Without being sarcastic…

I think Project 2025’s goal is less about “cost cutting” and more about reducing bureaucracy & consolidating power… I genuinely don’t think they have real plans for where to spend the money besides some vague goals like lowering income tax or something

And in practice, they are cutting a bunch of important governmental endeavors that have very good ROI (NIH has always bipartisan for a reason), so they are literally wasting everyone’s money, not saving

I just thought it’s more of an issue of language/expression than anything… Methinks the concept of “leasing/renting” for an indefinite amount of time might be quite new in human history, so maybe we just don’t have a better word for it

Case in point… From a pure technical standpoint, I thought a game I purchased on Steam or an audiobook from Amazon is technically “leased indefinitely with no additional fees”, but doesn’t the lack of additional fees make it equivalent to owning something?

And as otherwise pointed out, under capitalist systems you can literally own a home, but would still have to pay taxes to pay for maintenance of publicly shared resources… so at what time should we call it “leased” instead

The Chinese language doesn’t quite work that way as it is based almost solely on distinct characters…

I guess you can just keep compounding characters together. Just as a quick example, “[the] People’s Republic of China” is a 7-character word in Chinese with no breaks… it can go much, much longer as necessary, but I’m not sure if that counts, since it’s essentially just three words joined together (“China”, “People”, “Republic”)

Otherwise, the closest thing might be some of the longer Chinese idioms (“Chengyu”), although most Chengyus are only 4 characters long

Learning a language where you need to know how to write thousands of differently squiggles (with almost no rules whatsoever) to even communicate is difficult in its own way though

It seems that a lot of scientist jobs are advertised on EURAXESS (sometimes mandated by law). There are also research topic-specific job boards… for example Nature Jobs advertises all sorts of positions across the world, although most are in China (since they are desperate for talent). Also by “scientist” I’m referring to anything PhD student-level and above, so yeah. I think Sweden is the country I know which has both reasonable research quality while still being a bit desperate on looking for more applicants

If that’s not possible: a lot of countries have their own job board too, but most of them require knowledge of the local language… (again, scientists kind-of get a pass on this due to English being the lingua franca)

Some companies do international transfer too… like how Denmark is known for pharmaceuticals, so maybe someone working for Novo Nordisk could theoretically ask for that? Although I assume those jobs would be very competitive now…

Unironically… I’ve basically hinted at everyone I know on ways to apply for EU-based science jobs if they are interested (surprisingly… a lot of ppl are not)

I’m still being optimistic though, really hope the US can somehow pull out a miracle

I… don’t quite feel comfortable sharing the full details, but F-1; I have submitted a green card application too but no way it’s gonna pass now. I might find an opportunity to write about it a bit more in the future

Sadly, not quite: several countries want to, but they all have their own funding difficulties. They are trying to though, since these days American scientists might be seen as being offered at a steep discount

The HHS official announcement link if anyone is interested.

Yes, the double speak is quite strong. Also quite obvious who wrote this based on the URL.