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America's Tech Decline: a Reading Guide
ErichTheRed writes "Computerworld has put together an interesting collection of links to various sources detailing the decline of US R&D/innovation in technology. The cross section of sources is interesting — everything from government to private industry. It's interesting to see that some people are actually concerned about this...even though all the US does is argue internally while rewarding the behaviour that hastens the decline."
Is it just me or is the America-is-over sentiment growing by leaps and bounds lately? Not that I'm judging it, I feel the same way much of the time. But it seems more and more that this attitude is coming to the forefront of our national consciousness and yet none of our leaders have done anything to address it.
Sad times. Guess I should go check out Mandarin for Dummies from the library.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Look, we've hit limits with what we can do with materials and kerosene. That's why a 747 from 1969 is the same as today's.
We're starting to hit the limits of what we can do with information processing. Once you hit atoms, where do you go from there?
As the world runs out of cheap chemical energy, the social model of continuous growth, suburbanisation, car culture and "jobs" requiring no more than typing away at a computer will have to change.
We'll start seeing innovations in how people will live.
Was this generated by a program using a context free grammar. http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/
Kudos and Erdos for you.
Blue sky projects and huge investment in R&D (admittedly largely due to the Cold War) were the reason we were number 1. The decline is all to do with the respect for stupidity that we see today, from reality shows, to youtube "fail" videos, religious obsession with celebrity, the rise of Anti-science, commercial fanboy-ism in all its forms etc.
That's not the way it used to be, even as recently as the 90s. The country is now suspicious of intelligence and academia.
My observation is that it's much harder for country to garner it's second wind than it is it's first. We've become complacent as all we've ever known is greatness, and when that starts to slip, we don't really know what it will be like not being number. Of course, there is a lot to be said about whether or not many of these up and coming countries will be able to sustain their growth. There are many that suspect that India will not and will eventually collapse rather than establish itself permanently as a tech leader. China is much more likely to maintain it's growth, but there is a lot of question about whether the government will be able to keep it's oppressive control over the people as the nation becomes more advanced (probably not) and what effect that will have on it's growth. There is also much to note that while America may lose it's dominance as THE key player in everything, that does not mean that it will fall into irrelevance or still not be a force to be reckoned with. I propose the idea that the US will have a brief collapse, mostly due to currency destabilization within the next 20 years. With that collapse it will have the opportunity to do two things, to either continue increasing the same bureaucratic nonsense that got it into the mess in the first place, putting more regulation on things and strangling ideas, or to go back to the same low level of regulation that caused all the great prosperity in the first place.
Why not just buy off the World Economic Forum and force them to publish more favorable results? That's right...we're America! That's how we roll!
Not so much that the US has really declined as the rest of the world has caught up.
When I see even North Koreans have cell phones (ok, they're probably reissued japanese discards on a closed network) I'm thinking there's getting to be less difference based upon location.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
USSR fell. But that give rise to BRICS. The decline in R&D is not a talent issue ( there is another topic not long ago here in /. about the high unemployment of PhDs), but of a financial issue. $$$ is tight everywhere, and scientific advancement is usually considered as a "vanity" rather than "necessity".
New Economic Perspectives
Innovation and discovery comes from people with inquisitive minds - minds that have been nurtured by a well rounded education system; one that encourages critical thinking, experimentation, and a good understanding of what scientific knowledge we have already. Now look at what is happening in the US - a drastic cutback in public education, "teaching to the test", and in many areas, official dismissal of science and scientific discoveries. Quite a few school districts are actively pushing creationism against evolution, dismissing global climate change, and many "non-essential" curriculum activities.
I was once told "If you think the cost of education is expensive, consider the cost of ignorance."
There's no investment in long term growth. It's all about "let's sell our soul for a profitable quarter." There's no long term R&D and employee development. And it doesn't help when the government has hit all time highs as far as debt/deficits.
TFA lists as concerns the wrong ones. 1) STEM "education", which is really training. You don't train people to innovate, you train people to push buttons or flip burgers. Education begins with independent, critical thinking and that is less and less fostered by the educational system. 2) Why would a smart student do STEM when the money is in pie-dividing, not pie creation? Besides, B-school is about parties and sex, not cracking books all night and all weekend. 3) The progress toward a knowledge-based economy -should- be slowest for the early adopters, then people can copy it and learn from those mistakes. 4) The benchmark of "green energy" is wrong, it is now viable only because governments mandate it. From TFA: "Clean energy is an industry the government has cited as important to future growth." And the government will piss in your pocket and tell you it's raining. Government initiatives are playgrounds for rent-seekers, perpetual-motion nuts, and con men.
America's tech decline is fostered by a government in thrall to companies that ship profits to Jersey, Bermuda and Monaco; jobs to China and Vietnam; and toxic waste to Africa. Simplification of the tax code, taxing companies and individuals on parity (after all, companies are people) and letting the bastards walk if they don't like it, and a serious crackdown on malfeasance under color of authority are what the government should be doing.
"Wrote Grove: "You could say, as many do, that shipping jobs overseas is no big deal because the high-value work -- and much of the profits -- remain in the U.S. That may well be so. But what kind of a society are we going to have if it consists of highly paid people doing high-value-added work -- and masses of unemployed?""
