Great initiative, and good to see that it has an effect. I'm a bit sceptical about the available funds. 1 million over 5 years is a nice starting package (4+ PhD students), but the availability of overall research grant money in the Netherlands has been under pressure for years and is difficult to acquire. Researchers moving here may find it difficult to acquire further grant money compared to US, at least in CS.
China is not very immigration friendly to non-han folks, but I guess chinese researchers won't make it to the US and this already will have a great effect on the chinese economy.
Europe is in its own set of problems and it is not in the same situation that US used to be after WW2 (only major economy not affected by bombing).
Europe's problems:
* active major war in Ukraine (lasting longer than Axis/Soviet war in WW2)
* energy supply issues (unlike US it's not energy sufficient and the places that supply it with energy are involved with wars)
* a wall of people aging away from employment and into doctor's and hospital waiting rooms (forcing less investment into research and roads/bridges/railway, more towards stabilizing pensions, healthcare)
* major pieces of the european export economy are being replaced by China (eg chinese car brands eating the lunch of european car brands).
> China is not very immigration friendly to non-han folks
What do you mean? I've never been to China, but know quite a few non-han white Europeans who lived there for both shorter and longer periods of time. Some studied, others worked there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_China has a good summary (click through to its sources); as of 2020 there were about 1.5 million immigrants in China, just under 600K of which from Hong Kong/Macao/Taiwan; as of 2023 there's 12.000 people with permanent residency cards, which would be the expats that live and work there without nationalizing.
No, total immigration matters. Human progress is always subject to the law large numbers.
Skilled polish engineers don't want to be the only polish person in the entire country. They want food, culture, community that reminds them of home. Even as they assimilate. That's why the American melting pot works well. It encourages enclaves that touch one another.
China is the opposite of that. You are hard hammered into the Han-ness, immediately. The language, the writing (which is a HUGE hurdle), the food, the way of life.
For what it's worth, this is the terminology I learned in school decades ago, but I don't think it's preferred anymore. My daughter has a book that calls it a "salad" instead (mixed but retaining their respective properties). I'm probably just old and crotchety but I like that way less.
People can feel how they want to feel, campaigns are run on feelings and not facts. Just because Trump says Haitians are eating cats and dogs doesn't make it true.
The Mormons of Utah, the Cajun/French of Louisiana, the Norwegians in the Dakotas, the Scotch Irish of everywhere, and the Amish are all (non-brown) examples of enclaves existing in the US. Nobody says that they are not assimilating well. We let them live their lives because personal liberty used to be a thing here.
I've never been to China either. It's a huge country and it probably depends on where you are (hong kong probably friendlier than a random place in the mainland), but from what I heard/read:
* language issues. Many chinese don't speak english. Also a problem in many european countries (esp latin and slavic speaking ones), but at least the european languages are easier to learn. Compare this to Amsterdam, Goteborg, Berlin-Mitte or Kopenhagen where everyone speaks english.
* citizenship is one of the hardest to get in the world.
* I heard complaints about onboarding into the chinese app/digital ID ecosystem.
Would it be silly to add "general lack of air conditioning" to that list? I imagine at some point it inevitably stops being a joke and starts being a real problem. Have we reached that point yet? [1] [2]
> Europe is in its own set of problems and it is not in the same situation that US used to be after WW2 (only major economy not affected by bombing).
Both Japan and South Korea were equally devastated and yet they managed to build world-class technology industries in the subsequent decades. I think the problems with Europe and the EU are a lot deeper than that.
A lot deeper than active wars and energy supply issues???
Europe's economy has been slowing down since 2007, which is the peak of conventional oil. The problem of Europe is that is doesn't have access to abundant energy like the US does. The US likes to think that they have a better economy because they are smarter/work harder, but the reality is simple: abundant energy makes the economy.
Either they underestimate, which is ignorance, or they estimate properly and are anti-truth.
What use do propagandists and fascists have for research? It only stands to continually disprove their lies. They obviously hate science and truth and want it gone, to be replaced with cult of personality and Christian nationalism.
