> You can still buy the console that can read physical games and buy the physical games and never plug it on the internet, right?
I'm not positive this is possible. I seem to remember times when trying to play a newer game on the Switch required a system update, even though I had the physical card. I might be misremembering, though.
Games can require a firmware update to play, but AIUI the physical carts are supposed to have their required firmware bundled alongside the game so you can update without an internet connection.
They even did that on the original Xbox. The first year of consoles didn't have Xbox Live and therefore had no knowledge of the service to obtain updates, dashboard updates were delivered on games that used Xbox Live. For that first year, the only thing the Ethernet port was used for was LAN games (and WAN games with private networks). To my knowledge, dashboard updates were only delivered with games but title updates and DLC could be downloaded over the internet.
> people tend to not live near parents anymore so they lose free childcare
For some reason I don't see this mentioned as often, but I've always felt it a significant root cause (among many of course).
Childcare is really expensive, but it used to be "free". I grew up with grandparents/aunts/uncles/older cousins available to baby sit me. But now very much of my cohort have moved away from our home region for better jobs. My nearest family is a 4 hour drive away.
Combine this with a strong individuality streak (less reliance on neighbors and community) and you have to turn to very expensive childcare.
Raising children without that support is very daunting, at least to me.
It fits with everything in the rich world, especially the west, especially the US which is - replacing family/community/social/etc systems with pay-as-you-go solutions. And this is one of many areas it falls apart.
One of the major unspoken costs of having hotbeds of industry and the opportunity cost associated for not being in those hotbeds. Hotbeds are great for the entrepreneur but it still costs a hell of a lot in other ways that would otherwise enrich society.
Not in Rust, but I've seen it with Python in scientific computing. Someone needs to do some minor matrix math, so they install numpy. Numpy isn't so bad, but if installing it via conda it pulls in MKL, which sits at 171MB right now (although I have memories of it being bigger in the past). It also pulls in intel-openmp, which is 17MB.
> Someone needs to do some minor matrix math, so they install numpy
I’m just not convinced that it’s worth the pain to avoid installing these packages.
You want speedy matrix math. Why would you install some second rate package just because it has a lighter footprint on disk? I want my dependencies rock solid so I don’t have to screw with debugging them. They’re not my core business - if (when) they don’t “just work” it’s a massive time sink.
NumPy isn’t “left pad” so this argument doesn’t seem strong to me.
Because rust is paying the price to compile everything fromch scratch on a release build, you can pay a little extra to turn on link time optimization and turn of parallelism on release builds and absolutely nothing gets compiled in that you don't use, and nothing gets repeated. Also enabling symbols to be stripped can take something with tokio, clap, serde, nalgebra (matrix stuff) and still be 2-5Mb binary. That is still huge to me because I'm old, but you can get it smaller if you want to recompile std along with your other dependencies.
MKL is usually what you want if you are doing matrix math on an Intel CPU.
A better design is to make it easy you to choose or hotswap your BLAS/LAPACK implementation. E.g. OpenBLAS for AMD.
Edit: To be clear, Netlib (the reference implementation) is almost always NOT what you want. It's designed to be readable, not optimized for modern CPUs.
As if review timelines aren't already way too long. I'm currently waiting 9 months for a small $250k grant (edit: waiting to hear if I've even gotten it. I barely remember what the proposal was about now).
I can tell you most scientists are just trying to do their jobs, studying hard stuff. Unfortunately, we do not really have the resources to fight anything.
Tough situation, and lots of scientists are pretty frightened. Many junior scientists (myself included) are looking at leaving the country.
Theoretically, if you can make Trump happy and show you are on his side, Trump could make that case disappear.
Or, more realistically, Trump will still screw them over anyway, scorpion & frog style.
Large companies are bending over backwards to curry favor with Trump (see Meta settling and paying millions on a case they were winning and almost certainly would win).
“There are reports of Musk staffers on the CDC campus today, and yesterday an NSF official said at an internal meeting that the agency is apparently planning to lay off up to half its staff over the next two months.”
This country is completely turning its back on science and education and there is basically nothing that can be done right now. It’s very depressing.
I’m a scientist currently on an NSF grant. I am certainly poking around other countries to see what’s out there, and I’m not the only one.
A lot of scientists (at least in my field, computational chemistry) have decent skills that are transferrable to other areas. So I expect quite a few to move on.
There’s not that many jobs going in academia in other countries, and you’ll be looking at a significant pay cut due to the strong US dollar.
Most likely, people who leave academia will be leaving for industry instead.
I do feel for those in the hard sciences, they have become collateral damage in what is mostly a battle between politicians and humanities departments.
