Eric Schmidt Warns US Technology Edge Over China Slipping (bloomberg.com) 96
Eric Schmidt wants to reshape Washington's industrial policy to combat an intensifying US-China tech rivalry. The former Google chief executive officer's philanthropic arm issued recommendations aimed at encouraging US politicians to counter China's rising technological ambitions by ramping up regulatory scrutiny, encouraging more private investment and offering tax credits to train workers. From a report: China surprised the US on key "battleground" technologies -- including wireless 5G, microelectronics and AI -- as the Asian nation's industrial policy enabled it to dominate markets for drones, high-capacity batteries, critical minerals, solar panels, turbines and shipbuilding, the Schmidt-backed Special Competitive Studies Project said Tuesday in a report.
"The US has some immense economic advantages, but there are some warning lights flashing," Liza Tobin, the project's senior director and a former China director for the US National Security Council, said on a call with reporters. "The US needs an America-style industrial strategy that leverages competition in our dynamic private sector and has carefully targeted incentives in sectors where we need to lead." The report calls on the US government to boost microelectronic production with the help of a large fund to unlock private capital, create an open-source security center to assist investments in digital infrastructure, establish a national security commission on digital finance and give regulators more power to screen investment flows to China that could threaten US national security.
"The US has some immense economic advantages, but there are some warning lights flashing," Liza Tobin, the project's senior director and a former China director for the US National Security Council, said on a call with reporters. "The US needs an America-style industrial strategy that leverages competition in our dynamic private sector and has carefully targeted incentives in sectors where we need to lead." The report calls on the US government to boost microelectronic production with the help of a large fund to unlock private capital, create an open-source security center to assist investments in digital infrastructure, establish a national security commission on digital finance and give regulators more power to screen investment flows to China that could threaten US national security.
Given how Google turned out... (Score:5, Interesting)
Given how Google turned out, if Eric Schmidt was "adult supervision" while Google was "growing up", he's definitively a shitty "parent".
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Plot twist: Schmidt embraced China and transferred cutting-edge technology to them.
Oh, wait - everybody knew that already.
"Adult" != "CFR Sociopath"
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Calvinism.
The deeply-rooted calvinism that totally soaks WASP culture is the main reason for all ill social isses.
(Calvinists believe that the poor are without morals, because having no morals make them lazy, and the sacred duty of every calvinist is to punish the poor, because they have no morals).
Making advanced chips (Score:2)
Quit providing the most advanced chips to China and they will be forced to develop their own.
Some US policies fail to consider the secondary effects.
Slipping? Just Now? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Slipping? Just Now? (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. Back in the days you can take electronics or programming courses without going deep into debt.
I couldn't disagree more. When I went to school, computer education amounted to an hour or two a week in front of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, and this was at the high school level. Now, the amount of official programs available as elective courses is mind boggling, it's possible to walk out of high school with multiple meaningful certifications and a $0 outlay. It's more possible than ever to find hackerspaces, volunteer organizations, and communities that exist primarily or solely to promote technology instruction at low or no cost. Community colleges in the 90s rarely offered any programming classes beyond Pascal, COBOL, and FORTRAN. Now you can go to a community college and receive top instruction in big data, cloud, and virtually any hot language you want to learn, not to mention reverse engineering, information security, and tons of other highly specialized domains.
Whatever problems we have, I'm 100% sure that there are many more educational opportunities for young techies looking to find the leading edge than there were back in the 90s, when "our thing" was an obscure club of socially outcast pocket protector owners.
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Thre's too much non-technology in technology now. Computer Science is fundamentally not high school curriculum. Programming might be, but it's not the same thing. And modern programming is almost at the anti-technology change, programmers who've never seen hardware or know what a transistor is, programmers who don't even "code" anymore and brag about it. There's almost no silicon left in Silicon Valley; the top three companies there are an advertiser, an advertiser, and an advertiser.
You aren't going to
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Nothing to say to this but a slow clap, could not agree more.
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The elites and decision makers in America don't seem to understand that being a society means allowing the plebes to play a part in that society. They seem to think making everything about them, and fuck the little guy, will turn out grand and fine for them. Short-term? Sure. Long-term? Uh, no. They'll fall when their foundations crack, rot, and fall out from under them as society is built on the backs of the lowest rung on the socio-economic ladder, not the top.
