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 swedish mapping company could have competed with google maps , which had so much search monopoly money backing it up from the start
The only way Europe could have prevented this is to just ban foreign monopolies, wich is what china did, and why they are now succesfully ‘innovating’.
I read often on this website that europe cannot ‘take risks’ or ‘innovate’ and is ‘riding on american innovation for free’ and I find that a bit insulting, because I fell that as things are geopolitically it’s just not possible for Europeans to compete fairly with Americans
- 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 fantastic digital landscape that is superior in so many areas compared to Europe (if you exclude the data privacy issue)
- reliance on the old economy is bad and this is a political decision.
- too many people are too scared of new technologies and want things "how they used to be". This is bad and is typical for many Europeans, especially here in Germany. Cultural change must happen but you cannot force it.
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.
Obviously we already have English, nearly universally spoken as a second or third language in the EU. So I assume you mean English, or some other language as the first language.
Which I think means all other languages would after a few generations become nearly extinct. Like Latin these days.
But despite how much I wish we had more innovation, I don't think losing all languages is worth it.
If English becomes national language, you could forget about innovation. A big reason why China and SK are successful is language barrier. It effectively stops brain drain and thus, increase innovation. All countries with either main language or secondary language as English has already lost tech market.
Just look at foreign competitors of Amazon, Google, Facebook etc. Even Russia like country have major tech companies while being poorer than western European countries.
> A big reason why China and SK are successful is language barrier. It effectively stops brain drain and thus, increase innovation.
This is BS. There will always be a loss of brain power to the lingua franca nation(s), regardless what that language happens to be. The research opportunities will (almost?) always be better.
That said, many people stay in China or return to China because they like it there, even if they speak English at a high level and have the option to stay in an English-speaking country. This has been true in my circle of friends and professional acquaintances since the 90s.
It might be the case that China is large enough to create its own large opportunities, so emigrating from China to an English-speaking country may not be particularly compelling. That said, I think it’s an apple-and-oranges comparison — the opportunities largely seem to be simply different from where I sit.
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.
The EU doesn’t even agree on which alphabet to use, Latin is the most common one but the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets are also official in the union.
English is my second language, and while I wouldn’t mind changing the official language of my country, I can’t see that ever happening, there’s just so much culture attached to the language, that would be forgotten together with our language.
Yep. A common European first language would start a process which would result in a terrible loss of local cultural tradition. Cultural suicude for the common good has been suggested before, but I can't imagine that there would be a lot of people who'd agree with it.
As a Swedish-speaking Finn, I can confirm that a culture can end up on the decline even if there's powerful legal backing to preserving it (including forcing the remaining ~90% of the population to learning Swedish in school). Incidentally, I'd say there's a large correlation with English being more and more accepted in Finnish society, but I suspect the actual root cause simply is that cultural production is mainly taking place in the first language (Finnish) and that it leaves less for the others.
The same would happen if you managed to get the entire EU to agree to switch to one single language (remember, it's likely that it would be French or German instead of English). As a result of pushing adoption of the new first language, it would mean increased cultural output in that language, and a reduced output for the others. After a while, the differences will start showing.
I've lived in Denmark for quite a few years and I agree that people in Copenhagen and the other larger cities wouldn't notice that much of a difference to begin with, but remember that this would mean a cultural shift that will take multiple generations. Ask the German speakers in southern Jutland in another 24 years, and compare how their culture thrives compared to how they did before the war and you will probably have a pretty decent view on how the situation would be for many, many of EU's minorities 100 years after the switch to a single European first language.
Modern languages already have words for things like a mouse, a screen or the Big Bang, but it's all stupid stuff like an analogy to how a computer mouse looks like an animal because of its long cord-tail, a reference to the white screen a projector casts it's projection on, or a vulgar put-down of a theory being like God's orgasm.
If we take a dead language and start adding in vocabulary, we can quietly sweep that all under a rug before we encounter any alien species we have to explain ourselves to.
Alien species: "So you remodeled your language, removing all traces of history and culture from it, because you were worried about the impression you'd make on aliens you didn't know, you didn't even know existed?"
"You're the most pathetic people in the known universe."
I mean, we'll try, but we can only do so much. Even in ancient languages, every word for "tool" is also slang for "penis", and twenty percent of the verbs can also be used to refer to a sex act.
Quite a few large french companies that are global in nature have switched to English first, but for the broader acceptance and the government to officially support English as the unifying language I share your skepticism
> - 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.
If that were the cost, then it would not be worth the price. Fortunately, it is completely unnecessary. It suffices to look to when Europe was at her best.
Technology is mere instrument. What you describe is Procrustean cultural destruction to satisfy some metric. Technology is not the end, but a means that has its proper place. The destruction of the various cultures that make the world rich is a recipe for monoculture and thus lack of inspiration. A diverse and decentralized Europe permits the exchange of ideas to occur in an atmosphere of diverse cultures. "Scale" is about de facto standardization and standardization is a double edged sword, not an unalloyed good. If anything, scale is what makes monopolies possible.
The solution is not to create a bland mass of rootless "citizen consumers" crafted out of the corporate pop culture, though, to be honest, Europe is practically there already, wearily drifting along, preferring to keep warm. The solution is a fundamental awakening of Europeans to the deep roots of their civilization and what made it great. That's where the life force is. The EU is in practice a form of managed decline perpetrated by delusional ideologues, petty bureaucrats, and ignorant airheads. It is antithetical to a vibrant Europe so looking for a solution there is like asking a dictator of some banana republic what makes a vibrant country.
> - 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.
Can't overstate how important this is. India is slowly coming to terms with adopting English (instead of Hindi) as the lingua franca - it has been a reliable economic mobility driver for millions of people. More European states might do well by adopting a bilingual/trilingual approach to expand economic opportunities for the population. I think parts of Scandinavia already manage to do this quite well.
> innovation in Europe can only scale if we achieve a higher degree of unity in Europe
Interesting, I hadn't seen the term localisation used beyond language. IMO, the major hindrance to European unification is nationalistic reflexes together with too many voluntary projects: EEC vs EU, Schengen, human rights, immigration, the euro... the instigators of such projects thought the success of these projects/goals would encourage more countries to opt in at a later date, which never happened, as a general rule. This resulted in more ways to slice and dice what "Europe" means, instead of contributing to unification.
A frequent occurrence is national politicians pretending they played no part in the council of ministers and blame-shifting towards Europe in order to gain or maintain domestic popularity. This actively undermines belief in EU institutions.
The facts seem to indicate the individual countries want to keep the systems they have in place, which can include vast differences in labour law, bureaucracy, remuneration schemes, pension plans, sick leave regulation and workplace safety, despite a basic common regulatory framework. As far as I'm aware, US states don't have as much variance between them.
As a result, a would-be tech giant has higher startup costs if it wants to employ people throughout Europe. I would say actual language localisation is a much less prohibitive cost.
As a German, do you see greater unification happening any time soon? I'm not sure I do, as one of your smaller neighbours.
There has been a strong movement to more unity in Europe. But, this has not been accompanied by democratisation.
To stay competitive Europe needs unity in the political process, defense and border security for example, and not in regulations in economy, finance, immigration etc, which are excessive already.
That's not monopolistic abuse; what you described is just investment in a new sector with profits from an existing one. Companies, investors and funds do it all the time.
Abuse would be when a company leverages a monopoly to enter or influence another market, such as bundling Internet Explorer with Windows.
Perhaps monopoly abuse is not the right term, but Microsoft did buy their way into the gaming industry by selling millions of consoles at a loss. There is no way for any company that is not already a multi-billion dollar company to compete with that. The same happens in many other areas where large tech companies use their inertia and tons of existing capital to make it impossible for anyone but other tech giants to compete with them. This is extremely problematic because these companies almost win “by default” just by swinging their weight around, even if their product might not be the best product in that area.
You might want to change your example, as while the tactic is reprehensible and common to VC-backed companies, selling consoles at loss is standard practice for I think all makers (they recoup it by license fees on games)
Nintendo doesn’t sell at a loss - only Sony and Microsoft do. Both are huge multi-billion dollar companies that entered the console market using money they had from other ventures. There is also effectively no other competition on this market besides those companies. I think my example is fine.
If the profits come from a monopoly, I'd argue that it's monopolistic abuse. If they weren't abusing the monopoly, they wouldn't have the profits to do whatever the next thing is, which often involves losing money in the short term to tie up a market in the longer term (i.e. further abuse of monopoly).
https://www.nearmap.com/ was another one that google looked at, before buying the other mob that became maps.google.com. They are also Australian.
It depends what you mean by successful I guess, but nearmap fits my definition of successful. Far better more and detailed maps that google, sold to people who needs such things rather than being used as platform to sell advertising.
In the beginning they used to have an honour system that allowed everyone to view their maps for free. They merely requested people who used it commercially to to purchase access. I gather that didn't work out, or maybe it was just a way of ensuring everybody knew about their product as there is no free access now. but while it was free it was great for checking when roof gutters needed cleaning, comparing flood levels and that sort of thing.
The commercial value proposition of Maps is its applications to advertising - as a platform, and as meta data that informs Google where users are, which provides context for what ad they might click on next.
Europe has the single market, and lots of English speakers. But it also has very conservative capital and tax and employment systems that make entrepreneurship difficult. Some of that is easy to fix, some hard to fix.
Despite the name, the European Single Market is far less unified than that of the US. A company starting out in Europe will have to overcome linguistic, cultural and regulatory barriers in 27 different countries. While American companies still have to deal with regulatory differences across state borders, it is not quite the same as what European start-ups face.
==But it also has very conservative capital and tax and employment systems that make entrepreneurship difficult.==
The rate of new business creation is higher in Europe than the US. I would guess that the US has more venture-backed entrepreneurs, but more businesses are being start by Europeans than Americans.
“The net rate of business creation among the EU economies has been over three times faster than in the USA and Canada since the financial crisis, according to research by RSM International, the seventh largest global network of independent audit, tax and consulting firms.”
I haven't fully checked that source but whats the filtering criterion for "new business creation"?
I remember someone used to call Sweden an "top innovative country" and when I took a closer look, he based that argument on amount of new business creation (weighted with population)
Taking a closer look, it was evident that they didn't sort the business by size, or how long they stayed, revenue or amount of employer. And as a person who lived there I know a lot of people start businesses just to circumvent the high tax rate, very restrictive hiring laws/taxes, and essentially do consulting (freelance) job. This is a symptom of how the society was made: hiring and income are heavily taxed, but not the same can be said for businesses. The claim that the country was innovative based on number of business creation quickly fell apart.
== hiring and income are heavily taxed, but not the same can be said for businesses.==
Same is true in the US. We just changed to tax code to make it even more beneficial to be a business over a salaried-employee. Did you apply the same skepticism for the US numbers?
> has very conservative capital and tax and employment systems
I agree with you to a degree on capital and tax (although there are exceptions within Europe if you take the time to look).
However, if you say Europe should be adopting the US employment system, I'll tell you right now that you can stick that where the sun doesn't shine. Sure the European employment model is not perfect, but by god is it a gazillion times better than the Wild West model deployed in the US.
In Russia we have several successful competitors to Google Maps and even a search engine that's actually good. Competing with Google is extremly difficult, but possible
Yandex is a great example of a company which absolutely squashes Google on technical chops wherever it has tried to compete; and it only has 9000 employees (compared to Google's 120,000).
Not entirely related to this discussion, but one thing I know about Yandex: Their web crawlers are ruthless. They hammer my sites to the point where I need to specifically throttle them based on their "from" header (they seem to ignore 429s - they simply make requests with a different IP).
This is only a problem because I have a few sites that are like "search engines" in that they have basically an infinite number of pages (one for each possible search term), and so they just keep crawling the "related searches" links. It's probably not a problem for most sites, but it's a pain for me.
Google seems to more strategically crawl pages based on search terms that they know are popular, whereas Yandex just crawls every possible link it can find.
All of that said, I'm quite happy to deal with it for the benefit of having another competitor to Google - the more the merrier. Hopefully one day they add some more "smarts" to their crawlers though - starting with respecting 429s across all their IPs, perhaps.
In what ways is it better? Data wise it seems thinner in most places eg New York, London. Perhaps it depends on where you are looking. Moscow does look richer yes, but outside Russia?
I don't think it's better outside Russia. But within Russia, the level of detail and the accuracy of data is much better. In Moscow and St Petersburg at least, you can see street level details down to individual buildings easily - I would say it's better than Google in NYC.
I do wonder if Google's poor performance in Russia, and Yandex's poor performance outside Russia are a function of data restrictions. I'm not sure western countries would be as keen to share data with a Russian company, and vice versa.
I didn't mean from a technological perspective, but from a sustainability one.
These kinds of startups can often compete/outcompete on tech, in fact that's their premise, but they're looking for an ASAP exit, rather than running something sustainably for decades.
Europe isn't able to compete with American tech salaries, plain and simple. American tech salaries, on the other hand, are inflated by exaggerated tech stock valuations.
At best very indirectly by having to compete with "lotto tickets" in theory for start ups and total compensation but in practice not really since the sensible default financial assumption when factoring in equity stake at a random start up is "worth $0 because it will probably fail".
I think the arguments for Europe being less innovative or risk taking is because these companies seem to start first in the US and then come to Europe, not the other way round.
There is no "Europe", though. France and Germany speak different languages and have different legal systems. Spain is different again. And Poland. And Greece. And Ireland. And Italy.
Put it this way: if products depend on viral growth, then European countries are socially distanced from each other as a result of these barriers.
It's obviously a complex situation, but I think the regulation of small business has more to do with it than the social diversity in the EU (which matters as well). By the time a company in the EU is big enough to go from national to expanding into the wider EU markets, it has capital to do so, and there is no shortage of local experts to help with that. But getting to that scale, or really to anything that requires more than a couple employees, is the big hurdle to overcome. I am not sure how to overcome that and respect employee rights, since a strong progressive tax on corporations that would subsidize some of the employment costs of smaller businesses would make the larger EU companies noncompetitive internationally. So in a real sense the failure of international labor laws is partially responsible for the difficulty of EU companies to innovate (or more precisely, to profit and grow based off their innovation).
Another point is that historically the US tech sector took off fast and takes off fast, so they are awash with cash based on being first movers, and they have a competitive advantage when it comes to attracting talent. I think that advantage has been perhaps completely destroyed in the last 4 years due to local political and social issues making life there unattractive. Sure many people will run for the money, but perhaps now not enough to create imbalance in the labor market. Also, companies today understand better how fast things scale in the US due to the single market/language/comparatively lax regulations, and they know to focus on that market much earlier in their growth cycle. This contributed to the success of Spotify, Zendesk, etc. So if I had to predict there will be a rising percentage of successes out of the EU in the next ten years compared to the last ten years. But it's always going to be hard to start.
