This is well written, concise, and outlines a problem that most people would call “political” without being hostile to other people (while still making it clear what the problem is). Great job, I wish we had more opinion pieces like this.
Also, I agree 100%. Some people don’t like foreigners at US schools, thinking that those foreigners are taking spots away from worthy Americans. I think the only thing worse is if the foreigners stop wanting to come to US schools because of the implications about how far the American education system has fallen.
I understand the need to frame arguments in an objective and clinical way. At the same time, it's frustrating because it just feels like being so distant emotionally doesn't drive deep enough into the way the current environment shakes so many people to their cores. It's an egregious assault on individual experiences and there's no real way to sugarcoat that.
You can deport illegal immigrants without taking away their dignity and without frightening the ever living shit out of everyone. But this isn't that. The intention is fear.
The fact that you think Trump is running a scam on foolish people, while the natural state of things is an altruistic Democratic government is why you lost and will likely continue to lose.
The "Democratic"/"left wing" platform is not as popular as you believe; not in the US, not in England, not in Canada, not in Germany...
This all stems from backlash against those policies. You need to fix the issues, not tell people "you voted for the wrong guy".
American democrats aren't what is considered left wing in Europe. They're neoliberals which classes as moderate rightwing in Europe. Left as we see it in Europe doesn't really exist in America. Except perhaps some outliers Bernie Sanders.
I don't think the democrats should lower themselves to messaging like trump's though. In doing so they would give up their own worth. And copying your enemy is never a good idea because nobody can be better at it than the real thing.
I don't think the democrats are great (I'm European left wing) but I do absolutely think that Trump is running a scam on foolish people. He has even said so himself in the past.
The problem is also that the republicans manufacture issues. There are no issues with trans people. Most people wouldn't even know a trans person (which is also why it's such a good group to demonize, people don't often have friends in that group to dissuade them from hating). There's no issues with immigrants as such, the issue is more that some groups are very poor and turn to crime. This is not exclusive to immigrants. The actual solution is to make sure even poor people have opportunities that don't involve crime. But hey that's 'communism'. You can call it what you want but life is a lot safer here in Europe. But they're just riling people up in order to create a platform.
The thing is, you can't fix issues that don't actually exist. So this is a very hard situation to solve.
> > The "Democratic"/"left wing" platform is not as popular as you believe; not in the US, not in England, not in Canada, not in Germany...
At least the Democratic platform is a platform as opposed to the other party who is being held hostage for 13 years by a single individual who cannot complete a coherent sentence without rambling and weaving (and he couldn't do it in 2015 either)
Exactly. People forget this, and "forget" this, but democracy's power is not based on picking the best (or even merely not disastrous) rulers. Italy, Germany and more recently Russia illustrate that pretty disastrous choices have been made by democratic institutions (I don't mean the Ukraine war, I mean electing Putin in the first place).
Democracy's power is almost entirely in voting out bad rulers without destroying the entire country. That's why a great deal of people's ideas of democracy are ridiculous. For example, democracy can tolerate the existence of fake news or terrible/fake science, just go read newspapers from the interwar period. Take an alternative of the islamist gulf monarchies. They'll end in destruction and fire, war or revolution, because that's the only way to replace the government, so you can pretty much guarantee that's what will (eventually) happen.
The simple truth one hopes America, including democrats, can embrace is that Biden was bad, and allowing him to cling to power was horrible (if he'd made Ms. Harris president halfway through his presidency, THAT might have worked). What was done during the election ... seriously? Yes, Trump is worse (and he'll be voted out, or at least take the GOP down, like he did before), but that doesn't matter in most people's minds. Besides, taking the "least bad" option, what democrats generally advocate these days, is how Italy and Germany destroyed their democracy (Mussulini and Hitler were put in power, not elected, because any other choice would have resulted in civil war. How that worked? Easy: they instructed their supporters to fight until they were the least bad option, and the police couldn't keep control. Which is why I think countries like France are playing with fire since every extreme party in France and Germany, the various extreme left, right, green is trying the same playbook now: elect them or they sabotage the entire country. Why? Same reason Hitler did it: he only had maybe 20% of people really behind him. But 20% of the population can sabotage the entire country, easily. Of course, Hitler was the only one doing it, and these parties are not)
The intention is to express political dominance. By panicking and responding emotionally, you are feeding the trolls. It is as much an ego trip for the right to act oppressive (within the bounds of "the rules") as it is for the left wing to act oppressed.
If the democratic party is going to win, they need to succinctly and stoically state a handful of memorable counterpoints to appeal to the common man. What we have had for the past decade is a ton of noise from the mainstream media explaining a million reasons why we should oppose Trump. The left wing does not equip it's supporters to argue against the right well.
Trump won in 2016 rattling on about Hillary's emails. Trump didn't give a million reasons for us to oppose Hillary, he had 1. He would have a single canned response and name for each of his opponents. The point is you have to agree on a couple of memorable weak points to attack.
Those are just slogans. But in terms of arguments, I would say he had one major negative argument "Her Emails" and two major positive arguments "Make America Great Again" "Build a Wall".
The most important thing is that these are points that are so simple even an idiot can understand them.
I can't even keep track of all of trump's controversies because they are so numerous and complex. But if I was a democrat I would just stick to one or two points that even moderates can resonate with like the "Epstein Files" or Palantir or the nuclear secrets or something.
One my dad reliably latches on to is “they’re going to take your guns”. Trump used this, I’m pretty sure, all three races. Weirdly there were never even moves toward doing this the time he lost. It’s as if this was just bullshit. But, it gets voters fired up (getting people to show up for you is more important than swaying anyone to your side)
Lots of people voted for him this time for overtime and tips being tax-exempt. Some (especially on the overtime thing) have since come to regret it when the fine print didn’t include them, but it got their vote.
He ran on lots of issues. “Build the wall” echos what tons of Republican voters have been saying for decades. Their politicians wouldn’t do it—hell, Trump didn’t, he just half-assed a little bit of it and called it done—because it’s a really bad idea, but he sold people on the notion that he’d get it done, where “it” was something they’d long wanted done.
Many other issues like that, that did get him votes.
They've been using the guns argument since at least Reagan, who passed gun restrictions as governor of California. I know I've heard it my entire life, but I've yet to see anyone even propose such legislation
There was the (embarrassingly bad, even if you like gun control) “assault weapons ban” but since then democrats haven’t even been able to consistently achieve the thing that Republicans often say they want instead of more gun laws: “enforce the ones already on the books” (this is so common I assume it must have been pushed initially by some major Republican figure, but I’m not sure who it was) so the risk of their passing substantial gun control laws today is extremely low, even with decent majorities in the legislature and holding the presidency.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of democratic politicians are openly against outright bans and quite a few of them even mean it—Democrats managing to pass even some better version of the extremely-partial AWB is fantasy any time soon, and I very much doubt they’d get half their own people to vote to restrict firearms any more than that. (Setting aside that the courts have recently set perhaps the narrowest scope for allowable gun restrictions in the country’s history, so it might not matter even if they could pass any of this)
I think this is a misunderstanding of how he works, and especially how he got elected the first time.
I believe there has long been a significant gap between what national-stage elected republicans say and do, and what Republican voters say and want them to do.
Frankly, what Republican voters say they want is often a lot meaner than anything their politicians were delivering. I’ve not only heard “why don’t they just build a wall?” from ordinary not-terminally-online R voters, I’ve heard, many times going back 20+ years, “they should just mine the border”. Kilmeade’s comment about just killing homeless people who wouldn’t accept aid (who cares why they don’t, I guess)? I’ve heard it, that’s not new, what’s new is people that prominent saying it.
R voter sentiment also veers far away from the (Republican-initiated) neoliberal (ex-)consensus on trade. (Incidentally, this also isn’t popular on the left, but both major parties agreed on it for more than 30 years, so it didn’t matter).
Dropping lots of foreign aid? Mass government worker firings? Sending the army in to cities to fight out-of-control crime or brutally quelling riots with the army (that one’s on the “we’ll see” list but if we get four full years, the smart money says we will see it)? Normal stuff to hear on a wishlist from an awful lot of R voters. They’ll just tell you this stuff.
I could go on.
Trump got where he is by exploiting a large gap between what voters want and what parties have been delivering. This gap was huge for the republicans, and there was a little overlap with own-voter dissatisfaction with Democrats. He was able to make voters believe he’d do many of the things they’d long wanted their elected officials to do, but that they weren’t doing, and often weren’t even talking about doing.
The right is a master class in political messaging. They learned this One Weird Trick™ to manipulate the masses: people are stupid and vote their emotions. By defining the language they win almost by default: family values, school choice, pro life, death taxes, etc.
