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America Losing Its Edge In Innovation
jaywhybee writes "Forbes has an interesting article about America losing its edge in innovation because engineers and scientists in the US are not as respected as they are in other countries, and thus fewer youths aspire to become one. Quoting: 'I’ve visited more than 100 countries in the past several years, meeting people from all walks of life, from impoverished children in India to heads of state. Almost every adult I’ve talked with in these countries shares a belief that the path to success is paved with science and engineering. In fact, scientists and engineers are celebrities in most countries. They’re not seen as geeks or misfits, as they too often are in the US, but rather as society’s leaders and innovators. In China, eight of the top nine political posts are held by engineers. In the US, almost no engineers or scientists are engaged in high-level politics, and there is a virtual absence of engineers in our public policy debates.'"
Especially among crooks^H^H^H^H^H^H politicians.
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
Think back to the TV shows of the '50's and '60's. We had an Astronaut/physics guy as the main character in I dream of Jeanie, A senior marketing executive as the husband of a witch in Bewitched, and many many others. The key factor was, they were all intelligent.
These days we have Homer Simpson and the King of queens, et al.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Hey, then there are some in Politics! Social Engineers and Psuedo Scientists!
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Does anyone remember a film called 'A Face in the Crowd' that was done in the 1950s? This anti-intellectual bumpkin rises to the top of the media ladder on a wave of folksy intolerance and blather. Well, this was satire that's become truth. This weird form of popularism has become a way of attacking anyone with expertise. Elites are bad. People with specific knowledge are bad. If it's not blue collar around his neck -- DON'T TRUST HIM!
Amazingly enough, the brainwork of innovation doesn't thrive in that culture.
Only brainless jocks are perceived to have leader quality in the US, as long as you are tough and aggressive.
People think that fear is respect and thus think that the one instilling most fear has to be respected most.
No time to read this article, I have to see what my favourite hollywood actress is doing with her hair this week
People tend to gravitate towards professions that pay better. For instance, your typical Wall St analyst has about the same level of education as an engineer. If somebody is looking at those two options (because they're good with numbers and analysis), and wants to make the big bucks, which one are they going to pick, the one that will pull in $120K a year or the one that will pull in $250K a year?
The wonderful thing about using the numbers here is that it's a completely objective measure. Unlike "respect" which is harder to quantify.
I am officially gone from
If you classify patent trolls as innovators then all is well.
It doesn't matter if innovation ceases in the US because innovation will occur elsewhere. The ideas, the innovations, that tangibly improve life will be shared by their creators wherever those creators are. Those ideas will still benefit us, whether those ideas were conceived in Hydrabad or Sunnyvale. Ideas and innovation are a type of imaginary property. Ideas are written down and transmitted digitally. Like any digital copy, when you share an idea with someone else, you do not deprive the person who conceived that idea of their property.
I was just thinking of this the other day. We put so much importance on children to excel in sports, hoping that one dey they will make it into the NFL/NBA/NHL/MLB that we neglect to realize how minuscule that chance is. The problem with trying to excel at sports is that if you aren't good enough to be in the top league, you are basically just a point where you don't make any money at all, or at best have to have a second job even to make ends meet. Even if you are good enough at football to make it to the CFL, you still have to have a second job because you don't make enough doing your sport. On the other hand, if we pushed kids to excel in school and intelligence, even if they didn't make it into the elite, for instance being a world class heart surgeon, they would still have plenty of good jobs to fall back on if it turned out they couldn't achieve being one of the best in the world. They could be a family practitioner, a nurse, or do many other things in the same field, and still make quite a decent living. There's only a market for 400+ (432 currently based on quick google) professional basketball players. The market for most other professions is quite higher. There's probably 400 doctors in my city.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
why is it always the cynical capitalists that complain
about lack of engineering talent. it's not like they're willing
to pay for them.
if you're a bright kid and want to make money, you don't
go get an engineering degree. you go into finance.
Yeah, a lot of those kids say they want to become scientists or engineers but very few actually have a passion for it, they only get into it because it's what their parents tell them to get into. It's been my experience that people without a passion for science/engineering and are only going through the motions because they were forced into make really shitty engineers. It's Friedman-esque reporting at its finest(ie taking PR points from companies as the honest truth and not scrutinizing a single thing they are fed provided it matches their preset narrative).
Monstar L
Who cares? Can't we just outsource that, too? Actually, *don't* we just outsource that, too?
Anyway, America is about money, jesus, and big tits. Success is about catering to the common denominator. Intellectual advancement and pursuit is for "elitist" pricks with their fancy words and all. Anyway, America loves Jesus and Jesus doesn't give a shit about it. Jesus cares about celebrity and sports. If you need proof, just think of the last time you heard a scientist thank jesus for their discovery? Never! Because jesus only helps football players blond bimbos accepting their Golden Globes.
And society reinforces this. I've been a jock and a nerd my entire life and I probably don't need to tell anyone what activities and accomplishments got audiences, rewards, cheerleaders, public acknowledgement, and respect . . . and which didn't.
I don't see how putting engineers on political posts instead of letting them do what they have been trained for should be an advantage. Except, of course, if you have a surplus of engineers (which one never has).
In America, you purchase respect. America losing its edge in innovation because engineers and scientists in the US are not as well paid as they are in other countries relative to local prices. Why would anyone spend 4 years training to become a low paid engineer when they could become a highly paid lawyer or financier or manager?
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Maybe it's better not to have the people vote. To be more serious, I always thought it was weird that in the US, they elected everyone. From politicians, to judges, to dog catchers. I think elections are important, but that most people lack the interest in figuring out what to do in every single situation. It seems to work better in countries where people only vote for their member of parliament, and let the millions of little decisions be handled by someone else, so they can spend more time figuring out who to vote for in the first place, rather than obsessing over a million questions on the ballot.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I don't quite get the meaning of the example about China. I don't recall when was the last time we have any significant innovation for the world. Oh, and we the people don't really care what did the top politicians study in college. End up they are just communists.
It has been obvious for more than a decade for anyone watching USA from abroad.
From watching US TV series I learn that brains have been replaced by God or other mysticism. Pseudoscience galore and the good science (from PBS) has no viewers.
Universities are graduation foreign students in the sciences and Americans with lawyers and political degrees. Luckily you still have a private sector that has a lot of innovation and hires brains from other countries. That keeps a lot of the patents and wealth in USA.
Imaginary property law shifts the balance of power away from engineers and towards the paper pushers. It doesn't matter how smart an engineer you are if some lawyer waving a patent gets to determine what all engineers can and cannot build. By definition, patent monopoly grants prevent a free market in engineering services, distorting the market so that it's more profitable to be a lawyer with the right to control what thousands of engineers can do and horsetrading those rights. So smart americans aspire to be lawyers not engineers, because in america it's the lawyers in charge, thanks to patent grants. You have to really love engineering to become an engineer in america, because it's a fundamentally irrational choice to do so in america.
Patents are a "right" to prevent other people doing something - engineers, psychologically, typically simply don't want to do that (there are exceptions, and lo, they are giant douchebags hated by most actual engineers - see edison vs. tesla...).
Politicians in America (especially at the higher levels) are almost exclusively lawyers, with a handful of businessmen and sports or movie stars. The only exception are the two or maybe three former doctors that I can think of out of about a thousand in the house and senate. There are a few religious nuts sprinkled in, too -- but for the most part, almost 100% of politicians merely cater to the religious nut angle, because that's the lowest common denominator which consistently wins them elections.
Does Economic Engineering count, or is that in Mad Scientist category?
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In 2008, NH Senator Sununu was the only graduated, certified engineer in the US Senate...and was replaced by former Governor Jeanne "Red Ridinghood" Shaheen...
If the people of the developed world knew more of history and geography, they might realize that the lifestyle they enjoy is due to their societies' mastery of technology, and that it is not an entitlement. People of the developing world, for whom this issue is more clearly germane, can see that this is so.
This should not come as much of a surprise. After all, some American people want to teach creationism in schools. If science does not get respect at the bottom most level, its hardly surprising that it doesnt get it at the higher ones.
This is the first generation that has lower expectations than the previous one.
We just got greedy, lazy and too drunk/stoned to give a shit.
I don't blame society, government or any other accretive social construct.
WE did it to ourselves.
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It seems that the article's author leaps to the conclusion that a lack of engineers and scientists in politics is a bad thing for innovation. I would like to see evidence of that.
In fact, one can argue the opposite: that engineers and scientists focused on engineering and science, rather than politics, is a better way to insure innovation.
But since this article was probably not written by a scientist, I suppose we're unlikely to see any scientific methods used in his argument.
We had an Astronaut/physics guy as the main character in I dream of Jeanie, A senior marketing executive as the husband of a witch in Bewitched, and many many others
Well, if someone thinks a "senior marketing executive" is a position that inspires technical innovation, I think I've found why the US is losing its edge.
In other TV shows of the time there was "Get Smart" with the most incompetent secret agent you can imagine and "Gilligan's Island" with the most incompetent sailor you can imagine. Of course, in the 1960s you also had "Hogan's Heroes" with a bunch of pretty competent fliers. Then in the 1980s there was "MacGyver" which is the epitome of technological ingenuity.
No, I don't think you can get much information on this trend from TV shows.
You can debate in government until you are blue in the face, but if the government is the one destroying the economy, it will not help you, will not see things your way.
From an outsider's perspective, I'd have to disagree. I don't see your government doing that much differently than it has in the past. What I do see is corporate-controlled media promote a general deference to large companies. For instance, where innovators once thought of creating that great new gadget, then bringing it to market and building a huge company, I now see people who simply want to make that great gadget, then sell out to the first big company with a wad of cash. There is an inherently non-competitive mindset being entrenched, and IMO is the single greatest stifling force your imaginative entrepreneurs are up against. There is also the insane culture of litigation. Noone, *noone* can expect to bring a new thing to market in America, without enduring a barrage of utterly ridiculous lawsuits. If your product is popular enough to supply an income, the lawyers make sure that the bulk of it is diverted into their profession.
They follow the jobs.
My daughter went to a top high school, worked at NIH during the summer, and won an Intel semi-finalist for her NIH project. After noting the job insecurity of the post-docs at NIH she crossed science off her list.
She is now a successful lawyer.
Also -- note that the most famous engineer in the US is Dilbert.
The popular belief these days is that everyone is allowed to a have 'democratic' opinion on any subject regardless if they have any clue as to what they are talking about.
No more do we look up, listen to and expect people with expertise to give us the benefit of their experience. Rather we shun 'experts' with their 'facts', since surely that sort of commitment to their field has made them biased and unreliable sources. Only the truly uneducated and ignorant are 'pure' in their innocence, only the most intuitive, simplistic and superficial description of the world maybe be considered honest. Anyone with an explanation longer than a sound bite, let alone a formula, is a charlatan, using his book-knowledge to fool us!
Trust your gut feelings, your most primitive prejudice, that which you share with those who are the loudest. Because they are the ones in charge now, they are the ones who get what they want in this world. Who gives a toss about the laws of physics, logic or math, when the truth is determined by everyone - with mod points.
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
I don't think China is communist by any sense of the word. It is a dictatorship and that's true. And I do think democracy is a mess.
But I don't think a country which lets large foreign corporations open large factories on its soil can be described as "Communism" by any sense of the term. In fact:
"7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan. " ... "all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation"
When we keep cutting (or allowing to stagnate) the funding for science and engineering research, this is exactly what we get. We can't expect good science to be done with no financial backing. Scientists who love their work will indeed work for embarrassingly little money, but eventually they do need to pay the bills to keep the lights on in the lab to keep the work moving.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
From TFA: "Already, 70% of engineers with PhD’s who graduate from U.S. universities are foreign-born. Increasingly, these talented individuals are not staying in the U.S – instead, they’re returning home, where they find greater opportunities.
Part of the problem is the lack of priority U.S. parents place on core education. But there are also problems inherent in our public education system. We simply don’t have enough qualified math and science teachers. Many of those teaching math and science have never taken a university-level course in those subjects."
Um. If the jobs aren't there for US grads, it's the fault of their parents and teachers? Logic much? Seems like a rational choice to avoid areas where there's not a lot of work on.
Why not look at how entrepreneurs are funded -- by VCs who fund almost exclusively men, even though businesses started by and run by women are twice as likely to succeed.
Why not look at the gross discrimination against women in engineering, science and mathematics at all levels -- we could easily double the pool of US engineering talent by simply developing more objective measures of success, or at least heeding them where available.
Hey, screw you! We *also* overwhelmingly believe in alien abductions and psychics!
Many grow up in homes of faith, if only the good news story of Bill Gates, the evils of Linux and a warning about Google could be presented in a more clear way:
1 In the beginning was the DOS, and the DOS was THE OS, and it was good. And behold the Gates said, “Thou shalt not tinker with my disciple Paterson's design for it is good and it workith. For Paterson made the DOS, and lo of all of his OS work, from the designs which I, the Gates, paid him upon the street.”
2 “And shouldst thou hack with it, and crack all manner of foul improvements upon it, and profane its internal parts, thou shalt surely have malfunctions, and in the midst of important work thou shalt surely come to crash.”
3 And as the versions passed men in their ignorance and arrogance didst forget the word of the Gates and began to profane the DOS. The tribe of the gamesman did place 3d and extended memory upon the DOS and their texture artists didst expand the tolerances and alter colors to their liking, their clearness of mind being clouded by imagination.
4 Their hackers did compile all manner of foul code upon the DOS and did so alter it that it became expensive to use. For lo, the developers didst charge a great tax upon the purchasers of the DOS so that the lowly cubicle worker could not afford a license. And the profaning of the internal code didst render it unworkable when the connecting of the net fell upon it and didst try and fit more users of applications onto the network than the holy number of ten, appointed for the Intel.
5 And lo, they didst install cheap 3d cards, which are an abomination unto the Gates. For they doth break and lose their zero when thou dost need true math. And those who have upgraded so will be rebooted in great numbers by their errors in the games.
6 And it came to pass that the Gates didst see the abomination wrought by man and didst cause, as he had warned, fearful malfunctions to come upon the abominations and upon the developers who thought they could code no wrong.
