*if

interesting, you a full on mitt support like me? Or do you just like him better then his opponents?

As to answer your question, its rather short sighted and too broad:
How old will you be when you get your Ph. D?
What country do you currently live in?
Whats the after tax income (adjusted for PPP) of potential jobs you could get inside America and abroad at the time of initial employment?
What is the HDI of your country compared to Americas (at the time of initial employment)?
What is the economic situation of the two countries?
Could you aquire dual citizenship?
Which country would you rather live in?
When are you finishing your Ph.D (like in 1 year, 2 years etc.)?
What are you getting your doctorate in?

I forgot what is the misery index of the two countries?

28
Let's say Netherlands (I don't want to give away to many private details)
I dunno. Pretty good I thought. I'm a physical/polymer chemist (will look it up)
Let's take NL here: slightly higher
Not sure but I feel I can get a better paid job and bigger house in the US
Don't know but I guess
US seems attractive for its consumer-mindedness (I really really really like my hamburger MY way). I'm worried about the insanely high crime rate and weapons availability though. Can I avoid both?
1 or 2 years
Physical polymer chemistry

If you currently live in Europe, yes.
If you currently live in US, weird question

"Emigration to the US after Ph.D.: YES/NO? "

Depends on the PhD, and if you have reasonable job prospects. A Doctorate in economics is going to be more marketable than a Doctorate in Church Music

Just emigrating for shits and giggles, hoping for your Big Break is pretty much the equivalent of moving to California to become a movie star.

Hey Bad! How've you been? Long time no see!

Ehm... Not a church music kind of guy. Not looking for a big break, just seeing if the deal I can get in the US isn't better than in Europe, which feels like a dying continent.

It's funny that you bring up the "my hamburger MY way" thing. When I was in Vienna studying abroad I went to McDonald's twice. Homesick. My first time there I crafted a beautiful and grammatically correct German sentence asking for just cheese that my professor later said was totally idiomatic and right. But when I got the burger it was layered in that gross McDonald's mustard and those awful pickles. I suppose they just don't let you change your order in Europe. Bizarre.

A bit of a derail, but this thread had little promise anyway.

"I'm worried about the insanely high crime rate and weapons availability though."

You'll have to keep worrying about the weapons wherever because I believe Illinois is the only state without any concealed carry law. As for crime, just don't live in a bad part of a major city.

WTF? This is a great thread!

Anyway are you from the US Invy? I see you also like your burger your way.

I mean it about the Burger thing. I just feel like my years of hard studying won't get properly rewarded in Western Europe and I believe I could possibly have a better deal in the US.

Mitt Romney as President makes you want to come here...? O.o

Why?

Obama/Romney reminds me of Clinton/Dole...

One candidate's wounded and trying to carry on against a foaming-mad opposing Congress,
The other's a dull, rich, boring guy with no sense of vision...

Bleh.

"I'm worried about the insanely high crime rate and weapons availability though. Can I avoid both?"

Yes and no. A PhD in chemistry is going to make it easier to find a job, within reason - although keep in mind that while you have a fairly rare degree, the number of jobs calling for that fairly rare degree are limited.

However, the vast majority of those jobs will be in large cities. Large cities anywhere tend to have a higher crime rate. Many larger cities have bans on weapon ownership, but that just means the person breaking into your house knows you don't have a gun.

While the crime rate is doubtlessly higher here, the odds of an one individual being the victim is low, unless they're engaged in high risk behavior. So go running around center city Philadelphia, getting high, and throwing money in the air will likely get you mugged. Going to the grocery store in the same area will not. Although note that I spend as little time in Philly as I possibly can - but that's mostly because I hate traffic

My thread titles are semi-serious obiwan^2, so if Obama's still there that probably doesn't change much. I do want it to be nicely capitalist though. Not too much social security - everybody happy nonsense, that is what makes Europe weak.

@RedHouse: move to Canada!

