Playing devil's advocate here, I'll point out that there's a bit of a difference between a clear goal that's technologically difficult (send people to the moon) and an unclear goal. Electronic record-keeping, at least at first glance, sounds really easy - you create a database, populate it with some tables and some columns, and you go home. Trouble is, practically applying electronic record-keeping isn't anywhere near as cut and dry, especially in a hospital setting. What information do you keep? Heck, what information are you even allowed to keep (HIPAA and so on)? How do you keep the information from walking out the door? How do you guarantee that the right information is getting into the system?
Technologically, none of this is cutting new ground - it's all just databases with various front-ends. The problem here is that you have a bunch of hospitals and doctors with wildly divergent business methodologies and wildly divergent goals that recently received a mandate and some money from the federal government to become less divergent and nobody is entirely sure how to do that. It's more like a standards debate than a technological issue, and standards debates take a while. To put this into perspective, C++0x will probably take 13 years between initial conception and planning to actual ISO publication, assuming they hold to their "late 2010-early 2011" deadline, and they had to put a feature freeze in place in 2006 in order for that deadline to look even remotely reasonable. Medical IT regulations, meanwhile, are still changing, and nobody can even agree on what goals this initiative is supposed to achieve, much less how anybody is supposed to achieve them. This is why a lot of medical groups are freaking out about the deadline - since nobody's clearly defined what it means to actually meet the deadline, much less how anybody goes about doing that, it's going to be virtually impossible to do so.
Of course, the flip side here is that the entire reason everybody took federal money on this is because it was such an ill-defined project in the first place - as long as you're doing something that looks vaguely connected, you could say that you're working on becoming "compliant", whatever that might mean at a given point in time, and collect free money for it. That's now looking like a less-wise decision than it did a few years ago.
True, but Mac's backwards incompatibility as of late has had less to do with simple API changes and more to do with major architectural changes. For example, the change from PowerPC to Intel broke Classic Mode since they implemented Classic Mode as something closely resembling an OSX-based hypervisor with an OS9 guest. At least Apple made it possible for PowerPC-native code to run under newer versions of OSX, which is more than can be said about Microsoft and NT-Alpha. The change from OS9 to OSX was also a major architectural change that broke a ton of compatibility, which is why Classic Mode was created in the first place - again, though, it's not like Microsoft Win9x programs universally work flawlessly under WinNT derivatives.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying Apple is a particularly good citizen when it comes to backwards compatibility. It's not. However, I think there's an important distinction between a dependency issue and an architectural compatibility issue.
Oh, no doubt - Windows is famous for its backwards compatibility, for both better and worse, while Apple has largely adopted the attitude that, if something is more than five years old, they won't make any promises. Considering how they've changed both operating systems and hardware in the past 10 years, it's an understandable position to adopt, but it's still rather frustrating. Even so, though, that's not really a dependency issue - it's more of a compatibility issue. The issue isn't a missing library - it's a missing piece of hardware or a missing operating system.
If I buy an application that says it'll run on Windows XP/Vista/7 I can be pretty confident that it'll work.
False! Only if it is maintained and has been tweaked by the producer. You apparently don't use much older software or software not named "Photoshop".
If it wasn't maintained, it wouldn't say it runs on XP/Vista/7, now would it?;-)
If I want an app for my generic Linux box, I'm jumping head-long down a rabbit hole of trying to figure out which version will work with my particular distro and what other dependencies
From your post I can tell you have not used a desktop linux distro in the last... five years? More? At this point my mother could search for "television" and have MythTV installed and running in 10 min
Have you actually tried MythTV? I just installed a fresh copy of Mythbuntu (yeah, yeah, I know...) last weekend, imported a video file, and now it won't find the danged thing or scan/var/libs/mythtv/videos for any new video files. Then there's the fantastic rendering of menu buttons that bleed on top of each other or have missing text (I'm looking at you, "Import DVD"), the way you have to manually configure it to put videos in the aforementioned directory in the first place (default setting is blank), the lack of on-screen documentation suggesting that "Esc" actually does something useful... *sigh*
Look, I like the idea behind it, don't get me wrong, and I'm sure it's easier to set up than a lot of things out there, but let's not kid ourselves - MythTV, or at least Mythbuntu, is still a bit fussy. Heck, the fact that I have to qualify my statement in the first place (Mythbuntu vs. MythTV) kind of drives the parent's point home. How many times has someone said in these forums that Kubuntu is terrible but OpenSUSE is awesome? They're both Linux with KDE on top, right? Why are they different? Oh right - because Linux isn't simple or cut and dried.
