Two things that are as (maybe more) important to me as server location are the data use restrictions and the profit model of the site. If (for example) Kamunity explicitly said that data would not be sold, and was explicitly a non-profit I'd be more interested. Wikipedia and Mastodon have their problems, but at least there's not an obvious need for them to exploit their users to make money.
While indeed a positive outlook, I think alot of Americans are beginning to wonder what the benefit will be to them.
The isolationist and xenophobic rhetoric of recent years is mostly a reaction to a growing sense that increasingly few Americans are benefiting from global goodwill and development. While I dont agree with the sentiment, its not entirely incorrect to describe such relationships are parasitic more then symbiotic when they become increasingly one-sided.
Why should Americans be exporting PHDs to other countries when they dont seem to be reaping the benefits?
Germany has taxpayer-subsidized education even for foreign students. They may stay, the may leave. One of its views is that the time the student spent in the country helps foster cultural ties and understanding, and generates goodwill towards the country...
I suppose "goodwill" is hard to translate to cold hard cash, so America doesn't really like it ;-)
Given that most PhD students pay for their earlier education and then do underpaid grunt work as part of their program, the US should already be reaping the benefits. It's only failing to reap them in the sense that more could be gained if they stayed, and that a citizen would be more likely to stay.
Having a fraction of US PhD leave might be a good thing for cross-pollination. The fact that they've left doesn't mean their contacts and relationships vaporize. This could help America stay abreast and integrated with foreign research.
> isolationist and xenophobic rhetoric of recent years is mostly a reaction to a growing sense that increasingly few Americans are benefiting from global goodwill and development
I think the rhetoric is the cause, not the response to that sense (besides the obvious feedback loop). Internationalism created a world of unprecendented - literally in human history - freedom, peace and prosperity. You can see what things look like with even the beginnings of nationalism.
I would implore you to empathize with the American working class, who have seen their living standards continuously deteriorate over multiple generations.
I know the hackernews audience skews more affluent and wealthy, with demographics pulling from more developed coastal cities, but the vast majority of citizens do not exist in such living conditions. Focusing entirely on the development an prosperity of only a handful of our cities is what has created the perfect fertile soil for Xenophobia to grow.
I dont see the rhetoric as the cause, just the motions of opportunists taking advantage of a situation that we are all at fault for.
Despite all the freedom, peace, and prosperity, its so unevenly distributed that many citizens live in squalor rivaling some destitute underdeveloped nations.
The American working class doesn't like to acknowledge its own existence or assert its self-worth. There's no real self identity for that class in America.
In fact, a huge number of the people that are in that class would resent you for classifying them in this way. And the same is true for those in the upper middle class, or elites.
Secondly, trying to scope the xenophobia problem to just the working class is itself a bit of a misdirection. Plenty of that comes from the swaths of upper middle class white collar folks. And plenty of it comes from second gen immigrants who are eager to be counted among the natives.
The xenophobia _is_ the substitute American culture provides as a filler for the vacuum left by the lack of any sort of class identity. Everybody falls over themselves demonstrating how they can be "more American" in one way or the other. Who is a "real" American, what their qualities are, whether this particular thing or that particular thing is more or less American, etc. etc.
It's an alternate focus to direct all that shame the culture demands from the poor.
The US is not "exporting" anything. PhDs are people, they pay for their education and they leave.
Nevertheless responding to your question:
>Contrary to common perceptions, US technology benefits from these graduates' work even if they leave: though the US share of global patent citations to graduates' science drops from 70% to 50% after migrating, it remains five times larger than the destination country share
So let me see: a person from another country receives a service that is exclusive, very limited and in high demand (PhD), pays for it, and that person eventually takes it back to country of origin.
US education must be in a woeful state because that is the definition of export.
Given the exclusivity and value of the service you'd think you'd want to hang on to it, but I guess xenophobia is one thing that is more important than money.
I've been hearing nothing but bad things about the actual education in US institutions. I think they've tarnished their name at this point to no return.
STEM PhD students typically pay with labor rather than cash. Labor to teach undergrads, and to perform other university research. (though they typically pay their undergrad with large piles of cash).
That is, very much, a substantial form of payment.
This is manifestly not true. What leads you to believe this? Certainly there are some who don't, just as with undergraduate education. But there's no blanket program in the US to pay for all STEM PhDs.
