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Does Being First Still Matter In America?
dcblogs writes At the supercomputing conference, SC14, this week, a U.S. Dept. of Energy offical said the government has set a goal of 2023 as its delivery date for an exascale system. It may be taking a risky path with that amount of lead time because of increasing international competition. There was a time when the U.S. didn't settle for second place. President John F. Kennedy delivered his famous "we choose to go to the moon" speech in 1962, and seven years later a man walked on the moon. The U.S. exascale goal is nine years away. China, Europe and Japan all have major exascale efforts, and the government has already dropped on supercomputing. The European forecast of Hurricane Sandy in 2012 was so far ahead of U.S. models in predicting the storm's path that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was called before Congress to explain how it happened. It was told by a U.S. official that NOAA wasn't keeping up in computational capability. It's still not keeping up. Cliff Mass, a professor of meteorology at the University of Washington, wrote on his blog last month that the U.S. is "rapidly falling behind leading weather prediction centers around the world" because it has yet to catch up in computational capability to Europe. That criticism followed the $128 million recent purchase a Cray supercomputer by the U.K.'s Met Office, its meteorological agency.
From TFS:
We only walked on the moon seven years later because we'd already been developing the parts - for as much as six years in the case of the F1 engine. And because President Kennedy died in 1963 (before he could completely back away from the commitment), allowing LBJ to push for funding as a monument.
Not to mention we couldn't really end up in second place - because we were essentially the only runner in the race. The Soviets were years late in starting because they didn't believe we'd actually even stick with it. And even when they did enter the race, it was a half hearted effort with little political support.
Simply put the US population (or at least the portion that politicians pay attention to) seem unwilling to fund being first.
Being first still matters a lot. Just not in the metrics you admire.
External debt? USA#1 at $17E+12 and growing fast. Corporate tax rate? Number one baby. Rate of medical cost growth? We go that. Education cost growth? Ditto. Firearms per capita? We own the whole right hand side of that histogram. Because we lack a 50% peasant population to drop the average (like China) we're still far ahead in per capita carbon production. We're the largest oil producer on Earth as well.
So yeah, #1 still matters.
I'm going to present an alternate theory. Don't blame the media.
Blame American citizens. We have developed a collective... bluster about science. An approach where random shit we think we know trumps years of hard research and challenging facts.
It's not just creationists and global warming deniers and anti-vaccers, you know stand-out cases of pushing for ideas based on utter nonsense, but the subtler, softer kind too. I'm having a damn hard time coming up with examples that won't draw out a flamewar from people indignant about how I'm insulting them, so I'll try to speak in general terms:
People talking about what they know about genetics in a way that just utterly predicts everything about a person. Maybe people taking a middle-of-the-road soft stance against nuclear energy because radiation is dangerous. Not radically anti-science like the former groups, just self-assured and wrong.
The media certainly exacerbates this by being willing to drag any public controversy to the forefront of national discussion to fill airtime, but they aren't the source. We are.
This is the first time the "first post" post is somewhat related to the article. Well done, Tablizer.
Looking at the big picture the US still leads in anything that really matters. And that is not some type of rah-rah bullshit. The space station has served it's purpose and contrary to popular belief the US has had a reusable X-37 space craft up and running for over 5 years now. The kind of program that makes ASAT weapons old tech while giving the US the ability to take out any satellite they want to. The US space program has put multiple landers on Mars and has had probes traveling through the solar system for many years. And for all the morons crowing about the US debt keep in mind that China only owns about 4% of outstanding US debt in the form of bonds and securities and they cling to it because it's the safest place to stash large sums of cash because the return on investment beats the hell out of internal Chinese investments. And if things become tight the US can just repatriate the cash and assets from the welfare countries in Europe. The new energy marketplace dynamics are about to make the ME and Russia irrelevant to the US energy needs. Let China or any other country that has been freeloading on US protection start paying to protect their oil and gas supplies. Let Europe get down on their knees and give Putin a nice juicy blowjob since they have zero soft or hard power without US support which they have taken for granted and certainly not footed any of the costs for. And finally let the US take the leash off of Israel and let them finish the job they should have been allowed to do back in 1967 or 1973. It's way past time for the US to limit it's international involvement and really start serving their own needs with no apologies and let everyone else fend for themselves. After all when is the last time the world has did anything to help the US in any meaningful manner? Let's see how the world looks after the "empire" tells everyone else to go pound sand and when they need any military services they need to prepay the invoice before any services are rendered. And limit any state sponsored humanitarian concerns and relief efforts to domestic US interests since there certainly has never been any return on investment in that particular area.
There was a time when the US had the tallest buildings, the longest bridges, the biggest dams, etc. What happened is the wealth in the US is now concentrated in "soft" areas like finance, retailing, entertainment, etc. Even more harmful is the concentration of wealth in a few individuals who are mainly concerned with their own amusements. Think of the Walton or Ziff children who, unlike their parents, have neither the interest nor the capability to contribute to economic growth. The record prices of art, antiques and other toys for the rich are yet more signs of the dissipation of the US economy. Hard industries like manufacturing, construction, scientific research etc. are starved for capital which is leading to the US becoming a second tier country like the UK, Japan, or Austria-Hungary.
One of the things that drove the race for the moon was us losing the space race with the Soviet Union. Having that big a Cold War enemy was a huge boost in one respect (mandates to educate the population and advance science) and a huge detractor in another (who-knows-how-many trillions of dollars wasted on a nuclear arms race that neither side actually needed to participate in.)
I think the times are different now:
- Education isn't seen as a guarantee of a decent job anymore, so fewer people are spending the money and effort on it.
- Decent jobs are no longer guaranteed either, so people are more concerned with day to day survival than long-term planning.
- We don't have a huge boogeyman like the USSR ready to wipe us out the second we let up the pressure...the closest thing now is China, and they're our biggest trade partners.
- Media is more fragmented. You can argue either side of this point, but the world was a lot simpler when there were only 3 TV networks, a much longer news cycle and newspapers of record that did real journalism. Now no one can make any sort of controversial move without 200 news analysts jumping all over it and putting forth their opinion as fact.
- People don't trust large institutions or governments, who are often the only entities big or powerful enough to mandate huge changes or push science forward. (Example: AT&T funding Bell Labs with phone company revenues leading to breakthrough inventions, or the US funding Apollo and other NASA programs.)
I think that some of these factors make it impossible to be "first" in key areas, simply because no one is willing to stick their neck out and invest the time, effort or resources.
Considering that you don't seem to be aware that the Preamble were goals of the Constitution, NOT powers granted by the Constitution to the Federal Government, it's kind of embarrassing that you think that that's relevant to the Federal Government....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Looking at the big picture - 50 years ago no American had to say "Looking at the big picture." I think we are seeing many little signs that the US is losing its importance - even though at the moment it is still the dominant superpower. As to why - who knows. But the completely uncritical way that most citizens of that country can't see any problems is part of the problem. I'm not saying the USA are bad guys, but come on - *look* at what you wrote: "It's way past time for the US to limit it's international involvement and really start serving their own needs with no apologies and let everyone else fend for themselves." If you really feel that the USA isn't serving their own needs on the international arena, you need to read history more.