If you live close enough to the US border you could get your consumer itch scratched by spending a day in Buffalo, while getting all the benefits of Canada (free healthcare, an affordable pension system (rather then one bankrupting the country), a rather low unemployment rate, a low crime rate etc. etc.)

Wow. Dang Fasces. That doesn't sound so bad. You do this Buffalo thing yourself?

Honestly, I wouldn't be concerned about crime when moving to America. You'll likely have a good paying job and be able to afford to live in a nice area. Yes, your job may be in the city, but you can easily live in a privileged suburb. Plus, you now have the benefit of the Internet, so you can easily locate the good and bad parts of a state without ever setting foot there.

"everybody happy nonsense, that is what makes Europe weak."

Well, maybe it's just because I'm not there, but...

How's "make everybody happy" a terrible idea? It's unfeasible, but:

1. What's wrong with Aim High, Land a Bit Lower (Lofty Goals, Reasonable Landings, that sort of thing?)

2. I'd rather that sort of outlook than "Screw helping y'all, if you can't pull yourself up by your bootstraps, why SHOULD I help you?"

3. Granted, not everyone can be helped, and maybe even not everybody deserves help, but surely the vast majority of people deserve to be happy in their lives...so what's wrong with a capitalist outlook and still occasionally helping your neighbor, and so on, everybody helping each other just a bit, none of that socialist/communist "According to need" nonsense, but what's wrong aiding according to ability, almost like a patron system...if I think a group of kids have talent, but maybe they can't afford a good college, what's the harm in setting up a fund there, for them? It helps them, they might help me in the future, AND it makes us both happy:

They're happier, getting some help...and I get the pleasure of helping someone and feeling good, and so, it's out of selfishness, sure, but still--

What's the harm in a bit of capitalist-style help to try and increase total happiness along merit, elitism-based lines...a blurring of capitalist and Utilitarian ideals, if you will?

@obiwan; that's an interesting discussion - sorry if I provoked it - but can we save the friendly capitalism for another thread?
@abge; alright. noted. Where do you live?
@stratagos: I promise you I won't go running around Philly throwing money around lol

(Besides which, you'd have to content with A LOT of uptight-ness and stupidity in America...

There's a HUGE difference between "Everyone has the right to free speech" and "Everyone has the right to free speech, thus everyone's opinion counts equally."

You have creationists nut jobs shooting down some of the most brilliant professors and scientists in the world, dumbing down our kids, and the justification:

"Well, Evolution is YOUR opinion..."

As if a scientific discussion was opinion-based!

And that's just here in California, I can't imagine the idiocy that must go on in Alabama or Mississippi...and if it sounds like I'm picking on the South again, I AM...but it's justified here, look where most of this crap comes from, and where the strongest concentration of it is...they're making us all out to be idiots on the international stage and holding back our kids and the country...and I KNOW it's not everyone in the South, or those states, but still, percentage-wise, the largest concentration of these people...!!!

I dunno, The Atlantic Seaboard and Europe seems a lot more lax about all this...

Maybe the grass is greener on the other side of the Pond, so to speak, but still, between all that Creationist crap, neighboring Arizona keeping the Latinos down, banning all ethnic studies and Mexican-American books from classrooms--INCLUDING THE TEMPEST, HOW THE FUCK did Shakespeare become a Latino text?!--and California shamefully banning same sex marriage the way it did, and FOX News...really, most of our news is bad now, but especially FOX...

WHY would you want to come here, I guess, is my question--I've been saving for years to try and hopefully take a teaching job, maybe, by the end of the decade in NYC, or maybe even get to see England and Europe as a writer, if I ever make it...

If I were rich enough, and made it to England, I'd pull a T.S.Eliot and just stay, maybe commute back to NYC and that area for a while at a time, maybe fly to LA for the holidays to see family and old friends again...

But I'd STAY, if I could, it seems so much more lax and less mental, less judgmental...it feels like socially some places in the USA I've been to are 30, 40 years behind the East and Europe...

Why would you WANT to come, I guess, is my question, when comparatively, the USA is a great nation, I love it, but if I had the opportunity to leave and go East or to Europe, I'D GO, like THAT...WHY do you want to come?