Nailed it. Offshoring makes companies and their management richer. It saves a little for consumers of the relevant product, if the savings are passed on to them rather than simply taken as profits ... but those consumers have fewer and fewer jobs from which to get income to buy the products.
The endgame here is for the local market for consumer goods to dwindle, and then for the company to move it's main office to a tax haven and/or somewhere with a population that still has money to spend. They've basically mined the consumer market until it's depleted, and then they move on. This is what happens when you consistently underpay your regular workers and/or ship their jobs elsewhere: you undermine the entire economy. Apparently modern industries have forgotten basic lessons from way back in the days of Henry Ford: pay your workers reasonably well, and they will ultimately help your community and business thrive.
Can't say this article is shocking. Perhaps if our society valued intellect, abhorred a gov't that is larger than all manufacturing jobs combined, and made personal responsibility a cornerstone and not a sound-byte.... nah, who am I kidding. We reaped our profits and sowed the seeds of our own destruction. Case in point: ChiCom... give China your IP if you want access to their economy, never mind that they'll create a knock-off the next day and bury you with your own product.
First we had the legs race. Then we had the arms race. Now we're going to have the brain race. And, if we're lucky, the final stage will be the human race. - John Brunner
If you want innovation in America, rather than complaining about it, you need to change something. Science and technology are fundamentally social endeavors as much as technical ones. Take a quarter of the defense budget and instead put it towards public education and basic research.
Also, I think it's a blind alley to consider innovation a zero-sum game. It is helpful rather than harmful that other countries are making serious contributions. Ultimately we are going to discover intelligent life elsewhere, and which-country-scored-fourth-in-high-school-math is going to seem like small potatoes compared to getting humanity prepped for the next phase, whatever that turns out to be.
to think of all of this as, the world is catching up with the US (and in general, the rest of the world is catching up to Western Civilization). Yeah the US certainly has its problems, but like the article stated, comparing it to four countries who added together don't have half the population of the US, let alone the land area, is no different than having your answer before your facts to support it.
Saying the China is moving to a digital economy faster than the US is odd, but then again the favorite thing to do among such people is to ignore all those China doesn't count when it wants to look good, who happen to be the same people it counts when it wants to look good in other areas. Let alone, moving from where they were to anywhere would show more progress than most countries can make. After seeing the real estate situation in China I figure it is just a few years before they have similar problems. They are just better at hiding the problems they have, from practice and intimidation.
The only problem the US faces that is has not tried to fix is Washington DC. Entitlement spending will cripple this country. The discretionary spending (where those mythical 39 billion dollars from recent cuts came out of) is less than a third of the budget. The rest is guaranteed spending. Meaning we could cut everything but Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Defense, and still be spending negatively.
So, the threat is real, but it is from the leadership of the country, not some foreign bogeyman. As with all power structures that have crumbling support they need external bogeymen. Hence through their sycophants in the media they create them on demand.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Our current school system discredits creativity, and forces everyone into the same mold. Arguably, this mold is 100% useless in the real world, especially in a world that requires any innovation.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
The problem is short attention spans, and a difficulty in communicating the benefits of long-term, fundamental research combined with a political, financial and popular culture obsessed with a "that was yesterday, what have you done for me lately" mentality.
A perfect illustration is shortly after the "merger" of France-based Alcatel and U.S.-based Lucent Technologies was the virtual kneecapping of Bell Labs.
Then CEO Patricia Russo announced that long-term, fundamental research would no longer be performed at Bell Labs as that wasn't the culture of Alcatel. If a project couldn't be productized in 7 years, it would be shelved.
To me that was a "break out the shovels" moment. As in, "It has been a long, hard decline but we can see the bottom. Break out the shovels, we're going to dig this hole deeper."
The same thing goes on with Congress and funding basic scientific research at placed like NASA, the various National Labs (Sandia, Lawrence Livermore, Fermi, Oak Ridge, etc.). Just look at what happened to the Superconducting Super Collider.
The problem is you can't always predict what benefits will come from fundamental research, thus you can't give the bean counters a predicted return on investment number. When is an even harder number.
The only real time the United States as a government priority has pumped money into research is if that research could be used to blow shit up. Actually, this is probably true of Britain, Germany, Russia, Japan and China as well.
We need to be able to clearly articulate the benefits to society and the economy as a whole that fundamental research brings. If we want to drive forward into the future imagined by the visionaries, and not end up in the one envisioned by the dystopians (no Mad Max, please), this and education need to be our top priorities as a nation. Which nation? Any and every nation.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
My impression has been that those with money and those looking to acquire it are trying to do it the easy way. The challenging ways of building wealth have been abandoned in America. This is why we don't make much of anything. And when we do, it's often crap where someone in some other country is building it for cheap.
I've also come to the conclusion that the reason there is such an obsession with intellectual property is because people subconsciously know that nobody needs us. We're not much more than middlemen, still resting on the laurels of those who've come before who actually did innovate and build things. It's only a matter of time before the Chinese, like the Japanese, strike out on their own. This defense of IP is desperate attempt to stave off the inevitable.
Although, admittedly, I'm not convinced that China has the culture and devotion that the Japanese have. From my experience Chinese entrepreneurs are primarily driven the same things as Americans, how to make the most money for the least amount of effort. I predict that eventually China will price itself out of cheap manufacturing and everyone will migrate to South East Asia and South America. I foresee a future where most manufacturing based in Africa; the Chinese interestingly are already moving in that direction.
