How does Chinese immigration work for STEM?
What does residency look like for someone making $500+ k in America?
What are the Y Combinators? (No CCP Tans.)
You would have to be insane to consider founding or investing in a Chinese startup when you could do so in Silicon Valley or even NYC or Austin.
With all due respect, you´re not thinking long-term, or dare I say even medium-term.
For now, I live in the former most powerful country in the world prior to the rise of the US.
The fact that the Bank of England was historically a private business is awkward when it comes to explaining to some modern country why it's not OK that their central bank is giving the leader's nephew $100M in unsecured loans, and this sort of discomfort is part of why it was bought by the British government and gradually ceased operating as a private bank in my lifetime. When I was younger I knew people whose mortgage was issued by the country's central bank. Not like celebrities or politicians or anything, just bureaucrats who got a good deal, sort of "mates rates" but for a house loan.
To be fair, this has felt like the natural consequence of the "maximize capitalism without regarding the downsides" maxim the US seems to have been operated under for a long time. Corporations have been (indirectly) running the country for some decades at this point, it's just way more obvious and in the face now when a "businessman" sits as president.
The US drifted far from any form of pure open market laissez-faire capitalism or balanced regulated capitalism some time past.
Kinda similar to the people who say of the SU "but it was not true communism".
Either way, we're talking here about small in groups treating a larger out group as sheep to be manipulated and harvested.
The idea that if it was only somehow more pure in some ideological virtue, then it would have worked, you'll need really hard historical material empirical evidence to defend such a claim
Not that it wasn't white and pure enough but that if it was the shade whiter you advocate for, it would have somehow been a complete 180°, like some magical threshold
I thought things would look up after the 2012 election, when people were looking for meaningful change. Unfortunately a charismatic demagogue entered the scene and has taken power. Since then, we’ve been on the worst possible timeline, and I don’t see an easy way out of this mess. It’s going to take a lot of work for Americans to trust each other again and for the rest of the world to trust us.
The first only thing he did in the first term was tax cuts for rich people, and people voted for him knowing that, and he fulfilled that this time around too. Democrats are the ones that pass legislation to help the poor and middle class with generous paid leave, minimum wage, and subsidized healthcare.
Trump is about feeling superior as an uneducated white man (which even non white men like, as it asserts their relative ranking in the socioeconomic ladder. A black leader or a woman leader and especially a well spoken one makes them feel like they failed in the rat race.
However, Trump, at least in 2016, also attracted the votes of people who were fed up with the hollowing out of middle America and who resonated with his protectionist economic policies, and he also attracted people who were swayed by his “drain the swamp” rhetoric, which resonated with people who did not want an election featuring Clinton II (Hillary Clinton) vs Bush III (Jeb Bush). It is these people who have been fooled, who have not gotten politics purged of corruption. Much of the old GOP has completely capitulated to Trump, with the rest largely driven out of politics. The “swamp” never got drained; it’s now Chernobyl levels of toxic.
In addition, the two party system has made Republicans voters too loyal to their party. They’re so afraid of the Democratic Party, that their leaders will take away people’s guns, money, and free speech, that they don’t dismiss the warnings of authoritarianism as just plain fearmongering and “Trump derangement syndrome.” Well, the authoritarianism is here today. Right now it’s being directed at “enemies” like immigrants, anti-Trump politicians, scientists, and educators, but eventually the authoritarianism will affect Trump’s base. Unfortunately a lot of innocent people are suffering, and the nearest election is the 2026 midterms, which highlights a major weakness in the American government; we have no recall mechanism, nor do we have mechanisms like parliamentary systems where snap elections can be called.
If it were me I'd be sacking people until they started getting a mean adjustment somewhere around 0. I doubt that is what Trump is doing, but the managers left themselves vulnerable to technical criticism.
[0] https://mishtalk.com/economics/in-honor-of-labor-day-lets-re...
Why sack them? It's not like they refused to mean adjust or failed to do so. The numbers came out, and before anybody has even had a chance to question them. Before any coherent criticism as had time to root, the person responsible is fired.
