain. Is either the same thing, or it does not really matter.
"Negro" means "black", and is just a color. Some people are racist, specially out of the big cities, and even more are classist but if you are black and people describe you as a man negro or a woman negra they don't mean to insult you, they are just describing you.
You are either Spanish, or foreign. You will be always be the "moroccan" or the "gringo" but not the "black" or the "white". Europeans had mixed their bloods for ages and people here consider themselves as much "white" than you (if not more) and will find offensive the distinction.
As long as you act as a reasonably civilized person, only the extreme right idiots will care about your tan. Avoid this European MAGA like the dangerous plague that they are.
In restaurants, you need to call the waiter and say what you want. If you want the bill, you need to ask politely for the bill. Don't wait to be noticed or you will wait forever. You will not be chased off the table normally, that would be rude.
You will receive the amount of food expected traditionally in the area (not the humongous portions normal in US unless you visit the North).
Tips are fully voluntary. Unless you go to a very exclusive place you should tip between 0 and 2 dollars and don't need to argue why. (Forget about that X% of the service. We hate going out and being forced to do math).
People will benefit also of the environmental regulation. I assume that a big chunk of the morbid obesity epidemics in US came from unregulated contamination.
In some small populations near mountains and forests, wildfire crime is a recurrent problem. If there are cows or sheep roaming wild in the area, expect wildfire mafias. Assure to remove any flammable materials near your house and to memorize your escape route.
I mean so you'll move to Spain and just be horrible ignorant of any issues facing the local population, living in a financial bubble where you've earned significantly move then the them and can ignore any political issues locally.
Sure it's "freeing" to just move and stop caring about "politics" and use money to smooth over or move again if anything slightly bothers you.
Isn't it enough to not having to look over your shoulder fearing you will be a statistic in the long list of atrocities being committed by this government? Having a good quality of life is something to be guilty about?!
At least it's a good thing that we're able to a) observe and b) talk about and c) acknowledge openly(ish) that academic, mainstream, practicing "science" (including as visible to microscopists and all that entails) is currently a "mess".
This allows us to, eventually, address those issues (or die trying!).
Science used to move at a pace of one lifetime after another (pearl clutching 'til the end and confirmation bias and careers built on saving face and economic entrenchments all that).
But I hypothesize that with AI, we can point to "a thing that is not a person with all that is bundled up with that" and say "look, maybe this other train of thought is worth entertaining". Not to say the AI is right. Ideas will stand or fall on their own merit. Just that an AI is not a person outside the field. Normally, an outsider says something, nobody listens. But, if an anonymous AI says something (of course, cleaned up for voice and concision and validated by a human as a first pass), the worst you can say is "ok prove it" or "here is where that is wrong". Instead of: deafening silence.
In other words, I hope AI augments our ability to have those hard conversations that need to be had. Without people losing their jobs due to their prior (understandable) errors, and within the spirit of always using the best available information.
I shared this optimistic indirect use-case for AI with (less technical) friends recently, and they literally were speechless and finally one person said "you're the only one who thinks that".
Am I right, though? There's a there there, isn't there?
While there are a lot of problems with how the journal model of publication has evolved over time, and AI has actually made that problem far worse, not better, the real threat and "mess" that science is in currently in the US is from the administration.
Science in the US used to be one of the world's best funded science communities, and also one with the most independence. That is currently being reversed at a startling pace, both in funding and independence. This is the mess science is in, and it's a great loss for the world. While US science leadership may not have been without issue, it was still a huge positive for humanity. It's not about AI.
Science has had waves, and people have over pushed its advances (for profit) and hidden some of its shortcomings (we can point to a lot of problems) and is going through a massive reckoning where its influence is being curtailed.
Probably (IMO) the biggest problem science has, is that people don't realise that the key to its strength isn't that it finds all these advances/truths, but that it's comfortable with the idea that we really don't know anything.
