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Comment by ck425 | Hacker News Reader

You can't deny there will be less funding, given the amount of funding we receive from the EU. Though hopefully the new PM will prioritise investment in research and hopefully given the strong technology sector in the UK CompSci will get a reasonable share of it. But that's still to be seen and given May's attitude toward technology experts and level of knowledge during the discussions around the Snoopers Charter I'm sceptical of her understanding and appreciation of the importance of the technology sector.

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The EU doesn't "fund" anything, the UK funds the EU by paying in more than it gets back out. It's literally the UK's own money being recycled through Brussels, except with extra rules and exchange rate risks thrown in.

Whether or not research funding is cut is an entirely open question right now. Maybe it will be: the EU has effectively been overriding the austerity policies everyone else in the economy has had to deal with, and academias has benefited from that. But as no policies have been announced yet, nobody can know what will happen.

We all know this. The UK has been funding a bureaucracy in the EU that in turn funds projects in impoverished areas of the UK (amongst others). It will need to replace that bureaucracy; the transaction and planning costs on everything on the drawing board to in progress right now, will not be cheap, quite apart from the direct funding costs. The replacement bureaucracy probably won't be cheaper either, since it will have less efficiencies of scale and less institutional experience.

In short, "nobody can know what will happen" is expensive; it directly implies that the immediate short term will be costly.

That's not how EU funding works. It distributes funds with many rules attached, but implementing those rules is the job of local government bureaucracies not the EU.

The EU regional development funds are notoriously wasteful, I wouldn't ascribe any value to scale or institutional experience.

> The EU regional development funds are notoriously wasteful

Can you give references? Preferably not only one anecdotical example, and with comparisons with state development funds (especially from the UK).

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cornwall-33360841

http://www.politico.eu/article/eu-wasted-money-on-new-airpor...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/11985763...

I don't know of any comparisons with state-run development funds in the UK, if you find one let me know, but post-Gordon Brown the UK tends to focus less on big spending projects to try and economically boost the regions, hence the grumbling about how London gets the lions share of investment funding.

The EU likes to dole out a lot of money to businesses for investment purposes, which is suspiciously close to central planning. I doubt national-level central planners do a radically better job though.

as no policies have been announced yet, nobody can know what will happen

Yes, and this is the short-term disaster of Brexit: much investment goes on hold until we know what will happen.

It might be better in the long run, but we have no idea what the long run will look like at the moment because there was no Brexit manifesto and a serious conflict between the "EEA" Brexit and the anti-immigrant Brexit.

Eh? Academia has definitely been hit hard by austerity like the rest of the public sector. There have been basically no pay rises since the Tories came in.

If you think "basically no pay rises" is what austerity means then I think you just proved my point for me ...

edit: To clarify (given the telling off below), the rest of the public sector in the UK has seen massive budget cuts with 20, 30, 40% loss not being uncommon in some departments, or in the BEST case (like the NHS) large workload increases with extremely small or no budget increases. It's hard for me to imagine how anyone could be unaware of that given the amount of coverage of it over the last 8 years.

So when someone says "no pay rises" is the same thing as being hit hard by austerity, that shows a remarkable level of disconnection from what's going on elsewhere.

There's no need for this kind of remark, all you're doing is posturing to preserve your ego instead of actually trying to understand. This is not communicating in good faith. Please try to do better.

Can you give me an example of a public sector job that has taken a 40% pay cut? I'm really interested to know.

We are seeing a cut in funding because until we exit and redistribute that money the EU will in the meantime not fund UK scientists or UK based projects.

As I said given May's history with the technology industries it seems unlikely.

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