Firing people is not how you get more accurate numbers. It's how you get yes-men.
It is like they failed to do so - there is a timeseries of consistently negative adjustments. The BLS revising numbers down isn't an unexpected event, that is pretty standard for their jobs reports.
It is better to resolve things with a conversation rather than formal action. But if a conversation doesn't get immediate results it is fastest just to move people on at that level of seniority. The competition is fierce and it is more about finding the right person for the job than trying to micromanage performance.
And nobody at CBS has been arrested, but that doesn't mean corruption isn't happening.
When reality and truth do not matter, why would they want accurate numbers? They do not need the country to flourish, they just need their personal wealth to grow and the rest of the population to remain compliant. From that point of view, shooting the messenger before the message gets out of control makes perfect sense. It is working well enough for many autocratic regimes around the world.
And the commissioner was just sacked and the reason given was because she was incompetent. Goes to show the risks of being in a high performing environment and not having a trivially demonstrable track record of high performance. If a dude with no particular track record can clearly articulate why the numbers are biased then your employment might fall into question.
The reason given was she purposefully changed the numbers to make Trump look bad. There was of course no evidence given for that.
Which is certainly a political reason and easy to disagree with. But it is reasonable and factually defensible. Her Bureau has been publishing optimistic estimates.
[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/08/bls-has-lengthy-...
Moreover, do note that all published numbers come with standard errors [2] and 90% confidence intervals, which did include the corrections of -133k and -120k that were made for May and June. The current interval for July is -63k to +209k [3]. Anybody who understood high school stats knows the meaning and implications of this.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesnaicsrev.htm#Summary
And I'm not going to bother digging through the manuals to figure out how the BLS is calculating their standard errors, but there is a pretty decent chance they've been calculated assuming that the error mean is 0 when in fact it appears to be biased.
When the jobs market is currently being impacted by a leader throwing around unprecedented tariffs, and upending decades of economic practice by throwing away national deals that he himself negotiated, you are not going to be able to accurately predict things - because they are unprecedented.
See North Korea or Russia. People have been claiming they're on the verge of collapse for decades but the reality is that they just keep going.
Same with global warming, it causes migration, loads of immigrants is great for the right wing, scares people into voting for them, they have no incentive to fix the problem that's causing them to get more votes.
Edit:
This is a comment about the administration, not Tao.
Don't get me wrong : i'm not defending what's happening here. It's absurd and a very bad sign for US democracy. What i'm saying is that people only wake up when they're the ones in the crosshairs.
Taken together, it makes it clear that we need to formulate even more clearly than before, what kind of society and country we want to live in. Not just oneliners, of course, those are now hollowed-out (see "freedom").
By the way, do you have an example of the academics feeling threatened by making political statements?
And not just academia if i look at zuckerberg's testimony over federal government censoring people arbitrarily on the platforms.
"I thought I was safe in my hideout, but a kick to the groin proved me wrong." -Testicles
An uber driver who gets rich by other means will stop driving for uber, not drive for uber for free.
The bigger problem is the recipients of these cuts seem to think it is about an "issue", and are incapable of accepting they are having sand kicked in their face.
Your suggestion is saying that research should be privatised, and shows very little thought about how research works and who benefits from it.
The actions of the administration serve to force all academics not behaving as you describe research to start doing so, though. The criticism you have, is manufactured.
Yes, there are coordination problems for projects at some scale, for which government involvement makes it possible, however these are far fewer than we are made to believe.
you say that like it's a lot of money? I mean sure, in comparison to the amount of money I make yes, but in comparison to value derived from research, amounts of money collected from California, amount of money given to California, and amount of money federal government spends on other things - is it a lot of money? I have a feeling it's not.
>I feel like government financing should be made available to those that actually need the money.
yeah, if they actually needed the money they would shut down the programs using the money when they stopped getting the money.
If the policy was no government funding if you have an endowment the net result would be that endowments would be spent down, and then not only would they need government funding for the things the government now funds, they would also need government funding for the things that are currently funded from the endowment's earnings.
