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Comment by shiroiuma | Hacker News Reader

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German universities are now telling any US researcher who looses their funding that they will be funded at a Germany university and get help with their visa application.

> German universities are now telling any US researcher who looses their funding that they will be funded at a Germany university

Is this true? Is there a link to the policy? Anything is possible, but this sounds fishy. German research funding isn't known for either generosity or particularly wide reach.

It’s apparently Pan-European now: https://apnews.com/article/europe-us-science-funding-researc...

This, as written, is just an idea. Lots of forward looking statements on how the EU must do this and that and no explicit promise to offer funding to all affected US scientists. Not even many details on the funding. Is it the same funding? Equivalent funding? Some funding (how much? what are the conditions? etc.).

Not claiming that this will not entice anyone over, but it is far, far different from the original claim. Sorry.

This comment seems crazy to me.

Chinas political stance more closely resembles right-wing policies than left leaning ones.

All the xenophobic notions you are talking about china has in spades.

I am not saying China is not doing things right here will lead to your described outcome, what I am saying you conflation with western politics is completely out of this world, and is a excellent example of why the outcome you describe may be a reality for China.

Why do you think right-wing policies are intrinsically tied to anti-science sentiment?

Yes, politically China does look very right-wing with some of their policies (like those trying to push women to have babies), despite the "communism" moniker. However, unlike the US, they are very pro-science and they put their money where their mouth is.

You’re arguing against a position I never took.

I didn’t say right-wing policies are inherently anti-science. I said your contrast makes no sense. You’re blaming Western decline on xenophobia and far-right politics, but China has strong nationalism, social conservatism, demographic engineering, speech controls, and limited immigration. All things typically associated with the political tendencies you are criticizing.

So which is it?

If nationalism and social conservatism are corrosive to long-term success, then China shouldn’t be your example of strategic competence. If those traits aren’t inherently corrosive, then maybe "far-right politics" isn’t the explanatory variable you think it is.

You can’t simultaneously argue that right-wing xenophobia is sinking the West while praising a country that institutionalizes many of those same tendencies.

If your actual claim is about state capacity and science investment, then say that. But don’t smuggle in partisan framing as the cause of decline and then retreat to "pro-science funding" when the comparison falls apart.

Go back and re-read my comments. I never specifically said that xenophobia was sinking the West. That's something that you said, not me.

The West is sinking due to many causes, and is predictably turning to xenophobia as a distraction. It's a typical far-right playbook: find some minority group to blame all the country's troubles on, instead of looking at the real reasons.

China doesn't need to amp up xenophobia because it just doesn't have a lot of immigrants in its borders in the first place, and it isn't sinking (yet) compared to the West, and seems to be generally outperforming them for now. In fact, they can distract people from the problems caused by their government's bad policies by blaming "the West" instead.

Depends on if the Chinese can get over foreigners messing up the tones all the time.

English has the advantage that it already had a lot of different ways of pronouncing it before becoming the world language, so the expectations for how perfect people's pronunciation should be was lower.

That’s just not true though. Sure English doesn’t have tones, but there are other tricky parts of the language. Additionally, Russian is another “difficult” language, but all the satellite nations had no problem picking it up.

The real reason people learn English isn’t because it’s easy. It’s because they need to. As someone who is married to an immigrant, it’s not easy for them. They’ve just worked really hard over decades.

Americans will do fine learning Chinese if it ever becomes an economic necessity.

It's not easy to become highly proficient in english but it's quite easy to speak just barely well enough to communicate effectively in a professional context. Importantly, the written form follows naturally from the spoken. You won't get all the edge cases right (that's incredibly difficult even for native speakers) but getting in the ballpark can be done purely phonetically with a fairly small set of rules. Combine with modern spellcheck and I expect it's pretty difficult to beat for ease of practical use.

I think at least a few of the latin based languages are in the same ballpark but for inane historical reasons it's english that won out.

Compare with chinese where even if you sweep tones under the rug you've got a bunch of idioms (difficult) followed by one of the most difficult writing systems in existence. Don't get me wrong, I think the writing system is quite elegant and has a truly impressive history, but neither of those things has anything to do with ease of mastery.

A tangential thought is that if you intentionally set out to come up with a rule following yet maximally difficult language I think a reasonable approach would be to fuse the equivalent of latin grammar with chinese tones and then fuse a chinese style writing system with arabic style contextually sensitive ligatures.

Pinyin converts reading into a vocabulary exercise. China might decide to Pinyin all the things.

> Russian is another “difficult” language, but all the satellite nations had no problem picking it up.

Russian is not more difficult than English and a lot of the satellite states were speaking other Slavic languages. If you already speak Spanish, it's less difficult to pick up Italian too.

There’s also the fact that a huge portion of foreign immigrants to the US don’t and won’t learn English, but can still operate just fine (or even have the system cater to them - press 1 for Spanish).

Look at the uproar over requiring commercial drivers to be able to read road signs in English.

The US also did annex large parts of what used to be Mexico in the 19th century, so you don't even technically have so be an immigrant to speak Spanish

Unless you're 126 years old, that excuse doesn't really hold up. Plenty of immigrants came from Italy, Poland, and Russia more recently than your mentioned time, but you don't hear Press 3 for Italian too often.

Well... they weren't immigrants, they were annexed. Why should they speak English?

They didn't have to. But they also shouldn't expect the annexing government or populace to accommodate them.

Their country lost the war, lost the territory, and those that stayed and chose to take American citizenship should've learned English, the (de facto) language of the country they chose to join.

People still speak German in South Tyrol even though it's part of Italy since 1919.

Along Interstate 5 in 1980s-90s Southern California, there were large signs, black-on-white, which showed a pictogram of a family running.

The English text above read "WATCH FOR PEOPLE CROSSING ROAD"

The Spanish text below read "PROHIBIDO"

Your comment makes no sense. I think it’s pretty safe to say that China has higher technological momentum than the U.S., and the U.S. has higher technological momentum than the EU. But that’s also the same ordering for xenophobia and far-right leadership: https://www.npr.org/2021/09/02/1033687586/china-ban-effemina.... China clearly is the most xenophobic and right wing, followed by the U.S., followed by the EU.

It is kind of crazy that a lot of those moves that are so massively successful is a social media and other actions to specifically destabilize the US. And it was only possible to do BECAUSE we're so open. In China you can't get past the firewall and you can't migrate there without being on watch lists and very easily removed in a way that would make ICE look like an Ice Cream parlor.

I sort of agree with this but also keep in mind that (at least until tiktok) the social media companies doing the destabilization were all entirely home grown. And they actively pursued harmful practices. So rather than blaming outside actors I think we need to confront the fact that what we actually have is an underlying gross political failure directly leading to a lack of effective regulation.

The right moves are state control, long horizon policies and regulations, all things the US willingly throw out in the name of freedom. For all its restrictions on human rights and personal freedom, the Chinese people and government have a mutual understanding. As long as the government better the lives of the people, they will be given free reign to do as they wish. This gives the government a long leash to enact far sighted policies to improve themselves. On the other hand, US politics is based on mistrust and the default assumption that anyone with power will abuse it, culminating in the "small government" rhetoric. Idealistic at best, but entirely crippling in the face of powerful organisations and corporations.

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