It's also important to consider that until the fall of the iron curtain the US needed western Europe to be strong economically and now does not care about Europe that much anymore, so they use industrial espionage, etc. like against the rest of the world.
The EU is nowhere as culturally unified as the U.S is. So the pool of resources available isn't as large.
I'd also not be so quick on the regulation front. Looking at the (lack of) environmental regulation in the US right about now or the absolute astonishing cost of any medical emergency, I'd say they went too far in the other direction.
The lack of cultural unity thing is a curtain to hide behind. There's no reason Europe can't have a powerful federal government, other than it would result in transfers from the "export based economies" to the others.
> There's no reason Europe can't have a powerful federal government
Europe does not share a language in common, a culture in common, not even a currency in common. The "federal government" idea would be rejected by many out of hand. The history of bitter wars between European countries has not simply been forgotten and many would feel it encroaches on their sovereignty.
Just look at the reaction to mild proposals for an EU armed force as an example, or the many "Euroskeptic" politicians going around.
I think you underestimate what it takes to form a strong federal government.
This is obviously a massive topic, but from my vantage as a foreigner living in Europe is that Europe already has (and pays for) all features of a federal government with two exceptions.
* Responsibility to implement treaties remains with the individual members.
* No ability to tax or set fiscal policy.
The advantage of a single set of laws is obvious. For starters I wouldn't be spending my Sunday reading a 500 page document on minor items describing how Denmark's implementation of an EU treaty differs from the treaty's wording. (Although it would cost the jobs of the people who produce such documents, and as such would fly in the face of the one central pillar of paneuropean identity).
The ability to tax and set fiscal policy is needed to offset the imbalance created by the single currency. Another lengthy topic, but basically the assumption that every EU member should "export" is simply impossible. A normal currency system would correct a trade imbalance automatically. The euro systematically undervalues the cost of German output buy forcing their European neighbors to transact in the same currency.
And then you have mafias, bankers, tax havens, uneven social nets, and a raft of other social problems that can only effectively be dealt with by a central government. The irony should not be lost that the American government has had better success battling the Italian mafia than the Italians have.
And who should pick the central government? Vote by population so that Germany is in charge?
Minorities don't care well under powerful central government. Unless that government is a minority dictator tha terrorizes the majority.
Would you enjoy being europe's version of an Uighur in China?
> And then you have mafias, bankers, tax havens, uneven social nets, and a raft of other social problems that can only effectively be dealt with by a central government
US has all these problems even worse than Europe except maybe the mafia next the mafia took over the government directly.
The lack of cultural unity is the reason people don't want a powerful federal government.
With the turn the democratically elected Hungarian and Polish governments have taken the past few years, I sure hope there won't be a powerful federal EU government any time soon.
Powerful federal government only exists on newly settled land or post genocide or under dictatorship.
Germany tried that twice but the Americans stopped it. Either because the US didn't want that particular genocide or because they didn't want a unified Europe under european control.
I don't know how to judge general innovation but it should be noted that in AI at least, Europe has been the major contributing region since 1990. See the AI index report 2019:
Sorry I can't link directly to the plot. Go to page 16 in the pdf, a section titled "Published papers: AI Papers by Region".
In short, Europe has been the region with the most output in AI research in the last 30 years with US second and China initially at third place, but overtaking the US around 2006 ish and finally Europe in 2018.
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 websites you end up using aren't made in Europe.
And that's talking about the things that are already there. Looking into the future I don't see anything technology related on the horizon either.
The main technological thing that isn't like that is cars, but even there EVs from Tesla appear more innovative.
I think that comparing only the technology sector gives a wrong perspective on the amount of research being done:
According to the National Science Foundation of the USA https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20206/publication-output-by-re...
The EU actually produces more research papers than China or the US. (of course that isn't a perfect metric, but it's still an indicator)
I think that many people conflate "innovation" with "big companies" which isn't the case:
You don't need a google/Apple/Facebook equivalent to innovate (and having such towering companies may hurt in the long run, but wether or not big "googlesque" companies are a good thing is an entirely different question)
There are also a lot of unknown companies that have huge influence on the overall market by being global leaders in very narrow non-consumer facing areas, so called "hidden champions".
These companies have become more important due to globalisation.
To give a concrete example: While your phone wasn't built in the EU, odds are that it was at least partially produced with machines by ASML, a company that produces lithography machines for ~80% of chip manufacturers.
Also, due to this site here literally being "hackernews" and the pervasiveness of digital systems in normal life, we are getting a pretty skewd look at the industry as a whole: For example, the biggest chemical company in the world is BASF, a european company and the chemical company Bayer now owns a majority share of agricultural chemistry.
Interesting that you picked two examples where the innovation wasn’t commercialized and the innovator did not become rich. I suspect there‘s some cultural aspect to that.
IMO this is a big difference: I'd actually feel quit bad about becoming rich off th back oef a technology or innovation that I could have made more open and widely available.
LHC at CERN (Switzerland), XFEL at DESY in Hamburg (Germany), ITER in France, etc. (probably all have a lot of non-EU funding though)
The EU Horizon 2020 budget is 70 billion EUR, spent over basically 6 years. Around 80 billion is now being spent as post-pandemic stimulus, but less than what was proposed by the Commission.
That said, you're probably right that US pumps hundreds of billions into "innovation" (let's say R&D) whereas it's just a hundred for the EU.
Fortunately the EU is catching up, but alas it's not because it's so aggressively allocating more for R&D, though the trend is positive, but the US' trend is at best flat, maybe even negative: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... (Of course these are GDP percentages, and since the US' economy is bigger, the absolute numbers are a lot bigger for the US. And that's why even though Japan's percentage looks best, their absolute amount is below what the EU spends on R&D.)
I know it's off topic, but could you clarify how you could see this happening?
I mean the only issue I can see is that the EU will end up with multiple, smaller finanical centres, hindering scale. But other than that, I can't see the problems of EU with respect to Brexit.
Now, the euro without transfers, that's a bloody problem, but that's been a real problem for 20 years, and no amount of ECB bandaging will fix it.
If Brexit succeeds then other countries will plan a leave of their own. That's the reason for all these punitive measures the EU is putting on the UK.
Innovation must stand up to the test of time, but history teaches us that large empires and political unions generally don't. Even the US might be having trouble one day.
I cannot look into the future, but as far as I know, i would rather be in the same club as all the wealthy guys than stand outside and not have anything to deal with.
The UK might still have the idea and arrogance of being a big kingdom, but they're really not. We'll see, i don't think it will end neither good or bad for the EU in that regard, but if the days comes that UK is derailed in any way, the EU will not help - i think.
And that's dangerous of course, but its solely a problem the UK put on themselves. Good luck
There‘s not enough funding and risk money in europe to play the game with the big ones. Europe is sadly completely risk averse. You only get big money if it is sure you succeed.
I remember reading an article by The Economist staring this too – US is (or at least, was) far more willing to take risks when it came to venture capital and investment, compared to Europe.
I don't think that's necessarily the case. The Bretton Woods era produced national industries when finance wasn't as unrestricted. Though what happened is more or less the same as today. Companies like Alstom were competitive but got Huawei/TikTok'ed (executive arrests, forced sales etc). The EU just doesn't have the structural resilience to compete with the US shifting the Nash equilibrium.
But the issue I see is that innovation is a bit like herding cats. You can't really push for it. And even in the US, most of it is located on 2 cities. And of course, being on SV it is much easier to get you a check for 10Mi dollars for a worse idea than 1Mi or even 100k in Europe
I don't see China's "innovation" as being much that (maybe except in AI and maybe ByteDance is a new thing, still) but more scaling up known solutions (ecommerce, fb on steroids in the form of wechat, etc) and market protection.
getting things to work at scale is nontrivial. I would expect hn of all places to understand that
and other industries they have a lead in include drones, solar technology, EV (arguable).. considering the unparalled hardware ecosystem in Shenzhen/the PRD, I expect more and more industries will be getting added to the list
Agreed, non-trivial but also not rocket science (at least not now - I guess it's easier today than at the beginnings of twitter and fb for example) and throwing money at the problem usually helps.
Agree on the other industries, and maybe their innovation is building things more cheaply than other places (externalities aside)
IKEA, SAP, Beretta, Airbus, Spotify, Linux, Prometheus, Grafana, Booking.com just from the top of my head of things that are proof of European innovation and tech sector.
> As for innovation? US isn't even top 10 when it comes to Nobel prize per capita
Your per capita list is an epic compliment to the US.
The fact that the US is #15 per capita is extraordinary, given your list is comparing the US to top ten countries like East Timor, Saint Lucia, Luxembourg and Iceland, where if you get one or two you leap ahead of the entire world.
Among large population nations, only the UK and Germany rank higher, with Germany only slightly ahead. The UK for their part are far beyond everyone else on any reasonable comparison scale.
The US has five times the population of France and exceeds them on Nobels per capita. That is an amazing performance by the US.
The fact that the US is so massive and still ranks ahead of: the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada, Australia, Finland, New Zealand, Italy, Japan, Spain, Portugal, Greece, etc. - is similarly staggering.
The US has over three times the rate of Italy, nearly double the rate of Canada, and over five times the rate of Japan.
The US per capita rate is 46% higher than the EU.
I'm going to drop Saint Lucia, East Timor, Iceland and Luxembourg from the comparison list because it's beyond silly, they all have one Nobel and micro populations. On a more rational list, the US is #11, with an 11.7 rate per 10m people. A nearby comparison is Ireland with a 14.5 rate; Ireland has seven total, the US has 383 and roughly 70 times the population. Like I said, it's an epic compliment for the US to be so highly ranked on a list dominated by small populations. The US is the sole country over 100 million population until you get down to #35 Japan at a 2.2 rate; except for the UK, the top 10 is all under 10 million population.
> extraordinary, given your list is comparing the US to top ten countries like East Timor, Saint Lucia, Luxembourg and Iceland
Compare that with the resources available and it will look much less extraordinary
It is extraordinary that countries with much less resources, much less competition and orders of magnitude smaller pool of talents to chose from (4 orders of magnitude in the case of Iceland, East Timor and Luxembourg), can rival the richest and most powerful country in the World in modern history
But let's look at the US noble prize winners
19 born in Germany
12 born in Canada
11 born in United Kingdom
7 born in Italy
7 born in Russia
6 born in China
6 born in Austria
4 born in India
4 born in Hungary
3 born in South Africa
3 born in France
2 born in Poland
2 born in Netherlands
2 born in Romania
2 born in Japan
2 born in Israel
1 born in Venezuela
1 born in Turkey
1 born in Taiwan
1 born in Switzerland
1 born in Spain
1 born in Norway
1 born in New Zealand
1 born in Mexico
1 born in Korea
1 born in Ireland
1 born in Egypt
1 born in Australia
for a grand total of 103 Nobel prizes won by foreigners
- as Mark Kastner said "these prizes are a lagging indicator. They show us what we were doing right decades ago"
- Much of the research that lead Joachim Frank, a German born chemist, to win the Nobel prize for chemistry in 2017 took place in Europe and it was based on base research that took place outside of the US.
The trio who was appointed was formed by Jacques Dubochet from Switzerland, Richard Henderson from Scotland and Frank from Germany.
Frank was affiliated with US institutions when he was nominated, hence the prize has been claimed by US.
They are basically buying Nobel prize winners post facto.
> 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 Germany that tells one thing or two...
Using unicorns as a proxy for innovation is maybe not a great idea, because it's just looking at a few outliers of heavily concentrated capital. It doesn't tell you anything about the majority of companies that are not unicorns and will never be, but that might nonetheless be highly innovative and profitable.
For example, if you look at foreign direct investment, the Netherlands lead the pack in 2017 with $4.888 trillion invested by residents of other countries. [1] Yet apparently there's only one Dutch unicorn (team.blue). Evidently there's a lot of investment going to other companies instead of betting on a single unicorn.
Interestingly, those tables show the EU, as a whole, being several places behind the US per capita, both overall and in terms of science Nobels specifically. Kind of negates your point.
Per capita statistics are heavily biased towards smaller countries. There are not enough Nobel prize a in history for any large country to have as many Nobel prize as the Faroe islands does.
GDPR is the perfect example for OPs point. The whole thing is just stupid, protects nobody and thought millions of people to just click on Okay on any modal they are presented with.
There is a lot more to GDPR than cookie warnings. It ensures among other things that random companies won't get access to your data because of a purchase you made or a toll bridge you've crossed.
I go to the US every 2 or 3 years for a few days, and that's enough to end up on a bunch of American marketing lists. GDPR is here to prevent things like that.
It also prevents companies from holding my data hostage, and gives me a way to delete it.
There are other privacy-related laws that prevent companies from publishing a mugshot of me and extorting money from me to remove it.
No self-regulation doesn't work, mostly because people do not really care and do not incentivize companies for good behavior.
But the current legislation is spotty as best and doesn't really help, Google and Facebook are still collecting tons of data while SMBs will be the guys who get sued for not complying 100%.
Schmidt has the typical perspective of someone who knows nothing about China.
For ease, I've singled out this one point:
> For example, Chinese telecoms infrastructure giant Huawei spends as much as $20bn (£15.6bn) on research and development - one of the highest budgets in the world.
Any member of Chinese society knows that budgets like this are announced to look impressive, and that the money itself goes through so many layers that siphon off 20% that when the project(s) are finally delivered, it was done on a shoestring and the deliverable looks like a rough approximation of what was in the scope. Just don't look under the hood.
Then there are all the other grand initiatives where the money is quietly put into the stock market and again the deliverable is a "driverless car" etc. that in reality doesn't work.
Obviously, there's a lot more nuance than this, but if I went around refuting all these "China experts", I'd have no time for anything else. The point is: don't believe the hype. Just because a lot of low-hanging tech fruit is highly visible and China has a lack of ethical and legal oversight does not mean the country is innovative.
To be fair, Schmidt's larger point seemed to be about how bad the US has been doing and he used China as a counter example to illustrate that. If his counter example turns out to be exaggerated that doesn't change the fact that US r&d spending is lower than before Sputnik. (I have no idea whether his numbers are right.)
Your point to not believe the hype is a very good one though.
> And that's one of the key reasons why China has been able to catch up... he thinks the US is still ahead of China in tech innovation, for now. But that the gap is narrowing fast.
Which is awesome.
Because framing it as "ahead" or a "gap" is completely backwards. Innovation isn't a competition or zero-sum game.
Innovation coming out of China benefits the world, just like innovation coming out of the US does. What matters is the total.
How about we be thankful that there are now so many more scientists the world over contributing to research and knowledge? How amazing is that for the human race?
