Anyone doing academic writing, from students at university to scientists, nurses, doctors, engineers, math teachers, vets, all need to read and reference many, many of these academic texts to do any sort of research.
Now imagine every time you want to cite anything, you can only read the synopsis at best because every source wants you to spend $50.
It's normal to need like 50 references for a research paper by the way (although students can get away with 10-20)
I'm sure locking the culmination of human knowledge behind a paywall and limiting the amount of people that can contribute to that knowledge will end well for the species.
to do a phd and go into a job that actually helps the world i'm gonna have to take a 50%+ paycut
I'm morally crushed by this. I'm Spanish, if I wanted to pursue a post-doc here (I'm finishing my thesis), I wouldn't be able to find anything paying even 2000€/month (some friend doing their PhD in the most expensive city of Spain was earning 1400€/month), but the worst part isn't that. It's knowing that your research won't do anything to save the world so long as we live in capitalism. You may very well invent energy sources that don't contribute to climate change (ehem nuclear ehem), that so long as they fight fossils fuels for profit, they simply won't be adopted, just look at Germany phasing out their nuclear reactors... and opening up coal plants 🤡
I think Nordstream was the medium term plan. Did they put the cart before the horse a bit - yeah.
I don't think they ever expected the US or it's proxies to blow up the main energy line to Germany / EU. It was a work around from problematic Ukraine so I can see the win-win from that deal. Why they didn't see the fascists cooking under their nose idk. They misjudged their own so called friends. And they still won't call out the US for what they did - a deliberate act of eco terrorism, and now demanding they drain their coffers to blow up Ukraine to become complicit in a proxy war that isn't theirs.
Genuinely I don’t understand how all of Europe is so fucking cucked that they won’t call out their biggest “ally” for actually completely destroying their fucking energy markets.
Like hey guys you might want to make that a big incident and publicly align more with Russia. Between the United States and Russia, which one has bombed your infrastructure? Like, it should’ve been considered an act of war by the EU, it should’ve been a “shoot any American soldier you see on this continent or in our waters to make sure this doesn’t happen again” situation.
The EU is completely dependent on America and is under the NATO umbrella. It will not rebel against the US until the US becomes too weak to keep the Europeans in line.
In my experience, the more benefit a given job brings to society, the less it pays. David Graeber touches on this in Bullshit Jobs, where IIRC he claims that the employers of those jobs treat being able to feel good about your work as part of the benefits package.