You should read the summary more carefully. It doesn't mention any assessment of social ties, it just talks about personality traits.
Sure, there's correlation -- someone who is disagreeable, neurotic, and irresponsible may tend to have weaker social ties. But showing that an easily measurable personality trait has predictive value has significant utility. That's really the whole point of personality psychology, isn't it? To make inferences about future behaviors from readily observable past behaviors.
No, I'd say it's also wrong, but it's not as creepy.
There's two creepiness factor differences here. (1) Apple's walled-garden is not clandestine. You buy an iPhone you're buying into that garden. Internet tracking happens without your even implied consent. (2) Apple's hegemony has a clear limitation: Apple's mobile devices. That makes it trivial to escape: you just use a different vendor's phone. Internet monitoring is pervasive; you can't escape it no matter where you try to go with your browser.
Yes, we do realize that. It's not the magnitude of change per se that's the problem, it's the rate of change.
Hitting +2C above pre-industrial levels by the end of this century represents warming 10x more rapid than anything we see geological record since the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. You are absolutely correct that local ecological disruptions are constantly wiping out individual populations, but with globally distributed rapid changes we'll see (indeed are seeing) widespread extinctions of entire species and shifts toward weedier species.
Now people adapt more rapidly than plants and animals, so climate change is not anything like an extinction event for our species. But at that rate we're going to see differential effects depending between populations. People whose income comes primarily from financial investments will actually do well out of that level of climate change; all they need to do is rebalance their portfolios annually. People whose livelihood is tied to a specific geographic area will find adaptation difficult or impossible, producing refugees and political crises.
And that's with just a 2C increase, which presumes vigorous action on our part. Without action, a +4C scenario is increasingly plausible. Again, that's not an extinction event for our species, but it won't be nice for most of us.
Well, that's the thing about design; people's response to a design is subjective and emotional. People who don't understand that invariably believe that anyone who doesn't like the same things they do must be stupid.
There are absolutely ways of making e-mail safe. The technology has existed for decades and has been available in some email systems.
But to run a system like that, you've got to have administrators who can manage things like cryptographic trust delegation, and not everyone is willing to pay for that kind of expertise "just for email".
Now I think that if everybody *did*, it would be a net win. There'd be no more phishing. Claims of identity would have a kind of audit trail, and you could revoke trust in certificates issued by authorities that weren't up to snuff. Communications would be routinely secured, even against bad guys with physical access to your device.
But the thing is it only works if most people are willing to put up with the hassle. It's not our technology that needs upgrading, it's *us*.
US manufacturing output has increased on a dollar basis in recent decades. But on a number of jobs basis we're where we were in the late 1940s, but with a much larger population. What's happened is that US manufacturing has specialized on high value areas like aerospace where unskilled labor is not a big factor in the end cost.
There's no doubt that some domestic manufacturers will add jobs as a result of a trade war, but this does not represent a net job gain, even in manufacturing as a whole. Sure we'll gain some steel mill jobs, but those manufacturing dollars being created are in things like aircraft, which will take a hit. This is the ill wind principle at work: somebody always benefits from change. So while the steel mill putting on more employees is good news, it's not the whole picture.
I have no doubt we could replace Chinese imports entirely, but it won't happen overnight. It took a decade of concerted effort for China to capture all those manufacturing jobs the US lost. What's more it's certain we won't be employing as many people as we used to. Again it gets to my point: even presuming the policy works out in the end, it may not reach the end because of short term pain.
Night of Long Knives. People like Hitler are whatever they need to be to get what they want out of you.
It's hard to fathom from a 21st century standpoint, but in the early 20th century there was a widespread perception that capitalism had failed. Back then calling your party "socialist" would like calling your party the "Blockchain Party" today.
In reality what most successful societies did was split the difference: a market economy with government regulation and social welfare programs. Attempts at state planned economies lingered on for another 90 years, but on the other hand no pure laissez faire capitalist societies existed in that period. The closest to that ideal was the US, which nonetheless had social security, welfare, and government protected labor unions all through its heyday in the 50s and 60s.