They learned that it doesn't matter if it's true, relevant, or hypocritical, as long as it feeds fear and anger in their constituents.
The left fails because the issues they support can require nuance and consideration and that's a lot to ask of a voter who just wants to be told who to vote for.
My assessment isn't meant to be tribal, there's plenty to critique on the left from DNC leadership to "overexubernt" members whose excess is used to define the left as a whole (wokism).
It's heartbreaking that the divide is now complete and is not likely to change without some unfortunate actions.
I think you're right actually. Now that I reflect on it, there are many times where the roles are reversed. For example, with this recent assassination of charlie kirk, the right wingers are role playing as the oppressed and are practicing the crybulling tactics of getting people fired from their jobs for politically incorrect speech.
But I think the right generally appeals to people with a more tyrannical personality, and vice versa.
This won't convince anyone who wants to pause all immigration.
However, if you want to allow some immigration, you can make a case PhDs in computer science from Carnegie Mellon, which is what he's talking about.
These are kids who were already world-class coming in and become even better by the time they graduate. It is paid for by taxpayers, for which they should be grateful, and it is done in a context that builds admiration for the country.
We're starting to see the impact. A number of our older peers have kids beginning to graduate high school or undergrad. I personally know of 3 situations this fall/next spring already where very talented kids have chosen European schools this year over Ivy League admits
And, more critically - if foreigners are deciding to take up faculty positions in their home countries.
Countries like India, Vietnam, and South Korea have begun replicating the Chinese Thousand Talents program to attract their diasporas back to domestic academia.
Significant domains of CS such as HPC/Systems, Networking, OS internals, etc are heavily dependent on faculty, graduate students, and post-docs who are all on some sort of visa. And increasingly, at least amongst Indians, becuase the backlogs for US citizenship are insane, a number of those people have been taking sweetheart positions at INIs like the new IITs with almost US$100k in public-private lab startup grants on top of a $20k salary (tax free due to the income tax changes) with free housing and car and complete autonomy to consult with private sector players without IP entanglement (one of the biggest headaches for public private STEM R&D partnerships in the US).
Vietnam is doing something similar as well to attract Vietnamese diaspora in SK and Japan, along with Viet Kieu in America and Australia.
A nativist academic culture in STEM in the US would completely destroy any R&D capacity that even exists today.
> A nativist academic culture in STEM in the US would completely destroy any R&D capacity that even exists today.
Well, considering all other countries mentioned here are just hiring native people who worked in US. Indians are not hiring Chinese, or Europeans or any other than natively Indians. Same for Chinese or others. So nativist policy can for those countries but not US is strange.
If one sees crowd at US embassy or consulates in India, US has nothing to worry about talent not trying hard to come to US.
All this analysis about US downfall seems kind of assuming that rest of the world is doing lot better. Traveling to India in last few years and experiencing first hand tells me believing even 1% of these hype generators of India is believing too much.
As an Australian, I've seen recruiters from the US, Europe, Hong Kong, and Dubai. I think such offers are reflective of who pays more than Australia rather than nativism.
Since tech wages in the US are the highest anywhere in the world, with the possible exception of Monaco or something, I would imagine Americans don't see a lot of recruiters from elsewhere in the world. I would also imagine that's because it's harder to recruit someone who's earning American wages.
But these US wages aren't actually all that great anymore. The vast majority of people will have nothing to show for their decade of working in tech other than a bad back, carpal tunnel, and a neurosis.
The cost of living in the Bay Area creeps ever upward and absorbs just enough salary to keep the worker bees coming back to the office the next day. It's really not that different of a life than elsewhere in materialistic terms. Except there is also nothing to do other than work or go hiking. More and more people are cluing in.
For a number of nationalities like Indians and Chinese, it takes 15-25 years to naturalize as a permanent resident/green card holder because of the backlogs and processing issues at USCIS.
That is a lot of instability, with various pitfalls at each step (eg. potentially getting deported if you cannot find a new job in 60 days after being terminated, increasingly needing to pay out of pocket to do visa processing instead of the company doing it).
More critically, if you have a kid and you as the parent do not get a green card by 21, they will be treated as a new applicant and will have to start the entire process from scratch.
If you are able to demand EU or Canada level salaries in India or China, you have no reason to deal with the kind of headaches I mentioned above. You could have put a similar amount of money purchasing real estate in Hyderabad or Hangzhou, or investing in the Chinese or Indian equities market which are both seeing an IPO boom, or founded your own startup without being scared of being the reason you and your dependents got booted out. You can't even justify buying a house or a condo because you won't even know if you'd be able to live there long term.
As a result, what you end up seeing is people from both countries increasingly viewing their stay in the US as temporary - so the American strategy of leveraging a brain drain to make more Americans is failing, becuase it is now becoming a reverse brain drain right when they are mid-career (so at their most valuable point from a human capital perspective).
This has been impacting everyone from line level IC engineers all the way up to even VPs at major companies and even a couple well know VCs I am acquaintances with.
If you can’t afford to live on 150k/year even in SF, that’s just poor financial planning…
It’s not like McDonald’s or Target don’t exist in SF. Those workers get paid way less than big tech and somehow they make rent every month. Yea, you might have to commute instead living within walking distance of the campus where you work, but that’s just being a responsible adult imo.
Levels.fyi puts the median software engineering salary in San Francisco at USD$238000, while the median where I currently live is USD$90000. That's 2.6x higher.
Yeah, I get it. The multiplier on the salary has gone down from 3.6x to 2.6x. A studio is ridiculously expensive, I once paid $2300/month to live in one room in the piss-soaked Tenderloin, I understand your pain. It's not as good as it sounds. Still ... if you were sitting in Germany or Dubai and had to decide which area to try to recruit from, do you think you'd choose the more expensive one unless you had no choice?
Indians in America aren't eligible for an E3 like Australians are.
Furthermore, Indians in America face a 20-80 year permanent residency backlog depending on when they arrived in the US. The majority of Indians nationals in America will eventually return to India as a result.
The US is increasingly viewed as a temporary posting instead of as a naturalization destination becuase of the backlog, and most other Western countries don't provide lucrative offers for the cream of the crop compared to what they can demand in India.
For example, the average new grad salary at IIT Kanpur was around US$30K for the class of 2024 [0], and a mid-career TC of US$60k-70K is realistic for INI grads (as one of the other posters in this thread is an example of).
Most of India's R&D is overwhelmingly generated by alumni of these INIs, and the majority of investment is placed in these programs. These are also the kinds of programs that previously used to represent the bulk of the brain drain 15-20 years ago, but their grads overwhelmingly remain in India unless doing graduate school like a PhD or an MBA (these aren't the kinds of people doing an MSc in Business Analytics at Wollongong in order to get an Australian permanent residency), let alone accepting decades of indentured servitude due to the EB2 processing backlog.
I'm not sure what information you're trying to impart here, because I was talking about nativism in hiring practices and this has nothing to do with what I wrote.
I agree that Indians get fucked by the US when it comes to immigration and that the E-3 visa is awesome. What does that have to do with whether India, Europe, and China refuse to hire foreigners for nativist reasons? Did you reply to the wrong person by accident?
>Well, considering all other countries mentioned here are just hiring native people who worked in US. Indians are not hiring Chinese, or Europeans or any other than natively Indians. Same for Chinese or others. So nativist policy can for those countries but not US is strange.
Context is not neutral. "We want to hold onto the labor we produce" works for labor exporters in a way that it doesn't work for labor importers.
Making private sector/startup consultancy really easy for professors to do is one of the main reasons there is an insane pickup of pace in the return of the diaspora. Many professors in my IIT suddenly have BMWs. I''ve never seen it before 2021ish. And yes, BMWs are a luxury car in India. And no. IITs being a government college don't pay professors enough for them to afford a luxury car on salary alone (in the context of financial conservativeness typical to india). For more context, my starting SWE job before I came back for M.S paid as much as my professor earned decades into his career, being dean, and having a couple of other responsibilities. - 50L per year (total comp, not base). Also helps that the STEM economy is picking up like crazy.
It is true that the govt institutions themselves have less IIT representation, mostly due to low salaries. However, what matters to the private sector is sources of capital. Tech investors in india usually went to IITs themselves, and so the ecosystem always remains close to IITs, allowing professors easy access. Lot of the startups (even YC ones!) by IIT students actually involved one of their professors in the ideation stage, and they even have equity % sometimes. Similar to Rajeev Motwani holding a stake in Google, they get really rich sometimes.
> Making private sector/startup consultancy really easy for professors to do is one of the main reasons there is an insane pickup of pace in the return of the diaspora
Yep! The University of Waterloo back in Ontario did the same thing in the 1960s, which helped catapult the program into a Tier 1 CSE program comparable to older more established programs like UToronto and UMich.
