I realise saying the prediction is aging poorly might stir up some strong feelings, especially given the history of American leadership in science. However, dismissing major surveys from Nature or Elsevier as "clickbait" while relying on personal observation feels like it might be missing the forest for the trees. While your experience is valid, the macro data shows a tough reality: the US lost nearly 20,000 scientific research jobs in 2025 alone.

The idea that the "globe goes as America goes" might feel like a comfortable sentiment to hold, but the rest of the world isn't waiting for the US to stabilise. The UK and EU have been actively ramping up funding and infrastructure to absorb the talent you feel has nowhere to go. We aren't seeing a global reduction in science, but rather a global redistribution to where the stability is.

Your "undetectable" prediction is already aging poorly, I suspect because you're relying on personal anecdotes. You're treating the US lead like it’s set in stone, but 2025/26 stats show that the "top 5 percent" you mentioned are the ones most likely to jump ship when things get shaky. The recent Nature survey found 75% of US-based scientists are now considering moving abroad, and mostly to the UK and EU, because they’re tired of "funding whiplash." Even the NSF’s own 2025 data (Report 25-325) shows that "stay rates" for top-tier PhDs are dropping; in some tech fields, researchers are leaving at a 50% rate instead of sticking around to deal with US visa hurdles and costs.

The "infrastructure" excuse doesn't hold water either. The 2025 Elsevier Science Innovator report shows the EU now handles 22% of high-quality global research, while the US has dipped to 17%. While the US faces massive 2026 budget volatility, the UK and EU are doubling down on stability. Since rejoining Horizon Europe, the UK has staged a massive comeback, ranking first in the latest round of prestigious ERC grants and dominating the 2026 QS Europe Rankings.

The structural shift is even more visible in the university metrics. The 2025/26 Leiden Rankings show that while the US still has a few "peak" elite schools, Europe has built a much broader and more stable base of high-impact research centers, particularly in the UK, Netherlands, and Switzerland. Personal experience at a few high-end US labs doesn't change the macro reality: the US lost 20,000 scientific research jobs in 2025 alone.

Spoken like someone who hasn't actually looked at the stats. Science is a power law game. It is not about the total headcount moving; it is about the top 5 percent moving. If the top 10,000 PhDs, the ones landing the major grants and patenting the next gen tech, decide that a lower salary is worth the trade off for actual stability, the US loses its competitive edge. The financial suicide argument falls apart once you look past the raw dollar figure. Subtract the 50,000 dollar private school tuition, the 20,000 dollar health insurance premiums, and the 4,000 dollar monthly mortgage for a 110 square meter house in a US tech hub. The math shifts quickly. Germany, for example, is consistently 30 to 40 percent cheaper across the board. The zero buy-in claim is also factually wrong. The US has bilateral totalisation agreements with the UK and most of the EU, including Germany, France, and Italy. You don't lose your credits; you combine them. You can work in Berlin for ten years and those years count toward your US Social Security retirement threshold, and vice versa. It is not a vacuum; it is a coordinated global system. Beyond the money, there is the quality of life reality. The US currently ranks 38th globally in quality of life, trailing well behind the European nations you dismissed. We are talking about a 4 year gap in life expectancy. In the EU, your kids get a world class education and a functioning social safety net without needing a 401k to survive a single medical emergency or a car crash - the latter of which you are six times more likely to die from in the US than in the UK. You claim the EU lacks infrastructure, but they have the one thing the US is currently hemorrhaging: predictability. Researchers are trading big funding for public funding that does not evaporate every time a continuing resolution fails or a political cycle turns.

Hang on you're just casually waving away "neighbouring Europe" like it's a footnote? That's 450 million people in the EU alone plus Norway, Switzerland and others, nearly all learning British English as standard. That's not a minor detail you can just brush past. So we've got the UK, Ireland, basically all of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Kenya and the rest of the Commonwealth. Yes, some of that's colonial history but so is American English in the Philippines and Liberia. The difference is British English also became the default across Europe through proximity and established educational systems, not because anyone was colonised. And "it's just more practical because of US global reach" is doing a lot of work there. Sure Hollywood and Silicon Valley have spread American spellings but international business, academia and diplomatic contexts still lean heavily British. The IELTS exam used for immigration and uni admission across most of the English speaking world uses British English.