7 Seeing the malfunctions and the confusion of men, the student of the underworld did see an opportunity to further ensnare man and didst bring forth an OS copyrighted for free, whose CLI was such that they looked and coded like a UNIX server, yet the eyes of man being clouded, they were consumed by the free servers and did install vast quantities of them.
8 And being a deceitful European the student of the underworld did make these free servers difficult to the gamers of earth and they were unable to tinker much with the design, and lo these free servers did appear to function.
9 And the European one also brought forth servers in which the cores didst both power manage and scale smoothly and which require a “guru” to make them appear stable.
10 But admins being stupid did not understand these new servers and didst proceed to code themselves with the free servers and with the packet pushing and pulling for lo their manual of Emacs required great intelligence which admins had long since forsaken. Yet admins continue to gloat over these free servers blaming evil corporations for the negligent reboots which they themselves had committed.
11 And when telco networks had been totally ensnared with the free servers, the student of the underworld didst cause a plague of the terrible Google to descend upon man and the free servers delivered their retribution upon men. And there was a great wailing and phishing of credit in the land.
12 Then seeing that the eyes of man were slowly being opened and that man was truly sorrowful for his sinful misdeeds, the Gates did send his marketers in the form of academics who did hear and obey the teachings of the prophet and who didst restore the profaned servers to their proper configuration, and lo, to the amazement of investors they didst begin to profit as the prophet had intended.
13 And the deans of the colleges didst remove tenure from the charlatans and socialists on the facilities, and there was joy and profit in the internet, except for the evil trolls which tried occasionally to prey on the men and women of the internet and who were sent to the place of eternal negative moderation by the followers of Ballmer.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
There is nothing to qualify the statement ,"In the US, almost no engineers or scientists are engaged in high-level politics".
It is well known that the high level politicians in the U.S. are "Social Engineers","Social Scientists" and "Scientologists".
It must be so too. How else could we live our lives day to day without Republicrats to protect us from ourselves, raise and educate our children, use our individual value as labor to back the dollar, keep us fed, housed and healthy, decide our national morality, and utilize the full potential of the citizenry to drive their personal aspirations for wealth and power at the cost of the freedom we forgot we had ? Damn, as a nation of pinheads, we need our "political scientists and engineers" or we would surely languish in the pure hell of freedom,prosperity,life liberty and potential happiness the founding fathers tried to foist off on us.
Now just who the hell is Forbes trying to fool ?....
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Of course, when the day comes that Indian and Chinese scientists and engineers prefer to stay home rather than be second-class aliens in the USA we'll have to make other plans. Sue them, maybe.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Hey, then there are some in Politics! Social Engineers and Psuedo Scientists!
Is theology a (social) science? We have way the heck too many of that type in charge, here in the usa.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
"Innovation" is thrown out to appeal to the young and the naive. Everyone wants to think they're doing something that is making the world a better place so our corporate overlords tap into that by turning every scientific and engineering innovation into something akin to the wheel or the light bulb. Let's face it, big-screen televisions and iPhones may bring pleasure to those who buy them but they don't meet any fundamental human need.
If you want to know why this country doesn't exalt engineers like other countries you just need to look around the U.S.. We may complain about our infrastructure but it far exceeds the infrastructure of most countries. We have well designed homes, roads, water distribution, and sewer systems. The really important areas have already been engineered, so what is left? The need to "green-up" some of these areas will keep some engineers busy but for the most part engineers are really working on luxury items. We don't really NEED a space program, genetically modified seeds, or a slew of other items. They are just adding to an already phenomenally complex world that is exceeding our ability to understand and react to in a rational way. We are trying to solve problems created by technology with more technology which, IMHO, is insane.
"Meaningless!, Meaningless!" says the Teacher. "Utterly meaningless!"
I don't think that most parents dream of their children being professional sport players. But rather realize that participating in sports teaches their children how to work together in a team. For "single" sports, like tennis or golf, the child learns how to bring out the best in him or herself. That drive to do the best they can also is valid for academic work: "Are you satisfied with a B in math, or if you really try hard, you could get a A?"
Plus the health benefits, which don't need to be elaborated.
However, it is pretty sad that heroes for most kids are professional athletes or gangsta rappers. Not a scientist or engineer to be seen.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
The funny thing is, the moment I pressed submit on that one, I realized I had been brainwashed by too much Colbert, and ashamed for having no original thought of my own.
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
From an outsider's perspective, I'd have to disagree. I don't see your government doing that much differently than it has in the past.
- which past? If we are talking about the last 98 years, then you are right, the gov't is doing mostly the same thing (safe for Harding, who actually cut gov't by 70%, fired 70% of federal gov't to fight the Fed caused recession in 1920, which was a huge success, the recession was over in 1 year).
But the chickens came home to roost. The inflationary policies of the Fed and gov't, the borrowing, the spending, the growth of gov't, the growth of spending of borrowed money, the wars, the ever growing size of list of business regulations, the growing monopolization of all industries by gov't intervention, yes, all of those things have been happening in one form or another, but now, the USA is no longer a producer of goods. It's running 50+ Billion USD/month trade deficit because it cannot supply itself with goods, energy and even food (thank you, department of Agriculture). The USA cannot supply itself with educated people (thank you, department of Education.) USA has a gov't, which caused massive problems in everything, from foreign policies to civil rights. Yes, imagine, I am one of the people who is against all rules and regulations, including the part of the Civil Rights act, which concerns private establishments. Why, do you ask? Am I a racist? No. I am looking at this and seeing the exact same thing: backfiring. Before the Civil Rights act the young black people in USA from ages of 16-24 had 85% employment. Today they are 50% unemployed. That's not good, but the society is NOT more racist today, far from it. But the policy of the government has created this problem, it backfired, because the small businesses cannot afford any lawsuits and thus they would rather avoid hiring anybody who is a minority, than hire them, then risk having a lawsuit on their hands - be it a woman, and a possible sexual harassment lawsuit, be it a minority, and a possible discrimination lawsuit resulting from trying to fire them.
But you see, people were always hired and fired, but once you have gov't laws on your side, you can now try and apply them for any situation, and even situations that have nothing to do with you being fired.
Gov't policy on agriculture subsidies and food price fixing policies have backfired and caused massive obesity in population because fructose is in everything, because it's subsidized and cheap, while prices on food are 'fixed' by gov't and so instead of having them fluctuate, the companies look for the most efficient ways to lower costs all the time - thus ingredients that are worse and worse.
Gov't foreign policy is constantly backfiring. All of the intervention, the wars - Vietnam, Korea, Grenada, Iraq, Kuwait, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan and all the other 'unseen' wars, Columbia... The drug wars.
The war on poverty - well, here is another war that gov't started and again, the poverty is winning.
-
I am of an opinion that anything that gov't does can be understood completely by just turning it on its head, upside down and looking at the opposite of what gov't is proposing, and then you will see the real meaning, the real results.
If gov't is 'fighting poverty', then it means gov't will increase poverty.
If gov't is 'fighting drugs', then there will be more deaths associated with that and more drug problems.
If gov't is helping Osama Bin Laden, then he'll be eventually trying to kill US citizens.
If gov't is helping Saddam Hussein, then eventually there will be a war with him.
If gov't is setting a liability cap of 10Million dollars to let deep water oil drilling while simultaneously prohibiting shallow water oil drilling - prepare for a disaster.
If gov't is saying: everybody must have a house, then NOBODY will have a house.
If gov't is saying: we will insure your bank deposits with FDIC, then they w
You can't handle the truth.
I am not going for flames, I am being honest here. I teach at what would be called a "rich kids" school (in a medium sized metro area of 1.2 million), even though the real rich kids schools are even higher up the tuition scale than my school. I bring this up to point out what seems to be most important to a vast majority of "elite" families: playing, starting and excelling on sports teams. Science club? What kind of dork does that!? Focus most time on studies? Loser! I fear much of our nation is stuck in a trap where parents are reliving their lives and the kids are feeding like crack addicts off of this behavior. What the hell kind of future do we have when the "top" young people of the future will sit around at board meetings talking about the time they caught the game winning touchdown in a flag football game played in 8th grade?
Sig Registration Form 34c_766(a) submitted to Ministry of Signature Management. Approval pending.
That flat tax POS who inherited his wealth from Daddy can move to Bejing that useless piece of pond scum. He couldn't innovate out of a paper bag.
The Arabic countries led by the Muslims were the most advanced scientists and engineers in the world, until they let the religious crazies take over. Just sayin', America...
... management is greatly to blame on this. If they truly respected people with STEM skills, they would start paying them what they are worth, as well as giving them freedom to innovate, come up with ideas, and solve problems. A few companies already do this. More need to. Good jobs for people with STEM skills are lacking.
And yes, there is also a shortage of people with STEM skills, too. These problems are a vicious cycle. When there are fewer jobs, with less pay, and less opportunity to do great things, many people will find somewhere else to go.
Supposedly executive management has MBA skills. They should understand concepts like supply and demand. What they are trying to do is use supply and demand to cut costs. Increasing the supply by opening up access to more people in other countries does cut costs. But it also triggers the feedback mechanism, which is a slow and pervasive one due to the time frames involved in the long career incentive to education to employment cycle. That feedback mechanism reduces the supply to match the demand.
Supply and demand is elastic. But they probably learned this only in product marketing terms, where the elasticity is measured only in a year or two. The career incentive, education, and employment cycle is longer, from ten to twenty years or more, depending on where the career incentive phase is looking is getting feedback from the employment phase (e.g. seeing 40 year old engineers being mothballed and out of work makes this elasticity cycle even longer).
If management wants Americans with STEM skills, as opposed to just any Earthling with STEM skills, then they need make it happen. I suspect the reality is, they just don't care. They made their bed. They can sleep in it.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I go back to the same set of problems being responsible for this; and they're especially obvious having lived in Asia for several years.
1) An excessive and irrational fixation on "being yourself". American culture is obsessed with stressing the supposed significance of being a special little snowflake. I can't count the number of children's shows that harp on about this nonsense. The irony is that Americans end up conforming themselves to pre-defined pigeon holes anyway way worse that I've seen in other countries.
And with this comes the idiocy that you're not going to be told what to do. You're going to live your life your own way. And that brings me to number 2:
2) A fixation on pleasure. American culture portrays this unrealistic image of what life should be. Basically, if we're not mountain climbing, or doing some other extreme activity, by day and not actively participating in the bar/club scene at night we're not living life. So what does that mean? We're supposed to devote our lives to pleasure and not work. We're suckers if we work for a living.
There's also this tendency to "do what you love" as opposed to doing what will ensure success. Along with this comes the compulsive desire to make science and math fun. I think that's great but in the right context. The fact is that science and math usually isn't fun; it's a lot of hard work. So stop instilling unrealistic expectations in the youth that they can grow up to do fun things.
3) A crap work ethic. Too many Americans have an awful work ethic. They do just enough to get by but somehow think they're entitled to that job. Far too often I seen people rationalize that mentality by arguing that they deserve better, that they could do what management does. Maybe they can, but given that they can barely do their own jobs right, I wouldn't bet on it. There's too much self-righteousness going around.
Not that Asia is this wonderland of success. There are a lot of people who end up going nowhere in life and get just as screwed as anyone you might find in the states. A common problem I encountered was that a lot of men were so obsessed with having their own business, despite lacking the skills or resources to accomplish this, that they refused to get a job and work for someone else. Some would get some low-wage job like driving taxis but most lived off their parents and, if married, their wives. I'd say a lot of that is due to the excessive positive reinforcement and generally spoiled lives a lot of boys there have encountered growing up. And in general, I've been seeing the same cultural attitudes we have in the US cropping up there.
But the fact is that by and large hard work is still valued. Parents instill the importance of education and hardwork in their kids. They engage them in activities they're convinced will ensure academic success. They aren't fixated on raising athletes, celebrities or kids who are socially popular. And people tend choose careers based on what will provide the best living, not what will make them happiest. And they work their asses off, putting in long hours on a regular basis.
I know quite a few couples where the father barely sees their kids. And while not happy about the situation their perspective is that it's better to work hard now and ensure a good education and better life for their kids. Some of them probably don't even think that far, this is simply how life is.
My point has meandered a bit here, but the gist of what I'm saying is that Americans, and Europeans, don't value hard work like Asians do, but they're sure convinced they're entitled to success.
Many of the early political leaders of this country were surveyors, such as George Washington. Others were political philosophers or scientific farmers such as Franklin. Still others, like Lincoln, were amateur engineers.
A shift occurred near the end of the 19th century, but definitely by the late 20th century America lost its ability to elect a non-politician. Hoover was a mining engineer, but that is not what his claim to fame was. For a better example, there is no way Dwight D. Eisenhower could be elected today. It seems to me that only the career politician and not the technocrat has any possibility of being elected to high political office in the United States.
Certainly on the right there is a push against intellectualism. This is due to the (correct) perception of correlation between education and atheism. A well educated man would recognize that (1) God cannot be proven to exist and (2) humans have spent most of the non-agriculturally occupied time of the past 12000 years trying to prove that God exists therefore (3) God likely does not exist. An non-well uneducated man would think that Glenn Beck's chalkboard makes some sense.
I believe that this movement in the United States away from intellectualism is conscious. The embrace in the last election of "Joe Six-Pack" and the concern of the opinion of "Joe the Plumber" would seem to validate this belief. Who on earth would want to categorize themselves as "Joe Six-Pack"?
The premise of America in the past has been that the common man is inherently uncommon. He can make himself great through industry and intelligence. Instead, there is a embrace of the common anti-virtue. It's almost as an emergence of a permanent lower class. Typically, this change was multi-generational, but it could occur with one man.
Today, there are now people in the United States who cannot, for purely cultural reasons, cannot move up. They will not be able to attend college or find a job that pays well. There will be exceptions, but these will be few and far between; the sort of likelihood of a boy playing basketball and making it to the NBA.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
A winning football team brings back alumni to fill the stadium. These proud alumni donate money to the university. That probably easily covers the costs of any sports scholarships, and there is probably plenty left over to help finance the university. And it's good for the university image, and keeps it in the limelight.