The lessons will be learned too late to do an
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That depends on what you are measuring and how you measure it. That said, it's to be expected. China was devastated by WWII, and it didn't have an "Marshall plan" that rebuilt it.
There are reasons why China might be expected to be less productive of advanced science/technology than, say, the US, but it's got a HUGEly larger number of people making those advances. So for it to be advancing faster isn't that big a surprise. Besides, the West has it's own problems. Corporate dominance of a field tends to
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The US is hellbent on destroying public education, preventing higher education for as many citizens as possible and going as far backwards as possible
The bourgeois need hordes of semi-litterate drones that will happily buy whatever shit they sell, without asking questions, and employees that will do whatever they are told, without asking ethical questions.
Of course, only the bourgeois can afford the high-priced education needed to rise above the semi-educated masses for their offspring.
Root causes (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of our edge slippage is due to social, rather than governmental/structural, issues. Tech career advancement is increasingly driven by reasons other than merit - which results in less valuable creative output and lower productivity in general. Communities whose cooperation used to drive advancement are now Balkanized and in a state of cold war with each other, their energies pouring into frustrating each other rather than achieving something together or collaborating to surmount shared obstacles. Animosity, resentment, and ulterior motives abound in our field, now.
Until we solve these problems substantially, I don't think we'll see another repeat of the 90s dot com era of daily emerging advancements, no matter how many subsidies we hand out or committees we create.
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You did not repeat what was said in the post you responded to, neither word-for-word nor paraphrasing. Maybe you thought it was implied, but it wasn't said, and I didn't get the same implication.
(There have always been some people being promoted for reasons other than merit - who they know, who they kiss up to, who they're related to, etc.)
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I know English is hard for ESL. You must be foreign. I wasn't repeating the guy I responded to. I repeated the narrative. Please work harder on your English. What's your native language? You're pretty good for a foreigner but too literal like most until they get the hang of every day casual English.
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And your interpretation of that comment is an excellent example of what he was talking about, if rather one-dimensional.
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"Tech career advancement is increasingly driven by reasons other than merit..."
Maybe? Or is it that advancement means transitioning into positions that require new skills, and your old ones aren't as valuable or valued? In other words, the criteria for filling a new position might not include what you think is fundamentally your skillset.
To assume a position was therefore filled "without merit" is to try to restrict the expectations of others to that which you, personally, are good at.
I've promoted people
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People do that ALL THE TIME.
"Why did you promote him? He's only been here six months! I've been here 10 years busting my ass."
-- "Did you ask for it? Did you work on the skills needed? Did you advocate for yourself? Do you, in fact, have an advancement plan?"
"No. I just did a rock-solid job the same way for a decade."
-- "So your goal was to have you somebody notice, and give you a new world?"
"Well, yeah!"
-- "Well then..."
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Or is it that advancement means transitioning into positions that require new skills, and your old ones aren't as valuable or valued?
The issue I was raising wasn't a personal beef with my own career, it's an observation I've picked up based on current trends in the industry. "Clue" used to be the ticket to success in our industry. Now, I see lots of folks with clue languishing on the sidelines while people with no clue, but a lot of checkboxes checked around identity, political alignment, and allied cliques
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Thanks for the clarification.
People like to decry politics and the importance of being your own best advocate. Politics aren't inherently evil. They are a large part of how decisions get made in a limited resource economy. The higher you get the more important it is that you learn to navigate.
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People like to decry politics and the importance of being your own best advocate. Politics aren't inherently evil.
I'm an American. Politics, for us, are a system of systems. So while, of course, politics as a subject isn't inherently evil, indeed it's necessary... the systems themselves can be, can produce evil outcomes, or just wrong outcomes. In those cases, I think it's important to decry *those* politics, specifically, because those are malfunctioning systems that need to be repaired.
Further, often I t
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If you do X well, and seem content to do X, I'll leave you there. I'm not going to drag you to Y.
Perhaps, like many bosses, you will single out someone who is particularly bad at X and promote her to doing Y, in the forlorn hope that she must be good at *something*.
A syndrome that has made many corporations what they are today.
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We've absolutely perfected that around here. We had somebody that sucked on the line. They moved the person to line-supe. They sucked as line-supe, they moved them to office drone. They sucked as office drone, they moved them to office management. They sucked at office management, they moved them to training. Because when you absolutely, positively, have zero god damn skills, you should train people.
It's amazing we stay afloat at all. How we manage to remain profitable is beyond me.
