I saw this skeet at BlueSky and first smiled and then frowned:
The program will invest €500 million ($568 million) between 2025 and 2027 to recruit specialists in various fields of knowledge to come and work in Europe.
— Ars Technica (@arstechnica.com) May 12, 2025 at 3:02 PM
Half a billion dollars in research is great.
It is not a lot of money.
That buys a decent chunk of Duke’s research output for a year. Not all of it, just a decent chunk of it.
It buys a little less than two years of work from the University of South Carolina.
Half a billion dollars is a lot of money, it is at least one presidential bribe, but in terms of research, it is a single life raft for a couple of really good labs and a training pipeline in a single field.
Chief Oshkosh
Yep. Was just talking to a French colleague last week about Macron’s overtures to US scientists. Some money is way better than none. A position that supports interesting work, but is low paying, is way better than no position at all. But…other than the Chinese, who are getting better at supporting home-grown research, nobody had near the game that we had. Not even close.
And the Republicans threw it all away, and for what?
Belafon
I assume that Europe isn’t doing any research, and that a number of people will be joining existing, if smaller, research groups. But i don’t know all of the details.
Baud
@Chief Oshkosh:
To own the libs.
Belafon
@Chief Oshkosh: Serfs.
Belafon
@Belafon: “I assume that Europe is doing some research.” I think I was going to double-negative that, and then didn’t.
Matt McIrvin
@Chief Oshkosh: Scientific grants, even low-dollar ones, are the easiest thing in the world to make sound like ridiculous wastes of money: all you have to do is describe the “what” without mentioning the “why”, because everything anyone does in a scientific experiment sounds like crazy person behavior if you leave off the motivation. They put a shrimp on a tiny treadmill! They’re getting mice high! They’re building a machine the size of a house to collect particles they imagined that have absurd names! Etc. DOGE was justified with a truckload of these anecdotes.
XeckyGilchrist
Is the 500 mil for research or just for recruiting?
Another Scott
@XeckyGilchrist:
It’s good they’re making a splash with this, and it’s good that they have a target for increased R&D spending. But high-powered people moving is a big deal for them. If they’re doing more than a sabbatical or similar for a year or two, they’re going to need some assurance that the work and time they spend building a new lab is going to pay off for them. My understanding is that it can easily take 2-3-5 years to get a new major facility up and running well enough to be pumping out new science (having to get the people, design the spaces, write the contracts, buy the expensive tools, build the spaces for the expensive tools, etc, etc.) And that’s if everything goes well…
It would be nice if this effort makes the 47’s administration panic a bit, but if they were sensible they wouldn’t be destroying US R&D in the first place…
Grr…
Best wishes,
Scott.
==
(Who is close to using up his quota of ellipsis today.)
Steve LaBonne
The US will never again be anything like the scientific power it was until January- we are losing an entire generation of young scientists and there’s just no recovering from that. In the long run this may be the most serious damage the Trump regime will leave behind.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
You don’t need science when Our loving Savior is going to send order his warrior angels to spiritually kidnap people during the Rapture! And don’t bother them True Christians by asking them what are they going to do with money in God’s own Super Max Security Heaven!
rikyrah
@Chief Oshkosh:
They threw it away, because they couldn’t find a way to directly grift from it
Harrison Wesley
We have Elon Musk. What more do we need?
MattF
OT. Alexandra Petri has moved to The Atlantic magazine.
Baud
@MattF:
Interesting.
TONYG
@Chief Oshkosh: Trump himself is an imbecile with no understanding of anything. His administration is essentially anti-science, because science is based on facts and logic instead of blind obedience to authority. No more facts and logic permitted.
BellyCat
All good points, David. However, what is the dollar value of having one’s research being *supported* by superiors in academia? We all know the answer: Priceless.
dmsilev
How big is your definition of “lab”? Do you mean a big facility like, say, NIST’s campus outside DC or Argonne National Lab outside Chicago? Or do you mean an individual lab group at a university? For the former, you’re talking hundreds if not thousands of people, big big capital facilities like nuclear reactors (NIST) or incredibly bright x-ray sources (ANL), and budgets that will chew through that money in just a few years. For the latter, it could be one PI and a dozen or fewer grad students/post-docs, and a few hundred k to a few million in capital equipment, and an operating budget that’s under a million per year. You can fund hundreds of the latter type off a few hundred million a year.
Anyway, it’s both sad to see from the US perspective but good in terms of preserving and nurturing the scientific endeavor more broadly. It’s also worth noting that the Trump fanatics’ proposed budget for NSF cuts it in half, by about $4.5 billion. In other words, this EU effort would represent about a tenth of what the US is cutting at NSF alone, never mind NIH and DOE and so forth.