> Lot of the startups (even YC ones!) by IIT students actually involved one of their professors in the ideation stage, and they even have equity % sometimes
Yep! There are also some NIT, BITS Pilani, IIT, and other program specific networks made by their alumnis in academia and VC. I think Foundation Capital (Netflix, Cerebras, Fortanix) is running one such program.
> It is true that the govt institutions themselves have less IIT representation, mostly due to low salaries
Ministry affiliated universities are a major reason why. For example, ISRO overwhelmingly recruits from IIST, ONGC from IIPE, and other SOEs or R&D programs will recruit from universities specialized in that specific disciple instead of an IIT or NIT now.
Indian spaceflight program done by ISRO have very few people from IITs or any of the so called elite colleges.
Unlike china Indian colleges are really backward due to lack of research funding and a coaching industry which have gamified the entrance exams.
> Indian spaceflight program done by ISRO have very few people from IITs or any of the so called elite colleges
The bulk of recruitment at ISRO has always been happening at the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology (IIST) and the Indian Institute of Sciences (IISc) - not IITs.
Even getting into an IIST or IISc is almost as difficult as getting into an old IIT based on the JEE cutoffs.
Both India and China have specialized institutions dedicated to subfields that end up getting the bulk of R&D funding in said subfields, for example, Petroleum Engineering and the China University of Petroleum and the Indian Institute of Petroleum Engineering, or in mining enigneeing, the China University of Mining and Technology and the Indian School of Mines (now IIT Dhanbad).
> Unlike china Indian colleges are really backward due to lack of research funding and a coaching industry which have gamified the entrance exams
China also bases acceptance on entrance exams - the Gaokao is equally as competitive as the JEE Advanced. The exact same gamification of entrance exams and coaching centers is sadly the norm in China as well, despite the Xi admin's initial attempts to crack down on it.
Additonally, Chinese R&D funding is also stratified the same way Indian R&D funding is.
The equivalent of a government engineering college in both China and India would be receiving relatively limited funding or autonomy, but a Double First Class University in China or an INI in India well get the first pick of research grants and subsidizes.
If there is a promising professor at a mid-tier program, they are likely affiliated and getting their funding via affiliation to a national academy like the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
This is why all regional powers have a civilian space flight program - the same thing you mentioned but also it allows you to sidestep some international treaties around testing.
> Countries like India, Vietnam, and South Korea have begun replicating the Chinese Thousand Talents program to attract their diasporas back to domestic academia.
Really? I'm yet to meet a single diaspora (i.e. born/raised abroad) professor here in Korea and I interact with universities quite a bit.
Unless diaspora here includes those who did their full university education abroad though, lots of those indeed.
We can only hope this administration and its supporters are a temporary aberration that the US can claw its way back out of. Otherwise, that classic advice to sign up your kids for Mandarin class starts to sound pretty good.
Because if you want to get a good science education, you need to be in a place that supports science and education. The administration has disrupted the system that made the US the world scientific leader, a status it’s had only since the mid-20th century, which it achieved through concerted government and social investment. Which country is doing that right now?
I find this quite true in my field. Recently I attended the biggest conference in computer vision (CVPR), and almost half the time I was there, I heard Chinese instead of English. Most people I met joked that we should learn Mandarin if we want to continue doing AI research now.
America isn’t the only place that speaks English. It’s the global standard language. When a Japanese and a Chinese person negotiate they are already using English.
The vast majority of English speakers do not live in the US or the UK. English is the most widely spoken language in the world. If you are at dinner with people from several countries, the "Lingua Franca" will almost certainly be English.
The popularity of Mandarin relies on the sheer mass of native speakers in China. That population is shrinking and that shrinking is expected to accelerate. The cultural export of China is inherently limited by its ideology - there's a reason we have (had, really) "Hong Kong Cinema" not "Peking Cinema".
All Japanese people learn English at school; few learn Chinese as you can verify by reading about the Japanese school system from various sources including Wikipedia.
Similarly in China, English is the only mandatory foreign language taught at school.
Frequently, Chinese or Japanese. For example companies in these countries employ translators. Are you suggesting they rely on primary school-level English to negotiate?
You claimed, without a source other than wikipedia, that everyone in Japan learns English in school. I see this [0] on wikipedia which says "a select number of public primary schools ... have mandatory English classes"
Instead we are seeing increased siloing of scientific domains. The EU is cracking down on EU-Chinese research cooperation (as recent arrests and deportations in France have shown), India still has a de facto freeze on Chinese R&D and China is still enforcing export controls on IP to India, and South Korea and Japan are still controlling any IP generated from their industrial research fusion programs.
We're instead seeing at least 6-7 different scientific and capital ecosystems forming, and with collaboration being tightly controlled by governments.
Assuming that's true... if the largest silo is China I can imagine plenty of people wanting to "defect" to China for their own advancement. But you'll have to speak Chinese.
Kids may want to learn Chinese for the same reason they may want to learn Arabic or Spanish. It helps doing business in some parts of the world.
But China is not going to be the dominant superpower (except maybe if they manage to beat the rest of the world in AI). Their labor force is already in decline, which means they must gradually shift their focus from building the future to maintaining the society. Like Europe and Japan are already doing.
Just curious, but is there any evidence that Chinese/Indian/etc will even be as open to US students as the US has been to them? I have no knowledge of what their intentions may be, but I think it’s a pretty large assumption that they would even take American students at all
American here who went to a Chinese (grad) school for CS and was admitted to every Chinese school I applied to. This is very much a possible route, if you’re appropriately qualified for the program. The main issue is language: outside of HK, programs in English are rare.
That's extremely impressive that you managed to reach such a high level of fluency. I find written and technical Chinese is extremely tricky and different from spoken Chinese
PKU and Tisnghua both have overseas student programs and they are particularly eager to have qualified takers. Now, the question is how far does that go when the schools really become popular undergrad and grad STEM studies?
The bigger problem is that schools like MIT, Stanford, UCB, UCI throw (or threw?) lots of resources at students that Chinese schools didn't really do (and maybe still don't? My info is 10 years out of date). Even the lower ranked schools have ample resources and fairly well paying TA/RA-ships available. In China, you would have to work for your professor's side company to get money, and the professor might not let you graduate if you were doing a good job (again, 10 years ago, I have no idea what its like today, China is changing quickly).
I would find it hard to imagine they wouldn't welcome foreign students just for the fact that there are so few in comparison to start with. Even if tons of US kids started going to China for college, they would always remain a tiny fraction of students due to the population size disparity.
> Chinese/Indian/etc will even be as open to US students as the US has been to them
India has been opening campuses abroad like IIT Madras in Tanzania [0] and IIT Delhi in Abu Dhabi [1] to cater specifically to building that kind of relationship in Africa and MENA. The majority of seats allocated (66%) are for foreign nationals.
Top Indian programs like IIT Delhi have been very active giving fellowships and subsidises for students and researchers from ASEAN [2], the African Union [3], Pacific Island nations [4], and Afghanistan [5]
And Vietnam would do similar programs as well for poorer ASEAN nations and a number of African countries (notably Angola and Mozambique) as well as Cuba
Japan has been running a multi-decade long international student and R&D collaboration program that helped jumpstart South Korea and China's R&D capacity in the 1980s and 1990s, along with much of ASEAN's more recently (my SO is a product of that). Same with South Korea as well.
Looking at the history of US leads to the depressing conclusion that this administration is not an aberration but is instead a return to the same old shit from 150 years ago.
You mean reactionism. A conservative wants to keep the status quo. A reactionary wants to regress to a previous status quo (i.e. perhaps from 150 years ago).
Conservation literally means to preserve. Teddy Roosevelt was a conservative who established the national park system to preserve our country's natural wonder. You might also say that conservatives don't believe in spending lots of money and are against high deficits and fiscal craziness. None of those really describe the conservative movement in America today.
"Tories in England long imagined that they were enthusiastic about monarchy, the church, and the beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about ground rent."
That feels like it could have been written today, doesn't it? When push comes to shove, things like Christianity, constitutional order or "fiscal restraint" seem to always take second seat to the yield from owning things, especially real estate.
My wife, daughter and I are Canadian-U.S. dual citizens. We live in Canada. It is exhausting trying to reason through the decision of how to advise our 17 year-old on her post-secondary plans. She has opportunities to study at eminent institutions in the U.S. but is it wise? The broad attack on U.S. education at the hands of the current administration is extremely off-putting.
