6 ms·

I would suggest more accurately that America has gifted it to China, through: * Systematic attack on education and knowledge at all levels, from cutting fundin

I would suggest more accurately that America has gifted it to China, through: * Systematic attack on education and knowledge at all levels, from cutting funding, bludgeoning it with standardized testing, taxing grad students and cutting financial aid, and creating a culture where superstition and idiocy is rewarded instead of knowledge for its own sake. * Cost accounting has wiped out basic research * Offshoring and outsourcing have moved core competencies to others who have improved on them and made newer products. I think there are few or no LCD panels made domestically any more. How about hard drives? Chip fabs?

spiffage 9y ago
We've also shot ourselves in the foot with land-use policy in SF/Silicon Valley. When engineers build products at a company that succeeds, the gains end up accruing to landlords. It's been de facto illegal to build more housing units for a long time. Engineers here largely either win the stock option lottery or leave (and be put to less economically efficient use) once they start a family. Under these rules, Silicon Valley won't be Silicon Valley for much longer. Indeed, the people who speak up at city hall meetings and are the biggest activists in elections talk all the time about how much they want the tech industry to fail. My big hope has been that when Silicon Valley cedes its mantle, it's at least to a country that's relatively friendly to western values.
polskibus 9y ago
You forgot about WTO approval.
coredog64 9y ago
Please take a look at this list and tell me how many non US fabs you see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_sites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_si... GlobalFoundries is more global, but there's only one fab in China. A previous employer was a semiconductor company, and it was pretty clear that the high-tech fabs had to run in the US, and that only the older generations could be moved offshore.
- Cyph0n 9y ago
  Your comment is very misleading. Intel's state of the art fabs are for Intel use only and are NOT accessible to fabless companies. Once you take this into account, fabless US companies who want to fabricate their chips at modern technology nodes need to either use GlobalFoundries or TSMC. GF has a large fab in NY I believe, but the company itself is owned by the UAE. The vast majority of non-Intel fabs are concentrated in Taiwan, SK, and to a lesser extent, Singapore.
- kevin_b_er 9y ago
  You've conveniently linked Intel's chip fab plants where as your parent poster said nothing about Intel. Here's a list of chip fabs beyond just Intel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabrication_plants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
echevil 9y ago
As an immigrant in America, one of the most jaw-dropping fact I learned about American culture is that kids getting best grades in school are often tagged as "geeks" and often get bullied, and kids all want to be "cool". Well, though it might be common sense in America, in China and other east Asian countries, if you can't get good grades, you won't get much respect from anybody.
- qiqing 9y ago
  This was a personal struggle for me, as a first generation immigrant. I'd try to explain to my parents why I was getting bullied and having a hard time making friends, asking them for advice. In response, they'd assure me that obviously the students with the best grades should garner all the respect like it was for them in their childhoods, and that's just how the world's supposed to work. ::shakes my head::
  - nopinsight 9y ago
    Would switching to a magnet school or a gifted program help? Asking this for others whose kids might face the same situation. It appears there are pockets of academic excellence in many US cities. I don't know how widespread they are though.
    - qiqing 9y ago
      I was already in a magnet school at the time, in the gifted program, but it was in a small ethnically homogeneous town. The things that do make it better: (1) moving to a larger, more diverse city / population center, (2) not being the only Asian kid in a class (better if you're > 5% because having only 2-3 in a class still 'others' you).
      - stcredzero 9y ago
        (better if you're > 5% because having only 2-3 in a class still 'others' you). I was also in the gifted program. There are special problems with being a hypo-minority. For one thing, you're highly visible to every sociopath in the area. This is a part of what women can experience in the tech field, when they are only about 1% of the local population.
gt_ 9y ago
I was under the impression the market would take care of everything. No? Maybe private interests don’t have enough influence on politics.
- imglorp 9y ago
  Market forces are what got us into this. Maximizing immediate stock returns demands propping up old tech, cost accounting and offshoring and outsourcing, not investing in research or risky products.
  - candiodari 9y ago
    And yet when you look at the results here, it's not market forces, it's government policy that has at least aided other manufacturing centers rise. Things starting from the free or extremely cheap shipping given to Chinese companies (not by the Chinese government, by the US and others through international mail service agreements). The environmental regulations (even where they clearly cause gas power plants in developed world to shut down to be replaced by coal power plants in China/Indonesia). Besides I keep hearing that the Chinese state funds exactly one kind of research: sending "favorite sons" to study abroad. Internal Chinese research ... it exists, and it's growing, but it's far from the research effort spent in the US or Europe. And yes, especially in Europe research funding is slinking and this does make it look like the opposite is true, but if you look into it, it doesn't appear true. People keep claiming that China is making plans on a very long time horizon, and yet every Chinese I meet is utterly convinced of the opposite. They claim the Chinese state is a broken, corrupt, massively fractured and tenuously held together monster that has NO plans that go out even a few years. In theory, they have 5 year plans, but they don't follow through on them, so not really.
Chardok 9y ago
It is almost a punishment to try to better yourself in America, and our society will certainly suffer from it. Why try to get a degree that doesn't guarantee any sort of employment, but does guarantee a large financial burden that follows you even beyond bankruptcy? It is absurd how short sighted our higher education system is here.
- 1231sdfsf 9y ago
  That's why there is a saying "peaked in high school" in North America. From my experience, even though I was not a geek, its the geeks that end up becoming the bosses past 30.
- geodel 9y ago
  Not just here. It is all over the world. In fact it is far worse in countries with large population and falling job opportunities in most sectors.
mtgx 9y ago
Beyond what the government has gifted, tech companies have gifted their technology to China on a silver platter, too. They chose to do business there, knowing their tech would be stolen, and they even stayed when the Chinese government made the tech stealing official, by forcing US companies to accept "joint ventures" where basically they'd only be allowed to sell their tech locally through a local provider. That was the final nail in the coffin of American technology. I still think ultimately China will fail because it will shoot itself in the foot with all of that authoritarianism and censorship, which will get worse and will kill creativity and chase away the brilliant creators. But in the meantime, they have all they could possibly want, and it's mostly given to them.
- mixmastamyk 9y ago
  It’s almost as if no system is perfect. ;-)
klipt 9y ago
Don't forget * letting foreign students do PhDs here then not letting them stay due to a broken immigration system.
stcredzero 9y ago
creating a culture where superstition and idiocy is rewarded instead of knowledge for its own sake Full disclosure: I'm an Atheist, but I share the some views with Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett with regards to the culture and practices of religion also embodying value which was accrued through a process of cultural evolution by natural selection. What's worse than not having medicine for a sick patient is instead giving them poison or a harmful remedy, like bleeding or leeching. We seem to be replacing one set of dogmatic beliefs which can support toxic mentalities of moral panics and witch-hunting with another set of dogmatic beliefs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_bQTxNT-K8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_bQTxNT-K8 From the Right side of the political spectrum, we see science denial and suppression of information through noise and obfuscation around the areas of biological evolution and climate change. From the Left side of the political spectrum, we see the same thing in the social sciences. There is indeed a closing of the American mind. Ideological adherence is enforced through bullying, logical argument is denied, and science is expected to kow-tow to politics. The West is now struggling with its own form of Lysenkoism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
briankelly 9y ago
We bought in hard into this myth that the service-based economy is the next evolutionary step above the manufacturing economy. So we sold our industries to Asia for cheap cash and cheap consumables, completely kicking out our foundation from under us. Meanwhile, the moat around Silicon Valley is proving to be much less wide and deep than believed, and, for instance, easily defeated by Chinese policies (see Zuckerberg's pathetic grovelling at the feet of Xi). I mostly blame the growing popularity of "MBA wisdom" where short-term extraction of value is sold as growth and fundamentals are almost completely ignored. Companies focused on producing good quality products and careful innovation can't even survive in our market. The worst thing I think is how much "oral tradition" of institutional knowledge we've had to have lost in the past several decades.