Now, if there's an article that actually proves US innovation is slowing compared to itself in the past somehow, that actually measures total results rather than government-funded inputs (e.g. including private funding and taking impact/effectiveness into account, not just # of papers published)... then I'd be very interested in that.
But this article isn't that. This article is just cheap nationalism. Ugh.
Whatever you're position happens to be, you can't pretend like we're all in this innovating together for the betterment of humankind. China and the US have very different ideologies and are opposing forces in global geopolitics. There are a lot of people, both inside the US and outside, that would prefer to see the US continue to be the most innovative country, so Schmidt's perspective is relevant and informative, not just cheap nationalism.
The article uses published scientific papers as an example. That's open. That's research results the US is getting for free, from China. Which is awesome!
The only way I can interpret your comment as making sense is if we were talking solely about military innovation -- innovation in China's navies, in its air force, in its missiles, or even its ability to hack and disrupt foreign networks.
But Schmidt clearly isn't talking about that, he's talking about basic scientific and engineering research.
I don't disagree there are people who see it as a competition and want to see the US "win", but that is cheap nationalism to me. Because the fact is, the more research that gets done, the more everybody wins.
Even if it's not the intention, why don't you think that research is, indeed, ultimately resulting in the betterment of humankind? Isn't that what progress is?
Here's another way to think about it: producing research is like producing anything else, like iPhones. The world is better off because China has the manufacturing capacity to churn out iPhones cheaper and better than anyone else. Which benefits us all. Because it's not a competition -- it's progress.
Is it awesome? The Chinese government has such power over the people and businesses innovating that there could be significant implications for Chinese citizens, neighboring countries, and the world. Where innovation happens first and how closely it's held affects so much. Your comment strikes me as dangerously optimistic.
Funny really to say this when the USA is backed by corporations, which flows directly into its core government.
China is a huge country with a non-democratic ideology. And it works immensly well - just look at all the US corporations which has invested heavily in chineese labor.
> US innovation is slowing compared to itself in the past somehow, that actually measures total results rather than government-funded inputs
Schmidt might say you’re missing the point: government funded science is a leading indicator of future results because the government is the largest body investing in and sharing the results of basic, foundational, non-product research in the weirdest variety of subjects. Turn that off and you turn off the fountain from which innovations can be productized.
> [2019:] For the third year in a row, President Donald Trump’s administration has unveiled a budget request to Congress that calls for deep spending cuts at many federal science agencies, including a 13% cut for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and a 12% cut for the National Science Foundation (NSF)
Cutting funding for the NSF is and will continue to decelerate the pace of innovation because the basic research is no longer being done.
If you follow the article around you realize this isn't about money invested but simply based on how many scientific articles are being published [0] and not dollars invested even though they toss in one Chinese based companies number.
Personally I do not find article count a good number to base the claim on. Percentage of GPD might not be a good reference either but then again I am not 100% sure a dollar for dollar comparison works well in all cases.
> The United States became a global leader in R&D in the 20th century, funding as much as 69% of
annual global R&D in the period following World War II.
1 Figure 1 shows the growth in total
U.S. R&D expenditures from 1953 to 2018 in current dollars.
2 U.S. R&D in 2018 was 112 times
higher than it was in 1953 in current dollars, and more than 15 times higher in constant dollars.3
By sector, business-funded R&D grew the most during this period. However, faster growth in
total R&D spending of other nations reduced the U.S. share of global R&D to approximately
27.7% in 2017.
As an employee of Google, it's sad to see it turn into a conventional company. Sure we take certain risks here and there, but by and large we're optimizing for the next quarter's PnL / growth. We would much rather invest in growing our ad revenue by x% than to start a new team doing something novel. Whenever a new idea comes up that's a bit outside the predictable path of OKRs, it's almost scoffed at, and you're implicitly told not to be silly. There's very little left of the "nothing is impossible" attitude.
Google is still a fantastic company to work at as far as compensation and benefits, but it won't be for long (maybe 10 more years?)
The fact that "conventional company" was redefined because everyone started to be more like Google (as an operation, not privacy/advertising issues), is a great thing.
Google isn't a startup and there's no reason why it should be or why that would be good. "Innovation" isn't valuable if it isn't scaled up.
"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.
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 the 60s to get his masters in math at BYU. Probably the only South Asian in the entire class. He overcame extreme poverty,(half of his siblings died in childhood), disabilities to go on and achieve so much. I benefit from his achievements and being a US citizen.
That being said, we’re losing our preeminence due to growing xenophobia and a strident “might is right” worldview. But it doesn’t have to be this way - we can embrace our shared humanity while still competing on the global stage for talent.
Google under Eric Schmidt literally colluded with other large SV companies to depress wages. There was a court case, it was a big deal, ~$400M was paid out over it.
""I believe we have a policy of no recruiting from Apple and this is a direct inbound request. Can you get this stopped and let me know why this is happening? I will need to send a response back to Apple quickly so please let me know as soon as you can. Thanks Eric". Schmidt's email led to a recruiter for Google being "terminated within the hour" for not having adhered to the illegal scheme."
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://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
FWIW, I could write the same comment as the GP. My dad even shared an office building with the person who’s the topic of this thread, for a time.
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.
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, they just want to import a cheaper worker.
Or they don’t really care where a skilled worker comes from... we should be able to higher and attract best and brightest across the world. Current immigration system is not setup for that.
Training of a highly educated person takes at least 15 years starting with elementary school. Looks like the US school system is in bad shape, but it a bit strange to demand from Eric Schmidt to fix it. Immigration is a way to get skilled workers which doesn't require waiting many years for the results, but it doesn't preclude fixing education meanwhile.
And let the brain drain go to Europe or China instead?. Or is it statistically possible that the best innovators and skilled individuals are only born in the US?
I do not mind a little competition if we bring people who might improve our technological edge. China is going to surpass the US eventually and oh lord, we are in denial!.
This is my opinion, I am not claiming to know the absolute truth or facts.
> And let the brain drain go to Europe or China instead?
A lot of things would need to change for that to happen. Switzerland naturalizes more people every year than the PRC has ever naturalized and the Swiss are not known for making joining their nation easy. Shanghai, the richest city in China, has a GDP per capita on par with Poland last I checked and the country as a whole is ranked 96th, a bit above Thailand. The EU isn’t that attractive either. Germany is poorer than all US states but Mississippi. Money isn’t the only thing when it comes to brain drain but it’s a big, big thing.
mandarin and German are not exactly easy to learn in my country. maybe French, but I’m still culturally exposed to English. I live in a Spanish speaking island in the Caribbean, and really, being drawn to the US is inevitable. With that being said, most people are drawn to the US for the reasons highlighted above. That will not change any time soon.
US software engineer salaries are high since they develop software the entire world uses. If you prevent companies from recruiting talent from the entire world then companies like Google or Facebook that has 70% immigrants on their payroll will have to move their big offices abroad likely reducing American salaries.
#1 In general terms, what's China's commitment (investment) in higher ed? Compared to the USA and other economies?
USA's tuition, loans, student debt is always good for an argument on HN. Almost no one mentions that the USA decided to privatize higher ed some decades back. So I was wondering if China and others made the same mistake.
#2 How does current China think about growing inequity?
One persons's story in "American Factory" resonated with me. Glass furnace technician Hong We https://www.imdb.com/name/nm10930334/ works his ass off, making huge personal sacrifices, to further enrich Fuyao Glass America owner Jeff Daochuan Liu.
Shown is gob standard corporate team building meetings where Fuyao uses economic nationalism to motivate their underpaid staff.
What is Hong We's future? When will the feel goods not be enough? When will Hong We demand to be paid fairly?
I assume Labor in China will follow the American trajectory. With all that political and cultural strive that entails. But I'm keen to hear what others think.
Edit: I think Cao Dewang is the founder and owner, not Jeff Daochuan Liu. I regret the error.
The problem with making higher ed only a public service is you run into rationing. If all positions have to be government funded there tends to be fewer positions.
There are plenty of people on HN who likely would not have made the cut in a EU country.
US higher ed already is a public service. Only 25% of students are in private colleges/universities, and ~every professor who does research is funded mostly by government.
I believe that what's actually happening with US higher ed supply is that we stopped founding large research universities. Many of the great public schools were endowed using federal land[1] and eventually the government ran out of valuable agricultural land.
The institutions themselves are mixed and the student funding is also mixed but can lean towards private, especially if you are not a first pick for higher ed but are still capable. In non-US locations there can be no private funding option.
Student tuition has replaced a lot of government funding. As we can see it has gone to administrative spending. Do you think new unis would fix that?
I was staff (vs faculty) for a public uni. It was understood that all state funding would eventually go away, effectively making it a private uni. I'd have to look up the numbers, but state funding went from 80% in the 1970s down to 10% in the 2010s.
Obviously, rising administrative overhead is due to cost disease, and misc adjacent theories, like Graeber's bullshit jobs).
But I haven't seen anyone discuss the corollary of "keeping up appearances". Parents now spending ~$3,000 per credit hour (non-resident) have high expectations. Better housing, better food, better amenities, responsive office staff, etc. All that cruise ship caliber fluff needs that much more bureaucracy.
Hmm. I didn't think so previously, but outcomes at least seem to support your theory (0).
I would be very interested to see any research discussing the reasons for this difference and whether cultural expectations account for any of it (expecting a degree on the employer side driving up demand).
Unsure. Controlling university spend on administrative positions is attractive. It would be similar to mandating expenditures on claims for insurance companies.
Access to education seems higher in the US as-is though it is still in perfect. I am one of the people the US system left behind. Not sure how to get back to school.
Anyone else find it ironic that Google is the subject of one of the biggest anti-trust cases in recent history, and now Schmidt is blaming the US for not innovating enough?
Maybe if so much of the tech industry's wealth and resources weren't pooled together into a handful of massive monopolists who have nearly complete control over whether any competitor lives or dies, the US (and really, the entire world) would have more opportunity to innovate.
Google definitely could of created a research laboratory. Wasnt it not long ago that companies would invest a lot more money on research? That was why we got so many impressive projects out of Bell Labs and I am sure other companies. Its a shame that horse race ended.
Whats worse is Google wants all their software to be as intangible as possible by forcing it all on their servers. Google hasnt had many desktop apps you can use without their servers involved in a long time. I dont consider Chrome a desktop app since it is their own OS and the new IE based on its hostility on the web to build up a Google Monopoly.
Google and Microsoft do a lot of interesting research. Waymo is a good example.
I'm not sure what Apple does.
My issue with big tech is not lack of innovation or research, but rather that it's all private. We're driving people out orgs that share their research with the world and into ones that lock it away.
I think Apples research is seeing what happens when you sit on a quarter of a trillion dollars. Without veering far off topic. I don't think apple really has a culture of innovation anymore. Each rectangle looks the same. Remember when nokia had all their crazy feature phones. Taking a 30% cut on apps isn't that.
It seems Apple isn't on the bleeding edge anymore, but rather they take what is already out there and make the best possible version of it and knock it out of the park.
Take Airpods or FaceID, Apple was not the first to innovate in the headphone space or in the face unlock space. But when they did eventually come out with their own version, that version is miles ahead of the competition.
Researchers working at Bell Labs are credited with the development of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the photovoltaic cell, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the Unix operating system, and the programming languages B, C, C++, and S.
Source: Wikipedia page on Bell Labs.
Yes, google does research but not the basic fundamental research that isn’t immediately a product to be sold.
Let's not be silly, we all know AMP is a way bigger innovation than all of that combined....
In all seriousness, it's very sad how impotent US research has become. Only a few companies and individuals truly pushing the envelope these days (e.g. Musk).
This. At least from my understanding Bell Labs and PARC published papers continuously (I’ve read many over the years, not sure how much got published vs not).
Regarding being pedantic: well, I'm not sure what to say. I think confusing "could of" with "could have" is a fundamental, terrible mistake. I guess one person's permissiveness is another's idiocracy?
Pointing out that it is becoming a common mistake to confuse the verb "to have" with the preposition "of" -> pedantic!
Failing to capitalize "Nazi" according to what the Oxford dictionary thinks is best for a contraction of two German words -> HAHAHAH! You were being a grammar nazi, but ironically you failed to capitalize Nazi correctly.
That may be true but it does not address the kinds of large-scale, national policy issues Schmidt is talking about. We have lost our way in technology strategy. Instead of welcoming foreign students we chase them away. Instead of integrating tech markets globally to extend our soft power, we practice knee jerk techno-nationalism. It is not even done competently. The "advisors" pushing these policies are known for being cranks. The utter mess that is the TikTok forced sale highlights that we do not have policy as much as we have bad improvisation around spastic uninformed actions.
We have always had seemingly invulnerable dominant tech companies. Remember Intel? Their dominance was seen as holding down chip innovation, but it was also an instrument of American soft power. The latter is what Schmidt is talking about.
The trend against immigration was caused by a combination of unchecked illegal immigration causing economic and cultural pressure against the lower class combined with nearly unchecked immigration causing pressure on the middle class(see H1B exploitation by Disney, tech contracting companies, etc). Fix these issues, and you will fix much of the disdain towards immigrants shown by modern-day Plebs.
That was an intentional reference to plebians. Most people act on this site like anyone not super-pro immigration is ignorant. My comment was a slight jab towards that mentality without drawing direct conflict.
After WW2/Korea (I forget the exact time frame) IBM was making money just fine and refused to take a risk on then modern transistor computing machines.
The US Government spent the money and effectively donated trillions in profits to the rich elites of today.
I find it hilarious how ignorant we are of the last 50-70 years of details of our history. Basically the lifetime of Bezos, Gates... their parents changed the rules to benefit their mini dictators
Here’s a hint: no different than what’s happened with covid handouts, government pays out big dollars to their buddies, we all get to then fight over a seat at the hand chosen ones table
Free market isn’t anything more than a simple propaganda line
Anyone that can believe human biology has evolved away from the behavior of a generation ago is a childish fool
Keep sequestering social power into the hands of a minority of barons and lords, everyone. That’s the goal, no different than a church; keep you focused on their lofty ambitions and need for capital at the expense of your own.
Our biology is just as susceptible to blind faith as our ancestors.
> The US Government spent the money and effectively donated trillions in profits to the rich elites of today.
Those rich elites being everybody who uses a computer. Basic scientific research is the paradigmatic case of where the government should be spending money. The rich don’t get better iPhones, they barely get better computers considering how fast the state of the art advances. There may be fields where something resembling your argument has some truth to it but basic research in computing and computing hardware isn’t it.
The biological shortcomings inherent to the species are inherent in scientists and engineers.
