The actual law is more that you need an objective reason for a fixed-term contract in any sector. A genuine project (such as the completion of a PhD) is an acceptable reason. The availability of funding is not.

In practice, it has been accepted that postdocs can have fixed-term contracts, because it's a trainee position. Similarly, an assistant professor can have a fixed-term contract before tenure. Both of those are in some sense against the spirit of the law, but the legal system tends to favor consistency and reasonable outcomes over strict adherence to the law.

European universities have more postdocs than American universities, because there is more research funding available. But then there are fewer faculty positions for those postdocs, as the universities themselves are not so well funded. That creates a constant stream of researchers looking for other opportunities, which American universities used to take advantage of.

Universities tend to operate strictly on a budget, because they only have limited discretionary funds. While a business may choose to buy things it believes it needs, because it expects to make money in the future, a university generally needs to secure the funding first. If you are a researcher, you don't get an office, a laptop, and some lab space simply because you need them to do your job. You may get them if an external funder explicitly chooses to pay for them.

I had some visibility into the funding of Finnish universities during the transition to the current system. Under the old system, core funding was more generous. Each university allocated the resources between various units and individual professors, which involved a lot of politics. If someone was particularly successful in obtaining external funding, they might not have enough office/lab space for all the people they could otherwise hire.

The funding model gradually changed to address issues like that. Departments had to pay internal rents to the university for the facilities they used. The government started allocating some of the core funds according the success each university had in obtaining external funding. And at some point, they moved most of that money from core funding to grant overheads.

Not really, it is different in America, where everyone is utterly car dependent. Raise US fuel prices from barely nothing to barely nothing plus a tenth of a cent and TikTok explodes with Americans sat in cars, junk food in hand, saying some utter nonsense about how crraazy the new gas prices are.

Meanwhile, in Europe, where petrol prices have always been vastly higher than what any American has ever paid, if the price goes up, then meh. Same deal in Asia, it is not as if Japan has riots due to the price of 'gas'.

There is a funny side to this, sometimes untold atrocities are committed, maybe with a decapitation strike here, a double-tap on a school there, maybe with a few mosques for palate cleansing purposes, for nobody in America to care about that, just their gas prices.

Zoning comes into it too. Where I am, in the UK, there are many minimum wage jobs where the staff will be walking, getting the bus or getting the train to work. Apart from anything, many businesses just do not have car parking spaces for customers, never mind staff.

The class of journalists are heavily car dependent though, so, for them, gas prices are going to be huge news, because it affects them. They just have to go to a garage forecourt, interview a few 'talking heads' about how atrocious the prices are, and they have their story.

I write this having not been to a petrol station in thirty years, and currently living in a block of twelve flats (apartments) where nobody has a car. We do have a fantastic selection of hedgehogs, foxes, rabbits, squirrels and birds though, all alive due to the magic of practically no cars.

But none of us are going to make the news for saying 'meh, keep Hormuz closed, good riddance to it!', whilst feeding monkey nuts to named squirrels (on TikTok). If we were slurping on McDepression Meals, moaning about gas prices from a massive truck that cost $50K, then we would get 'heard'.

In the US, sure.

In Australia we established a Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, looked at all the schools and institutions regardless of creed (and, it turned out, the Christian Brothers were the clear worst of the worst - although few came away unscathed) and then put a senior Vatican Cardinal on trial.

TBH it's been a lot harder to get the worst carbon offenders under close scrutiny in a very public eye.

It's important to note that the US has the largest number of Protestants (across all denominations) among all countries.

It’s true. In the US reality itself has become controversial. Maybe the oligarchs’ lies are just as valid as objective reality? Who can say!

Everyone wants someone else to deal with it. It's like we have a live grenade and rather than defusing it or disposing of it we keep passing it around hoping it explodes on someone else.

I see no controversy there, yes we should take some very strong action since we literally crap where we live and we only have 1 self-contained room for it all, the debate (not controversy) should be about which steps are most efficient, while not ruining the economy albeit some acceptable setback is probably unavoidable.

So no to dumb fuckery EU did with biofuels (for which vast rainforests in ie Borneo had to be cut down forever), no destruction of local automotive industry while rest of the world couldn't care less. And Yes to many other, saner activities, of which some are done, in some places.

Yes, the controversy is political because it's about controlling people. There's never a right answer to political problems because they're at the edge of deciding what the objectives should even be and how the good and bad outcomes should be distributed among people. Didn't you ever look at history and think "those silly people 100s or 1000s of years ago made a mistake and ruined everything"? Those people were no different from you - they believed their political beliefs were the right ones. There will be beliefs you hold which future historians will look at as mistakes too.