All of the dozens of US STEM PhDs I know from recent decades had to pay their tuition by working as TAs, RAs, or usually both. They didn't walk in the door with a trust fund, work through the coursework, and then write up a dissertation. I'm not sure that's even a possibility in most STEM fields: you need access to millions of dollars of ultra-specialized equipment which you can realistically only get by working in an existing lab, which means being an RA.
"...a growing sense that increasingly few Americans are benefiting from global goodwill and development"
That "growing sense" is not growing organically, it's being energetically fertilized. The problem isn't that most Americans aren't benefiting from global goodwill and development, it's that they aren't benefiting from domestic development. And the minority who are benefiting disproportionately from domestic economic growth are expending significant resources to convince everybody else that the problem lies with the rest of the world.
> The isolationist and xenophobic rhetoric of recent years is mostly a reaction to a growing sense that increasingly few Americans are benefiting from global goodwill and development.
I'm not sure I buy your claim that this is the reason for the rhetoric. And if you're right that this is the reason for the rhetoric, it's extremely flawed reasoning.
Diminishing material conditions makes a fertil breeding ground for right wing nationalism (isolationism and xenophobia). It's a pattern being replicated all over the world. UK citizens don't have high heat bills and sewage leaking into their rivers because of privatization and Brexit, it's because there's too many refugees!
Of course it's incorrect, but without the diminishing material conditions, it's a lot harder to get people to drum up the energy to be racist.
The US got talent for free for years; young people whose upbringing and education has been paid by/in a foreign country. The most expensive formative years had been paid for by the sponsoring country.
> The isolationist and xenophobic rhetoric of recent years is mostly a reaction to a growing sense that increasingly few Americans are benefiting from global goodwill and development
The rhetoric is learned from a well balanced media diet, served for free by the 0.0001%
"Increasingly few Americans are" getting to evade the consequence of wealth concentration and monopolies. Large parts of the US economy have been starved by monopolist practices in the past decennia. I recently linked a very approachable documentary¹ from ARTE, in thee parts, if you want to understand what is really happening.
Maybe try a vpn? It is an European production, I am not sure, but there could be some rights limitation. It is available till end of January. Protonvpn is free and has EUR servers.
Bit of a shame for the hassle though, the documentary is very good and the topics it touches are rarely highlighted. So give it an other try.
My read: China is seen as a serious geopolitical rival that the United States must beat in a shooting or Cold or AI or <insert here> war. As a result PHDs to China as an export would be a negative impact, not a positive one potentially.
Or their constant threats against Taiwan, or their oppression of LGBT people in their borders, or their genocide against the Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang, or their heel-turn into racialized nationalism (Han Chauvinism).
On top of that, it is a significant reverse brain drain. Like 20-25 years ago you'd be hard pressed to find tenure track CS faculty at most America programs let alone a major program lime Cal or UIUC consider returning to a program like Shanghai Jiao Tong or IIT Bombay compared to today.
It has upskilled academia in those countries, but we also lost talent who could have remained here.
It is it really our talent though? The US has been so addicted to China and India for STEM talent for so long that...what did they expect was going to happen? And the effect is much more prominent for China than India: China has a lot of money to dump into modernizing while India is still a relatively poor country. Imagine what will happen when India gets richer as well?
Based on personal experience (friends who either entered academia/industry or me being the son of white collar immigrants to the US) I'd say large portion want to return to China and India due to family ties, but a number would have stayed in the US if immigration wasn't such a PITA - especially because companies and programs don't really like filing for an O-1s unless they found a unicorn.
You hit the nail on the head on developing countries not being as poor anymore, and opportunties proliferating which reduces the pull factor, but there are a decent amount of academics and professionals who would gladly work in the US if given the opportunity and it wasn't such a headache.
my immediate question was whether fentanyl is unique in that a vaccine can be developed for it. From [1] we read "Vaccines for cocaine, methamphetamine, nicotine and others have all been tested in rats and, in some cases, people."
Reading further, [1] says these vaccines have not yet been successful.
I think gains on assets held for less than (say) two days should be taxed at a rate higher than normal income. On a related note, long-term investment is the good part of capitalism, and I'm ok with taxing gains on assets held for long terms (say 5 years) at a rate lower than normal income. The point is to incentivize people to work hard to find those investments that will pay off in the long run. Implementing the taxes described above would often increase bid-ask spreads; the size of the bid-ask spread could be an indicator of the uncertainty in the market.
you gain all kinds of health benefits from the exercise, and if enough people bike, you'll gain health benefits from lower pollution in your environment. That latter is more of a society thing though, which you don't seem to care about...
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