IMO it depends on the field and her scholarships. If it's tech, just go to waterloo, it's a great school, has a great reputation and you get the Canadian discount, if it's not, you have more research to do. With her professors not having as much grant work to do, they might actually focus on teaching for once! As an undergrad, research doesn't matter much and no 17 year old is certain they want to become a PhD researcher type at that age.
Otherwise as dual citizens it's overblown. There is a lot of hot air in Canada that doesn't match the on the boots on the ground reality of life in the USA (for citizens / green card holders) because Canada is pissed off that America caused a downturn in Canada's economy and Canadians feel the pinch because the downturn is about 25% worse in Canada as a result.
But IMO it's self inflicted wound and has been a very, very long time coming. Canada has kept on kicking the economic can down the road for decades now and it's toll is collecting interest more and more.
The political worker class in DC is also very pissed off because the administration there initiated the equivalent of extreme mass layoffs in a sector that is not used to that.
In the USA, people are kind of mopey about the downturn, but in democratic areas the level of emotion is far less than it was with trump was the first time, while in Canada, it seems like it's more intense than it was in California with trump for the first time.
Yup. Certain people get their panties in a tizzy every time an R president gets elected. Dubya was the antichrist, remember? It's just the same old tune all over again.
The most eminent institutions in America are older than the United States. Trump has been president for 6 years, and he's 79 years of age. I don't know if you're a betting man but my money is on the colleges winning this fight in the long run.
Trump will be gone in 3 years, possibly fewer given his age and health confounders. Don't make long-term plans based on the direction of short-term political winds.
Although this is correct, the narrative is obviously 100% centered on US perspective.
The author worries about the brain drain that could affect places like Pittsburgh, but on the other hand, people is already living it, as my kids just see grandparents once per year, since we live in another country, but there is people who can't even do it on an annual base, because they live far away or in countries considered at risk.
What's surprising to me is that internal migration in the US is actually down from its peak. People today are more likely to live in or close to their hometown than they were in the 20th century. Part of this is simply because urbanization goes only one way.
Some people don't like rural communities anyway. I've lived in a provincial town with about 150k people for a while and that was already too much for me. All the groupthink, the conservative "family values", the way everyone knows everyone, the religion. It really rubbed me the wrong way. Also the lack of resources, the place was the graveyard of ambition. And all the imbecile councillors considering themselves the center of the world. Never anything new to explore, few opportunities to find people with different opinions, no really interesting tech (I'm big into the maker community) etc. Things always arrived there last. New initiatives being announced by said councillors only to die off quickly when the novelty wears off. I found the place deeply suffocating and I felt like the world was passing me by. I know some people are happy with their lives there but I certainly was not. I don't want a house with a big garden and peace and quiet. I love living in a neighborhood that's alive.
Take this with a grain of salt because I'm very independent, individualist and progressive. I think that was already clear from the above :)
I live in a big city now and I love it so much. Excellent public transport so I don't need a car anymore (haven't driven in 7 years), always new things to do and see. New initiatives that actually go somewhere instead of dying out like in the small town.
I can imagine people that like to think outside the box and build stuff like me often like to live in bigger places. That's not even education related as such (you can also be self taught) though it does tend to correlate of course.
And no I wouldn't think of visiting the US in the current situation, let alone move there to study or work (I'm not in the studying age anymore anyway). I do agree with the author that the current politics would deter skilled people.
This is the first in a very long time that I’ve seen my thoughts written down by someone else. Unfortunately I didn’t get out and thanks to 2 burnouts & counting I’m stuck in a shithole country doing shithole jobs.
If you’re young and want to get out, get out. Don’t take my path of studying and working until a path emerges. If I could do it again I don’t think I’d even finish secondary education and just pack my bags at 17.
There are certainly a lot of people like you describe, but there also many "hippy" types that just like to grow plants or DIY makers. Often they have to do more with less, but cheap land can give people the freedom to do stuff like loud metal working or space to repair older equipment for cheap or grow large gardens.
One of the biggest problems though is just the poverty, options are limited and wages are shit and like you mentioned innovations don't make their way into rural areas until like 10+ years later. And if you don't move away to a big city the majority of people are never going to make a lot of money and will often be ignored for most everything except as a source of revenue for podunk courts and cops. Of the highly intelligent and aspirational few that are left, most end up severely stifled by lack of financial opportunity even if they are doing great work because most of their potential customer base are poor too.
This whole politics being practiced by excluding others or by just generally being a jerk ... I don't get it. It's like throwing a fit, it's not going anywhere good.
My oldest is applying to college right now and this has worried me immensely. College isn't going to be the same anymore. Dark forces are working hard to discourage discourse and diversity. I want to support institutions that still stand for something and value truth and enlightenment but it's hard to know if we're succeeding.
I wish the people who cared so much about Charlie Kirk gave even one thought to the victims of the right wing school shooter that happened the very same day in Colorado.
It didn't make it out much in the news that day, because obviously, but only the shooter died as a result of his terror. The other two injured students are expected to live, thankfully:
As a global citizen of Earth, I would agree. But I'm also a citizen of the United States, and have a vested personal interest in its academic and economic superiority. And I think that's normal. You don't even have to be nationalistic or patriotic about your particular country to feel that way. Academic and economic declines in any country will cause problems for everyone who lives there.
Of course there should be. However, those nations should worry about that on behalf of their citizens. No other nation is going to concern itself with whether Americans can live close to their parents.
Yup, the author is in a fairly rare fortunate situation for someone who is good in his field. A lot of us moved countries or continents to be good at our jobs, and there is always a personal cost.
Although, for grandkids, I guess that when you are far you are also more intentional with making sure you spend time with their grandparents when they are far.
There are plenty. The author is over exaggerating the prestige of CMU compared to other institutes outside of the USA.
Just in the western countries:
Toronto, Cambridge, ENS in France, the many max Planck institutes in Germany (eg Tubingen), the two federal institutes in Switzerland.
Faculty positions in any of those are likely to be better than CMU (in terms of start up package, funding, quality of students, quality of faculty, and ability to hire people).
This is the sort of attitude that allows nations to fall. If a nation isn't protecting it's most valuable resources, they will be taken away by others who want them.
> Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.
This is well written, concise, and outlines a problem that most people would call “political” without being hostile to other people (while still making it clear what the problem is). Great job, I wish we had more opinion pieces like this.
Also, I agree 100%. Some people don’t like foreigners at US schools, thinking that those foreigners are taking spots away from worthy Americans. I think the only thing worse is if the foreigners stop wanting to come to US schools because of the implications about how far the American education system has fallen.
I understand the need to frame arguments in an objective and clinical way. At the same time, it's frustrating because it just feels like being so distant emotionally doesn't drive deep enough into the way the current environment shakes so many people to their cores. It's an egregious assault on individual experiences and there's no real way to sugarcoat that.
You can deport illegal immigrants without taking away their dignity and without frightening the ever living shit out of everyone. But this isn't that. The intention is fear.
The fact that you think Trump is running a scam on foolish people, while the natural state of things is an altruistic Democratic government is why you lost and will likely continue to lose.
The "Democratic"/"left wing" platform is not as popular as you believe; not in the US, not in England, not in Canada, not in Germany...
This all stems from backlash against those policies. You need to fix the issues, not tell people "you voted for the wrong guy".
Both are true. The Democratic policy platform is unpopular, and Trump is running a scam on foolish people.
I voted third-party.
American democrats aren't what is considered left wing in Europe. They're neoliberals which classes as moderate rightwing in Europe. Left as we see it in Europe doesn't really exist in America. Except perhaps some outliers Bernie Sanders.
I don't think the democrats should lower themselves to messaging like trump's though. In doing so they would give up their own worth. And copying your enemy is never a good idea because nobody can be better at it than the real thing.
I don't think the democrats are great (I'm European left wing) but I do absolutely think that Trump is running a scam on foolish people. He has even said so himself in the past.
The problem is also that the republicans manufacture issues. There are no issues with trans people. Most people wouldn't even know a trans person (which is also why it's such a good group to demonize, people don't often have friends in that group to dissuade them from hating). There's no issues with immigrants as such, the issue is more that some groups are very poor and turn to crime. This is not exclusive to immigrants. The actual solution is to make sure even poor people have opportunities that don't involve crime. But hey that's 'communism'. You can call it what you want but life is a lot safer here in Europe. But they're just riling people up in order to create a platform.
The thing is, you can't fix issues that don't actually exist. So this is a very hard situation to solve.
> > The "Democratic"/"left wing" platform is not as popular as you believe; not in the US, not in England, not in Canada, not in Germany...