So scientists are getting a reality check. Even scientists have customers, in their case the government. In the private sector a customer can change their mind, even often for a retarded reason, and suddenly decide to stop employing your services. Turns out that happens in government to. We're all employed at the convenience and service of our customers, if they change their mind, ultimately that's their decision that can be made at any moment at which point the most practical next move (assuming the customer is unwilling to change their mind) is to either find another customer or offer a different service.

Probably a good opportunity for them to stop and reflect that they're not from a special caste or class, and gravity / global warming / all the rest effect them and the plebs all the same and that includes their exposure to the labor market. Their pleas that it is somehow special when it happens to them falls on deaf ears considering the government funded or employed scientists who have any expertise or position to comment on economics (like Milton Friedman) would preach with their loudest voice from the ivory tower that the plebs duke it out in Darwinistic free-market competition.

> It’s entirely possible Russia will find itself with a pacific warm water port.

You are 100% right. Yes, some people could believe that huge mistake.

Global effects will still catch them. The atmosphere and the oceans are global systems that don't care about frontiers. Warm oceans in Russia means extra hot waters in the equator belt, that means Hurricanes on steroids. This nice Russian port in Putingrade could be destroyed each year by the extreme weather. And nobody could navigate safely in huge stormy areas of the oceans.

> Perhaps tons of tundra frost will become fertile farm land.

Perhaps we will find that the peat soil starts releasing methane at a level never seen before. And that we enter in an unstoppable cycle of global extinction, just after dismantling science for fun. Weee!. This planet has resorted to that nasty trick a few times before.

Once it starts and self-feeds there is not enough money in the planet to bribe the ecosystems. They will fall until the next stable level of energy available. A level that may grant, or may not grant, minimum conditions for plant survival. Humans can't live without plants.

But a few rich choosen ones will go to Mars, party all night and it will feel like a Tattoine's adolescent dream!

Being rich only works if there are a much bigger amount of people that fix your needs and breeds your food. Money in Mars can't buy you a tuna sandwich when all tunas went extinct. Mars will became a very disappointing place in no time. A place that hates us with passion, with probabilities of survival abysmally lower than the earth. This people will be done the first time that the life-supporting machines will fall. Something that would never happen in the Earth.

The earth? will be fine. Go fast-forward several million years in the future and some organism will be seen traveling in machines fueled with petrol made of human corpses.

What a pointless comment.

"Climate Change" isn't caused by flying a plane, it's caused by flying thousands of planes every day. This is a real distinction because the individuals you are talking to do not have any meaningful way to affect the 40,000+ flights per day. Just as a random example.

If your next response is going to be "well if everyone stops taking flights that would affect them all", then yes, congratulations, you've discovered what laws are and how democracies work.

Username checks out. I do live that sort of lifestyle and I think your agument is bogus. Different people engage in different amounts of carbon-producing consumerism, but it's notable that different developed countries have quite different carbon outputs, indicating that it's possible to achieve the goal of lowering the collective carbon footprint without immiserating the population.

That's a ludicrous proposal.

A whole planets' society's structural problems cannot be solved by an individuals action. Your own attitude explains the 'why'.

This is a systemic issue that needs systemic fixing.

Indeed. File under "bitter pills to swallow."

It's so easy to sit in an air-conditioned house, with our 2-day delivered Amazon stuff, and just make pronouncements like degrowth, etc.

Meanwhile about 99% of the humans who live in places that haven't fully industrialized are either working feverishly to industrialize like us, or are trying to find a way to move to an industrialized country because of how incredibly hard it is to live where they are.

I also suspect that our most committed enviro-leftists genuinely believe that their lifestyle is already fully aligned to their values -- they don't even own a car, take transit everywhere! They pay an extra $25 for carbon offsets when they fly, and they "recycle everything"! They live in a blue state that mandates high levels of "clean energy" in the power grid.

They do not ask themselves where the factories are built that make the wind turbines or solar panels, what powers their buses and trains and makes the cement that the streets are paved with. What powers the diesel trucks that bring their organic produce and manufactured soy products to Whole Foods for them.

All this isn't to even comment on where climate change actually is on the 2 axes of "Non-issue ----> existential threat" and "Completely avoidable if we start now ----> Entirely outside human control." I'm just saying that I suspect nearly every Western climate change activist would be filled with regret if we started making every societal decision to truly optimize for climate concerns to the exclusion of all other priorities.

This is just a poor strawman/false dilemma: you don't have to be 100% or 0% for something to be effective or true. You're not addressing the actual claim (_why_ climate change is controversial, and particularly why the current structure makes it particularly controversial to corporations, etc.), you're just making a non-sequitur that everyone is affected by it.