Fundamentally science says - this is the best understanding we have of the given data, AND, reiterating that this is what people miss, science absolutely accepts that a better understanding or fresh data can at any moment in time change things.
That confuses most people, they like their understanding of the world to be concrete.
Just have faith (in science, not sure about the U.S. - empires come and go)
In any case, you've inspired me to post the original reply I had composed for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48575653 (the immediate parent to your comment), below. This is what I wanted to say, before then deciding to just be grateful for the sharing of the parent's perspective:
""" I'd frame AI as a plausible hypothesis engine, not as a working scientist (yet). I think AI can do some things that look like rational analysis (far better than many/most humans much of the time, perhaps), but I reserve that (most rare and prestigious and important) activity of actual science for humans too, when it counts, for sure.
I get the main article is about the very real "chaos/threat" of no funding, not the "chaos/threat" of AI-articles/"research" nor the "chaos/threat" of "real issues in the state of Science (before funding crises)".
IMO, the state of Science (before funding crises) could be, perhaps, inextricably (though not overtly) linked to the later/current chaos/threat of markedly reduced funding. No? Maybe it's not stated anywhere, but it seems oh so likely, reading between the lines.
If funding cuts, in the medium to long term, lead to a good thing (which would be the best we can now wish for -- and, after all, everything comes and goes in and out with the pendulum of time), it will be a much needed "reset" of science onto a more honest (and net knowledge-learning productive) model.
It (Science) was, arguably, already well by the wayside. Not just sort of expensive (though not very, compared with other budget items). But more importantly: inefficient (to put it nicely). And more importantly still: often (perhaps more often than not!) plain wrong. And that means, sadly: fairly/largely ineffective (degree depending on the domain). Which is the opposite of what is wanted. If you're going to do Science, it should at least be valid, or if it's not, it should be possible for those in their own field to tell that it is not. Else, it's kind of broken.
And if it doesn't serve it's purpose, what can you do but reboot. Reset. Just like a computer.
At least Science can be rebuilt. You just start doing it again (with what you have/can). With more rigor.
Maybe this reads like more of the same. But I don't think "being well funded" correlates well with "doing good science". (Only if the science is measured by the paychecks. Which is economics, not science.) """
This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of "science." Science is not experiments and papers. Science is a set of methods by which we discover truth.
I will agree: if you knew in advance which experiments to do, or which needed fewer resources, you could make science more efficient. Pharma could save a ton of money by not testing all the stupid compounds that don't work. We could abandon safety protocols and simply not make mistakes that harm people. Rocket companies could simply start by designing the working rocket on the first try instead of making all the failures first. Physicists should just model reality accurately instead of spending money building giant particle accelerators to check how reality works. These are all good ideas, and I am sure there are many more!
In the Land of Theory, there are any number of ways to make science more efficient and always right. You can guarantee yourself a Nobel prize if you can demonstrate how to run real science in the the Land of Theory.
I've read that asia is leading the world in scientific discoveries and therefore Mandarin gets the naming rights. That's privilege and the reason English is fleeting
I don't think I believe that this is a real Confucius quote.
russia: brain drain
usa: brain drain
https://www.aau.edu/sites/default/files/Resources-American-S...
But what about "free healthcare". Don't americans want socialized healthcare over their despised privatized system?
> - points and lottery based immigration system that penalizes them for each year you age after 30
Many countries with socialized healthcare do this. They only want young people and don't want older people who are a risk at becoming a burden to the state before they paid a lot into the system. After a certain age or health status, many workers, even locals not just immigrants, start to become a net negative to the welfare state, consuming more resources in care than they contribute back, so you need a constant stream of young healthy workers to keep the ponzi scheme going.
US being private healthcare doesn't give a damn since your health conditions are your own problem.
>Canada's immigration system is just structurally tilted toward brain drain. It's all stick and no carrot.
And yet they have record immigration rates, mostly from india. So it seems there's plenty of desperate people on the planet that don't even need a carrot, they prefer the Canadian stick because the situation back in their home is so much worse than the canadian stick.
