Some people like to pick cherries and some are cherry pickers. California is amazing. If we lose some employers and our economy falters okay. Happy to take it as it comes personally. Growing up here was can remember when it was a quiet place I would come home to from college breaks. Those were the good old days for me. Today’s days are pretty good too.
Ya a lot of people on this site are ideologically positioned in a way that required demonizing CA. I don’t have any skin in that game but it seems pretty clearly A Thing to me from the other side of the country.
A lot of people on this site do or used to live in CA. It is especially galling to have people who have never lived there tell those that have what it is like there. Especially people who have tried to build or run a business in CA.
The Silicon Valley founderati is chock-full of (right wing) libertarians. I can't tell if they were always that way, or are increasingly disgruntled by state-taxes the wealthier they get.
I agree but I fail to see how bad water infrastructure that allows poop to get into the water supply in Mexico has anything to do with this topic. Nobody is arguing that you should be able to spew cancer causing chemicals into the air. It is possible to do all these industrial processes responsibly. It just costs more to do it. So either you can allow businesses to do these things with reasonable amounts of regulation locally or you can prevent those businesses (what CA does) and import these products made somewhere where they won't follow your regulations. And since pollution notoriously doesn't honor borders, perhaps its best not to use simplistic scarecrow arguments and instead have a nuanced understanding of the topic. But don't let me stop your partisan hackery, I'm sure you enjoy it.
10k PhDs lost isn't a step in the direction of fixing anything, though. There is little to no evidence that the people leaving aren't the top performers, let alone the bottom.
> There is little to no evidence that the people leaving aren't the top performers, let alone the bottom.
According to the article, the majority of the losses were voluntary (people quitting or accepting buyout offers) and not people who were directly laid-off.
While this isn't direct evidence of where these people sit on the spectrum from top to bottom performers, my anecdotal life experience suggests that when losses like this are voluntary its far more likely they are top performers who have plenty of options elsewhere (either in the private sector, or in other governments).
Also (and also anecdotally) this brain-drain doesn't just apply to direct government workers. I know of several people who worked in (and in some cases headed up) prestigious university research labs in the US who have left in the last year after massive funding cuts. Most of them were immigrants who went back to universities in their country of origin, some after having been here for decades.
At least amongst my circles, that seems so obvious. I don’t know what things are actually like on the ground. But from here in Australia, the subtext of all the ICE news is that foreigners are no longer welcome in the US. And that America is becoming an authoritarian, fascist state.
Of course I don’t want to visit the US. There’s no way I’d want to move there right now.
I know of multiple US run conferences which are taking place in Europe this year. Too many attendees wouldn’t come if they were hosted in the US.
> At least amongst my circles, that seems so obvious
Blindingly obvious.
The long-term (very likely permanent in many cases) damage being done to America by the Trump administration through brain-drain, weakening of our own economy, and causing the entire rest of the world to (rightfully) distrust us as a reliable ally and/or trading partner is incalculable.
And it is all pure unforced error driven by a malignant narcissist bent on retribution who is also seemingly being used by a few different actors with their own individual axes to grind as he slips into dementia.
> But from here in Australia, the subtext of all the ICE news is that foreigners are no longer welcome in the US. And that America is becoming an authoritarian, fascist state.
This is also how it feels in the US. (And it isn't only foreigners -- the message is also that "the wrong kind" of American citizens are also no longer welcome in the US)
There's reason to suspect that the one's leaving are more likely to be top performers. First, top performers are the most likely to be able to find another job easily so they would take the voluntary buyout or just leave when things get crazy. Also, some of the DOGE cuts targeted probationary employees which include those that have recently been promoted or recently hired, both are classes of employee that the department explicitly wanted to keep.
I think your comment is more a refutation of the top level than the person you're responding to. I think people are right to assume there is already a serious throughput issue with scientific research, especially so-called "basic" research in the US and seeing a mass exodus from the government is troubling because public funding is what, historically, generates the big breakthroughs.
What the person you're replying to was likely trying to say is that once you get into this size of layoffs its no longer about the individuals and their performances and a claim that all 10k of them are on one side of a theoretical "bell curve" (which btw i havent seen evidence can actually be measured) is big and needs evidence.
> public funding is what, historically, generates the big breakthroughs
Without an opinion on the rest of this, public funding in the US doesn't produce big breakthroughs from scientists employed by the government, but rather by funding university research.
It appears that, after the administration canceling a significant proportion of grants in 2025, that science funding has largely been maintained or increased from pre-2025 levels for 2026, although how the 2026 funding gets spent, and whether it is all spent, is an open question.