It's like someone saying "tax fraud by billionaires is a massive issue" and responding "well, did you declare every single dollar on your tax forms hmm?": they're both issues, but the former is obviously a much more impactful, structural and relevant one. You're trying to nullify their argument by attacking the "purity" of the person, but that doesn't negate the truth of their point. This is like a greatest-hits of common logical/debate fallacies (strawman, false dilemma, non-sequitur).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem

There's a reason it's called a "problem." Doing the thing on your own is not a solution to it.

Sure we can all do our part as best possible, but this requires systemic change.

Required reading: https://orionmagazine.org/article/forget-shorter-showers/

If the bible cited even 1/1000th as many studies and experiments as the IPCC Reports, it would be a very different book.

> If people go into the details of some absorption spectrum they risk to get cancelled.

On the flickering smidgen of a chance that you are making this complaint in good faith, the reason why nobody feels obliged to walk you through the science is because for decades there has been a raging denial-of-service battle where the anti-climate-activist side spams questions under the pretense of "I'm just a curious individual, just asking questions" (JAQing off) when in fact they are exploiting the asymmetry between asking and answering a question. It takes 1x effort to ask and 100x effort to compile a good answer and you can only tell that the question was being asked in bad faith at the end when, after having the question thoroughly and convincingly answered, the JAQ-off completely fails to update their priors and immediately rotates to another misunderstanding that validates their politics. And then another, and another, indefinitely, because the JAQ-off never wanted to learn, they always just wanted to promote their politics.

If the science community opens its arms to this, it gets stabbed in the heart. Ask me how I know. Our response is twofold:

1. Don't assume good faith until someone invests effort to demonstrate it

2. Point to the IPCC reports, which are one of the most monumental assemblies of knowledge, observation, and experimentation in human history.

These days, "the simplified IPCC reports are still too hard for me" isn't even an excuse because LLMs exist and are good at explaining the scientific basis for climate issues. Whichever detail of whichever absorption spectrum you have in mind has almost certainly been studied by a hundred authors across a dozen labs who have also studied and answered 5 more questions about the absorption spectrum that you didn't think to ask. But the information is out there: go get it!

Once you have invested effort in digging into the IPCC report, finding a study, reading it, building a question -- then you can go to a particular researcher and ask a particular question. You will get an answer, because you pass gate #1. But right now you are very far from passing gate #1 because you have put in no work to formulate a good question.

> It is best to say that it is a religious topic. Everybody has strong opinions about it, but nobody has ever bothered to look into any details of atmosphere physics. Everybody thinks he knows everything about the subject, but nobody ever checked anything. If people go into the details of some absorption spectrum they risk to get cancelled

Wat

I am just a climate science hobbyist: my graduate work was in another science field, but I follow the field a bit and read some of the hot papers. But even in my day job we still use a fair bit of atmospheric physics.

I have to run into atmospheric physics a fair bit and it's not my area of training. I know that the friends and colleagues who are in research deal with it much, much, much more intimately.

This comment is wildly, and weirdly, off the mark. Atmospheric physics is no more a religion than steel metallurgy or rainforest ecology is. It's grounded in hard experimental data and observations.

It's only a religious topic to climate change denialists.

> nobody has ever bothered to look into any details of atmosphere physics.

I’m sorry but this is demonstrably wrong as the simplest search of reputable scientific journals would show.

You’re clearly referring to something specific, what is it?

dude make an argument or dont, this kind of half assed "I know something but the man won't let me talk about it" is annoying and useless.

I'm not well-versed in social science either so I don't have a slam dunk here, but I'd be very willing to bet it's more involved than you're portraying.

To flip it on your space telescope, another one? They've been doing this for years, they're just going to tell us there's a lot of galaxies out there, boring.

Perhaps better than "if I don't like it, it deserves to have its funding cut"

> The replication crisis in science is particularly bad within the social sciences

This is true. Your conclusion is false and prejudicial. The problem is better characterized as social science is being harder to do well than we tohught.

I just want to say that what you say makes a lot of sense to me and I am happy people like you are pushing against the narrative.

> I mean, there's zero chance my research would have fallen afoul of any such terms, but let me put it this way: my field was completely up-ended by DeepMind. They not only won a Nobel for that work in record time, but used an approach so severely out of fashion that it couldn't really get any attention.

Someone else mentioned that a project got cut because they used the term "engendered".

The keywords search cuts were not exactly skillfully enacted.

You didn’t write a coherent objection, you just said I didn’t understand what I was talking about.

As I expected, the comment I wanted to 'pre vouch' is dead and flagged now.

> I expect it to be voted down. Would you also recommend "pre vouching" for it?

I expected your comment is upvoted, as HN community generally does to 'you don't know what you're talking about' kind of comment, so no.

I agree that pure science should not be cut and prioritized. The more frustrating thing about the type of sociological research you critique is that it feels like that data already exists somewhere - between health insurance companies, google, social media, etc. We know that we can de-anonymize data to get very specific actionable data for advertising. American scientists should have a Mega API from Palantir to ask their questions as well, and it ultimately won't cost as much.

