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China again boosts R&D spending by more than 10%

sciencemag.org

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Re: China again boosts R&D spending by more than 10%

#91

Post by landryraccoon »

Hnrobert42 wrote: post #83
arcticbull wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. (a) that changes nothing about what I said, and... (b) do you really, truly, honestly, believe that if America were behind in tech the first thing they'd do wouldn't be to send in the spies? Of course they would. I know because that's what I would do. As a leader my obligation is to my people at the end of the day -- and this is true -- who's going to stop me? In what world would you sit back and say, well, I th…

No. The U.S. intell community does not do that, empirically. There isn’t even the apparatus for doing that. The US IC’s ties to industry, apart from defense contractors and communications, are very tenuous, hamstrung by clearance and classification problem and a very insular culture. So, in addition to being factually incorrect, is very damaging to the national discourse to normalize CPC’s strategy of wholesale IP th…

> is very damaging to the national discourse to normalize CPC’s strategy of wholesale IP theft.

Can you clarify why? China is a state actor. State actors generally can be expected to act in self serving ways. What would be the basis for preventing espionage? Is this a moral argument that spying is evil?

Of course countries should protect themselves from foreign espionage if they can, but I don’t see what blame accomplishes, unless you are willing to have a hot war to stop spying.

Re: China again boosts R&D spending by more than 10%

#92

Post by godelski »

justicezyx wrote: post #62
gamblor956 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of that IP was stolen from US and EU companies. Cost isn't the only reason that manufacturing is moving out of China; companies are finally realizing that using Chinese factories is tantamount to giving the PRC access to all of your technical IP.

This rhetoric is becoming more and more false with time... https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/10/16/china-intellectual-prop...

Your source seems to support the gp's argument. It was written just under a year ago and is talking about a deal not struck.

> According to some reports, Chinese IP theft has cost the United States $225 billion to $600 billion a year. No wonder, then, that getting China to better protect IP is a point of rare consensus among both the White House and the Democratic leadership.

This isn't a small chunk of change. In fact, this is comparable to the R&D budgets the main article is talking about.

It then says

> But history tells us to be cautious; Washington’s demands are unrealistic. Countries do not enact strong IP rights systems until their ability to innovate at home displaces reliance on outside knowledge. The United States’ own century long drift toward strong protections is a case in point.

Which the tldr is: don't expect it to work. So I'm not sure why this becomes less true over time, as this is very recent and doesn't seem to have changed anything. Sure, other countries did it too, but why does that matter? Doesn't make it right.

Re: China again boosts R&D spending by more than 10%

#93

Post by arcticbull »

gamblor956 wrote: post #78
arcticbull wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an incredibly short-sighted way of looking at what's happening. If you want to become a Chef, you don't start by inventing new Michelin star dishes de novo. You copy your betters. Over and over and over. Then, once you learn how they do what they do, you innovate. Japan did this. Do not underestimate China.

The difference is that a chef-in-training works for the Michelin-star chef in the "better" chef's restaurant, and then leaves to start their own restaurant. China's game plan has been to encourage companies to use Chinese factories based on artificially low prices (subsidized with massive PRC spending), and then to (usually openly) steal the IP and begin making competing products. This cycle has already happened to o…

> The difference is that a chef-in-training works for the Michelin-star chef in the "better" chef's restaurant, and then leaves to start their own restaurant.

> China's game plan has been to encourage companies to use Chinese factories based on artificially low prices (subsidized with massive PRC spending), and then to (usually openly) steal the IP and begin making competing products.

"working for" then "starting their own" yeah. See, you get it.

Your analogy gets even better, just not in ways you expected, in that people who go work at Michelin starred restaurants in the kitchen do so for low-to-zero wages because the real benefit is the experience they're gaining initially.