Your argument to the contrary is reductionist to the point of absurdity. Emotionally minimizing their set of privileges to “their iPhones are the same!” Insanity. Great we all get the same iPhone. I’d rather have their healthcare. But let them push us into multimedia gadgetry production, not hospital building, by shaping the information we see through the gadgets!
Economics of keeping people healthy is costlier to them than keeping us sedate and distracted from our literal health through the high of new disposable stuff.
Capacity for blind faith is a feature of our biology. If you’re going to peddle science in engineering systems, you can’t wave away the science of biology and say “well in social contexts core physics are arbitrarily different.”
Engineers are carpenters with circuits (disclaimer: hardware engineer with 20yrs in the industry). They haven’t re-invented physics that can’t be re-invented. They’re librarians of knowledge, not creators of unique physical truth in fundamental ways.
And to address the social system aspects, the historical record is clear and easily Googled. You’ve done nothing to challenge the arguments I’ve studied over decades. Social media hot takes hardly wave away decades of measured science and public government files.
Special purpose accounts and, especially, using HN primarily for ideological battle, are not allowed here. That leads to repetitive, tedious discussions, and usually flamewars.
Just look at tensorflow. It masquerades as enabling open source ai, while really pushing people to pricey, proprietary google cloud compute. How these ppl can keep a straight face, I have no idea.
I'm talking about Google sequestering tensor cores and writing the distributed training code for g-cloud pods. Even your nice embedded inference device was designed with the hopes you'd grab some high performance compute to train something high quality. (These embedded devices are useless for training)
Fair enough, but with everything google, the free tier good enough for a prototype and personal use. If I need to scale it, there are other options. For me, I appreciate the option of this model, it makes high tech accessible to low capital ventures. And sometimes buying locked in services is the rational decision taking into account the costs of learning other platforms and maintaining a
vender unlocked platform.
When innovation in the world of bits is no longer sufficient and mass innovation in the physical world is required, what is the western world going to do? Knowledge is not something permanent and mass production was centralized in China decades ago. Nobody around you remembers how to build real things, unlike your competition in China. They call the shots now...
"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".
You've heard a very exaggerated version of the narrative. Manufacturing output is only twice as high in China as in the US; certainly a large disparity, but hardly consistent with the idea that the Western world has stopped building real things.
Why do we persist in this old fashioned notion that Nation States are the axis on which “innovation” turns? The brainpower, resources, and motivation for innovating increasingly lie with huge multinational tech companies, not nation states. And they largely don’t care where you live - if you’re smart they want to hire you (unlike nation states with their Byzantine immigration policies)
Cause Schmidt’s new venture is to ask the government for money, and his sales pitch is “US is falling behind China in R&D, you need to spend more money.”
Big companies asking the government for money is by no means new. And “innovation” sounds so much better than begging or rent-seeking. This whole article is a whirl of hot air.
I think laws are extremely far-reaching. Imagine you're a group of like-minded people in power in the world's most powerful country right now. What's to stop you from dismantling a company?
Or in other terms, do you think that laws are slower than the cost of innovation? You're right to quote "innovation" here, because it seems nebulous. But the only reason it seems so is because it is difficult. To "innovate" independently of national boundaries, a company must have infrastructure, talent, and capital (at the least) that can pick up and move.
I'm aware of capital mobility, but at some point "the buck stops." In the case of innovation, real results need to come from real people. You can't business and finance it away to some remote island.
Edit: Changed something like "imagine you're a group of GOP officials" to "imagine you're a group of like-minded people in power in the world's most powerful country right now." My thoughts aren't meant to be political, so interpret the latter however.
The US department of defense's R&D budget is over 100 Billion/year, e.g. [0]. Google's is about a quarter of that. I realize R&D money isn't a proxy for ideas, but it is a proxy for the people that have them.
Of course nation states are not the determinant of technology outcomes. There are plenty of examples of failed initiatives. Remember "fifth generation computing?" But national soft power in chips, aviation, biotech, etc. is very real. Screwing that up is bad.
A reminder that Google's revenues come almost completely from ad technology that they bought (from Doubleclick, IIRC). Google has stuck its fingers into hundreds of pies since then, to its credit, and has found that innovation is difficult, unpredictable, and expensive.
Google Ads was not an acquisition. Google had a successful home grown online ad business for ~8 years before they bought DoubleClick. Google AdWords was launched in 2000 [1] and acquired DoubleClick in 2008 [2].
DoubleClick was a competitor and the acquisition faced antitrust scrutiny [3]. In addition to eliminating a competitor, the acquisition helped Google expand into display ads, and DoubleClick was seen as the market leader in that segment [3]. Google had previously only been a leader in search and contextual text ads [3].
While Google does not break out display ads, they do break out ad revenue from Google properties, Youtube, and ads on 3rd part sites. Google generally only displays text ads on Google-branded sites, while Youtube and 3rd party site ad revenue is a mix of text and display ads. From their most recent earnings report, Google-branded site ad revenue was $21,319 M, Youtube was $3,812 M, and 3rd party sites was $4,736 M [4]. As you can see, to this day, display ads make up a small portion of Google's ad revenue.
No, not really. The vast majority of the OS was developed after Android was acquired. It wasn't even a shippable product before then. Source: I have a Sooner, the first ever android phone, abd I wrote software for it.
The value of Android to Google is that it enables them to gather vast quantities of data from their users. Google uses this data to enhance the efficacy of its advertising, by predicting what people will click on.
Gmail started as an internal 20% project too, I think. The key elements of GCP were also developed in-house. But yeah, a lot of their good stuff started as an acquisition.
(Disclosure: I was a Googler for a few years, joining through an adtech-related acquisition, and a Google intern one summer several years before that. But I haven't worked for Google in over five years.)
But Gmail was just Email with a counting Storage timer (which was really exiting at times where 30MB was a normal Free-mail quota).
And GCP...well nothing new after Heroku and Amazon.
It just feels that google is always two steps behind from new inventions, then they try to half heartily implement it, or buy another corporation. Google should sell itself for free to Elon (Joke...but also not really)
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.
But Chinese xenophobia is not American style. Sure they lack immigration but so many Chinese travel outside for education and business that they are in fact hyper aware of cultural differences and are upskilling themselves en masse in dealing with various cultures. They bring that skill back home to build companies and sub cultures that ape the best of other countries.
This is very unlike US style xenophobia where Murica number 1 and anything about foreigners sucks.
I would respectfully suggest that you're letting your opinions on American politics color your perspective here, because "my country number 1 and foreigners suck" is a pretty universal style of xenophobia. I don't know enough about Chinese culture specifically to say for sure, but I'd be very surprised if they don't have nationalists in that vein, since every country I'm familiar with does.
And Iraq is taking Kuwaiti babies out of incubators and Libya was... what again? Considering the Uyghur population doubled in the last 50 years and China has 20 times more mosques than the US, China isn't very good at geocoding.
> China and most Asian countries are ethonostates.
In America, if you suggest that we should be an ethnostate you would not only be called a white supremecist, you'd likely lose your job. In fact, today to even suggest reducing immigration (like Trump) you get called a white supremecist. That is just a reality.
Xenophobia has gradients and degrees:
What I am talking about:
The number one reason why the US was able to be so dominant technologically for such a long time was because of multiculturalism and innovation/frontier/development mindset, regardless of a human's background or origin.
That attracted the best foreign minds (including best Chinese minds) out of China and they became US citizens and their children probably do AI at 3-letter institutions for us.
We put the barrier on smart people coming in. They went to the next best place, in China's case, that is China. They are innovating there and their kids are working in 3-letter companies in China. This is freaking the crap out of USA and it shows with so much news about China bothering so many people.
But we are to fault ourselves. Out of xenophobia, not only did we stop encouraging smart people from coming to the US and building businesses or innovation here, we also ourselves don't go out to other countries too much because "we numbah 1".
What you are talking about:
Problems with multicultural society. You hold a very narrow view of multicultural societies. America has NEVER been monocultural in its history. It was always anglos vs dutch or protestants vs catholics or Irish hate or Italian hate or Polish hate and of course slavery and xenophobia.
America was a great success until recently, fighting through past civil wars and hard earned unity, until recently where the leaders abandoned our strengths for political gains (and I'm going to call out Republicans here for racism).
China, India and EU are large successes in multicultural societies themselves. People in China might look the same to the western eye but they are all different peoples, from different tribes and different cultures. China has been working to UNITE its peoples, America has been working to DIVIDE its peoples. And I say this as a patriot who hates PRC.
A united America will always be better than mono-China. But China unifying its peoples to interact with the world. And America wants to go back to civil wars era. These two forces together will ensure Murica numbah one is pretty much dead.
An open America will crush the xenophobic China that you refer to. But a xenophobic America has more to lose.
> You hold a very narrow view of multicultural societies
No, I hold an accurate view of them.
Differences matter and the difference between two Han Chinese is not the same difference between a White person and a Somali refugee no matter how much you pretend it is.
America was not always a multi-cultural society. It was a society for the white man. This was explicitly stated by every president from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln to Woodrow Wilson. Our frontier spirit was largely driven by claiming land for the white man away from supposedly barbaric and inferior races. Go read a history of the Mexican-America war if you want to dive into how much racial solidarity played a part in us winning that war. You like others want to make it seem a lot less homogeneous than it was by talking about Irish and Italian immigrants (of which I am one).
Similarly, China is not a multi-cultural society and neither is India. I'd encourage you to actually go to these places. When I went to India I had to stay in a barricaded hotel with bomb checks. I had people requesting to get a picture with me as I was so unusual every time I went out.
And as for why I think America was successful at innovating earlier in the 20th century? I think it has a huge part to do with a tremendous culture of education and learning, as well as huge amounts of investments.
Just to give an example, the Apollo project was 2% of GDP! Just think about that. Can you imagine research investment happening at that level?
> and neither is India. I'd encourage you to actually go to these places. When I went to India I had to stay in a barricaded hotel with bomb checks. I had people requesting to get a picture with me as I was so unusual every time I went out.
This sounds like some nonsensical attempt to reduce things to race
> India has more than two thousand ethnic groups,[14] and every major religion is represented, as are four major families of languages (Indo-European, Dravidian, Austroasiatic and Sino-Tibetan languages) as well as two language isolates (the Nihali language[15] spoken in parts of Maharashtra and the Burushaski language spoken in parts of Jammu and Kashmir (Kashmir))
I would recommend you to read up a bit more about China and India multiculturalism. Also read up on American demographics over time and how American success was not guaranteed until America started removing barriers.
America was a great country because we resolved to make it unified and not retain old world (European) differences. I don't see any such resolve today. All I see is a fantasy of some land occupied by white people. A fantasy that never truly existed in the history of America because America has always had diversity.
>Differences matter and the difference between two Han Chinese is not the same difference between a White person and a Somali refugee no matter how much you pretend it is.
As long as we can transact freely and respect private property, the culture wars are not as important as some would make them.
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.
Something tells me the modern left (which generally isn't seen as xenophobic or nationalistic) would not take very kindly to the importation of Nazi rocket scientists in [current year].
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 you can't put that genie back in the bottle.
It’s wavering in the us because Trump wants to get re-elected and immigrants are an easy target because they can’t vote! Otherwise I don’t think he cares. He married an immigrant! He could’ve picked a nice American woman..
Those directly involved in innovation, especially scientists and technicians, are more and more traveling, changing employers and above all communicating, in all relevant meaning of this term here, therefore by 'publishing' as well as by leaving information circulate informally among peers.
A high proportion of scientists go through major US universities. This imbues them with certain ideas and creates social (IRL) networks where 'information ought to be free'. Those who then work elsewhere (let's say 'return to China') just cannot completely drop them, and some even broadcast those ideas and associated behaviors.
Moreover the US supremacy on software provides them with increasing means to effectively spy on research conducted in all countries.
Consequently, the US ability to benefit from innovation payed for by other nations keeps growing.
In a way it is similar to the 80's "Strategic Defense Initiative" against the USSR ('let them dissipate resources'), with the added bonus of being able to rack a fair part of the benefits up.
Papers are one metric. In the case of ML, as with other technologies such as web infrastructure, there comes a point where the state of research plateaus for a while and the main progress is in commercial implementations.
So, for example, autonomous vehicle technology now is more a matter of implementations than theory. This is where China has an advantage over the US by virtue of the willingness of its government to make large scale infrastructure investments. The US once led in such endeavours e.g. Eisenhower's Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 that paid for 90 percent of the cost of construction of Interstate Highways.
Now, in the government domain, the leader is China.
China intends for self-driving cars to propel smart megacity
Out of curiosity, can you please define "work[ing] on AI/Machine Learning"?
On your actual point (sorry for the digression) many machine learning papers have at least 2/3s of authors with Chinese-sounding names, though affiliated with US institutions (or companies). Maybe no major papers have come out of "China", but they sure have come out of the work of Chinese citizens.
China has increased its research output and impact in recent years. The AI Index report has a plot:
You'll have to go to page 19 to the pdf for the section titled "Published papers: Citation impact by region" which shows Field-Waited Impact by region and over time- sorry, I can't see a way to link directly to the page.
Other plots in the sam report also paint a similar picture: China is revving up its research engine on AI.
I see this as a missed opportunity. Most Chinese researchers are and were trained in US and UK institutions. Unfortunately, instead of making sure to forge strong bonds of friendship and collaboration that would hold after the return of those students and researchers to China, the US at least has chosen to see them as a threat, so the effect is that they've basically been training their competition. The UK is a bit more on the fence about it for now.
That doesn't matter so much because they can apply all the SOTA results just as well as the rest of us, and maybe better because they have fewer ethical concerns.
Also tiny incremental advances that are barely worth publishing, assuming they are even replicable. It seems they pay their faculty based on publication quantity.
It is the old military industrial complex thing again, isn't it?
Drumming up a scary vision of global war against China using flying AI-killer robots in outer space while your companies are siphoning billions of dollars out of defense budgets and you get your competition (Huawei, TikTok etc.) banned on national security grounds.
Innovation comes from a functioning global market place of "ideas". It is a 1+1=3 game, not a zero-sum one.
Drop the new cold war and get back to doing business.
If you deal with unequal trade "partners" like China that grossly disregard any intellectual property, don't care about labor security and environmental standards and as a result have a massive trade surplus not based on innovation but mostly based on cheap labor you have to draw a line at some point.
The biggest "ball" that was dropped on innovation in the US was to allow companies to outsource their manufacturing to mainland china.
China has rapidly become a global leader in automation. From 2018 to 2020, a sales increase between 15 and 20 percent on average per year is possible for industrial robots. Annual sales volume has currently reached the highest level ever recorded for a single country: Within a year, sales in China surged by 27 percent to 87,000 units (2016).
Eric Schmidt is a household name around here. Doesn’t mean I give a damn about what he thinks.
