311–320 of 562 posts
Maybe companies such as OpenAI are the answer to this problem?
> "America does not have enough people with those skills." Seriously, I feel the US has a big education problem, with part of it being cultural I think. Seems being educated, knowledgeable, having expertise, learning about science and technology, medicine and law, just isn't valued anymore, in fact it's almost being denigrated and shamed. What I see instead is people pushing for anti-intellectualism and valuing the "…
Could be true but it’s far less important than the brute fact that advanced study is a loser, monetarily. A very big loser. If you can get a doctorate you can get an MBA or a JD in less time and earn a lot more money. Less likely to damage your mental health, far less likely to end in failure and drop out, job market is either better or much, much better.
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The people of Hiroshima were building submarines and torpedos, supplying an Imperial Japan Naval base, and supporting a war that Japan declared on the United States. And wouldn't stop doing so until destroyed, whether with conventional or nuclear bombs.
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What metric are you basing this determination on? Is it purely about “big tech”? It seems from my perspective that most European countries are pretty decently innovative, in particular with a variety of companies offering advanced engineering and technology services. Is there actually a lack of innovation, or is it specifically a lack of “innovation” in the “there is no Airbnb so Europe sucks” sense?
I think it's more of a case of "most electronics and everything that runs on it is not made in Europe". I'm a European posting on an American company's forum using a browser made in the US running on an operating system made by an American company running on a phone designed and built in China with components made in a variety of countries that aren't in Europe. The same goes for using a desktop PC. Even most of the…
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What could the one common language be? English would seem to be the logical choice, but there is no way France would agree to that.
English may be more acceptable once the UK excited, leaving no favored EU state.
"Almighty Chinese gods, can you please design, prototype and mass produce this device for me. I would like to use it as a platform and run my crappy code on it so I can compete with your own people".
Tangential, since this article is about the US and China. But if the US has dropped the ball, then Europe (or the EU specifically) didn't even bother to go to the game. The only thing we're innovative at is coming up with regulations. And I say this as someone who thinks the US tech sector should be under much heavier regulatory scrutiny.
There was still not that long ago an incredible amount of innovative companies and products in Europe. But at that time companies were still built for their home markets first and on that regard the USA is big and unified. Since software is mostly winner takes all it means that when the USA companies came to Europe they had already won the USA and could steamroll the local competition There is for example no way a sw…
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That’s the cynical perspective. The flip side is that the US has traditionally attracted the best talent in the world. This class has gone on to win the most Nobel prizes and create the most valuable companies in the world. Focusing on a real negative externality (labor arbitrage) fails to recognize the immense benefits skilled immigrants bring to this country. I’m a son if one of them. My dad came this country in th…
The real innovation largely stopped soon after your dad came to the US (although it probably wasn't his fault!) and in the time of massive, society-changing levels of immigration, not seen since the 1920s. The model of immigrants causing innovation and xenophobia holding it back simply doesn't match observation. Something interesting happened in the early '70s and it deserves a much better explanation https://wtfhapp…
Quibbling over the definition of “innovation” aside, this country was built by immigrants because America itself is a country of composed predominantly of immigrants.
As for 1971, my explanation is that this was the point of no return for the various great society programs that we benefit from today (Medicare medicaid and social security). It was a point at which keeping a full-time w-2 employee on payroll leaped involuntarily. It made American labor safer and also more expensive, and encouraged capitalists to seek out cheaper labor in the “developing world”. It also created a lot of bureaucracy around managing the new tax dollars.
I don’t think it has anything significant to do with immigration. Although the “problem” presented by those charts is so vague that people can see in them whatever they like, I suppose.
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> in fact it's almost being denigrated and shamed. "Almost" really isn't necessary there anymore. There's a growing group that believes virtually all doctors, scientists, and professionals within certain fields are "in on it" and part of some big conspiracy to do some vague, undefined thing that'll take down America and corrupt their children. These used to just be a fringe group. Now it feels like about half the peo…
> There's a growing group that believes ... certain fields are "in on it" ... some big conspiracy to do some vague, undefined thing I mean, I won't fault anyone if they are jaded and distrust everything the "experts" have to say these days. Look at what we witnessed in the last 20 or so years: 1. Iraq war, where our intelligence agencies were sure about WMDs and the senate voted 97-0 to wage a war that ended up wasti…