At least the Democratic platform is a platform as opposed to the other party who is being held hostage for 13 years by a single individual who cannot complete a coherent sentence without rambling and weaving (and he couldn't do it in 2015 either)
Exactly. People forget this, and "forget" this, but democracy's power is not based on picking the best (or even merely not disastrous) rulers. Italy, Germany and more recently Russia illustrate that pretty disastrous choices have been made by democratic institutions (I don't mean the Ukraine war, I mean electing Putin in the first place).
Democracy's power is almost entirely in voting out bad rulers without destroying the entire country. That's why a great deal of people's ideas of democracy are ridiculous. For example, democracy can tolerate the existence of fake news or terrible/fake science, just go read newspapers from the interwar period. Take an alternative of the islamist gulf monarchies. They'll end in destruction and fire, war or revolution, because that's the only way to replace the government, so you can pretty much guarantee that's what will (eventually) happen.
The simple truth one hopes America, including democrats, can embrace is that Biden was bad, and allowing him to cling to power was horrible (if he'd made Ms. Harris president halfway through his presidency, THAT might have worked). What was done during the election ... seriously? Yes, Trump is worse (and he'll be voted out, or at least take the GOP down, like he did before), but that doesn't matter in most people's minds. Besides, taking the "least bad" option, what democrats generally advocate these days, is how Italy and Germany destroyed their democracy (Mussulini and Hitler were put in power, not elected, because any other choice would have resulted in civil war. How that worked? Easy: they instructed their supporters to fight until they were the least bad option, and the police couldn't keep control. Which is why I think countries like France are playing with fire since every extreme party in France and Germany, the various extreme left, right, green is trying the same playbook now: elect them or they sabotage the entire country. Why? Same reason Hitler did it: he only had maybe 20% of people really behind him. But 20% of the population can sabotage the entire country, easily. Of course, Hitler was the only one doing it, and these parties are not)
The intention is to express political dominance. By panicking and responding emotionally, you are feeding the trolls. It is as much an ego trip for the right to act oppressive (within the bounds of "the rules") as it is for the left wing to act oppressed.
If the democratic party is going to win, they need to succinctly and stoically state a handful of memorable counterpoints to appeal to the common man. What we have had for the past decade is a ton of noise from the mainstream media explaining a million reasons why we should oppose Trump. The left wing does not equip it's supporters to argue against the right well.
Trump won in 2016 rattling on about Hillary's emails. Trump didn't give a million reasons for us to oppose Hillary, he had 1. He would have a single canned response and name for each of his opponents. The point is you have to agree on a couple of memorable weak points to attack.
> Trump didn't give a million reasons for us to oppose Hillary, he had 1.
Which 1? Building the wall? Draining the swamp? Locking her up? Making America great again? I may be missing more.
Those are just slogans. But in terms of arguments, I would say he had one major negative argument "Her Emails" and two major positive arguments "Make America Great Again" "Build a Wall".
The most important thing is that these are points that are so simple even an idiot can understand them.
I can't even keep track of all of trump's controversies because they are so numerous and complex. But if I was a democrat I would just stick to one or two points that even moderates can resonate with like the "Epstein Files" or Palantir or the nuclear secrets or something.
There were really two and you missed them both: she’s a Clinton. And she’s an aggressive woman.
> succinctly and stoically state a handful of memorable counterpoints to appeal to the common man
That is how democratic party loose and I suspect people who push for it know exactly that.
Trumo won by being emotional, entertainingly toxic and sucking media attention. "Stoic" calm just makes you look like a weak sucker.
Ffs dude it's lose not loose.
You missed a bunch of other ones.
One my dad reliably latches on to is “they’re going to take your guns”. Trump used this, I’m pretty sure, all three races. Weirdly there were never even moves toward doing this the time he lost. It’s as if this was just bullshit. But, it gets voters fired up (getting people to show up for you is more important than swaying anyone to your side)
Lots of people voted for him this time for overtime and tips being tax-exempt. Some (especially on the overtime thing) have since come to regret it when the fine print didn’t include them, but it got their vote.
He ran on lots of issues. “Build the wall” echos what tons of Republican voters have been saying for decades. Their politicians wouldn’t do it—hell, Trump didn’t, he just half-assed a little bit of it and called it done—because it’s a really bad idea, but he sold people on the notion that he’d get it done, where “it” was something they’d long wanted done.
Many other issues like that, that did get him votes.
They've been using the guns argument since at least Reagan, who passed gun restrictions as governor of California. I know I've heard it my entire life, but I've yet to see anyone even propose such legislation
There was the (embarrassingly bad, even if you like gun control) “assault weapons ban” but since then democrats haven’t even been able to consistently achieve the thing that Republicans often say they want instead of more gun laws: “enforce the ones already on the books” (this is so common I assume it must have been pushed initially by some major Republican figure, but I’m not sure who it was) so the risk of their passing substantial gun control laws today is extremely low, even with decent majorities in the legislature and holding the presidency.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of democratic politicians are openly against outright bans and quite a few of them even mean it—Democrats managing to pass even some better version of the extremely-partial AWB is fantasy any time soon, and I very much doubt they’d get half their own people to vote to restrict firearms any more than that. (Setting aside that the courts have recently set perhaps the narrowest scope for allowable gun restrictions in the country’s history, so it might not matter even if they could pass any of this)
Exactly. It's not an actual problem, it just riles certain people up.
Crazy thing is that they are discussing taking guns from trans people.
It's now a cult and they're voting for him not for his policies.
"A republic, if you can keep it" -- Ben Franklin
I think this is a misunderstanding of how he works, and especially how he got elected the first time.
I believe there has long been a significant gap between what national-stage elected republicans say and do, and what Republican voters say and want them to do.
Frankly, what Republican voters say they want is often a lot meaner than anything their politicians were delivering. I’ve not only heard “why don’t they just build a wall?” from ordinary not-terminally-online R voters, I’ve heard, many times going back 20+ years, “they should just mine the border”. Kilmeade’s comment about just killing homeless people who wouldn’t accept aid (who cares why they don’t, I guess)? I’ve heard it, that’s not new, what’s new is people that prominent saying it.
R voter sentiment also veers far away from the (Republican-initiated) neoliberal (ex-)consensus on trade. (Incidentally, this also isn’t popular on the left, but both major parties agreed on it for more than 30 years, so it didn’t matter).
Dropping lots of foreign aid? Mass government worker firings? Sending the army in to cities to fight out-of-control crime or brutally quelling riots with the army (that one’s on the “we’ll see” list but if we get four full years, the smart money says we will see it)? Normal stuff to hear on a wishlist from an awful lot of R voters. They’ll just tell you this stuff.
I could go on.
Trump got where he is by exploiting a large gap between what voters want and what parties have been delivering. This gap was huge for the republicans, and there was a little overlap with own-voter dissatisfaction with Democrats. He was able to make voters believe he’d do many of the things they’d long wanted their elected officials to do, but that they weren’t doing, and often weren’t even talking about doing.
The right is a master class in political messaging. They learned this One Weird Trick™ to manipulate the masses: people are stupid and vote their emotions. By defining the language they win almost by default: family values, school choice, pro life, death taxes, etc.
They learned that it doesn't matter if it's true, relevant, or hypocritical, as long as it feeds fear and anger in their constituents.
The left fails because the issues they support can require nuance and consideration and that's a lot to ask of a voter who just wants to be told who to vote for.
My assessment isn't meant to be tribal, there's plenty to critique on the left from DNC leadership to "overexubernt" members whose excess is used to define the left as a whole (wokism).
It's heartbreaking that the divide is now complete and is not likely to change without some unfortunate actions.
I agree. It's all about the memes. I think this is a great teardown of the 2016 election:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8Y-P0v2Hh0&t=1567s
> ...as it is for the left wing to act oppressed.
I'm sorry, but "the left" hardly has a monopoly on that.
I think you're right actually. Now that I reflect on it, there are many times where the roles are reversed. For example, with this recent assassination of charlie kirk, the right wingers are role playing as the oppressed and are practicing the crybulling tactics of getting people fired from their jobs for politically incorrect speech.
But I think the right generally appeals to people with a more tyrannical personality, and vice versa.
the intention is to normalize extrajudicial government force by starting with vulnerable people technically "outside of the law"
it really is a "first they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist..."-esque program at this point
[flagged]
This won't convince anyone who wants to pause all immigration.
However, if you want to allow some immigration, you can make a case PhDs in computer science from Carnegie Mellon, which is what he's talking about.
These are kids who were already world-class coming in and become even better by the time they graduate. It is paid for by taxpayers, for which they should be grateful, and it is done in a context that builds admiration for the country.
We're starting to see the impact. A number of our older peers have kids beginning to graduate high school or undergrad. I personally know of 3 situations this fall/next spring already where very talented kids have chosen European schools this year over Ivy League admits
And, more critically - if foreigners are deciding to take up faculty positions in their home countries.