> See that's the thing. We don't have dependencies. No need to run after libfoo to run appbar.
> Just open the DMG, drag and drop to wherever (/Applications is nice) and run.
Yes you do. You just won't admit to them.
No. You really don't. Each Mac application is actually a directory (Mail.app is actually/Applications/Mail.app/...), which contains the executable and (assuming the programmer did what they were supposed to) any relevant libraries and so forth that the executable needs to run. Since each.app folder is self-contained, you don't have to worry about what version of libfoo is installed on your system (each app carries a copy of the one it needs). More information on this can be found here.
ut fuck anyone who thinks they have the right to determine if someone's work is a waste of time or not.
People determine that all the time. It's why some people get hired and some people get fired. It's why some people shop at Walmart and others don't. It's why some people buy Toyotas and others ride the bus... and so on. With that in mind, I don't recommend fucking everyone that participates in a market economy - you just don't know where some of them have been.
As for the whole Nouveau vs. closed source blob situation, I think Nouveau is a decent starting option for a distribution since it's something they have some control over. As others have pointed out, those that need official Nvidia drivers know where to look.
Oh yeah? Well, I have an Apple//e with a Microsoft CP/M Softcard in it. It gives me a grand total of 128k of RAM and two processors (the Apple's 6502 and the Softcard's Zilog Z-80), which is perfect for when I want to run WordStar or work in TurboPascal.
I hate to admit it, but it doesn't get used much these days.:-)
To put that into perspective, if you look at their SEC filings, that would mean 0.484% of, worst case, a little over $19 billion, or $92 million for the 2nd quarter of 2010. Of their net income (i.e. profit), that would account for 1.4% of their total profit; needless to say, MS can probably absorb that. Of course, that $19 billion was their gross revenue, of which a good chunk of that probably isn't taxed per Washington's corporate tax law (IANAA) and certainly doesn't apply as licensing revenue (gross revenue would also include XBoxen, Zunes, and other hardware, among other things). That said, I will point out that most businesses don't operate at a 33-50% profit margin or somewhere thereabouts; I would have to imagine that a 0.484% on gross retail would be particularly painful, since most retail establishments are lucky if they can break 5%.
I will, however, point out that I live about five minutes away from MS Licensing's office in Reno, so I'm really getting a kick out of these replies.
Hmm... Dune-Star Wars... that could be mildly entertaining. Plans within plans within plans. The Force must flow. Anakin/Vader is the Kwizatz Haderach, who brings balance to the force (largely by eliminating it) and order to humanity, but Luke must execute the Golden Path and enslave the new Rebellion in over a thousand years of darkness. Meanwhile, Han Solo is reborn over and over and over again for various reasons.
On second thought, let's not do this and say we did, mmkay?
I can't buy tin foil anymore. Why? Because Reynolds Wrapkilled it, the monsters! They were in it with Wrigley and the Catalina Island Conservancy! Screw you, Ryne Sandberg, your Wrigley-loving, tin hating bastard!
I don't think the US would collapse in a heap, though things still wouldn't be pretty. This isn't Argentina, where foreign concerns own everything, including food production. What would probably happen is our currency would inflate for a while, we'd pay higher fuel prices since all of that has to be imported, but meanwhile our exports would suddenly become remarkably competitive both locally and abroad. Besides, it's not like all of the education and experience in the US would magically disappear with the dollar - heck, Germany proved quite nicely that, if you have a trained and educated workforce, you can pick yourself back up rather quickly from economic disasters, no matter how uninspired the leadership.