However, to kill my own argument, do we really want a system where students choose a university based on winning sports teams?
Admissions Officer: "Son, why do you want to attend the University of Texas?"
Potential Student: "Uh, the football team is good? Is that the right answer?"
I'd rather see a system where universities were well known for academic departments, instead of sports:
Sports Commentator: "Well, Princeton seems to be fielding an excellent physics faculty this year! Anything to add to that John Madden?"
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
pseudoscience pays better, The popular ones in US are against science, so still is being debated that we will have a second sun next year, tv shows teach that aliens invade us to extract our soul and that global warming is an evil lie to steal our money. Study science and the most you will get is to be misquoted out of context in the future to support someone's agenda, or being ridiculed in TV shows like Big Bang Theory. And add to that that thanks to indiscriminate patenting trying to do anything is walking in a minefield, and you could see no good future going in that direction. Generating market bubbles pay better and seem to have no risks for you.
Funny... that stuff was also taught in the early 1900s as well... didnt we become a superpower in that timeframe?
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Salesman & marketing pukes run my company that was founded & ran for it's first 50 years by engineers. Now we do nothing unless it's chasing the competition. At that point our leaders point & claim how our engineers dropped the ball & did not come through with the innovative product. All the while outsourcing more & more tech work to India & China. & we wonder why kids don't want to go into engineering.
We get no respect. We get little resources. None of them ask for our will listen to our opinions. All we can do it work more hours (to keep our jobs) while looking for work elsewhere. From what I read in my user groups, marketing pukes running the company is becoming quite common.
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
There is an old joke in the UK, at a dinner party tell your host you are an engineer and he will show you his washing machine. Do the same in Germany and he will introduce you to his daughter.
There's a similar film called "Meet John Doe", starring Gary Cooper and directed by Frank Capra. Basically, a bumpkin-type becomes famous and amasses a huge grassroots following. As his following increases in the film, I was struck with the similarity between that - from 1941- with today's tea party movement.
Thing is - I'd take the uneducated John Doe from the film over at least 2/3 of the politicians in the US today. His platform was based on solid principles, and wasn't willing to give in to business interests or be corrupted in any way.
My point is that these kinds of politicians aren't necessarily bad. Although I guess it's much easier for the Face in the Crowd type to gain power than the honest type, as evidenced by those that actually come to power (including people like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, who hold considerable sway amounting to actual power).
That said - it wasn't until fairly recently that I fully understood how anti-intellectual and, ultimately, uneducated most of the population in the US is. In grad school I taught intro geology lab classes to mostly non-science-majors. Granted, it wasn't a particularly prestigious university, but the general attitude of some of the students astounded me - why they were even going to university is beyond me. Also at that time I started being exposed to more people who didn't attend a prestigious university for an undergrad degree, as all of my high school friends and most other people I knew had. After I got to know several people like that well, I began to notice that most random people I saw out and about were like that. Call me imperceptive and naive, but I guess I gave people the benefit of the doubt before that time that at the very least they weren't anti-intellectual.
As an engineer I work on things everyday that have direct and immediate consequences in the physical world. Hence my errors of judgment or bias have a direct feedback to me. The physical world is a hard unforgiving taskmaster.
A politician is buffered from any consequences or feedbacks to his actions by distance; the bureaucracy surrounding him as well as the physical disconnect.
As an engineer I must compromise between contradictory and opposite qualities and find practical combinations that satisfy a multitude of specifications and demands. I must accommodate as well as critically evaluate the demands of users, marketing and design and architecture people, and come up with a mutual understanding of what they actually want within the means of what is possible.
A politician is defined only by what that supports him in power - those who fund and elect him for the next term.
The limits with my work are the laws of physics - both direct resources: money, time, people - as well as all kinds of non-intuitive ones: scaling, flow rate, logistic function, probability distribution. Hence my sense for the 'truth' is not based on passion but experimentation, and I appear unsure and as having no confidence in my 'opinions' - which I don't really have at all, as most people understand them. An opinion for me is always something I can explain - at least to myself - and most of the time to others. It is this process that both helps me understand my own reasoning better (keeps me honest to myself), as well as provides a further insight into my cognition as well as to some extent of those of others.
A politician swims in the superficial memes of popular sentiment. He maybe an ideologue but a successful one is also a pragmatist: he shapes truth into what is most convenient for the occasion and in doing so may actually benefit from self-delusion, even intentional and conscious.
It maybe be argued that in this way a politician is more 'human' than an engineer and thus is more suited to lead us. And that my friends is the conclusion that cost me my mod points.
Burn baby burn!
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
It's relative. Not being taught any quantum mechanics isn't a problem for someone living in 1900. In a world where even children's toys contain transistors, it makes it a bit harder to fill your engineering jobs...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
No, I don't think you can get much information on this trend from TV shows.
Sure you can. But it will actually take some scientific analysis - a top of the head list of shows and your opinions won't give much of an answer. Some examples of what you would have to:
And you would have to take care not to let your perception of the situation bias it. For example, just because you think a given show was popular does not mean that it actually was.
-WolvesOfTheNight
Engineers understand facts. Facts get in the way of political and corporate goals.
Here in the USA where we worship at the altar of profits it is in the best interests of the powers-that-be to marginalize those pesky engineers, facts, and science.
At least for this quarter.
Long term, of course, we are all fighting for our piece of a shrinking pie.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
The consensus seems to be that more people are going into finance and business because it pays better than science and engineering. That's incredibly sad. Shouldn't one go into science for the science? Since when was money more important that a fun job and fulfilling career?
There's just so much absurdity and stupidity in that sentence I *have* to answer. In the 1960s half the planet was computerized. The 1960s were THE decade of computer innovation. It's sad that you remember the '60s as the decade that put a lot of kerosene into a metal tube and not the decade that gave us the mother of all demos and sketchpad.
The Mother of All Demos by the man who invented the mouse in the '60s
Yeah, guess what, the mouse wasn't invented by Apple.
Sketchpad. As a youtube commenter puts it: ooooomg.... 1962/1963 !!! I just can't believe it! Way cooler than going to the moon!
Computer on the Saturn V
And as for your assertion that there was no prior art, that's just fucking stupid. What the hell do you think NASA took the best Germans for? Their potato salad recipe? Do you honestly believe all these heroic Americans just invented everything out of thin air in less than a decade because going to the Moon is just so useful? Get your head out of your ass. America went to the Moon as the biggest stunt in history using the developped technological base that came out of WWII and business and science needs that drove the computer industry. NASA was a *USER*, not a developper of computers.
You probably think we only have computers today because of the Moon missions when it's the other way around.
Look, in 1959 there were already experimental graphic design tools for making CARS. *Nothing* to do with rockets or going to the Moon.
Picture
Learn some history I've rarely seen such pig-ignorance, and in an era of instant information access, it's PATHETIC.
And as for your retarded spelling of "cosmonaughts", Jesus wept, man, Jesus wept.
only treats the symptoms, not the cause.
First unjustified assumption:
"Because if American students have a negative impression – or no impression at all – of science and engineering, then they’re hardly likely to choose them as professions."
Really? The author, Norm Augustine, provides zero evidence that this is true. I didn't choose my job because of other people's impression of it. I chose it because I enjoy and I get paid good money to do it.
He then goes on to say the usual things about lack of investment, bad teachers, bad parents, etc. I'm not sure how those exactly relate to his above thesis but presumably he means that if we paid more attention to Engineering people would have a positive impression of it. Maybe so. But none of these explain why parents are not directing their children to be Engineers and children are not interested in Engineering.
If you want parents to direct their children to be Engineers, tell them how much Engineers make per year. If it's not enough, they won't care. Also, that means that Engineers must grow the market for Engineers through innovation otherwise flooding the market with Engineers will just drive down salaries and thus would be counter-productive. So, it's not just any old kind of Engineers we want but entrepreneurial Engineers and, for the most part, that means a change in the way educate Engineers (i.e. Engineering needs to be more than computation). Which leads me to my next point.
If you want children to become interested in Engineering, then the curriculum needs to be reformed. Science and math curriculum for the most part sucks. Mathematics is often taught by the TERC method which is better than the axiomatic method of rote memorization that preceeded it (i.e. math curriculum from the 60's to the 90's) but doesn't spend enough time showing kids why the short-cuts we normally use in mathematics actually work. For those that are unfamiliar with TERC, TERC emphasizes process and making mathematics intuitive. To grossly simplify, where as most people would just say there are five blocks on the floor in the case where there are five blocks on the floor but TERC would require you to count each block. That's a horrible example but if you are interested wikipedia is your friend. Anyhow, the point is that there is no way to make math and science easy, they are hard, but we don't have to make them easy to make them interesting. We must make them inspire wonder and excitement.
How do we do that? That's a good question and if I had the answer I'd write a book but I do know it's possible because I've found it on my own while studying mathematics and science. I can't count the number of times I've said to myself: "Wow, that's so cool!". So it can be done. Can it be done consistently at scale? I have no idea.
1. Pop the debt bubble. Throw everything back to the dark ages.
2. Send in Baron Wulfenbach.
Put aside our horrible primary/secondary education system that doesn't adequately prepare them for the curriculum. I'm an engineer for a Dow component corporation and they are more interested sourcing their engineering work to low cost centers (read India) than staffing to appropriate levels here in the states. That's not to say that we don't hire US engineers, just not in the numbers required to do all of the work that needs to be done. Most engineers that I know spend more time managing/supporting outsource efforts or other company initiative stuff than doing actual engineering work.
We are having a huge problem of lack of engineers here in Brazil. People are leaving universities already hired even if you have zero experience. If you want a good life outside the financial market you should consider move to another country.
Brazil has some bureaucracy to get residence permission to work here but I am sure you will get a good salary and a nice quality of life. And yes, people here care more about engineers, medical doctors (one exception would be famous soccer players).
This is just an expample. I don't know the situation of India, China and others. But an experienced engineer here can get about US120k a year but you are going to pay half of the price for food and house and other things. Cars is an exception, it is more expensive than america and internet connection i pay about US$50 for 30Mbps FTTH connection.
This is just an example, there are more need for example in Africa. One of my friends a few years ago saved some money and decided to try bulding some houses in Angola. He opened a company with only him as an engineer and hired local people to build. He's fucking rich now and offered me to work there for US250k a year. If I wasn't coward because Angola had a civil war 10 years ago I would probably go. You can make huge savings for your retirement in places you probably never considered going. Take a time and look for the oportunities.
Current policy is the problem, but it's always a fallacy to say "government is the problem." Unless you support anarchy (and by anarchy I don't mean some utopian Chompsky anarchy that never has nor will exist, I mean chaos), then government cannot be a problem in and of itself. Government policy can be a problem, but here the problem is that the government isn't investing in education.
When you personify the government as some crazy anti-individual you only illustrate how out of touch you are with reality.
Way to cite your own post, btw. Here's the problem with your argument: manufacturing jobs will be lost to robots, so it really doesn't matter if we lose them to foreign countries in the short term. In the long term they're gone. We need to create a society of educated individuals whose jobs cannot be replaced by computers, robots, and machines. This starts with education and it requires the government's support.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
So anybody at all can be an engineer if they just decide so?
Yes! exactly. Engineering is about a state of mind. You can sit in a school all you like but you'll never become an engineer.
An engineer is someone who makes things, makes things better, as is passionate about it. The questions is: when did I become an engineer?
When I took apart my first machine and put it back together?
When I designed my first circuit, programmed my first code?
When I sold my first design, setup and registered my own business?
You can cry into your pillow all you like about formal qualifications - the most successful and inspiring engineers I know never benefited from or cared much for the education they went through - they were already engineers.
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
How about a sculpture of Jesus with HUGE KNOCKERS and hundred dollar bills in his both hands. Think it will sell?
You can't handle the truth.
An engineer is someone who drives a train.
chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga CHOO CHOO!
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I'm a corporate finance analyst (like an accountant) who got into this gig because my math skills were good but not strong enough to be a good engineer. I love science and engineering and I've always wanted to get involved somehow. I've tried to focus on engineering or manufacturing-based firms for hiring (I'm an MBA student at the moment), and in interviews I mention one of my strengths is my respect for science and my ability to effectively communicate financial concepts to scientists and engineers. But what else can I do?
That's definitely in the "Mad Scientist" category.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
An engineer is a guy who works with engines. The guy on the train works with train engines. Scotty works with starship engines. Myself, I work with difference engines and the like.
It's all well and good that you have certified, chartered engineers and the like putting together bridges and the like, but honestly, you don't have a god-given right to ownership of the title, so when someone uses it who just doesn't quite need that level of rigor for their website, chill out, mmmk? :)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Well, for most of my life, I've been knee deep in the 'American engineer shortage'. The fact is that there is an oversupply of engineers in much of the western world and a shortage elsewhere. Currently, I'm living in the Middle East and enjoying a 100% pay raise compared to America.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Current policy is the problem, but it's always a fallacy to say "government is the problem."
- yeah, if by 'current policy' you mean the policy of governments to get entangled in economy and create monopolies and destroy competition, while simultaneously growing itself through counterfeiting bank notes, then I agree with you totally.
Unless you support anarchy (and by anarchy I don't mean some utopian Chompsky anarchy that never has nor will exist, I mean chaos), then government cannot be a problem in and of itself.
- government is a necessary evil, a spending item, a luxury.
Government is something that you build and you never grow. I support gov't to do a very small number of things: minimum military and justice system.
Government policy can be a problem, but here the problem is that the government isn't investing in education.
- I completely disagree, my points are made, I am against gov't doing anything beyond minimum military and justice system. Gov't has no role in anything else.
When you personify the government as some crazy anti-individual you only illustrate how out of touch you are with reality.
- show me where do I 'personify' gov't exactly? But it's uniform and it is following the same practices, working together in the same direction.
Way to cite your own post, btw.
- I hope you enjoy it. I rather do that than leave snark remarks about your comments to some third party ACs in the middle of the thread.
