panda-giddiness

Needless to say, this is categorically different from a company "moving" to Panama, without even maintaining a physical presence there, for the express purpose of avoiding American regulators. It's a false equivalence.

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- The investigation concerns somewhere between four and a dozen people spanning nearly half a decade. A dozen people dying or disappearing over the course of 4 years is hardly the statistical anomaly the articles claims it to be.

- Despite attempts to link these scientists together, there really is no common thread. One person was a biologist, not a rocket scientist; and two of the "scientists" weren't even scientists at all.

- Many of these purported "mysterious" deaths are hardly that mysterious. Two likely died of natural causes, one was murdered by a former classmate, and one disappeared while hiking. Most of the others appeared to have suffered from psychological distress.

And look, I don't want to minimize these people. These deaths and disappearances are all tragedies. The families and friends deserve closure. But dragging them into the conspiracy theory circuit is not going to do them any favors. If anything, it will likely make matters worse.

And as a scientist myself, the administration's "concern" about missing scientists feels like a slap in the face. This administration has been more hostile towards us than any other in modern history. I'll leave the article with the last word because I couldn't have worded it any better.

> Ironically, America doesn’t seem to need much help when it comes to disappearing scientists. About 1,000 employees have been laid off from NASA’s JPL in the past few years. One senior scientist who is still there told my colleague Ross Andersen last October that he’d never seen the place so empty and lifeless. In the meantime, the Trump administration has repeatedly proposed cutting NASA’s science research funding in half, a plan that would surely lead to further loss of staff at JPL, not to mention the abandonment of probes that have been sent into our solar system.

> And while the FBI looks into potential foreign involvement in professors’ deaths at MIT and Caltech, the Trump administration says that it intends to halve the budget of the National Science Foundation, which in recent years has furnished those two schools with hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants. Already, more than 40 percent of the NSF’s scientific staff have left or been fired.

> This is just a subset of the harms that have been done to the U.S. research enterprise since the start of 2025. In response, some top scientists have been getting up and walking out the door. Their absence can’t be blamed on China, Russia, or Iran. Maybe the White House should look into it.

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The more interesting question to ask is: Why has Japan decided to tighten immigration requirements now? But in my opinion the answer is rather obvious, especially when you consider the current Prime Minister's nationalistic beliefs: It's much easier to blame foreigners for insufficient welfare, ailing infrastructure, etc than to actually improve welfare, infrastructure, etc.

Also, the example of "a 68 year old alcoholic high school dropout with multiple violent criminal convictions" is rather ridiculous. You're arguing a strawman. It's already impossible for such a candidate to immigrate almost anywhere barring some other exceptional circumstances.

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