Either way, I'm pessimistic on America's future. And while it's fun to blame someone else it's really everybody's fault; starting with the government, management and ending with the worker.
How dare you assert that any of our resources be directed by the government into research and development for the greater good of the nation? When CEO's could instead have the total freedom to take the money and run? As Reagan's assistant secretary for productivity & technology said in 1984, outlining a plan to restructure all of higher education, "Accountability and expertise must come from the private sector where the user needs are best identified. This is our intent." Thank god that has been so successful!
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
For all the good that tolerance and openness has done, the realization that one group of people is not inherently 'better' than any other does have its not-so-pleasant consequences too, and in particular it tends to not turn out well for those traditionally favored. We're dealing with one such case now. In this case, when one can do things just as well anywhere on the globe as in America, American workers just plain don't provide good value for the labor dollars being spent. In IT and manufacturing, one can get the same productivity (in terms of both amount and quality of product) or even better elsewhere at considerably better rates, and in manufacturing the difference is often so large that it even covers the overhead of shipping the finished product "back" to the target market. Why wouldn't a business jump on that? Like anyone else, they have little choice but to maximize the value they get for their money; whether or not it is good, it is what they do to survive.
There are fields where this equation doesn't hold: namely, what I call "location-tied fields" where the work needs to be done at or very near the place where its end products will finally go. Customer service is something of a counterintuitive example here, but it holds: natively speaking the language of one's target market is too huge of an advantage to ignore, as anyone who has had to deal with outsourced call centers can attest. Skilled manual labor (i.e. the trades) almost universally falls into this category as well: you cannot work unless you can work onsite. But with very few exceptions, location-tied fields don't get a lot of respect in the US, and this isn't just a matter of pay: these jobs are never considered even when politicians cry out for adding more "good jobs" to the economy. The only real exceptions to this are the fields of medicine and law, both of which are location-tied (you can't treat a patient unless you are with the patient, and while it is technically possible to practice law in places other than where one lives the complexities of jurisdiction make it quite difficult) yet make so much money as to essentially buy their way past the stigma.
This doesn't bode well for the US, and in particular for "born-Americans" (a group I'm defining as people born into American culture or steeped in it as an insider from an extremely young age, as opposed to immigrants, isolated cultural groups within the US, or non-Americans) in general. The value for the jobs that born-Americans respect just isn't in America anymore, and the jobs with value in America are not thought worth considering by born-Americans. The answers to this include either a greater focus on location-tied work (which in turn will require more respect for such work) or a correction in the cost of non-location-tied work to bring it closer to its value, but nobody really wants to do either of these things. Where, then, will their jobs come from?
If you want to help it return, kill all patent trolls.
Instead of trying to figure out why America is in decline and doing something about it, let's just assume that America is not in decline and keep doing all the things that brought us to this point! Then, if that's not enough sticking-your-head-in-the-sand, we can ridicule the people who suggest doing anything about it, perhaps with catchy phrases such as "blame America first" or something.
That's right, blame it on religion instead of harder targets like teacher's unions that have protected terrible and under-performing teachers. I'm a great example of why they should be broken up. My math education was so bad in "good public schools" that I am now staring down the prospects of having to go to a community college to make sure I have all of the foundations plus engineering calculus down pat before I can apply for a M.S. in any respectable subject.
How about the fact that we throw kids of wildly different abilities into the same class and teach to the lowest common denominator? This means that most classes are incredibly slow for the students who can perform. Heck, this applied even to the AP classes I took in high school.
But oh yeah, it's teaching creationism that's destroying kids' ability to do Math, Physics, etc. A few minor points of contention between religion and science are to blame for why kids are completely turned off.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Aaaaand... the second result from a google search. By far? Look at more than the first google result and try again.
How does it feel to be a liar with pants constantly on fire?
That is the day the decline began. As soon as those guys touched down, the budget ax started swinging and interest just shriveled up. As if they decided there's nothing left to do.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
AWWWWW CRAP does that mean we have to endure a remake of this ?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Here is a very interesting video from 1994.
To sum up. If you outsource all of your jobs. You'll not have any paying customers left.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PQrz8F0dBI
Don't forget their lawyers and their congress-critters.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
There is plenty greatness and technological leadership of all kinds in the US. The problem has been the rise of anti-government, anti-science rhetoric and budgeting that is hollowing out any opportunity for the scientific community to lead and be listened to. Consequently, what you see on the political and social front is stagnation and the rest of the world catching up or passing us in many fields of endeavor.
Unfortunately, we are in that period of "currency destabilization" or to put it more precisely "dollar devaluation" now, not 20 years from now. The collapse won't bring with it opportunity here, only a much higher prices and scarce government resources for doing most anything technological or not going forward. Instead of supporting science and technology T-party and republican rhetoric, which makes up 1/3 of our government and the body politic these days, is hell bent on diminishing it. You can see this in the insane notion that we can default on our debts to force their ideology on the other 2/3rds. They seem more intent on breaking wind rather than addressing the consequences of the issue.
We like to think our economy is dominant because of our military, but both are highly dependent on foreign resources and brain power, not to mention capital. Our economy has largely specialized in financial transactions, which as we learned with credit default swaps, much of the derivatives-based speculation is little more than an unstable, government sanctioned Ponzi scheme that produces little in the way of social or technological advance.
