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IBM Warns of China Closing the Supercomputer Gap
eldavojohn writes "China is digging a massive hole to house a computer building with the intent of usurping the United States' lead in the field of supercomputing, claims IBM. As of earlier this year, Oak Ridge Lab was beating China's Shenzhen Center. But now, an IBM representative has said to a Washington, DC forum, 'You have sovereign nations making material investments of a tremendous magnitude to basically eat our lunch, eat our collective lunch.' China has long been a contender in this regard, and Europe and Japan have similar goals to build an exascale supercomputer. To achieve this by 2020, the US will need to focus on 'co-design,' where hardware is developed in tandem with every other aspect of the computer, from applications down to optics. This isn't the first time a 'space race' style supercomputing push has been spurred by international competitiveness."
So everyone's trying to make a big, fast computer.
What's at stake? What does the winner win?
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It's the only way to be sure.
Apparently there is nothing new under the Sun. The reader of this PR to help IBM sell more of their HPC machines should read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap first.
Those countries are sending their best and brightest to US universities to learn. Last I looked, they take the same classes as Americans - at least the Americans who are still studying that stuff.
When you offshore R&D to other countries, you spread knowledge around faster.
Why do I get the feeling the IBM is setting themselves up to receive Government handouts.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
Supercomputers are cool, but I really don't care which country has the largest. It's a bit sad to be honest. How are China going to "eat [USA's] lunch" with a big supercomputer (which in supercomputing terms seems to just involve throwing more money at it to add in even more interconnects and processors - not exactly very innovative)? By beating them at Chess?
which is totally what she said
In other words, IBM wants the government to give them lots of cash so they can ship more jobs over to India.
If they're worried about China advancing in computer technology, maybe they shouldn't build research labs there!
Really, since when does IBM care about what happens in the U.S.? Aren't they the same company that recently told some of their top researchers that they could either move to China, Poland, or a couple of other countries on their own dime and work for 'local wages' or be out of a job?
I also remember the 1980s supercomputer, artificial intelligence race with Japan. What a load!
What do we need a super computer for? Just offer up a tax credit for participating in distributed computing ;)
Anyhow, who cares if China has the fastest super computer. What are they going to do with it that is so threatening?
Nerd Wars going global. I don't see any other explanation.
Apparently there is nothing new under the Sun.
Of course not, since Sun is under Oracle now; they're not making any new acquisitions.
It's fair to question Oracle's commitment to the HPC market now that it owns Sun, though I'm not quite sure why you're bringing them up in this context. This seems mostly to be IBM angling for more HPC grant money.
IBM says, "hey! China is going to beat you, you better start buying all my stuff fast!"
Hmm...
You have to hand it to IBM's marketing team... Nice strategy.
Making the government buy more stuff by effectively injecting FUD. I really can't think of a better way to make people buy stuff without knowing what they need it for.
.: Max Romantschuk
(sigh)
Low taxes do NOT mean low government revenue. The US government pulled in more money AFTER Bush's tax cuts than any time in history. (unfortunately, they spent even more, but that's a different story)
From USA Today, Feb 12, 2007:
The continued strong growth in revenues reflects the record profits corporations have been recording in recent years and low levels of unemployment, which means more Americans are working and paying taxes.
(It's amazing how short our memories are. All I hear about today is how bad the economy was under Bush, yet from 2003-2007, we were booming, but no one care remember anything more than 2 years back)
See: Laffer Curve.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
This is the same company that sold most of it's commodity hardware business to Red China. The same company that's heavily investing in research... in China and India. The same company that continued to sell the Nazi's computing hardware used against allied forces and for managing the Holocaust via their their Brazilian unit. IBM has had a long history of selling out America in order to maximize profits.
the company that has been taking all of the US jobs AND TECH, and sending these to China and India SUDDENLY wants US to spend money on super computers. ANd exactly where would these be built at? Why CHINA.
IBM was ran by traitors in WWII. I see it still is.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
(It's amazing how short our memories are. All I hear about today is how bad the economy was under Bush, yet from 2003-2007, we were booming, but no one care remember anything more than 2 years back)
It's also convenient to forget that in 2007, the Democrats took control of Congress, and that things really went south afterward. The Executive Branch has a lot of power (and perhaps more than originally intended), but legislation originates in the House of Representatives. Nothing substantial can occur without their approval.