Right, let's cut through the noise. There is a significant political dimension to this story that's been buried under a mountain of speculation. The Trump administration is openly favoring David Ellison's bid for WBD, with officials stating that the owner of WBD is highly important to the administration. This political interest is underscored by a recent, controversial event. Paramount paid Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit over a Kamala Harris interview, and their merger was approved shortly afterward. Now, three senators are investigating whether Ellison cut a side deal with Trump, raising legitimate corruption concerns. Ellison's own political history paints a picture of strategic opportunism. He is a self-described social liberal who gave nearly a million dollars to Biden's campaign. Yet, he began appearing at UFC fights with Trump precisely when he needed regulatory approval. Furthermore, under his leadership, CBS dissolved its race and culture unit, laid off women disproportionately, and fired the Gaza correspondent. This isn't ideological balance; it's strategic positioning for business advantage. The real story here is that the Trump administration appears to be using antitrust power to reward friendly billionaires and penalize others. As the Writers Guild noted, we are handing the keys to the media kingdom to entities primarily motivated by maximizing short-term returns. This is a genuine scandal about the antitrust process being compromised by political favouritism and billionaires acquiring media influence through political connections. David Ellison isn't correcting decades of Hollywood ideology. He is simply demonstrating that paying the right people and making the right promises gets regulatory approval.

This comment is a textbook example of American exceptionalism divorced from reality. VS Code isn't made by 'competent US-teams' and it never has been. The core development has been led by teams in Zürich, Switzerland and Seattle, with the Zürich team under Erich Gamma driving the project since its inception. The Monaco editor that powers VS Code was developed in Europe, not the United States. The suggestion that US engineering teams are inherently superior to those working elsewhere is not only factually wrong but contradicts Microsoft's own organisational structure. Microsoft's India Development Centre in Hyderabad is the company's largest software development centre outside Redmond, and these teams focus on strategic and IP-sensitive product development, and hardly what you'd expect if the work were considered 'outsourced slop'. Major American tech companies deliberately establish world-class engineering centres across Europe and Asia precisely because that's where exceptional talent is concentrated. The notion that quality software can only come from American teams ignores decades of evidence: from ARM's British origins revolutionising mobile computing, to the Nordic countries' contributions to telecommunications, to the extraordinary engineering coming out of India, Taiwan, South Korea, and beyond. The distributed, international nature of modern software development, drawing on diverse perspectives and round-the-clock productivity across time zones, is a strength and not a weakness. Dismissing entire regions' contributions with crude stereotypes says far more about the commenter's prejudices than it does about engineering quality.

Couldn't agree more. Azure is very poorly designed, full of broken or half-baked features and even their top tier support personnel haven't got a clue what they're doing. I've been using AWS for around 4 years and Azure for nearly 18 months and the difference is like night and day. AWS does have occasional outages but generally, they knew about them before we noticed and often even warned that maintenance may effect VMs ect. With Azure even after it's been well proven that there is an issue affecting thousands of users they won't always update their status page and their engineers are very slow to accept fault. Many features on Azure are simply other companies solutions badly packaged in the Azure platform with only ClickOps supported.

Unfortunately, this is completely correct. MS have had huge capacity issues in West Europe. I suspect some smaller-scale users may not notice the availability issues but these have been present for a while now and it has definitely been exacerbated by the situation with COVID-19. Specialised instance types are very often unavailable and some still never been available in West Europe and even some of the more memory focussed instance types have been intermittently unavailable lately. Teams also went down for most of the world a couple of weeks back, we kept messaging capability but calls using the Web UI stopped working and call quality was very poor.