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"How we manage to remain profitable is beyond me.
Welcome to the power of a functioning "organization". Everybody sucks at something in ther job. A characteristic of a functioning organization is that overlaps between people develop to ensure what's necessary gets done. That's despite the Peter Principle and all the places where incompetence appears.
If you stripped a company to exactly enough people to do exactly the right amount of things needed provided everybody is excellent all the time, you'll fail alm
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While I agree with your position, I still think when somebody fails at jobs over and over and over, and shows no competence at anything, they shouldn't remain protected and moved "up" in the organization. Sometimes you need to cut out the cancer. We tend to put it in charge, or make it a trainer.
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Well, absolutely. I agree.
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Here's the problem that most corporations have. You have someone that's really good at X, let's say an engineer, who constantly gets passed over for advancement because he's a great engineer, but has no interest in management, and in fact, would be a terrible manager. But, this great engineer keeps seeing people promoted into management making more money and getting more benefits than them and it breeds resentment because their pay and benefits aren't increasing at nearly the level of their manager counte
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"The point is, you need to provide non-managers with the same career growth potential as managers."
Why? I'm not trying to be argumentative, but different jobs have vastly different impacts.
The organizations I know well all have some degree of parallel advancement for highly skilled "individual contributors", but most cap out at Manager, or Senior Manager. Of course, those titles mean different things everywhere. But, frankly, when you begin to hit Director and above, your decisions are measured in the mil
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"The point is, you need to provide non-managers with the same career growth potential as managers."
Why? I'm not trying to be argumentative, but different jobs have vastly different impacts.
That's true. The managers should be making much less than the engineers, but good luck convincing them of that.
Please try to remember that the engineers perform the work the profits are based upon, and they are not fungible. A lot of managers believe otherwise, and kill golden geese regularly.
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Sure. But every last person, down to the janitor, can make that claim. A utilities company can't survive without people fixing machines and digging ditches. Engineers don't get to work without the army without accountants, administrative assistants, lawyers... everybody is crucial. But does that mean compensation should be across-the-board level?
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Sorry... engineers are "semi" fungible. You may need a specific one, like, say, a petrochemical engineer... but there are lots who could do the job you need done. This is true for nearly ANY occupation, skilled or otherwise.
All you have to do is spend some time listening to the recently laid-off. They're all convinced the company will fail because they're letting go of "key" people - the non-fungible... but most of the time, a few years later later, the company is still there.
I've lost very strong folks to
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I've lost very strong folks to the open market before. I missed their contribution, in some cases a lot. But we adjusted and moved on.
That period of adjustment costs money! It affects productivity when top talent leaves, obviously not so much when it's further down. The people who remember not just the reasons you did things but also why they make sense are important, as I'm sure you know? Can you exist without them? Sure, if your company knows what it's doing, and some do. But it's not the ideal outcome.
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That's true. It's not idea. I agree.
That's why I included the caveat "semi". Some folks are more important and valuable. But almost none are drop-dead critical. Any company that carries a risk of complete failure because of the departure of a tiny few shouldn't be in business.
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Why? I'm not trying to be argumentative, but different jobs have vastly different impacts.
30 years ago, I ran the IT for a small manufacturing company with 150 employees. One thing I did was to run the payroll and print the paycheques. A lot of techs actually earned more money than the president, thanks to overtime.
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And you've got also to remember that while the internet was being developed, just about nobody paid any attention to it. Some academics did, and a few people in government (Including DARPA), but that was just about 0% of the population.
Robots are already more occupying public attention that the internet was in its first decade. Who knows how may other such things are developing. There's some interesting work recently in nano-materials, and in chemical synthesis. Many of those things may not take the wor
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The solution is for people to be better socialized as kids. My understanding is that school can be quite brutal for a lot of children in the US. Lack of employment rights also feeds into that dog-eat-dog world, where pure ability and merit rarely factor into anything.
Education is absolutely fundamental to every country's economy, once it industrializes and becomes a knowledge and skill based system.
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The solution is for people to be better socialized as kids.
I don't want to reject this theory out of hand, but to me, it seems dubious to blame education without identifying what changed within education to precipitate the differing outcomes versus the past, when these outcomes were less common. How has schooling changed in that time frame, to create these new and worse outcomes? If we answer that, we know what we need to fix. If we can't or don't answer that, then ultimately we're just flailing and taking
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Nothing changed in education, it's just that people are less willing to put up with poor behaviour now. Things like sexism and hostile work environments were the norm and there wasn't much that could be done about them.