Hitler was a vegetarian, but he definitely wasn't a vegan. He ate eggs, for example and caviar, and reportedly occasionally had a slice of ham.
On the other hand he was also known to harangue people eating meat at dinner with descriptions of animals being slaughtered. So what should we take away from this? That Hitler was humane, or that he was a habitual mind-fucker?
Here's the thing you have to realize about vegetarianism in the early 20th Century. You know how carbs are evil now? Back then the macronutrient villain was protein. That's how people started eating breakfast cereal, a foodstuff literally invented for industrial production. All those crackpot vegetarian theories about meat putrefying in your gut were culturally mainstream back then.
Unfortunately, you're ignoring the actual numbers. China imports 115 billion dollars in US goods annually plus another 54 billion in services. 169 billion dollars is not "minor". The marginal effects are going to be greater, because its affect on commodity prices will send a lot of producers out of business.
This is King Cotton thinking all over again. After South America gears up to replace the 14 billion dollars in soybean exports the US loses, they aren't going to just go away. They'll have the capacity and commercial relations to compete with the US for that and other markets.
I imagine it depends on how close you are to the boom. The military has rules for overland supersonic flights to minimize nuisance. This restricts supersonic flight to certain corridors at certain minimum altitudes.
The Concorde flew at 55,000 to 60,000 feet, and still wasn't allowed to fly supersonic over land. At that height it wouldn't be splitting any eardrums on the ground, but it still could be heard and still would be considered a nuisance. That's one of the reasons Concorde wasn't economical; it was only advantageous on transoceanic routes.
You don't know what propaganda is. Let me illustrate.
Suppose a million soldiers died in an actual war. That fact is not propaganda. It is useful fodder for propagandists, who if they're skillful adhere to a carefully curated version of the truth. I know we think of voters as a tabula rasa onto which political strategists write their masterpieces, but peoples' personal experiences play a role in how they vote. This is why the Republicans had setbacks in 2008; they couldn't propaganda their way into making people think Iraq was going well. It affected too many peoples' lives.
Now I don't have time to discuss every point you raised in your very long post, so I'll pick one: the fall of the Soviet Union. I think that's an interesting analogy, but you may have the wrong end of the stick. You're thinking we're us, and China's the Soviet Union in this analogy, because, well, we're us.
Let me invite you to consider that while US economic, diplomatic and military pressure played a role in the fall of the Soviet Union, you have to also consider the fact that the Soviet Union was made up almost entirely of people who didn't want to live in a Soviet Union. A look at the history of that part of the world is illustrative. There's a myth that invading Russia is a stupid, suicidal move for anyone to take, and you can point to many doomed attempts. But you can also point to many successful attempts. And it turns out there's a single factor which determines whether invading Russia is a good idea: how politically unified Russia is a the moment.
So I ask: which country will be more politically unified in a contest of economic wills here: the US or China?
It's important not to overestimate or underestimate an opponent. China has distinct advantages and disadvantages vis a vis the US.
China no longer has a centrally planned economy, but they do have a lot more ability to intervene in the economy, both de jure and de facto. What's more the Chinese government has more political will to mitigate the effects of a trade war than the US would. Nobody in the Chinese government would disagree with intervening to start with, and its in everyone's interests to do so.
The US government doesn't have the political will to pass a budget. They had to pass a law to force themselves to pass a budget resolution, with the predictable effect that Congress passed budgets that it ignores, struggling over new budgeting priorities in appropriations bills, which is like trying to do your household budget while you're writing checks. My theory is that it's due to widespread gerrymandering. This produces safe congressional seats for both parties, resulting in congressmen elected from both parties with fewer political skills. Unless an effective response can be mounted by the Trump administration using already existing programs and laws, the idea that Congress will be able to respond in real time is far-fetched. Twenty-five years ago, maybe.
On the other hand, China has the problem of endemic corruption that poses huge internal problems for them with public trust in the government. The thing is open conflict doesn't make their problem harder.