spiffage 9y ago

We've also shot ourselves in the foot with land-use policy in SF/Silicon Valley. When engineers build products at a company that succeeds, the gains end up accruing to landlords. It's been de facto illegal to build more housing units for a long time. Engineers here largely either win the stock option lottery or leave (and be put to less economically efficient use) once they start a family. Under these rules, Silicon Valley won't be Silicon Valley for much longer. Indeed, the people who speak up at city hall meetings and are the biggest activists in elections talk all the time about how much they want the tech industry to fail. My big hope has been that when Silicon Valley cedes its mantle, it's at least to a country that's relatively friendly to western values.

polskibus 9y ago

You forgot about WTO approval.

coredog64 9y ago

Please take a look at this list and tell me how many non US fabs you see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_sites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_si... GlobalFoundries is more global, but there's only one fab in China. A previous employer was a semiconductor company, and it was pretty clear that the high-tech fabs had to run in the US, and that only the older generations could be moved offshore.

Cyph0n 9y ago
Your comment is very misleading. Intel's state of the art fabs are for Intel use only and are NOT accessible to fabless companies. Once you take this into account, fabless US companies who want to fabricate their chips at modern technology nodes need to either use GlobalFoundries or TSMC. GF has a large fab in NY I believe, but the company itself is owned by the UAE. The vast majority of non-Intel fabs are concentrated in Taiwan, SK, and to a lesser extent, Singapore.
kevin_b_er 9y ago
You've conveniently linked Intel's chip fab plants where as your parent poster said nothing about Intel. Here's a list of chip fabs beyond just Intel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabrication_plants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

echevil 9y ago

As an immigrant in America, one of the most jaw-dropping fact I learned about American culture is that kids getting best grades in school are often tagged as "geeks" and often get bullied, and kids all want to be "cool". Well, though it might be common sense in America, in China and other east Asian countries, if you can't get good grades, you won't get much respect from anybody.