However, I do think that if you're relying on a stream of desperate people from all over the world to replenish your own brain drain because you manage to push away your most valuable people, then you're doing it wrong and it's not gonna be sustainable, you're just putting band aids on major structural issues to cover the rot, and eventuall y the piper will have to be paid.
I haven't lived in either country but as someone who lives in a country with socialised healthcare, it mainly benefits the older generations, as health issues begin to crop up nearer retirement.
If a Canadian spends most of their working life in the U.S. then returns to Canada to raise their kids or to retire then they're getting the best of both worlds.
Not really. The internet bubble might make you think that, but actually ordinary people aren't interested.
People with good jobs have health insurance, people without get government subsidized insurance. Either way most people are fine with what they have.
And the issues with healthcare in the US will not be solved by the government being the one to pay. Billing is too complex (i.e. costly), and Dr salaries are too high (compare them to other countries). Neither of those issues are solved by the government paying.
And don't forget how Americans hear stories from other countries about huge waits for care, and they want none of that.
There are zero proposals to make all Dr's employees of the government, on salary, who just take care of whoever shows up. But that might actually work to reduce costs.
Clearly, all those people who lost everything or even became homeless from some health issue despite paying insurance all their lives must be fictional
The U.S. had roughly 770,000 people experiencing homelessness in 2024. Even if one-third of cases involved medical debt as a contributing factor, that gives 200 homeless people per 100,000 residents with healthcare costs contributing to their fate.
And obviously way more affected if we expand from complete homelessness to a housing downgrade (e.g. from a nice home to renting some appartment or going to a trailer or some motel) to cover medical costs that would have been trivial elsewhere, and even more so for those.
As for "how many people die/suffer from long waiting times in Canada/socialized health systems?", we know in Canada e.g.: 15,474 deaths while waiting ≈ 38 deaths per 100,000 people per year. And that's dying while waiting, not dying because of the wait. A lot of them are heavily impacted/elderly etc and would have died anyway with or without procedure (and the wait time of some of those could be comparable to a typical US wait time, or be totally independent from the healthcare system, and based on e.g. donor list priority, etc.).
To contrast, this report (2) estimates around 200,000 deaths/year ≈ 59 deaths per 100,000 Americans from lack of access / insurance/access-related mortality.
In recent years about 40% of uninsured adults reported delaying, skipping, or not obtaining needed care or medication because of cost. Even among insured adults, about 8% reported doing so. Gallup found 38% of Americans said they or a family member postponed medical treatment because of cost in 2022, the highest level in its long-running survey.
Keep in mind that about 8.2% of the US population that's uninsured (compared to ~ 0 in Canada). And that's not counting the US under-insured, claim denials, and costs that exceed deductibles and annual limits that all heavily burden even the insured in the US. In fact most US citizens with medical debt ARE insured.
1. https://publichealthpost.org/health-equity/medical-debt-home...
2. https://pnhp.org/news/estimated-us-deaths-associated-with-he...
People do not become homeless because of medical debt, that's simply not a thing that happens. Nor do people "lose everything" because of medical debt, that also doesn't happen.
If the medical debt is that bad they just don't pay it, or they file for bankruptcy. Absolutely nothing happens in the US if you don't pay medical debt. Nothing. It doesn't even hurt your credit score.
That study you linked should be held up as a case study in lying with statistics. But as hard as they tried to lie if you actually read it closely you will discover that medical debt does not cause homelessness.
And how did you come up with that conclusion? Are you reading minds? No, I genuinely asked to know, since many factors are important, there's no winner out of the gate.
But since you showed you can't argue in good faith and need to start accusing people out of the gate, I'll leave the conversation here and let you be. Good day.
I didn't, the parent commenter did. I simply answered your question on why HE did it, and even said it your question was put "as if" it implied it, not that it necessarily implied it.