Countries like India, Vietnam, and South Korea have begun replicating the Chinese Thousand Talents program to attract their diasporas back to domestic academia.
Significant domains of CS such as HPC/Systems, Networking, OS internals, etc are heavily dependent on faculty, graduate students, and post-docs who are all on some sort of visa. And increasingly, at least amongst Indians, becuase the backlogs for US citizenship are insane, a number of those people have been taking sweetheart positions at INIs like the new IITs with almost US$100k in public-private lab startup grants on top of a $20k salary (tax free due to the income tax changes) with free housing and car and complete autonomy to consult with private sector players without IP entanglement (one of the biggest headaches for public private STEM R&D partnerships in the US).
Vietnam is doing something similar as well to attract Vietnamese diaspora in SK and Japan, along with Viet Kieu in America and Australia.
A nativist academic culture in STEM in the US would completely destroy any R&D capacity that even exists today.
> A nativist academic culture in STEM in the US would completely destroy any R&D capacity that even exists today.
Well, considering all other countries mentioned here are just hiring native people who worked in US. Indians are not hiring Chinese, or Europeans or any other than natively Indians. Same for Chinese or others. So nativist policy can for those countries but not US is strange.
If one sees crowd at US embassy or consulates in India, US has nothing to worry about talent not trying hard to come to US.
All this analysis about US downfall seems kind of assuming that rest of the world is doing lot better. Traveling to India in last few years and experiencing first hand tells me believing even 1% of these hype generators of India is believing too much.
As an Australian, I've seen recruiters from the US, Europe, Hong Kong, and Dubai. I think such offers are reflective of who pays more than Australia rather than nativism.
Since tech wages in the US are the highest anywhere in the world, with the possible exception of Monaco or something, I would imagine Americans don't see a lot of recruiters from elsewhere in the world. I would also imagine that's because it's harder to recruit someone who's earning American wages.
But these US wages aren't actually all that great anymore. The vast majority of people will have nothing to show for their decade of working in tech other than a bad back, carpal tunnel, and a neurosis.
The cost of living in the Bay Area creeps ever upward and absorbs just enough salary to keep the worker bees coming back to the office the next day. It's really not that different of a life than elsewhere in materialistic terms. Except there is also nothing to do other than work or go hiking. More and more people are cluing in.
> The vast majority of people will have nothing to show for their decade of working in tech other than a bad back, carpal tunnel, and a neurosis.
If you're terrible with money, perhaps. Anyone making SWE wages in the bay area should be able to save a decent amount of money.
I think (or I hope) what they mean is long-term.
For a number of nationalities like Indians and Chinese, it takes 15-25 years to naturalize as a permanent resident/green card holder because of the backlogs and processing issues at USCIS.
That is a lot of instability, with various pitfalls at each step (eg. potentially getting deported if you cannot find a new job in 60 days after being terminated, increasingly needing to pay out of pocket to do visa processing instead of the company doing it).
More critically, if you have a kid and you as the parent do not get a green card by 21, they will be treated as a new applicant and will have to start the entire process from scratch.
If you are able to demand EU or Canada level salaries in India or China, you have no reason to deal with the kind of headaches I mentioned above. You could have put a similar amount of money purchasing real estate in Hyderabad or Hangzhou, or investing in the Chinese or Indian equities market which are both seeing an IPO boom, or founded your own startup without being scared of being the reason you and your dependents got booted out. You can't even justify buying a house or a condo because you won't even know if you'd be able to live there long term.
As a result, what you end up seeing is people from both countries increasingly viewing their stay in the US as temporary - so the American strategy of leveraging a brain drain to make more Americans is failing, becuase it is now becoming a reverse brain drain right when they are mid-career (so at their most valuable point from a human capital perspective).
This has been impacting everyone from line level IC engineers all the way up to even VPs at major companies and even a couple well know VCs I am acquaintances with.
If you can’t afford to live on 150k/year even in SF, that’s just poor financial planning…
It’s not like McDonald’s or Target don’t exist in SF. Those workers get paid way less than big tech and somehow they make rent every month. Yea, you might have to commute instead living within walking distance of the campus where you work, but that’s just being a responsible adult imo.
Levels.fyi puts the median software engineering salary in San Francisco at USD$238000, while the median where I currently live is USD$90000. That's 2.6x higher.
Yeah, I get it. The multiplier on the salary has gone down from 3.6x to 2.6x. A studio is ridiculously expensive, I once paid $2300/month to live in one room in the piss-soaked Tenderloin, I understand your pain. It's not as good as it sounds. Still ... if you were sitting in Germany or Dubai and had to decide which area to try to recruit from, do you think you'd choose the more expensive one unless you had no choice?
Indians in America aren't eligible for an E3 like Australians are.
Furthermore, Indians in America face a 20-80 year permanent residency backlog depending on when they arrived in the US. The majority of Indians nationals in America will eventually return to India as a result.
The US is increasingly viewed as a temporary posting instead of as a naturalization destination becuase of the backlog, and most other Western countries don't provide lucrative offers for the cream of the crop compared to what they can demand in India.
For example, the average new grad salary at IIT Kanpur was around US$30K for the class of 2024 [0], and a mid-career TC of US$60k-70K is realistic for INI grads (as one of the other posters in this thread is an example of).
Most of India's R&D is overwhelmingly generated by alumni of these INIs, and the majority of investment is placed in these programs. These are also the kinds of programs that previously used to represent the bulk of the brain drain 15-20 years ago, but their grads overwhelmingly remain in India unless doing graduate school like a PhD or an MBA (these aren't the kinds of people doing an MSc in Business Analytics at Wollongong in order to get an Australian permanent residency), let alone accepting decades of indentured servitude due to the EB2 processing backlog.
[0] - https://m.economictimes.com/jobs/fresher/iit-kanpur-class-of...
I'm not sure what information you're trying to impart here, because I was talking about nativism in hiring practices and this has nothing to do with what I wrote.
I agree that Indians get fucked by the US when it comes to immigration and that the E-3 visa is awesome. What does that have to do with whether India, Europe, and China refuse to hire foreigners for nativist reasons? Did you reply to the wrong person by accident?
Whoops! I went 1 level too deep in the thread! Meant to reply to geodel
>Well, considering all other countries mentioned here are just hiring native people who worked in US. Indians are not hiring Chinese, or Europeans or any other than natively Indians. Same for Chinese or others. So nativist policy can for those countries but not US is strange.
Context is not neutral. "We want to hold onto the labor we produce" works for labor exporters in a way that it doesn't work for labor importers.
Making private sector/startup consultancy really easy for professors to do is one of the main reasons there is an insane pickup of pace in the return of the diaspora. Many professors in my IIT suddenly have BMWs. I''ve never seen it before 2021ish. And yes, BMWs are a luxury car in India. And no. IITs being a government college don't pay professors enough for them to afford a luxury car on salary alone (in the context of financial conservativeness typical to india). For more context, my starting SWE job before I came back for M.S paid as much as my professor earned decades into his career, being dean, and having a couple of other responsibilities. - 50L per year (total comp, not base). Also helps that the STEM economy is picking up like crazy.
It is true that the govt institutions themselves have less IIT representation, mostly due to low salaries. However, what matters to the private sector is sources of capital. Tech investors in india usually went to IITs themselves, and so the ecosystem always remains close to IITs, allowing professors easy access. Lot of the startups (even YC ones!) by IIT students actually involved one of their professors in the ideation stage, and they even have equity % sometimes. Similar to Rajeev Motwani holding a stake in Google, they get really rich sometimes.
> Making private sector/startup consultancy really easy for professors to do is one of the main reasons there is an insane pickup of pace in the return of the diaspora
Yep! The University of Waterloo back in Ontario did the same thing in the 1960s, which helped catapult the program into a Tier 1 CSE program comparable to older more established programs like UToronto and UMich.
> Lot of the startups (even YC ones!) by IIT students actually involved one of their professors in the ideation stage, and they even have equity % sometimes
Yep! There are also some NIT, BITS Pilani, IIT, and other program specific networks made by their alumnis in academia and VC. I think Foundation Capital (Netflix, Cerebras, Fortanix) is running one such program.
> It is true that the govt institutions themselves have less IIT representation, mostly due to low salaries
Ministry affiliated universities are a major reason why. For example, ISRO overwhelmingly recruits from IIST, ONGC from IIPE, and other SOEs or R&D programs will recruit from universities specialized in that specific disciple instead of an IIT or NIT now.
> ministry affiliated
Ooh, didn't know that. Interesting.
Yeah, and the - often ignored in conversations - IIITs, are also quite strong.
This is one of the reasons India has a civilian spaceflight program.