I dunno man my salary is six figures and I’m an academic scientist living in the Netherlands. My life is much higher quality than the equivalent could buy me in anywhere worth living in the USA. Like I agree the salaries can be low but you simply don’t need to make 300k usd to have a nice life here. I have a flat in the middle of the city of Utrecht where I cycle to work and pop off to the pub after and the gym is two minutes walk and I have a 400m ice skating track twenty minutes bike away. And on the work side I have free compute on an 3000 cpu cluster with also an gpu cluster of h100s and lots of resources for travelling for conferences and other stuff like that. And a lot of my startup friends here are here specifically because they went to San Francisco and got investment offers around 1 millionish and then tried to hire around and all the engineers were expecting 250k+ and then came to Europe and found people just as good who work for 80-100k. That’s a completely different runway for them and they actually have time to develop a product because they don’t have to pay so much and their people are still happy with their lives. Like I do agree there aren’t that many jobs like mine and Europe needs to get their heads out of their asses and poach as many America based scientists and engineers right now as they can. But I think American based people have this idea of Europe that prevents them from seeing their options here. I do think Europe needs more resources and less bureaucracy surrounding big science projects but I’ll make that point when I have my own big science project haha.
Hear hear - Utrecht might be the finest city in the world, too.
And Europe is missing a gigantic opportunity right now. The fact that talent is cheap, there's a strong social safety net, and we don't have enormous amounts of entrepreneurship is really strange.
It's easier to run a startup in the US, so why do it anywhere else? The financing is easier, the labor laws more business-friendly, and the native market bigger. And that's how it's going to stay for the foreseeable future. EU internal market integration has been paused for decades, weakening labor laws is a non-starter in any European country, and European pension funds are generally not allowed to invest in index funds, let alone something as risky as VC. If you think the EU will ever catch up, think again. The political will to do so is just not there.
From my PoV, the EU doesn't need to catch up. The US will be the one crashing down. There is an ocean in the middle but I can still see Americans digging their hole deeper and deeper.
It is better that we not fight wars and that we endeavour to increase the quality of life for all then we win some made up game of geopolitical competition.
safety and trust are hard to sell. it is widely known. What you say shows that "immediate gains always win" with no context.. It is literally unwise over time.
Yeah I don't get it. I know that Cherry Ventures just raised another 500 million euros but that is really nothing compared to what is in America. I think there is really a missed opportunity both from the government side of things and VC side of things. The government could relax restrictions on small businesses, hand out more tax credits, make it more beneficial to move here (e.g., my understanding is netherlands has a small business visa but it only lasts a year and you have to prove you are making money which is hard for a startup to do after a single year), more government money for research and more money to bring research results to market. Like the european research council (ERC) has a program called something like proof of concept where you get add on funds to an existing ERC grant to produce a proof of concept that could be taken to market but you are required to be the PI on the original grant to apply for the proof of concept. If instead you let anyone apply like the way NSF grants for startup work that would be better. for example postdocs that worked on the original ERC cannot apply for the follow on proof of concept money to try and make a startup that commercializes the research. only the PI of the original ERC grant can apply. That seems silly to me since probably the postdocs are better positioned to be startup leaders than the PI since the PI is more likely to have a permanent academic job and be uninterested in leaving that job to start a company out of one of the research agendas they are pursuing. you probably would get way more results out of the program than it generates now. I think from the VC side of things they could simply try and recruit more of these people who are working on such grants to become founders. In america there is a more clear MIT/Stanford/Caltech pipeline into silly valley and VC offices than there is in europe. VCs are responsible, imo, to create such a pipeline not academics. Anyways, if you are VC reading this feel free to reach out if you think that I am making sense. If I am not making sense feel free to tell me why. I am, of course, just some guy on the internet.
I have a proptech webapp that I built for myself but now gets several signups per week and has active users, yet nobody wants to invest. My last job was for an idiotic startup that had literally three dozen users at its peak yet was able to get over $2 million in VC, perhaps because it was in the US.
I really don't see why Europe can't figure this out.
I've been suspicious that the quality of life cut is distinct from the pay cut.
Living in a dense European city, you do not need a car, healthcare is free, and you are generally afforded more time off and a stricter wlb compromise compared to the US. One doesn't need to eat takeout as often if there is time to cook. Depending on the country, rent/housing costs are more or less under control.
On the other hand swiss/Netherlands food is expensive even by bay area standards.
To be competitive in academia in Europe, you’re not going to have as much free time as you expect.
You’re unlikely to be able to afford to live in the center of a dense Western European city on researcher wages, and most of the jobs aren’t in the city center either, so you’ll probably still need a car.
I think in the US people romanticise living and working in Europe to an unrealistic degree. There are good reasons why the net migration of skilled workers is towards the US rather than away from it.