Now largely I've been playing devil's advocate here, but here's what I think will happen: I think the Trump adminsitration may be able to force enough to claim a "victory", but they'll be concessions that Beijing could have been negotiated to anyway, so Beijing will also claim a "victory". Nobody will have the power to claim an absolutely clear political win. Looked at economically both sides will lose.
General Omar Bradley once said, "Amateurs talk strategy; professionals talk logistics." In other words winning a war depends not just on the damage you can inflict, but on your ability to sustain the conflict.
Let's suppose it's true, as you claim, that China will suffer greater damage in a trade war measured in dollars; that's a secondary point. The side that "wins" (note scare quotes) is the one that can maintain its will to fight the longest. You win a trade war by being the first to inflict economic damage that is too painful for the other side to sustain politically.
Suppose the US loses a million jobs as a result of the trade war. Now imagine saying to those million people who are out of work, "It's OK because China lost two million jobs. We won." Now further imagine China gets to decide exactly in which Congressional districts those one million jobs will be lost -- because for practical purposes they do.
It's important not to overestimate an enemy's strengths, but you can't ignore them either. The Chinese leadership isn't beyond public opinion, but it doesn't have to put a key part of its government up for elections every two years. Over here Democratic discussion sites are full of lugubrious hand wringing over the effects of a trade war, but there is a very discernible note of glee over what it is going to do to the Republicans.
Sure, it's possible that there are some US devices that the agencies are reluctant to own up to. But it's not really believable to assume all the devices are domestic.
If I were Russia's SVR I'd have them all over the place in the US and EU. Wouldn't you?
Back in the Cold War there used to be a saying: an American will do anything if there's enough insurance. A Russian will do anything if there's enough vodka.
Oh, and by the way "ra-men" is the Japanese transliteration of the Chinese la mian -- note the characteristic Japanese consonant shift. Chinese languages have "r" and "l" sounds which are precisely equivalent to their English counterparts. Japanese has a single consonant that's in between, which is why Japanese English speakers often have difficulty with these two sounds in English. Chinese speakers (despite what you've heard in movies) do not.
The history of ramen is pretty well documented; wikipedia has a good article on it. Ramen started out being served in Chinese restaurants -- yes, Chinese restaurants have been popular in Japan for centuries, the oldest continually operating Chinese restaurant is over a 130 years old. But it really took off with Japanese soldiers returning from WW2.
Anyhow, Japan did the same thing with curry -- an unspeakable British take on the various sauced dishes found around the Indian subcontinent. It's now the Japanese equivalent of mac and cheese; your mom makes you kar served over short-grained Japanese rice with a panko-crusted katsu. It's a far cry from the British schoolboy take on curry, which feature raw "curry powder" (a bowdlerized garam masala) and rutabagas. The Japanese very sensibly decided to cook their spice mixture in a roux, and then figured out that you could precook the roux mixture and package it in shelf-stable form.
Japan is a counter-example. Nationalism never stopped them from adopting something foreign if they think it's good.
Take ramen -- we think of it as quintessentially Japanese food, but in fact it's actually Chinese -- or at least the all-important noodle is. The Chinese in the 1500s developed an alkaline noodle that remains chewy in hot broth rather than falling apart. These only started to appear in Japan about a hundred years ago, and it was only about thirty years ago that it reached its current status as an iconic national dish.
This is something I really admire about Japan: it's ability to adopt things from elsewhere and make them their own. Ramen are Japanese because the Japanese took Chinese lamian and transformed it into something new through their mania for refinement. It's a lesson other cultures could learn.
How many companies (or countries) shoot themselves in the foot, denying themselves the benefit of an idea because it was "not invented here"?
If vanity stands in the way of doing the sensible thing, you can either learn to be humble, or you can confabulate a rationalization. Maybe America should do the same thing; we can even claim it's our own idea.
Well, I don't know who you are, so I can't judge the truth of the statement that "we" are able to tell the difference between reason and hate-mongering propaganda, but if by "we" you mean "people in general", your argument doesn't hold up.
