US Report Sees Perils To America's Tech Future 373
dcblogs sends this excerpt from ComputerWorld:
"The ability of the U.S. to compete globally is eroding, according to an Obama administration report released Friday. It described itself as a 'call to arms.' Titled 'The Competitiveness and Innovative Capacity of the United States (PDF),' it points out a number of 'alarms,' including: the U.S. ran a trade surplus in 'advanced technology products,' which includes biotechnology products, computers, semiconductors and robotics, until 2002. In 2010, however, the U.S. 'ran an $81 billion trade deficit in this critically important sector.' In terms of federal research, in 1980 the federal government provided about 70% of all dollars spent on basic research, but since then the government's share of basic research funding given to all entities has fallen to 57%. It also says real median household income has stalled, and argues for policies that foster innovation."
Re:Fine. Kill software patents. (Score:3, Interesting)
0) Most ideas are a dime a dozen, the difficult bit is actually doing it well and successfully. Despite all their efforts on copying China isn't going to get a man on the moon by next month. Why should someone who just happened to patent some obvious idea be able to stop others who could be better able at implementing the idea?
China wont be in the moon next month because they dont have the technology. If China had hands-on all of our space tech, they would most certainly be in a position to do anything we can do, and do it cheaper. That's the whole point. That's why we keep or space and military tech secret ; So that we remain dominant and the advantages inherent in our investment remain ours, at least for some period of time.
Why would an innovator not want to be protected in the same manner?
Obviously. (Score:5, Interesting)
What's so sad about all this is that anyone outside of the government and the (pardon the term) 1% have known this was coming for a long time now. Hell, I'm sure they knew it was coming too, they just didn't care because they are traitors out to corrupt capitalism and democracy to line their own pockets. I have no problem with capitalism, it's the only viable economic system, but you cannot allow people to corrupt the system of government to tilt the playing field in their favor. That's not capitalism.
I love how the Republicans whine about liberals being in favor of "wealth redistribution" when their own policies are clearly aimed at wealth redistribution in the other direction. Neither strategy is capitalistic and neither strategy is viable in the long term. How, exactly, is propping up the music industry, an industry with a completely outdated business model and declining content quality, capitalism? How is it helpful to the country to do so? The answer, of course, is that it isn't. It's just what happens when you let executives of the failing industry bribe politicians legally. Meanwhile, the copyright legislation they have pushed for is wreaking havoc on the innovation which made America competitive in the first place. They sell this to voters under the illusion that the US will be on top of the food chain forever, regardless of what we do, and we can just dictate new rules when we don't like the old ones. It's not going to work that way for long.
There have been articles on the decline of basic research in this country for years now. I remember posting links to USENET on the same ever so long ago. It's the same thing that has happened to manufacturing that people have been decrying for decades. The US is moving towards an economy based entirely on gambling in the stock market. We don't produce things anymore, hell we don't even INVEST in things anymore, we just let bankers find new ways to wring more money out of the middle class. High frequency trading? Seriously? No one sees a problem with an industry that produces absolutely no value and no product whatsoever? This is all well and good for them...until the rest of the world catches on that they are adding no value they can continue to exploit them as well. However, they'll be driving their Mercedes through endless ghetto with bullets whizzing by their windows.
It's not a sustainable model for a society, but it is exactly what we are heading for and it's exactly what we deserve. We've chosen to become fat and stupid and to allow ourselves to support people who offer nothing in return. Liberals are certainly NO better, but where I see it the most is in the Republican party. People are willing to go to the mat for people who make more in a year than they will in their lifetime, even though those people are demonstrably bad at their jobs. Executives are leaving companies worse off than when they started and yet somehow still receive massive bonuses...and the right leaning middle class supports this! Their ostensibly "capitalism friendly" political opinions lead them into arguments with leftists...and they forget that they're not just supposed to oppose leftists, but they're supposed to be capitalists themselves and support capitalistic policies. They shout down people who decry poor copyright legislation and invest in companies which are just garbage. Look at the tech bubble. All you had to do was get an IT kid fresh out of college, pay him 40 grand a year, and he could tell you that investing in a company that had no product and provided no service, but had a nifty website, was a bad idea.