> Dr Schmidt, who is currently the Chair of the US Department of Defense's innovation board, said he thinks the US is still ahead of China in tech innovation, for now.
“Invest in my next project now, before it’s too late!” is what I read it as.
Edit: let me clarify. Innovation isn't zero-sum. I believe America is the most fascinating experiment – balancing (albeit imperfectly) innovation with ethics. There's a lot of innovation that can happen – and at a cost that's too great.
For example, North Korea has demonstrated an ability to develop nuclear weapons (deep technical advancement), and China can develop datasets on millions (billions?) of people (broad technical advancement). But, the ethical costs are too great. I don't want to celebrate cultures of innovation that do this – foreign or domestic.
Sure, let's always have an eye on increasing our investments against R&D – fundamental and more broadly. But I'm no apologist for falling behind when the truth is that that view of innovation is a zero-sum game where we lose our humanity in the process.
Weird examples. The US has demonstrated an ability to develop nuclear weapons (deep technical advancement) as well and it has developed datasets on millions of people (see the Snowden revelations).
How and why are you dismissing the ethical costs in this case?
The cost of innovation in crude governments of faith (Dictatorships, Tyrranies, etc) is measured in starvation, famine and deaths in the population. The cost of innovation in modern governments built on systems (socialist or capitalist democracies) is a lot of squaking about the innovation and its uses.
The cost of the NORK's replicating nukes and China's profiling their citizens contrasts with the US in that those costs are much lower in the US. The US isn't carting off undesirables to re-education camps (there's a prison system with a lot of people in jail but every single one of them was put there by a jury) or starving its citizenry to make innovations (although there is a point to be made there). This, in turn, tends to increase the rate of innovation (people don't come to associate the change with bad things and because they are discussing them more people are exploring them).
China or Europe can be #1 in scientific paper publishing but until I see robots that can do what General Dynamics is doing or even what Honda was doing 5 years ago, it's all just copying the leader and the development cycle for those countries to product decent copies is quite long and tends to be inconsistent due to people developing bad cases of I-don't-give-a-shit-itus. E.G. China has problems innovating for the same reason they have problems making an aircraft carrier and maintaining a navy; their steel mills churn out inconsistent crap.
The BBC article is trying to deliver a message using Schmidt's name, and isn't coming to any conclusions or providing any data. It's pure propaganda and a total waste of time to read or comment on really.
Yeah the problem with Chinese innovation is the government still has a brain drain for fundamental science and Advanced manufacturing which still needs years of development. So thanks a lot Trump to help creating a Chinese hostile atmosphere to turn it to a brain gain (you can argue about it but many talented people are going back whatsoever)
However the people there are ironically submissive, dictatorial, flexible and long term thinking. Every now and then magically CCP would adopt some bottom up Suggestion and turn it to top down strategy that does the right thing
You know what I found most fascinating about the Hiroshima memorial in Japan? They go on about how bad the bombing was but literally have a statement to the effect that if Japan was invaded they would have fought to the last man, woman and child. Millions would have died on both sides and the country would have been a wasteland. So unpleasant as it is, sometimes ethics does require the lesser of two evils as there is no good choice.
There are reams of scholarship about how the bomb wasn’t necessary to end the war in the Pacific Theater. This was, in fact, the conclusion at the time of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey:
> Bаsеd on а dеtаilеd invеstigаtion of аll thе fаcts, аnd supportеd by thе tеstimony of thе surviving Jаpаnеsе lеаdеrs involvеd, it is thе Survеy's opinion thаt cеrtаinly prior to 31 Dеcеmbеr 1945, аnd in аll probаbility prior to 1 Novеmbеr 1945, Jаpаn would hаvе surrеndеrеd еvеn if thе аtomic bombs hаd not bееn droppеd, еvеn if Russiа hаd not еntеrеd thе wаr, аnd еvеn if no invаsion hаd bееn plаnnеd or contеmplаtеd.
Americans have invented this popular narrative about Hiroshima solely because it undergirds the fragile notion of “heroism” that country still clings to. Unnecessarily nuking a city that was at that point primarily women, children, and old people is anathema to the story we tell about ourselves, so we’ve simply decided it wasn’t so.
Saying we knew something in hindsight given information not available to the decision makers at the time is a poor argument. Amazingly Truman didn't have the honest testimony of the Japanese leaders to make his choice on in 1945.
Plenty of US military leaders advised against the bombing, prior to the strike, including Eisenhower. But we’re not speaking to legitimacy of hindsight views anyway, instead the lasting, incorrect assertion that it was necessary or justified, which you embraced in your first comment.
Do you actually think damages caused in actual wars are somehow comparable to those in peace time technical development? What do you really mean by that?
DuPont developed Teflon, then made billions by taking it to market without developing a way to dispose of the toxic waste byproducts of the manufacturing process. They just dumped it into virgin streams in West Virginia.
Then they avoided responsibility for the deaths they caused by spending millions in the us court system to reduce the damages payout to less than one years profits.
This is comping directly from the DoD, so the military. And yes, the military uses peacetime to develop technologies to be used later in war to devastating effects.
I’m willing to hear your nuanced take on how America balances innovation with ethics.
It’s the very same innovation that is used to wage wars that have destabilized whole regions and led to the deaths of millions. Or the same military force that is used to implicitly backstop dictators that have carried out some of the worst genocides of this century.
I’m not sure this is what balancing ethics looks like.
America is innovative. Sure. America is god gifts to humanity the most ethical and innovative civilization we couldn’t do without ? No.
I think that quote could use a bit of nuance itself (albeit, yeah, maybe bringing up Hiroshima like that does set off Godwin's Law alarm). China can develop datasets on millions (billions?) of people and, yes, given the current state of AI research, that can give them an edge, and I am, too, of the opinion that it's better to not have this edge than to develop it at such an expense in human lives and well-being.
So where is the scientific answer to that? Is there any serious additional research effort, and more industrial effort, going into models that are less reliant on training data, for example? What industries are trying to become less dependent on massive data collection, and on massively data-driven models?
You can still get heaps of money with a product that can be aptly described as "it does linear regression with sugar on top and it'll tell you great things if you throw more than 100GB of tables at it". Selling an analytics SaaS that sucks up data from every imaginable data source to tell you things about your Google Analytics graphs is still a pretty profitable business. On the other hand, serious researchers in academia, and a lot of talented engineers, are struggling to get funding for topics that do not have the magic words "machine learning", "data-driven", and "AI" in them, and they mostly go ignored because everything can be solved with enough data.
The GP clearly meant the US is ethical RELATIVE to other countries currently "innovating" i.e. China.
Even as stoutly anti-American as my country and people are, I still fervently hope it's the USA and NOT China who prevail in future techno/political battles.
Granted, when the U.S. was as old as the current Chinese government is, it had officially sanctioned slavery in place.
My theory is that as countries become stronger and more confident that they can withstand internal pressures without outsiders immediately being able to take advantage of them, they'll slowly become more and more democratic as they prosper.
I think this is vastly preferable than having the CIA install a pro-US puppet regime that is deeply unpopular and will only lead to another coup, meaning investors are not confident in the country being stable enough for investment and the populations suffer.
The problem starts with culture. In high school, people want to be athletes and pop singers or idk actors. Social skills are over valued. Also the way science is taught in the US discourages exploration and encourages "draw indide the circle". Not to method how hostile academia is.
Maybe it's a similar kind of trend where women in western countries prefer non-STEM related fields on average as they have access to an abundance of more attractive possibilities. It's a sign of social progress, as twisted as it seems. Math is hard, people avoid it when they feel they can.
Not sure what you mean by this. I'd say the US way of teaching in STEM prioritizes solving problems, which is an excellent way to do it, and exactly what an entrepreneur or researcher most needs from school. School systems in other countries are far worse about this, basing school on rote practice and memorization.
Though also class projects strike me as a good way to encourage exploration and creativity, and seems to be something emphasized much more in the US versus other countries in my experience.
Most of the difference between a Sr engineer vs Staff/Sr staff/Mgr is all social skills. Its not just what you get done, but how you get it done and how you leverage other people that matters. Social skills are absolutely vital to climb the engineering career ladder.
I am always curious what people think about the following subject: Do you believe patents promote innovation or hamper it? Certainly some business models are dependent on patents and intellectual property restrictions, but do you think it actually promotes innovation?
My own observation has been that with the 3D printer for example, innovation was stagnant for the 20 years that they were under patent. Once the patents expired, innovation in the space boomed and the price of a decent 3D printer dropped by 100x.
So with the US so patent-heavy, are we actually making things more expensive and crippling innovation? What would it do to the price of your washing machine if it was open source hardware? Prusa Research has seemingly had good competitive success even with all open source products and many clones, so I feel like the economics can work. Would we be better off if we learned the economics of open source hardware and pushed the industry in that direction? Have any economists taken this question seriously?
This blog post on innovation from Bunnie Huang talks about the real on the ground experience of innovation without IP restrictions here:
https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284
> My own observation has been that with the 3D printer for example, innovation was stagnant for the 20 years that they were under patent. Once the patents expired, innovation in the space boomed and the price of a decent 3D printer dropped by 100x.
I've seen this in other fields as well. Regular printers were mostly giant appliances until xerox's patents expired. I suspect the extremely slow start for VR (before it finally has started going somewhere now) is due to the flurry of patents you can see from the 90's finally expiring. I'm quite hopeful that a lot of technologies will take off in this way in the next few years, due to the expiration of patents from the internet bubble's R&D.
And regardless what one thinks about patents in theory, in practice it has clearly become a horrific mess, with the patent office rejected far too few applications. Applying technology everyone learns in college to a new problem actually counts as novel and non-obvious to them.
The "saving grace" is America's "ask forgiveness later" business culture. Basically violate patents as necessary, and if you make it big, pile up your own counter portfolio of patents to go to war with. The beneficiaries are the patent office and of course lawyers. Patent trolls become a problem though, as they have no products to get counter-sued over.
Historically, from steam engines to 3D printing, innovation has been stifled by patents. The book "Against Intellectual Monopoly" [0] from Boldrin and Levine (two economists, Levine website has more work by other economists) gives an historical perspective on IP and offers answers to common (and less common) rebuttals ("Why would anyone invest in research if another company can just copy their work?").
Can you elaborate on what you mean when you say "America will win"? What do you mean win?
Open source hardware is really good at making things low cost, because whoever can offer the best value (low cost, reasonably quality) will succeed. So what if we did that with big stuff like MRI machines and semiconductor fabricating equipment and robotics? Wouldn't that make all that stuff cheap, thereby making us better off? Like health care and car repairs and manufacturing would all be cheaper, and we can use that to thrive.
"OpenHardware is engineering on an artist's business model" -Logxen (at least the first person I heard say it :) )
Openhardware is more than about being the cheapest...it is about free modification of anything and everything involved in the project and the ability to share, innovate, sell (as long as GPL is respected) and create. I would actually argue that what makes OSHW projects weaker is the race to the bottom. I watched this happen in more than one OSHW community so far that I have been involved in. Largely, the core devs abandon projects once they get big enough to bring in the cloners since typically you end up getting a lot of "You need to fix this because we are using it, we don't care if we buy your hardware, you are responsible for making it work to my needs". I know this is very common in OSS as well. It is very frustrating to watch happen knowing that the cloners (in our case) do not respect GPL of the project, do not handle their own customer support and sell at a rate which makes it so the "real devs" cannot afford to maintain the project.
Even knowing all this though...I still have a focus on OSHW over patents. My personal belief is that patents only are valuable if you can defend them. I also feel that if I have something valuable enough to want to patent it is probably something the world may need...why not give it away and help everyone.
The real benefit of OSHW is the same thing that can make it very difficult as well...everything is open, so you leave yourself open to all compliments as well as criticisms...there are times where some people with very high level training are willing to help by contributing but more importantly by trolling. If you can fix the issues that they are complaining about, it shows that you are interested in helping the community (and at times they are also very high level people who are not intending to help but they are pointing out issues which may be opaque to the devs).
As far as OSHW robotics. Look into Moveo for a hardware example (there are others) and ROS for control software.
Background: I have been working directly with Reprap since 2011 (Long time member and Op in #reprap@freenode) and working with the Smoothieware/Smoothieboard project since ~2013 doing QA/Inspection/Test/Rework/Hand building protos.
Open source hardware is also really good at allowing whoever can produce something cheapest to capture all the profits.
Unless the designers are careful about controlling the results of their labor they won't be the ones "thriving", or even benefiting. It only works in certain niches where the technical aspects of production or market naturally exclude most other manufacturers.
Or what about designers who don't necessarily want to be in production just to make money?
Ask someone who has spent years and thousands of dollars developing something only to have a copy shop in Asia start selling their widget for half the cost a month after the design files get posted if they think that's a sustainable business model.
I guess I am asking a systems question. I am asking if it is worth researching what a more open or fully open economy would do for the overall rate of innovation.
If we found that it was better to be more open, we could find a way to slowly transition to a more open economy. After transition, you would know someone else may duplicate your work, and you would invest appropriately. You might invest less but you would also benefit more directly from everyone else's investment, so it is non obvious if you would be better or worse off.
"Open source hardware is also really good at allowing whoever can produce something cheapest to capture all the profits."
Please name specific companies to back up this claim. Open hardware companies that succeed despite clones are Arduino, Prusa Research, Sparkfun, Adafruit...
Certainly the rules would be different in an open economy, and so we would have to transition with care. But I think there is a chance that an open economy would have a higher rate of overall innovation. If that were true, the implications for humanity would be staggering. We can duplicate information for free, and so we can duplicate some forms of value for free. But I have never seen an economic theory that leverages this obvious feature of computerized information to produce more value.
but where do all the resources for creating complicated technologies like chip fabrication and MRI machines come from? small start ups certainly can't, at least not for large scale R&D. only gov'ts and large corporations really can, and the latter only will if they have some guarantee of making a profit off of the work they put into the tec
As a pirate, the more you can share information, the better off society is. Without patents you would have a much faster innovation cycle. The inventor could make some money by being first to market but couldn't milk it for 20 years. They would have to go back and innovate again. At the same time, other people would be innovating on what they released.
I think the makers would still make without patents. I know that I do.
> Ex-Google boss Eric Schmidt: US 'dropped the ball' on innovation
... yes, by:
* Letting capital become concentrated to an incredible level, especially in the tech sector.
* Degrading public education through under-funding, privatization (and perhaps problematic pedagogical approaches).
* Allowing infrastructure and welfare services to degrade, contributing to many people being saddled with "life overhead" that inhibits their disposition and availability to innovate technologically.
* Encouraging US residents, in particular students, to become saddled with large amounts of debt.
and I could go on.