...Gee, I hope I didn't put you off at all...)

;)

obi if you're a writer is ^this a bit how you're going to do it? Seems like you can fill a page or two ;)
Europe is also a bit too modern for me. Same sex marriage is not my cup of tea. I do hate the "evolution is your opinion" thing though. Yeah, I guess Fasces is not so far off with his Canada suggestion.
How is Toronto this time of the year?

@red

I've lived all around Mass. Planning on moving to Boston after I graduate. I'll let you know if I get shot. : )

PS what's with banning the Tempest? I had to read that for English literature. Is this really true? Which braindead fucktard came up with that idea?

LOL! Someone from LaLa Land knocking the south! LaLa Land is a world all it's own so out of touch with reality as to be a universe all it's own. @Obi - suggest you look to fixing those fucked up asshole actors who insist they "know psychology" and shit and push their Scientology mumbo jumbo crap before you attack the South. That's right, I'll take a million Southerners over one Tom Cruise shit-for-brains any day.

@redhouse:

Nah...

If I were writing an essay for a class, I'd just type it all, hit spell-check, give it a once-over, and hand it in, just doing it all the night before...I CAN fill pages fast, I can type pretty quickly when I have to (plus, of an English or Poly Sci essay, it's REALLY easy to eat up pages when you can just reference Shakespeare or Plato or whomever as often as you like to just bulk up your essay more and more...I usually just think of the topic, what my position is, what I basically want to say, and then just how many different authors and works I can use to try and prove my point to a T...I just think of them the same way Plato structure's his dialogues--pile on as many different arguments and responses to anticipated rejections and differing interpretations as possible to try and prove your point to be true...that, and I just like to write.)

If it were a fiction piece, I'd type it and let everyone tear it apart...we have a FB group, some friends and I, we're trying to write a collaborative book, and we all try and have at least one person post at least 1 chapter once a week, so something's always being edited or typed or at least discussed...hopefully it'll be done by the end of the year...

I'll post some bits here, some time, if anyone's that interested (Though I'd only post my parts, as I can't really post something someone else wrote without asking them or anything, and the stories are sort of meant to interconnect, my idea of it is something like "The Sound and the Fury" by Faulkner or "The Waves" by Virginia Woolf--currently reading it, BRILLIANT, easily the best book by a female author I've ever read, already one of my favorites...it's like if someone took the characterization and genius of a George Bernard Shaw and combined it with the poetry of Eliot, it's honestly one of the most stylistic and amazing books I've ever read, I'm honestly in awe of her accomplishment--with multiple authors and styles and branched-off stories surrounding a singular plot that runs through them all...sort of trying to show a Facebook-ized world, all fragmented and scattered, and yet closer than ever, with all the new ways of expressing ideas that are, essentially, old, like culture is a take off of "The Selfish Gene," only culturally, not genetically, it's just memes and fragments of identity trying to perpetuate their existence and recombine, but it's still the same building blocks over and over, no matter how you mix them.)

^NOT a proper sentence at all, by the way, that'd be run-on...terrible... ;)

"PS what's with banning the Tempest? I had to read that for English literature. Is this really true? Which braindead fucktard came up with that idea?"

Yep, it's true, I posted here about it when I first heard about it:

Arizona has cut ALL it's ethnic studies programs...Latino Literature along with it. To make this clusterfuck even BETTER, apparently books that won awards--can't remember their names--that reconsider Columbus and the 500 years since (ie, viewing him more as an opportunist and a bigoted genocidal product of his time than a saint who braved the seas JUST to...find a country...he didn't even know existed) have been removed as well as...

ANY book where, to paraphrase, there is ANY discussion of racial subjugation, cruelty, or anything like that...

So, basically--if two races in the book don't get along, it's not allowed to be taught in that part of Arizona, if not the whole state.