Is there truly a direct cause-effect relationship, with no time lag? I don't think so. But, if one is going to blame the Bush administration for everything that occurred under its watch and (so far) two years later, then one has to also acknowledge that the Democrats have controlled both houses of Congress for the past 4 years.
are these nations using AMD CPU's like a lot of other supercomputers out there? sounds like IBM is looking for some gubment money to buy up PowerPC CPU's that they can't sell
Who invests in China? Who has Labs in China? This situation was inevitable, and it is based on decisions made years ago.
The US wasn't booming. They were simply borrowing metric tons of money: it's easy to have a "boom" with borrowed money, unfortunately sooner or later you have to pay the money back....
The current crisis (no it's not over, not for a long time) was caused by these exact years you cite.
you call this weather?
does evil never sleep? or, did we ever REALLY have a 'vote' on anything?
as far as we can tell, there has been no (0) public minded political representation here (US) in more than 20 years, which is as long as we've been watching 'it' (the process). so, in order to to maintain taxation without representation..... they must falsify the already phony #s over&over. phewww. that's how we feel. that's US. many/most of us anyway. it's quite doubtful any invisible/imaginary 'enemy' could out do our own fauxking murder & mayhem system, both at home & around the (now under reported) shaking globe.
they treat us as though we came from monkeys, & they ?didn't?, as evidenced by their tendency to encourage us to do/use less, while they continue to suck DOWn/waste/destroy immeasurable amounts of stuff, & feast on nubile virgins (of both sexes) in their palatial conclaves, surrounded by armies of (infinitely corrupted) hired goons. paid for by.... there we (?monkeys?) go again.
the search (for one honest/selfless person) continues;
google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=weather+manipulation
google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=bush+cheney+wolfowitz+oil+rumsfeld+wmd+blair+obama+weather+authors
modifying this search makes it even more interesting/scary. it's likely just a coincidence that the same names turn up together in 1000's of documents re: murder, mayhem & just generalized felonious underhandedness.
meanwhile (as it may take a while longer to finish wrecking this place); the corepirate nazi illuminati is always hunting that patch of red on almost everyones' neck. if they cannot find yours (greed, fear ego etc...) then you can go starve. that's their (slippery/slimy) 'platform' now. see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorder
never a better time to consult with/trust in our ?creators?, who may not be what we were forced to (not) believe in. why would descendants of monkeys need to worship anything (except maybe the 400 lb/megaton 'gorilla')? the lights are coming up rapidly all over now. see you there? cup of primordial ooze we are/anyone?
See: Laffer Curve.
And like most people who cite the Laffer Curve without really understanding what it is, you are missing the very basic fact (reflected in its actual name) that it is a CURVE. All the Laffer Curve represents is that there is some tax rate at which tax revenues are maximized. It doesn't state that it is a high or a low rate. Those economists who have attempted to quantify that optimal tax rate have tended to reach values far higher than what slashdot Laffer Curve advocates actually think is a good idea. Or would you like a 78.8% tax rate as one economist calculated?
Your cite to the august economics journal USA Today notwithstanding, the economy wasn't "booming" from 2003-2007; some people made a lot of money, but real wages fell during that time period. The illusion of prosperity isn't prosperity. And tax revenues generally rise every year outside a recession, so "record levels" isn't really that impressive.
IBM and the USA have a divine right to building the largest supercomputer or something?
Since when did the "Indian Business Machine" cared about America? When there is government contracts to be won by scare-mongering?
EvilCON - Made Famous by
You mean artificialy booming due to the artificial stock boost morfine. The price for detoxing back to reality is extremely high, but yeah; it was totaly booming. NOT. It made the fscking economy weak as hell. Not to mention destroy it.
Oh hello new recession we're climbing out of.
Get lost.
Here be signatures
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
See: Laffer Curve.
And like most people who cite the Laffer Curve without really understanding what it is, you are missing the very basic fact (reflected in its actual name) that it is a CURVE. All the Laffer Curve represents is that there is some tax rate at which tax revenues are maximized. It doesn't state that it is a high or a low rate.
