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Comment by locallost | Hacker News Reader

I was hoping the EU can capitalize on this, but remain skeptical as the EU politicians have noticed what kind of rhetoric is successful and are starting to bang the same drum louder and louder. Being anti immigration one of the main ideas. We'll see. My bet is China will be the big winner.

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Recently the EU allocated billions to fund tech startups. But if you read the bare minimum demands, you'll see how suspicious it is. Like, you have to have a female co-founder, when everybody in the trade knows it's very hard to find a trustworthy co-founder of any kind.

I haven't heard of anybody getting these funds. I suspect the recipients were pre-selected before the announcement and the criteria was tailored to match them. And I also suspect, in some roundabout way, part of the money will end up in political campaigns or something.

How would you hear of somebody getting these funds? I don’t personally know anybody who’s gotten massive VC funding in the US either, but I think it does happen.

I don’t see any reason to be skeptical of the requirement to find a female co-founder, I mean it is clearly a program to promote equality, but that is an uncontroversial goal in some places.

Suspicious that the EU claims to "promote gender equality" while turning a blind eye to the male only conscription perpetrated by EU members Austria, Finland, etc

Should the EU have the right to reject national election results if the results show no gender equality?

It is a lot easier to come up with new rules for a project that requires proactively making investments (where it is assumed they will be selective anyway), than it is to convince a country to change their military policy.

> convince a country to change their military policy

Maybe they can't force them but the EU has mechanisms to punish illiberal behavior like the fines they are charging Hungary.

They should start fining countries that do make only drafts, at least to start a conversation about it.

it's very hard to find a trustworthy co-founder of any kind

that may be so, but did you check if the funding is limited to teams with at least two or more people? some funds do not allow single founders at all for whatever reason.

> My bet is China will be the big winner.

Because China is so much more immigration and foreigner friendly?

How about the opposite: the "great again" USA is very unwelcoming, that Chinese citizens who were attracted to the freedoms it once offered (a different flavour of freedom compared to the one Trump is currently offering) might now think "Sheesh, maybe let's not try to migrate to the USA and start a life there!".

I don't know, personally never went there. But it doesn't seem to be throwing out babies with the bath water, as currently the case in the US. What their immigration policies are in general I don't know, but they are a knowledge hungry worldpower, and we are talking about scientists here. And as for the EU, my concern remains, there are way too many Trump copycats, and it's difficult to trust it will not go down the same road. The problems and root causes are similar. If I didn't have kids I would've left Germany for sure by now.

> And as for the EU, my concern remains, there are way too many Trump copycats

Fully agreed on that one.

China can turn on a dime. And they smell blood.

https://www.china-briefing.com/news/chinas-entry-exit-k-visa...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jC8f1qs3TGs

Give it 5-10 years and the situation could look very different. If they decide to pour tons of money into it, they could dominate like with trains or solar.

I would never invest time, money or my life into a country without a functioning legal system. In a country where the likes of Jack Ma are not safe nobody is safe.

71% of H1Bs are Indian. They might feel differently, especially after looking at ICE.

Personally I prefer looking at the average case: http://data.worldhappiness.report/chart

China still has lots of ground to make up, but they’re headed in the right direction. Needless to say, the US isn’t.

Looking at the average case is a massive logical fallacy. It isn't the average case that will likely determine the outcome of your case, because as an immigrant you are not average.

They’re quite correlated….

It’s hard for a country to take very good care of its citizens (healthcare, free education, social security, economic opportunity, work-life balance, access to nature) at the Finland level then turn around and persecute immigrants. It just doesn’t happen. It takes a lot of goodwill and trust (in citizens, politics, institutions) to get all that to work. Then clearly they’re also trying to attract immigrants, they can’t turn around and start locking them up.

Look at the history of Europe (colonialism), what usually happens is they practice and fine-tune atrocities outside then import them. Bush and Iraq as a prelude to Trump.

China is headed in the wrong direction. Xi has screwed the pooch.

You do realise Chinese form a large immigrant population in the US, right?

And as much as I dislike saying this - Chinese government doesn’t want you talking about politics. Otherwise you should be mostly fine.

While US government is going beyond politics. Pushing stuff like that autism and Tylenol connection on correlation study. That is going beyond politics and impacting academic and scientific analysis.

> You do realise Chinese form a large immigrant population in the US, right?

Did I say anything that made you think otherwise, right?

> And as much as I dislike saying this - Chinese government doesn’t want you talking about politics. Otherwise you should be mostly fine.

Ahhh too bad then, because one of the things that I really like about the societies that I'd bet my life/money/health/other resources on is that I want to be able to talk about politics. Otherwise, what's the point, all you are doing is lining some dictator's pocket.

> While US government is going beyond politics. Pushing stuff like that autism and Tylenol connection on correlation study. That is going beyond politics and impacting academic and scientific analysis.

Yes, the US is also on a bad path. But so is China. And they too push plenty of bullshit. How is that Tianmen Square investigation coming along?

CNN was reporting on the dangers of Tylenol during pregnancy less than 10 years ago.

> Did I say anything that made you think otherwise, right?

Yes this line made you seem ignorant.

>> Because China is so much more immigration and foreigner friendly?

The brain drain to China will not be based on immigrants or foreigners rather Chinese going back. Capisce?

And you seem to be arguing for the sake of arguing.

> Yes, the US is also on a bad path. But so is China. And they too push plenty of bullshit. How is that Tianmen Square investigation coming along?

Tiananmen Square happened in 1989. China has been on the "bad path" for years. No one is denying that. But that is not the same parallel as US government pushing hack medicines and correlation studies like autism and Tylenol. Find me an example of China doing that instead of going for the lowest denominator of "Tiananmen Square, see gotcha".

Because PRC is returning sea turtle / talented diasphora friendly and there's a fuckload of talented PRC born diasphora abroad who frankly has to self censor under mccarthy free speech anyways.

This has been my observation living in the EU.

Two regions that have been capitalising from skilled programmers and that hardly anyone talks about are the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

They are in an excellent position to capitalize on the situation: deep pockets and a shady reputation that has kept competition low, so they should have plenty of open position.

China can benefit in the short-term if talent moves there, but it's very difficult to gain citizenship in China if you're not ethnically Chinese. That probably won't matter for people just moving for work, but those looking for a better life for their children or a home would likely consider it a blocker.

There are millions of overseas Chinese descendants who already speak Chinese and are wholly or partly ethnically Chinese. That would be an easy pool to draw from first.

For example Terence Tao speaks Cantonese.

lol, China is the most anti immigrant which is why their immigration levels are so low.

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