Here's the problem with your argument: manufacturing jobs will be lost to robots, so it really doesn't matter if we lose them to foreign countries in the short term
- robots are the way into the future, but those countries, to who USA is losing the production capacity right now will stop providing the US with the fruits of their labor and then USA will be sitting there, waving its dick in the desert - no robots, no products, nothing.
We need to create a society of educated individuals whose jobs cannot be replaced by computers, robots, and machines.
- no. What we NEED is to leave people alone so they take the economy to where it will be, not try to micromanage how people work, what they do, what they come up with, how they invest their money, etc.
This starts with education and it requires the government's support.
- that's very very sad, if you really believe that, because education and department of education have nothing to do with each other. USA had biggest economic growth without department of education. What is needed is again - leaving people alone.
Not only US gov't has no authority under the Constitution to get involved into education, but also it has no competence to do any of it either. The US gov't is a failure of enormous proportions and magnitudes, from the Fed's mandate to price stability, to the FDIC and Feddie/Fannie and 1-0% interest rates, causing massive asset bubbles and boom/bust cycles that were artificial all due to inflation and it will eventually completely destroy the US economy by monetizing all of its US bonds debt (and I expect the next QE will be in State bonds, then in muni bonds, then more corporate bail outs...)
There is nobody to bail out the US gov't.
You can't handle the truth.
I think this is reasonable. The economists have been generally aware of a diminishing marginal return for each dollar you get for a while now.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Government is the one, that is causing the fall of the US economy
Sad that you ruin your comment with a largely baseless shot against your favorite boogeyman, because you then move on to make a valid point:
Science and engineering will not be promoted in a society that has no production
This is not the problem caused by gubmint. Countries where science and engineering are thriving, such as in Germany or Canada, have much larger government spending per capita and more social programs than the United States. The idea that government is the principal hurdle to overcome would only make sense if we had no data from outside the United States, but fortunately we have discovered that there places with similar economies in the lands beyond these shores.
I'd argue that the challenge is split between two factors: culture (as in, sports are cool, science and math are not) and economics (manufacturing goes elsewhere because of liberal trade policies and a strong dollar relative to other currencies). Again, you can't argue that the latter problem is caused by government just because that nicely fits into your preferred world view, or you would get stuck failing to explain why countries with government run healthcare (unlike ours, even under the recent reform) and sub-65 retirement ages have employment rates equal to or higher than ours, as well as more manufacturing.
Two modest solutions:
An MBA can show profit in this quarter. Engineers more than one quarter. How many companies look beyond the next quarter?
Most insightful comment in this discussion.
I do not have an axe to grind. In 70's & 80's during my growing up years, I always admired you guys. You made things "Built to last", you made things that were interesting and useful. I took pride in owning American made stuff. There was element of "truth" in American made stuff and technology.
What went wrong?
Here in Slashdot, I hope there are Americans who acknowledge this. What can be corrected?
My pet theory is, this MBA stuff is destroying what made America proud. Companies need to be run by Technocrats (Engineers who are passionate about their ideas) not someone who is playing tunes to numbers (Wall Street, Venture Capital Funds etc).
and more about a lack of respect for any sort of intellect. At least here in the US.
Turn on Fox News.. at least once during every host's shift you'll see a casting of all things liberal and intellectual as evil and bad for america. 'My politics are right. Yours just aren't wrong, they're evil.' (Jon Stewart comment iirc)
It's an inferiority complex. Dumb people are just smart enough to know they are dumber than intellectuals. And like every insecure bully ever, they lash out.
Funny... that stuff was also taught in the early 1900s as well... didnt we become a superpower in that timeframe?
Uhm, no? You became a superpower when Europe was torn apart by wars, and many scientists fled to the US to continue their work.
President Barack Obama - Law
Vice President Joe Biden - Law
Speaker of House John Boehner - Business
President pro tempore Daniel Inouye - Law
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton - Law
Secretary of the Treasury (Timothy Geithner) - Asian Studies/Economics
Secretary of Defense (Robert Gates) - History
Attorney General (Eric Holder) - Law
Secretary of the Interior (Ken Salazar) - Law
Secretary of Agriculture (Tom Vilsack) - Law
Secretary of Commerce (Gary Locke) - Law
Secretary of Labor (Hilda Solis) - Public Policy
Secretary of Health and Human Services (Kathleen Sebelius) - Public Policy
Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (Shaun Donovan) - Public Policy
Secretary of Transportation (Ray LaHood) - Education/Sociology
Secretary of Energy (Steven Chu) - Physics
Secretary of Education (Arne Duncan) - Sociology
Secretary of Veterans Affairs (Eric Shinseki) - Science/Literature
Secretary of Homeland Security (Janet Napolitano) - Law
The top posts are held by those who have been educated in law, and Cabinet members mostly educated in fields related to their positions.
You want to talk about the decay of culture and values? That's nothing new, every aging generation in every society in the history of humanity has fretted, writhed, and screamed about it.
The fact that American media prefers a self-deprecating sense of humor doesn't mean we embody those caricatures of ourselves.
"In China, eight of the top nine political posts are held by engineers"
Well, those politicians, like my father, were born, raised, and educated in a system that made that decision for them - they were assigned to study engineering by the government to fulfill quotas demanded by the planned economy. It was only in the 80's when the planned economy was abolished and economic reforms were instituted that this practice came to an end. Scientists at the time were indeed looked up to for their intelligence and social contributions, but so too were they looked up to because graduating from a top science school and joining the Communist Party was the only path to political power and thus wealth in those days. Nowadays in China, people no longer have such respect for scientists because they see that even middle school drop-outs can start factories or businesses and strike immense fortunes. They have greater respect (and disgust) for those who wield guile and personal connections, like everyone else in the world.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Sad that you ruin your comment with a largely baseless shot against your favorite boogeyman, because you then move on to make a valid point:
- I made 2 valid points, your failure to recognize them doesn't diminish that fact.
This is not the problem caused by gubmint.
- I am somewhat tired of this discussion, if you want, you can go through my journal, I have plenty of stuff there, with links to many of my other posts that I link to specifically to avoid repeating the same thing over and over...
Countries where science and engineering are thriving, such as in Germany or Canada, have much larger government spending per capita and more social programs than the United States.
- I am actually a Canadian, born in the former USSR, currently in Germany, doing business in Asia. I disagree with you on all points, that Canada and Germany have thriving engineering, that more gov't money is spent there per capita, that there are more social programs than in USA, etc.
get stuck failing to explain why countries with government run healthcare (unlike ours, even under the recent reform) and sub-65 retirement ages have employment rates equal to or higher than ours, as well as more manufacturing.
- USA is still manufacturing more than Canada or Germany, it has a 50Billion/month trade deficit with China, but in terms of manufacturing it's manufacturing plenty.
The problem with USA is that it's manufacturing mostly weapons and it's doing various 'value added' stuff, assembling parts created elsewhere. As to unemployment in USA, that's quite simple. USA has a gov't that is bigger than any other government, with all the subcontractors, USA is in a number of wars that nobody else is in, USA is spending twice as much as it's getting revenue, so it's borrowing, and thus printing bonds and promises to pay dollars later, so it's taxing its future.
The REASON why USA has such outflow of capital is exactly because USA is overregulating, overtaxing, overburdening in more ways than ANYBODY ON THE PLANET.
Unfortunately for the US people, it's gov't has gone bat shit insane in terms of spending and growing, so now when anybody in US gov't is talking about 'cutting spending', they do not actually mean really stopping the spending. They mean to say: we will reduce the increase, by which we were going to increase the spending.
It's like if you worked for me, and I called you one morning and told you: congratulations! You are getting a pay raise!
You'd be like: Yahoo!
Then I'd say: that's right, from now on your salary is cut by 15%.
You'd be like: WTF?!
and then I'd hit you the way US gov't does: -Well, when I woke up this morning, I thought, why not cut this guy's salary by 30%? But by the time I came to work, I decided only to cut your salary by 15%. So you got a huge pay raise.
Now go, enjoy your day.
---
That's how US gov't 'cuts' spending.
--
Cut school sports, reduce pupil headcount per teacher
- Whatever. Department of education must be abolished.
Tariffs on imports. It's called "protectionism," and though it's a no-no when you have free trade policies that actually work, it's exactly what you do when something as silly as exchange rates causes lopsided export levels.
- whatever. Enjoy paying higher prices on everything then, because even the stuff that's manufactured in USA gets all the components from China and other countries, so all you'll do will only increase the end price for you and in reality US has no production capacity to satisfy the demand, that's why there is 50Billion/month trade deficit in the first place.
Any tariff on import will only cause your prices to go up and will create shortages, but it will neither make US economy better, nor will it create any new US manufacturing capacity.
You can't handle the truth.
No more do we look up, listen to and expect people with expertise to give us the benefit of their experience. Rather we shun 'experts' with their 'facts', since surely that sort of commitment to their field has made them biased and unreliable sources. Only the truly uneducated and ignorant are 'pure' in their innocence, only the most intuitive, simplistic and superficial description of the world maybe be considered honest. Anyone with an explanation longer than a sound bite, let alone a formula, is a charlatan, using his book-knowledge to fool us!
Trust your gut feelings, your most primitive prejudice, that which you share with those who are the loudest. Because they are the ones in charge now, they are the ones who get what they want in this world. Who gives a toss about the laws of physics, logic or math, when the truth is determined by everyone - with mod points.
You mean like the urban planning experts who bulldozed neighbourhoods and built highways everywhere, hollowing out American cities for decades? The experts that amateurs like Jane Jacobs fought to preserve urbanism?
The experts who said Agent Orange and DDT were safe? The experts who put asbestos fibers in buildings for decades? Those experts?
Experts can be wrong too.
From an outsider's perspective, I'd have to disagree. I don't see your government doing that much differently than it has in the past. What I do see is corporate-controlled media promote a general deference to large companies. For instance, where innovators once thought of creating that great new gadget, then bringing it to market and building a huge company, I now see people who simply want to make that great gadget, then sell out to the first big company with a wad of cash. There is an inherently non-competitive mindset being entrenched, and IMO is the single greatest stifling force your imaginative entrepreneurs are up against. There is also the insane culture of litigation. Noone, *noone* can expect to bring a new thing to market in America, without enduring a barrage of utterly ridiculous lawsuits. If your product is popular enough to supply an income, the lawyers make sure that the bulk of it is diverted into their profession.
So you outline a few symptoms: large businesses controlling aspects of society, a disturbing lack of competition, and excessive litigation. What single factor do they have in common? Government as enabler. Onerous regulation heavily favors big business and kills competition. Excessive litigation is purely a function of law.
Android, iPhone, LINUX (may have started out in Europe, but it seems like most of the code contribution is US), SpaceX, etc.
If we are talking innovation, that has more to do with freedom to create and the ability to get rich doing it. The West, and America, still is the best place for doing that. China may MAKE the iPhone, but they didn't design it. Innovation is creating the new things people want and being able to martial the capital and talent from a global pool to make that happen. America still has that in s---loads compared to the rest of the world, and especially China.
Articles like this seems like engineers wishing they were as valued as lawyers and MBAs. While noble, it has little bearing on innovation. A lawyer and MBA can be taught why an innovation is important and they can support it. Teaching an engineer how to be charismastic and to lead people takes longer.
Having said all that, the creeping corporatism that is once again retaking American government will undo that--again. The second handers are gaining more and more power. Aided & abetted, ironically, by Ayn Rand followers like Ron Paul. For example, net neutrality is about making sure the conditions that allowed competition to happen on an even playing field to identify the true innovators like Google. Now, if the entrenched money can buy better access, you can be damn sure they will use that money to buy poorer access for new start-ups. That's how innovation gets stifled: not a lack of engineers, but confusing whats-good-for-corporations with freedom.
I said this happened before. Several times in fact. Each time, there was a "sputnik" moment that woke America up and shook things up. The last example I can think of is the automative industry in the 1970s. The big three had used their power to effectively shut out American start-ups and reduce the market to four players: themselves and AMC. They spent their R&D on styling & marketing rather than fuel economy and innovation. Thus the only innovation came from OUTSIDE the United States, and after the shot across their bow in the 1973 oil shock, they were still in denial and the Federal government had to kick them in the butt with CAFE to even get them thinking about real engineering innovation. Then the 1979 oil shock was the sputnik moment when foreign car companies and their innovation began to eclipse them.
Supporting corporations over freedom to innovate is the real problem. Not so much the lack of respect of engineers and scientists, IMHO.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
I have been trying to get Shea in Highlands Ranch to name new streets after top teachers, scientists, and engineers. I have written and suggested that 'I live at the corner of Watson and Crick' has a cool sounds to it. How about I live on Einstein Way? Or how about "Hawkin's String"?
Not a thing from them.
America needs to start small and work back up to regain this. But by naming roads after scientist and Engineers, we do not just honor these ppl. Instead, we will see children looking up the meaning of the roads on the net and finding out about these legendary individuals.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I think the author of the article makes an astoundingly poor conclusion. In reality, America is losing its technical prowess, not due to engineers being labeled as geeks/outsiders, but because engineering jobs are being shipped overseas. Engineering jobs are being given to India, China, Singapore, Taiwan, etc. Since government has rewarded industry in terms of tax breaks for offshoring jobs and other travesties, there is little or no incentive to go through the hard work and schooling to become an engineer when there is a dearth of jobs available. America is a service economy and a service economy is essentially third world stagnation.
Any engineer or scientist who doesn't want the responsibility can easily duck it, and usually does. They know doing an honest job of it is hard work. They know leaders are targets. And there is an unending supply of loudmouthed suckers who will leap at a chance to be The Man because they think "it's good to be the king", think they'd enjoy calling the shots. They think the ones doing it now are a bunch of idiots and doing better than them will be easy. Or they don't give a damn, and just want the bigger paycheck. All the engineers have to do is be quiet, and the loudmouth will look proactive, "can do", and energetic. The higher ups or customers will fall for it almost every time. Once in a leadership position, they find it very convenient to blame problems on the "incompetent" engineers, as if they could do any better. Everyone else sees the bosses slanging the engineers, so what to they do? Pile on of course. Galling to work under someone who has no clue how hard or easy the work is, and who has caused many of the problems being blamed on the engineers. As if mere technical problems aren't plenty hard enough, have to deal with all the politicking too.