I lived in both the US for a while (Bay Area), but I am now back in Europa. Quality of life in Europa is really high and you can certainly live quite well in most Western European cities from a typical wage for a researcher. Although many people would indeed not need to own a car (public transport is often very good, in many places you can also get around via bike or even by walking), most do and this easily possible with common salaries. There are places which are expensive, but many cities are quite reasonable. Universal healthcare, a stable society, low crime are among the many advantages.
Having lived in both, how would you equate your personal “purchasing power parity” between Europe and the US? At my firm, I could generally move to Berlin whenever I desired - however this comes with a 50% pay cut. I'm honestly unclear if I'd be ahead or behind where I am in the states if I took that deal.
Not OP and I haven't been in US but I've pondered on this since I've worked in Europe where taxes are among the top3 highest, and also Japan. (And ALSO had the opportunity to work remote, hired in one living in the other)
Basically the take is first what anyone that have lived abroad (or economist should) know, that you can't flat compare salary or PPP since the expenditure and quality of goods/service per expenditures are drastically different.
So one have to also consider what your expenditure, and quality requirements are. In the most extreme case, if your goal is "early retirement" then probably work in US retire abroad is optimal. But if your goal is "working in something I like while not having to be stressed about it" then it falls to the latter. What about your requirement for socialization and size of housing, dating/children, etc. How many products do you buy and how important is that? 50% paycut but no need to upkeep a car, no need to worry for healhcare, no need to save for kids college, can all add up.
The only thing that I think you can say with absolute certainty from the personal PPP in EU vs US comparison is that if traveling abroad (and buying products from abroad) is absolutely crucial to your happiness, nowhere beat the dollar & high salary.
Since you have your high US salary why not visit the Berlin office, or travel there. Try to find someone in a similar position in life as you are, and extrapolate from that
“Since you have your high US salary why not visit the Berlin office, or travel there. Try to find someone in a similar position in life as you are, and extrapolate from that”
Good advice. Do the research before making the move. 50% salary cut at higher levels is tough to overcome though.
> You’re unlikely to be able to afford to live in the center of a dense Western European city on researcher wages, and most of the jobs aren’t in the city center either, so you’ll probably still need a car.
Universities in Europe tend to have quite central locations in the cities. Also universities are practically guaranteed to have good public transport connectivity, as students have to be able to get there.
And even though researcher wages can be low relative to US, within the respective countries they are solidly (upper) middle class, and housing isn't a major problem.
I live a 5-minute bike ride away from the Delft Technopolis, and 20 minutes by train to Leiden's Bio Science Park. If I want to, there's 24h train services to the dense city centers of Rotterdam (15 minutes), Den Haag (15 minutes) and Amsterdam (45 minutes).
I do own a car, but I actually have to set a recurring reminder on my phone to take my car out for a ride every so often to avoid the battery draining empty. I think US people romanticise car ownership because they can't imagine how good the alternative can be.
That said, I don't work in academia and don't know what the median wage for that would be. But I don't see why a researcher wouldn't able to afford to live where I do currently, it's not wildly expensive here.
the other important thing to keep in mind is that in the EU in general, there's no added taxes on the bill, and tips are less of a thing here, so there's not a magical 20%+ hidden charge to factor in on everything you order.
We get signal wherever we can :) Boston Logan has about a 20-30% premium on normal groceries. SFO is probably closer to 5-10%. I assumed the premium could not be greater than 50% for Amsterdam airport.
Quality of life is highly subjective. Different people prefer different things. Many of us who value open space and privacy would see moving to a dense city as a step down.
It's the hard sciences I feel for because they typically deliver good returns on taxpayer funded research expenditure, and are generally disciplined enough to keep their head down and focus on their work, rather than engage in culture wars.
In contrast, the humanities made their own bed. They became politically partisan, engaged in systematically discriminatory hiring practices, and routinely conduct research that the public perceive to hold little utility.
Ultimately academics need to keep in mind that they rely on the generosity of taxpayers to fund their research. If the public aren't happy that they are getting value for money they will defund these programs.
I hope that the blowback is contained to the humanities departments, but guilt by association is unfortunately a thing in politics.
I think very few people proactively decide to become partisan. Most liberal arts academics just want to work in their special field. Sometimes the things they study get politicized, but that’s mostly the doing of talking heads.
If somebody wanted to become a partisan hack, there are easier ways than getting tenure, right?
It's not so much that people want to become partisan, but rather the culture of the discipline.
The culture within the hard sciences is to challenge existing theories and narratives.
The culture within the social sciences is almost the polar opposite. It still superficially presents as a science, but in practice is a purity spiral with an orthodoxy of established conclusions which cannot be challenged without severe career consequences.
The hard sciences had their Galileo affair 400 years ago, the soft sciences are in the midst of theirs right now.
