The Dutch company ASML, as basically the only company in the world that makes the lithography machines used to produce the most complex microchips, has again become a geopolitical pawn. The United States government is preparing to force the Netherlands to ban ASML from selling almost any chip-making machines to China, NU.nl reports.
Great context. Though you should probably change all that talk of the US funding research to the past tense, or the in-freefall-collapse-as-budgets-are-slashed-and-political-goons-replace-science-advisors tense, which is rarely used but the current situation fits.
Yeah unfortunately a lot of this research was performed or funded by the dept of energy which currently doesn’t exist anymore. Luckily though since these types of patents generate a good amount of money I haven’t really seen as much a of significant scale back in it from universities like some other fields, at least from people I know who do this sort of work. They are mostly keeping all the people doing it on and just scaling back on new equipment and buildings and things like that. Talking with people they are mostly just biding their time until the next election as most of this was done as executive orders so it can be undone the same way even if it takes years to rebuild. It does just suck that one of the two major political parties decided to make anti-intelligence and anti-science their main personality though it remains to be seen whether it stays that way once their dear leader is gone from power and given his health hopefully gone from the living world.
Yes, biding time and running a pincher strategy of sending out some people to kiss the ring and sending significantly more to the watch groups, industry partners, and courts. Though we’ve also lost as many people to foreign institutions in the last two years as in the previous twenty.
The GOP courted the anti-intellectual vote because their ideology no longer had popular support. It was a deal with the devil and now the devil has come to collect. It’s unlikely they can wind back that deal. The only hope is that more voters wake up and start to understand the impacts of putting morons in charge.