When I was a teenager I had dinner at the house of an older Jewish couple; the other guests were an elderly German couple who knew my Jewish friends through classical music circles. The German couple was old enough to remember living under the Nazis, and when the conversation turned that way these very nice people made it very clear that in the 1940s they'd have turned in any Jews they'd known were hiding. They wanted me to understand that even respectable, cultured, intelligent people can be brainwashed.
Look around you. People are perfectly willing to go along with stupid, vicious, even incoherent ideas as long as there are a lot of other people doing it. Most people's behavior isn't governed by religion, or their professed philosophical principles; it's governed by what appears normal to them.
The reason that government censorship doesn't work isn't because people are wise and thoughtful; it's because government censorship spitting into the wind of perceived normalcy. However, shaming racist bullshit and shunning the people repeating it is very effective.
This assumes that companies have no alternatives but to cultivate American workers if they can't import the skills. This is especially untrue since the Internet -- it's easier than ever to offshore jobs.
Somewhere between the idea that expanding H1B as it is is the only way to increase the talent pool in the US and the notion it has no potential usefulness is the truth. If the US wants to continue to be a world leader in technology, it has to do both. Why? Because the US has only 5% of the world's population. Even if we have two or three times our share of talent, that's not enough to dominate innovation in the long term.
Here's a bit of history that people who haven't lived through it might not know: US tech dominance in the mid 20th century was built on a combination of US workers and top European talent. When I went to MIT in the early 80s, many of the top professors were WW2 refugees -- Jews or politically undesirable intellectuals who fled the Axis countries before the war, and talented people to came to the US while Europe was still rebuilding in the 1950s. And of course a few people like Werner von Braun -- an outright Nazi who was just too useful to punish.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, that's not true of all Americans; we have the same intelligence distribution as anyone else. Stupidity is an emergent behavior.
You should read the summary more carefully. It doesn't mention any assessment of social ties, it just talks about personality traits.
Sure, there's correlation -- someone who is disagreeable, neurotic, and irresponsible may tend to have weaker social ties. But showing that an easily measurable personality trait has predictive value has significant utility. That's really the whole point of personality psychology, isn't it? To make inferences about future behaviors from readily observable past behaviors.
No, I'd say it's also wrong, but it's not as creepy.
There's two creepiness factor differences here. (1) Apple's walled-garden is not clandestine. You buy an iPhone you're buying into that garden. Internet tracking happens without your even implied consent. (2) Apple's hegemony has a clear limitation: Apple's mobile devices. That makes it trivial to escape: you just use a different vendor's phone. Internet monitoring is pervasive; you can't escape it no matter where you try to go with your browser.
Oh, I think he means that webcomic that plays so fast and loose with the facts that it includes literature citations...
Which I notice you don't have.
Yes, we do realize that. It's not the magnitude of change per se that's the problem, it's the rate of change.
Hitting +2C above pre-industrial levels by the end of this century represents warming 10x more rapid than anything we see geological record since the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. You are absolutely correct that local ecological disruptions are constantly wiping out individual populations, but with globally distributed rapid changes we'll see (indeed are seeing) widespread extinctions of entire species and shifts toward weedier species.
Now people adapt more rapidly than plants and animals, so climate change is not anything like an extinction event for our species. But at that rate we're going to see differential effects depending between populations. People whose income comes primarily from financial investments will actually do well out of that level of climate change; all they need to do is rebalance their portfolios annually. People whose livelihood is tied to a specific geographic area will find adaptation difficult or impossible, producing refugees and political crises.
And that's with just a 2C increase, which presumes vigorous action on our part. Without action, a +4C scenario is increasingly plausible. Again, that's not an extinction event for our species, but it won't be nice for most of us.
Well, that's the thing about design; people's response to a design is subjective and emotional. People who don't understand that invariably believe that anyone who doesn't like the same things they do must be stupid.