Now, it's true that federal and state investment in research has dropped, but Schmidt seems to be focused on getting what amounts to indirect government subsidy for R&D.
Yeah this could be titled “Ex-CEO of D-o-D incubated monopoly, that actively stifled innovation through products they later cancelled and anti-competitive search practices complains about lack of innovation”
Not saying that’s the whole picture but there’s certainly some “pot calling the kettle” going on here.
Edit: Perhaps a real issue would be looking at how big-tech lobbies government and its impact on innovation
> "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 "college dropouts".
There's also just the quality and access to education seems it's getting worse and worse.
I don't know, but it frustrates me that the truth is the US doesn't have the know how that its companies require anymore, and has to either outsource the work or import workers who do from elsewhere.
> 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 people I know are buying into that stuff. Even some college-educated professionals think only their field is valid, and everyone else is part of "them."
> 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 wasting thousands of American lives, trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives along with destabilizing the entire region.
2. Financial crisis, where the so-called masters of the Universe from Wall St crashed the entire economy and the "maestro" Greenspan denied the existence of a housing bubble in 2005.
3. Recent revelations that scientific studies about the ill effects of sugar were suppressed in 60's / 70's and instead sugar lobby spent money on deflecting blame to fat.
4. Snowden revelations.
5. Details uncovered about the Harvard admissions process which show how the elites are favored via legacy or obscure sports admissions.
6. TPP, especially the way it was conducted where the elected representatives didn't have any access to the details of the negotiations, while the lobbyists from the key industries had full access.
You keep reading that kind of stuff and you start discounting "elite opinions" more and more.
> Iraq war, where our intelligence agencies were sure about WMDs and the senate voted 97-0 to wage a war that ended up wasting thousands of American lives, trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives along with destabilizing the entire region.
My impression is that the war was a solution in search of a problem. The administration leaned on the intelligence community until the right conclusion was produced.
Isn't it an effect of a feeling caused by governments using experts in a way letting (too often and a too large part of) the public think that they, at worst, are all (gov & experts alike) pushing their own short-termed and only self-beneficial agendas or, at best, nearly always devise some "Grand Plan" which then appears to cost much more than budgeted, gives less than promised and has unwanted unexpected side-effects?
There is a fair part of subjectivity in those opinions, for example most of us tend to forget/neglect granted benefits and focus on unwanted side-effects.
It seems to me that a growing opinion is that governments less and less understand what is going on, and therefore cannot efficiently adequately assess and plan. This is especially true when it comes to managing innovation, which is intrinsically full of new concepts and uncertainty.
It's a self fulfilling prophecy that's been ongoing since the 80s. An entire political party's ideology is based on the idea that government doesn't work and when in power they set out to prove it by making government dysfunctional by defunding agencies and confusing their mandates.
That same party politicized clean air regulations, climate change, and wearing masks. This has crippled expertise because if one side can just pay anyone to say anything, whats the point?
From a non-US perspective, you described the dominant ideology of both your political parties. I'm not saying they are 'the same', but they both are extreme neoliberale market proponents. They also both embrace a tight intertwined government and enterprise regimen to the point where it becomes very difficult to tell who owns who, or whether it is just one organisation.
Sorry, no, that is not the dominant ideology of both parties. You didn’t say “both sides are the same” but you are equating neoliberalism with anti-science. Go bang that “neoliberals bad” drum somewhere else.
Neoliberals are pro-market, and markets are inherently anti-science.
If they weren't anti-science they wouldn't spend so much time running campaigns to discredit objective scientific research that harms their financial interests - from the effects of tobacco to lead in petrol to opioids to big oil to climate change.
The historical record on this is absolutely crystal clear and unambiguous.
Elected officials from both parties have failed us. Yes the Republicans have made it painfully obvious just how little they care about the goals of the American experiment these last 4 years, but the Democratic party isn't fundamentally any better.
The founders set the entire western world down the path of a bastardization of a republic and a representative democracy out of fear that voters are stupid. That choice has inherent risk that leaders will be corrupted and that those elected will move further away from what is in the public's best interests. The founders simply believed that this wouldn't arise, that the system could correct course and weed out the bad actors.
All the Republicans have done since 2016 is shown how that belief fails. We don't have a true democracy, and what semblance of one had been chipped away at for years. The Republican Party of old wasn't wrong in wanting small government, the best way to keep corruption out of a representative system is to keep power out of those representatives' hands. They simply joined the Democratic Party on the side of big government and massive budgetary spending with a different target audience (big business and banks rather than citizens).
The Democratic Party can't be ignored though. They have made a career of spending money they don't have and creating social programs that aren't sustainable and can't properly be defined on the scale of 300M+ citizens. Their solution for any problem is more control and more intricate rules, but that just leads to a less resilient system that is more dependant on the idea of leadership having every answer and solution.
The cities and States with the worst public education systems and the highest crime rates have been run by one party, the Democrats, for 50+ years. Some 100+!
They can and have continued to raise taxes and subsequently squander any money they collect. Any attempt to break that stranglehold, such as changing teachers union hiring practices or allowing for charter schools, is met with total resistance.
You’re right that government is the problem, but get it right which party is responsible.
Thats just utterly untrue and the reverse of whats actually true.
"states that were coded as blue based upon results from the 2004 presidential election were significantly higher in education funding than were states coded as red. Students in blue states scored significantly higher on outcome measures of math and reading in grades four and eight than did students in red states."
Is there any correlation at all between increased school funding and better educational outcomes? For instance, Utah spends $5k per student per year while Baltimore spends $25k per student per year. Utahan children have higher graduation rates, better GPAs, and better standardized test scores. It's the same across the US from NYC to LA.
I'm growing more and more skeptical that throwing more and more money into the furnace that is the US education system is suddenly going to produce better outcomes. How much more must Baltimore spend? $30k a student? $50k a student? $100k a student? Where's the magic number?
I got it from the Annual Survey of School System Finances, U.S. Census Bureau, though on checking it again it's between $6,000 and $7,000 (I was recalling from memory). So not what I put in my comment exactly, but doesn't change my main point in any way.
- Comparing two statistical flukes.
- Socio-economic factor: Utah has better wealth distribution.
- Socio-economic factor: Utah has affordable housing and Baltimore so the effective wealth gap is lower.
- Baltimore has other issues.
That’s the most facile thing I’ve ever read. Did it control for cost of living? Did it control for demographics?
In 2019, and I’m using this because you can explore it at https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/mathematics/states/groups?... , Mississippi’s 8th grade math mean score was the same as New Hampshire’s, when comparing white students. Mississippi is just way less white than New Hampshire. California, also near the bottom overall, has better white performance than New Hampshire, but not as good as Massachusetts, which has always had a lot of smart people moving to Boston.
The ranking there is simply a diversity/brain drain ranking. Mississippi and California are way more diverse, so they rank low. States with nothing to attract or keep smart parents, like West Virginia, rank low too.
Yes, the whole puzzle becomes much simpler to think about when you consider the possibility that the school scores primarily reflect the quality of students admitted, and not the quality of the education administered.
I note that koolba's comment was evidence-lite and really rather partisan. So it is probably incorrect.
However, claiming the reverse is true is also evidence-lite. That paper looks like it was a fairly cursory piece of work and didn't account for population size or characteristics (eg, number of disadvantaged students) in the correlation work.
I suspect what it really shows is that political affiliation isn't the biggest driver of outcomes. Looking at the table at the end of the paper and thinking about population, I suspect the aim would be more of what Massachusetts does and less of what California does (both Democrat states) if possible.
I wouldn't blame the government here, but the media. Their job is literally to represent experts and their true image to the general public - as in, they're supposed to research and tell us whether the expert seems credible, and if the government is lying about experts (or anything else) it's the media's job to call them out on it.
I think you are giving far too much credit to other members of our species. Members of the media are clearly as fallible as the dysfunctional politicians they are covering.
CNN and other left-of-center media organizations would do themselves a favor by at least holding their tongue on areas where they are too explicitly demonstrating their bias. The way their pundits make ad hominem remarks against the president every other story serves no purpose but to further aggravate the conservative right. It so obviously dilutes whatever message is attempted to be conveyed, turning what should be considered "news" into a pornography of entertainment that further divides our country. It's so blatantly destructive and should be so easy to filter out; but they create soundbite after soundbite that is cannon fodder for the other side.
Publications like the Economist are critical of the president but not in an antagonizing, ad hominem way. If more of the 'mainstream media' would follow that approach, more of their message would get through to the other side rather than adding fuel to their fire.
Interesting analogy with pornography. Just replace 'horny' with 'angry' as the primary driving emotion and political news matches porn pretty well. Potentially exciting but ultimately vacuous. Harmless in theory, but causes harm in practice by distracting / diverting energy and action away from the real thing. Is sustained through novelty, which encourages producing extremes.
So that means the US has a big (political) porn addiction problem. Hey, it kinda works.
Fox News has been doing this literally for decades, to the point where they have zero journalistic credibility anymore. CNN is rather tame by comparison.
Sure, but their goal has always been to simply appeal to their base rather than to evangelize the gospel of the GOP. They're far too partisan an institution to be attempting a shot like that.
The difference is that the left-leaning news institutions make up the bulk of the "mainstream media" and they're now just a mirror-image of fox news. And their winning strategy in 2020 is not to become the clone of the right's repugnant rhetoric. The winning strategy should be to convert the moderates or those slightly right of center; yet the more they assume the shape of Fox News the less disingenuous they appear, which makes this task ever less likely. I literally have friends who were life long liberals 4 or 5 months ago who got sucked into some strange corners of the conspiratorial right wing web and many of their grievances are against the mainstream media. Many of which are hard to argue against.
What can the media do when people would rather read a literal propaganda piece on facebook, watch some quack on fox news, listen to conspiracy theories on AM radio, or hear their preacher spew bigoted nonsense every sunday? We aren't taught how to continually educate ourselves about the world after school, so we would rather lean into things that confirm our biases rather than expand our perspective.
You can't expect a private sector media organization to "do the right thing." It's the old hoping for behavior B while rewarding behavior A. The only way to get a media organization that serves the public is to fund it with public money and make it an independent institution just like the judiciary and the central bank (and sometimes the statistics organization).
That's an interesting take as news organizations are not nonprofits. They are only businesses. The government is supposed to be acting as the central source of good information not a collection of for-profit companies. The issue we face now is our government is manipulating messages for political gain and the media is manipulating filters to further viewership both of which feed upon each other. I don't see how you place no blame on the government here.
I mean, it is hard to reason with you on your opinion, since anybody who doesn't echo what you say would be just classified by you as a member of this group and his opinion automatically dismissed. And this wouldn't even make you doubt yourself, since "half the people you know are buying into that stuff" already and you seem to be pretty confident that it is them who are fools buying into some cheap nonsense, not you.
However, as a possible member of this community of fools myself, I feel like there are some pretty good reasons to hold opinions you probably find so ridiculous that it isn't even worth your time to consider them. Of course, everything can be ridiculed by making such a generalizations as "virtually all doctors, scientists, and professionals": about every possible sentence starting with something as generic as that would turn out either ridiculously false, or ridiculously obvious.
The point being pretty much the contrary: unfortunately, having a title doesn't equal "being qualified and trustworthy" even on topics that supposedly should be covered by that title, much less on making generic political/historic/socio-economic claims. Moreover, being a professional liar with a nice title seems to be a pretty solid career choice nowadays (well, pretty much always was, if you ask me, but it is you who is claiming that number of people who notice this is growing).
Doctors on average know more about medical subjects than non-doctors. Engineers generally know more about engineering than non-engineers. Climate scientists know more about what’s going on with the climate than non-climate scientists.
Facebook-educated woke people who think everyone is just some con man and they know more than them are simply people with too much confidence. Laying evidence out in front of them will only make them angry or mock it because it collided with their world views instilled by clownery they saw on TV or from equally “woke” people.
Are doctors wrong sometimes? Of course. Are some particularly bad doctors wrong a lot of the time? Yes. Are a massive group of doctors out there “hiding the truth” and people with no formal education have the real solutions, but their answers are being suppressed? No.
The best I can think besides the usual suspects is a more rare one: "the more you know, the more you know you don't know" which is being read incorrectly as "why bother learning when everything is always wrong [describes 20 major problems with human race]". At that point, it is hard to follow.
> 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.
From my point of view I think that is a healthy reaction against technocracy, and it's not US-specific. Those "doctors, scientists, and professionals within certain fields" can't expect to take the decisions that influence the life of millions each and every day, with almost no over-sight, and then complain when people question those decisions.
"But science says that we should do that and that!" is not a valid enough reason anymore, because science has "said" lots of things that have been proved to be very bad to some parts of the populace (see eugenics, which has been demoted to "non-science" after the fact so that those technocrats that had tried to implement it could wash their hands off of it).
I definitely agree with your central point that anyone can use any ideology to endorse their own personal beliefs, but it also has to be said that giving the same weight to the feelings of a person versus actual fact, spoken by an expert, is the literal degradation of our society.
And then you get the Replication Crisis[1], in which we find that a shockingly large number of studies in the social sciences failed to meet the bar for scientific fact.
There are plenty of "actual facts", spoken by "experts", which a few years later turn out to be absolutely false.
Many people lack the necessary expertise to recognize an expert when they see one.
They thus are left to resort to authority as the proximate measure accessible to them to assess how much credit to assign to the opinions of a particular expert.
To complicate matters, there are documented cases where in the past half century at least experts have be bought by special interest groups such as big tobacco etc. This eroded public trust in any experts and many people were brought up assuming every public discourse with expert opinions is rigged. That generation now 40-50yo and their world view is having a certain weight on current matters. (Disclaimer: this is just my personal opinion, I'm not an expert. And even if I was many people wouldn't trust me anyway ;-p )
It’s easier to set up a system to provide nonpartisan funding and review of scientific work than it is to have everyone read and source all of the research.
It’s also easier to set up an apolitical body that makes recommendations based on research than it is to have everyone draw their own conclusions or devolve into “blue science” vs “red science”
These are mechanisms that cultivate public trust, and there are countries that do a pretty good job at it.
Until those apolitical bodies become institutionalized and perceived by some people as being an expression of an elite caste and then a new political current arises to galvanize people against "elites" and poasibly takes over one of the existing parties (or creates a new one, depending on the country specific political and election rules)
Agreed. Its frustrating that the idea that "college is useless and a bad deal" is not challenged more. I see a real difference in terms of rigor, discipline, and professionalism from college grads vs those that didnt go.
I don't understand China's educational strategy (no information), but their manufacturing strategy was highly decentralised. Shenzhen for example had a substantially independent government system with a modified tax code. They've been running a lot of independent experiments everywhere I looked, figuring out how to prosper.
