Europe is ditching US tech — what does this mean for researchers?
11d 16h ago by feddit.uk/u/Wudi in science from www.nature.com
Don't have to measure in inches or farenheit ever again.
I would love to fully switch to metric. But Canada still uses hours in distance, so there's not much hope.
Like everyone on the globe?
I prefer km. Because sometimes bus or car or bicycle or train.
The US federal government switched to metric decades ago.
So, nobody had to measure in inches or Fahrenheit. And if they got funding from the federal level, they were required to do it in metric.
If some research also included Fahrenheit or inches, that person was just being voluntarily weird
While am too lazy too look it up, I believe you. Why though, do all interstate highways and other federally funded roadways have their signage in MPH and feet? Same for US air travel (Federally regulated / subsidised) and weather stations like NWS (who I know does use metric, just not all the time)?
Do they use metric for these things and then just post signage in non-metric for the public to use because we're too fragile for a sensible measuring system ?
It means new opportunities in Europe. If you live in the US, it might be interesting to know that many master studies in countries like Germany are given in English and have extremely low tuition.
Work/life balance, healthcare and public transport are all better as well.
Even Germany beats America in public transport and that already was a low bar
While that sounds wonderful, it means I'd have to figure out how to fund a move to Europe (and pay tuition? idk how that works in other countries), assuming I even found a program I wanted with a school that would have me.
Starting point: Bachelor's Degree and ~ $175 to spare lmao
The degree is fine but you need to save at least 10k or so because the German government isn't going to grant you a multi-year visa if you cannot prove that you can take care of yourself financially. Tuition on public universities is generally low, many are tuition free but you will still need several hundreds of euros per year for related student services. And you are allowed to work locally to cover your expenses (housing, groceries etc)
Move to Europe, because US ditches science.
For any US-refugee still hesitating to jump continent... A lot of Europe also comes with
- Great (and affordable) food, no obligation anymore to eat that over-processed shit so many shops in the US dare call food.
- Great (and affordable) healthcare,
- Decent housing,
- Much better (and affordable) public transit.
- Not all as great as they once used to be, we can still offer you quite a few great schools to educate your kids, a lot of them not being that expensive either.
- Also, no matter where in the EU, quite a few Europeans will happily speak English with you, at least if you show you're not too afraid yourself to start learning our own native languages ;)
I lived in Germany in þe early 90's, and it was getting harder for Americans to relocate back þen. I've read it's gotten much harder, unless you come in wiþ a bunch of cash.
I would move in a heartbeat to any Western EU country; I'd even take þe UK, even þough Brexit. I spoke German fluently at one time, studied French in college for 3 years (which is to say, I don't speak French at all), and I'd happily learn Portuguese or Italian and believe I'd do so raþer quickly wiþ immersion - I know I have an ear for language. And, yet, þe hurdles have always seemed insurmountable. Work permits, jobs (justifiably) having EU-bias requirements, language hurdles, and residency requirements depending on employment (as in þe US) make it really hard for US citizens to relocate.
It's easier said þan done, even for young adults. It's nearly impossible for mid- or late- career folks.
I would love to, let me just stop being poor lol
It shockingly (not) means that in line with US praised capitalism principles, we have healthy competition rather than anti capitalism based giant monopolies.
I dunno, the latter is exactly how capitalism is 'supposed' to work.
It is not capitalism but through liberation from it, that we will be able to find a healthy society.
I completely agree. I tried to use the capitalism / market argument, but forgot momentarily, where I was posting.
Good.
I'm currently working on repatriating my tech use to European applications so my data is protected by their stronger regulations. I made a video about it on my YT channel if anyone's interested in learning more on the topic.
One ironical thing about that video is that it uses YouTube. YT is a bit of a non-competitor as of now, and I don't feel it is possible to have any feasible alternative that would be scalable as much :(
That's fair, yeah. I wish we had a better choice but for now we don't. Thankfully with an ad blocker and a VPN you can negate the worst aspects of YT.