The opinionated loudmouths are the ones who shouldn't be leading, but they end up in a disproportionate number of leadership positions. Even when the engineer wants to take on the responsibility, it's tough to compete with the flashy, smooth-talking, boot licking Man with a Plan who understands the Realities of Business. And if the quiet engineer somehow wins the job anyway, then this guy is a constant thorn in the side. He's angry, and he's looking for any chance to take the engineer down. And being the sort of fool he is, he may well do it even if that leads to disaster, and gets everyone fired or causes the company to tank.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Critics of its education system deplore divisive schooling oblivious to science and technology as well as business and economy:
The left-wing agenda behind proposed solutions does not take the truth out of the deficiencies identified in their argument.
As a matter of fact much of Europe has long suffered from a "brain drain" to the U.S. perceived to promise more recognition (and reward) in scientific careers.
just look how China's political system has benefited.
Just look at how China's economy has benefited.
The popular belief these days is that everyone is allowed to a have 'democratic' opinion on any subject regardless if they have any clue as to what they are talking about
These links may also be enlightening:
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/05/12/confident-dumb-peopl.html
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_Effect
So lemme see, the engineers do all the work, get none of the credit, are paid almost nothing in relative terms, all while working massive overtime in the process. Hell yeah! Sign me up!
When you sit on your ass all day consuming media and iGizmos and outsource everything you don't want to do to third world countries.
What era exactly are you talking about, because back when the arabs mattered, Mohammed had not yet been born. For that matter, mass migrations over the centuries make it pretty sure that whatever groups lived in region X, doesn't live there anymore.
You are familiar with for instance with Alexander the Great? A greek. Well sorta, from the bad side of greece. So to what racial group do you attribute the results of his conquests? Who are his true descendants? He roamed around the mediterenian to India, spreading a different way of thinking that mixed with the local ways. Global trade happened a LOT earlier then most people assume.
Islam is a fate that not only came later but was preceded by mass genocide and mass migration. The persians? They were destroyed. It is as idiotic to claim that Muslims == Persians as it is to link the average fat American with the original indian tribes.
Before you try learning from history, make sure you are reading the adult version, not the sing along version from Animaniacs.
If the US wants to study history, look to England and how it tore itself apart post WW2, unable to accept the new realities of the modern world were socialism and capitalism constantly interact not to create the perfect society but the society that never goes to far down anyone single path at the cost of everything else.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
We imported most of our scientists. We can thank Hitler and Mussolini for our scientific talent. Einstein, Fermi, many other came here.
http://science.jrank.org/pages/48899/brain-drains-paperclip-operations.html
Anti-immigrant sentiment, anti-intellectualism, and declining opportunities in the US as opposed to other immigrant destinations has diminished this desirable in-migration. The same factors that discourage native-born citizens from entering technical professions also discourage immigrants
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
Overall, the US mechanisms for innovation... CHINA!! BE AFRAID! ... demand based economies and access to capital... CHINA!! CHINA CHINA CHINA! ... centers of excellence like Silicon Valley that show no signs of slowing... CHINA! CHINA HAS PEOPLE THAT CAN USE COMPUTERS! OH NOES!
If I wanted to listen to Fox News, I'd listen to Fox News.
The IEEE tracks salaries in electrical engineering. Around 1970, engineers and lawyers made about the same amount of money. Real estate agents were down at the level of used car salespeople.
The US does not need more scientists and engineers. If it did, salaries would go up.
Fact is that a lot of western core techonolgy did NOT come from the US but from Europe especially England. The US just funded the nazi's long enough so that britain had to give up all its tech for free to buy expensive support. Oh that is a bit paranoid but the fact is that countless technology the US used to build their post WW2 empire did not come from the US.
Neither did pardoning nazi war criminals and setting them up with a life of luxury as a reward for working not just Jews and such but US soldiers to death help the US get into space first.
So what really is this lead this article is talking about? Japan has long been the place for the latest gadgets. They laugh at our mobile phones as being hoplessly out of date. American cars have never been thought of as high tech by anyone.
Trolling?A bit perhaps BUT there is a reason: How can you judge yourself if your self image is warped. And god knows the US self image is warped. Part of the reason is that the US is incredible self-centered. It is not just ego, it is practical things. As a dutch citizen I grew up in a world where if you wanted to watch a 2nd tv station you watched a foreign channel. Being exposed to different cultures was the norm even for mass media. This is ACTUALLY changing right now, more and more TV is dubbed in a nation that always used subtitles even for children.
But surely watching Magnum P.I. is not the same as truly experiencing another culture? No but it is the closest most of us will ever get. It helps the tiniest bit to get your head around the idea that there is more then one way that leads to rome and that for someone else, that other road might be faster. Think of it, what is the best way to get from Amsterdam to Rome? We can measure this and come up with pefect road. Now is that also the perfect road for someone in Berlin? No? How can that be? We found the perfect road, how can anything else possibly come close or even be better for you?
Americans believe that American Way Of Life is perfect not just for them but for everyone and they get very suprised when they find out other people disagree. Que countless wars to liberate people that then went about killing their liberators.
If Americans want to do some soul searching, they first need to stop reading their own history books and read some foreign ones. The more they upsetting the better. Just to get a different perspective. Only the can you start to look at your changing world. And realize, that it really hasn't been changing all that much.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Salesman & marketing pukes run my company that was founded & ran for it's first 50 years by engineers. Now we do nothing unless it's chasing the competition. At that point our leaders point & claim how our engineers dropped the ball & did not come through with the innovative product. All the while outsourcing more & more tech work to India & China. & we wonder why kids don't want to go into engineering.
We get no respect. We get little resources. None of them ask for our will listen to our opinions. All we can do it work more hours (to keep our jobs) while looking for work elsewhere. From what I read in my user groups, marketing pukes running the company is becoming quite common.
But you are only telling one side of the story. Somewhere else, your competitors are posting about how they are in a small company dominated by engineers that is making tons of money by being innovative and picking off the customers of their dim-witted competition. The engineers at that company are happy and having fun and loving their job.
In other words, you are working for the wrong company.
Government isn't doing anything to destroy the economy. We are.
We've got a dichotomy here. The dichotomy is that we worship capitalism, but we also tend to be an empathic and moral society (well, sometimes at least). These two cannot coexist peacefully. Capitalism is inherently amoral. Capitalism does not care about child labor laws, safety regulations, minimum wage, pollution restrictions, or a well educated populace capable of making reasonable decisions. All of those get in the way making profits.
We, being a moral and empathic society, have summarily told capitalism that we do not like treating people as disposable slave labor and we do not like treating our environment like toilet paper. Capitalism, like the spoiled child it is, doesn't really like being told what to do. So capitalism starts trying to find ways to get around these rules. This includes hiring illegal aliens and off-shoring production to countries that don't have such pesky rules to get in the way of making money. And since these foreign countries usually have high unemployment rates, labor is a lot cheaper even if they have to train them.
Now, the ironic part is that we are brainwashed in this country into thinking that in order to be worth anything, you have to have stuff. Lot's of stuff. Even stuff you can't really afford to have. So instead of our society collectively boycotting companies who circumvent the rules to punish them buy denying the largest consumer base in the world, we end up buying all the stuff that is now made in other countries(while turning a blind eye to their practices) making them record profits. This encourages companies to move more of their production overseas to make even more profit.
The government isn't to blame. We are. By having a moral compass that's easily influenced by cheap stuff we ENCOURAGE companies to go around the humane rules we have in place in this country. We don't boycott companies that use child labor sweatshops in Indonesia because we're all too happy to buy NAMEBRAND(tm) GIZMO for cheap. We don't ostracize companies that cause pollution in third world nations if they make REAL COOL CLOTHING ITEM(tm) that everyone wants. Just look how popular DeBeers diamonds are.
We, the people, decided collectively that we wanted a safe, sane, and clean working environments. We decided we wanted to be able to breath downwind of a production plant. We decided that we wanted companies not to treat their workers like replaceable slaves. We decided that we didn't want to allow the exploitation of children. We decided that everyone was entitled to at least a minimal wage and standard of living. These were all moral decisions that directly conflicted or impacted corporate bottom lines. In response, they went elsewhere.
Now if we all actually stood up for what we believed in a boycotted the hell out of these companies, then they'd come crawling back begging for forgiveness. Being the largest consumer economy in the world gives us a lot of power if we so choose to use it. But we don't, because we like cheap stuff. We are our own worst enemy in this dilemma. Blaming the government is a cheap cop-out to absolve us of our responsibility.
~X~
Being called geeks/nerds is the result of America's obsessive compulsive need to label and tag each and everything, every action and every person if they remotely exhibit certain commonly shared characteristics. If you ride a bike, you must follow the biker culture. If you go to grad school, you must know what Star Trek is all about.
If I buy Promised Land milk, it's not because I'm making a strong religious statement. It's not because I'm contemplating embracing Jesus and the Christian way. It's because it fucking tastes good.
US is losing a lot more than its edge in innovation by ostracizing "geeks" and "nerds". The sad part is, there won't be enough of the geeks and nerds left to predict what US will end up losing.
Theology is like a weird Non-Euclidian Axiom that morphs everything around it.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Never in my life has engineering been seen as a glamorous profession, or a road to riches. Back in the early 80s when I was in school, if you told someone you were an engineer at best you'd get a little respect for being able to do something not everyone could. But you didn't get the kind of personal interest you' get if you said you were pre-med. Even if you were *pre-law*, people assumed you might be headed for great things, maybe even fabulous wealth and prestige, although that was highly unlikely. If you were an engineering student, people would assume that you were headed for a comfortable, middle-class suburban lifestyle with well above median income, but nothing like riches.
And that assumption was not only accurate, it was good for engineering as a profession.
Engineering was something you did because you had an affinity for it. You weren't persuaded to take it up, you must needed to know the effort you put into learning it would be repaid with a career. Now there's a lot more effort put into teaching elementary student about what engineering is like, which is a good thing, but no effort like that will ever do as much as the prospect of a steady career with plenty of good jobs.
Up until the 70s it was common to spend one's entire career in a single company, or perhaps no more than three or four. Now it's as common to change careers as it was once to change jobs.
Until the end of the Cold War, the engineering job market (and physics job market as well) was supported by projects undertaken for national prestige. After the Cold War, we looked for a "peace dividend" -- in other words we wanted to cash out of our investments in our national future. Free trade was part of that. The ideology of free trade is anti-nationalistic. The global system works better, produces more wealth, when trade barriers are removed. But if you are a country that had amassed as much wealth as the US, there was nothing that you could do that couldn't be done more cheaply elsewhere.
That includes innovation.
Innovation is a type of labor that can be purchased like any other kind of labor. So really there is at present no more reason for America to be a center of innovation than there is for America to be a center of manufacturing. There is no reason for young Americans to train themselves in disciplines that won't offer them careers.
The only reason to intervene in this natural course of events is nationalistic, the desire to make Americans as a people better paid than their counterparts elsewhere.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I would argue that it's Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman. They're taking a pro-science and pro-engineering philosophy, making it entertaining without compromising the facts, and presenting it to a mass audience. As always, xkcd has it right.
US did it with no computers, no prior art, and no research base to draw from....
Thank goodness for great Americans like Werhner von Braun and all the groundbreaking research done at the US research facility in Peenemünde.
Yeah, I know about Robert Goddard. But the US is famous for doing (poorly funded) research that everyone else picks up and runs with.
Have gnu, will travel.
IBM owns the patents on Innovations in US
The slashdot story comes from this article in Forbes. As expected, the forbes article is just another cookie-cutter pro-H1B propaganda article. Same old "arguments." Basically, they are saying "because of the desperate shortages of US tech workers, we need to temporarily allow more H1Bs, just until US schools get up to speed."
This corporate propaganda has been fully disproved many times, but the flood of these cookie-cutter articles, continues. Tell a lie often enough, and it becomes the truth.
From Forbes:
Jan 20, 2011
Danger: America Is Losing Its Edge In Innovation
* Improve K-12 science and math education.
* Invest in long-term basic research.
* Attract and retain the best and brightest students, scientists and engineers in the U.S. and around the world.
* Create and sustain incentives for innovation and research investment.
http://blogs.forbes.com/ciocentral/2011/01/20/danger-america-is-losing-its-edge-in-innovation/
Here is the real situation:
Duke University study reporting no shortage of US Engineers:
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Management/Study-There-Is-No-Shortage-of-US-Engineers/
PISA Scores Show Demography Is Destiny In Education Too—But Washington Doesn’t Want You To Know
http://www.vdare.com/sailer/101219_pisa.htm
Sorry, I couldn't read through that whole post. The part where you talked about government "counterfeiting bank notes" left my head spinning a bit.
Regulatory capture on steroids.
In an important way I think you are right, "government" is the problem.
The problem though is the fact that what we have now is a fake "government" rather than the real thing.
(having read your comments) Could it be said that you don't favor *any* entity having influence over the direction of society, and the attendant economic impacts?
You seem like a smart guy, so I have to believe that you already know a sad truth: Nature abhors a vacuum, and a power vacuum is the most abhorrent of all.
Somebody or a group WILL wield that power. The only question is whether it will be managed inadequately, and with much error, by people whose names are known and can be fired at the next election, or whether the power will be wielded by those who have absolutely zero accountability.
Lately, we're headed down the "zero accountability" path way too fast. I am 54, and I had hoped the fall wouldn't come until a bit later in my life. Unfortunately it's thundering down upon us way faster than I expected. My wife and I are wondering whether our lifetime of savings will be stolen by the plutocrats who have grabbed the power when we will most need those resources as our competitive strength wanes through the natural effects of our aging.
For worse or better, we're no longer "Dagny Taggart" or "John Galt". Sometime in the next 10-30 years, we will need to depend on the services of others, paid for by our savings. And the way things seems to be headed, just when we won't have the strength to fight back, we won't even be able to fall back on the resources that we've saved. My wife and I have never saved less than 40% of our incomes as an engineer (me) and clinical psychologist (her), and the last few years have been *brutal* for people who don't have government support (meaning, for example, the favorable tax treatment given to people who don't make a goddamned thing).