You lost me with your comments on "bureaucratic nonsense" and "strangling ideas", the later to me just an empty sophism. I doubt the Patent Office or the Intellectual Property Courts and Law are at the heart of our problem, which ultimately is one of the inability of about 1/3 of the country not being able to reason effectively nor see the adverse consequences of that. Much of this comes from poor education and direct efforts by some to distort the truth about a broad range of science and technology issues from global climate change to regulation of the internet. With respect to the latter, it is hard to argue that its the bureaucrats that are the problem, as essential current efforts and policy are to keep things as they are. It is special interests who want to be able to be granted special rights to manipulate the infrastructure to control the flow of information through the "tubes" and legislators with such poor educations in science and technology that they haven't any idea of what it is they are doing, not necessarily that the are not well-intentioned.
This is symptomatic of a much larger issue, namely that science has given the average man and woman great powers and capabilities, but who are unable to think clearly or cogently enough about the consequences of what they are doing with that power.
You can see it from Fukushima, to global warming, to the computation of derivatives on mortgage backed securities, and just about every other problem humanity has. Without science there was relatively little damage such thoughtless individuals could do the planet, but that is no longer the case. With 7 billion humans now inhabiting the earth that problem becomes so large as to overwhelm what good science can achieve.
I'm the submitter, so I figured I'd reserve my comments for here so this wasn't rejected with the comment "tl; dr". :-)
Here's how I feel -- I'm not 100% sold on the argument that everything is crashing down, but I do have some serious concerns for the future. Some of them could be easily fixable if people would just get on board, and others will take a long time and tons of investment to fix. Here's my list of issues:
So -- all we need to do is break companies' addiction to short te
| Well, I'd be happy to hear how US helped Mexico and Canada.
Well you are and endless source of amusement and really bad ideas. Without you, our smug condescension would need a new target. Don't ever change, we need you just the way you are...
No. The problem is free trade when there are extreme cost of living differentials and massive subsidies. Assuming both areas are stable, profit maximization occurs when the product is produced in the low cost of living area and sold in the high cost of living area. This funnels more money to the rich. In addition, massive subsidies take the risk out of the research and make it hard for the more efficient guy to compete. They may wipe out the very thing you are trying to create. To big to fail = no market economy.
The obvious first problem is that American students, who have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to attend universities and stay in debt for most of their lives can't compete with students from other countries where education is subsidized or free. American students end their undergrad deeply in financial trouble and can't continue on to advanced degree programs which is why these programs are stacked with foreign nationals.
The second problem is the preference of US tech corporations for hiring foreign nationals over US citizens. Not having an accent can be a problem when trying to get a job at a firm that is trying to put on a diverse and multinational image.
Finally, someone came up with the idea that in the US, human beings are not supposed to expect to be able to survive. Survival is not a god-given right in American society we are told. Just because someone spent half their life learning an engineering or science discipline doesn't mean they deserve or should get an engineering or science job or any job for that matter. This is the current state of mind in the US, that employment and survival, forget about research and development, are only for the lucky.
Please check your facts. Most of the European side of USSR does not have any pre-war buildings left. Not to mention 20 million war casualties and 40 million of the brightest minds executed during Stalin's repressions. True, US was never seriously touched by WW2, but USSR was occupied and bombed all the way to Moscow.
to the end of the petroleum era. rising demand (higher standards of living in india, china, brazil...) and falling supply (deeper, hard to process) means all sorts of deep assumptions change about our economies. #1: it won't make economic sense to ship cheap crap across the pacific from china anymore. we'll start making cheap crap here at home again
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Your comments are little more than "More government is the problem" BS.
If you really want to talk about talk about the source of budget deficits you need to look at stock-options, since they allow corporate insiders to pay tax on income at vastly lower rates, especially when coupled with insider leverage from the tax expense the rest of us get to pay for corporate tax deductions of all kinds. It isn't your government that is ripping you off, its corporate insiders who have used stock-options to largely fund their take over of government to buy politicians who spew the "government is the problem" rhetoric their by giving them even more power to set up a "government within the government"
For example, your comments on "green energy" technology are just pure fantasy. It falsely assumes that industries competing against green energy (oil, gas, coal) are not getting any government subsidies. Perhaps your ignorance stems from your lack of familiarity with the US tax code. Do you pay at a roughly 35% rate or are you one of those who fills out the hundreds of special forms providing you with an 15% tax on the preponderance of your income that derives from stock options, which are taxes as capital gains, than can be further reduced in some cases to zero, by special deductions for "rolling stock", "ethanol and gasoline additive credits", "coal-gasification" credits, etc. [or add your favorite corporate tax-giveaway here], which amount to roughly 5T$ per year and not available to the average taxpayer.
I won't even bother to address your canard with respect to STEM education, since you don't seem to understand that training and education and "innovation" are not entirely separable activities, and even much less so in STEM, where you can't even understand the issues unless you have been sufficiently educated (trained).
To put it another way, you have been had by watching too much Fox News and being fooled by those pundits, who, to use your expression, have been "busy pissing in your pocket".
If the top-heavy international finance economy centered in the US collapses, all of the necessary factors will be in place to quickly reinvent the US as a new economic superpower. There are many good reasons why the US is the wealthiest country on the planet in spite of its mistakes, and those reasons will survive any potential economic collapse.