There are absolutely ways of making e-mail safe. The technology has existed for decades and has been available in some email systems.
But to run a system like that, you've got to have administrators who can manage things like cryptographic trust delegation, and not everyone is willing to pay for that kind of expertise "just for email".
Now I think that if everybody *did*, it would be a net win. There'd be no more phishing. Claims of identity would have a kind of audit trail, and you could revoke trust in certificates issued by authorities that weren't up to snuff. Communications would be routinely secured, even against bad guys with physical access to your device.
But the thing is it only works if most people are willing to put up with the hassle. It's not our technology that needs upgrading, it's *us*.
US manufacturing output has increased on a dollar basis in recent decades. But on a number of jobs basis we're where we were in the late 1940s, but with a much larger population. What's happened is that US manufacturing has specialized on high value areas like aerospace where unskilled labor is not a big factor in the end cost.
There's no doubt that some domestic manufacturers will add jobs as a result of a trade war, but this does not represent a net job gain, even in manufacturing as a whole. Sure we'll gain some steel mill jobs, but those manufacturing dollars being created are in things like aircraft, which will take a hit. This is the ill wind principle at work: somebody always benefits from change. So while the steel mill putting on more employees is good news, it's not the whole picture.
I have no doubt we could replace Chinese imports entirely, but it won't happen overnight. It took a decade of concerted effort for China to capture all those manufacturing jobs the US lost. What's more it's certain we won't be employing as many people as we used to. Again it gets to my point: even presuming the policy works out in the end, it may not reach the end because of short term pain.
Night of Long Knives. People like Hitler are whatever they need to be to get what they want out of you.
It's hard to fathom from a 21st century standpoint, but in the early 20th century there was a widespread perception that capitalism had failed. Back then calling your party "socialist" would like calling your party the "Blockchain Party" today.
In reality what most successful societies did was split the difference: a market economy with government regulation and social welfare programs. Attempts at state planned economies lingered on for another 90 years, but on the other hand no pure laissez faire capitalist societies existed in that period. The closest to that ideal was the US, which nonetheless had social security, welfare, and government protected labor unions all through its heyday in the 50s and 60s.
Hitler was a vegetarian, but he definitely wasn't a vegan. He ate eggs, for example and caviar, and reportedly occasionally had a slice of ham.
On the other hand he was also known to harangue people eating meat at dinner with descriptions of animals being slaughtered. So what should we take away from this? That Hitler was humane, or that he was a habitual mind-fucker?
Here's the thing you have to realize about vegetarianism in the early 20th Century. You know how carbs are evil now? Back then the macronutrient villain was protein. That's how people started eating breakfast cereal, a foodstuff literally invented for industrial production. All those crackpot vegetarian theories about meat putrefying in your gut were culturally mainstream back then.
Unfortunately, you're ignoring the actual numbers. China imports 115 billion dollars in US goods annually plus another 54 billion in services. 169 billion dollars is not "minor". The marginal effects are going to be greater, because its affect on commodity prices will send a lot of producers out of business.
This is King Cotton thinking all over again. After South America gears up to replace the 14 billion dollars in soybean exports the US loses, they aren't going to just go away. They'll have the capacity and commercial relations to compete with the US for that and other markets.
I imagine it depends on how close you are to the boom. The military has rules for overland supersonic flights to minimize nuisance. This restricts supersonic flight to certain corridors at certain minimum altitudes.
The Concorde flew at 55,000 to 60,000 feet, and still wasn't allowed to fly supersonic over land. At that height it wouldn't be splitting any eardrums on the ground, but it still could be heard and still would be considered a nuisance. That's one of the reasons Concorde wasn't economical; it was only advantageous on transoceanic routes.
You don't know what propaganda is. Let me illustrate.
Suppose a million soldiers died in an actual war. That fact is not propaganda. It is useful fodder for propagandists, who if they're skillful adhere to a carefully curated version of the truth. I know we think of voters as a tabula rasa onto which political strategists write their masterpieces, but peoples' personal experiences play a role in how they vote. This is why the Republicans had setbacks in 2008; they couldn't propaganda their way into making people think Iraq was going well. It affected too many peoples' lives.