Also, money in endowments is often legally restricted. Donors put conditions on their donations which limit what they can be used for. For example a donor might donate several million dollars to create and pay the salary of a named professorship in a specific department. That money goes into the endowment, but it and its earnings can only be spent on paying whoever currently holds that professorship.
A typical endowments includes hundreds or thousands of such restricted donations.
China is producing 77K STEM PhDs in 2025 and that number is quickly growing year over year, US - 42K/year. (and just ponder for a moment that those 77K are the smartest out of 1.5B population of a country where STEM is all the rage - those 77K are really top line smart and driven ones with all the support from the state)
Is Trump using antisemitism as an excuse to crack down on liberal universities? Because this will make people only more critical of Israel.
US universities do a lot of research on Palestine and Israel's occupation and apartheid there. In addition, universities are naturally liberal and are targets of the right wing anti-education movement.
stop rearranging chairs on the deck of a sinking ship and move on terence
But you are right. That's why I said: can change quickly.
EDIT: For people wondering why I think it's worse in Europe, it's because in Europe the ruling class and the universities are on the same side. And when I say Europe, I mean UK, France and Germany.
If you truly believe that the whole world is "just as bad" as this, then you are unimaginably far to the right.
If you're fully aligned, there's no telling what would happen if you weren't, and you can't use "nothing happens" as evidence that nothing would happen - you're always allowed to share the opinions of whoever funds you.
If Germany got a right-wing government on the federal level, I expect to see either funding being slashed or universities adjusting their positions.
Would you please expand on this?
Oh, so I can freely go up against the German government's policies and have my career in academia unaffected and keep my government funding?
I lived in Germany and don't remember people or organisations ever being able to break government rules with no consequences (unless they had high friends in politics).
Something smells here.
I lived in Germany and the moment you don't do what the government says you get the full shaft. Nobody let's you rebel against the government with no consequences, not in US, not in Germany, not in UK, nowhere.
People painting Germany like a bastion of free speech are coping hard. Only if you consider free speech doing and saying only what the government says.
People here argued that the US is fascist because in academia you can't get away with breaking governments rules getting you defunded and pointing at Germany for being superior in this regard.
So then I asked for proof that in other countries you can get away in academia with breaking the government's rules and not get defunded. It really is that simple.
What about Christian Drosten who criticized a lot of the Corona decisions, Jan Boehmermann who is very critical but still employed by state-financed TV. Fridays for Future?
Other countries like the way the US used to be 15 years ago? Is your argument really "other people don't have rights, therefore we shouldn't either"?
However, in this case, it's quite hard to argue that Terrence Tao had anything to do with antisemitism or anything against Trump's policies. Actually I don't think Terrence Tao did anything that Trump cared about. This isn't really a free speech issue, it's more like some fundamental instability in the US, and maybe the US government is running out on money and trying to cut down on research expenditure using excuses.
I'm sure the German government will react with much more leniency than the US.
On the front of funding research? Considering that one is constantly adding more funds for research, while the other one is removing funds, I'm not sure how accurate that is.
Or Dutch professors openly criticizing the plans by the right-wing government (which just fell) as being damaging, unproductive amd sometimes unconstitutional?
The only examples I see are the opposite of what you say. Can you name any examples in Germany, Sweden, Norway or Holland? (Those are the countries that I'm confident talking about at least)
Sounds like a feature, not a bug.
> And when I say Europe, I mean UK, France and Germany.
Europe is much larger and more diverse than those three countries. Scandinavia for example consistently top the list in most well-being statistics.
It's never been any different, all the way back to when Germans or Irish or whoever were the 'demonized immigrants'. This is what made America great. Anytime we want it, those conditions can return. It was no illusion.
It’s researchers who are not at the top of their fields who will have a much harder time leaving America to find research positions, since academic positions and funding haven’t been easy to obtain in places like Canada, Europe, Australia, and Japan for at least two decades.
