How America Can Get Its Tech Mojo Back 380
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.'"
shoot all the lawyers and patent trolls (Score:5, Interesting)
then people won't be afraid to invent again.
Tech needs Apprenticeships! (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
I'm going with fix the listed problems. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Easy (Score:4, Interesting)
Easy. Abolish patent law and copyright law. [mises.org] (PDF here [ucla.edu])
Historically, those two concepts have probably been the biggest impediments to the advancement of human civilization.
But not by Marketing-BS-Speak (Score:2, Interesting)
The article is not part of the solution, it rather illustrates the Problem. And no, the US cannot come out of this if foreign talent stops coming. Not enough US citizens have what it takes.
Re:Easy (Score:4, Interesting)
Please then explain why the industrial revolution took off when England instated a patent system.
Re:The education system has been bad for tech for (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Well (Score:2, Interesting)
That's true, and there's nothing stopping the Chinese from leveraging open source.
Plus the Chinese aren't hypocritical bastards about it. From the summary:
Really? Where can I go to find this individuality? In America a true individual is pretty damn hard to find. You do realize that choosing to follow the crowd, to respond to advertising, to adhere to trends, to behave in predictable patterns in large numbers, to obsess over black/white/hispanic/asian/female and other group identities, to fear everything the news tells you to fear, you realize that doesn't make you an individual, you do know that right?
Occasionally I encounter a real individual in the USA. It's nice. It's refreshing. Such a person doesn't just believe everything they hear like a mindless idiot. Such a person knows that an advertiser is one of the most biased and therefore unreliable sources of information imaginable. Such a person doesn't have an idiotic tabloid-style concern for what everyone else is up to, how they manage their personal lives, who they're seeing, etc. Such a person knows that media and government are saturated with lying cocksuckers who serve only themselves while putting on a phony image of caring about our well-being. Such a person can follow simple instructions without needing to burden a service employee with holding their hand. Such a person generally just wants to live and let live. Such a person doesn't desire the casual attention of strangers and finds it unwanted and maybe even creepy, not flattering and ego-boosting. Such a person really doesn't care if you share, like, or approve of their beliefs, opinions, what they watch/read/observe/listen to/think about. Such a person assumes that their suffering is due to their own bad decision-making and seeks to learn how to make better decisions instead of playing the victim and looking for someone or something else to blame.
So, where can I go to find these "traditional" individualists? All I see are a bunch of type-cast automatons who think they're an individual, just like everybody else, because their ego would take a staggering hit if they only realized just how programmable they truly are. It would totally destroy their fantasy that they are self-directed in any way or actually make their own decisions or control their own lives.
At least the Chinese aren't in denial about the fact that their lives are run by forces beyond their control. That lack of denial is the only redeeming value of rule-by-brutality -- everybody knows where they stand. America is a soft tyranny based on rule by propaganda and withholding of information. In America people submit to forces beyond their control and they think this is their own idea and will defend their phony decisions.
Re:Simple (Score:2, Interesting)
I had some friends come back across the US-Canada border (to Canada). They said that they were in line for quite a while, but when they got to the border itself they were just waved through. Apparently Canadian customs, as usual, was mostly interested in people smuggling semis full of tax free cigarettes across the border. The line was due to US customs... searching Americans, outbound from the US.
I've heard of a few countries that impede their citizens when exiting the country. They're pretty much all places I'd want to stay away from.
Re:Well (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Well (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [youtube.com]
Re:Well (Score:4, Interesting)
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.