You have a large and educated workforce. (And any recent undermining of the education system can be easily reversed.)
You have a well-developed nation-wide transportation infrastructure. (Maybe a little light on rail, but just look at Canada for comparison and it looks fantastic.)
You have vast tracts of rich agricultural land and substantial areas of year-round growing seasons.
You have immense mineral wealth, including a very good supply of rare earth elements and nuclear fuels.
If things continue to decline, and in a period of turmoil the old way cracks apart and topples, it seems likely that a new paradigm could develop that focuses on long-term economic health rather than short term gains to share value or dividend of stocks, one that is inclusive of the working class and even more favorable to the innovative class. If that happens, the turnaround will be awe-inspiring.
Seems Dilbert and The Office are the most accurate description of how American business really works. Fortunately for us, there are still many workplaces that aren't dysfunctional, or which have engineers who manage to accomplish things in spite of bad management. Education has its problems, but there, I never saw anything as bad as the problems at the work place. I've wondered if it's just me, perhaps I've been unlucky, or haven't been careful enough about accepting certain job offers and then finding out I shouldn't have. I've asked everyone I could what their work experiences have been like, and most have said more than half their job experiences were dysfunctional. Whatever laments we have over the lack of quality of STEM education, management education has got to be much worse. What kind of fool management shoves their best people into closets, out of personal and totally unjustified dislike or fear, perhaps only for being too smart? Tries to treat their employees as slaves, with heavy micromanagement and surveillance, believing people are naturally lazy slackers and must be forced to work? Thinks putting up a front of competence is the most important thing to do, denying there are problems, rather than actually being competent? Lacks the imagination to envision what is really important, and grasp what is a total waste of everyone's time? Gotta love being told your thoughts and ideas are not wanted and are all wrong anyway, then ordered to spend weeks or months on a worthless project only to have it cancelled... and then they try to blame you for it! Employment seems like it's Revenge of the Incompetent.
And why is it like this? One reason is the pressure. We're straining to improve our already very fat standard of living on a static base. This is a recipe for angst. Another is that the meritocracy seemingly stops at the management level. Our leadership is crap. Our corporations are positively medieval in their governance. As if it isn't hard enough to perform to the level necessary to justify the relatively hefty compensation our engineers earn, we have incompetent, thieving management making life harder while upping the requirements because their far larger compensation packages and blunders must be paid for somehow.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Business as usual is over. Welcome to the 21st century. This is the century of transitions, of steady-state economies instead of growth economies, of humanity adapting to live from only the energy influx to our one planet that's provided by sunlight. This concept begins to dawn in most intelligent people in our world. It's just that you Americans have been so rich, so powerful, so much on top of the world, that you have lost important concepts in your vocabulary and thought-patterns:
Except people like you have been saying that since the dawn of time, and continue being wrong. It's not that sustainability is a dirty word, it's that technology enables growth to continue on the same resource base.
The massive increase in world population has not caused a massive population crash due to starvation and disease, because we invented ways to grow more food on the same land, and discovered the germ theory of disease. You can see the same long-term trend for just about any resource constraint that might have limited growth - it's ignored until it actuall becomes a problem and then the problem gets solved. We're not just tool-using monkeys, we're tool-creating monkeys.
Sure, ultimately the energy from sunlight will be some sort of limiting factor, but take America as an example: our electrical usage is about 1 Tw, the average power of sunlight hitting america (including night, clouds, etc) is about 2000 Tw. We're no where near any kind of limit. And unless we abandon the space program entirely, by the time we grow our power usage 100 fold and this starts to be an issue, we won't be limited to Earth-bound power collection for long.
Are you really saying "you're so much more successful than me, so you need to change to do things our less-successful way"? Because that's what I'm hearing.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I think if you look back at history, you'll see that from time-to-time America has gone through inferiority complexes in one way or another.
I seem to recall that fairly early on, we were envious of the academic establishments and music of Europe. Result? Smithsonian, classical composers emerged.
The one that is within some of our lifetimes is Sputnik. Boy, did that light a fire under our asses. We jumped all the way to the Moon.
I see this as one of the benefits of an open society. We can engage in collective handwringing over our failures, and we're the better for it.
Learning Mandarin? I saw this in the 80s. Our highschool added Japanese. How'd that work out?
The American inferiority complex is healthy. That doesn't mean we should ignore it, quite the contrary. We should listen to it. I see parallels between our present day and the Progressive era of the turn of the 20th century. Back then, corporate influence was also an issue. We tackled it then, and we can tackle it today. The way we handle it probably won't look the same; but we have the capability of handling it.
America. Even our inferiorty complex is great. :)
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Plateaus in innovation are natural. People aged 25-40 are your drivers of innovation. On a macro scale, the more brain power you put toward solving problems, the more innovation will result.
We have to look at what public policy has done to our ability to innovate. We've all but squashed our own entrepreneurial spirit through a variety of taxes, regulations, and attempts at social engineering. As control over industry goes up, only the big fish can survive. Corporate tax rates are obscene, and put small businesses at a real disadvantage. Taxes cut into a business' margins so drastically that the only way to make a business viable, outside of cheating on your taxes, is to operate on such an enormous scale that you make up for your margins in volume. Advantage: mega-corporations. With a quasi-monopoly, a company no longer is required to innovate its practices or its products. They can just keep selling the same cheap crap, because nobody can overcome the barriers to entry in order to mount a reasonable challenge.