Now I don't have time to discuss every point you raised in your very long post, so I'll pick one: the fall of the Soviet Union. I think that's an interesting analogy, but you may have the wrong end of the stick. You're thinking we're us, and China's the Soviet Union in this analogy, because, well, we're us.
Let me invite you to consider that while US economic, diplomatic and military pressure played a role in the fall of the Soviet Union, you have to also consider the fact that the Soviet Union was made up almost entirely of people who didn't want to live in a Soviet Union. A look at the history of that part of the world is illustrative. There's a myth that invading Russia is a stupid, suicidal move for anyone to take, and you can point to many doomed attempts. But you can also point to many successful attempts. And it turns out there's a single factor which determines whether invading Russia is a good idea: how politically unified Russia is a the moment.
So I ask: which country will be more politically unified in a contest of economic wills here: the US or China?
It's important not to overestimate or underestimate an opponent. China has distinct advantages and disadvantages vis a vis the US.
China no longer has a centrally planned economy, but they do have a lot more ability to intervene in the economy, both de jure and de facto. What's more the Chinese government has more political will to mitigate the effects of a trade war than the US would. Nobody in the Chinese government would disagree with intervening to start with, and its in everyone's interests to do so.
The US government doesn't have the political will to pass a budget. They had to pass a law to force themselves to pass a budget resolution, with the predictable effect that Congress passed budgets that it ignores, struggling over new budgeting priorities in appropriations bills, which is like trying to do your household budget while you're writing checks. My theory is that it's due to widespread gerrymandering. This produces safe congressional seats for both parties, resulting in congressmen elected from both parties with fewer political skills. Unless an effective response can be mounted by the Trump administration using already existing programs and laws, the idea that Congress will be able to respond in real time is far-fetched. Twenty-five years ago, maybe.
On the other hand, China has the problem of endemic corruption that poses huge internal problems for them with public trust in the government. The thing is open conflict doesn't make their problem harder.
Now largely I've been playing devil's advocate here, but here's what I think will happen: I think the Trump adminsitration may be able to force enough to claim a "victory", but they'll be concessions that Beijing could have been negotiated to anyway, so Beijing will also claim a "victory". Nobody will have the power to claim an absolutely clear political win. Looked at economically both sides will lose.
I'm not talking about propaganda; wars would be easy if you could propaganda your way to victory.
General Omar Bradley once said, "Amateurs talk strategy; professionals talk logistics." In other words winning a war depends not just on the damage you can inflict, but on your ability to sustain the conflict.
Let's suppose it's true, as you claim, that China will suffer greater damage in a trade war measured in dollars; that's a secondary point. The side that "wins" (note scare quotes) is the one that can maintain its will to fight the longest. You win a trade war by being the first to inflict economic damage that is too painful for the other side to sustain politically.
Suppose the US loses a million jobs as a result of the trade war. Now imagine saying to those million people who are out of work, "It's OK because China lost two million jobs. We won." Now further imagine China gets to decide exactly in which Congressional districts those one million jobs will be lost -- because for practical purposes they do.
It's important not to overestimate an enemy's strengths, but you can't ignore them either. The Chinese leadership isn't beyond public opinion, but it doesn't have to put a key part of its government up for elections every two years. Over here Democratic discussion sites are full of lugubrious hand wringing over the effects of a trade war, but there is a very discernible note of glee over what it is going to do to the Republicans.
Sure, it's possible that there are some US devices that the agencies are reluctant to own up to. But it's not really believable to assume all the devices are domestic.
If I were Russia's SVR I'd have them all over the place in the US and EU. Wouldn't you?
It's almost inevitable that everyone is spying on everyone else with these things.
Back in the Cold War there used to be a saying: an American will do anything if there's enough insurance. A Russian will do anything if there's enough vodka.