What will most likely be the case is that scientific careers will be halted temporarily or permanently from these funding cuts. Graduate admissions are harder than ever now, it’s harder to find a research position, and I can’t imagine how much more difficult tenure will be to obtain if professors can’t fundraise and publish. Industry isn’t always an option, either. A lot of researcher’s careers will face major setbacks, some unrecoverable, all due to the capriciousness of our rulers.
But I think it's very justified for the federal to do something (not necessarily this thing) against institutions that show racist behaviors. e.g. Little Rock Nine.
So are you in support of the current defunding?
> The lawsuit, filed more than a year ago, alleged that by not immediately ordering the encampment to be taken down, UCLA provided support to pro-Palestinian activists who “enforced” what it termed a “Jew Exclusion Zone,” prohibiting Jewish students and staff from passing through the camp’s makeshift barricades.
Personally I think this is a textbook racist behavior. Replace "Jewish" with "black" and "Palestinian' with "white" and see if you agree. I personally firmly believe if white activists try to enforce a "Non Black Zone" in the campus, the college administration has a responsibility to take it down and discipline said activists.
I'm not sure if this defunding is justified though, as it seems that UCLA has settled this case and the defunding sounds retrospective.
A lot of the college protesters are in fact Jewish. This is a fact the pro-Israel propaganda would rather you not know about. Otherwise, how could they claim "antisemitism" whenever you criticize the actions of the foreign country.
I also want to add my own observation, which might be biased: There was a clear, sizeable fraction of the protests that was beyond "pro-Palestine / anti-Israel's Palestine policy". There was celebration of Hamas and of the attack, especially in the first days.
And, for the record, I think it's willfully ignorant to pretend that Jews and non-jews are given equal amounts of leeway by all Palestine protesters. While the majority may be doing so in good faith, I've seen far too many people being viewed with suspicion for wearing Jewish traditional headware by supposedly unbiased activists to believe that anti-Semites aren't using the movement to get a free ride.
Secondly, protests are escalatory by definition. If no one is listening to a protest, and absolutely no one is impacted, it will escalate until people listen.
You can denounce this form of protest - which I would argue is the only form of protest - from a high perch, but when push comes to shove, if it were your cause, you would do the exact same thing.
Look back at history, and you’ll see the same pattern in all high stakes college protests, from anti-war protests to anti-apartheid protests. The fact that you are either unaware or indifferent to this truth means the machine is working as intended.
https://epicenter.wcfia.harvard.edu/blog/student-protests-an...
for me it looks like not just a civil case with UCLA. To me it looks like a straight criminal case of violation of federal civil rights law that FBI is supposed to prosecute. I.e. instead of collective punishment for the whole UCLA, i'd go with criminal prosecution against the specific individuals who perpetrated (i.e. those protesters who perpetrated the discrimination of Jews) as well as who materially supported (i.e. the administrators for example) those crimes.
i wish institutions would do the work to publish their sources in a way that is clear complete and verifiable.
i would love to understand what others on hn do day-to-day other than takes cues from media they “trust”.
Edit: Incidentally, Trump absolutely gutted the Department of Education, including the Office of Civil Rights, appointing loyalists who explicitly don’t believe it should exist. Are these the actions of a president concerned with civil rights?
Also, indulge us in a wild guess as to what Trump would’ve done to the Little Rock 9. Consider that he signed a full-page newspaper ad calling for the death of the Central Park 5, a wrongfully convicted group of Black and Latino teenagers.
Invoking our civil rights legacy here is perverse.
Their goal isn't to build legal cases against actual offenses, their goal is extortion.
The faculty should take this opportunity to make the Universities drastically reduce the dead weight of administrators who have grown much more than faculty and produce no value.
That’s not at all clear. Regardless, there is no proportionality in the actions that this administration is taking against UCLA and other eminent universities. The tools for righting civil rights issues in education should be through consent decrees that permit the DOJ to set criteria and monitor for compliance. The destruction of a large part of the research enterprise for these claims, particularly when the claims are widely regarded as nonsense, is heavy-handed and gives the distinct impression of another agenda.
for university administrative departments , thoughtful corresponding things that capture what they do all day in understandable and defensible ways.