Obviously we don't want to go back to that stuff, so the only way is to help people.
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Nothing changed in education
Maybe not where you're from, but in the USA high school students have gone from studying the classics during the 50s to often graduating as functional illiterates 70 years later.
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I studied some classic literature, it wasn't very helpful for later life. Computer skills were basic but much more useful.
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That said, public behaviour of people in general has seemed to go downhill since earlier in my life, and that affects education in public schools where they have to try to teach all comers.
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Nothing changed in education
That seems to contradict the available evidence. Besides, if nothing changed in educating then how did the changes in the resulting education occur?
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Education has gone pretty far downhill in just my lifetime, and here are a few of the reasons why (in my opinion, and in no particular order):
1) College is the norm. Back a hundred years ago, college was for the elite - not necessarily the rich, but also the gifted students. 5-10% of the population had it - it meant something. Today, with 65%+ attending college, it really means nothing. And to accommodate 2/3rds of the population, it has had to be dumbed down considerably. There are remedial classes b
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Guess I hit send too soon - all of the above means that our most precious resource - kids with IQs above 120, just to draw an arbitrary line in the sand - are being given the shaft.
There really is no place for them in our schools anymore - no place they can excel unless they themselves *teach* themselves - with no guidance, little help, and roadblocks at every turn. Some are able to overcome all this, but the rest?
The rest we, as a society, lose. We can't afford that. We really can't.
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Tech career advancement is increasingly driven by reasons other than merit - which results in less valuable creative output and lower productivity in general.
You reckon? I've only participated in hiring+promotion discussion for engineers and managers at big tech, and I've never seen the slightest hint of anything other than merit-based. What have you been seeing and where?
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You reckon? I've only participated in hiring+promotion discussion for engineers and managers at big tech, and I've never seen the slightest hint of anything other than merit-based. What have you been seeing and where?
Academia and government are pretty rife with this, in my experience.
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Academia and government are pretty rife with this, in my experience.
Sure, but you were talking about *tech career advancement*. I've seen only meritocracy in tech careers in industry.
Are you taking your experience of academia and government and suggesting that they apply to industry? (I don't think they do). Or are you saying that academia and government are a significant portion of tech careers? (I don't think they are). Otherwise, I don't see how the experience of academia and government is significant to a discussion of tech career advancement?
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Academia and government are fairly outsized in technology careers, yes. Think about where the Internet was birthed from!
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Most of our edge slippage is due to social, rather than governmental/structural, issues.
One party has been deliberately compromising education for decades explicitly to avoid the creation of an "educated proletariat" in so many words, and you're going to tell us it's not governmental? I do believe that's today's GTFOH.
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One party has been deliberately compromising education for decades explicitly to avoid the creation of an "educated proletariat" in so many words, and you're going to tell us it's not governmental? I do believe that's today's GTFOH.
I'm going to presume that you're talking about the forcing of public education down the throats of parents and kids, teachers unions, and opposition to voucher and homeschooling programs that statistically produce superior educational outcomes for kids?
As someone who attended a w
Rich people asking the government for money (Score:5, Insightful)
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There's no reason to give them a helping hand instead of an extra shove down.
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...at a time that China is reeling from a 2008-style real estate crisis...
That cannot happen in China, because the government is on the side of the people not the banks.
“Ron Suskind’s Confidence Men reported that on March 27 2009, just two months after taking office, [Obama] invited the executives of thirteen leading Wall Street institutions to the White House. After listening to their arguments for why banks had to go on paying bonuses (ostensibly to get the best talent to manage their money), Obama told them: ‘Be careful how you make those statements, gentlem
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Obama told them: âBe careful how you make those statements, gentlemen. The public isnâ(TM)t buying thatâ(TM).
The problem is "the public" doesn't understand the salaries that professionals draw.
They feel that $60,000 per year is a reasonable salary for a city manager in a city with a working budget of $2B per year.
Now obviously CEOs are off-the-scale, but that's a different situation.
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That cannot happen in China, because the government is on the side of the people not the banks.
What? The party is on the side of the party, and if you're not in it, you're not invited. Just like here, except instead of pretending to be free market capitalists, they're pretending to be communists.