Also, consider that we currently have a lot of brains engaged in solving non-technical problems. GE, for example, has a staff of 970 tax attorneys, whose sole charter is to optimize their tax bill by utilizing overseas tax shelters and the like. That represents a lot of powerful brain cycles effectively being flushed down the toilet.
Certainly there are still a great number of entrepreneurs out there, and companies like Apple are defying the trend of tech innovation. However, we should realize they are outliers, last vestiges of a bygone era, and not representative of the future. The first step to changing course is to identify policies that may be stifling us, and alter them.
This is a very broad subject but two things stand out in my mind, the percent of economy that represents manufacturing, and secondly that society has a system to highly train everyone for a skilled job in the workforce.
Germany has kept its manufacturing base at 24% of its economy, while the US has slowly slid to 11%. Today they have the second best trade ratio behind only China. Some believe this is mainly due to having primarily mid size family owned businesses that are stakeholders, instead of corporations.
In the US getting skilled education past high school is getting very expensive, going up much faster than inflation. There is not a solid system for skilled technical or vocational training like other (mainly European) countries.
How do you correct these 2 problems?
"Quit attacking teachers". That's the soundbite you always get back. It's BS of course; but it can be effective.
When you attack the unions, you are NOT attacking teachers. The union system is corrupt. It promotes based on seniority, not performance. It protects everybody once they obtain tenure, even if they don't deserve protection. They serve to siphon off public money into the Democratic Party.
You're not attacking teachers. You're attacking a system under which many human beings become corrupt, because the system rewards laziness and corruption.
Unfortunately, that logic doesn't condense into a sound bite. "The union is not the teacher"? It just doesn't have quite the same panache as "quit attacking teachers".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
America has been a superpower for what, 60 years? call it 120 years if you want to count the period where it was gaining significant mindshare around the world but before it was a true super power.
A population growth which has been supported by cheap fossil fuels, which provide both energy in a very convenient form for mechanization and a very handy chemical feed stock for fertilizers and pesticides.
Any replacement we come up with not only has to provide more energy than fossil fuels do at the moment because of increasing population, but also do it without effecting the total area of agricultural land or you are going to need to push yields even higher than you would have had to do just to keep up with population growth.
I'm not saying this is impossible, but if we get it wrong and don't find those replacement technologies and energy sources, then we are going to have to sustain a massive global population crash.
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
Or, our standard of living could decline towards that of the third-world countries we're shipping our jobs to, until they meet - and then others will continue upwards and us down, due to momentum.
Sure, ultimately the energy from sunlight will be some sort of limiting factor, but take America as an example: our electrical usage is about 1 Tw, the average power of sunlight hitting america (including night, clouds, etc) is about 2000 Tw. We're no where near any kind of limit.
That seems to assume humans are the only creatures on the planet, and other stuff like weather and climate don't need significant amounts of that wattage to run normally (e.g. in ways that we like).
Then add the losses of converting the sunlight to electricity. If it's 20% efficiency you need 5TW (and 5/2000 of the area in USA) .
So how far are you from that limit really?
BTW if there ever was "free energy" and lots of users there would be another limit - the earth might start glowing (when seen from space) from all the waste heat (including those from cooling systems ). ;)
Sure you do. They just live somewhere else, and they're getting rich very quickly---great customers! Since they're a growth market, the companies have to hire more there to get local talent and undrerstanding, and of course rightsize the US cost structure.
I mean, who cares about the Equatorial Guinea market?
Why do you think the key to greatness is class envy?
Revolutions happen when the masses realize they got nothing left to lose.
Revolutions are needed when stagnation is getting out of control.
The US has stagnated.
The masses do not yet realize they got nothing to lose.
Therefor: This same decline has been in process for a long time. Like when Japan took over as power economy from the USA. China is just Japan squared.
Is the US doomed? Hardly but it don't matter how slow a ship is sinking. If you don't bail, the sinking will happen. A ship taking on water isn't doomed but a ship that takes on a drop of water a day will eventually sinkif nothing is done.
And the US is doing NOTHING.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I have my name on nine patents, five of which I got *after* turning 40. Just sayin'
Any replacement we come up with not only has to provide more energy than fossil fuels do at the moment because of increasing population, but also do it without effecting the total area of agricultural land or you are going to need to push yields even higher than you would have had to do just to keep up with population growth.
Farmland in America has been shrinking for 50 years and the area covered by forest has grown as a result - There's plenty of land. The land area needed to transition to solar (even at the low efficiency of solar thermal) isn't a big concern, the blocking factor is simple NIMBYism, plus the people who don't want any power plant built any where for any reason. Both the social and tech problems are well within human ability to solve, but for all the predictions of doom there just aren't significant problems (in this area) affecting people's day-to-day lives yet, so there's been no real reason to change.
Also, America's native-born poluation is shrinking - our population grows only through immigration (not that that's a bad thing).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
As I said, that 2000x available energy means we won't "run out" until we're using ~100x what we are now (and of course efficiencies will go up over time). Long before that we'd likely be putting the solar panels in outer space (PG&E was already looking at that seriously, because the NIMBYism is so bad in CA).
