331–340 of 562 posts
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I’d say the EU and euro zone is one of the biggest and boldest innovations in the postwar Western world.
But it's still terribly fragile and Brexit risks the whole thing collapsing. Not necessarily an innovation if it won't stand up to time.
Xenophobia and nationalism sure don't help. We used to import the smartest most capable people from all across the world to develop and market their inventions and ideas and maybe even become rich in the process. Now, not so much.
I know at least 3 genius-level people from Europe that refuse to go to the US, because they are white, and every single moment they see these "whitey are racist by just being white" they simply descend even more into their beliefs. Also, their humour would get them fired within a minute in the USA.
"This high skills immigration is crucial to American competitiveness, global competitiveness, building these new companies and so forth," he said. "America does not have enough people with those skills." Translation -- US software engineer salaries are still too high for his liking, so he wants to dilute the market with more to lower the overall cost.
Bingo It really annoys me when they bitch about not being able to bring in skilled workers from overseas because they can't find skilled people here... Hey, maybe they should fucking train someone! Usually when a tech boss is complaining about not having skilled staff locally it's code for "... I want to find someone cheaper overseas". It's like seeing a job ad that wants a wizard at everything but has terrible pay,…
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Since you mention regulation, I think it is something to be proud of. GDPR, Germany saying hell-no to forced Facebook accounts, etc. As for innovation? US isn't even top 10 when it comes to Nobel prize per capita ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Nobel_l... ). IKEA, SAP, Beretta, Airbus, Spotify, Linux, Prometheus, Grafana, Booking.com just from the top of my head of things that are proof of Euro…
> Unicorns are concentrated in a few countries/regions: United States (136), China (120), India (26), UK (15), South Korea (11), Israel (7), Indonesia (6), Singapore (4), Switzerland (4), Hong Kong (4), France (3), Portugal (3), Sweden (3), Australia (2), Belgium (2), Canada (2), Germany (2), Luxembourg (2), Spain (2), Ukraine (2) and ten other countries (1 each) Israel has more than 3x more unicorns than we in Germa…
- Uber, whose only innovation is price dumping using infinite investor cache on losing billions of dollars yearly
- Facebook, whose only innovation is creating festering echo chambers, siphoning private data wholesale and dodging laws
- JUUL, whose only innovation is selling electronic cigarettes
- Coinbase, whose only innovation is to be a middleman in bitcoin scams
- Magic Leap, whose only innovation is siphoning off investors' money and finally producing a subpar gadget
- Pinterest whose only innovation is spam Google search results with stolen pictures
etc.
There are very few actual innovators among these "unicorns".
Xenophobia and nationalism sure don't help. We used to import the smartest most capable people from all across the world to develop and market their inventions and ideas and maybe even become rich in the process. Now, not so much.
But somehow China a country with even more Xenophobia and nationalism is catching up to us. And the U.S. used to have more Xenophobia and nationalism in the past and was also substantially more innovative.
Maybe the real problem is that the U.S. (all the way up to the top) has become anti-intellectual. We have completely dumbed down our culture so that children today want to be basketball players instead of astronauts. Our schools and government explicitly oppose meritocracy. There is just too much money in junk media and junk education that its never going to be fixed and instead we have to bring in more immigrants.
Xenophobia and nationalism sure don't help. We used to import the smartest most capable people from all across the world to develop and market their inventions and ideas and maybe even become rich in the process. Now, not so much.
The process you describe nostalgically is called braindrain on the third world, and if it's wavering it's due to changing economic and geopolitical landscapes. The process itself created an outflow of scientific and technological knowledge, which paired with industrial outsourcing strenghtened even America's geopolitical rivals. Actual xenophobic and nationalistic attitudes might have protected American hegemony, but…
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And to ensure that manufacturing moved to China! Or at the very least, proximate to its geographical sphere of influence. Honestly, it was a brilliant move on their part. Everybody seems to focus on university, but there is a lot of very hard-won know-how at the technician level of the manufacturing sector. Most of this is difficult-to-impossible to codify, and tends to pass both cohort-to-cohort, and via professiona…
> A big part of the Chinese education strategy has been to send lots of students to US universities to get advanced degrees and take that knowledge back to build China. >> And to ensure that manufacturing moved to China! Of course they did. But, to be fair: 1) Those students were not educated for free. They paid big money for it, and the universities were happy to grab the money fast 2) Some of this people were force…
And how. International students in the US pay outrageous tuition fees.
> Some of this people were forced to go after their student visa expired.
That's what happened to my wife.
By comparison, my visa in Japan was dead simple. No lawyers required.
The message that the US sends to international students is something like: "Thank you for ponying up all that money, for spending a year learning the language well enough to go to school, and for spending four years integrating into our language and culture. Now get the fuck out."
> How to blame them for using their degree or creating a company in their own country later?
Um... who is blaming who for what? I don't follow.
> They shouldn't be seen as neither serfs nor slaves; technically they don't owe anything to US.
Why would anybody think that international students owe anything to the country where they studied?
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I’d say the EU and euro zone is one of the biggest and boldest innovations in the postwar Western world.
But it's still terribly fragile and Brexit risks the whole thing collapsing. Not necessarily an innovation if it won't stand up to time.
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I like your points and agree on your conclusion. Further, I would like to add a few ideas: - innovation in Europe can only scale if we achieve a higher degree of unity in Europe, including one common language, one common jurisdiction and law framework. Localization is just too expensive in Europe and hinders scaling. - a certain degree of protectionism is good. I am a big fan of how China made it. They have a really…
I don't agree that centralization in Europe is the answer, that's exactly how you end up relying on others manufacturing capacity. Decentralize more so when the political winds change you are not at the mercy of other countries if your own nation has no manufacturing capacity to speak of.
If you rely on a superpower, then that's your own damn fault :-))