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How America Can Get Its Tech Mojo Back
jfruhlinger writes "The American tech industry is hobbled by a poor education system, misguided spending priorities, and a byzantine patent system. But America can still come out on top, not least because of its longstanding tradition of individuality and private R&D investment. 'Open, distributed projects have the potential to outperform the traditional closed, controlled research model by reducing costs and duplication of effort, making it easy to collect and analyze masses of data from diverse sources, and allowing the best brains to participate no matter where they live.'"
Get our tech mojo back? Errmm, what? Last I checked, tech giants like Apple, IBM, Dell, HP, Microsoft, Intel, AMD, Google, and Facebook --to name a few-- are all American companies staffed mostly with American citizens.
Open and Distributed just opened up the project to the whole world. That helps America specifically how?
then people won't be afraid to invent again.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
There is so much that can't be learned in a class room yet for stuff like help desk level 1 they want 4 years or more.
One of the biggest reason - the US is paying price for blind obsession with capitalism.
Money does not count for everything. Some of the cool technologies were group effort, incubated in universities around the country and not by corporates. By branding all altruistic efforts with Communism/socialism, the country has alienated a lot of creative types.
Start by counting Steve Jobs a salesman and not an innovator and that would be a good start.
The only advantage the US has is liquid capital. Unfortunately it doesn't like spending it in the US, so I say add that to the list of things to fix.
1. Stop being xenophobic gits and get back to the melting-pot culture that made this the best fucking country on Earth in the first place.
2. ???
3. Tech!
and they all have massive portions of their corporate bodies lying outside the jurisdiction of the united states.
Easy. Abolish patent law and copyright law. (PDF here)
Historically, those two concepts have probably been the biggest impediments to the advancement of human civilization.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
Having seen some of this so-called "higher education" in the US as a guest, I have to say it cannot be the envy of anyone knowing the US system. What I saw was rather pathetic, both on master level and on PhD level. Sure, there are a few good universities, but the rest of the world has them too. And, at least in the systems I know (Germany, Switzerland), the average University, is much, much better than the average in the US.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I mean, sure, maybe in the OLD days of Slashdot. But the comments are a lot different now than they were then. We've grown. Evolved! I thought we now all agreed that individuality was a bad thing, and that top-down central planning was the way of the future.
- aj
We need the OPTION of "pure technology" programs with no filler and no other goals than giving the student customer as much information and training in the field of their choice.
We have that, see trade schools, even community colleges to a degree. Expand these areas, but do not lower the bar on the university system. The point of the university is to produce a more well rounded person who also has those technical skills(*). Believe it or not, some geeks will need to be able to effectively communicate with people in business, the humanities, medicine, science, etc in order to fulfill the computer needs of these groups. They might even need to lead a group of people with diverse backgrounds representing those various fields.
(*) Whether universities are accomplishing this goal is a different conversation.
I may disagree with what you say, sir, but I will fight to the death for my right to punch you in the face for saying it.
To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion.
I don't buy that that's the problem when you have some corps paying ZERO taxes, and many even receiving money from the government despite pulling in record profits.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
He is probably talking about the public ed which I have to say depending on the area can be just okay or downright shite on a shingle. I ended up yanking my two boys out of public and going home school because not only was the public school a *football school* but probably one of the most bigoted places I had the misfortune to step foot in. The final straw was when a teacher decided to bring her bible INTO CLASS and instead on teaching English gave an hour long speech on "idolaters and sodomites" while my two boys, one Catholic and one gay, were in class.
We would have sued but my sister was in the final stage of cancer and frankly there was just too much stress to deal with their bullshit at the same time. So I told them where they could shove their bibles and went home school. Now the oldest is a Sophomore pred med and the youngest is deciding whether to go computer generated artworks or pursue his love of cooking and become a chef.
*-for those not in the USA a football school is where the entire school is based around...surprise...football. In a football school the books can be 20 years old and the computers worse than what you would dumpster dive, but the training gear would make most AA college programs green with envy and the footballers can pretty much do any damned thing they please and walk away from it. I myself didn't have to go to class for my last 4 years as the coach found me reading Asimov in detention on my first day of HS (The other coach said "Anyone not ready to give me 20 laps can get out of my gym"...so I left. I though I would die laughing when the principal put us in study hall/detention and told the coach "you NEVER tell them they can leave EVAR!") and drug me from class to class and got the teachers to sign off on giving me straight As without showing up, and in return I spent the time teaching my own class where I taught footballers how to spell flower and stood so they could pass the minimum skills test and keep playing. I swear everything was spelled phonetically by those guys, like floer for flower and stud for stood. But as long as they got to play the coach was happy and the classes were so dumbed down I was bored to tears anyway in school, so it all worked out just fine.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
We're not going to take our education system seriously until we see ourselves as being in a rivalry with other developed countries. With all the bad shit that came out of the Cold War, we knew that the Soviets and Chinese were serious about education so we had to be serious about education.