You are absolutely correct. Also, the optimum rate today may not be the optimum rate tomorrow. However, when taxes were lower, government revenues were higher, meaning that we are on the right side of the peak. ("right" meaning direction, not "correct")
Your cite to the august economics journal USA Today notwithstanding, the economy wasn't "booming" from 2003-2007; some people made a lot of money, but real wages fell during that time period. The illusion of prosperity isn't prosperity. And tax revenues generally rise every year outside a recession, so "record levels" isn't really that impressive.
4% unemployment is better than 10% unemployment. Falling wages is much better than NO wages. I also believe the wages were better in '06 than they are today, especially if you consider the 18 million more people that are actually making wages.
Besides, as unemployment falls, wages will fall to some degree with it. High wage earners are usually not the ones that are unemployed. A falling unemployment rate means that people who were unemployed are finding jobs. People that find jobs who are not working at the time usually take what they can get and usually don't demand what they were making at their last job.
Falling wages does not mean that people who made X at job Y are making less than X today at job Y. Wages rarely fall for people who are working the same job. However, when people change jobs or leave unemployment, they are likely to make less money starting out.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
You mean artificialy booming due to the artificial stock boost morfine. The price for detoxing back to reality is extremely high, but yeah; it was totaly booming. NOT. It made the fscking economy weak as hell. Not to mention destroy it.
Oh hello new recession we're climbing out of.
Get lost.
You mean like the dow hitting 6000 in after 9-11? Is that be bubble you are talking about?
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
well, skynet won't be so lonely...
Oh, no, China is connecting a crapload of bog-standard x86 chips together and running Linux on it, how can we ever compete with that?
Most supercomputers, from a hardware perspective, are boring and stupid. Their designs are lazy - just keep slapping in more x86 chips and hope the software can be written to break down the problem into parallel operations easily, because if they run into Ahmdahl's law, they're hosed.
Only Fuji and NEC, and to a much lesser extent, IBM, have really bothered with something different, and the NEC system is getting long in the tooth.
So everyone's trying to make a big, fast computer. What's at stake? What does the winner win?
For some the prize may be nuclear weapons in a post test ban world. Its not just the non-nuclear powers either, existing nuclear powers have a "need" too. With currently deployed nuclear weapons aging and in need of replacement (from their owner's perspective) there is a desire to modernize weapon designs (easier to deliver smaller bombs, more bombs from existing fissionable material, etc). Super computers are essential for such activities. That supercomputer purchased from climate modeling can be repurposed for weapons design.
Similar issues with respect to supercomputers for molecular modeling applications. The machine purchased for drug testing can be repurposed for chemical and biological weapons. Well that's the pentagon perspective. The pharmaceutical industry will be concerned even with legitimate drug testing, I'm sure lobbyists are warning congress of the "supercomputer gap".
I remember a similar cry in the 1980s that Japan was going whip the USA in fifth-generation A.I. computing, unless the US government ponied up much more R&D funds. Turned Japan was pursuing a blind ally with fine-grained parallelism and Prolog. Such projects in both the US and Japan went nowhere.
Because they are not financially viable yet. These computing experiments may test ideas such as billion cores, optical interconnect, etc. Because sometimes these technologies pan out and sometimes they dont, I support a limited number of high-end projects at a time.
The US is still going to be the most technologically advanced country whether they build this computer or not. They build it out of technologies invented here in the US after all.
Our friends over at The Register are covering the HPC conference ( http://www.theregister.co.uk/hardware/hpc_blog/ ) going on in New Orleansl. The Nvida Fermi/Tesla GPU products seem to be taking a bigger and bigger chunk of the old high end market. Companies like IBM and Cray are using them in their own products since the cost per flop ratio is so favorable. Anyone can play around with parallel processing now thanks to the Nvidia CUDA api. If you have a GeForce chip then you pretty much have everyting you need.
Now if I could just talk my wife into letting me buy one of these. http://content.dell.com/us/en/enterprise/d/hpcc/cray-cx1iws-dell.aspx
Average Intelligence is a Scary Thing
uh....median income levels ?
sure the economy was booming: people were living on credit. this is like the old joke about the man who jumps off the empire state building: as he passes the 20th floor, he yells out, so far so good...