For a lot of people it's easier to learn English than Chinese - you wouldn't get far if you don't speak the language in China. English gets you very far in Europe though, most research institutions, universities, high end professions, etc already have English as the going language because of the international character of these places.
Chinese are far more open to working in foreign environments/contexts that Americans are, IMO. Just look at the foreign language learning statistics: most Americans tend to only know English, unless their family was fairly recently from a non-English speaking country. Meanwhile the Chinese landing in the US tend to already have decent English education, and dive right into doing what they're there to do.
This title is such clickbait. All the article talks about is a Dutch fund created to recruit scientists and they have successfully recruited them. At 1 million euros per head.
They have the first 34 researchers, all from top universities and institutes. That’s a major achievement, because as the article says, every researcher brings new knowledge as well as a whole international network with them.
Exactly; the biggest company in the Netherlands and its products (ASML and high end lithography machines), is built on top of the works of only a handful of researchers. The US nuclear weapons and space programs were similarly built on top of researchers they got from Europe. This is very much NOT a numbers game, and I want to believe top researchers rate their work and the benefit of humanity higher than a country, especially if that country is backsliding.
> the biggest company in the Netherlands and its products (ASML and high end lithography machines), is built on top of the works of only a handful of researchers.
This is... wildly wrong. ASML is a multi-national company that licenses IP largely from USA and Japan, but also Taiwan and Germany. The actual EUV light source is developed and produced in California by Cymer, which ASML acquired in 2013. But ASML was only permitted to acquire the company under a strict technology sharing and export control agreement with the US government. Additionally, a huge portion of the photolithography research is directly developed (and owned) by US companies and research organizations such as IBM, Albany NanoTech, and SEMATECH.
There is a reason why ASML's next-generation research photolithography machine is currently being installed and developed in upstate New York, and not somewhere in the Netherlands. The same reason that Cymer is still in San Diego instead of being relocated to Europe.
Seems accurate enough to me. That’s not a ton of money to uproot your life over tbh. Shows there’s willingness to leave with a little bit of incentive.
In the US we sometimes use the term “bribe” in morally neutral or even positive situations.
It just means giving someone money or a different incentive to convince them to do something they weren’t going to do or were undecided but considering doing and the extra incentive is the catalyst for making the decision.
We also have the legal concept of a bribe but the OP probably wasn’t using it in the legal sense - I.e. accusing the Netherlands of doing something illegal.
The money isn't really for the researchers personally, but for doing the research. They are merely offered a job at a time where their jobs are on the line in the USA. And not even that, they still have to apply and compete with top researchers from other parts of the world. Really hard to call that a bribe, even in a morally neutral way. At most you could say the Netherlands - and other European countries - are taking advantages of the situation where the USA is abandoning their top researchers.
But for years it has been the other way around. Top talent from the Netherlands has been moving to the US in order to get funding (and a bigger salary).
> In the US we sometimes use the term “bribe” in morally neutral or even positive situations.
I live here in the US. I've NEVER heard the term bribe in a neutral or even positive way. It might be used in a mocking way, as if to mock the idea of bribes, but never seriously.
So, unless you are confusing that mocking nature as morally neutral or even positive, this is incorrect.
The article has failed to prove that anybody has taken the bait and left.
> For the researcher, the qualities must, from an international perspective, far exceed what is customary within the international peer group. The institution receives a maximum of €1 million per researcher for the next five years.
Let's be generous and assume you are one of the chosen ones. Your institution will take 20% off the top leaving with you 1million×.80/5 or 160k EUR per year.
After income taxes, your take home pay is €90,868.00 or $103k USD. Not bad for the average man, but not good for a top researcher like they want.
EUR 160k works out to about $182,640. For that level of income in a top tier institution in a state with an income tax like Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, MD you would take home $121,565, or 15% more.