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I assure you that isolationism will create more problems than it solves.
some real thick ones on /. today (Score:2)
There are only about 2 1/2 nuclear superpowers. Cutting ties with 20% of the world's population from 30% of the world's money is pretty damn significant when they're the two largest militaries with nuclear ballistic missile capabilities. The rest of the world cannot survive if the US and China can't settle their difference peacefully.
Uh oh (Score:2)
Maybe we should stop letting China steal our technology?
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Re: Uh oh (Score:2)
Re: Uh oh (Score:2)
obligatory Asimov quote (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
Really, it can't be repeated enough.
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indeed. We can't get rid of democracy soon enough.
Begging for Money (Score:3)
The real threat to the US is the trust in the MBA and isolationism over discovery and interaction with other cultures. There is a myth that the Asians took over the Auto industry was by stealing US technology. This is partially true. They stole the statistics that made building a reliable car possible. The math that US executives ignored because they depended on fear to keep them afloat. We see this Harley Davidson which has orders but canâ(TM)t fill them because and American Brand has no rigorous quality control. And so some are made overseas.
Google is based on math. It used graph theory to create a map of the internet we all use. It is difficult to use math in manufacturing because the workers cry they are being spied on. TI used all the oil money they had to innovate the IC. Then no one wanted it because how did it directly make the CEO richer?
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The Japanese took over the auto industry by making what people wanted to buy. Doing it efficiently (not least, by building their cars out of our crushed ones) just meant they made big profits.
tax credits to train workers? & CAP loans / in (Score:2)
tax credits to train workers? also need to CAP student loans with an income based payback with NO tax bomb and limited interest say 1-4% max.
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China is serious (Score:2)
Since 2015 China has established >35 investment funds with more than $65B in AUM to pursue dual use technology.
DIUs 2022 budget ~$35M
In-Q-Tel's annual ~$100M
DARPA's 2022 budget ~ $3.5B
https://twitter.com/vc/status/... [twitter.com]
Wonder why? (Score:2)
Couldn't *possibly* have anything to do with MBA managers and upper management offshoring to China since the nineties? Couldn't be that they're manufacturing parts in what you're reading this on? Couldn't be that the US' largest non-government employer is what a friend used to call Chinamart?
And it also couldn't be because the *only* track for promotion is into management, not a tech track?
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Couldn't *possibly* have anything to do with MBA managers and upper management offshoring to China since the nineties? Couldn't be that they're manufacturing parts in what you're reading this on? Couldn't be that the US' largest non-government employer is what a friend used to call Chinamart?
China had its chance :
"...When Mr Xi took over in 2012, China was changing fast.
The middle class was growing, private firms were booming and citizens were connecting on social media.
A different leader might have seen these as opportunities. Mr Xi saw only threats..."
-- The Economist, October 1st 2022
In other words (Score:2)
Let's have the taxpayer, again, shell out billions and billions of their dollars every year so companies don't have to use the billions and billions they have stockpiled.
Better to soak the people than expect companies to step up and do what is needed.
IP Law (Score:2)
For example, many operating systems implement nearly identical subsystems, because the problems being solved dictate the solutions.
This, we need a system that can distinguish between real innovation verses problem solving as well as a "use it or lose it" policy. Use it or lose it m
Tax base (Score:3)
Somebody explain to Eric that for Washington to increase government research grants, his megabucks buddies need to pony up their tax rates.
What tech edge? (Score:2)
Chinese tech is what it always has been. Cheap. You get what you pay for.
Give money to my investments! (Score:2)
He just wants more, that's all he cares about.
Meh. (Score:2)
Yankees are stupid. Their greed outsources production to China.
The Chinese are smart (their average IQ is the highest in the world), they gain experience manufacturing shit for the Yankees.
The US have only themselves to blame for their woes.
LMFTFY (Score:1)
US Slipping
There, fixed that for you.
You're welcome!
Inevitable (Score:1)
There is no way for the US to maintain a technological edge over a country with five times its population. We're going to have to get used to being #2, and eventually #3 (behind India) - or we are going to have to go full military empire.
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Necessity is the mother of all invention. I would argue that BECAUSE the USA cannot compete with pure bodies (slave labor), we MUST innovate with technology. A problem India or China could solve just by throwing a large number of slave labor at, the USA would need to solve with tech in order to compete. Eventually India and China will need to spend more on their labor, increasing the cost of producing a widget, and will have to turn to the technology that was created a decade ago.