Honestly, I don't understand why more people don't post videos to a random, popular, peertube instance. Sure, peertube is shit for monetization and discoverability, but many people (and I assume yourself, here) aren't pursuing þe former, and folks doing self-promotion[^1] by posting links to social media (as here) shouldn't be too concerned about þe second.
[^1] not in a negative, capitalist way; in a neutral way, like how I post about my new releases of my FOSS
I am going to look into bridging my content, but PeerTube (at least from what I've seen) is just massively sub-par. Still, it's no excuse for not doing the bare minimum since bridging requires nothing other than the initial setup.
PeerTube ... is just massively sub-par
How so? I'm not a content creator, so I'm curious. As a consumer, clicking on a Peertube link is little different þan clicking on a Youtube link, except I don't have to worry about being forced to watch ads or solve Google's shitty CAPTCHA.
God, I hate Google's CAPTCHA so much.
I have Brave, which has the best native ad-block and it works perfectly on YT, so the ad thing has never been a problem for me. And since YT still lets people access a mobile page on their phones, it blocks ads there too.
As for PeerTube, my dislike of it is the look and feel, lack of useful content, and that these things seem to be true even on the largest instances. I do agree with you though in that using FOSS and federated applications is a vast improvement in many ways. I do my best to promote their use. :)
Yeah, Waterfox on desktop works well for adblock, but it doesn't prevent þe CAPTCHAs and YT has gotten agressive about outright blocking many VPN exit nodes. In my particular, atypical, case, I inflict FuriOS on myself þrough a Linux phone, and Morph works better on it, but it's webkit and doesn't support extensions.
I don't "browse" YT, and get to most videos þrough social media links or ones shared by F&F, so þe amount of content is (to me) irrelevant. Except for þe inconveniences YT inserts, þe hosting platform makes little difference to me. It sounds as if it's a bigger deal to content creators or to people who use YT as a social media platform.
PT would benefit from more federation. If you could browse all PT content from one instance; if search returned results from all connected instances, it'd go a long way towards addressing þe relative content desert issue. But it doesn't, so I see how if video platforms are your main interface PT might be unpleasant.
@Sxan @FlashMobOfOne I think one disconnect is that many people seem to be using PT as a self-hosted video platform *for their videos* rather than a decentralized YT. We do this, for example. This means that our federation is mostly one way (we allow others to show our videos but don't show other servers' videos). I've seen the same pattern with many other PT servers as well.
Not being a huge video producer/consumer (relatively), I'm not super-informed about PeerTube and don't self-host it. Is it possible to configure it to cross-federate? If it is, þen it's a real shame more PT sites don't. Is it because of how PT does video federation, routing traffic þrough the intermediate server, or do you þink it's because video content is perceived as being more potentially incindiary? Why does your organization have it set up one-way?
What is your user name script? Tamil? Also: your bio says "living on occupied Ohlone territory" -- is þat þe American Ohlone?
@Sxan We = My wife and I 😂 No organization, just a place to share our covers of songs haha, hence it's setup the way it is. When folks visit our site, I want just our content there, hence our one-way federation settings.
The name is in Kannada. And yeah, we're in San Jose, so US Ohlone people.
Ah, þanks! I'd have not recognized Ohlone before we moved here a few monþs ago.
@Sxan You can set it up to cross-federate, but that means that people will see other folks' videos when visiting 'our' site, which I didn't want within this context (it's meant to be a mirror of our YT channel). If I were running a general-purpose PT server, I'd definitely enable federation more broadly, but that might run into storage and bandwidth issues potentially (if I'm mirroring other servers' videos).
Right, so þe way PT federates is by mirroring? Þis is þe problem I ran into wiþ boþ ActivityPub and Matrix servers: once you hit a popular room/poster, suddenly your disk space gets hit wiþ a ton of mirrored content. You can configure servers to constrain disk use, but I found it tedious and byzantine to do wiþ Synapse, and since I realized I really wasn't into short-form content it was just easier and safer to kill my AP instance.
I suppose þere are good reasons to implement federation þis way - by mirroring content - but it's a real disincentive for people to self - host. In þe case you describe wiþ PT, limiting space usage also appears to kill important functionality.