| Cerebralbore101 said: Environmental regulations are not a slog for economic growth. They are an insurance policy to stave off massive environmental disasters, and other external costs of pollution. If I dump raw sewage into the town's local water supply, and everybody gets sick, is that not a massive drain on the local economy? The dust bowl was one of the main causes of the great depression. Chernobyl nearly poisoned half of Europe in the 80's. The economics of currency is ultimately dependent on the economics of ecology. Destroy the world's ecology so that crops can't grow, and fish can't be caught. Then see how important environmental regulations are. As far as Ericsson and Nokia falling victim to Chinese competitors like Huawei... Who's to say that this is a result of those policies? Correlation =/= causation after all. |
Case in point, China keeps environmental regulations to a minimum and they are experiencing a boom in productivity plus keeping it that way allows China to dictate the supply of rare earth metals worldwide. Environmental regulation ONLY serve to get in the way if it unreasonably forces austerity and China is taking this advantage to heart. A 'sustainable' future is not worth sustaining if your citizens end up being jobless ...
China especially defies the idea of low pay somehow having bad effects. In more ways than I could imagine the Chinese are the most ideal employees possible. They aren't entitled to any rights, work long hours, are paid relatively low, and all this is fueled purely with nationalism ...
Ericsson and Nokia ARE falling victim to Huawei. Have you not seen their losses or declines over the years ? Huawei is the most dominant corporation in the carrier business equipment ...
What exactly do you suggest would be a better way to rein in China other than tariffs ? Do we just flat out call a sanction from the entire western world against them or what ?
| Cerebralbore101 said:
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That was far into the past. Today, most of the breakthroughs we see DON'T come from government funded research. The space age will likely be brought about because of some large corporation instead of NASA ...
This ISN'T the sputnik moment anymore for America where they heavily invested in a technological race against the Soviet Union. The biggest problem with government 'managed' research is that in the case of a democracy there's no guarantee that the manager in that project would be a 'specialist'. We don't need politicians in technical projects, we need the 'specialists' and we're unlikely to get that with American leaders ...
The reason why state subsidies for research in China work so well as it does is that the CCP are full of technocrats and if you can prove that you're a qualified 'specialist' to them in a specific field of high need then you'll automatically be granted a lot of power from the party to further pursue technical progress. This feedback process is ideal for reverse engineering and sometimes it works at the leading edge but without applying a similar model of govenrnance in America, they won't be able to see the same benefit since government funding would be a waste ...
| Cerebralbore101 said:
Bell Lab's UUCP came after ARPANET pioneered computer networks. The first router was built before Cisco was a public company. It was made by a team of people at Stanford. http://pdp10.nocrew.org/docs/cisco.html Packet Switching, TCP/IP, Email, and Hypertext were all the result of government agencies, or people employed by them. Ethernet was invented at Xerox. Stanford (a private university) came up with the router (not Cisco). So yes, it was largely the government. I'm more than willing to give Xerox/Stanford fair credit, for their contributions, but to say it wasn't mostly the government is simply revisionist history. |
ARPANET was NEVER sold to consumers so it was pretty much just a concept outside of labs!
IMO ISPs like AT&T, Verizon, T-mobile, Vodafone, etc are the true creators behind the internet because they were the ones who made the backhauls which is extremely important infrastructure and then we have hardware companies like Cisco. The 'internet' that we see today is not a government creation but it is a corporate collaboration ...
The internet is more than just predated hardware, it's an idea that can't be solely government funded and in fact the closest predecessor to the internet was NSFNET which had tons of private funding from ISPs rather than ARPANET which ended up being a dead end since the government wasn't interested in developing the backhual or maintaining their network technology ...
| Cerebralbore101 said:
The point is that government research does help technology move forward even if we are a market leader (or technological leader in this case). |
Name me one very important technology that was created during this millennium by government funded research ...
Pretty sure government funded research didn't give us AI, wireless communications technology, automation, or the latest medical technology so what exactly did they do so far recently that makes them so 'essential' to research like you imply ?
| Cerebralbore101 said:
But you were the one arguing that prices increased due to increased enrollment. Did you change your mind? As long as we can agree that more people going to college isn't what drove prices up, we're good. |
I didn't specifically argue that a linear increase in enrollment meant a linear increase in prices as well. In the case of post-secondary schools it seems when demand increases linearly, the price increases exponentially ...
Tuition free post-secondary school is NOT an entitlement! If it were that simple then just about every program including the likes of Art History would be a ROI but that's not so in the real world. Schools CAN'T keep running if their students aren't profitable ... (money is important to maintain the school)
| Cerebralbore101 said:
Whoa, whoa, whoa! I am not saying we should model ourselves after China. I'm saying we should go back to how things operated in the 60's with government/corporations working together to grow the economy. I'm not sure why we need to foster, and then hold onto monopolies in order to be competitive. Aren't monopolies bad for the overall economy as a whole? Or are you talking about a monopoly in the sense that every major corp is located in the US? I think that would be very hard to hold onto. China isn't the only country with cheap labor, and little value for human rights. Corps will always look for the cheapest place to build goods, and the USA will never be that place again. USA should be for inventing things, and upkeep of services. 3rd world countries should be the manufacturing base. But I do see the problem with China. They have the cheap labor AND the tech. Or enough of the tech to be able to compete unfairly, when combined with their labor. |
Maybe but nearly no American politicians today understand the importance of technological leadership so there's no political will for it ...
America needs to foster monopolies because it gives the Americans a competitive edge against other nations. Monopolies are bad for the opposing country's economy but it's good for the domestic economy since it stands to make more money. I'm not arguing that the US should hold every monopoly but just the most essential ones and yes it's hard to compete with China on just pricing alone since just about everyone would fail ...
America indeed should be inventing things but now it is China who is starting to invent important technology as well so can you imagine a future where it is SOLELY China that invents ALL important technology in the future ?
Can you imagine just how annoying it would be if China successfully 'colonized' the moon and claimed it for themselves just because they somehow invented superior aerospace technology ?
