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What are our strengths/specializations in your opinion? My main concern as a millennial, who rightly put didn't witness this transformation, is that by continu

What are our strengths/specializations in your opinion? My main concern as a millennial, who rightly put didn't witness this transformation, is that by continuing down a path of fewer and fewer specializations we get pinched off completely.

PaulHoule 1y ago
Let’s see.. higher ed, which Trump is trying to eliminate.
- franktankbank 1y ago
  Come on Paul. I hope that's not the one and only. Without raw experience how useful is the higher ed?
  - PaulHoule 1y ago
    It changed my life but my son decided to go the blue-collar route and I love him just the same. In terms of foreign trade, higher-ed is one of our greatest exports. Many other nations would like to knock us off the top, none could come close until Trump scored an own goal.
    - franktankbank 1y ago
      Yea I've got kids I've got to think about here, quite a few. I get very heated trying to understand the whole global aspect. All I see in the US is a vast resource getting stomped upon. I wish your boy the best and any others. Trump as I see him is a wrecking ball, I'm not sure where it ends up.
      - PaulHoule 1y ago
        I'm proud that Vera Rubin discovered evidence for dark matter at my Uni. I'm proud that Douglas Osheroff discovered Superfluid Helium 3. I'm proud that Gerald Salton invented full text search and that Ivan Sutherland invented 3-d graphics rendering as used in video games. I'm even more proud that our ag school is helping farmers in New York and the rest of the world make money and feed a growing population that expects to eat better (however they define "better") in a challenging climate. That our vet school trains vets and farriers. That our ROTC trains officers for all of our armed services. I don't see a contradiction that I'm also proud that Catholic priest and activist Daniel Berrigan against the Vietnam war escaped the FBI in the same building where those officers train.
        gsf_emergency_2 1y ago
        I know these tribal feelings but I also felt... a wider sense of gratitude when at Leiden I saw enshrined Onnes' equipment for discovering superconductivity, or that otherwise insignificant suburban streets were named after Snell, Leeuwenhoek, Huyghens, Rembrandt, .. and other people I ought to have learnt about There's something to be said for the way pioneers of the hand and mind are remembered as political operators or donors are.. Sure bureaucrats set those up but the exceptionality pointed at there felt inclusive People can feel whatever they want about the achievements at their own institutions, .. it just feels purer when the institution is just a backdrop for these universal achievements .. plus I can go into any Leidse bakery and introduce myself as a scientist without bracing for sideeye (doesn't happen even on HN!) That's not pride, that's just a sense of belonging Why I chose this example. Somehow the Calvinist ressentiment "let no man be greater than I", which is equally present in NL as in the anglo heart/hinterlands.. makes a singular exception for intellectual achievements (as opposed to some purely emotional ones, like some particularly potent puns) Don't know if villages in China will remember their current & future groundbreakers :) There's hope: DeepSeek's hometown put up laudatory red banners for him.. nonironically.. is that like confetti for Apollo 11? I think not. In the latter case, there's a serious case to be made that NASA deserved the confetti more.. that's how ressentiment "works"
    - gsf_emergency_2 1y ago
      Think you'll have to be more specific. In liberal arts nobody comes close, but the "value" of that is largely explained by "networking" (network effects if we're to be charitable :) In theoretical research, gap is rapidly closing. In hard sciences research, I only see clear supremacy in capital intensive areas. Guess that's where the footguns were aimed at. The classroom teaching is a mixed bag
      - PaulHoule 1y ago