Regulatory capture carried to an extreme.
we worship capitalism
- seriously? Who is worshiping capitalism? Large monopolies? Government? Average Joe?
Large monopolies have very little to do with capitalism, they are gov't created, gov't subsidized, gov't protected from competition, gov't stimulated, gov't subsidized. All of this so that they return the favor to the gov't by re-electing those who want to be in power. It's a symbiotic relationship, but where is the 'capitalism' there?
What do you think 'capitalism' is? Capitalism has a meaning - it's really collecting, saving capital to invest it, to organize the investment around tools and labor and ideas so that profit can be generated and more capital can be re-invested.
So which of those who you think 'worship capitalism' actually worship it? Because in today's USA the savers are persona-non grata. The gov't has made it clear enough: do not save.
Do not save. Spend. Spend on consumables. Do not save and invest, spend instead. The gov't money does not come from savings or even just taxes, it's borrowed and then it's spent, how is that capitalism?
but we also tend to be an empathic and moral society (well, sometimes at least)
- I challenge this as well. We are not empathic and moral any more than the gov't that represents us. We are selfish and stupid and lazy, now that's true. That's why we go against the good economic policies towards bad ones. You think it is a good policy to have minimum wage?
It's a terrible policy. Minimum wage has created more unemployment than there was before it, minimum wage in USA actually, was designed to ensure that there is less competition to the labor union participants. But minimum wage creates unemployment and poverty. Is that moral and smart? Or is that stupid and bad policy? I say it's stupid and it is bad policy, because by pricing out some schmuck, who was making $3/hour from the market, because it is illegal to pay him that much, but at $5/hour he is a money LOSING proposition for a business, the gov't has done a bunch of stupid shit, that's unpaid for:
1. Unemployment (he should have been working)
2. Reduced possibility of future employment (people gain experience and move on from lower paying job to higher paying jobs.)
3. Increased gov't spending - now you have to pay the guy welfare.
4. Decreased individual initiative - you provide the wrong incentives. You can't turn this on and off easily. Once somebody is on welfare, he is on welfare for good (of-course there are always examples to the contrary).
5. Decreased economic activity - why shouldn't the job for $3/hour exist? Why can't we have grocery baggers and gas pump attendants and phone answering folk etc.?
The people get replaced with machines, ones the people cost more than the investment into machines, so minimum wage forces people to compete not only against each other, but also against capital (savings).
Was this good and was this moral?
Capitalism does not care about child labor laws
- Ha. Capitalism is what made it POSSIBLE to NOT have child labor. What do you think the 4-5 year old children were doing PRIOR to capitalism? Playing Nintendo? Capitalism and industrialization is what created the wealth, which allowed to reduce reliance on child labor, which actually allowed the people to stop being subsistence farmers, who needed a LOT of children to survive, so women started gaining their RIGHTS because of the WEALTH that capitalism provided. Rights, they are very much dependent on economic situation, not on just abstract ideas about what's moral or not.
pollution restrictions
- and there should not be pollution restrictions. The State does have a job - minimum military and justice system. And the justice system must work, it must be workable. And State should not own any property, all property must be private. Only private property owners CARE about their property. The 10Million Cap on deep w
You can't handle the truth.
I've been to the Bay Area, Hong Kong various cities in China (e.g. Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, etc.) before. I'm in Hong Kong right now but I'm going back to the Bay Area next month.
Bay Area: Engineers are rather well respected from what I can see. My sample may be biased though since I've been working with the upper layer of the valley so far (VCs, CxOs, Stanford PhDs, etc.) But hey, if your company just exited for a few million dollars, the local media and TechCrunch cares. You open a party and your friends love you.
Hong Kong: If you're an engineer (even a CTO "engineer"), you're a loser, period. Nobody ever heard of a VC or angel investor here - these things takes time to pay off, all people want is fast money. I can go rant about HK's economic environment until my face turns blue but suffice to say, innovation, technology, entrepreneurship are thinly veiled insult words here meaning you can't make fast and easy money. Some of my friends got funding of >$100M HKD and the media never paid any attention. Someone else just exited for $1B HKD last week and the mainstream media just don't care.
China: Yes there're many high tech firms in Beijing and Shenzhen and engineers do get much higher salaries (5x - 100x, depending on who you're comparing to) compared to the average uneducated worker (China has high literacy level but very low education level). Things is.. that's only for the lucky people who attended the top Chinese universities (e.g. Tsinghua) and succeeded in getting a job and work permit in the high tech cities only. If you aren't one of those 1-in-a-1000 lucky guys... sorry man but your life is gonna suck. Even if you are one of the lucky engineers - the top of the food chain in China is being a government official, not a C-Suite executive, and 100% not an engineer. The real elites in China aren't looking to become an engineer, but rather join the government and make a few really fast million bucks there.
So, from what I can tell... US's fear on losing its tech edge to Asia is highly overrated. If you really want the top tech companies, engineers and scientists in the world, the people have to love doing it and are financially allowed to keep doing it out of love (not every engineer is a tech company CxO or got hired by Google, you see...). That's simply not happening in China nor Hong Kong. The thing about Chinese engineers being ultra competitive is way overblown - if you're constantly under threat of being evicted from your ultra-expensive (compared to your tiny salary) flat, and your flat sucks - you'd be aggressive too. But it also makes you very short sighted because all you can think of is how to get a nicer house to live in, but not how to make the next Google or figure out how to build rockets cheap. So you're surely not gonna be doing better scientific research, opening a novel tech startup, or doing an open source project. Copying and cutting corners, on the other hand, works short term, but that's doesn't get China any edge ahead of the US.
"Theology is little more than a branch of literary criticism. The first difference is that the former's range of books is far narrower. The second is that among the works in its syllabus are precisely none that would ever be read for enjoyment - whereas its secular cousin includes almost a dozen, by some reckonings."
-- Oscar Wilde
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Tariffs on imports. It's called "protectionism," and though it's a no-no when you have free trade policies that actually work, it's exactly what you do when something as silly as exchange rates causes lopsided export levels.
You can promote this idea if you want, but we should be aware of the outcomes:
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Based on your very loose definition, a painter would be considered an engineer.
"The profession in which a knowledge of the mathematical and natural sciences gained by study, experience, and practice is applied with judgment to develop ways to utilize, economically, the materials and forces of nature for the benefit of mankind"
Most of those tasks don't even count as engineering. Even designing your circuit may not be considered engineering if it was simply a bunch of parts connected to meet some desired functionality. It would be considered engineering if you designed it to meet a set of specifications, such as perform with a given failure rate under an expected set of environmental parameters.
I'm a software developer for a living, but most of my coding doesn't even come close to being considered engineering. I write code to specifications based on experience only. I don't use math to determine how the code should be written, and there are not statistics involved in the QA process.
Where are they? The last time we had a scientific media darling who was worth his salt was the 80's. Now we're left with *shudder* Neil Degrasse Tyson.
Anti-immigrant sentiment, anti-intellectualism, and declining opportunities in the US as opposed to other immigrant destinations has diminished this desirable in-migration. The same factors that discourage native-born citizens from entering technical professions also discourage immigrants
The interesting thing is that's tons of immigrants here, especially illegal ones. I live in Arizona, ground zero for illegal immigration, and they're everywhere. But these people aren't exactly pro-intellectualism either, they're exactly the opposite. They're basically just like dumb white rednecks, except their skin's a little bit darker and they speak Spanish, and they're much more interested in starting fistfights to prove their manhood.
Basically, we're allowing in a bunch of uneducated, backwards immigrants, because businesses like having an ultra-cheap labor pool, while no longer being attractive to the highly educated and skilled immigrants who are the people you want to come to your country.
America is losing it's edge in innovation, but it has nothing to do with engineers and scientists not getting any respect. There are two sources of research dollars -- government and private sector. Government has been cutting back, except in key areas. It is hard to get government funding for research, particularly with such a huge deficit.
On the other hand, private funding of research has all but dried up. This has been going on for a number of years. Why? Because business, today, is all about making a quick buck. Research may or may not pay off. Why invest millions in something that may or may not prove profitable, when for the same amount of money, you can purchase another business, carve it up and sell the pieces for a profit.
With calls for smaller government, it doesn't look likely that research dollars will be increasing any time soon. In the current business climate, it also doesn't look like the private sector will step up to the plate and risk anything.
This isn't something new, it's been going on since the 1980s.
In the UK, we elected a scientifically trained leader. They did more harm to industry, art, science and education than any since - until now anyway.
Who was that? Margeret Thatcher. You may love her on your side of the Atlantic, it was not so much fun here!
Definitely, we all need artists and engineers in government. Just be very careful when you choose!
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
The only reason to intervene in this natural course of events is nationalistic, the desire to make Americans as a people better paid than their counterparts elsewhere.
Not quite. The only reason to intervene in this unnatural course of events is to keep American and it's citizens from becoming a third world country. America has already lost it's manufacturing base, it has lost or is losing it's research and technology base and there aren't enough agricultural jobs to support it's citizenry.
Look at Japan after WWII. It rebuilt its economy from the ground up. Japanese businesses were willing to forgo short term profits for long term prosperity. During the same time period, US businesses started to maximize short term profits erroneously thinking they were the only players in town.
A lot of people got rich in the 80s and 90s following this thought process. They didn't do it by producing anything, not even research. They did it by buying up profitable companies, splitting them up and selling the pieces for more than the whole.
Choose to invest in the long term and the board of directors will find somebody else to run the company.
To sum it up, short term greed won out over long term prosperity.
Seriously, start your own and run it the way that it SHOULD be ran. That is the only solution for this nightmare that has us in a vice. Basically, between politicians, sales, Marketing, and Accounting, we are witnessing the wholesale destruction of America. The way out, is to fire up our own companies and get Americans to buy those products while re-building manufacturing.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The actual problem is caused largely by lopsided "free" trade, which sent factory work overseas. What's left is sales-clerk positions, which requires fitting into society more than factory work from a social standpoint; and being a poor monitory, you're mannerisms and speech are not going to fit well for a sales-clerk position with "main stream" America.
The rest of your statements are bits and pieces of standard right-wing talking points. The devil's in the details and we'd have to dissect them one at a time to address them.
Table-ized A.I.
That's stupid. "Engineer", like "doctor" is a reserved title in many societies. In Quebec you can't call yourself an engineer unless you have a degree.
This is simply not true. Quebec is just about the only place in the world where the word engineer by itself is protected, otherwise, Microsoft would not be able to get away with certifying monkeys as MSCEs (the E stands for Engineer).
The word engineer as the spelling implies denotes someone who operates an engine. It used to mean train driver. Stop trying to redefine & protect an existing word. Set up a standards body & go with chartered engineer, professional engineers, etc.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Insistence on traditional fiat currencies (gold and silver) over modern fiat currencies aside. The idea that the entity that backs the bank notes is "counterfeiting" them by producing them still makes my head spin. I mean, you can make arguments about the horrors of modern currencies and the magical purity of precious metals, sure. Some of them are even convincing. But weird paradoxical statements are still weird and paradoxical.
Gold is not a fiat currency :)
Printing bank notes without having coins backing the bank notes is counterfeiting.
Precious metals are not magical. Gold has all properties of money: it stores value, it can be divided into units of account and it can be used as medium of exchange, it is also relatively rare and impossible to counterfeit itself, and it does not deteriorate over time. Unlike any paper currency, (trust in which I DO find amusing from a person who insists that gold as money is some sort of a paradox) gold actually has value that is backed up by thousands of years of human civilizations relying on gold for this function.
You can't handle the truth.
Maybe the competition isn't in the US.
I see you also listen to the Peter Schiff show. He's a great guy.
Be relentless!
To be honest, I think US has actually advantage in leadership that there only few engineers. Engineers rarely make good leaders or can understand what customers want.
But I also agree that lack of the is a bad thing. It can be partly because its 'hard' field of expertise. You need to do math and actually be precise.
Compare that to many business degrees. In all respect to many business people, their degrees are too often very abstract things you can pull off with good overall knowledge and minimal math.
Its ridicuously easy to get business degrees compared to many technical or nature science degress. So what I am saying, is that since people can get good salary with finance and business degrees quite easily, few care to go to more technical fields. In developing countries and some export oriented countries(like Germany, Japan, Finland or China) the case is bit diffrent. There are more engineers because there is more need for them more and less people with fancy business degrees because there are less jobs for them.
In overall I think its good if country needs engineers, it tells there is manufacturing and development in country. But I dont want them to be leaders.
Leaders have to be flexible, understand other humans well and be creative, and thats not many times what engineers are about.
Many engineers don't make good business or people leaders in my experience. Much better chance with those flimsy business degrees.
Nobody knows the trouble I've seen, nobody knows has the trouble seen me, even I sometimes wonder why I write these line
Do you have any hard data on this? How are you measuring the volume or quantity or significance of regulation? You wouldn't expect us to just take your or Rush Limbaugh's word for it, would you? Science requires evidence as a prerequisite.
Table-ized A.I.
Excellent post and excellent article reference. I hope they find a way to mod you to 6.
Table-ized A.I.
we worship capitalism
- seriously? Who is worshiping capitalism?
Let me clarify here.
Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production are privately owned and operated for a private profit; decisions regarding supply, demand, price, distribution, and investments are made by private actors in the free market; profit is distributed to owners who choose to invest in businesses, and wages are paid to workers employed by businesses and companies.
We, as in this country, adore capitalism. Or rather, the capitalism that companies and politicians want us to think is capitalism.
It is still capitalism, and capitalism comes with positives and negatives. When companies control too much wealth and influence, it becomes corporatism or fascism.
Large monopolies? Government? Average Joe?
Large monopolies have very little to do with capitalism, they are gov't created, gov't subsidized, gov't protected from competition, gov't stimulated, gov't subsidized.
Bullshit. Monopolies existed long before the government got involved. The reason why we have anti-trust and anti-monopoly laws is because monopolies were abusing their wealth and power.
