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“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
by supportengineer 1y ago
“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”
- jmclnx 1y agoForgot one, weapons that kill massive amounts of people at once, the US is by far number one in that.
- floatrock 1y agoIncluding schoolchildren!
- Onavo 1y agoThat's kinda the point. The whole neoliberal push for capitalism and market access is rooted in the idea of comparative advantages and specialization driving costs down.
- frfl 1y agoHad to glance up and check this wasn't HiroProtagonist's account writing this https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=HiroProtagonist https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=HiroProtagonist
- Eric_WVGG 1y ago:) (“Snow Crash”, Neal Stephenson, 1992)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- lisbbb 1y agoYeah, I got the reference, but it was bullcrap then and it's still bullcrap now, too.