Education Secretary-designate Betsy DeVos arrives before testifying on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Jan. 17, 2017, at her confirmation hearing. CREDIT: AP/Carolyn Kaster.
Think Progress has the story. All the bad news is at Pharyngula, where I first saw this, and experienced that caved-in, sinking chest feeling, in spite of being heavily medicated.* All I can say right now is go read. Read, and renew your conviction and commitment to fight back. We are in situation dire as fuck.
*Dealing with extreme stress right now, PTSD shit. Likely to be on the erratic side for a bit, can’t focus right now. There will also probably be mass amounts of typos, please be kind in your corrections.
IGNORANCE IS STRENGF
Well, if American English is going to make one of those sound-shifts and start writing ‘th’ as ‘f’, my kids are only going to be the happier for it.
I got nothing else.
Now my doubts are: can the US keep its lead in science and technology in a land of ignoramuses? If not, how many years (decades?) would it take for the country to lose its momentum and start lagging behind? Do these people know, or care?
Kreator, I don’t think we are in the lead. If we are, it won’t take long to fall straight to the bottom.
Kreator, US has got in the lead due to influx of refugees from nazi Germany and after WW2 further acquiring of a lot of brains that fled the eastern bloc. Even today a lot of scientific work in US is done by people not born in US
If Dump manages to shut the border, America will become the first very quickly. The first from the bottom.
China is already hungry for engineers and they are trying hard to lead in science. From what I hear, the pay there for qualified jobs is already climbing. So China will gladly take the first place, if Dump screws NATO big time and helps to destabilize EU enough to break it apart.
(I know second hand stories from an EU company that has been bought from US stockholder by a chinese company. The workers there claim that it was a change for the better by far. The chinese are looking for long-term growth, not for quick money grab. A significant change from previous experience of cutting corners all the time regardless of long term consequences.)
I know some second-hand stories of Canadian companies bought by Chinese Companies.
The Chinese Companies actually sent actual Chinese-people managers with
Chinese-style expectations to manage Canadian rig pigs.
I don’t think their Business Language Vocabulary List included “go fuck yourself”.
chigau, I am probably sitting on my line, but I do not understand whether your anecdote confirms mine or refutes it.
I’m not sure there is such a thing as a lead in science right now, anyway. You might say there are a couple of countries -- you know, mostly ‘old’ western nations including the US, but not only -- jostling for first place but I’m not even sure what a ‘first place’ would mean or how to measure it. Metrics like ‘papers published’, ‘students graduated at X level’ and the likes are sometimes brought up and are, to my mind, meaningless. That’s trying to measure science as if it was an industrial commodity. 14 bn cans of chopped tomatoes per annum may make you a leading producer of tomatoes, but even a trillion published papers a month do not a science leader make.
But what will almost certainly happen is that countries like China and India will become more prominent in terms of funding and major projects (e.g. China’s FAST radio telescope). Conversely other nations will fade somewhat if they start reducing funding and don’t maintain the educational/academic standards that seem necessary to ‘incubate’ grand undertakings. The US certainly seems to set itself on the latter path.
If the EU really does fall apart our individual nations may also head towards obscurity, who knows? One of the union’s main advantage beside EU funding are the freedom of movement and the cooperation that is possible between nominally separate countries. It’s why UK universities and acadmics were strongly opposed to the Leave campaign.
Long term what? Oooh, I know. You’re talking about that thing where the boss gets a giant cheque* and a new job, right? Everyone else just gets a piece of paper and no job.
P.S.: Marcus, American English has always been wrong. If Americans can’t be bothered to write “ou” instead of “o” they might as well go with “f” over “th”. :)
*Yes, I had to go back and change this in light of my post scriptum but I still like BE better even if I’m terrible at it. God save the Queen’s dictionary.