That might carry over to education. The biggest mistake the US seems to be making is centralising and standardising a whole bunch of functions (education, healthcare, etc) at the federal level. Then if the anything goes wrong there is no escape. And the US federal government doesn't seem to be up to the task on a good day.
The US has always had a big ignorant population dragged along by a small core of ingenious, often foreign, visionaries. That doesn't seem to have changed recently.
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.
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 professional networks.
> 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 forced to go after their student visa expired. They could not work in US without a permit and were forced to exit. How to blame them for using their degree or creating a company in their own country later?
They shouldn't be seen as neither serfs nor slaves; technically they don't owe anything to US.
> They paid big money for it, and the universities were happy to grab the money fast
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?
My hypothesis is that the US is a victim of its own success: several generations of living in a prosperous, stable society reduces the need for the average citizen to develop survival skills. Here I use the term 'survival skills' very generally: it includes specialized education and expertise in some area, financial planning and risk management skills, inter-personnel and conflict resolution skills, emotional resilience etc.
I suspect that the education problem may be on the demand side (due to the above reason) rather than on the supply side (even though the prohibitive higher education costs do play a big role).
I think that’s an insane answer. We’ve divested in public schools over a prolonged period of time, plain and simple. The public schools that have not experienced that magically are in the wealthy “rich” neighborhoods. The system is working as intended. You want an educated population? Make sure schools have the proper investments. None of this 30 kids per classroom bullshit. Do 10-15 and see what kind of students you churn out.
I think it's insane not to consider that we're getting too comfortable as a society. According to Nielsen, the average adult spends over 11 hours a day consuming media. I imagine a lot of it is passive, but that nevertheless must have an impact on our productivity.
Public education spending as a percentage of GDP is at an all time high. I dont think people appreciate the cost of public schooling in the US. According to data provided by the federal government, public schools in the US spend on average $15,500 per child per year. That is an enormous amount of money and it is only climbing ever higher year after year.
Averages are skewed by extremes which feeds into my point that the wealthy neighborhoods spend far more on public schools than in poorer communities.
Even with all that, it also means we’re spending nearly $500000 on a classroom in which a teacher makes 40-50k (let’s round that up to 60-80k for the payroll taxes). Where is the rest of the money going? We could have a hard cap on 20 kids and for teacher pay to be more competitive for less money than we spend today.
It depends on the area. It's been particularly divested in California, which falls short of the average per child spend despite having the highest GDP. In CA, per child spend has fallen 15% from 1970-1997.
Counterpoint: I grew up in a third world country where class room sizes were between 30-40. Facilities and teacher qualifications were spartan at best. Good textbooks cost an appreciable fraction of an average person's monthly income.
Until recently (I joined a startup), I was VP Engineering for a Fortune 100 corporation, leading the development of a system that ran an appreciable fraction of the company's revenue (over $50B) through it. Before that I developed trading systems software for two of the world's largest stock exchanges. Largely self-congratulatory and anecdotal, yes, but that seems to be what you wanted to validate the counterpoint.
> Seriously, I feel the US has a big education problem, with part of it being cultural I think
I think a lot of it is pricing and the debt model we use to fund it.
> Seems being educated, knowledgeable, having expertise, learning about science and technology, medicine and law, just isn't valued anymore
The returns on that investment just aren't as good as they used to be, couple that with the required debt above, and stagnant wage growth in these industries and I'd say it's clear they aren't valued anymore.
> and has to either outsource the work or import workers who do from elsewhere.
That's actually seems more like part of the reasons for the above issues than it is something that follows from it.
Combine all this with the fact that total self-employment and other measures of entrepreneurship have been trending downwards lately while the level of corporate integration and mergers have been increasing and it's a recipe for the destruction of middle to middle-upper class incomes and careers.
> What I see instead is people pushing for anti-intellectualism and valuing the "college dropouts".
This is a symptom of a sick system, and when the system is sick, it's inhabitants become sick as well.
It's because people being educated has become 'being elite'. Even in our own profession, I find it difficult to communicate with smart people who lack foundational knowledge, falter, ask for help and then ask me how I knew the right answer.
I've had more than person tell me that there's no way this was taught at a university (threading, OS knowledge)
The US has always had a big regional divide in skill levels as well as respect for knowledge, with the out-of-the-way places having a problem with both.
The problem is political dynamics meant that the attitudes of the backward parts of the country have actually set policy for quite a while. That benefited American corporations in the short term - lots of CEO probably think for-profit, student-loan-driven education is a great idea. But it's harmed the US and even US corporations as these policies show their longer term results.
> The US has always had a big regional divide in skill levels as well as respect for knowledge, with the out-of-the-way places having a problem with both.
There are a lot of really good schools in flyover states. Looking at the top 10 engineering schools in the US, depending on your definition of "flyover," there's CMU, Michigan, Purdue, Illinois, and UT.
But it also has a broad problem of lack of quality of high school level education. Maybe a few good suburban school but the average is terrible.
Tuscaloosa is education center of Alabama, having the university of Alabama but secondary education is bad enough stop companies locating there.
"Around the late 1980s/early 1990s Saturn chose not to locate a plant in Tuscaloosa because of the performance of the public schools, and by 1993 the city leadership wanted Mercedes-Benz to build a plant there."
I'm guessing Saturn's concern was specifically with workers with just a high school diploma?
What makes this amusing is Saturn was probably looking to open plants in the South because most of the states are right-to-work states that are more business friendly and have fewer worker protections. The less-government approach that attracted them there also drove them away because less government also meant worse schools and worse workers.
Is some of this a failure to distinguish between software engineering and computer science? Some famous CS person quipped that "CS is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." That's fine for studying applied information theory and whatnot, but it seems like maybe the time has come for a formal bifurcation of the fields.
Aren’t the fields already bifurcated? Software engineering degrees exist. The fact that many software engineers have a more theoretical degree in computer science isn’t that unusual; you see the same pattern with business and economics.
Computer science needs renaming - like you said, computer science is not about computers, and it's obviously not about science either (it's closer to maths).
For me it's that 85% of the time I use networking, you're using something that I learned by myself. But that 85% accounts for only 10-15% of the knowledge. So there are a lot of concepts that I learned in school (like DNS, link/physical layer, microarchitecture, etc) that I rarely use. But just because I don't use a lot of the stuff often doesn't mean I never use it. And even the things that I really never use (like programming an FPGA) aren't things that I regret learning.
Maybe those were older people? Threads came about in 96 and became default in the linux kernel in 2.6 (released in 2003).
Sharing memory between processes was a mess before that. Java green threads (emulating threads in user space, which often blocked badly on IO) were horrifying.
Python threading implementations were even worse of a joke till fairly recently.
> 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 "college dropouts".
It's because outside of a few exceptions(tech in particular), you would earn more money being a businessman than being employed, academic or professional.
People always say that we should value teachers, nurses, etc. But it's all just lip service.
Money and salary are what society uses to indicate how much they truly value you.
Imagine how we'd operate if people were truly free to do their calling, and all the scientists and poets and musicians posing as businessmen and HR reps came out of the woodwork. We'd be commenting in this thread from Mars by now.
> There's also just the quality and access to education seems it's getting worse and worse.
I don't know about access in other countries, but the quality of education is dropping like a stone pretty much in every developed country right now. (And it's not a recent trend, it's been years in the making)
* Inflation of people with college degrees. From 5% in 1940 to 35% in 2019. This dilutes the quality of both the student pool and of the professorial pool.
* Distance from the last major war, all the way back in 1945. Educate like your life depends on it has long faded from memory. In medicine, in engineering, in hard sciences.
* The mismatch between skills taught in academia and job market skills. By now everyone is jaded at the notion that the main point of education is the diploma, seen as a key to unlock the job market. Of second importance, networking, get into an Ivy to rub elbows with the right crowd. Knowledge and critical thinking come as a distant last.
* Or perhaps, even simpler, the dilution of the male spirit which sees competitiveness in excellence as an inherent moral good. Our forebears wore educational attainment as a peacock plumage. These days peacocks are outright vilified.
What do you mean by quality here? I'd say the quality of the teaching has been going up as the quality of the students has been going down (precisely because access is going up). The focus is increasingly on the lowest common denominator which requires a lot more effort from teachers.
I imagine the situation is country-specific and I’m not aware of any good studies that try to measure it. But anecdotally, as a university student around 2010, I noticed that the standards expected of undergraduates in old textbooks, exam papers and theses seemed higher. Maybe it’s just that these sources gave me the false impression of an ideal student, but a lot has changed in recent decades. As well as the growth in the student population, by 2010 it was pretty common for “full-time” students to work part-time as well.
Hannah Arendt was probably an exceptional professor in 1955, but I wonder how this compares to a final exam for a first-year political science class at an exceptionally good university today? https://twitter.com/Samantharhill/status/1297545059466907650
> I say work a job that pays, and that you can tolerate, then do what you enjoy in your free time.
That's not what kids want to hear these days. They want life to be easy, and a big government ready to issue a wide safety net for them if they make bad choices in life. Perpetual childhood.
“Kids these days” have their eyes wide open. Just a few decades ago you used to have access to an affordable college education with good jobs on graduation. With a modest level of saving you’d have enough for the deposit on a house within a few years.
None of that is true now. It’s drilled into high school kids that they must take on a punishingly expensive college education or they’ll never amount to anything. Then when they graduate they discover an awful jobs market. As for buying a house... better wait for a relative to die and hope they were generous to you in the will because there’s no other way you’re ever going to make that deposit.
The idea that young people today and spoiled and rely on handouts is a nonsensical meme.
> “Kids these days” have their eyes wide open. Just a few decades ago you used to have access to an affordable college education with good jobs on graduation. With a modest level of saving you’d have enough for the deposit on a house within a few years.
Except if those kids would get degrees in the right areas (like the thread is complaining they aren't), they would absolutely be able to get excellent jobs upon graduation. The unemployment rate in engineering has been almost nil for years. Even fields like civil and biomedical engineering, previously at the bottom of engineering in terms of prospects and pay, are now a lock for jobs, with employers desperate to hire anyone they can get. And of course computer science is now doing even better than all of them despite being much easier, frankly.
> "they must take on a punishingly expensive college education or they’ll never amount to anything."
Except that high school graduates have the option to do 2 years of community college (~5k) and 2 years at a state school (~13k). Generally possible to most while living at home for no additional rent. CS jobs are in high supply and 100k+ out of college. The college cost would be paid off in a year.
Then there's the fact that many positions are not requiring a college education at all.
I don't think the average programmer is getting paid that (the AU equivalent) much here in Australia outside of maybe some companies in Melbourne and Sydney and maybe Adelaide.
The article and thread was talking about the US, which has the highest software salaries worldwide and where I was referring to for the 100k+ compensation.
While I don't know too much about the Australian market, positions all across the US are 100k+ entry level. Not just in a few select cities, but probably in almost every state. Like Nebraska, Texas, and Tennessee with median house prices just 2x that entry level compensation.[0][1][2]
One other issue here is the disparity of salaries of finance/software folks make vs other engineers. This has caused a lot of folks to not pursue careers in aerospace, chemical, mechanical etc and just get software or finance jobs.
It’s hard to justify not working for a FANG and taking a pay cut.
Part of the story here, too, is that relatively few Americans make up the populations of top graduate programs. An undergraduate degree or less might be sufficient to build a great advertising business, but it's unlikely to be enough to make major advancements in AI, quantum computing, semiconductors/photovoltaics, superconductors, etc.
> Seriously, I feel the US has a big education problem, with part of it being cultural I think.
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.
> Overall, 79% of people between the ages of 12 and 24 in Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, and Russia say they feel optimistic about the direction of the world, compared to only about half of those in far more well-off places like Australia, France, Germany, Great Britain, and Sweden. In the United States, the number is 63%.
> Of the top countries on our survey, China has developers that are the most optimistic, believing that people born today will have a better life than their parents. Developers in Western European countries like France and Germany are among the least optimistic about the future.
China is also much larger country than US. It has 3x more people than US. Those individuals are going to be at par with people in west at some point. There are so many interesting things to discuss and question.
The optimism or lack thereof is mainly due to news and social media. Climate change, wars, criminality, cops shooting people of color, economic inequality etc. I've lived in a communist country and all the official news was boring propaganda in the lines of "our beloved leader went to <country> to visit his omologue, <name> where they deliberated about world peace". Then I saw a Gulf News newspaper from the UAE: only positive news, obviously propaganda. I'm not saying we shouldn't discuss these issues but western news has an overy negative tone, it keeps parroting the same issues and competes for our attention. Social media is even worse than news. My so keeps scrolling at insta posts and voices discontent about certain travel influencers going on vacation all the time while she has to work overtime and take a pay cut.
Part of it is inability to access higher education financially without getting into debt. Part of it is structural because we have forgotten to innovate in education by offering apprenticeship.
Another big part of this is ego. We, collectively, have this massive Murica number 1 ego that we are unable to accept that we actually collectively have started sucking hard. We have elected numbnuts who don't have any desire to improve society and make it an engine of innovation instead of a society divided by issues of the last century.
The US has a very capitalistic economy, maybe too much even.
In general, in the US, whenever you hear "there's not enough people to do X" it means "there's not enough people willing to do X for what I want to pay"
The truth is, in the US there's a ton of different well-paying careers. CS isn't like medical in US with artificial limits on the number of doctors that graduate every year. The only thing stopping more people from doing CS is money. If they offer enough money they will have a practically unlimited talent pool.
Tech CEO's are always whining about lack of tech workers so they can abuse H1B visas to get employees below market rates. Since they're basically indentured servants to their employers for years to decades until they can get a green card.
The lack of government money in CS research I think everyone in the tech field agrees with
This anti intellectual push is seen in India as well. The ruling party has worked over time to blame experts and mocking intellectuals on everything
The reason is very simple, ruling party gets vores by fooling people. They announce the same monetary package year after year without actually giving the package and their media i.e. entire right wing funded media starts praising the package and hailing our supreme leader.
The U.S. is the exception, not the rule. We have a global, neoliberal economy. We don't need skilled americans. What we need is more useless watchamacallits! Would you like to buy some bottled water? It comes from a spring, I promise!
Or maybe another smart phone? Probably been awhile since you bought one of those. Why not buy one again?
The fact is it’s extremely valued, in the economy[1]. And that value - the resentment thereof - is why many without the education purposely elect buffoonish leaders that choose to be proud of ignorance
Is it really? FAANG jobs are outliers. Some professional fields seem to do OK (medical), but others are atrocious on average (law).
Most people see science/engineering jobs as a path to a cubicle for a while with an OK salary before being laid off at 40. And for the most part, they're right.
“Most people” - pretty sure children of educated parents are focused heavily on education and being steered to jobs that require that education. That’s 40-60% of the US population.