I don't know your opinion of the New York Times, but few media are ALL bad. The times had a wonderful piece a year or so back, where they looked at the families in all the houses on a short cul de sac in CA - the reporter just went thru one house after the other, getting peoples stories.
and the take home? people were having a great time, spending way beyond their means, I mean doing really crazy stuff, like going to vegas on a home equity loan The other side is, if you are worried about your job (say going to china) and your company cuts your pay, the profits go up, but is this "good" for the country ? If you can spout Laffer curve, I'm sure I could find a PhD economist or 3 who can show how lowering wages to maximize profits leads to bad things....
Some things are quick fixes and other things are not.
The all mighty economy is in many aspects like Skinner's Pigeons with the economists each acting like they've found the pattern. Even if the DFL was 100% honestly working for us, it could not reliably stop the momentum of the present situation because of the nature of the problem. Perhaps it could be done better; that is always speculative, and always a sore point open to criticism. Of course they are not 100% honest either...
In addition, about 30% of the population will never accept the truth when it counters their beliefs no matter how obvious and factual; it may actually make them more entrenched: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128490874
(Note: I'm not saying just that 1/3 but I'm referring to the 1/3 who blindly follow anything the neoliberals want, which to some degree still loves Bush.)
While Democrats and Republicans look dangerously similar to the informed observer, they still function differently and arguably their differences are necessary to keep the whole democracy farce alive. Democrats are disorganized and not unified, it is like herding cats - in fact, they pride themselves on their diversity of opinion over being effective. The Republicans are run like much more like a modern business and it comes as no surprise they embrace selling out to business openly and fire insubordinates. There are a few good ones on both sides; more on the Democrat side because they are more tolerant which also means they tolerate moderate Republicans becoming Democrats. The label "Democrat" does not mean a whole lot. A 1 party rule by Democrats does not look like the other side. Yes, in the larger picture of critical issues both produce similar results.
Corruption maintains a working control over the game making the two parties more like a Good Cop, Bad Cop routine and the public wastes time fighting about which one is the Bad Cop. As I am again doing with this post.
You are incorrect if you think the Exec Branch has so much power. It has gained too much power, that is true - but actually, it is not powerful.... Its a matter of going with the flow or against it. Going with the flow, it appears almost dictatorial but going against it - it appears weak -- it does not have as much to do with the individual in the job as people think it does.... or the law... Corruption is too powerful today and the power brokers determine which way the "flow" is going and how strong.
Healthcare should have pointed this out if you really payed attention to it (not on tv news.) The public wanted more by huge numbers. That didn't matter, Obama stubbornly pushed his party to suicide forcing them to not give up which is what most wanted and some planned for. Remember, its better to try and fail (for millions of excuses) than to oppose something popular - that's politics 101. Even most the opposition couldn't reveal their true position, it always had to be framed in failure -- its not good enough, its in the wrong direction, etc. Few dared to say they loved the current situation -- lying is part of the job you know.
Some think the 70s was the turning point. I think Nixon was a turning point. It wasn't Carter being weak or poor at his job - the system was hijacked so it didn't matter. Either "side" honestly pursuing their goals will not be effective going against the flow of corruption. I must admit however, I was shocked healthcare passed with any significant concessions (still pathetic, but better than I expected.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
An enormous ditch does not a supercomputer make.
Beowulf cluster!
Rick B.
In America, our capitalists insist that the individual's (i.e., their own) interests come before the state's and the people's, and anything that they do is justified by the profit motive even if it should hurt America. In China, capitalism is used as a motivational tool to benefit the state - with the constraint that hurting the state will result in your being gifted with some of that uniquely Chinese jewelry: A bullet behind the ear.
Put another way, decades of observation of America taught China that you cannot depend upon "enlightened self-interest" or "their responsibility to shareholders" to keep humans motivated by greed on the high road, but if you shoot those who drift off the road you've chosen, you don't need sidewalks.
Put another way, China weaponized trade and used American greed against us. And now such as IBM wish to complain about the consequences of their eagerness to be fabulously wealthy victims? Who built Lenovo? Little green men from Mars?