Today, our leaders have encouraged us to see ourselves in a rivalry with Islam, and they believe the only way to combat the religious fervor of Islam is with religious fervor of our own. That requires us to be anti-intellectual.
Since I was a kid in the late 60's, there has never been a period of such anti-intellectualism in the 'States like there is today. Just in the past two weeks I've heard "conservative" voices in the media talking about how "college isn't for everyone" on one hand, and how we need to be govern by "Christian precepts" on the other.
Even a real conservative like James Madison, a Founder, wanted a national, government-run university. In 1815 he called for such a university before Congress, saying that it would be "a nursery of enlightened preceptors."
Anti-science, anti-commons, anti-intellect, anti-education, anti-information. Those are the loudest messages from today's "leaders". When a presidential candidate (with a degree from a diploma mill) mangles the language and uses a non-existent word, supporters use the same word ("refudiate") in a sense of sympathetic ignorance, as if to say, "Hey, she may be stupid, but she's just like us". Children are schooled at home because the curriculum is seen as insufficiently ignorant. "Professorial" is used as a curse to condemn an educated president. A classical education is seen as an inferior background to having inherited money and made more. Teachers who have middle-class pay and pensions are said to "have it too good". Scientific facts are put on the same level as ideological nonsense, because "there are two sides to every issue". The right to be misinformed is jealously protected. When it is demonstrated that the leading "news" outlet is purposely misinforming their audience, it is worn as a badge of honor, by both the unreliable narrators and the misinformed themselves. People are told it's raining as they're being pissed on, and the sodden say "we needed the rain".
We've got a very bad half-century ahead of us unless the trend changes. And as our best days get further behind us, the collective chip on our shoulder will get bigger and bigger. That means a lot of the rest of the world is in for a very bad half-century, too.
It would be foolish for anyone over the age of majority to expect any "tech resurgence" in the US in their lifetime. We'll be burning witches before that happens.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I don't agree.
Politicians in the US are encouraging religion for two reasons:
So, yes, religious beliefs are part of the political agenda. But this is being done because of selfish political reasons, not to "counter" the islamists.
At least for now, the only ones that believe that the best way to combat extremist islam with its own weapons are the rednecks taking their kids to a Jesus camp
Where exactly that work mentions "self-made man" or anything close to the American idea of that?
"Self-made man" is an originally unprivileged person who achieved wealth, power and privilege, supposedly entirely as a result of his own efforts as opposed to being born into privilege, accident, or assistance of society or other members' of society. Such idea was considered utterly idiotic over the whole history of mankind, except for brief and limited time and place when was possible to acquire new land by simply laying claim on newly discovered or undeveloped territory. Before that, in agrarian society, social position of any person was entirely based on amount of land the person owns or controls -- and therefore impossible to change unless for a nobleman that already has control over vast amount of land, with land ownership and political power being supposedly divinely protected privileges. After that, it became based on climbing numerous ladders over hierarchies in industrial society -- and therefore requiring either membership in various elites, or going through education system where a person is constantly assisted by others, or usually both.
"Self-made man" was based on a fantastic image of American frontier -- its poster boy would be a person who taken over some uninhabited land (no problem with local nobility already claiming it, or land being so worthless, no one would bother claiming it) and developed it into a successful business (in such a fantastic world, neither education nor pre-established relationships with people in power are necessary for such accomplishment). It was projected onto early industrialists in US (better known as robber barons), and probably at some extent in Europe (where early capitalists, despite their enterprises all being based on inherited wealth, were seen as having too "low" origin for their power and wealth compared to "real" aristocracy).
While some outside US would believe in such nonsense, it is absolutely definitely an American invention to promote and glorify such a thing. Worse yet, outside US people who are described as "self-made" by American standards, would be categorized as "Nouveau riche", a term that has, and always had strong negative connotations.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.