All of this so that they return the favor to the gov't by re-electing those who want to be in power. It's a symbiotic relationship, but where is the 'capitalism' there?
Using money to ensure favorable legislation to make more profit and ensure against competitors entering the market seems like a pretty smart move to increase your capital.
Capitalism doesn't mean fair or equal markets. It means free competition and what better way to be king of the world than to prevent competitors from even coming near your hunting grounds?
Capitalism is not concerned with the well being of society as a whole. It is concerned only with private individuals or groups of individuals to further private gains. If those gains happen to benefit society as well, then so be it.
What do you think 'capitalism' is? Capitalism has a meaning - it's really collecting, saving capital to invest it, to organize the investment around tools and labor and ideas so that profit can be generated and more capital can be re-invested.
No, it's about private ownership and profit. The less money paid for generating profit the better. Capitalism has nothing to do with saving money.
So which of those who you think 'worship capitalism' actually worship it? Because in today's USA the savers are persona-non grata.
As I said, capitalism is not about saving. Capitalism is an economical philosophy based on private ownership and profit. There is no mention of saving one way or the other.
Big companies would love to have completely free unbridled markets and no regulations. The smaller companies and individuals, not so much.
The gov't has made it clear enough: do not save.
Do not save. Spend. Spend on consumables. Do not save and invest, spend instead. The gov't money does not come from savings or even just taxes, it's borrowed and then it's spent, how is that capitalism?
Our society tells us to spend. The government does not. Nobody is pointing a gun to your head to spend all your money. Nor does the government really care as long as you keep paying your taxes.
Government spending is a non-sequitur to capitalism and this discussion, as capitalism is not a political philosophy. Our government is not a capitalistic entity, nor a private one.
but we also tend to be an empathic and moral society (well, sometimes at least)
- I challenge this as well. We are not empathic and moral any more than the gov't that represents us. We are selfish and stupid and lazy, now that's true.
While I don't dispute that we can be selfish, stupid, and lazy at times, s
~X~
It's 2011. We're not doing bad. I know I've heard the same thing through the nineties and eighties, and could probably find examples from the seventies and sixties.
It was clear that when the opinions of engineers were not even worth considering at NASA that they were considered worthless just about everywhere in the USA. In that case it was people from a finance or politics background instead of marketing but with the same outcome.
Not true. The cost of manufacturing is typically less than half the retail price of an item. And most Americans would be willing to pay a little more for trinkets to increase job options.
Please clarify
The export-centric countries have a lot more to lose than we do in a trade war and they know it. They may make some initial noise, but in the longer run it would encourage them to open up their trade.
Table-ized A.I.
And that is just what Corporate America did: Shipped the plant floor overseas, so designers and engineers here in America are now living in a fictional universe with a significant delay before their ideas meet the harsh realities of production.
Likewise ideas that come from the plant floor? lollll...why would they come back to America, especially from a nation like China where neither the state's nor the people's goals have anything at all to do with making America or American corporations...well, American CEOs and major shareholders...any better/wealthier, but rather consist solely of having America bankroll their climb to global supremacy or wealth, respectively?
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Not only US gov't has no authority under the Constitution to get involved into education, but also it has no competence to do any of it either.
And, while idiot Libertarians like you are yelling about "constitutional authority", macro-economic "angels dancing on pinheads" crapola, and other moonbattery, foreign governments are doing things like supporting education, funding research, and promoting industrial policies that are kicking our asses. You can see government as an assistant to reach our goals or as a problem. Those of you who see it as only a problem will never win as the common man is too afraid of anarchy to ever let your ideas hold sway. You'll also never be able to compete with those who use shared resources to aid progress to all.
That is all.
In India and some other countries, any college graduate is often called an "engineer". By this definition, all our politicians are engineers. Similarly, the definition of an "intellectual" is often very broad in non-Western nations, encompassing businessmen, plumbers, or nurses.
But going by the narrow definition of "engineer", do we really want geeks with no people skills, no training in humanities or social science, to become our nation's leaders?
Gold gets a little confusing as a currency because it's also a commodity. The thing is, gold and other precious metals traditionally have been fiat currencies. Many societies that have used them that way have had laws dictating their value in various ways. For example 1/16th laws specifying the value of silver relative to gold. Laws specifying the value of gold to some unit of currency, such as existed in the US when it was on the gold standard.
Of course, you can fall back on gold as a commodity. That may seem good, but the problem is, gold can't work as a traded commodity and a currency at the same time. Consider the copper penny. If we actually used gold coins, people would melt them down whenever they could get more than face value for them. If it were sitting in a vault to "back" the currency... Well, that's just stupid in a lot of ways.
Also, the paradox I mentioned wasn't using gold as money, it was the concept of a nation "counterfeiting" its own bank notes by printing them. Sorry I wasn't more clear.
As an American with an engineering degree who has been living abroad for more than 10 years, I wholeheartedly agree. It's one of the prime reasons I left in the first place, engineers are just not respected... or rather valued enough, in the US. I lay part of the blame on the religious right-wing mentality of many in the US, where religion, or merely saying you are religious, irregardless of actually going to church, holds a far more important role in society than fact-based fields of science and engineering. The separation of church and state, as intended by the founding fathers, practically no longer exists. The broken two-party political system and corruption of politics and business (lobbies have far too much control and influence) are also big turn-offs in the US. In every measure of quality of life, I am happier and more content that when I was living in the US. I am treated fairer by my employer and have more rights as an employee, I work fewer hours per week than my American counterparts and have far more time off and paid vacation each year.
Bottom line, I live to work, rather than work to live. The US is falling behind and is rapidly losing competitiveness with the rest of the world. I only hope things will turn around, but I have seen no signs of it recently.
Hmmm, that's interesting. A lot of people here in Europe say we're attracting the wrong kind of immigrants (low on education, high on religion) because of our welfare states. If you like government subsidies and aren't able to make a lot yourself you go to high tax Europe. If you're a well educated enterpreneur you go to low tax US.
Depends on what kind of education you have and what kind of worker you are. Not all highly-educated people are entrepreneurs; lots are scientists, engineers, doctors, etc. For them, there's other factors besides just taxes: job availability, job quality, quality of life, quality of schools for their kids, etc.
Sure, taxes here in the US are a little bit lower than in much of Europe (but not nearly as low as, for instance, Ireland), but our major cities aren't that nice or safe to live in, our public schools are about as good as the ones in Zimbabwe, our healthcare system leaves a lot to be desired, etc. Plus, the H1-B visa many skilled immigrants get is basically a form of indentured servitude, and is readily abused by employers. I don't know, I'm just speculating, but maybe working conditions are better in Europe for many industries; it wouldn't surprise me as Europe seems to be much more worker-friendly than America, where "salaried exempt" workers are frequently pushed to put in lots of unpaid overtime.
The article states : "These nations and many others have rightly concluded that the way to win in the world economy is by doing a better job of educating and innovating. And America? We’re losing our edge. Innovation is something we’ve always been good at. Until now, we’ve been the undisputed leaders when it comes to finding new ideas through basic research, translating those ideas into products through world-class engineering, and getting to market first through aggressive entrepreneurship."
This seems incredibly short sighted to me. I mean yeah we are losing our high-technology jobs, but isn't this the same as losing our low-tech manufacturing jobs. Do we still need to be the worlds largest exporter of technology? Honestly I don't know, but this article takes for granted that these things are necessary for America to leader of the world. There is a good chance to do damage here if we get it wrong, what if for the sake of having a "strong and powerful industrial base" we started focusing on massive amounts of low tech manufacturing again. I mean America could be self-sufficient again! Of course that stupid but it sounds logical right?
If I had to bet money I would say America is right on course for remaining world leader. By focusing on finance we can control the worlds economy and just buy all the high tech shit we need, just like we have been buying all the low tech shit we need for decades. Finance pays better than engineering in America for a reason. And if in the future finance in no longer king we can just shed our skin again.
This should come as no surprise, I think. I can spot three reasons without even trying:
1. In the West (not just the US) people with a high education are regarded with something only just short of barefaced contempt. At best you are a nerd or boffin, at worst some sad wanker that has studied something idiotic and wasted taxpayers' money.
2. The celebrity culture: we see all the time that in order to be successful, you have to be "a celebrity" - ie someone too stupid to make much of their life except appear on "I'm a sad egomaniac, get me out of here"
3. Objectively speaking, you can go to university for 5 - 10 years, study hard under unfavourable conditions, work in your spare time to make enough money and still end up have a huge debt, which you then spend the next decade paying off on while holding a so-so job. Or you can learn something fairly easy and useful, like repairing cars, get paid while you are an apprentice, and then after 3 years work in job that pays as much or more. Plus: no debt, so you can buy house, car etc straight away.
Based on these circumstances, which would a sensible young person choose?
You wrote a 10 page essay in response to a well-known slashdot troll/sociopath. Waste of time buddy...
Just a quick question, and this is for everyone not just Americans (The same attitude is prevalent in Africa)
Why is being Elitist or intellectual considered a bad thing?
When I visited the US last year I was SHOCKED about the totally broken infrastructure. Telefones, streets, public security, schools, this is all at a level I would have expected in a third world country. A poor one. Greed, corruption and indifference everywhere. Yes, there are some active people trying to make things better. But those few do it on their own, without help and backing and are not even a drip on a hot stone.
The OSCE estimates that the US would have to pay 130 billion dollars every year for 40 years to get the same infrastructure most euopean and asians countries have.
Or like a friend from russia said: The streets in the US look pretty much like in the sowjet union a year before collaps of the system.
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
Agreed on all counts, but then there are government initiatives that have actually worked:
1. ban on smoking in bars and restaurants made us instantly healthier with no negative side effects (except for the nicotine addicts who refuse to admit that they have a problem)
2. internet
3. GPS
Deregulation has its own set of problems and I'm mystified why free-market purists like you consistently fail to acknowledge them. Remember the near-complete financial meltdown of '08? It was a purely free-market product caused by a combination of unbelievable greed (across all layers of society, not just top) and appalling lack of government intervention even when it was obvious we were headed for disaster.
Let's face it - minimal sensible governance can be good just like free markets can be good.
Ubuntu on primary work desktop since Dapper Drake (2006).
Amen - most CEO's nowdays do not come from science or engineering they come from sales and marketing - since they are associated with "revenue" they claim huge commisions (engineer orginizations are "cost centers") and leverage the P&L to promote themselves. Ironically my CEO says good products made sales easy - his background is marketing/sales yet he is the CEO - the scientist/engineer(s) who made the good products which allowed him to get his CEO job were outsourced to china...
Keep your innovation I don't want to spend the next decade in court for a piece of something that might appear to be similar to something else. So until the US pulls its own head out of its gaping ass I will continue to innovate in private and keep it to myself.
"The laws of science be a harsh mistress." --Bender
I guess people like to make bald statements ("Eight of nine top political posts (in the PRC) are held by engineers.
Sheesh; that was easy to check; and wrong. Even the "nine" is problematic. What's real is:
Hu JinTao - Gen secy of CPC, Pres of PRC; hydraulic eng. ...Wen JiaBao - premier of PRC; PhD in geology
Xi JinPing - first secy of CPC, VP of PRC; chem eng.
Not bad. But from there on, they're business-school degrees (albeit one from LSE) plus the minEd has a history degree.
A long way down the list (way past "nine") is Chen Zhu - minHealth; PhDs in microbiology and medicine from Shanghai and Université Paris. Curiously, not a CPC member.
I think he was pointing out that the professed prophet actually did these things. I don't think anyone argues that Jesus was a pedophile, mass murder, etc... for example. Nothing about the followers of any religion.
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
Oh, I'm sorry, in general, neither companies nor the government want to put *real* *money*, and *real* agendas, into R&D, the Republicans and Tea Partiers claim that business will do it, and business, run by MBA's, are thinking this quarter, period, and r&d is *such* a waste of money, I mean, it may not produce results for years, and basic research, why, what ROI is there on that, I mean, really....
Meanwhile, the US is utterly dependent on RUSSIA to get people into orbit....
mark
When stupid crap like Survivor, "Jerseylicious" and other MTV pap get on television, that's what kids want to be. They want to be sassy reality TV show stars with glamorous jobs like "hair dresser" and "image-consultant". It's garbage.
Back in the day we had good science fiction. Now science fiction on television is a rarity. The Scifi channel decided it didn't want to be 'nerdy' anymore. It's entertainment that fosters ambition, and today our kids want to marry rich and act like baffoons for millions. Using technology isn't a joy or privelege for them, it's something as dry as making toast.
With a few very notable exceptions, engineers employed in big corporate jobs are not driving serious, world-changing innovation. That's especially true for jobs that are at risk for being outsourced. By definition, if your job can be outsourced, you are not driving innovation.
True innovation is almost always driven by engineers and scientists starting their own companies and creating something new. Andy Grove is right that job creation only comes with the "scaling up" phase, but before a business can scale up it needs to seriously innovate.
From the perspective of innovation it could be argued that it is *good* that entry level engineers are having trouble finding caretaker or straightforward jobs. Perhaps some of them will decide to try that crazy idea they've had for a while, instead of perfecting the rear rocker arm on the latest SUV.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I am a major sports fan and love to play sports. I pay more for my entertainment because I want it. Cutting sports is an attempt at taking away competition in society and society without competition is a society where smart people lose. Yes, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were competitors. Do not attack sports because the MEDIA hypes them as a game is easier to understand.
Science Channel is my TV favorite channel, then comes ESPN, and NBA/NFL channels, then Crap Drama Channels.
Who really wants to jump up and down and say "Look at me, I put a semi-colon at the end of this line and the program now compiles!!!!" That may seem really cool for some, but its not really entertaining to me to see that (its great when I nail a major issue).
If you think you get to be stupid playing professional sports, you really need to look again. There is a reason so few do it.
Now pay me 250 an hour to figure out you forgot to plug in your USB mouse and thats why your computer don't work!
I can program myself out of a Hello World Contest!!
The entire public education structure is broken
Not really. And I say this as a former would-be teacher who bailed because of weaknesses in the system, and of course, as a grown-up student who can now see many flaws in my the education I received.