Then you haven't seen competition on the legitimized use of force in action. We usually call that "war", "civil war", or, alternatively, "gang violence". Trust me - it's not as great as it sounds.
Look, I'm pretty active with my local Libertarian Party chapter. I definitely want to see much less government than what we have. However, I know my history and I know my foreign affairs. If you want to see what a weak central government without a monopoly on force looks like, go look up Latin American history for the better part of the 20th Century. "Creative destruction" is great when you're talking about capital. It's less great when you're talking about guns and ammunition.
True, but no number of well-intentioned folks outside of government will ever change the fact that there will always be armed mobs who are willing to use the threat of violence to achieve their social and political ends. Question is, who do you want in control of the mob? Personally, I prefer mobs that are at least willing to entertain the possibility that I should have a voice in what they do, even if they don't always listen.
Agreed. I buy a lot of cheap tools from Harbor Freight for little one-off jobs - most of them are either Chinese or, oddly enough, Indian. They're also largely made out of ductile iron. Guess what? They bend and wear out faster, as you would expect a ductile iron tool to. It wouldn't matter if that ductile iron tool were made in the US or not - the chemistry just isn't there.
I'll point out that, at this point of the game, American factories are competing against foreign-owned factories built and run in America and are still losing. Part of that, of course, is due to the foreign factories generally being newer than their American counterparts, but there's much more to it than that. Thanks to a combination of short-sighted management and Wagner Act unionism, you had unions demanding gold-plated benefit packages from management that not only wanted to avoid profit-cutting strikes, but also wanted to create heinously expensive labor contracts that would put their competition out of business. It actually worked, too - that's why International doesn't sell pick-ups and why nobody buys new Studebakers anymore. It also nearly bankrupted Chrysler in the '70s and led to AMC swirling the drain. (Un?)fortunately, the Japanese and Europeans were unwilling to play along and kept the UAW out of their American plants, thus keeping them from getting "out-bid" for labor by GM and Ford.
There's a reason domestic automakers put up with the unions for so long. It's because, if you were #1 or #2, being able to set a legally binding market rate for labor that all of your competitors had to observe meant that your competitors couldn't just hire cheaper labor to make up for their deficiencies in economies of scale compared to you. That's a really handy way to make sure your smaller competitors remain small.
Actually, it's probably going to be a little bit of both.
Look, we need to remember something here - it's not like we were manufacturing high-quality goods in the US when we were still manufacturing goods. There's a reason people stopped buying American cars, for example. Sure, you can point at something made in the US from 50 years ago and say, "Ah ha! See? Our stuff was better!", but that's just selection bias. Of course the stuff that made it to today from 50 years ago is more durable than the stuff we have lying around our house now. That's why it's over 50 years old.. All the crappy stuff that fell apart instantly fell apart fifty years ago.
Back in the day, we made TVs. In those days, TVs were so expensive, TV repair was a legitimate career path. Nowadays, TVs are so cheap that it just doesn't make sense, which is why you don't see too many black & white TVs running around these days. Heck, the transition from analog TV to high definition TV will probably take less time for most families than the transition from black & white to color, if only because the cost of high definition TVs is falling so fast and so far that, when people's analog TVs die every 3-5 years (or so), they'll be able to easily afford a high definition one. How long did it take for VCRs to disappear once DVDs came out? The reason we can make these transitions so quickly these days is because of inexpensive manufactured goods.
That said, back in the day, we were pretty much the only industrialized country on the planet. After World War 2, the US was the only country around that had a significant industrial base that hadn't been bombed into the Stone Age (at least the only one of a decent size - obviously Australia, Canada, and New Zealand were still in decent shape, too). Guess who was the world's China? That's right - the US, which is why, even if we switch to a protectionist stance, we're never getting back to a world in which the United States is 10x more prosperous than every other country on the planet. There's simply too much competition these days. Of course, back in the day, China was starving - that's less of an issue now. Back in the day, Mexico was a backwards, lawless hellhole. Nowadays, they possess the 13th highest GDP in the world, just ahead of Australia, with a slightly lower per capita GDP than Russia and Turkey. That's still not great, mind you, but it's still more than double China's and a heck of a lot better than it was at the turn of the last century. Japan is now a world-leading economic power; going into World War 2, they were just a regional power, roughly along the lines of South Africa today and with roughly the same amount of regional and international pull. South Korea? They weren't even a regional power when they gained independence from Japan after World War 2.