        People I know from South Asia complain bitterly about the quality of education they get but they get it. Funny though I used to be proud of the Chinese language collection at my Uni which is one of the greatest outside (any) China and I still am but once I got really interested in the Chinese language it hit me that it's like 1% of what they have at Beijing University.
        gsf_emergency_2 1y ago
        One might argue networking got Ramanujan to where Canterbrigians can now be proud of him :) My favorite recollection in that place was going through Ken Wilson's notes. IIRC there was FORTRAN. Most interesting was a proof of Dyson's conjecture. Cant really remember because it wasn't that useful. Thought it was weird that he left-- gossip says it was the wife-- but nice that some people still bothered. Institutions rise & fall. Become cringe. Achievements can endure, but only thru the effort of wider communities to distill and distribute.
- potato3732842 1y ago
  The institution that created all the people who told us that globalization would make us all richer and the world freer when it seems to have done the opposite on a timeline just barely longer than the careers of those people while that industry goes on to severely lighten the pockets of every subsequent generation? From where I'm sitting it looks like the bully finally made his way around to picking on someone who had it coming.
  - danaris 1y ago
    Just because all the people who touted globalization went to college doesn't mean that college was the reason for it. That's ridiculously surface-level thinking. Higher education also gave us all the people who told us that was a bad idea, with graphs, and sources, and evidence. Higher education also gave us all the people who did the research that created the technologies we're using today. Higher education also gave us all the doctors, lawyers, engineers, rocket scientists, brain surgeons, and literally every other highly skilled worker we have. Higher education is absolutely vital to any functioning modern society. From where I'm sitting it looks like you've got a chip on your shoulder against higher education, and are attempting to reduce the entire sector—which is incredibly diverse—to a single genuinely bad viewpoint that you don't even provide any evidence higher education produced (as opposed to simply "a few ideologically motivated people who received higher education produced").
    - potato3732842 1y ago
      Every time a civil war erupts in the middle east there's some warmongers screeching "but what about the <ethnic/religious minority in the relevant country>, we ought to care about them" as a pretext for getting involved. You are engaging in the exact same. The primary reason academic labs churn out technological advancement for Microsoft, Exxon, etc, etc, is because the tax code makes it preferential to do that rather than run the same thing in-house. Also, I would like to note the slight of hand you just pulled between education and academia. There is no problem with doctors and lawyers getting their training. But that is absolutely distinct from professional academia. Those people are the customers. They are in and out. The institutions themselves are absolutely corrupt. It is very comparable to the catholic church scooping up all the wealth in europe in the 13-1500s and justifying it by embedding themselves in mundane parts of society and then screeching "but without us who will do the thing" as if that justified everything else they were up to. (Though to be fair, academia is not the only institution subject to such criticism these days).
wiredfool 1y ago
Music, movies, microcode and high speed pizza delivery.
- dotancohen 1y ago
  Don't forget spaceflight. The US (well, SpaceX) dominates in both manned and unmanned cost to orbit and time to orbit.
- dylan604 1y ago
  You say movies while a sibling comment mentioned media. However, more and more movies are not shot in the USA. Productions have been moving out of Hollywood for a really long time, and some of it is in other states, but more and more are leaving the US altogether. This is why Trump shot off that late night tweet/truth about placing tariffs on movies made outside the US. The only thing the US still has on movies is the mystique of Hollywood. The ability to shoot a film is not unique to the US at all