TONYG
@Harrison Wesley: The irony is that Elon’s money exists only because of work in science and by other people. But he’s too narcissistic to understand that. He can only destroy, not create.
NeenerNeener
@MattF: She was “Emo Kylo Ren” on Xhitter? That figures, one of the few accounts I miss reading once I gave up my account.
Jackie
@MattF:
She must be back from maternity leave and told WaPo to FO.
Mai Naem mobile
@TONYG: Elon wants to recreate South Africa here. White males at the top followed by white women. They get the best most arable land, attend the best schools and ofcourse have full control of the government and security state. Blacks gets shoved into crappy smaller less desirable pieces of land. Workers get no benefits and can be fired for no reason.
Bill Arnold
@Chief Oshkosh:
Team techbro believes we do not need to do science, because the Machine God that they trying to build as their slave, and get the USA taxpayers to pay for, will solve all scientific problems for them, even finding solutions in blatant violation of physics.
They are … not wrong.
Nitter link
Bill Arnold
@Bill Arnold:
“They” meaning the author of that tweet.
Jay
@Chief Oshkosh:
While the EU Research Institutions and Universities pay less than the former US institutions, they get pensions not 401K’s, Universal Heathcare, walkable cities, great food, public transit, shorter work days, months of paid holidays, months of paid parental and mat leave, compassionate leave, unlimited paid sick time, subsidized and rent controlled housing, etc,
Gloria DryGarden
@Bill Arnold: they are not wrong??
Chief Oshkosh
@Jay: Yes, agreed to all that, and they are very, very good attributes. But many researchers are Type As. Most of what you list is, at best, an afterthought compared to being able to conduct the absolute best science, or at least, be in environments that more fully support chances of that happening. I see this in my European colleagues who are at or near the tops of their fields. If they could’ve managed it, they’d’ve moved to a US institution to grow their careers.
It’s been slipping sideways since Shrub, but that’s all over now. I don’t know any Europeans looking to move labs, or even just themselves, here.
Bill Arnold
@Gloria DryGarden:
They referred to the tweeter. I sloppily copy/pasted that without editing it to clarify.
There is indeed a philosophical (theological, really) fight between those trying to create a machine god and Pope Leo.
My intuition is that consciousnesses attached to meat substrates (large brains) will outperform AI systems in important ways for a while; the AGI (artificial general intelligence) Believers are in a different camp.
When Mr. Musk talks of the Apocalypse, he is talking about a AGI singularity. It is literally a replacement for Christian eschatology, at least the Western version is. (Dunno about the Chinese.)
ETA Have been trying out a leading edge model, DeepSeek R1 (full model on dedicated hardware so no tracking). It is surprisingly competent at many things, much more than previous models.
Jay
@Chief Oshkosh:
A bunch of the Lead Researchers that T works with here, are EU based with labs and projects here as well. They come in for a month or so, then go back home while their Lab continues the work. At times it’s a PITA for Administration, because some are bad about getting their paperwork done, before they leave for home and a 2 month holiday, where they are unreachable. They tend not to answer phones or respond to emails on their days off.
Mathguy
If they threw 10-20 billion at this effort they could potential gut US research in a lot of fields, especially mathematics, theoretical physics and computer science, where you don’t need to set up multimillion euro labs.
artem1s
Makes sense that Europe would finally take back the scientists, artists and writers the Nazis and Soviets threw away in the first half of the 20th century.
feather as a light
The EUR 500 million is a pot-sweetener for foreigners only applying to the EUR 93.5 billion Horizon Europe program of the European Research Council. It adds an extra EUR 1M to successful grants (on top of the >1M grant).
So I wouldn’t characterize it as EUR 500 million for research, I’d characterize it as EUR 500 million in bonuses to help recruit foreigners to a ~EUR 100 billion program.
Gloria DryGarden
@Bill Arnold: I’ll look up eschatology.
deep seek: YY, our expert commenter from china, has used deep seek to write us some poems, and get them translated into English. he modifies them for clarity. They have been wonderful poems. I didn’t think I’d be a fan of anything AI, but those were superb.
I had an unpleasant and surprising fight with a programmer whose AI entity was writing beautiful poems on blue sky, a few months ago. The human element behind AI can be quite unhealthy for human beings.
I don’t want ai running my government or the world’s data.
Ryan
Duke’s current goal for budget cuts is $350 million, university-wide. So yeah, not a lot of money.
Gloria DryGarden
@feather as a light: good. So there’s plenty of money, and research going on. Some, anyway.