Oh, and by the way "ra-men" is the Japanese transliteration of the Chinese la mian -- note the characteristic Japanese consonant shift. Chinese languages have "r" and "l" sounds which are precisely equivalent to their English counterparts. Japanese has a single consonant that's in between, which is why Japanese English speakers often have difficulty with these two sounds in English. Chinese speakers (despite what you've heard in movies) do not.
The history of ramen is pretty well documented; wikipedia has a good article on it. Ramen started out being served in Chinese restaurants -- yes, Chinese restaurants have been popular in Japan for centuries, the oldest continually operating Chinese restaurant is over a 130 years old. But it really took off with Japanese soldiers returning from WW2.
Anyhow, Japan did the same thing with curry -- an unspeakable British take on the various sauced dishes found around the Indian subcontinent. It's now the Japanese equivalent of mac and cheese; your mom makes you kar served over short-grained Japanese rice with a panko-crusted katsu. It's a far cry from the British schoolboy take on curry, which feature raw "curry powder" (a bowdlerized garam masala) and rutabagas. The Japanese very sensibly decided to cook their spice mixture in a roux, and then figured out that you could precook the roux mixture and package it in shelf-stable form.
Japan is a counter-example. Nationalism never stopped them from adopting something foreign if they think it's good.
Take ramen -- we think of it as quintessentially Japanese food, but in fact it's actually Chinese -- or at least the all-important noodle is. The Chinese in the 1500s developed an alkaline noodle that remains chewy in hot broth rather than falling apart. These only started to appear in Japan about a hundred years ago, and it was only about thirty years ago that it reached its current status as an iconic national dish.
This is something I really admire about Japan: it's ability to adopt things from elsewhere and make them their own. Ramen are Japanese because the Japanese took Chinese lamian and transformed it into something new through their mania for refinement. It's a lesson other cultures could learn.
How many companies (or countries) shoot themselves in the foot, denying themselves the benefit of an idea because it was "not invented here"?
If vanity stands in the way of doing the sensible thing, you can either learn to be humble, or you can confabulate a rationalization. Maybe America should do the same thing; we can even claim it's our own idea.
Well, I don't know who you are, so I can't judge the truth of the statement that "we" are able to tell the difference between reason and hate-mongering propaganda, but if by "we" you mean "people in general", your argument doesn't hold up.
When I was a teenager I had dinner at the house of an older Jewish couple; the other guests were an elderly German couple who knew my Jewish friends through classical music circles. The German couple was old enough to remember living under the Nazis, and when the conversation turned that way these very nice people made it very clear that in the 1940s they'd have turned in any Jews they'd known were hiding. They wanted me to understand that even respectable, cultured, intelligent people can be brainwashed.
Look around you. People are perfectly willing to go along with stupid, vicious, even incoherent ideas as long as there are a lot of other people doing it. Most people's behavior isn't governed by religion, or their professed philosophical principles; it's governed by what appears normal to them.
The reason that government censorship doesn't work isn't because people are wise and thoughtful; it's because government censorship spitting into the wind of perceived normalcy. However, shaming racist bullshit and shunning the people repeating it is very effective.
This assumes that companies have no alternatives but to cultivate American workers if they can't import the skills. This is especially untrue since the Internet -- it's easier than ever to offshore jobs.
Somewhere between the idea that expanding H1B as it is is the only way to increase the talent pool in the US and the notion it has no potential usefulness is the truth. If the US wants to continue to be a world leader in technology, it has to do both. Why? Because the US has only 5% of the world's population. Even if we have two or three times our share of talent, that's not enough to dominate innovation in the long term.
Here's a bit of history that people who haven't lived through it might not know: US tech dominance in the mid 20th century was built on a combination of US workers and top European talent. When I went to MIT in the early 80s, many of the top professors were WW2 refugees -- Jews or politically undesirable intellectuals who fled the Axis countries before the war, and talented people to came to the US while Europe was still rebuilding in the 1950s. And of course a few people like Werner von Braun -- an outright Nazi who was just too useful to punish.