Also, Tao points out maybe the most important criticism of the Trump administration, which is how is cutting off all federal research funding improving the ability of faculty to do their work, given that the reason for an antidiscrimination claim in that setting is that discrimination prevents faculty from doing their work?
To my worried eyes this looks too much like Russia circa 2000 for comfort. Or Turkey early in Erdogan’s reign. Whatever happens, it will be painful and damaging.
The US House of Representatives has 219 GOPers that voted to pass certain legislation. The US Senate has 50 GOPers that voted to pass certain legislation and voted to confirm many appointments.
A large swath of the US public voted to put those 219+50 people into Congress and voted to put a convicted felon [1] and rapist [2] in the White House.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/trump-trial-deliberations-jury-te...
[2] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/12/30/appeals-court-upho...
You can’t put this on a few. It’s the genuine desire of the American voter.
Edit: come on people, read things in context. I was responding to someone who was implying that a majority of American voters support this. To support that assertion about any President's policies at a minimum you need that President to have received a majority of the popular vote.
When third parties get enough votes that a President gets a plurality but not a majority you can't really infer anything about what a majority of voters want.
Even if all the third parties were on the same side of the left/right spectrum as the President's party you can't infer much because if those voters agreed with most or all of the President's policies they would have voted for the President.
Voted for Trump: 77.3M
Voted for Harris: 75M
Voted for other candidates: 2.6M
Harris + others = 77.6M, which is greater than Trump's 77.3M
They also think they are not always correct, not always unbiased, and possibly not always honest; and the bias tends to be towards either things that benefit the urban elite, or "luxury beliefs" that have disproportionate costs on other people.
And the basis for that power is that they are supposedly right about things.
Spite politics is the ultimate form of post industrial vanity. People are so well off and have so little to worry about that their biggest ask from their leaders is to bully those who they don't like.
Though I don't agree with it, I think many conservatives feel the same way about e.g. trans rights - that it's a form of post industrial vanity.
The feds are forcing the universities to either protect the freedom of speech by banning peaceful protests against the genocide, or to have the universities research funding cut.
Given that so far we (U.S) have been unmatched in science and tech research, this is probably the biggest case of "self own" in recent memory.
- Australia
This really has very Germany 1930s vibes even if the direction of the anti is flipped.
If they predicted this, then their actions would make a lot of sense. It is notoriously difficult for scientists to change careers after years in research. For people cut off from US funding like this, a EU-guaranteed middle-class income will appear much more attractive than hoping for this newly unpredictable US situation to turn out well.
And I say this with no joy whatsoever, because all these developments are damaging great collaborations and personal relationships with friends and colleagues in the US.
From an individual perspective, the funding situation is (used to be?) better in the US than in Europe. Mostly because there is less competition, as the salary gap between the academia and the industry is wider in the US. Americans are less likely to do a PhD and pursue a career in the academia than Europeans.
Intelligent, smart, critical citizens are a nuisance for absocapitalism goals.
/s
On par for this administration.
https://www.mpim-bonn.mpg.de/application
Usually you need 2 letters of recommendation, I’d strongly assume that in the case of Tao one is enough.
Generally please consider the new „ Max Planck Transatlantic Program“:
https://www.mpg.de/25034916/max-planck-transatlantic-program
I don't think anyone should get in just on the relation to Tao, likewise it is also important that they move to a program that they have an interest in.
I do hope those students find an appropriate course for themselves as this must be extremely challenging for them both regarding their career and also mentally and socially.
TrueTom•3h ago
nosianu•3h ago
Linked article summary:
"UCLA agrees to $6.5m settlement with Jewish students over pro-Palestinian protests"
> The University of California, Los Angeles, will pay nearly $6.5m to settle a lawsuit by Jewish students and a professor who said the university allowed antisemitic discrimination to take place on campus during last year’s pro-Palestinian protests.
> The lawsuit alleged that with the “knowledge and acquiescence” of university officials, protesters prevented Jewish students from accessing parts of campus, and made antisemitic threats.