The obvious overlap with military technology aside, it's a way to retain and increase the institutional knowledge within India across a lot of areas.
Indian spaceflight program done by ISRO have very few people from IITs or any of the so called elite colleges. Unlike china Indian colleges are really backward due to lack of research funding and a coaching industry which have gamified the entrance exams.
> Indian spaceflight program done by ISRO have very few people from IITs or any of the so called elite colleges
The bulk of recruitment at ISRO has always been happening at the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology (IIST) and the Indian Institute of Sciences (IISc) - not IITs.
Even getting into an IIST or IISc is almost as difficult as getting into an old IIT based on the JEE cutoffs.
Both India and China have specialized institutions dedicated to subfields that end up getting the bulk of R&D funding in said subfields, for example, Petroleum Engineering and the China University of Petroleum and the Indian Institute of Petroleum Engineering, or in mining enigneeing, the China University of Mining and Technology and the Indian School of Mines (now IIT Dhanbad).
> Unlike china Indian colleges are really backward due to lack of research funding and a coaching industry which have gamified the entrance exams
China also bases acceptance on entrance exams - the Gaokao is equally as competitive as the JEE Advanced. The exact same gamification of entrance exams and coaching centers is sadly the norm in China as well, despite the Xi admin's initial attempts to crack down on it.
Additonally, Chinese R&D funding is also stratified the same way Indian R&D funding is.
The equivalent of a government engineering college in both China and India would be receiving relatively limited funding or autonomy, but a Double First Class University in China or an INI in India well get the first pick of research grants and subsidizes.
If there is a promising professor at a mid-tier program, they are likely affiliated and getting their funding via affiliation to a national academy like the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
This is why all regional powers have a civilian space flight program - the same thing you mentioned but also it allows you to sidestep some international treaties around testing.
> Countries like India, Vietnam, and South Korea have begun replicating the Chinese Thousand Talents program to attract their diasporas back to domestic academia.
Really? I'm yet to meet a single diaspora (i.e. born/raised abroad) professor here in Korea and I interact with universities quite a bit.
Unless diaspora here includes those who did their full university education abroad though, lots of those indeed.
> Unless diaspora here includes those who did their full university education abroad though, lots of those indeed.
Yes. By definition these are diaspora members as well.
We can only hope this administration and its supporters are a temporary aberration that the US can claw its way back out of. Otherwise, that classic advice to sign up your kids for Mandarin class starts to sound pretty good.
Why would moving to an even more authoritarian country be good advice? What?
Because if you want to get a good science education, you need to be in a place that supports science and education. The administration has disrupted the system that made the US the world scientific leader, a status it’s had only since the mid-20th century, which it achieved through concerted government and social investment. Which country is doing that right now?
B/c the next Carnegie Mellon will be there
The point is you'll be doing business in high technology with China, not America. Helps to speak the language when you negotiate.
I find this quite true in my field. Recently I attended the biggest conference in computer vision (CVPR), and almost half the time I was there, I heard Chinese instead of English. Most people I met joked that we should learn Mandarin if we want to continue doing AI research now.
America isn’t the only place that speaks English. It’s the global standard language. When a Japanese and a Chinese person negotiate they are already using English.
That is a wild claim
> That is a wild claim
It is not.
The vast majority of English speakers do not live in the US or the UK. English is the most widely spoken language in the world. If you are at dinner with people from several countries, the "Lingua Franca" will almost certainly be English.
The popularity of Mandarin relies on the sheer mass of native speakers in China. That population is shrinking and that shrinking is expected to accelerate. The cultural export of China is inherently limited by its ideology - there's a reason we have (had, really) "Hong Kong Cinema" not "Peking Cinema".
Which part?
"When a Japanese and a Chinese person negotiate they are already using English"
What language do you think they use?
All Japanese people learn English at school; few learn Chinese as you can verify by reading about the Japanese school system from various sources including Wikipedia.
Similarly in China, English is the only mandatory foreign language taught at school.
> What language do you think they use?
Frequently, Chinese or Japanese. For example companies in these countries employ translators. Are you suggesting they rely on primary school-level English to negotiate?
Who says they only study it in primary school?
You claimed, without a source other than wikipedia, that everyone in Japan learns English in school. I see this [0] on wikipedia which says "a select number of public primary schools ... have mandatory English classes"
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_education_in_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Japan#School_subj...
> The following is the set of compulsory subjects currently taught in the Japanese education system from the primary to secondary levels:
> * Foreign languages: English (rarely: Korean, Spanish, Arabic, French, German, or Chinese)
I disagree with that.
Instead we are seeing increased siloing of scientific domains. The EU is cracking down on EU-Chinese research cooperation (as recent arrests and deportations in France have shown), India still has a de facto freeze on Chinese R&D and China is still enforcing export controls on IP to India, and South Korea and Japan are still controlling any IP generated from their industrial research fusion programs.
We're instead seeing at least 6-7 different scientific and capital ecosystems forming, and with collaboration being tightly controlled by governments.
Assuming that's true... if the largest silo is China I can imagine plenty of people wanting to "defect" to China for their own advancement. But you'll have to speak Chinese.
Most countries and transnational organizations continue to use English as the primary lingua franca, even despite China becoming a major R&D hub.
The EU continues to use English as the lingua franca for scientific communication due to the diversity within the EU.
On the India side, research done as part of the pact with Japan [0], Taiwan [1], South Korea [2], the EU [3], and the US [4] is done in English.
And on the Vietnam side (based on my SO's experience), all of her ASEAN-Japan and ASEAN-SK collaboration was done in English as well.
[0] - https://www.jst.go.jp/inter/english/project/country/india.ht...
[1] - https://www.iitrpr.ac.in/indo-taiwan/
[2] - https://www.ikst.res.in/ikst-en/index.do
[3] - https://research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/news/all-resear...
[4] - https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2024/10/the-us-india-...
Kids may want to learn Chinese for the same reason they may want to learn Arabic or Spanish. It helps doing business in some parts of the world.
But China is not going to be the dominant superpower (except maybe if they manage to beat the rest of the world in AI). Their labor force is already in decline, which means they must gradually shift their focus from building the future to maintaining the society. Like Europe and Japan are already doing.
As opposed to the US, where the labor market will magically start growing net of immigration?
If people don’t want to move to the US, then America will get the same treatment.
Just curious, but is there any evidence that Chinese/Indian/etc will even be as open to US students as the US has been to them? I have no knowledge of what their intentions may be, but I think it’s a pretty large assumption that they would even take American students at all
American here who went to a Chinese (grad) school for CS and was admitted to every Chinese school I applied to. This is very much a possible route, if you’re appropriately qualified for the program. The main issue is language: outside of HK, programs in English are rare.
That's extremely impressive that you managed to reach such a high level of fluency. I find written and technical Chinese is extremely tricky and different from spoken Chinese
PKU and Tisnghua both have overseas student programs and they are particularly eager to have qualified takers. Now, the question is how far does that go when the schools really become popular undergrad and grad STEM studies?
The bigger problem is that schools like MIT, Stanford, UCB, UCI throw (or threw?) lots of resources at students that Chinese schools didn't really do (and maybe still don't? My info is 10 years out of date). Even the lower ranked schools have ample resources and fairly well paying TA/RA-ships available. In China, you would have to work for your professor's side company to get money, and the professor might not let you graduate if you were doing a good job (again, 10 years ago, I have no idea what its like today, China is changing quickly).
I would find it hard to imagine they wouldn't welcome foreign students just for the fact that there are so few in comparison to start with. Even if tons of US kids started going to China for college, they would always remain a tiny fraction of students due to the population size disparity.
> Chinese/Indian/etc will even be as open to US students as the US has been to them
India has been opening campuses abroad like IIT Madras in Tanzania [0] and IIT Delhi in Abu Dhabi [1] to cater specifically to building that kind of relationship in Africa and MENA. The majority of seats allocated (66%) are for foreign nationals.
Top Indian programs like IIT Delhi have been very active giving fellowships and subsidises for students and researchers from ASEAN [2], the African Union [3], Pacific Island nations [4], and Afghanistan [5]
And Vietnam would do similar programs as well for poorer ASEAN nations and a number of African countries (notably Angola and Mozambique) as well as Cuba
Japan has been running a multi-decade long international student and R&D collaboration program that helped jumpstart South Korea and China's R&D capacity in the 1980s and 1990s, along with much of ASEAN's more recently (my SO is a product of that). Same with South Korea as well.
[0] - https://www.iitmz.ac.in/
[1] - https://abudhabi.iitd.ac.in/
[2] - https://asean.iitd.ac.in/
[3] - https://www.itecgoi.in/index
[4] - https://www.itecgoi.in/Sagaramrut
[5] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-14/india-off...