Put another way, IBM whining about China investing in making them obsolete after a decade or two of IBM trying to make technology jobs in America obsolete is not American capitalism, it is American greed - and all that we have left.
Put another way, America herds cats, while China trains a tiger.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Why is IBM complaining now? They sent the Lenovo (Thinkpad) intellectual property to China, and expect China won't learn anything from it? And when the US takes out loans to try to re-grow US-based IP and regain its leadership, will IBM be paying for that?
If people haven't figured out what outsourcing and free trade really are doing to the US in the long-run, it's time to get a clue.
A computer is a means to an end. Being the first to occupy space. Going to the moon. Reducing carbon emissions by 90%. 100% energy independence. Those are goals. Building the biggest, fastest computer? That's like going out to build the world's biggest hammer without a house to build.
the only thing the US government wants to do with supercomputers is to make sure their massive cache of nukes can still go kabloowie.
Yeah, and that booming economy wasn't, like, the result of an unsustainable and ill-advised expansion of credit by an out-of-control financial sector, and a monstrous housing bubble or anything.
BTW, the Laffer Curve is pseudo-economics of the first-degree.
This is a ploy by IBM to get more government money. IBM and Cray are the two major super computer companies supplying the U.S. government. IBM at Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Argonne and Cray at Oak Ridge. IBM also has contracts at the NSA and Fermilab. IBM has gotten a large portion of its U.S. money from the government since its inception, providing punch card machines for the 1890 census for the U.S. census office. IBM has 400k employees of whom 100k are in the U.S., the largest tech company in the world, dwarfing all others. Yet I can't think of a single decent commercial product IBM makes. The Cell processor? The current Cray inc has very little to do with Seymour Cray, the name was bought by Tera computer. Tera computer was co-founded by Burton Smith who had earlier spent time at Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA) and also has a long running contract at the NSA.
problem solved
The economy didn't boom from 2003-2007. Want to tell how good/bad the economy is doing here in the US on the scale of the average person on the street? See what types of cars people drive and how old the vehicle is, because cars are a source of pride and identity for a lot of people in the US.
In the 1990s, you had your SUVs, your sports cars and your full sized rides. Now because starting salaries for people getting out of college are essentially exactly the same as they were in 2000 [1]. Cars have gone up by 5-10% every year. So, something like a Chevy Suburban which cost $30,000 in 2000 is now $50,000 (comparing MSRPs here), but salaries are still the same, so the car is priced out of range. People keep their older cars. Also, instead of people getting rides of their own choosing, they end up being forced to the compact and subcompact sector, not by choice, but out of financial necessity.
So, if the traffic cam is showing midrange to full size sedans/pickups/SUVS/coupes that are newish (less than 3 years old), the economy is recovering. If you see slews of compacts, subcompacts, and older cars, it means people are not able to afford what they would like to get.
[1]: The only profession this doesn't really apply to, where earnings actually go up each year, is law. Here, once someone passes their state bar exam, they have a career for life and (barring a felony conviction or disbarment) can never end up unemployed.
That's right. The Democrats passed those laws which made Wall Street make housing deals that didn't mean anything or an executive that didn't enforce existing laws...
Oh wait.
Isn't that what Fascism is?
I believe that when IBM was formed, it was International Business Machines. There is a reason it isn't called American Business Machines.
... this is what you get. Other countries jumping ahead of you. It's really a shame that conservatives have convinced everyone that governments can't do anything right except fighting protracted, useless wars, torturing enemies du jour, and spying on citizens. Otherwise we might actually have government projects that could do things that no private enterprise now has the time window to exploit (i.e., things that take longer than a fiscal quarter) - high-speed rail, more secure/robust power infrastructure, supercomputing research - just to name a few. Yes, we "sort of" encourage these sorts of things via government now, but only to a minimal level and with "public-private" partnerships that work worse than a purely governmental solution.
When the conservatives finally wedge us economically back to the status of a third-world country, I hope they'll be happy with themselves. Because we all know Somalia is the kind of laissez-faire paradise that they've wanted all along.
That is all.