Re: China again boosts R&D spending by more than 10%

#94

Post by smeeth »

mistermann wrote: post #79
smeeth wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I apologize if my comment came across as pedantic, I certainly wasn't trying to be. The way research in the humanities and social sciences are conducted are fundamentally different, which is why I think the lexical distinction is important in this case. Most social science research applies the scientific method (hypothesis testing etc.), most humanities research does not. >The quirkiness of specific forum conversatio…

What I'm getting at, in not a very effective way, is that I see low hanging fruit everywhere I look, and I don't think I'm the only one. Where I do think I may differ, is that I also sense a strong aversion to discussing this low hanging fruit in extreme detail and unconventional ways . For example, plenty of people think climate change is a legitimate threat, and that prudent societal responses are hampered by imper…

It sounds like you should pursue a PhD ;)

Yeah, I agree with you - those are important questions I wish we had better answers to.

I'm early into a research career though not in these fields and I'm starting to observe that knowing the problems that need solving/questions that need answering is often trivial when compared to actually solving the problems or answering the obvious question. That might be part of the issue here too, just my 2c.

Re: China again boosts R&D spending by more than 10%

#95

Post by Gibbon1 »

sudosysgen wrote: post #38
cma wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But their purchasing power parity is way higher so presumably they get more for less, other than stuff they have to import to support research.

I don't understand why this is downvoted. Money goes further in China than in the US, and the Chinese GDP PPP is indeed higher than the US, although barely.

A lot of what's spent in the US goes towards private rents. Money that goes towards rents is a waste. Most don't see it because it's everywhere. Either directly or indirectly. You pay more per sqft for an office, but you also pay more per hour for labor, because the guy you hires also pays rent[1]. Things cost more because the supply chain has to pay rents.

[1] Consider a lot of workers half their income goes to rent.

Re: China again boosts R&D spending by more than 10%

#96

Post by dang »

moreorless wrote: post #46
gamblor956 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of that IP was stolen from US and EU companies. Cost isn't the only reason that manufacturing is moving out of China; companies are finally realizing that using Chinese factories is tantamount to giving the PRC access to all of your technical IP.

> A lot of that ip was stolen from US and EU companies You can even go as far as ALL of that IP was stolen. Not only from US and EU, but Japanese, Peruvian, Jamaican, Mexican, as well as Brazilian. We all know that Chinese are NOT capable of innovation.

> "We all know that Chinese are NOT capable of innovation"

That's a slur, you can't do that here, and we've banned this account.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. That means, at minimum, not posting unsubstantive comments and not posting nationalistic (or other) flamebait, both of which your account was unfortunately doing a lot of.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: China again boosts R&D spending by more than 10%

#98

Post by tuesdayrain »

Taek wrote: post #7

I think this is a very good move for China and think the US should match it.

China is increasing spending on R&D, meanwhile America is increasing spending on "diversity training". Top Chinese universities admit the most brilliant students who study tirelessly, American universities actively deny those students due to being "overrepresented" and pick the less competent purely on the basis of skin color. America's bizarre focus on equal outcomes at any cost has actually made it more communist than the CCP in some categories. Who could have guessed? What a tragedy.

Re: China again boosts R&D spending by more than 10%

#99

Post by squidlogic »

maedla wrote: post #43
squidlogic wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the humanities succumbed to postmodernism long ago. Since then it has been impossible to impose strict tests on veracity as you find in hard sciences.

What do you mean?

Postmodernism teaches (among many things) that truth is not objective. Rather, the epistemological center in postmodernism IS the self. Each self has its own version of truth, rather than truth being perspective-independent.

In literature, for example, this means that authorial intent is supplanted by perspectivalism. That is, each reader interprets a text based on his or her own perspective, and each interpretation is equally valid. This plays out in the political realm most prominently in the supreme court's interpretation of laws (does it matter what the author meant to say or just what we now interpret them to have said?).

So when I say it's impossible for the humanities to impose strict tests on veracity, what I mean is that a strict test would yield true results that are perspective-independent. This is what the scientific method attempts to accomplish, and the hard sciences use this methodology. The humanities, however, have long ceded that it is impossible to arrive at a perspective-independent conclusion and IMO would therefore reject a similarly rigorous approach.

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