I am the author of the blog post.<p>I went for a walk and when I came back I found this mess. Excuses to those that could have felt offended by the comments posted by some readers.<p>Nasty comments have been deleted. Insults and personal fights are not acceptable in the comments section.<p>Please, feel free to contribute new comments to keep a useful discussion going.<p>Cheers,
Julio
Somehow, the article is polluted with islamophobic/racist comments.<p>But being a foreigner living in the Netherlands, I can say that most of what is said here is true (I would put a few nuances for some points but well, everybody has a different view on things :) )
And according to the other front-page post on the Netherlands on HN right now[1], because there are 22 American nuclear bombs stored there.<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5853081" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5853081</a>
I'm not convinced that a salaried PhD would be an advantage. Is there not something rather bizarre about the government taxing the money it's giving to you to support your studies?<p>I'm not sure how it works in the Netherlands, but in the UK you can claim unemployment benefits without having to have been paying taxes (so far as I'm aware). Surely people applying to PhD positions aren't so incapable of managing their finances that they require payment monthly rather than quarterly? That's the only difference I can see between a grant system and a salaried one.
As an American student studying for a PhD in Germany, I would say that basically all of the reasons listed here could be applied to Germany as well (except maybe the 30% rule).
Let me add a real #12 - restaurant food there is plentiful and fantastic. While I was courting my wife, she did a month in Delft. I was living in Stuttgart at the time and went there every weekend. We repeated only one restaurant in all that time and ate like kings.
They are indeed very open minded and interested in new technology and ideas.<p>We hope that they will like our tool for PhD students: bohr.launchrock.com