So, short list of books that wouldn't work under that logic:

To Kill a Mockingbird...Adventures of Huckleberry Finn...for that matter, MOST of what Mark Twain ever wrote...The Merchant of Venice...The Tempest (Caliban is subjugated, I guess, by Prospero...? That's my closest guess, so I suppose that somehow makes it count here?)...Heart of Darkness...a good bit of Faulkner's books...

And so on.

So, yeah...

@Obi - What does Arizona have to do with A) Mitt Romney (he isn't from there) or B) the South (it isn't a Southern state)?

@Draug:

Fair point...

But for as retarded and potentially-evil as it is--just read what they do to former members and folks who try and get out, disgusting--in Scientology...

AT LEAST they're not trying to push Xenu and L.Ron Hubbard-Creationism on classrooms.

(Actually, come to think of it...

THAT would kind of make a Creation Science 101 class almost worth it, if you taught ALL the fucked up ways we've told the Story of Creation:

The Bible...
The Norse Mythos...
Prometheus and the Clay...
Xenu and the Thetans and Space-747-Jets...

There's even one from American Lit 1 I remember from the Native Americans, don't remember the tribe...

I just remember some wicked babies, and gold and silver, and for some reason, the babies were smoking pipes...

NOW THAT sounds like a cool creation story...and AT LEAST, with the pipe inclusion, it's being pretty honest about just where that insight came from!)

;)

@Draug (Again):

I got on the "Why Come to America?" point with Mitt Romney in the title...

And that was one of the reasons I had against moving here, retarded education/immigration policies, like those in Arizona.

But you are using *one* state (and a small one in population at that) as a basis for not coming here. Let's look to the Pac NW, Great Lakes States, and the Atlantic Coast/New England for much more progressive and more populaced (i.e. more representative) examples on which to base his judgement, especially considering he is more likely to find profressional level work in those regions with his fiedl of expertise than the great desert of Arizona or even the Deep South and backwoods of Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia.

Thanks Draug!
These are some good tips. You're MidWest yourself right? How's life there? Did they install your poker table already?

". Let's look to the Pac NW, Great Lakes States, and the Atlantic Coast/New England for much more progressive and more populaced"

I DID leave the Atlantic Seaboard out of this...I say that at the top...

And as I live in California...yeah, it's not as bad as other places, but the education is still terrible, like I said, the opposition to gay marriage is shameful, like I said...

And then I targeted the South and Arizona, so...

In any case, though, I don't know which way we're trending, though:

Are the South and states like Arizona gaining traction in the greater American makeup, or the Coasts, East and West?

It seems like we're having more and more of the Creationism talk, and every GOP speech has a rather anti-Latino feel to it, very alienating, and Romney's no exception there, he'd have us all showing papers like this was Germany 1937.

I sadly feel that while the youth of America might be trending more towards the Coastal Views and the logic and fairness of agnosticism/atheism and openness towards same-sex marriage, younger voters are ALSO the most unreliable come voting time, and ALSO are the ones backing RP, and, well...

We all know how I feel about HIM, so I'll leave it there.

I'm not sure I like how we're trending as a nation from West Virginia-onward, through the South and Midwest, and I think, by contrast, the East and Europe are far more enlightened and are leaving us in the dust in education and progressiveness...

So, my point is--why leave England for a country that, I fear, is socially in the dust, for the most part...about 4/5 of the states are in the dust...

Mass., New York, Deleware, Conn., Rhode Island, Maryland...the rest in that Atlantic area...

Then you have CA, OR, and WA:

California is 48th in education, and rejected same sex marriage...
Oregon's economy isn't great, either...
Washington's not in the best of shape, either...

The urban centers along that strip--LA, SF, Portland, Seattle--are doing better, but LA has one of the biggest employment problems in the nation, as does Portland, if I recall, and SF is just damn expensive...


So, my point being:

Why leave The East Coast/Europe for a place that's worse educated, worse socially, less socially tolerant, less economically viable, or any combination of that?

Table gets belivered tomorrow, redhouse. And yes, I'm midwest. Cincinnati OH area (lived in Northern KY for 5 years and back in OH where I was raised).