Of course one could also come with that conclusion from reading your lengthy comment at the start of the thread pissing on socialized healthcare: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48581228 and trivially putting two and two together too.
>But since you showed you can't argue in good faith and need to start accusing people out of the gate, I'll leave the conversation here and let you be.
Of course you will. Conveniently frees you from having to take into account my sibling comment with numbers and references :)
In terms of people in the tech industry I know of who moved to Canada from countries where they get a legitimate pay boost there.. Yes, it makes sense for them. If they never attain permanent residency, at least they made more money than they would have back home for a few years.
However, I've rarely seen one of them turn down a chance to get an additional huge pay boost by moving to the United States afterwards. In fact, it's common for top tier companies to just use Canada as of sort of waiting room or fallback option for folks who are ultimately dreaming of moving to the US to make those higher salaries.
I don't think Canada can compete on pay, but there are certainly people who could get that top pay but would trade it for a chance to live permanently in Canada. I'm guessing those are the sorts of people who have already taken pay cuts to work in highly specialized or speculative areas of science and technology. These are great people to have because they are low risk and high reward in terms of impact on the economy.
Sadly, if you look at any forum for Canadian immigrants you'll find a huge amount of depressing stories about never attaining permanent residency or of grinding for years to game the point system in a way that is soul crushing. It is a broken system on both sides. Let me try to explain what I mean by that.
The European Union does not have a points and lottery based system as it's sole mechanism of entry the way Canada does. If you make above a certain salary, you can get a blue card. You can accumulate time on the blue card in any country in the EU (except for Ireland, which has their own similar system if I recall). After 5 years you can typically apply for permanent residency, in Germany just 2 years so long as you attain B1 German (very practical for usage in daily life and doable in the timeframe without cramming or cutting corners).
The implicit reasoning seems to be that if you can stay out of trouble and earn a good living for 5 years. You're probably worth keeping around. I think a heuristic like that beats a point system which simply encourages gaming behavior anyway.
Check out all of the people cramming French to try to increase their odds in the Canadian lottery for example. Canada probably doesn't get the sorts of genuine francophones they seem to be looking for--cramming for an exam with a verbal component is not the same as fluency--and the people entering the country are doing so by playing arbitrary games instead of living a real life.
And of course the French is just one example, there are also all of the useless courses and degree programs. The points-based lottery encourages and rewards the accumulation of arbitrary points, or in other words, a sort of dissimulation.
I suppose you could argue that Canada is selecting for people who are willing to diligently jump through hoops. If so, that does nothing to address brain drain.
Nobody would mind the lower Canadian salaries if they also came with a matched lower CoL, but that's not what's happening IRL. Similar issues across the EU where some very expensive to live areas don't pay proportionally high so the issue isn't necessarily pay but CoL. However as a worker your only option is demanding more money from your employer as you can't lower the CoL of the area. So there we are.
>The European Union does not have a points and lottery based system as it's sole mechanism of entry the way Canada does.
That's not a pro for the EU citizens as they get lower quality immigrants than Canada or anglophone countries with a stricter points system.
>I think a heuristic like that beats a point system which simply encourages gaming behavior anyway.
Blue card system is also heavily gamed thanks to unscrupulous EU employers wanting to wage dump the local workforce, and much more easily because there's no multiple points criteria.
It also gets immigrants from the China (772k), UK (427k), Germany, France (100k each). Saying its all stick and all those people are desperate is an insane take.
Believe it or not, not every person in this planet wants to move to the US.
Over what period of time?
>Believe it or not, not every person in this planet wants to move to the US.
No, but if emigrating to the US was just as easy as to Canada, very few would go there over the US. Similar with EU. Ambitious people don't like being lowballed.
>if emigrating to the US was just as easy as to Canada, very few would go there over the US.
Immigrating to the US, not emigrating. People emigrate from a place and immigrate to another.
And the thing about hypotheticals is you can't prove them. That's just your opinion.