Besides, life in the '50s and '60s wasn't that great in the US anyway, especially if you actually possessed melanin or were unfortunate enough to live in the South. Even if you were white, middle class meant something very different in '50s-era Birmingham than it meant in, say, '50s-era Detroit or Cleveland. Even if you were fortunate enough to live in an industrial city with lots of well-paying union jobs, what'd you get for it back then? A cookie-cutter suburban home sans-grounded wiring, a car that would rust or fail every three years or 50,000 miles, a TV if you really saved up for it, and lots and lots of canned food. Back then, frozen food was considered so novel and interesting that four-star restaurants in New York used to advertise that they used frozen product. Seriously, if you compared '50s America with today's... oh... Jamaica, you'd find yourself picking Jamaica in a heartbeat, and not just because of the weather.
Why does a totalitarian regime have to keep the workers happy? Squishing them with tanks when they complain seems simpler.
It's not so much the workers you have to keep happy, it's the military and the bureaucracy. If worker wealth disappears, wealth for the mid-level bureaucrat (e.g. party officials, regional governors, etc.) disappears, albeit more slowly. Once that happens, corruption turns up to 11 and nobody is willing to really sustain the country anymore. This happened to East Germany near the end - so much wealth was gone that nobody had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo anymore.
And what is difference to the worker if instead of selling the stuff built with their labor to the US, the Chinese government just buys it directly from them with freshly printed yuan and dumps it in the ocean? What changes, other than China not collecting IOUs that it exchanges for more IOUs.
One sends American wealth to China. The other sends Chinese wealth into the ocean. When American dollars are sent to China, they can trade those dollars for other, more useful things (oil, raw materials, and so on), provided the dollar is actually worth something. If the Chinese just start dumping surplus industrial output into the ocean, they won't get anything back to purchase new raw materials with, which would effectively shut down the factories sooner or later anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Playing devil's advocate here, I'll point out that there's a bit of a difference between a clear goal that's technologically difficult (send people to the moon) and an unclear goal. Electronic record-keeping, at least at first glance, sounds really easy - you create a database, populate it with some tables and some columns, and you go home. Trouble is, practically applying electronic record-keeping isn't anywhere near as cut and dry, especially in a hospital setting. What information do you keep? Heck, what information are you even allowed to keep (HIPAA and so on)? How do you keep the information from walking out the door? How do you guarantee that the right information is getting into the system?
Technologically, none of this is cutting new ground - it's all just databases with various front-ends. The problem here is that you have a bunch of hospitals and doctors with wildly divergent business methodologies and wildly divergent goals that recently received a mandate and some money from the federal government to become less divergent and nobody is entirely sure how to do that. It's more like a standards debate than a technological issue, and standards debates take a while. To put this into perspective, C++0x will probably take 13 years between initial conception and planning to actual ISO publication, assuming they hold to their "late 2010-early 2011" deadline, and they had to put a feature freeze in place in 2006 in order for that deadline to look even remotely reasonable. Medical IT regulations, meanwhile, are still changing, and nobody can even agree on what goals this initiative is supposed to achieve, much less how anybody is supposed to achieve them. This is why a lot of medical groups are freaking out about the deadline - since nobody's clearly defined what it means to actually meet the deadline, much less how anybody goes about doing that, it's going to be virtually impossible to do so.
Of course, the flip side here is that the entire reason everybody took federal money on this is because it was such an ill-defined project in the first place - as long as you're doing something that looks vaguely connected, you could say that you're working on becoming "compliant", whatever that might mean at a given point in time, and collect free money for it. That's now looking like a less-wise decision than it did a few years ago.