BTW if there ever was "free energy" and lots of users there would be another limit - the earth might start glowing (when seen from space) from all the waste heat (including those from cooling systems ). ;)
The laws of thermodynamics would like to have a word with you. ;)
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You don't listen to other countries; you have your own units system (Imperial) 100 years after everyone else except Burma has switched to metric.
Hey, you forgot about Liberia!!!
I took offense at the idea that the US is cracking because other countries are moving towards knowledge-based and green economies and infrastructures faster than the US did. Umm, the US did it first, and did it well, and then SHOWED other people how to do it (you can't open an iPad factory and not expect people to learn something about technology, design, manufacturing, marketing, etc.). Also, the US will be slower to change to a green infrastructure because we already HAD an infrastructure. It's well and good for China to say their new roads are made with green concrete when the US already has 8.5 million miles of roadway in place. It would be environmentally irresonsible to tear it all up and replace with greener options since it's already there. I get that appropriate metrics are hard to use, but come on....
Hint: It ain't race. It's health that has a giant effect on intelligence. With an economy being sold off piecemeal for the benefit of the most wealthy, no-one but them will be able to afford healthcare. Without healthcare, why, many, many more people will be just like you!
Paranoia is a Survival Trait!
See subject. The rich are doing all kinds of crap (enron & banking fraud + more) and we all know it. This nations heading towards a revolution because the dumb ass rich forgot one thing: People talk and spread know how to one another and the internet only makes it more possible to enlighten others by its usage for spreading truth. So, Mr. Bailout Banker (whom we taxpayers paid out the monies for your b.s. without OUR unanimous consent but put in place by your politicians you coerce via monies/lobbying bribes or even blackmail or worse doesn't fool us for a second)? You can eat shit and die.
The controllers always throughout all history tried to keep reading and writing, the presses, better education, and media to themselves, this is why. Any invading conqueror does the same as well.
Do you think your crap here, really fools anyone?
Clue - Cheating and robbing others blind and using an entire network "clique" to do so? Not superior by any means. It's more inferior and the lowest of the LOW... and, all done, just to keep the poor down and unable to fight back (like you need monies for in courts to bring suit on libelers for example).
It still has the most effective military on the planet.
An effective military is one that achieves political goals. By this standard, the US military has failed. It has not created a stable, democratic and unitary Iraqi State. It has not created "pacified" Afghanistan and enforced central authority.
It's possible that the most "effective" military is one that does not actually have to be used, but where the appearance of potential strength dissuades enemies from implementing action. In the late-1990s, and before the Bush II-era adventures into the Middle East and near-Asia, there was a lot of posturing about how a newer, leaner US military could intervene at relatively low financial cost using dramatically lower force numbers to implement rapid and enduring alterations in international balances of power and within States. The reality of the stalemate/withdrawal from Iraq and the escalating spread of the Afghan brushfire conflict into neighbouring States despite very high financial, materiel and troop costs has significantly weakened the global perception of the US military. Just as the Soviet military was considered quite effective *before* its Afghan quagmire...
Da Blog
US/UK/French/German workers are best placed doing skilled work. The average western worker is more skilled than the average developing world worker. So they can earn more, and create/produce more, than others.
It is the simple theory of comparative advantage.
The policy implication is that western economies should focus on moving as many people as possible into (highly) skilled employment. Complaining about the fact that they can't compete with unskilled labour is just pissing in the wind.
You're a couple of decades behind. The low skill manufacturing jobs are long gone, along with the high skill expertise involved with running these factories. Now the knowledge worker jobs are being shipped overseas. These were the jobs that smart people were supposed to get into to save them from the inevitable loss of manufacturing. Where do we go now? There's no more "up".
Localized services are a "circle the drain" idea. You may be able to skim off enough of the wealth that remains to temporarily keep yourself out of the hole but nothing you do even reduces the flow. Somebody still has to produce exportable goods and services to offset the imported things you buy.
Another option would be to promote midrange products and how they can ultimately save money. If a pair of jeans costs forty dollars but lasts three times as long as a pair of twenty dollar jeans, you save money despite the bigger front end expense.
Unfortunately, the WalMart mentality has created a situation where you have cheap stuff and extremely expensive stuff, with little if any middle ground.
Of course, another option would be for innovation to take over. Let's say that the innovation fostered by a group like MAKE magazine encourages people to go into limited run manufacturing. It is done in garages and neighborhood production centers, so shipping and handling is minimized. If the manufacturing equipment is flexible enough, you can produce a lot of different things that are high quality AND customized. You may pay more for the jeans, but they will be a perfect fit AND they will be the colors you want.
Why do you think the key to greatness is class envy?
Because "envy" is what criminals call their victim's desire for justice, and no nation can be great without first being just.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Because the government is bending the citizens over and giving them forced vaccinations where the sun doesn't shine.
And while our pants are down, they grab our wallets.
And by "justice", you specifically mean stealing from people you envy.
If I knew the answer to that, I suppose I wouldn't be. Don't you think ? You should.
> Ironically, the republican party has instead chosen to give up on Christianity rather than eliminating stock options.
I... what? :)
Stock options are one form of pay. There have been massive loopholes in the taxes regulating them that companies have used to defraud the public. Sometimes those loopholes are closed and sometimes the companies are fined heavily for that.