You can prove it by how many canadians move to work in the US versus how many Americans move to work in Canada. This discrepancy will scale if immigration barriers to the two countries would be the same, but since they're not we have to extrapolate based on other data.
Moving to Canada:
- Rational points-based immigration system with transparent rules which you can actually look up and prepare for, start your life as a Permanent Resident with all but voting rights compared with a citizen, become a citizen in a few years.
Moving to US:
- Wait years for an H1B with a yearly lottery with 15% chance
- Wait another 10 years for a Green Card, equivalent to a PR card - Wait another ? years for full citizenship
It's another contributing factor to the "brain drain" effect. In that it's a worse deal for a US Citizen to move to Canada on a CUSMA visa than for the opposite.
Case in point: an EE I know who is finishing his master's[1] is considering interesting proposals from solid (but not top tier, think Texas not Massachusetts) universities from the US, Germany and China. While he's afraid of the culture gap with China, it's clearly the one that has the more interesting things going on technically and the one he feels more excited about
[1]Engineering by itself is a bachelor's level degree here
There are a lot of QOL advantages to living in a less violent, less polarized, less cruelty-driven society that isn't actively trying to dismantle all of its institutions and destroy itself. Especially if you're one of those people who are in the crosshairs of jack-booted thugs and their cheerleaders.
Did you know: some people like Canada?
Hell, Canada extended its citizenship by descent law last December, and has been issuing citizenship certificates under it. Just this week many of the people who'd received these certificates had them revoked while there is further investigation into their documentation. Many of them are people who'd been living in Canada on temporary visas, and gave up their visa when they got proof of citizenship. Now they're in limbo with invalid passports and no legal status in the country.
Being an immigrant anywhere, and yes, that includes American "expats" in Canada or western Europe, means that you are at the whims of a capricious and chaotic immigration system that changes at the whims of a government you have no say in.
For many people, it does get better with time, though.
I am saying this as someone who pursued Canadian citizenship by descent and moved to New Zealand in the last year, so it's definitely happening some, but my impression so far is that the total number of people who actually make the move is small. Most people who are skilled enough for an overseas employer to jump through hoops to put them on a visa have more lucrative jobs available in the US that are closer to home without all of the downsides of emigration.
I would believe that a lot of dual citizens or skilled immigrants to the US are moving home.
It isn't. At least, not in the way being portrayed. The people going back to China were already from China, and the people returning to Europe are largely from there as well.
The dirty little secret of US academic research is that it became almost entirely dependent on Chinese labor over the past 30 years, and that's reversing a little bit.
When everyone goes home America loses the majority of it's research output, plus the extra Americans who choose to join them. I suspect a great many Americans will choose to join them, for personal or professional reasons. Why try to get a grant in the US, where the rules change whenever Trump sneezes, vs a stable, consistent system in the rest of the OECD?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6Y2wzmKHEU
The next federal election will be interesting as to the direction the Australian public wants to take the country, but it's not due until May 2028.
So either get in before then, or wait until afterwards to gauge your expectations of being welcome.
Having said that, the current Government (less conservative) won the May 2025 Federal election bigly (but maybe not quite a landslide) with 93 seats over the next most popular party at 43 seats, out of a total of 150 seats.
God I hope Pauline and one nation are just a stupid blip and that poll that put them ahead is a mirage though. She's doing the same bullshit playbook as the UK and US - 'elites' are destroying Australia by driving immigration! Meanwhile the richest woman in Australia is in the background holding the marionette's strings.
What's changed is recently she and her like-wits such as Joyce have abandoned traditional media and gone fully social media and focusing on building an ever growing echo chamber with zero internal examination or pushback on the bigotry.
With much thanks to the Vogon poet Gina Rinehart and GR's new bestie Elon.
my guess is southeast asia may overtake europe in a decade or so considering how wildly popular asian culture is with teenagers.
Is the assertion there are no places for her to enjoy doing what she's great at, without leaving the country, in private industry?