This feels like a weapons dealer telling you if you don't buy his stuff the other side will and you will lose, and that he'll fix that with a blank check...
[1]: The only profession this doesn't really apply to, where earnings actually go up each year, is law. Here, once someone passes their state bar exam, they have a career for life and (barring a felony conviction or disbarment) can never end up unemployed.
OMG...No. Seriously. Law is probably the most insecure profession right now; thousands of attorneys have been laid off, tens of thousands of struggling solo practitioners are struggling or bankrupt, and the law schools churn out approximately 45,000 graduates a year for, at best, 30,000 positions. Do a google search for "unemployed law graduates" or "law school scam blogs."
This is what happens when the competition got more disposable income than you do. ...
Their flat screen gets bigger, their car becomes cooler than yours, they move to better neighborhoods,
I believe a bitgrid chip would cost $10k or so for the first samples. If I'm right about this, it should be capable of scaling into the Exaflop range if you slapped enough of them together, at a cost of $10,000,000.
IBM announced two new and totally unrelated government contracts with the United States and China. Stockholders are pleased.
Does calling somebody a name while they're whipping you change the fact that they're whipping you?
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Its funny that nations which manage to get into wars regularly make themselves high moral judges over China at each occasion. Yes, not everything is good in China right now. But they have gone a long way since the beginning of the last century. And don't forget: totalitarianism was an invention of the West, and China is struggling hard to overcome its consequences.
So, no i don't understand why it not good news that one of the biggest nations develops. In the moment when China develops, salaries and standard of living there will rise. Thats good for the people there and good for the US and Europe, since then jobs will come back.
Seeing the stability of the region, i would rather prefer a wealthy and well-developed china than a underdeveloped country.
Those numbers are a lot better than the numbers for any other major, where the ratio of positions for applications can go from 1 in 2 up to 1 in 10. Even lawyers from T4 schools are certain to get six digit salaries in five years. T3 or T2 school graduates will be rocking 7 digits, especially if they live in NY, LA, Houston, Dallas, or DC. T1 graduates are set for life barring a felony conviction.
No, it may not be at the premiere Dewey, Cheatem, & Howe law firm, but there is always a place for an attorney. I have yet to see a single J. D. make less than $80,000 a year, while most other fields, people struggle to cut even the 40k mark when they graduate college, this is assuming one can find a job in this economy.
If this was not the case, then why do high school counselors warn graduating seniors against going into hard sciences and tell them to go the business/law route if they want to be productive citizens in the US?
yet from 2003-2007, we were booming
You know the thing about "booming economies"? They eventually go boom. But the process starts when the bubble appears, not when it bursts.
Isn't that what Fascism is?
China is fascist, there's little doubt about it (unlike all those bullshit lists that purport to prove that US is fascist).
So, now that we've established that fact, is it any consolation? Or one more reason to worry?
However, when taxes were lower, government revenues were higher, meaning that we are on the right side of the peak. ("right" meaning direction, not "correct")
I laughed when I read that. Government revenues typically go up from one year to the next regardless of changes in tax rates simply because of growth in the GDP. The real comparison to make is government revenue as a percentage of GDP. I suspect it's more likely we're on the left side of the Laffer curve.
China has bought IBM http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4077579.stm
No.
http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/139
Here be signatures
In America, our capitalists insist that the individual's (i.e., their own) interests come before the state's and the people's, and anything that they do is justified by the profit motive even if it should hurt America
Why has everyone been so negative? Somehow when your neighbor is striving to get ahead, woe is me. To recap the commentary capitalist IBM has sold out to the reds, who knows what they're plotting.
Maybe the sentiment can be explained. American unemployment is at stagnantly high levels, and look at China, who has been behind for so long, they shouldn't be catching up in the passing lane. Change is alarming, but it's inevitable, and change is everywhere.
So much for the psychology - look at it from a different economic angle. A stronger China will be a bigger customer with happier citizenry, willing to spend. American small businesses looking for growth should consider exports. They can export to backward third world countries filled with bandits, bad infrastructure, and not much liquid capital, or they can export to China, who is working hard on improving the country and getting richer.
Whether things will turn out for better or worse is not known. It's all speculation. A major unpredictable rival at the opposite end of the world is sure to make things exciting.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Why has everyone been so negative?