  - shawn_w 1y ago
    It's a quote from Snow Crash.
Esophagus4 1y ago
Fortunately, there are still plenty: financial services / capital markets, tech, biotech / pharma, media / entertainment, e-commerce, higher ed. Obviously, there are lots of players in those categories, but the U.S. is at or near top of the pack there. We just happen to be optimizing for the wrong thing right now. I heard a columnist say, incredulously, “China wants our financial services industry, and we want their manufacturing industry”
- franktankbank 1y ago
  > China wants our financial services industry, and we want their manufacturing industry Which one is easier to nab?
  - Esophagus4 1y ago
    Tbh I have no idea… financial services, I’m guessing from the way the question was asked?
    - franktankbank 1y ago
      No I'm asking also. I guess financial services is based primarily on trust/enforcement. Industry is based on toxic backbreaking labor and deep knowhow. Maybe I'm missing something about financial services, maybe its our ruthless military backing? I don't know man.
      - Esophagus4 1y ago
        Well I don’t know much about manufacturing tbh, but for China to take a chunk of our financial services industry would be very difficult. The dollar is still the world’s reserve currency by a long way, American capital markets are still the world’s largest and safest, and investors do not like capricious governments that don’t always adhere to established practices and rule of law (see: Ant Financial). Investors don’t want to put money in a place where saying the wrong thing or associating with the wrong person could negatively impact your ability to transact in that country (also see: Russia c. 1990). So I would assume it would take decades for China to maneuver the world away from American financial services.
skeezyboy 1y ago
>is that by continuing down a path of fewer and fewer specializations we get pinched off completely. you exist on americas economic downslope, sadly. an ever declining standard of living in a post manufacturing economy. china and everyone after can just copy your progress and basically be America in its boom days
like_any_other 1y ago
> What are our strengths/specializations in your opinion? Not static. The parent post reminds us that "Made in USA" meant low quality. But so did "Made in China". These things change, but if the national-level policy is "let the market figure it out" (the polar opposite of China's approach), they don't change for the better.
- AnimalMuppet 1y ago
  And before that, "Made in Japan" meant cheap junk, even within my lifetime.
  - JKCalhoun 1y ago
    Yeah, it seems to start out that way.
gsf_emergency_2 1y ago
Reposted because 1)you might have been too young to have read it (1992) 2)outsourcing and trade balance was in the full quote >When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else: music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery --Snow Crash,1992
- franktankbank 1y ago
  Sorry, I'm not sure the relevance of a fiction from 30+ years ago. I know I sound like a dick but seriously why should I care about it?
  - AnimalMuppet 1y ago
    You don't have to care about the book. The point of a quote is the quote. Why should you care about a quote from any time period? Because it expresses something well. Why should you care about an older quote? Because it expresses something well enough to have endured.
    - franktankbank 1y ago
      It's a quote from a fiction of a bygone era though. You think China can't write microcode? You think only USA has big breasted women and men with chiseled abs? None of this makes any sense. High speed pizza had to be tongue in cheek as written. Maybe you missed the point and it was all written tongue in cheek because who truly cares about those things if you don't have all your other bases covered? Maybe I missed the point. Are we already pinched off?