Genuinely curious.
I'm sorry that scientific projects are being cut but are we supposed to keep funding everything ad infinitum regardless of how our economy and our future is going to be crippled by debt?
EVERYONE is going to be crying about their projects being cut and there's no good way to do it where everyone is going to be happy. Some people are going to lose their jobs, and that sucks but there is no other way except having the courage to cut funding. We have to cut everything and then reorganize at a lower budget number and the reallocate funds to the most important projects.
We can't keep funding everything. You may not care about our debt but I certainly do and there's more than enough of us around that care. Our descendants are going to be fucked and that's not fair. I'm sorry you're losing your job but soon over half our budget is going to be used to pay off interest on our debt. Just the interest and not the principal. This is an economic crisis.
I would go as far as to say that the only things getting reduced funding are education and science research, but that’s just a hunch.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
Defense (DoD) budget is $900 billion now. When you also account for veterans' health, expenditures on nukes (goes to the DoEnergy), military stuff in space (goes to NASA), border protection, etc., the total national security spending tops $1.5 trillion. That's not counting the interest on past wars.
Medicare + SS is about $2.6 trillion. With Medicaid, it's up to $3.3 trillion, but this still gets you nowhere close to "all military is 1/6 of ss and medicare".
Even if we are more conservative about how we count "all military" - for instance, include veteran's health and nukes, but not CBP - it still doesn't get us close to the 1/6 number.
Would you explain your reasoning and numbers a bit more?
If you actually cared about the national debt you would back higher taxes and the democratic party given that the democrats are the only party who actually run a balanced budget at any point in the last 50 years.
But you don’t care about the national debt. You don’t care about the well being of americans. You don’t care about the cost of living, or protecting the environment for our children.
You don’t care about making the country better. All you care about is making sure that you don’t see anyone who is different. Your willful ignorance and hate disgusts me.
To fix society, you need to bring money down the ladder, from the ones whose wallets got indecently fat in the past few decades. Public spending (outside of police and military) and higher taxes for the rich are the only way to go, lest you want society to get completely consumed by the neoliberalist death cult.
They also tend to pay off big in societal progress. As an example, researching teaching and learning better results in better education, which results in better-trained kids and a more productive society. Research into clinical psychology leads to better therapy and emotionally healthier and well-adjusted people. Etc.
Science funding is one of the best investments we can make into the long-term success of the country, and it's a gross mistake to cut it. Literally one of the biggest mistakes we can commit. Science is a big part of what keeps us moving forward, and it is outlandishly cheap compared to the benefits.
The GOP cut a measly $60 million per year for scientific monitoring instruments in the ocean, yet are increasing spending by hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on things like military spending, White House security, and deporting good people they call “illegals”.
They haven’t cut the national debt because they cut taxes on the rich. Taxing the rich could pay for all the science and gradually pay down the debt. But it’s in the GOP interest to cut science to dumb down the population. Climate change is “fake” they say, meanwhile Fox acquired Roku (100+ million households), Paramount (MAGA) acquiring Warner Brothers, CBS, CNN, etc. Oligarchs taking over TikTok and their disinformation machine strengthens.
Science funding is a minuscule part of the US budget
What was that new number they were throwing around, 1.4 Trillion dollar budget?
But sure, let's worry about cutting funding to research institutes which were sucking the US dry with their budgets in the millions.
It depends. Do you want to be rich?
People don't "fund" science, they "invest" in science.
There is a big difference. Often, each dollar invested will return multiplied by five, ten or more.
But you can also spent 14 millions painting a pool in a different shade of blue or much more building the Barbie's disco dance house and will end with... the same pool, or a disco dance house that you will never be allowed to use. Is your money after all.
Why dont you stay and take a teaspoon of responsibility for the country/monster you created?
We are approaching a situation where everyone else on the planet is going to have to do it for you. It would be much cleaner for everyone involved if you dealt with this before it got that far.
Where are you heading?