With a PhD in a usable field, you'll want to look towards either the East or West coasts, particularly Northern CA through Washington and Wash. DC to New England, but Ohio and Pennsylvania and the other Great Lakes states (avoid Detroit at the moment until it starts into an economic recovery) all have industry and technology. The Carolinas aren't bad either for tech and industry.

For kicks:

50 States, 50 stereotypes...

Obviously comedic in tone...but some are spot on (and it's just a funny vid, anyway, they nailed California, I think...) :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h68UJaHvG_c

@Obi - The midwest isn't doing so bad if you actually think of all of it. Yes, a lot is farming/mining stuff, but then there is the Great Lakes which merges with the midwest in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois and when you think about those three states, they are financially very solid, reasonably progressive socially (not as much as you'd like I know, but then your are a socialist by nature and I am not).

"Wow. Dang Fasces. That doesn't sound so bad. You do this Buffalo thing yourself?"
Canadian's do it frequently enough for it to be parodied in the media:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEy_22hG2j4
(Rick Mercer is really funny, but not sure if people outside of Canada would get a lot of his humour)

I do it 2 or 3 times a year (in 2011 I did it once in June, once in October and once during the Christmas season) like prices in Buffalo are on average 24% lower then in Toronto (according to a report done in 2009, not sure how much its changed). Given that its only a 2 hour drive (if you include a 20 minute stop in customs), it is cheaper or move convenient then shopping in Toronto where everything is over priced.

Its a real shame that its like that, as it does hurt the Canadian economy, but when already spending 300k each year on top of a $3.4 million mortgage, you have to find some places to save money. (This is my parents expenses and mortgage from last year, luckily as a 17 year old I am not faced with the burden of debt yet)

"Same sex marriage is not my cup of tea."
Well you'll fit right in, with Stephen Harper just illegalizing it...

"I do hate the "evolution is your opinion" thing though. Yeah, I guess Fasces is not so far off with his Canada suggestion."
YAY :)

"How is Toronto this time of the year?"
I personally like it, but thats my oppinion.

@Obi - GREAT! I love Ohio! "People care about us at election time..." So true! And KY "21st century farming, 1920s textbooks..." (or something to that effect). That was truly an excellent video.

@Draug: awesome these are great tips. The west coast sounds like an interesting place particularly California has its appeal.
@obi: that video is very funny, I particularly love the reference to Brokeback Mountain at the end, lol.

@Fasces. Thanks for the tip. Now a little tip for you as you're still young: never discuss mom and dad's finances on the internet... that should stay in the family... ;)
Rick Mercer is funny indeed. :)

@Fasces - listen to redhouse on that tip. Your parents are clearly quite wealthy (or the Canadian dollar is worth about the same as the Japanese Yen, which I know is not true) and you wouldn't want someone targetting them because you posted just how well off they are.

"@Fasces - listen to redhouse on that tip. Your parents are clearly quite wealthy (or the Canadian dollar is worth about the same as the Japanese Yen, which I know is not true) and you wouldn't want someone targetting them because you posted just how well off they are."
I don't believe I posted how ell off they are, I posted how much debt they had :P

Also its the internet, were all anonymous (though knowing the city I live in, the fact that I lived in Africa for 6 years, my age and for some of you (if you venture far enough back in time on posts I have made) my first name, a little bit of stalking might make it easy to figure out.

@Redhouse: You basing Rick Mercer off that one clip I linked or do people outside of Canada actually watch him?

Haha then you posted in how much financial trouble they could be ;) Probably all the more reason to keep it in the family Fas!
I just saw the video it's fun. Never heard of Rick Mercer. From Canada all I really know is ehm... 1) Grizzly Bears 2) Maple Sirup 3) Lots of space. The latter two really appeal to me.

Maple Syrup also appeals to me, although I don't know about Maple Sirup. :-)

But if you like the trees and ample syrup and stuff, New England has a lot of that as well. Vermont is well known for it's syrup and has a decent tech industry too.

What's the PhD in redhouse?