Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?
Quanta?
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
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!
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."
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.
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
If you want to help it return, kill all patent trolls.
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.
Maybe. The space program might be a counter-example. When the USSR was in the lead, America pushed hard to keep up and "win the race". These are two very different strategies. The USSR was much more into conquering and exploiting the new frontier and had developed technology with that in mind. Arguably it's a damn good thing they didn't win (from any kind of ethical standpoint) for that very reason. The US got bored silly after "winning" and essentially dismantled all of NASA's projects on getting people to Mars (which they actually could have done by the mid 80s). They won the race, they got the prize, contest over. And when a contest is over, the normal thing is to go home and that is exactly what happened.
It has been argued that had Russia actually got men on the moon first, both Russia and the US would have active space colonies by now, not just a crudely-assembled and much-reduced space station that's too damn small for the kind of science needed to continue justifying it.
I would alter the argument a little, as I don't think the Cold War in Space would have been pretty: I think the US is fundamentally incapable of generating momentum in and of itself but is extremely capable of very efficiently tapping into the momentum of others and developing it in new and highly creative ways. In other words, the highly compete-till-you-die aggression of the US is only good if there's a competitor to compete against, that the US has less of a "work ethic" and more of a "win ethic". That other nations have a responsibility, particularly supernations like the EU, to be that competition and not defer a damn thing.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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?
Right, but the problem has been recently that we've been suffering "stag-flation." Things that are important to living: shelter, transit, food, and medical care have had their prices rising above commodity inflation and wage inflation for approaching a decade now. This is unsustainable, and will result in the choking off of a middle class in the united states. The importance of a middle class is not just a consumer base(as we have been told), but the creation of a broad range of educated people capable of understanding the world well enough to make strides in innovation. We're not losing current GDP, we're losing the next generation's GDP.
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
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
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".
Even if we magically had some no-cost way of putting things in orbit and propelling them to Saturn, scaling up that solution such that:
1) Constructing a self-sufficient autonomous or minimally-manned mining operation on Saturn;
2) Constructing the fleet of transports you'd need to move that cargo back to Earth from Saturn;
3) Moving the material you've mined from Titan's surface up to those transports;
4) Making a ~750 million to 1 billion mile one-way trip;
5) Moving the material from transports to earth's surface;
6) Having the capacity at both ends to keep the transports turning around smoothly;
7) Building machinery capable of withstanding the extremes for long enough to make it economically reasonable to build & ship them in the first place;
And doing all of this in real-time as a "supply/fueling" operation is economically retarded. If your solution to our energy problems involves some sort of magical matter-transmission technology we haven't invented yet, then your solution is not a solution, it is a fantasy.
In the meantime, Russia works for few decades on a sustainable (vs. crash projects in the style of Apollo) means of deep space travel. BTW, ISS is a part of that work...
... most frequently used launch vehicle in the world (and one of least expensive ones).
Heck, they have few decades of experience operating a manned spacecraft essentially capable of beyond-LEO operation (have $100 million? Get yourself a ride around the Moon - those are people behind almost all "orbital tourists"), a spacecraft which was the first to carry a macroscopic life beyond LEO (...around the Moon) and back, as Zond.
The technology which allowed them early lead in space was probably also largely a consequence of geopolitical reality and established US lead, in other field - huge bomber force. With "bomber gap" being just a myth, jumping on the next step was only reasonable for something perceived very much as a defense - so they had the first operational ICBM, R-7 Semyorka (not like "missile gap" wasn't a myth too - with just few rockets ready for launch a day later, and only if the policy of storing rockets and warheads separately was breached...). Not very good as an ICBM, not very practical. But - partly by chance, partly probably by the genius of Korolev & others involved - it turned out to be a fabulous launcher family; the most reliable
It launched Sputnik ; gave us the first photograph of far side of the Moon, first lunar flyby, first spacecraft reaching the escape velocity of the Earth & on circumsolar orbit; first lunar impact, soft landing + photos from the surface some time later; first flyby of another planet and atmospheric probes (well, and reaching the surface... crushed)
Also Gagarin. In fact, after Yuri, it launched every manned Soviet and Russian spacecraft (plus all "orbital tourists"). A century of service seems within its grasp (with new - yet unused - launchpad in Kourou...)
(BTW, will we ever drop the politically-motivated & quite absurd astronaut?)
One that hath name thou can not otter
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.
If you buy into the notion that the union is a good agent for the workers, then I can see your PoV.
Unions temporarily raised pay for some fields--as long as you weren't on strike. Then the jobs shifted to other states, and other countries.
I'm not opposed to unions as a matter of principal; but I see them as version 1.0 of a solution to the tension between labor and capital.
I'm not unaware of history either. I certainly don't want to carry us back to the 19th century laissez-faire.
OTOH, the Progressive movement of the 20th century got us things like the 8 hour workday and minimum wage. Everybody has these--whether they pay dues or not.
In other words, Rah Rah! for the workers. Unions? Meh.
It will be interesting to see what historians have to say about the unions and Free Trade 100 years from now. At the time of NAFTA, unions were actually divided. This probably has something to do with the union association with international socialist and labor movements. Some of them actually saw Free Trade as an opportunity to expand US-style labor rights to the 3rd world. Guess what happened instead?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
What's the alternative?
1. A Labor Party that represents workers whether they pay dues or not. 2. More Progressive planks in the Democratic Party platform, and polticians that won't rip those planks out of the floor everytime a Republican threatens to whip them with a wet noodle.
Both of these would be superior because they would be applied fairly to all workers, regardless of whether or not they were paying dues.
To note, we've done a lot of mixing of apples and oranges here. The discussion started with public employees, and then expanded to unions in general. Public employee unions are, IMHO, a special case. I don't like them as a matter of principal because they put the union too close to the government.
Fascism is the merger of corporations and state. Communism is the merger of unions and state.
This is one of those discussions that would (provided we could both stay civil) be a lot easier to hash out in person. You don't sound like a raging left-wing idealogue and I bet we could stay civil. I've dealt with some Leftists who literally froth at the mouth when you dare to suggest that unions aren't the greatest thing since sliced bread. You're not one of those guys; but I've got to cut this short because there's just too much typing already...
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?