Academic pay is standardised in many EU countries. For example in the UK you can look up union rates of pay. At UCL (I'm still currently affiliated as I finish my PhD) the pay for a professor starts at £82,157 and goes up to a minimum of £139,882 for the top band. There is an additional £4,678 on top as a London allowance. This roughly lines up with your figure per year, so seems reasonable as an allocation of cost.
Also there are usually very very generous pension schemes here, so total pay is actually quite a lot higher than stated. In addition there is very generous holiday allowance, 41 days at UCL for instance, since you get extra holidays when the university is closed over certain holiday days.
America is like a trust fund baby given all the advantages and then the baby goes "fuck it, life is too hard, I am just going to do coke and die early”.
No. It is for research that wouldn't be funded by companies, since it is either too risky or has too long of a time-horizon. If all academic research was removed from the world you would notice a vast stagnation in technological progress. This can be confirmed by looking at what technologies have come from this process, and what private research built upon public research.
Yea, exactly. You should send all your top scientists to Europe. Great idea to get rid of them. Totally just dragging down your country. Send them to Europe.
"Science work" is NOT doing nothing. All the modern conveniences we have today came through such work, which usually go for long stretches of time before payoff.
Europe is in its own set of problems and it is not in the same situation that US used to be after WW2 (only major economy not affected by bombing).
Europe's problems:
* active major war in Ukraine (lasting longer than Axis/Soviet war in WW2)
* energy supply issues (unlike US it's not energy sufficient and the places that supply it with energy are involved with wars)
* a wall of people aging away from employment and into doctor's and hospital waiting rooms (forcing less investment into research and roads/bridges/railway, more towards stabilizing pensions, healthcare)
* major pieces of the european export economy are being replaced by China (eg chinese car brands eating the lunch of european car brands).
Nobel Laureate in Chemistry Omar M. Yaghi joins Tsinghua University full-time https://www.tsinghua.edu.cn/en/info/1244/14984.htm
most of the A.I researchers are already Chinese.
now imagine other talented researchers on their way to earn Nobels - they're already in China & other countries but not visible yet.
this corrupt US administration fxxked the US in ways that will be felt for decades.
What do you mean? I've never been to China, but know quite a few non-han white Europeans who lived there for both shorter and longer periods of time. Some studied, others worked there.
For comparsion, in the US as of 2023, nearly 48 million inhabitants (14.3% of total) are foreign-born (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_Stat...). Or the Netherlands, 4.4 million of its ~18 million inhabitants are from abroad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Netherland...).
China is also objectively becoming more closed, not more open.
Not just the total amount including random people arriving at the coast.
Skilled polish engineers don't want to be the only polish person in the entire country. They want food, culture, community that reminds them of home. Even as they assimilate. That's why the American melting pot works well. It encourages enclaves that touch one another.
China is the opposite of that. You are hard hammered into the Han-ness, immediately. The language, the writing (which is a HUGE hurdle), the food, the way of life.
For what it's worth, this is the terminology I learned in school decades ago, but I don't think it's preferred anymore. My daughter has a book that calls it a "salad" instead (mixed but retaining their respective properties). I'm probably just old and crotchety but I like that way less.
I feel like a lot of Americans disagree on these nowadays though, no? Source: just look at recent campaigns and elections.
The Mormons of Utah, the Cajun/French of Louisiana, the Norwegians in the Dakotas, the Scotch Irish of everywhere, and the Amish are all (non-brown) examples of enclaves existing in the US. Nobody says that they are not assimilating well. We let them live their lives because personal liberty used to be a thing here.
* language issues. Many chinese don't speak english. Also a problem in many european countries (esp latin and slavic speaking ones), but at least the european languages are easier to learn. Compare this to Amsterdam, Goteborg, Berlin-Mitte or Kopenhagen where everyone speaks english.
* citizenship is one of the hardest to get in the world.
* I heard complaints about onboarding into the chinese app/digital ID ecosystem.
Would it be silly to add "general lack of air conditioning" to that list? I imagine at some point it inevitably stops being a joke and starts being a real problem. Have we reached that point yet? [1] [2]
[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-frances-june-heatwave...
