Trump's new tariff proposals include a 25% tax on video game consoles

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fatslob-:O said:

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. 

Yes, low pay can be good in some instances, and bad in others. The government regulations on low pay were mainly aimed at stopping the bad effects. But that's a whole other can of worms. Don't get me started on how much I hate these stupid "$15 an hour for minimum wage" types. 

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. 

Oh, no I completely agree that China needs to be reeled in. Tariff's are just not the way to do it. Buying our defense tech from China would be a military disaster. Honestly we should have never started trading with China in the first place. Any country that has that level of human rights problems shouldn't be a trade partner. They should be like North Korea IMO. Left on their own to rot, until they decide to join the rest of the world. 

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:

Right, but you said that government research only helps when playing catch-up. The examples I gave were to show instances where government research helped, while we were already the market leader. USA being the market leader was a crucial part of my argument. 

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 ... 

@bolded: That would have been true until 2014, but since then China tightened up their environmental policies a lot.

And it was high time for them, as the Water was both getting rare and slowly undrinkable with high amounts of cancer-causing NDMA; over 15% of the soils is strongly polluted, severely affecting farming and lending to the water problem mentioned above; overgrazing made the Gobi desert grow by about 1000 square miles per year; the air became unbreathable in certain cities during certain times (which is probably why China changed course on environment in the first place); and had the largest algae bloom ever in the Chinese sea, threatening their fisheries.

Or in short, the unchecked exploitation of their ressources started to threaten their own economy and the lives of their inhabitants. So, they had to change their ways.

Huawei is, sorry, was certainly dominant in the US, especially in rural regions, which relied very much upon them. But outside of there, their domination is much smaller. In bigger cities, it's normally either Ericcson or Nokia who are behind the carriers, not Huawei.

@underlined: Well. there is a new space race, and more exactly a new race to the moon, with the US, China and now also Russia again trying to get there first, and this time to stay there. So a push from governmental research might be exactly what is needed to push the US faster forward.