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even the science foundation people have to justify stuff by saying it'll be good for imperialism

The US is spreading genocide just fine; I’m not sure what “values” she thinks are in danger of not being spread.

Too anybody actually knowledgeable, the U.S. has 'lost' STEM leadership, particularly in the materials sciences.

McNutt

lol even the science foundation people have to justify stuff by saying it'll be good for imperialism

One of my favourite figures in science was the American chemist Harrison Brown. Not only was he a very good chemist, but he had a knack for basically scamming the US military into funding important research that he privately knew could never be applied to weapons. And he didn't just do that scamming for his own projects, but he applied those scamming skills to help his colleagues get funding for theirs. He was a one-man reverse-military-industrial-complex.

Brown was also the PhD advisor for Claire Patterson, the man who figured out how old Earth is by comparing isotopes of uranium and lead. During that research he developed the world's first proper cleanroom protocols for chemists. He later spearheaded the fight against the use of lead in consumer products (paint, toys, solder, gasoline, etc) after discovering how prevalent it was during his experiments to figure out the age of Earth. He personally travelled the entire world to gather samples to prove that lead pollution was a relatively recent phenomenon cause by industrial activity, and not something naturally-occuring as the oil companies and their hired guns were arguing.

STEM people usually get paid to do their doctorates. It's just that it is far too tempting for most of them to stop at a bachelors and make money than pursue the higher education necessary to actually advance the field, particularly for engineers. However, the real thing is that China just has way the fuck more people, so even if there were, by percentage, statistically less people pursuing higher level education, the actual amount of people doing this research in China is staggering.

I was at a crossroads in my grad school career. I was getting my MSc paid for and studying something important in STEM, but the future to go PhD looked like shit, as you say. literally, my only compelling rationale to get a PhD in the US was it would make--emigrating out of the US on a path to citizenship elsewhere--more feasible.

but I knew the US was failing a decade ago when I saw how aggressively China was courting young, English speaking academics on campuses to do their research and scholarship in China. I was in the middle of my own program, but considered doing it when I finished.

then I saw articles about how many young academics were leaving to do research in China on like NPR and next thing you know, the US government threatens to withhold any DoD grants from any research university that allows the organization hosting those recruitment opportunities on campus. and overnight those doors all shut with perfunctory apologies from university administration for terminating exchange programs.

I knew we were falling way behind before, but once the US schools shut their doors because the US threatened the DoD money laundering bag, I knew we were completely fucked.

No science, only war

There was a Portuguese epidemiologist during Covid that said something similar when she was asked why they still don't have a vaccine.

She basically said ask Ronaldo to make the vaccine since you want to pay him millions.

When Chinese researchers contribute to science in the West they're spies and should be fired, and when they go back to China to continue their research they're trying to surpass the West which is bad.

lol yup

seconded