[2] https://www.dw.com/en/heat-wave-european-countries-report-37...
Both Japan and South Korea were equally devastated and yet they managed to build world-class technology industries in the subsequent decades. I think the problems with Europe and the EU are a lot deeper than that.
Europe's economy has been slowing down since 2007, which is the peak of conventional oil. The problem of Europe is that is doesn't have access to abundant energy like the US does. The US likes to think that they have a better economy because they are smarter/work harder, but the reality is simple: abundant energy makes the economy.
What use do propagandists and fascists have for research? It only stands to continually disprove their lies. They obviously hate science and truth and want it gone, to be replaced with cult of personality and Christian nationalism.
This is... wildly wrong. ASML is a multi-national company that licenses IP largely from USA and Japan, but also Taiwan and Germany. The actual EUV light source is developed and produced in California by Cymer, which ASML acquired in 2013. But ASML was only permitted to acquire the company under a strict technology sharing and export control agreement with the US government. Additionally, a huge portion of the photolithography research is directly developed (and owned) by US companies and research organizations such as IBM, Albany NanoTech, and SEMATECH.
There is a reason why ASML's next-generation research photolithography machine is currently being installed and developed in upstate New York, and not somewhere in the Netherlands. The same reason that Cymer is still in San Diego instead of being relocated to Europe.
[0] https://www.eetimes.com/asml-to-build-400-million-us-researc...
[1] https://www.eetimes.com/asml-sematech-team-on-manufacturing-...
[2] https://research.ibm.com/blog/euv-center-albany-nstc
Over 5 years...
It just means giving someone money or a different incentive to convince them to do something they weren’t going to do or were undecided but considering doing and the extra incentive is the catalyst for making the decision.
We also have the legal concept of a bribe but the OP probably wasn’t using it in the legal sense - I.e. accusing the Netherlands of doing something illegal.
But for years it has been the other way around. Top talent from the Netherlands has been moving to the US in order to get funding (and a bigger salary).
I live here in the US. I've NEVER heard the term bribe in a neutral or even positive way. It might be used in a mocking way, as if to mock the idea of bribes, but never seriously.
So, unless you are confusing that mocking nature as morally neutral or even positive, this is incorrect.
Paying mandatory but arbitrary amount to a restaurant on top of your bill – tips (not a hidden fee).
Paying someone an official salary – a bribe.
American logic
AI, quantum, vaccines, cancer, Alzheimer's, mental health, nuclear energy, climate, food security, astrophysics, democratic resilience
There isn't a full list of fields or researchers because of privacy or not all researchers have told their current institutions about the change.
Cancer researchers, climatechange, food production, astrophysics, democracy, mental health, Alzheimers, ...
Basically all over the board. But don't worry - you folks still have a president that understands sports really..... REALLY well. /s
> For the researcher, the qualities must, from an international perspective, far exceed what is customary within the international peer group. The institution receives a maximum of €1 million per researcher for the next five years.
Let's be generous and assume you are one of the chosen ones. Your institution will take 20% off the top leaving with you 1million×.80/5 or 160k EUR per year.
After income taxes, your take home pay is €90,868.00 or $103k USD. Not bad for the average man, but not good for a top researcher like they want.
EUR 160k works out to about $182,640. For that level of income in a top tier institution in a state with an income tax like Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, MD you would take home $121,565, or 15% more.
https://thetax.nl/?income=160000&startFrom=Year&selectedYear...
Besides, 90K after taxes is upper middle class. 160K / year is 13K / month which is nearly twice the average income of the richest country in Europe (Switzerland) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_...), or top 0.1% according to https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/how-rich-am-i.
And that's just salary based on that number, it doesn't include other income sources.
Also there are usually very very generous pension schemes here, so total pay is actually quite a lot higher than stated. In addition there is very generous holiday allowance, 41 days at UCL for instance, since you get extra holidays when the university is closed over certain holiday days.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1trcILsBHkE