They weren’t teaching coding to grade schoolers at scale 10 years ago.
Ex-Google China boss, Kay Fu Lee in AI Powers explained how China made their innovative environmental based on better wilder clones that are just focused on making billions, starting locally now globally aka TikTok
Is no one going to talk about the hypocrisy? Eric Schmidt isn't a beacon of sensible innovation pushing America forward. Peter Thiel called him out eight years ago [1] and I strongly encourage you to watch the 4 min clip.
If the only companies that can realistically harness the value of academic research are the top 5 tech companies, then Schmidt is essentially advocating billions of dollars of government-backed R&D for them. Would Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant be where they are today without prior work? Who else has benefitted?
Maybe companies such as OpenAI are the answer to this problem?
Main focus is on IT, and sure maybe the US dropped the ball somewhere there, but the US is far beyond the leading biotech innovator in the world. This is harder to oust because of the regulatory standard (maybe a little eroded now, but not much) to sell products in the US market.
The Eric Schmidt who presided over the largest web marketing company in the world? The company that spent its innovation capital refining new and interesting ways to sell more shit to people?
Is this to be interpreted as a political message in light of the upcoming elections?
It certainly doesn't sound very insightful and he should know better. China has perfected the schooling system and employee discipline, this gives them a considerable advantage. US schools and colleges are a politicized mess, kids are distracted by "diversity" and other decadent but useless ideas. Perhaps it's hard to see through the eyes of someone who hired only from top universities (though they are messed up too), but I don't believe his statement was actually honest.
I saw a "Just Have A Think" YouTube channel video recently describing the 1MV HVDC line being built across China. It is part of Belt&Road infrastructure project and will allow them to distribute excess loads to different time zones without skin effect losses of an AC line. This is a part of their COVID stimulus injection.
When American $1.2k per citizen landed in accounts, I remember checking local Walmarts in the weeks that followed and I noticed all the TVs were gone.
With such a system, China could even launch excess solar as far as Germany in their afternoon peak sun angle when German duck curve morning peak begins?
Not sure what they had in the back, but the boxed units normally stocked under the displays were all gone. Employees in electronics confirmed mass exodus of TVs during Stimulus Week. Frozen vegetables gone for a few days, 1lb beef was dwindling most times (I wasn't visiting when they expect high traffic so maybe they were just being really efficient and what I saw was what was left without passing expiration date - no reason to set out a full shelf of beef at 8pm closing).
My sample size is... 2 Walmarts in Reno. But that was the forethought - "where is all this sudden money about to go now that everyone has 'free time at home'?"
The article prompt is ex-tech-leader pointing out reduced R&D budgeting, so I wanted to test the connection that there's an obsession with "watching" or "observing" pre arranged activity [via screen] instead of participating.
Everybody got the individual choice to purchase "what's already produced and available in storage" instead of being offered state money to build a few huge projects (spanning many provinces).
You think that people are going to tell a government survey that they used the government check to buy televisions? :-)
Similar to will people who support either political candidates disclose it in an interview - especially if they live amongst a social circle that leans the other way.
This is one of the main reasons survey techniques are being replaced by observational and inferential techniques in market research.
The problem is that bankruptcies, starvation, inability to maintain your car/house/children/job, and businesses collapsing due to the sudden demand shock are all extremely expensive for the economy in the long run. Those types of losses which these universal handouts are intended for are quick to inflict and long to recover from. As an example, if your normally profitable restaurant goes under and forced to permanently close due to insolvency, it'll take years to build back up a similar restaurant with a similar rapport, client base, efficiency and success. The long term economic impact of these handouts would easily outweigh the infrastructure investments you are proposing.
When times are good though, we should be increasing taxation and investing in infrastructure. Instead, the US Republican party sought to create a massive tax cut during economic boom, which means that we are in a worse financial situation when times have become rough.
I can get behind most of what you said except the idea that tax policy should match the economic situation of the day. We need stable tax policies that normalize for the booms/busts.
For the same reason we weren't creating infrastructure jobs before coronavirus. I'm not specifying what that reason is, and not for rhetorical reasons. I'm not specifying it because the need for infrastructure investment was just as acute before covid as after, and it wasn't being done then, and won't be done now.
Universal handouts weren't to handle unemployment. They were to pay people to stay home.
Could you elaborate on a plan (of course a really rough sketch) for "creating infrastructure jobs" during a global pandemic?
I agree with the premise, but I would like to know how to accomplish something like this. Especially if you have domain knowledge, it could be enlightening to the HN readership. There are a lot of accomplished people who read these forums, and it would be cool to see a seed get planted.
Not every unemployed person could operate a buldozer. What would you have them do, lay bricks? Train them to use heavy machinery after working in hospitality services?
Germany does this with some amount of succes but I don't know how they do it. German socialism seems to work at the expense of a zero point growth figure. They still pay the solidarity tax for East Germany.
Yes I actually would do this. Why can’t they lay bricks? Would they rather starve? There would need to be some training component for several jobs (bulldozer driver) but I think there could be a job that’s right for most. This is pretty similar to what the military does I believe, you get a job based on aptitude and such.
I don’t know if it’s the perfect solution but it feels more appropriate than our current approach. I don’t know much about the German way, I just know we pay for idle bodies while we have a lot of infrastructure that needs rebuilding.
Just from experience, I'm not sure I'd trust a military-style assessment to accurately identify skills. For example, I scored off the charts on linguistic comprehension (the Defense Language Aptitude Battery DLAB) and had a job as far from that as you can imagine.
It might be worth considering who "they" are (from your insanely outraging "why can't they lay bricks?" akin to "let them eat cake"). And why wouldn't "they" sweat for a good wage? Seriously, do some soul searching.
Your world is to make people starve or lay bricks?
It isn’t really all that valid in terms of the $1.2k payout. That was at the height of the pandemic, you absolutely didn’t want to have people out working in infrastructure jobs at that point, you wanted them to isolate at home.
But the broader question, could/should the US use this moment of mass unemployment to create infrastructure jobs: IMO, yes. But it’ll never happen because someone will say the word “socialism” and it’ll immediately become politically unimaginable.
We could do both. The GND and Freedom Dividend were both aimed at ameliorating major structural impediments to 1) infrastructure investment and renewal, and 2) grassroots-level innovation, respectively.
Of course, since they're apparently anathema to all but the leftiest lefties, we're back at square one trying to figure out what to do.
This is something an effective government would have in queue at all times. We have a track record of poor disaster planning. We generally ignore the fact that disasters will even happen.
Investment in public assets that take up the slack in the labour market and /remain/ public assets is the alternative to UBI I want to see.
An asset like a solar plant or a HVDC line produces revenue for the public. And there's no reason an independent publicly owned corporation can't function well.
I'll admit guaranteeing that the revenue isn't wasted by a government that becomes addicted to its revenue streams is another problem. (Denmark has a bridge with €30 plus tolls that were promised to become toll free once the loans were paid off. Never happened. Norway seems to do a better job with its oil fund.)
To bring China back as the reference, important government posts are extremely prestigious and held by very capable people. Outside of propping up their stock market, it is hard to fault their public investment stategy.
However, I disapprove of the surveillance state and the human rights abuses.
A HVDC belt buckle around the earth paired with oodles of PV seems like a rare legit silver bullet. Hopefully China is wildly successful with this, spurring further investment.
Consumerism is the foundation of the American economy and due to the way the economy is currently structured it helps the world when Americans consumer more. Let’s not make value judgements about consumer spending.
However, I do agree that the US should be spending more on infrastructure. A LOT more. Arguably, spending less on infrastructure is what’s caused the loss of a lot of blue collar jobs...
I was basically going to make the same point -- putting money in people's pockets is letting them make decisions about their own best interest, which in this case, appears to be rewarding Chinese investments in flatscreen TV factories.
As far as I can tell, the reason other countries haven't built anything like this is that it doesn't make sense from a grid engineering perspective, and the main benefit of building such a high-voltage high-capacity line is the propaganda one of being able to claim it's world leading. The big problem is that the grid needs to have enough redundancy to stay up if a single generator or transmission line fails, so the big high-capacity single transmission lines that China builds can't actually be used at close to their nominal capacity. It probably wouldn't even work as a propaganda stunt in countries with a free press; if the Trump administration built something like this, I just know the NYT headlines would be about how it was a useless Trumpian folly and showed the perils of his disdain for experts.
The book Doing Capitalism (2nd edition) does a good job of explaining the innovation process at this national interest level, and how it proceeds down to the private sector where it adapts to business models. Highly recommended.
Of course there are link farms etc, but that doesn't mean the "Google search is controlled by large (Chinese) botnets". That's like saying email is controlled by spammers. There are countermeasures.
I believe people like you have very poor realisation of the gravity such statement carry.
China been the factory of the world for the last 25 years. It has more than six to seven fold per-capita employment rate in technical professions than USA, and more than four times the population.
With all that given, it hard to fathom what a nation needs to do for 25 years to not to become proficient in technology when circumstances are so favourable. Saying the opposite is not pretentious, it's stupid.
I myself spent much of my career working in OEM manufacturing, and been involved in setting up manufacturing enterprises in USA, Canada, and China. The difference in real world skill level in between workers in China, and America is stunning. Putting it shortly, US recent engineering grads fare barely better than Chinese highschoolers at line work. Hiring manufacturing specialists in US is a futile endeavour. I can hire a specialist to program any major brand of chipshooters in a few days in Guangdong, in America, it took us 10 weeks to find somebody who was just capable of passing the interview test.
And it's not difficult to see why. For about 25 years (before Trump) the government of the United States made it easier to manufacture stuff in China than in the US, stripping the country bare of vital manufacturing capacity. The process is still ongoing in Europe, with no end in sight. Of course there won't be any manufacturing capacity remaining, and of course fresh grads wouldn't be interested in training for jobs that do not exist.
That's not because the Chinese are inherently smarter or more talented. That's because the US government had allowed the business establishment to ship everything overseas for a quick buck.
To say that China somehow "caught up" to the US using nothing but their own wits is, well, dim-witted.
Give me a break. I have been living in China and this man has no idea about what he is talking about. He is talking about pre-bubble China.
People are comparing the official numbers of Governments on the West, like Covid expansion, economy growth, investment on R&D and so on with the Chinese's. But the Chinese numbers are just a lie.
You just can not trust whatever numbers the Chinese give you. You can not trust any government in the West either but those governments have a democracy, journalists that can expose the truth or reality,competition and super super important, rule of Law.
In the West you can expose what your government does bad by law. It is not perfect but orders of magnitude better than on China.
For example journalists or scientists can investigate covid traceability, in China it is just officially forbidden.
Belgium has one of the biggest official numbers on coronavirus deaths just because they lie less than other Governments like Spain that have actually bigger real numbers. And Chinese numbers are in another league.
You just can not compare the numbers given by democratic governments with those of totalitarian regimes, because on paper they are fantastic, but in reality they are not true.
In China everything is controlled by the CCP, including (specially) the statistics.
People that have never lived there just can not comprehend how amazing are the structures that we have in the West(that took centuries to develop).
We take those structures for granted and believe other countries have those and are playing with the same rules as we do, but they do not.
China has lots of problems today, floods and covid had created havoc in the economy, much more than in the West. It is not easy to feed the enormous population they have.
But you don't know about it because giving bad news about China is just forbidden. In fact China had censored Western articles about China(Do you want face masks? We are sorry but until you remove that and that person that criticizes China on your media you will not have face masks.)
The population is growing older fast, they have less women than men because they abort girls and they can not do anything about that because abortion there is super easy.
When the economy was booming everything was great. People lived a tough life but expected their children to life much better. When the bubble burst is completely different.
The US has much brighter future than China. I say that as a European. People on USA have kids and they have much more resources because of the small population density.
Funny that he says that, Google is probably the lamest most un-visionary Corp ever...ok maybe second after Facebook. From a Product standpoint they invented Streetview that's it.
Your are right, that was really the only invention i could think of, but since it's not a customer product i didn't listen it (with Customer product i mean Gmail/Maps etc).
Gosh imagine that, even a former online Bookseller (amazon) is more innovative than google.
You gotta be kidding. It's hard to find a company that innovated more in the last 20 years:
MapReduce, Spanner, Protocol Buffers, Gmail, Go Lang, Android, Chrome, Microservices, Borg, Tensorflow, TPUs, Google Maps, Google Street View, Google Docs, Google Translate, Dremel, Duplex, Chromebooks, ChromeCast, Daydream, mobile first development, BeyondCorp, V8, Kubernetes, LevelDB...
Those are just some of things I can think of from the top of my head and doesn't include the machine learning research that google and deepmind are doing.
Exactly - development began in 2014, it was acquired in 2014, games against Sodol were March 2016. (I'm somewhat cheating here, so it's unfair, but I gotta tell you it's a real headscratcher having a stranger explain this to me while they're not checking wikipedia)
In the meantime AT&T has been rolling out gigabit up/down for the past 5 years. I got AT&T four years ago and the price has been $70/month no extra fees.
Google Fi is not Google Fiber - it’s probably the least overtly scumbag-y of the US cellphone networks. That said, I switched away from it today after a few years of OK service because they don’t support Apple Watches.
> Unlimited 3G hot spot and $20/month for tablets with unlimited data can’t be beat.
It can if you spend a lot of time travelling - Google's data packages (on 4G!) are good in most of the world at no additional cost.
There's also a service aspect - Fi was often better where I am (downtown in a major US city) than T-Mobile (which my work phone is on).
That said, T-Mobile seems to be more customer-centric than AT&T - who even in 2020 seem hostile to doing business, and I'd consider them in future or for my iPad, just for further network diversity.
T-mobile’s standard plans include 3G roaming for data and calls(?) in Canada and Mexico and 2G data roaming in most other countries. You can also get a $5 “day pass” for 3G data and calls in most countries.
As an aside, their rate plans are all inclusive no extra taxes or fees.
It is an “extra charge”. Don’t you pay for every gigabyte of data that you use? It’s all bundled with T-Mobile. What’s the advantage of that over just getting another sim while you’re out of the country? Especially now with e-Sims being a thing.
They have two packages, one with per GB charging up to a cap and one bundled.
The advantage of using a primary plan (possibly augmented with local services from time to time) is that you have a stable phone number, and a lot less screwing about. For a casual traveler that may not matter. For someone who is in a different country every other week (pre-pandemic) it makes a substantial difference.
Allowing skilled workers or students to immigrate is one thing. Turning a blind eye to CCP/PLA espionage and IP theft is another. It is misleading and illogical to conflate the two.
Given that Schmidt is an intelligent person capable of parsing logic, is it fair to ask if he has ulterior motives here?