I am having difficulty locating the historical records of any successful (let alone dominant) sports teams, businesses, or nations whose philosophy was "Que sera, sera.". Assuming the best will yield you this
Sharply raising the stakes in a dispute over Japan's detention of a Chinese fishing trawler captain, the Chinese government has blocked exports to Japan of a crucial category of minerals used in products like hybrid cars, wind turbines and guided missiles.
Chinese customs officials are halting shipments to Japan of so-called rare earth elements, preventing them from being loading aboard ships at Chinese ports, industry officials said on Thursday.
which is hardly a good thing when the opposing business has leadership that is not blinded by greed and so thinks far longer term than your business leaders do:
Amid such elemental abundance, your correspondent could not help pondering, as he turned for home, the recent moves by the Chinese to restrict their exports of rare-earth elements--scandium, yttrium and lanthanum, plus the 14 so-called lanthanides. Today, China supplies 97% of the world's demand for rare-earth metals, thanks to a far-sighted government policy going back to the 1960s that envisaged the rare earths as "the oil of the twenty-first century".
Again, America is cursed with individuals who think that their greed is of paramount importance and if they should endanger America in satiating that greed, then that's not their problem. The essential characteristic of America's right - of America's Republicans - is they feel that they are entitled to accumulate more wealth faster now without any constraints or guidelines whatsoever, and somebody else can worry about tomorrow.
To repeat myself, it is my judgment that China concluded that predominant characteristic of America's right was and is the greatest weakness that America has and so decades ago they set their hook (in Nixon!). Precisely as anticipated, ever since our right has been eagerly pursuing their twin goals of getting fabulously wealthy while hurting American "labor" (a.k.a. consumers and soldiers; hence, the shortsightedness).
We decline as China rises, which is an entirely predictable result when you gamble in the Orient using their cards...as anybody who has been in that area eventually learns.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
That obsessive hatred of American labor, by the way, is another weakness with which you can manipulate America's right. Why else would mighty AINO (American in name, only) Rupert Murdoch's organization be running stings on the parking lots of Detroit's automobile manufacturers? lolll...kind of trivial pursuit for a national - no, an international - news organization, unless you have additional goals that benefit from keeping the obsessive hatred of "Business-with-a-capital-B" for American labor primed.
It rather adds to the argument that America's automobile manufacturers should relocate that last of America's easily-convertible heavy industry offshore, don't you think?
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
making a fast computer doesnt seem to be very hard. /programming, efficiency of using such machine/.
i would like to know how to use such a computer
Those numbers are a lot better than the numbers for any other major, where the ratio of positions for applications can go from 1 in 2 up to 1 in 10. Even lawyers from T4 schools are certain to get six digit salaries in five years. T3 or T2 school graduates will be rocking 7 digits, especially if they live in NY, LA, Houston, Dallas, or DC. T1 graduates are set for life barring a felony conviction.
Talking to people who post advertisements for entry-level lawyer positions (requiring a license and 0-3 years), a single advertisement for a 40k a year position will bring in hundreds of resumes, some of them from experienced lawyers who were previously making well into the six figures but who are out of work. Most of the lawyers I know five years out of law school (an upper T2) make substantially less than 80k, and some of them are out of work. T2-T4 graduates who I talk to now tell me most of their fellow law grads do not have jobs at all, not even temp work. Temp work hourly rates have halved in the past few years. And if you are one of the tiny handful of people to get into Kramer Levin (and stay, since they cut a lot of attorney positions lately), the highest-paying firm in the country, and if you managed to last 5 years, you will make approximately $250k a year.
I do not know where you got your information, but I sincerely hope for your sake you are not in law school.
If this was not the case, then why do high school counselors warn graduating seniors against going into hard sciences and tell them to go the business/law route if they want to be productive citizens in the US?
I have never heard a high school counselor say this. I've never heard anyone other than you ever say a high school counselor said this. Students are told repeatedly throughout grades K-12 that the safest, most secure jobs are the technical ones. They are told to go into computer science and engineering. Pundits complain incessantly about US students falling behind in math and science, but ignore the humanities.