Paying people in stock options is actually a *good* idea if it's done right, because it incentivizes them to work for the best long-term interests of the company rather than the best near-quarter results. The problem is the tax structure around them, and around other forms of income, that allows for loopholes. Because the tax code is usually interpreted close to literally, and because it is highly technical, people get away with a lot.
The republicans actually tried to simplify the tax code a number of years ago--Dole ran on that platform. But politically, it didn't go anywhere. Policy and politics, sadly, are often disjoint. (To be fair, I do not know the details of the plan--but I remember it was a large element of their platform.)
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Oh man, you are so cool. You must be just naturally talented and popular. I am so jealous.
That's what I called it 10 years ago when I was trying to hire engineers for projects at a National Laboratory, the dumbing down. Perhaps 1 in 5 were competent. Most could do nothing without a computer to do it for them. Sad really, and a little scary because these were supposed to be the cream of the crop. They blamed each other for failures and were completely unable to diagnose complex systems. Now that others have recognised the trend perhaps something can be done about it. But given that the problem stems from our colleges and universities and programs that focus their energies on the worst performers (like no child left behind that in effect leaves all children behind) I have little hope of a reversal without a complete repudiation of the misguided government controlled education agenda.
Really its now invent, patent and profit. You cant say the USA is short on profit.
If the country shifted goals to racing ahead on tech, I am sure they would still do very well at it.
In the end it comes down to what you want.
A guy sits down at the bar, and orders a drink. As soon as the bar tender serves him, this little guy appears, runs down the guys arm, kicks over his drink, and runs back up and hides.
This goes on for several drinks, before the bartender asks "whats up with that weird little guy?"
The guy says he released a genie from a bottle, and for his 3 wishes asked for millions of dollars, a garage full of Porsches and a 12" prick.
Neat. I've never had a stalker before.
TimeCube much, APK?
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
BTW if there ever was "free energy" and lots of users there would be another limit - the earth might start glowing (when seen from space) from all the waste heat (including those from cooling systems ). ;)
The laws of thermodynamics would like to have a word with you. ;)
Earth based solar energy will never be that cheap, so it should be obvious that I was not talking about that :).
Back in the early 1800s, a bunch of Boston busybodies were all in a dither about the numbers of children running about playing instead of being cooped up in schools. They feared that we were turning out generations of ignorant illiterates, so they commissioned a survey... and found that only a tiny percentage (less than 5%) of children had not completed grammar school (where English and usually either Greek or Latin vocabulary and grammar and a modicum of math were learned; they were also called "classical schools") roughly equivalent in most ways to having completed junior college, today.
In northern Virginia a little earlier, a former indentured servant who had become quite successful bequeathed his fortune to set up and operate schools in what, by that time, had become 2 counties. Those funds allowed the schools to be constructed and operated until after the Civil War.
In back-woods PA in the early 1700s, a fellow named William Tennant set up a crude log-cabin school, with very high standards; though at first it was ridiculed for its rude quarters. He inspired others, including the graduates, of course. Some of them founded other colleges and academies, the graduates of which became presidents of Princeton, and founders of Hampden-Sidney and numerous other colleges. This cluster of scholars was inter-connected with the Scottish Enlightenment.
The USA still has the best universities in the world.
OTOH, there are many problems. There's a definite impression that university executives and sports coaches are a little excessively remunerated for the work they do. (They don't seem to work nearly as industriously as Witherspoon did to build and improve Princeton, for instance, and yet are paid far more.) Life in academia is, well, weird. In a way, it's highly sheltered from the need to produce what those outside value. So long as the politicians are willing to extort from the public and direct considerable sums to academia, they don't worry so much about monthly, quarterly, and annual sales; academicians just keep coming back to demand another few billion, regardless of how the general public is doing financially and what the average person can afford. And yet, Americans, including politicians, value education so highly that they tend to just keep on upping the appropriations and grants.
Of course, most US universities were historically shoe-string operations, where the more advanced students taught the newer, and students at every level worked in the labs and even university vegetable gardens and dairies and such to keep things going. Now, they're using/abusing a lot more adjuncts and and other temps, keeping grad students in multiple post-docs before they can land real jobs, holding down on the numbers of tenured posts, and that's all of a piece with the F, H-1B, J and L visa abuse.
We've always been ambivalent about tenure, too. It's actually a relatively recent innovation in US universities, though they'd like you to believe it's been part of universities since the classical Greek academies, and the Muslim academies of the 9th century. OT1H, it gives academic freedom to follow research where it leads and protection from political winds. OTOH, it allows bad profs to become entrenched and abuse their posts to spread propaganda to relatively defenseless students who must go along to get their credentials.
But, to shift gears back to the topic of "fairness", the issue is not just whether flooding US job markets with cheap, pliant labor which has not passed a background investigation to help ensure they're not criminally inclined.
The big issue with these visas is the many forms of fraud surrounding the system: fraudulent credentials (though measures have been reluctantly taken which have slowly reduced that), and the "best and brightest" fraud when in reality there are no substantial standards, the "talent shortage" fraud when we've been producing nearly 3 times as many capable US citizen STEM workers than have been employed to do STEM work, and the "Americans are inadequate" when even a former cross-border bodyshopper admits that "by every measure" "American engineers are the best".