I believe the opposite is happening in China. I saw an article the other day ( https://fortune.com/2026/01/14/china-graduates-1-3-million-e... ) that showed how the amount of engineers being produced there is orders of magnitude greater than the US. Way above what you'd expect given the different sizes of population. Now, i realize an engineer isn't the same as a PhD but i think we're seeing a dramatic brain drain happening in the west.
I’m not a PhD, just an engineer and I moved out of The Netherlands. It was no longer economical feasible to live there. I am very pessimistic about the future Western Europe. Right now it offers the one of the best QoL in the world for the average worker but who knows for how long. With the current brain and wealth drain there will no longer be enough people to support the social system.
Right now I'm not sure there is a country where young people are generally satisfied and optimistic about their future. America is a mess, Europe is generally a mess, China is struggling with too many grads who aren't able to find jobs matching their qualifications... From what I've heard things aren't exactly great in India either.
Australians will complain a lot but honestly the future is very bright. Higher exports than imports, government debt isn’t completely out of line and it’s not going exponential like some regions, it has European like public services, a median wealth 2.5x that of the USA, good employment figures.
It’s not perfect but i still think it’s pretty good.
But how much of the Australian economy is extraction for the Chinese economy? My brief understanding of the Aussie economy is that a large part of it is iron, hydrocarbons, copper, etc. going abroad, largely going to feed the Chinese economic machine. So economic performance is heavily tied into Chinese performance.
And the median wealth number is another way of saying "house prices are insane" right?
For the median wealth somewhat house price driven although there’s also the reality that median and mean wealth in Australia is remarkably close together. You can’t have median wealth driven by home equity if no one has a house yet in australia the median and say top 25% have remarkably similar houses.
So yes they are high but it’s not like the disparity in the USA where the median is well below Australia (lot’s of people in the USA lost wealth in 2008 and never recovered) while the mean is well above (driven by the few that are extremely wealthy living a lifestyle unattainable to the commoners).
Yeah, I was chatting with a friend living in Spain once, and ascending the ladder in responsibility didn't make sense, as whatever salary increase he got would be heavily taxed, and it didn't make sense to bear much more responsibility for just a little bit of extra money a year.
As you say, avg workers are "fine" there, but for anyone trying to standout or grow in their career, they will hit an income ceiling very fast due to the high taxation, so it doesn't make sense to keep on growing as you are not properly rewarded for it.
Where did you move? I understand you're retired: that changes the situation somewhat.
When I lived in Amsterdam, we were renting a flat. The gentleman we were renting from told us our rent easily covers all his expenses in South East Asia.
Spain. And I have to apologise, I call myself retired but in reality I'm just unemployed. It's more of a year long sabbatical, but I jokingly call it retirement since I moved to Spain and many Dutch people do so for retirement. I'm planning on setting up a company here.
Spain isn't great for being employed or freelance (autonomo) but if you set up a limited liability company (SL) and work from there it is not that bad. Tax on investments are averagely taxed compared to other countries.
>>Tax on investments are averagely taxed compared to other countries.
That is only if you haven't accumulated wealth yet.
The combination of quite high capital gain tax with sky high wealth tax, pretty high income tax isn't very attractive if your plan is to accumulate some wealth.
If you just want to make enough every year to live there I guess it's reasonable though.
I future-proofed myself by moving to a region with a €3M exception. So that I have a long way to go before paying wealth tax.
CGT is progressive and around 20%, compared to other European countries that is fairly average. Some Eastern European countries are at 15%, Belgian is going to 10%, Switzerland differs per canton.
Also, no CGT for fresh immigrants if you are able to use the Beckham law.
Is the exception still valid? I thought the new central regulation in effect removed those (if the region has exceptions then you pay federal "solidarity" tax). They introduced it to fight Madrid's and Andalusia's exemptions.
I investigated it some time ago though when I was considering moving to Andalusia so maybe something changed.
The Netherlands is taking action against the brain drain by rapidly importing highly skilled migrants through various tax lowering schemes in the first five years of living here.
However plenty of those people leave after that period. Especially with the upcoming 36% unrealized capital gains tax on all your savings and investments.
Feels a bit like ISPs giving discounts to new customers only.
This sounds like the Netherlands speed running their way out of investments. If a country I was living in proposed this, I would be leaving ASAP, or getting some heavy financial engineering done.
This is misleading. It's actually taxing 36% of _assumed gains_ of say 5% on all assets. So if you have $1M in savings, you'll end up paying 1.8% or $18K/annum, regardless of the actual investment return. I can see it would be painful during down years, but most of the time it would be ok.