It does consume a fair amount of space - whether it's waste or not depends on your perspective.
True, but Mac's backwards incompatibility as of late has had less to do with simple API changes and more to do with major architectural changes. For example, the change from PowerPC to Intel broke Classic Mode since they implemented Classic Mode as something closely resembling an OSX-based hypervisor with an OS9 guest. At least Apple made it possible for PowerPC-native code to run under newer versions of OSX, which is more than can be said about Microsoft and NT-Alpha. The change from OS9 to OSX was also a major architectural change that broke a ton of compatibility, which is why Classic Mode was created in the first place - again, though, it's not like Microsoft Win9x programs universally work flawlessly under WinNT derivatives.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying Apple is a particularly good citizen when it comes to backwards compatibility. It's not. However, I think there's an important distinction between a dependency issue and an architectural compatibility issue.
Oh, no doubt - Windows is famous for its backwards compatibility, for both better and worse, while Apple has largely adopted the attitude that, if something is more than five years old, they won't make any promises. Considering how they've changed both operating systems and hardware in the past 10 years, it's an understandable position to adopt, but it's still rather frustrating. Even so, though, that's not really a dependency issue - it's more of a compatibility issue. The issue isn't a missing library - it's a missing piece of hardware or a missing operating system.
If it wasn't maintained, it wouldn't say it runs on XP/Vista/7, now would it? ;-)
Have you actually tried MythTV? I just installed a fresh copy of Mythbuntu (yeah, yeah, I know...) last weekend, imported a video file, and now it won't find the danged thing or scan /var/libs/mythtv/videos for any new video files. Then there's the fantastic rendering of menu buttons that bleed on top of each other or have missing text (I'm looking at you, "Import DVD"), the way you have to manually configure it to put videos in the aforementioned directory in the first place (default setting is blank), the lack of on-screen documentation suggesting that "Esc" actually does something useful... *sigh*
Look, I like the idea behind it, don't get me wrong, and I'm sure it's easier to set up than a lot of things out there, but let's not kid ourselves - MythTV, or at least Mythbuntu, is still a bit fussy. Heck, the fact that I have to qualify my statement in the first place (Mythbuntu vs. MythTV) kind of drives the parent's point home. How many times has someone said in these forums that Kubuntu is terrible but OpenSUSE is awesome? They're both Linux with KDE on top, right? Why are they different? Oh right - because Linux isn't simple or cut and dried.
No. You really don't. Each Mac application is actually a directory (Mail.app is actually /Applications/Mail.app/...), which contains the executable and (assuming the programmer did what they were supposed to) any relevant libraries and so forth that the executable needs to run. Since each .app folder is self-contained, you don't have to worry about what version of libfoo is installed on your system (each app carries a copy of the one it needs). More information on this can be found here.
People determine that all the time. It's why some people get hired and some people get fired. It's why some people shop at Walmart and others don't. It's why some people buy Toyotas and others ride the bus... and so on. With that in mind, I don't recommend fucking everyone that participates in a market economy - you just don't know where some of them have been.
As for the whole Nouveau vs. closed source blob situation, I think Nouveau is a decent starting option for a distribution since it's something they have some control over. As others have pointed out, those that need official Nvidia drivers know where to look.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is why you don't do mescaline.
Oh yeah? Well, I have an Apple //e with a Microsoft CP/M Softcard in it. It gives me a grand total of 128k of RAM and two processors (the Apple's 6502 and the Softcard's Zilog Z-80), which is perfect for when I want to run WordStar or work in TurboPascal.
:-)
I hate to admit it, but it doesn't get used much these days.
As opposed to before the Internet and before data mining, when all your neighbors just gossiped about you behind your back.
My God... they'll know I buy perishables! They'll know I'm bluffing about my ability to wait out a siege! Curse you, fresh fruits and vegetables!
There's always property taxes. Bill Gates has to live somewhere.