qiqing 9y ago
This was a personal struggle for me, as a first generation immigrant. I'd try to explain to my parents why I was getting bullied and having a hard time making friends, asking them for advice. In response, they'd assure me that obviously the students with the best grades should garner all the respect like it was for them in their childhoods, and that's just how the world's supposed to work. ::shakes my head::
- nopinsight 9y ago
  Would switching to a magnet school or a gifted program help? Asking this for others whose kids might face the same situation. It appears there are pockets of academic excellence in many US cities. I don't know how widespread they are though.
  - qiqing 9y ago
    I was already in a magnet school at the time, in the gifted program, but it was in a small ethnically homogeneous town. The things that do make it better: (1) moving to a larger, more diverse city / population center, (2) not being the only Asian kid in a class (better if you're > 5% because having only 2-3 in a class still 'others' you).
    - stcredzero 9y ago
      (better if you're > 5% because having only 2-3 in a class still 'others' you). I was also in the gifted program. There are special problems with being a hypo-minority. For one thing, you're highly visible to every sociopath in the area. This is a part of what women can experience in the tech field, when they are only about 1% of the local population.

gt_ 9y ago

I was under the impression the market would take care of everything. No? Maybe private interests don’t have enough influence on politics.

imglorp 9y ago
Market forces are what got us into this. Maximizing immediate stock returns demands propping up old tech, cost accounting and offshoring and outsourcing, not investing in research or risky products.
- candiodari 9y ago
  And yet when you look at the results here, it's not market forces, it's government policy that has at least aided other manufacturing centers rise. Things starting from the free or extremely cheap shipping given to Chinese companies (not by the Chinese government, by the US and others through international mail service agreements). The environmental regulations (even where they clearly cause gas power plants in developed world to shut down to be replaced by coal power plants in China/Indonesia). Besides I keep hearing that the Chinese state funds exactly one kind of research: sending "favorite sons" to study abroad. Internal Chinese research ... it exists, and it's growing, but it's far from the research effort spent in the US or Europe. And yes, especially in Europe research funding is slinking and this does make it look like the opposite is true, but if you look into it, it doesn't appear true. People keep claiming that China is making plans on a very long time horizon, and yet every Chinese I meet is utterly convinced of the opposite. They claim the Chinese state is a broken, corrupt, massively fractured and tenuously held together monster that has NO plans that go out even a few years. In theory, they have 5 year plans, but they don't follow through on them, so not really.

Chardok 9y ago

It is almost a punishment to try to better yourself in America, and our society will certainly suffer from it. Why try to get a degree that doesn't guarantee any sort of employment, but does guarantee a large financial burden that follows you even beyond bankruptcy? It is absurd how short sighted our higher education system is here.

1231sdfsf 9y ago
That's why there is a saying "peaked in high school" in North America. From my experience, even though I was not a geek, its the geeks that end up becoming the bosses past 30.
geodel 9y ago
Not just here. It is all over the world. In fact it is far worse in countries with large population and falling job opportunities in most sectors.

mtgx 9y ago

Beyond what the government has gifted, tech companies have gifted their technology to China on a silver platter, too. They chose to do business there, knowing their tech would be stolen, and they even stayed when the Chinese government made the tech stealing official, by forcing US companies to accept "joint ventures" where basically they'd only be allowed to sell their tech locally through a local provider. That was the final nail in the coffin of American technology. I still think ultimately China will fail because it will shoot itself in the foot with all of that authoritarianism and censorship, which will get worse and will kill creativity and chase away the brilliant creators. But in the meantime, they have all they could possibly want, and it's mostly given to them.

mixmastamyk 9y ago
It’s almost as if no system is perfect. ;-)

klipt 9y ago

Don't forget * letting foreign students do PhDs here then not letting them stay due to a broken immigration system.

stcredzero 9y ago

creating a culture where superstition and idiocy is rewarded instead of knowledge for its own sake Full disclosure: I'm an Atheist, but I share the some views with Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett with regards to the culture and practices of religion also embodying value which was accrued through a process of cultural evolution by natural selection. What's worse than not having medicine for a sick patient is instead giving them poison or a harmful remedy, like bleeding or leeching. We seem to be replacing one set of dogmatic beliefs which can support toxic mentalities of moral panics and witch-hunting with another set of dogmatic beliefs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_bQTxNT-K8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_bQTxNT-K8 From the Right side of the political spectrum, we see science denial and suppression of information through noise and obfuscation around the areas of biological evolution and climate change. From the Left side of the political spectrum, we see the same thing in the social sciences. There is indeed a closing of the American mind. Ideological adherence is enforced through bullying, logical argument is denied, and science is expected to kow-tow to politics. The West is now struggling with its own form of Lysenkoism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism

briankelly 9y ago

We bought in hard into this myth that the service-based economy is the next evolutionary step above the manufacturing economy. So we sold our industries to Asia for cheap cash and cheap consumables, completely kicking out our foundation from under us. Meanwhile, the moat around Silicon Valley is proving to be much less wide and deep than believed, and, for instance, easily defeated by Chinese policies (see Zuckerberg's pathetic grovelling at the feet of Xi). I mostly blame the growing popularity of "MBA wisdom" where short-term extraction of value is sold as growth and fundamentals are almost completely ignored. Companies focused on producing good quality products and careful innovation can't even survive in our market. The worst thing I think is how much "oral tradition" of institutional knowledge we've had to have lost in the past several decades.