Looking at the history of US leads to the depressing conclusion that this administration is not an aberration but is instead a return to the same old shit from 150 years ago.
Welcome to literal conservatism.
You mean reactionism. A conservative wants to keep the status quo. A reactionary wants to regress to a previous status quo (i.e. perhaps from 150 years ago).
Conservation literally means to preserve. Teddy Roosevelt was a conservative who established the national park system to preserve our country's natural wonder. You might also say that conservatives don't believe in spending lots of money and are against high deficits and fiscal craziness. None of those really describe the conservative movement in America today.
That's not what it means in practice. The element being conserved is monarchy.
In one of Marx's most memorable letters:
"Tories in England long imagined that they were enthusiastic about monarchy, the church, and the beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about ground rent."
That feels like it could have been written today, doesn't it? When push comes to shove, things like Christianity, constitutional order or "fiscal restraint" seem to always take second seat to the yield from owning things, especially real estate.
That has never been an American conservative ideal for obvious reasons.
Yeah, it's more oligarchal.
The conservative movement today is heavily influenced by religious positions.
My wife, daughter and I are Canadian-U.S. dual citizens. We live in Canada. It is exhausting trying to reason through the decision of how to advise our 17 year-old on her post-secondary plans. She has opportunities to study at eminent institutions in the U.S. but is it wise? The broad attack on U.S. education at the hands of the current administration is extremely off-putting.
IMO it depends on the field and her scholarships. If it's tech, just go to waterloo, it's a great school, has a great reputation and you get the Canadian discount, if it's not, you have more research to do. With her professors not having as much grant work to do, they might actually focus on teaching for once! As an undergrad, research doesn't matter much and no 17 year old is certain they want to become a PhD researcher type at that age.
Otherwise as dual citizens it's overblown. There is a lot of hot air in Canada that doesn't match the on the boots on the ground reality of life in the USA (for citizens / green card holders) because Canada is pissed off that America caused a downturn in Canada's economy and Canadians feel the pinch because the downturn is about 25% worse in Canada as a result.
But IMO it's self inflicted wound and has been a very, very long time coming. Canada has kept on kicking the economic can down the road for decades now and it's toll is collecting interest more and more.
The political worker class in DC is also very pissed off because the administration there initiated the equivalent of extreme mass layoffs in a sector that is not used to that.
In the USA, people are kind of mopey about the downturn, but in democratic areas the level of emotion is far less than it was with trump was the first time, while in Canada, it seems like it's more intense than it was in California with trump for the first time.
Yup. Certain people get their panties in a tizzy every time an R president gets elected. Dubya was the antichrist, remember? It's just the same old tune all over again.
I think most people, republicans and democrats alike, recognize the CHASIM between the W and Trump administrations.
GWB caused almost every problem still afflicting the United States today.
What a myopic, closed minded view.
The most eminent institutions in America are older than the United States. Trump has been president for 6 years, and he's 79 years of age. I don't know if you're a betting man but my money is on the colleges winning this fight in the long run.
Trump will be gone in 3 years, possibly fewer given his age and health confounders. Don't make long-term plans based on the direction of short-term political winds.
Trump might be gone, but the people and attitudes that elected him won't be.
She already has offers from eminent institutions? Has early decision/action even happened yet? Or is she a recruited athlete?
Although this is correct, the narrative is obviously 100% centered on US perspective.
The author worries about the brain drain that could affect places like Pittsburgh, but on the other hand, people is already living it, as my kids just see grandparents once per year, since we live in another country, but there is people who can't even do it on an annual base, because they live far away or in countries considered at risk.
What's surprising to me is that internal migration in the US is actually down from its peak. People today are more likely to live in or close to their hometown than they were in the 20th century. Part of this is simply because urbanization goes only one way.
Some people don't like rural communities anyway. I've lived in a provincial town with about 150k people for a while and that was already too much for me. All the groupthink, the conservative "family values", the way everyone knows everyone, the religion. It really rubbed me the wrong way. Also the lack of resources, the place was the graveyard of ambition. And all the imbecile councillors considering themselves the center of the world. Never anything new to explore, few opportunities to find people with different opinions, no really interesting tech (I'm big into the maker community) etc. Things always arrived there last. New initiatives being announced by said councillors only to die off quickly when the novelty wears off. I found the place deeply suffocating and I felt like the world was passing me by. I know some people are happy with their lives there but I certainly was not. I don't want a house with a big garden and peace and quiet. I love living in a neighborhood that's alive.
Take this with a grain of salt because I'm very independent, individualist and progressive. I think that was already clear from the above :)
I live in a big city now and I love it so much. Excellent public transport so I don't need a car anymore (haven't driven in 7 years), always new things to do and see. New initiatives that actually go somewhere instead of dying out like in the small town.
I can imagine people that like to think outside the box and build stuff like me often like to live in bigger places. That's not even education related as such (you can also be self taught) though it does tend to correlate of course.
And no I wouldn't think of visiting the US in the current situation, let alone move there to study or work (I'm not in the studying age anymore anyway). I do agree with the author that the current politics would deter skilled people.
This is the first in a very long time that I’ve seen my thoughts written down by someone else. Unfortunately I didn’t get out and thanks to 2 burnouts & counting I’m stuck in a shithole country doing shithole jobs.
If you’re young and want to get out, get out. Don’t take my path of studying and working until a path emerges. If I could do it again I don’t think I’d even finish secondary education and just pack my bags at 17.
There are certainly a lot of people like you describe, but there also many "hippy" types that just like to grow plants or DIY makers. Often they have to do more with less, but cheap land can give people the freedom to do stuff like loud metal working or space to repair older equipment for cheap or grow large gardens.
One of the biggest problems though is just the poverty, options are limited and wages are shit and like you mentioned innovations don't make their way into rural areas until like 10+ years later. And if you don't move away to a big city the majority of people are never going to make a lot of money and will often be ignored for most everything except as a source of revenue for podunk courts and cops. Of the highly intelligent and aspirational few that are left, most end up severely stifled by lack of financial opportunity even if they are doing great work because most of their potential customer base are poor too.
This whole politics being practiced by excluding others or by just generally being a jerk ... I don't get it. It's like throwing a fit, it's not going anywhere good.
My oldest is applying to college right now and this has worried me immensely. College isn't going to be the same anymore. Dark forces are working hard to discourage discourse and diversity. I want to support institutions that still stand for something and value truth and enlightenment but it's hard to know if we're succeeding.
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I wish the people who cared so much about Charlie Kirk gave even one thought to the victims of the right wing school shooter that happened the very same day in Colorado.
It didn't make it out much in the news that day, because obviously, but only the shooter died as a result of his terror. The other two injured students are expected to live, thankfully:
https://coloradosun.com/2025/09/11/colorado-evergreen-high-s...
This post sounds a bit one sided. Maybe there should be centre of excellences elsewhere too. Let the others live near their parent’s farms as well.
As a global citizen of Earth, I would agree. But I'm also a citizen of the United States, and have a vested personal interest in its academic and economic superiority. And I think that's normal. You don't even have to be nationalistic or patriotic about your particular country to feel that way. Academic and economic declines in any country will cause problems for everyone who lives there.
Of course there should be. However, those nations should worry about that on behalf of their citizens. No other nation is going to concern itself with whether Americans can live close to their parents.
Yup, the author is in a fairly rare fortunate situation for someone who is good in his field. A lot of us moved countries or continents to be good at our jobs, and there is always a personal cost.
Although, for grandkids, I guess that when you are far you are also more intentional with making sure you spend time with their grandparents when they are far.
There are plenty. The author is over exaggerating the prestige of CMU compared to other institutes outside of the USA.
Just in the western countries:
Toronto, Cambridge, ENS in France, the many max Planck institutes in Germany (eg Tubingen), the two federal institutes in Switzerland.
Faculty positions in any of those are likely to be better than CMU (in terms of start up package, funding, quality of students, quality of faculty, and ability to hire people).
Proof he's right wing? Source?
This is the sort of attitude that allows nations to fall. If a nation isn't protecting it's most valuable resources, they will be taken away by others who want them.
If they excel, yes. If they powerpoint, no.
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> Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Is that the most provocative thing in the article? I thought it was just puffery.
It's at least a contender
Of course!
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I am struggling with the premise of this post. The analogies don’t seem to land very well
There are several premises:
1. CMU needs immigration to remain a top school.
2. His children will be in the top 1% of 1% of 1% to qualify for top schools.
3. His children will move away if CMU does not remain a top school...
4. and that would be bad, so bad that it justifies perpetual rent stress for 100 million Americans, an actual impact of immigration.