Many years ago, a friend of mine in the Netherlands had the same job as another guy, earning the same money, my friend being extremely thrifty, the other guy splurging. When they both found themselves out of a job at the same time, my friend got no support from the government as he had savings, while the other guy started getting a very generous allowance.
This goes directly against all that is reasonable. This is directly discouraging financial responsibility. My friend is thrifty just for the sake of it, he knows it's not in his interest. But he gets the short end.
Same situation in the UK. Even a modest amount of savings (a few months of your salary) is enough to disqualify you from the majority of benefits, childcare etc.
Correct. If you go over €38.478 in savings, you immediately lose your renters benefit. No taper, just a hard drop-off. You can lose up to €5.000 in renters benefit a year.
A legal tax avoidance is to just buy a €1000 TV if you are near the limit. Yes that is as crazy as it sounds but people do it.
This is true in the US too. I know people who are disabled here who can not find a job because if they start making minimum wage they loose all their benefits.
You can write it off against future capital gains, but not against income tax from employment. So if the market is down a few years, you gain a lot of tax credits and you pray that the government doesn't get rid of those credits in the mean time.
Why is this shocking? Surely if you hadn’t grown up with the very technical idea of unrealized gains, this would seem totally normal. The surprising thing is that we let ourselves be convinced in the past that making money with money should be tax advantaged compared to making money with labor.
Do you have to pay tax on unrealized gains with realized money? A classic problem with exercising employee stock options and holding the stock is that you have a tax event on the unrealized gain, but if the stock drops substantially, you still owe the tax money on the unrealized gain, but you cannot sell the stock for enough to pay for it. This happened to a lot of people around 2001.
Paying for unrealized gains with realized money is not a situation anyone want to be in.
I was thinking of 'real' holdings rather than options that don't have a liquid value. Not all unrealized gains are the same. Thanks for pointing out the complexity.
Say you have €80k in investments. Markets go up, in one year time your investments are worth €90k. You did not sell.
That means you had €10k in unrealized capital gains. Subtract the €1800 per person threshold. €8200, 36% tax is €2952 tax to be paid at the start of the year.
Losses give you tax credits redeemable against future capital gains (not against income tax from employment)
How does that even work? What does it apply to? Say I own a 100% share in a business, each year does the government appraise it and pretty much require me to divest a portion of it to pay the tax?
Unrealized capital gains taxes are crazy all in an effort to own the rich or something. Meanwhile the people they're perceived as targeting have all the resources to avoid it.
Yes, you are supposed to either sell part of the stocks to cover the yearly tax or you need to dip into your savings account to find money to cover the tax.
I don't know about non-publicly listed companies, I assume you indeed need to appraise yearly.
The rich don't pay these taxes as the unrealised capital gains tax is only for private individuals, not companies. The rich have their assets in companies / shells.
A 36% tax?! Nobody's going to invest in that environment, since the taxes will really sap your effective compounding rate. That's a great way to push all your finance people out of the country.
It's every bit as stupid as it sounds, and IMHO it's probably why we have Donald Trump in the White House today. Harris started talking about taxing unrealized capital gains almost immediately after she was nominated, and that's when the billionaires -- including the ones that own all the media outlets -- started switching sides.
Brought to you by the same party of self-defeating geniuses who thought they could win elections in Texas on a gun-control platform.
Because I was able to get a better QoL elsewhere in the EU.
The average worker in The Netherlands has one of the best QoL compared to average workers in other countries. But the Dutch income leveling and benefit system makes it so a high earner doesn’t have a significantly better QoL. Someone earning €30k has roughly the same spending power as someone earning €50k. (edit: net income after tax and benefits is €42k versus €47k for those two incomes but the person earning €30k has access to cheaper government housing)
In other countries, earning more gives you a better QoL.
I believe OP is saying that while QoL is great in the Netherlands, it has an upper bound. I suppose that he has access to resources that could provide an ever higher QoL in other countries. For example, in the USA, QoL can be good if you're a millionaire and gets better as you acquire more resources.
Unfortunately, there's no QoL lower bound in the USA, either.
I left mainly because of housing prices, the difficulty of being a freelancer, the 49.5% income tax after €78k, the 36% unrealized capital gains tax and just everything in life like supermarkets or public transport being so much more expensive than other European countries.
I took a big pay cut moving to Southern Europe, but post-tax I earn the same and everything is just so much cheaper. I honestly have a significant better life here. Good weather too.