To put that into perspective, if you look at their SEC filings, that would mean 0.484% of, worst case, a little over $19 billion, or $92 million for the 2nd quarter of 2010. Of their net income (i.e. profit), that would account for 1.4% of their total profit; needless to say, MS can probably absorb that. Of course, that $19 billion was their gross revenue, of which a good chunk of that probably isn't taxed per Washington's corporate tax law (IANAA) and certainly doesn't apply as licensing revenue (gross revenue would also include XBoxen, Zunes, and other hardware, among other things). That said, I will point out that most businesses don't operate at a 33-50% profit margin or somewhere thereabouts; I would have to imagine that a 0.484% on gross retail would be particularly painful, since most retail establishments are lucky if they can break 5%.
I will, however, point out that I live about five minutes away from MS Licensing's office in Reno, so I'm really getting a kick out of these replies.
Hmm... Dune-Star Wars... that could be mildly entertaining. Plans within plans within plans. The Force must flow. Anakin/Vader is the Kwizatz Haderach, who brings balance to the force (largely by eliminating it) and order to humanity, but Luke must execute the Golden Path and enslave the new Rebellion in over a thousand years of darkness. Meanwhile, Han Solo is reborn over and over and over again for various reasons.
On second thought, let's not do this and say we did, mmkay?
I can't buy tin foil anymore. Why? Because Reynolds Wrap killed it, the monsters! They were in it with Wrigley and the Catalina Island Conservancy! Screw you, Ryne Sandberg, your Wrigley-loving, tin hating bastard!
I don't think the US would collapse in a heap, though things still wouldn't be pretty. This isn't Argentina, where foreign concerns own everything, including food production. What would probably happen is our currency would inflate for a while, we'd pay higher fuel prices since all of that has to be imported, but meanwhile our exports would suddenly become remarkably competitive both locally and abroad. Besides, it's not like all of the education and experience in the US would magically disappear with the dollar - heck, Germany proved quite nicely that, if you have a trained and educated workforce, you can pick yourself back up rather quickly from economic disasters, no matter how uninspired the leadership.
Guilty as charged. If you're in Nevada, let me know and I'll happily put you in touch with the local Party. ;-)
Then you haven't seen competition on the legitimized use of force in action. We usually call that "war", "civil war", or, alternatively, "gang violence". Trust me - it's not as great as it sounds.
Look, I'm pretty active with my local Libertarian Party chapter. I definitely want to see much less government than what we have. However, I know my history and I know my foreign affairs. If you want to see what a weak central government without a monopoly on force looks like, go look up Latin American history for the better part of the 20th Century. "Creative destruction" is great when you're talking about capital. It's less great when you're talking about guns and ammunition.
Right - we should start this revolution in Sweden!
Worse car analogy: Why buy a Ferrari for 250k when I can buy a Peterbuilt for the same price?
True, but no number of well-intentioned folks outside of government will ever change the fact that there will always be armed mobs who are willing to use the threat of violence to achieve their social and political ends. Question is, who do you want in control of the mob? Personally, I prefer mobs that are at least willing to entertain the possibility that I should have a voice in what they do, even if they don't always listen.
Agreed. I buy a lot of cheap tools from Harbor Freight for little one-off jobs - most of them are either Chinese or, oddly enough, Indian. They're also largely made out of ductile iron. Guess what? They bend and wear out faster, as you would expect a ductile iron tool to. It wouldn't matter if that ductile iron tool were made in the US or not - the chemistry just isn't there.
I'll point out that, at this point of the game, American factories are competing against foreign-owned factories built and run in America and are still losing. Part of that, of course, is due to the foreign factories generally being newer than their American counterparts, but there's much more to it than that. Thanks to a combination of short-sighted management and Wagner Act unionism, you had unions demanding gold-plated benefit packages from management that not only wanted to avoid profit-cutting strikes, but also wanted to create heinously expensive labor contracts that would put their competition out of business. It actually worked, too - that's why International doesn't sell pick-ups and why nobody buys new Studebakers anymore. It also nearly bankrupted Chrysler in the '70s and led to AMC swirling the drain. (Un?)fortunately, the Japanese and Europeans were unwilling to play along and kept the UAW out of their American plants, thus keeping them from getting "out-bid" for labor by GM and Ford.