Depends on the kinds of positions. There's more to academia than tenure-track faculty (which isn't in my future at all anyway).
People around me tend to be in the RSE (Research Software Engineer) scene, which is growing in Europe. I, and many of my cohort, could fit in as research staff or faculty in many different disciplines.
Wouldn't get rich or famous, but certainly have a comfortable living working on interesting problems.
It sounds as if the universe revolves around the US. Did you know that one of the biggest HPC cluster in the world is in Saudi Arabia? I know grad students who went there got duplex villas for free lodging.
Before you start criticizing Saudi government, the reason we are discussing this right now is because a fascist government is forcing scientists out of the US.
This, the US is the country most willing to make daring bets on innovation.
Europe will not spend even 0.1% of its pension/welfare fund on big research bets. The private investors their will only want real estate investments, not fancy wancy "VC".
Young talent will flow one way from other countries to the US, because they've already seen what the grass is like on their side.
If the sentiment upthread holds, and large numbers of US academics move overseas, then relatively shortly, Europe may shift towards being more willing to make big research bets.
The population shift introduces new ideas, new perspectives, new ways of operating research, new connections towards funding and money, new views on what big bets even means.
The influx of foreign scientists and academics into America over the last century caused significant shifts in how America operated and viewed the idea of research and academia. Post-war Europeans (Von Braun's crowd being an obvious example) caused a large shift in the way America funded "big bet" projects. Saturn V perhaps. Same may happen in Europe.
Those academics can use HN from the opposite side of the Atlantic. VC money especially has the possibility of being territorially bound, yet its often far less constrained by the those types of lines in the dirt than many funding opportunities.
This theory presumes there is shortage of talented researchers in other countries, which is not the case.
There aren't countries with unfilled academic positions awaiting people from the US. If anything, the landscape is even more competitive outside the US.
The sentiments that you see online are meaningless. Ignore what people say and look at what they actually do. I guarantee you that very few US academics will move to Europe. The US has long had positive net migration from Europe, and some temporary changes to federal government funding policies won't significantly change that trend.
I think a lot of these guys and gals are fooling themselves with the whole, "find another country" thing. There is no other country that is A) doing research at these levels, B) Flush with cash, and C) needs you because they don't have a population that produces the necessary thinkers. That's basically only the US.
The European research budget is not insignificant. Horizon Europe 2021-2027 is the current vehicle that much of the funding is going through (European Research Council [ERC] being one of the most well known parts). It has a budget for the time-frame (all years) of EUR 96,899,000,000. [1] Of that, the ERC has EUR 16B [2], Digital, Industry and Space has ~EUR 15B, Climate, Energy and Mobility has ~EUR 15B, and several other sub-groups have smaller amounts.
Those then work with the country level organizations of Science Europe, and those together each spend about EUR 25B each year. [3] It's not insignificant. I tend to pay attention to space, and lately almost all there's been is European achievements in telescopes and astronomy.
And importantly enjoys a privleged position in the world economy that enables them to run these types of long term deficits with minimal negative consequences.
Something which might shift over the coming decades.
I think GDP/economic output/labor productivity continues to rise briskly. The government accounts are in debt because people in the US refuse to consistently vote for [people advocating] high enough taxes. But we could tax more (still less than Europe) and get balanced budget.
Higher taxes do genuinely restrict economic growth, so it's not like raising taxes is a magic bullet.
Personally, I think there is plenty of grift and wasteful expenditure we could look at addressing first, especially within the healthcare and defense portfolios.
Not as much as having insufficient resources dedicated to the education of the young hurts economic growth (long term).
I agree not using the world proven efficient healthcare strategy of universal coverage is pretty stupid economically, as is spending a trillion USD per annum on the military. But we are so rich these mistakes can be absorbed for surprisingly long.
Yes, but when you borrow, you have money in your hands.
US firms are also very highly priced relative to their profits when compared to firms elsewhere. So while things are probably not quite sensible in the US there's still money.
Just thought I would recommend some reading about this: "The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?" by Michael Sandel.
Basically, think about what the longer-term, overarching effects on society would be in a perfectly-meritocratic society. It likely wouldn't be all unicorns and rainbows.
Merit is somewhat paradoxically only partially about ability. If it turns out the most testably intelligent person chooses to spend his life flipping burgers and smoking weed then he has no more merit than the most testably dumb person who chose similarly.
In other words a perfect meritocracy isn't Gattaca. It's just a place where your rise isn't going to be directly constrained by things outside of your control, like in Gattaca - being directly rejected because of one's DNA.
In a meritocracy a fool who finds and excels at a niche can thrive, while a genius who doesn't exert himself can languish.
I'm not positive this is possible. I seem to remember times when trying to play a newer game on the Switch required a system update, even though I had the physical card. I might be misremembering, though.