PaulHoule 1y ago

Let’s see.. higher ed, which Trump is trying to eliminate.

franktankbank 1y ago
Come on Paul. I hope that's not the one and only. Without raw experience how useful is the higher ed?
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  It changed my life but my son decided to go the blue-collar route and I love him just the same. In terms of foreign trade, higher-ed is one of our greatest exports. Many other nations would like to knock us off the top, none could come close until Trump scored an own goal.
  - franktankbank 1y ago
    Yea I've got kids I've got to think about here, quite a few. I get very heated trying to understand the whole global aspect. All I see in the US is a vast resource getting stomped upon. I wish your boy the best and any others. Trump as I see him is a wrecking ball, I'm not sure where it ends up.
    - PaulHoule 1y ago
      I'm proud that Vera Rubin discovered evidence for dark matter at my Uni. I'm proud that Douglas Osheroff discovered Superfluid Helium 3. I'm proud that Gerald Salton invented full text search and that Ivan Sutherland invented 3-d graphics rendering as used in video games. I'm even more proud that our ag school is helping farmers in New York and the rest of the world make money and feed a growing population that expects to eat better (however they define "better") in a challenging climate. That our vet school trains vets and farriers. That our ROTC trains officers for all of our armed services. I don't see a contradiction that I'm also proud that Catholic priest and activist Daniel Berrigan against the Vietnam war escaped the FBI in the same building where those officers train.
      - gsf_emergency_2 1y ago
        I know these tribal feelings but I also felt... a wider sense of gratitude when at Leiden I saw enshrined Onnes' equipment for discovering superconductivity, or that otherwise insignificant suburban streets were named after Snell, Leeuwenhoek, Huyghens, Rembrandt, .. and other people I ought to have learnt about There's something to be said for the way pioneers of the hand and mind are remembered as political operators or donors are.. Sure bureaucrats set those up but the exceptionality pointed at there felt inclusive People can feel whatever they want about the achievements at their own institutions, .. it just feels purer when the institution is just a backdrop for these universal achievements .. plus I can go into any Leidse bakery and introduce myself as a scientist without bracing for sideeye (doesn't happen even on HN!) That's not pride, that's just a sense of belonging Why I chose this example. Somehow the Calvinist ressentiment "let no man be greater than I", which is equally present in NL as in the anglo heart/hinterlands.. makes a singular exception for intellectual achievements (as opposed to some purely emotional ones, like some particularly potent puns) Don't know if villages in China will remember their current & future groundbreakers :) There's hope: DeepSeek's hometown put up laudatory red banners for him.. nonironically.. is that like confetti for Apollo 11? I think not. In the latter case, there's a serious case to be made that NASA deserved the confetti more.. that's how ressentiment "works"
  - gsf_emergency_2 1y ago
    Think you'll have to be more specific. In liberal arts nobody comes close, but the "value" of that is largely explained by "networking" (network effects if we're to be charitable :) In theoretical research, gap is rapidly closing. In hard sciences research, I only see clear supremacy in capital intensive areas. Guess that's where the footguns were aimed at. The classroom teaching is a mixed bag
    - PaulHoule 1y ago
      People I know from South Asia complain bitterly about the quality of education they get but they get it. Funny though I used to be proud of the Chinese language collection at my Uni which is one of the greatest outside (any) China and I still am but once I got really interested in the Chinese language it hit me that it's like 1% of what they have at Beijing University.
      - gsf_emergency_2 1y ago
        One might argue networking got Ramanujan to where Canterbrigians can now be proud of him :) My favorite recollection in that place was going through Ken Wilson's notes. IIRC there was FORTRAN. Most interesting was a proof of Dyson's conjecture. Cant really remember because it wasn't that useful. Thought it was weird that he left-- gossip says it was the wife-- but nice that some people still bothered. Institutions rise & fall. Become cringe. Achievements can endure, but only thru the effort of wider communities to distill and distribute.
potato3732842 1y ago
The institution that created all the people who told us that globalization would make us all richer and the world freer when it seems to have done the opposite on a timeline just barely longer than the careers of those people while that industry goes on to severely lighten the pockets of every subsequent generation? From where I'm sitting it looks like the bully finally made his way around to picking on someone who had it coming.
- danaris 1y ago
  Just because all the people who touted globalization went to college doesn't mean that college was the reason for it. That's ridiculously surface-level thinking. Higher education also gave us all the people who told us that was a bad idea, with graphs, and sources, and evidence. Higher education also gave us all the people who did the research that created the technologies we're using today. Higher education also gave us all the doctors, lawyers, engineers, rocket scientists, brain surgeons, and literally every other highly skilled worker we have. Higher education is absolutely vital to any functioning modern society. From where I'm sitting it looks like you've got a chip on your shoulder against higher education, and are attempting to reduce the entire sector—which is incredibly diverse—to a single genuinely bad viewpoint that you don't even provide any evidence higher education produced (as opposed to simply "a few ideologically motivated people who received higher education produced").
  - potato3732842 1y ago
    Every time a civil war erupts in the middle east there's some warmongers screeching "but what about the <ethnic/religious minority in the relevant country>, we ought to care about them" as a pretext for getting involved. You are engaging in the exact same. The primary reason academic labs churn out technological advancement for Microsoft, Exxon, etc, etc, is because the tax code makes it preferential to do that rather than run the same thing in-house. Also, I would like to note the slight of hand you just pulled between education and academia. There is no problem with doctors and lawyers getting their training. But that is absolutely distinct from professional academia. Those people are the customers. They are in and out. The institutions themselves are absolutely corrupt. It is very comparable to the catholic church scooping up all the wealth in europe in the 13-1500s and justifying it by embedding themselves in mundane parts of society and then screeching "but without us who will do the thing" as if that justified everything else they were up to. (Though to be fair, academia is not the only institution subject to such criticism these days).