I understand you're not the landlord then. I agree this is a problem: the same(ish) earning you mentioned in another comment makes social mobility difficult. Some people are born with a house, others without. That's super unfair. I'd first tax that rather than income.
In the process of setting up a company to do consultancy services for Dutch companies, but eventually want to shift to local companies once I get to learn the language, culture and business.
Creating classes that bypass productive labor is possible. You then force workers to subsidize them. This maintains "full employment" on paper. The country, however, remains on the brink of collapse.
There was an interesting Freakonomics podcast a few months back that pointed out an interesting divide in how the US and China thinks about its leaders[0].
> China is a country that is run by engineers, while the U.S. is a country run by lawyers. Engineers, he explains, are driven to build while lawyers are driven to argue, and obstruct.
Even Trump:
> And even though Donald Trump is not a lawyer by any means, I think he is still a product of the lawyerly society, because lawsuits have been completely central to his business career. He has sued absolutely everyone. He has sued business partners, he has sued political opponents, he has sued his former lawyers as well. And there is, I think, something still very lawyerly about Donald Trump in which he is flinging accusations left and right, he’s trying to intimidate people, trying to establish guilt in the court of public opinion
Very interesting take and I think insightful on why the US is the way it is today and sidesteps the democracy vs autocracy debate.
Supposedly Roy Cohn was startled by how easily he was discarded when he wasn’t useful anymore. Makes me wonder who will be the next in line with the knife.
Maybe. I would like to think that is true but i don't have much evidence.
I think what we can see provably is that China is investing in the development of STEM contributors at the primary school level through advanced degrees and the central government is directing the economy to spend huge amounts on the work that they do.
I'm very curious about this because even tho we need to preserve democracy, some elements of meritocracy also seem needed. Obviously as Xi's latest purges show, there is some politics to it as well, but China does seem to do a fairly good job of meritocracy in the bureaucracy.
It is important to remember that meritocracy isn't a binary, it is a spectrum. Just having exams based upon literacy and ability to understand poetry about flowers for bureaucratic positions that do paperwork is more meritocratic than just a literal aristocracy and ensures literacy, but it still isn't necessarily the most relevant ability to actual ability to perform the job. Then there is the question if office politics qualify as actual job skill or is just a derailment of merit.
Furthermore there are complications with unequal resources and means of training. Not just from some families having more money, but also from more knowledge. Children who are read to are more likely to be literate, family businesses, and all that. The unequal resources raises deeper questions about what is the origin of merit.
It sounds like you're saying that this is a step in the direction of "fixing" academia. I don't see any evidence of that, all i see is fewer scientists receiving decreasing funding in a state where weve already been slashing basic research investment for generations. Also, there is no evidence that the ones that are leaving are the least productive. Intuitively it's likely the opposite: the ones who have the most potential will find work elsewhere and will be the first to leave.
EDIT: I would also like to say that i have never seen evidence that we can measure the performance of 10k PhDs in a single dimension at all. So a claim that this could be good for scientific research and development seems unprovable at best.
I'm not claiming that this is a step in the direction of fixing academia; I'm claiming that, because academia is currently broken, we shouldn't assume that the ~10k people who got PhDs under the current system are people doing actually-valuable work for the federal government and ultimately the American people.
Knowing current administration anti-science approach to things like climate and health, I wouldn't be all at surprised if many of those who left academia were ones producing quality work that just didn't align with Trump admin's ideology.
I suspect you're right, but what we are and are not surprised by is self-referential rather than evidentiary.
But are we supposed to be content with not being given enough information to make a meaningful differentiation between people with PhDs in human resources and $IDENTITY-studies vs PhDs in organic chemistry and climatology?
When there's hostility towards discernment, it makes me feel like the two political strains are working together to use a one-two punch of credentialism and anti-intellectualism to erode empirical investigation into reality.
If anyone is curious, as I was, where this misinformation came from: it appears to be a criticism of the Food Compass rating system from Tufts University. The connection to "past administrations" seems to be added by the person I'm replying to. They've also swapped Cheerios with Cheetos.
>On social media, I have seen graphics showing certain breakfast cereals scoring higher than eggs, cheese, or meat. Did Tufts create these graphics?
>No. Food Compass works very well, on average, across thousands of food and beverage products. But, when this number and diversity of products are scored, there are always some exceptions. These graphs were created by others to show these exceptions, rather than to show the overall performance of Food Compass and the many other foods for which Food Compass works well. But, as objective scientists, we accept constructive criticism and are using this to further improve Food Compass. We are working on an updated version now – see our versions page for more information.