On the other hand, of course, I actually got a pretty great public education, at the end of which I knew basic Calculus, electronic circuits, Pascal & C, how to use UNIX, basic writing and argument skills, an appreciation for poetry and literature, a little bit about the Spanish language, and college credit for a lot of this (never had to take freshman comp, general biology, american history, and I also had two semesters of Computer Science down). I can come up with examples of holes in my education too, but honestly, with a bit of better counseling from somebody or a better internal compass, I could have *easily* gotten a lot more out of the whole thing -- there was simply a lot stuff on the table that I just left there. All from a state (Utah) that tends to lag in per pupil spending.
The school I did my student teaching had at least that much to offer. Problems, yes, not necessarily the apogee, but pretty good.
Yes, of course there are districts and schools and individuals out there in deeper trouble than I'm describing... enough that reform is a worthy problem. But this idea that it's all broken top to bottom seems fishy to me, and I think it's driven more by a subtle antipathy than actual analysis.
A HS teacher should have at least an MS in the field they teach and not in education.
Credentialism isn't going to save us from any of our current problems. In fact, we probably need less of it: slightly lower barriers to getting into the profession, better evaluation of those already involved.
But even if we were talking about more subtle solutions, a subject-and-practice focused undegrad (augmented with some light pedagogical theory) is going to be as helpful as tacking on an extra two years of study, particularly for the better candidates.
On the teaching side HS should be more like college and less like grade school
Oh, certainly. Probably most importantly in having more time for teachers to refine and practice their subject matter and less time on per-se prep and teaching. Of course, that's going to cost us, particularly if we're also increasing the professionalization of teachers (and compensating accordingly).
Tweet, tweet.
Yet in Portugal they decriminalized drugs and getting better results: quote:
Compared to the European Union and the U.S., Portugal's drug use numbers are impressive. Following decriminalization, Portugal had the lowest rate of lifetime marijuana use in people over 15 in the E.U.: 10%. The most comparable figure in America is in people over 12: 39.8%. Proportionally, more Americans have used cocaine than Portuguese have used marijuana.
The Cato paper reports that between 2001 and 2006 in Portugal, rates of lifetime use of any illegal drug among seventh through ninth graders fell from 14.1% to 10.6%; drug use in older teens also declined. Lifetime heroin use among 16-to-18-year-olds fell from 2.5% to 1.8% (although there was a slight increase in marijuana use in that age group). New HIV infections in drug users fell by 17% between 1999 and 2003, and deaths related to heroin and similar drugs were cut by more than half. In addition, the number of people on methadone and buprenorphine treatment for drug addiction rose to 14,877 from 6,040, after decriminalization, and money saved on enforcement allowed for increased funding of drug-free treatment as well.
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Internet was going to happen with or without government. The gov't intervened with money into an already developing idea. There were peer to peer networks before the Internet and the idea of packet switching was derived from phone networks. So, yes, the TCP/IP was specifically developed with gov't money, but it doesn't mean it wouldn't have been developed privately. After all, the telegraph, radio, phone, light communications, TV were developed privately, and Tesla was envisioning an electronic wireless communication network way before anybody had that in mind.
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GPS - nothing without Einstein's relativity, both special and general. Nothing without Tsiolkovsky's formulation of rocket math and science. But yes, gov't money often accelerates something that is not directly useful to the market at that very moment. But look at the Moon landings - how many years have passed since and what?
Gov't can produce a lot of waste.
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Personally I wouldn't even be bothered with gov't spending on SCIENCE if it was not involved in ECONOMICS.
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Deregulation has its own set of problems and I'm mystified why free-market purists like you consistently fail to acknowledge them. Remember the near-complete financial meltdown of '08? It was a purely free-market product caused by a combination of unbelievable greed (across all layers of society, not just top) and appalling lack of government intervention even when it was obvious we were headed for disaster.
- I wonder if it would be better for me to write a book on this subject and then just link to it every time I hear this nonsense, what do you think? I have no idea how many times I have already explained what happened on the Internet, many of those times on this forum. My journal has some info on it.
But basically, point by point:
1. It was a purely free-market product - false.
There was no free market for a hundred miles around. FDIC - gov't provided insurance was and still is the moral hazard, which pushes banks into gambling and which allows people not to care which bank they lend the deposits to. That's not free market at all.
Fed setting 1%-0% short term interest rates have nothing to do with free market either. These 'free money' together with FDIC opened the flood gates for gambling with deposits AND leverage.
Freddie/Fannie is not free market at all. Gov't can't remove risk from lending and expect everybody not to jump on that and not to oversell/overbuy it. It's impossible. Once you 'remove risk' from lending, that's it, there is no more free market provided safe guard to stop any sort of abuse.
The regulation that was removed, that everybody cites in this case was Glass Steagall, which
You can't handle the truth.
The point I was trying to get across is that the idea of the concept of "counterfeiting" applying to a governments use of its own imprimatur via normal currency production is paradoxical. There are two states for the government: Either they have the authority to print currency or they don't. In the second case, where they don't have the authority to print currency, if they do produce currency, it's not counterfeiting because how can they counterfeit a non-existent currency. If they do have the authority to print currency, and they print currency, then the currency they produce is not counterfeit because they have the authority. You can attack the legitimacy of the currency, and some of your arguments make sense to a certain degree, but by using terms like "counterfeiting" you're just using incendiary rhetoric.
Are there problems with the money system as it exists today? Yes. Buckets of them. The fractional reserve system as it currently exists and the license banks have to simply create money is one of them. Not that a fractional reserve system is a bad idea. It's kind of necessary, just like it's necessary to oversell bandwidth and electrical capacity. Those things make perfect logistical sense, as long as there's a proper, working, regulatory regime in place. The problems come along when people come along and say, "look how much more short term money we can make if we ease these regulations" and then they foul the public commons. The ways this is done are myriad and complex, and it's appalling and something needs to be done. Up to there, I agree with you. You believe, however, that backing the currency with gold on a one to one basis will solve the problem and most people don't. It might add some natural constraints, except that they'd be just as easily worked around by crooked bankers and politicians. Has the US ever had enough gold to back its whole economy? From what I can tell, it's always worked on a fractional reserve system of some kind, issued notes and bonds or simply outright re-valued the dollar vs. gold when it needs to. Pretty much the same is true for all large governments through history. The smaller ones, when they have a gold shortage or oversupply have fallen back on other metals or trade tokens or just plain barter. Personal credit probably has more claim as a universal medium of exchange throughout history than gold does.
The commodity vs currency problem can't be magically waved away, either. What happens when gold becomes worth more than its face value in dollars due to foreign market prices? What happens when it becomes less? How rich do the gold-producing countries become? What if we get automated asteroid mining working and the worlds gold supply doubles in a matter of five years?
Have you ever heard of the Mali empire? They were rich from the gold trade to Europe at one point. Trade of gold made them wealthy, but what if they'd just kept the gold in the country? Would they have been richer as a nation then? Some individuals might have been, but the nation wouldn't have been richer for it, it was the trade that was important. Modern nations just remove the gold from the equation and keep a tally with their fiat currencies. Also, as it turned out, Mali didn't have much of its own gold, it was just getting it from further south. Europeans started sailing around them and Mali's influence and wealth declined.
You don't like the fact that economic systems are castles in the air. I really do get that. But you don't seem to see that economic systems backed by gold are still just castles in the air. Civilization is based on shared fantasies. The fantasy that fiat currency is worth something isn't any less real than the fantasy that gold is worth something.
There's a good Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett: _Making Money_. It's a sort of a sequel to _Going Postal_ which, despite being set in a fantasy world on the cusp of an industrial revolution and being about the postal system, manages to be one of the best hacker novels I've ever read. _Making Money_ deals with the i
It's just tits
Table-ized A.I.
"counterfeiting" applying to a governments use of its own imprimatur via normal currency production is paradoxical.
- but it is not paradoxical. In the case of USA the Constitution sets the rules and US Fed is breaking the rules, so there is no paradox, the government has exceeded its authority, that's all.
Every bank note must be backed by gold, if it is not backed by gold then it cannot exist. This is what Constitution states, this rules is one of the rules that the US government decided to break, so what is the paradox about simply doing something illegal?
There are two states for the government: Either they have the authority to print currency or they don't.
- false choice. The US Fed must have the gold coin first in order to print a corresponding bank note. Any bank notes that are printed that have no corresponding gold coin are counterfeit.
You can attack the legitimacy of the currency, and some of your arguments make sense to a certain degree, but by using terms like "counterfeiting" you're just using incendiary rhetoric.
- based on what? I am stating the fact, not an opinion.
Not that a fractional reserve system is a bad idea.
- it is a bad idea, there are no ifs and buts about it. Either there is money or there isn't money, fake credit given out on the fractional reserve will only last the country until it spirals into an inflationary depression.
Those things make perfect logistical sense, as long as there's a proper, working, regulatory regime in place.
- there is no such thing as a 'proper', 'working', 'regulatory regime'.
There is no need for any regulations, in fact all regulations are poison to the economy. Market distortions are the only real products of regulations.
f we ease these regulations" and then they foul the public commons.
- there shouldn't be any public commons. There is no such thing. Either there is an actual owner or not, if there isn't an owner, than all bets are off.
The Glass Steagall for example was an example of a counter-regulations put in place due to the original gov't sin of creating a moral hazard of FDIC. Of-course FDIC allowed some banks to get very big very fast, they became the political power, they got close with the politicians, got various free money from the Fed and were able to remove the Glass Steagall with that power.
In reality it is the gov't that should never have meddled with economics and should never have created FDIC in the first place, thus not creating the monopolies, not providing the breeding grounds for gambling with deposits, removing the due diligence that depositors should have exercised before giving their money to these FDIC insured banks.
ill solve the problem and most people don't.
- that's not an argument. Most people never in their lives even understand what money is in the first place. Most people don't know anything about computers or cars, why should anybody care what 'most people' have to say on economics?
It might add some natural constraints, except that they'd be just as easily worked around by crooked bankers and politicians
- it's very simple. The gov't has found a way to get around the limitations imposed on it by the Constitution of USA. Gov't shouldn't be in any businesses, there mustn't be a federal bank, there mustn't be any business related regulations, any commerce related regulations, any income taxes or payroll taxes or estate taxes, there mustn't be any departments of anything.
Education, Agriculture, IFS, Fed, FDA, FCC, EPA, FAA, etc.etc.etc., none of it should exist.
Has the US ever had enough gold to back its whole economy?
- that's a strange question. Even if you only have 1 kg of gold in TOTAL you can have the entire monetary system b
You can't handle the truth.
I have something else to say about your 'paradox'.
There is a new ruling by Federal Reserve, change of accounting, that took place last week. It announced that any losses on securities that Federal Reserve holds, will not be recognized as loss against Federal Reserve balance sheet, and instead the Fed will accrue those losses as liabilities to the US Treasury!
Now, you may not understand what this means, but let me try ant put it in very simple terms.
This is done to try and alleviate the fears that exist that the Federal Reserve may go bankrupt, because now it will LOOK like the Fed has no losses, instead these losses will belong on the books of US taxpayers.
The gov't is claiming that it made money on TARP, they are saying that the banks and others have paid the money back. But the REASON why the TARP was 'repaid', was because the Federal Reserve BOUGHT the toxic assets, and the Fed paid ABOVE market or on par for these assets. The Fed has held the short term interests low to allow these banks make all those 'record' profits on all that leverage.
Most of those short term profits will come at expense of long term losses, so all those banks will be going bankrupt again soon and will be asking for more bailouts.
But the point is that the Fed is holding all those terrible toxic assets, which are all money losers. But now the Fed and US gov't are saying: those losses are all losses of the Treasury, not of the Fed. Those are US tax payer losses.
So when the US gov't is saying: we MADE money on TARP, they are fucking lying, because now they are holding all that toxic debt.
But HOW, just HOW can Fed do this?
Fed's balance sheet consists of assets and liabilities, like a company's balance sheet does.
Liabilities are the PAPER MONEY: Federal Reserve Note - Legal Tender. It's not a 'dollar', it's a note = liabilities.
What's Fed's asset? The asset is what Fed buys with those notes when it spends them. The assets of Fed are US government securities. Until recently the Fed was buying very short term US Treasury bills - fairly secure form of asset until recently, their value wasn't falling, so the Fed's balance sheet held its balance.
With QE, the Fed has 30 year bonds, 10 year treasuries, credit card debt, auto loan debt, mortgage debt........... It's all bad stuff. The interest rates are going up. So all those 30 year treasuries, that are yielding 4%, the Fed will be stuck with them for 30 years. But the interest rates will go up. Say it's at 8% in a couple of years. If the value of the asset will fall (those 30 year treasuries are like 60-70 cents on a dollar now, but that's just a side note), the interest rates will rise and Fed's liabilities will exceed their assets, the Fed will be insolvent.
IF, IF the Federal reserve notes could be redeemed, then people would go and try to redeem them, it would BANKRUPT the Fed.
But the Fed notes cannot be redeemed, and that's what I am talking about. This is fraud, this is counterfeiting the bank notes. Those notes cannot be redeemed, they are fake - counterfeit.
What will the Fed give you if you ask to redeem the note? Will it give you the Treasury debt? Foreign exchange reserves? They don't have to give you ANYTHING.
It used to be, you could bring 35 Federal Reserve Notes to the Fed and get 1 ounce of gold for it. They had to have REAL assets to match their liabilities, so that the notes could be redeemed. Fed note is a promise to pay DOLLARS, promise to pay GOLD.
Now they will just say: OK. Would you like your 35 dollars in 1 note bills or in 5ves? They will not give you anything for all those fake notes.
So as the Fed's assets collapse due to the rising interest rates and defaulting mortgages, so the Fed becomes insolvent, it would mean what? What can you get for all those PROMISES TO PAY from the Fed?
NOTHING. You will get NOTHING. The Fed doesn't have to make good on its notes. This collapse of the Fed assets would expose the Fed for the FRAUD that it is. A coun
You can't handle the truth.