I could rant all day about this stuff. Won't do any good though. The stupid have won and the system is beyond hope. Hopefully I can eek out a decent living and die before the inevitable crash.
lot of fluff (Score:4, Interesting)
Second, it makes the assumption that government spending on these pillars works. As I noted [slashdot.org] in a recent thread about government funded engineering and research, there are vast differences of several orders of magnitude in how efficient research projects are from the best to the worst.
Perhaps the Obama administration has enough of a clue to set up effective research operations though I haven't seen any indication of that. But even if so, we still have to face that Congress, holder of the purse, has little interest in efficient research operations nor do most of the likely recipients of the funding.
This particularly holds for the least accountable of scientific research, so-called "blue sky" research. Obviously, the US government is quite capable of spending lots of money on blue sky research, but I don't grant that it is similarly capable of getting lots of blue sky research in return for that money.
We see similar problems with the other two pillars. Educational loans are notorious for having massively driven up the cost of education while simultaneously resulting in a drop in quality of many college degrees. And infrastructure building is a shifty past time that often results in near useless, overly expensive, or shoddy infrastructure that doesn't serve the role for which it was constructed.
This incidentally was the original topic of the thread when someone alleged that engineers are envious of China because of its ability to order massive engineering projects (which also happen to be infrastructure building projects). My original disagreement a few posts up that thread was that such projects had several serious problems with them, chiefly a deeply flawed implementation (but also bad economics) that made them unworthy of an engineer's consideration. That didn't go over well for some reason.
None of these address the gap between coming up with something in the lab and transporting that to something useful to society. It's not innovation, if that gap cannot be jumped.
Re:Fine. Kill software patents. (Score:4, Interesting)
This is wrong.
Slavery is cheap labor that you don't care about (you wouldn't give a shit about the quality of life of slaves when you determined your country's average quality of life of), and that doesn't cost the public much (don't need to factor those bodies in when building roads, hospitals, courts, schools, etc., etc.).
This is not wrong. Economics has been called The Dismal Science. A lot of people think it's called that because of all the boring numbers and supply and widgets and demand and aggregate statistics. In fact nothing could be further from the truth. Economics was named The Dismal Science by Thomas Carlyle who was in favor of slavery. He got really frustrated by economists who kept publishing papers showing that slavery was economically inefficient. Carlyle wrote an article called Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question in which he advocated slavery as a means of regulating the labor market.
~Loyal
Re:It's like a sad joke. (Score:5, Interesting)
At a new year's party - I endured a long conversation of a bunch of self-proclaimed "nerds and geeks" talking about how our new nerdy sci-fi culture was breeding a new generation of brilliant science-and-math oriented geniuses. Because we all grew up loving sci fi tv shows like star trek and star wars, and because we all play video games and read comic books.
I played the bad guy. The stick in the mud. As I always do. I expect not to be invited back next year. I asked the room: how many of them had completed Calculus, or Linear Algebra, or were working in Science or Engineering fields. Not a one. Well, one. But he was a Marketing Manager at a software company, and couldn't write a singe line of code to save his life. I am such a shit - I made them feel bad.
And that's what this is all about. Ego. Math and Science classes are hard work, and when you fail you get bad grades, and feel bad. And there isn't a big audience clapping, or a row of cheerleaders chanting "go team go!" when you win. No. Our culture celebrates ignorance, and punishes brilliance.
I honestly don't think that this nation deserves to be competitive anymore. We had our brief flash of glory. 40 years of selfish, bad policy. It will take a change of heart, and then at least 20 years to build it back. And I don't think that we have the gumption, and the capitalists who run our nation don't want to build anything back. They don't even want to pay to repair bridges. They will leave this country a smoking ruin, and move on to where the money is. Switzerland. Luxembourg. Dubai. KSA.
Re:Fine. Kill software patents. (Score:4, Interesting)
No, we need to go back to the rule that only landowners can vote. Of course, that's a little obsolete these days (lots of upper-middle-class people rent by choice because they're mobile, or live in NYC), so instead, there should be some kind of educational standard to vote, which doesn't discriminate based on race or sex, only educational level (i.e., if you can't understand Darwin's theory, regardless of whether you agree with it, you're too stupid to vote; also, if you don't understand the basic structure of the nation's government, and don't understand that the President doesn't make laws, you have no business voting). Things started really going downhill when any moron on the street could vote, and also when Senators were popularly elected.