> 'm not claiming that this is a step in the direction of fixing academia; I'm claiming that, because academia is currently broken, we shouldn't assume that the
Why?
If you go that far then
- senate
- scotus
- violence
- SV
- tech bros
- lies about AI
What is not broken.
The idea of academia is it is an investment. Look at internet, DoE, Genome, vaccines - a lot from academia. Companies barely do that.
Indeed. You're far more likely to get sensible policy opinions from a STEM PhD who knows what science is than from sleazy opportunist politicians, investors, and PR people.
You might even say that the opportunists dislike STEM because it gets in the way of their opportunism.
I think well meaning people in the west are looking for a silver lining and in the process overcomplicating a rather simple issue: the US government is cutting spending everywhere while its electorate demands even deeper cuts. The money has dried up and people are leaving.
(One of my best friends was a nuclear medicine phd who left his cancer research lab after covid to work at a VoiP company, so i too have anecdotes)
The US is in a weird spot. The electorate does not generally want education and research cut.
Republicans here have convinced their base that education and the educated are bad, which has fed their desire to cut academic funding and research at all levels.
That is to say, the federal government doesn't have a popular mandate to do any of this. They simply hold all levers of power through a slim majority of the voting populace.
And lets not forget that its only 22% of the total amount of people who live here. A large minority of potential voters are disenfranchised and do not vote. The government isnt just without a mandate it is extremely unpopular.
China is famous for low-quality research and bad papers, which is exactly what you'd expect from a system that grants an expanded number of formal credentials to people who aren't actually doing good scientific research.
Be that as it may, China also has persistent threat actors outfoxing American cybersecurity in the form of Salt Typhoon. The cards are on the table, and the US is already undoubtedly losing several fronts of asymmetrical warfare.
I have a friend who, to explain it simply, worked medium high up in the CIA for 8-12 years during Bush and Obama. The only time he gets serious about talking about his time there is on this topic. Chinas cyber security is, according to him, light years ahead of the US to the point where its embarrassing.
If I understand Salt Typhoon correctly it's a masterpiece. The descriptions I've seen indicate that they penetrated lawful intercept. Lawful intercept operates outside network operators network management systems because it was designed not to trust the network operators. I am skeptical of claims that Salt Typhoon has been eliminated from US networks. Any such implicitly claim to detect lawful intercept traffic and ensure it isn't nefarious, which traffic that system is designed to hide.
Geely owns Volvo and IIRC a significant portion of Volvos are Chinese made now.
There's a number of companies or brands that are now Chinese owned. China knows that home grown brands (like Geely) don't work on an international stage, so they buy well known brands like Volvo.
It's a bit of a silent behind the scenes takeover but I'd say that China is now seriously making competitive cars. If you can follow the brands and notice.
Geely is Volvo's parent company but Volvo still designs and manufactures its cars. Geely gets to benefit from Volvo technology for its own Chinese brands.
Just like Tata owns Jaguar and Land Rover but it doesn't mean India is "pumping out world-class cars".
I left China in 2017 so my info is a little dated but unless there was a _giant_ leap in quality I wouldn't trust a Chinese car any more than I trust other Chinese products (products made to spec in China is a different matter altogether). And when I was there anyone in China who could afford a foreign brand wasn't buying Chinese brands either.
It's not that Chinese are incapable of making great products, but cutting corners and crappy customer service is deeply embedded into their business culture. Things are changing but there's still a long way to go.
> It's the manufacturer's principal's bid and proposed criteria that are key.
Agreed. And Chinese brands are, on the whole, more concerned with cost than quality. Things are made to look shiny on the outside with a great "spec list", but are crap on the inside.
Lol, the fully homegrown BYD is destroying Tesla everywhere outside the US where it’s basically banned and you’re taking about Geely and Volvo and behind the scenes. It’s all out there on the stage.
> It’s just objective fact that BYD along with Tesla are world class cars
World class propaganda maybe. Cars definitely not.
I'll give China the Volvo brand. I can see the quality difference at any car show. I remember seeing some other nice looking Chinese cars but BYD (and Tesla for that matter) are objectively awful.
They’re still world class cars as they sell well everywhere in the world. The quality compared to some other smaller brands are not really important criteria in that context.
You are assuming there is meaningful work for them in the federal government. There might be more productive work for them in industry. Their contribution to the workforce could put pressure on inflated salaries, if that is the case.
If their credentials exceed their defacto responsibilities in the government, they might be blocking someone else from being promoted or otherwise "growing" or whatever.
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