Side tangent, I wonder how much China does these kinds of sociological studies, and the differences in infra/how they conduct the research. Lord knows we're not the only ones getting fat over here.

America is facing a multi-generational technical decline never before seen that will do irreparable harm across all fields of research, let alone the human cost especially borne by young scientists who have more to lose, and your grand insightful take is that well, some of it deserved to get cut, when you're not even the one making the decisions of which ones do receive funding.

It's actually more contrusctive to outline what the post you both are replying to you don't like and more specifically why?

Just because the medical system hasn't adapted to the (frankly astounding) findings produced by SDOH research doesn't mean it's not valuable or should be stopped. The takeaway from SDOH is that social determinants are by far more powerful forces on people's health than actual medicine.

You would prefer we spend all of our money on the 10-15% of health outcomes determined by actual medical care and simply ignore the remainder, and you argue this from a point of "logic?"

I understand you personally are of the opinion that it's bad research, but thank God you're not in charge of funding research, because I pay taxes too and I think it's good.

But that begs the question -- how do you determine what is relevent and irrelevant research, beyond just consulting your personal feelings? Because if you have a sure and nonbiased way to do that which will satisfy all the current stake holders (the entire tax base and US population), I think everyone would agree we should that!

But if you don't have a proposal beyond "I don't like it, it's bad" then I'm sorry, the current system with all its flaws (delegating funding decisions to renowned experts in their respective fields rather than the sensibilities of the HN comment section) is far superior to that.

Why not, I pay taxes too and I want researchers to study things you don't like. I don't want to fund the military, should they get their funding from Lockheed? Lord knows they have enough...

I'm not going to bother to write an essay like the other person.

Here is a scientific outcome that directly impacts the quality of medicine a majority of American citizens receive: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

Research in progress to address these issues was cancelled by DOGE because "melanin content of the skin." "Do your own research" if you care to, or fuck off.

Just to show how DEI works at NASA, I share a DEI plan we wrote for a proposal just before the change of administration. This plan was rated highly by the agency. Which parts are "appealing discriminatory practices"?

Inclusion Plan Both PIs and collaborators recognize the negative effect that systemic barriers have on academia and the importance of facilitating the full participation, belonging, and contribution of different groups and individuals within our work environment in general and the proposed project in particular. The proposed project is small in scope with few paid contributors and a well-defined group of collaborators, but it is always important to have a strategy in place to develop a positive and inclusive work environment. The PIs identify three areas where systemic barriers may affect our working environment or where questions around inclusion are critical:

1 Hiring strategies. The most obvious barrier against inclusivity in academia and STEM is bias (whether explicit or implicit) in recruiting staff and students. They will work closely with the recruitment and Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) offices at their respective institution to create recruitment strategies which are as unbiased as possible. One of their affiliations is a minority (Hispanic) serving institution – a transformative engine of social mobility – that offers a remarkable opportunity to (i) ensure student recruitment plans include underrepresented individuals and (ii) increase participation of a diverse and inclusive talent pool in climate change science. Both PIs will also participate in hiring workshops and training offered by their respective universities. Finally, they will leverage each PI’s background and earlier experiences by providing feedback in recruitment strategies and hiring decisions to each other, along with collaborative feedback from the associated offices at their institutions.

2. Work relationships with Post Docs and between collaborators It is also critical to create an inclusive working environment between PIs and Post Docs, enabling a positive collaboration between all members of the team. The two PIs will work with the hired Post Docs to write a career development plan during the first three months of their employment. They will also actively promote external mentorship for the Post Docs, either informally or via established mentorship programs, including AGU-endorsed programs Mentoring365 (a free and global mentoring platform for the Earth and space sciences community) and Mentoring365-circles (a peer-to-peer group mentoring program that allows early-career scientists to build skills and grow their network around common interests and objectives). Finally, they will ensure that the Post Docs are informed about how to report discrimination and how the University can support them during onboarding.

Both PIs have participated in management leadership training and have experience in organizing the kind of collaborative work that the proposed project requires. They will continue their learning process by participating in leadership workshops with a focus on DEI provided by their institutions.

3. Interactions with stakeholders. Inclusivity in stakeholder interactions is critical for a successful result. PI 2 will be the main lead for working with stakeholders, and as such leverage their experience and expertise from earlier projects where stakeholder inclusivity has been a critical component.

Mate, if you had to make a new account just to try posting this nonsense, it might be time for some self-reflection.

> The grants should go the best proposals, not to those with the proper genitalia, melanin content of the skin, and correct religion of those applying.

I'm confused. At least at the NSF, about 60-70% of their awards go to white men. Are those the appalling discriminatory practices, or what do you mean?