There's a reason domestic automakers put up with the unions for so long. It's because, if you were #1 or #2, being able to set a legally binding market rate for labor that all of your competitors had to observe meant that your competitors couldn't just hire cheaper labor to make up for their deficiencies in economies of scale compared to you. That's a really handy way to make sure your smaller competitors remain small.
Actually, it's probably going to be a little bit of both.
Look, we need to remember something here - it's not like we were manufacturing high-quality goods in the US when we were still manufacturing goods. There's a reason people stopped buying American cars, for example. Sure, you can point at something made in the US from 50 years ago and say, "Ah ha! See? Our stuff was better!", but that's just selection bias. Of course the stuff that made it to today from 50 years ago is more durable than the stuff we have lying around our house now. That's why it's over 50 years old.. All the crappy stuff that fell apart instantly fell apart fifty years ago.
Back in the day, we made TVs. In those days, TVs were so expensive, TV repair was a legitimate career path. Nowadays, TVs are so cheap that it just doesn't make sense, which is why you don't see too many black & white TVs running around these days. Heck, the transition from analog TV to high definition TV will probably take less time for most families than the transition from black & white to color, if only because the cost of high definition TVs is falling so fast and so far that, when people's analog TVs die every 3-5 years (or so), they'll be able to easily afford a high definition one. How long did it take for VCRs to disappear once DVDs came out? The reason we can make these transitions so quickly these days is because of inexpensive manufactured goods.
That said, back in the day, we were pretty much the only industrialized country on the planet. After World War 2, the US was the only country around that had a significant industrial base that hadn't been bombed into the Stone Age (at least the only one of a decent size - obviously Australia, Canada, and New Zealand were still in decent shape, too). Guess who was the world's China? That's right - the US, which is why, even if we switch to a protectionist stance, we're never getting back to a world in which the United States is 10x more prosperous than every other country on the planet. There's simply too much competition these days. Of course, back in the day, China was starving - that's less of an issue now. Back in the day, Mexico was a backwards, lawless hellhole. Nowadays, they possess the 13th highest GDP in the world, just ahead of Australia, with a slightly lower per capita GDP than Russia and Turkey. That's still not great, mind you, but it's still more than double China's and a heck of a lot better than it was at the turn of the last century. Japan is now a world-leading economic power; going into World War 2, they were just a regional power, roughly along the lines of South Africa today and with roughly the same amount of regional and international pull. South Korea? They weren't even a regional power when they gained independence from Japan after World War 2.
Besides, life in the '50s and '60s wasn't that great in the US anyway, especially if you actually possessed melanin or were unfortunate enough to live in the South. Even if you were white, middle class meant something very different in '50s-era Birmingham than it meant in, say, '50s-era Detroit or Cleveland. Even if you were fortunate enough to live in an industrial city with lots of well-paying union jobs, what'd you get for it back then? A cookie-cutter suburban home sans-grounded wiring, a car that would rust or fail every three years or 50,000 miles, a TV if you really saved up for it, and lots and lots of canned food. Back then, frozen food was considered so novel and interesting that four-star restaurants in New York used to advertise that they used frozen product. Seriously, if you compared '50s America with today's... oh... Jamaica, you'd find yourself picking Jamaica in a heartbeat, and not just because of the weather.
It's not so much the workers you have to keep happy, it's the military and the bureaucracy. If worker wealth disappears, wealth for the mid-level bureaucrat (e.g. party officials, regional governors, etc.) disappears, albeit more slowly. Once that happens, corruption turns up to 11 and nobody is willing to really sustain the country anymore. This happened to East Germany near the end - so much wealth was gone that nobody had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo anymore.
One sends American wealth to China. The other sends Chinese wealth into the ocean. When American dollars are sent to China, they can trade those dollars for other, more useful things (oil, raw materials, and so on), provided the dollar is actually worth something. If the Chinese just start dumping surplus industrial output into the ocean, they won't get anything back to purchase new raw materials with, which would effectively shut down the factories sooner or later anyway.