wiredfool 1y ago

Music, movies, microcode and high speed pizza delivery.

dotancohen 1y ago
Don't forget spaceflight. The US (well, SpaceX) dominates in both manned and unmanned cost to orbit and time to orbit.
dylan604 1y ago
You say movies while a sibling comment mentioned media. However, more and more movies are not shot in the USA. Productions have been moving out of Hollywood for a really long time, and some of it is in other states, but more and more are leaving the US altogether. This is why Trump shot off that late night tweet/truth about placing tariffs on movies made outside the US. The only thing the US still has on movies is the mystique of Hollywood. The ability to shoot a film is not unique to the US at all
- shawn_w 1y ago
  It's a quote from Snow Crash.

Esophagus4 1y ago

Fortunately, there are still plenty: financial services / capital markets, tech, biotech / pharma, media / entertainment, e-commerce, higher ed. Obviously, there are lots of players in those categories, but the U.S. is at or near top of the pack there. We just happen to be optimizing for the wrong thing right now. I heard a columnist say, incredulously, “China wants our financial services industry, and we want their manufacturing industry”

franktankbank 1y ago
> China wants our financial services industry, and we want their manufacturing industry Which one is easier to nab?
- Esophagus4 1y ago
  Tbh I have no idea… financial services, I’m guessing from the way the question was asked?
  - franktankbank 1y ago
    No I'm asking also. I guess financial services is based primarily on trust/enforcement. Industry is based on toxic backbreaking labor and deep knowhow. Maybe I'm missing something about financial services, maybe its our ruthless military backing? I don't know man.
    - Esophagus4 1y ago
      Well I don’t know much about manufacturing tbh, but for China to take a chunk of our financial services industry would be very difficult. The dollar is still the world’s reserve currency by a long way, American capital markets are still the world’s largest and safest, and investors do not like capricious governments that don’t always adhere to established practices and rule of law (see: Ant Financial). Investors don’t want to put money in a place where saying the wrong thing or associating with the wrong person could negatively impact your ability to transact in that country (also see: Russia c. 1990). So I would assume it would take decades for China to maneuver the world away from American financial services.

skeezyboy 1y ago

>is that by continuing down a path of fewer and fewer specializations we get pinched off completely. you exist on americas economic downslope, sadly. an ever declining standard of living in a post manufacturing economy. china and everyone after can just copy your progress and basically be America in its boom days

like_any_other 1y ago

> What are our strengths/specializations in your opinion? Not static. The parent post reminds us that "Made in USA" meant low quality. But so did "Made in China". These things change, but if the national-level policy is "let the market figure it out" (the polar opposite of China's approach), they don't change for the better.

AnimalMuppet 1y ago
And before that, "Made in Japan" meant cheap junk, even within my lifetime.
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  Yeah, it seems to start out that way.

gsf_emergency_2 1y ago

Reposted because 1)you might have been too young to have read it (1992) 2)outsourcing and trade balance was in the full quote >When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else: music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery --Snow Crash,1992

franktankbank 1y ago
Sorry, I'm not sure the relevance of a fiction from 30+ years ago. I know I sound like a dick but seriously why should I care about it?
- AnimalMuppet 1y ago
  You don't have to care about the book. The point of a quote is the quote. Why should you care about a quote from any time period? Because it expresses something well. Why should you care about an older quote? Because it expresses something well enough to have endured.
  - franktankbank 1y ago
    It's a quote from a fiction of a bygone era though. You think China can't write microcode? You think only USA has big breasted women and men with chiseled abs? None of this makes any sense. High speed pizza had to be tongue in cheek as written. Maybe you missed the point and it was all written tongue in cheek because who truly cares about those things if you don't have all your other bases covered? Maybe I missed the point. Are we already pinched off?