HAHAHA, Glorious Freedom Land =D

Made my day.

Hopefully this is all over by the time next gen consoles come out....Trump isn't going to want this lasting while he is up for re-election...

why not? if he can't get a real war going an economic war is his best chance to present himself as tough and manly

I don't think economic wars spur the same type of "FREEDOM!" response as having to pay more for the stuff you want.

Of course, he could do it anyway, would just be dumb. And would probably result in him losing the election, so we'd just have to wait till like Feb 2021 to get all the new toys.

Its difficult being the president when a new console generation starts because they always get blamed if it doesn't go well.

I still blame Obama for the Xbox One debacle, but it got much better under Trump. Some say Trump demanded MS fix Halo MCC.

In practice, the Trump is a war monger narrative isn't coming to fruition.

To the contrary, he's surrounded by people on both sides that seem to encourage invasions.

Are any electronics made in Africa? South Africa maybe?

The Americans voted for it. - No point worrying about spilt milk.
Pricing might actually fall in line with AUD for next-gen hardware? (Though our dollars monetary value is less, so technically we might pay less.)

They are pretty much delaying the inevitable though, China will overtake the USA, only a matter of when, not if. - But it will be interesting to see how the trade war affects things economically, it will provide the empirical evidence to other countries if they consider a similar path in the future on whether it is a good or bad thing.

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. 

"The US was nearly ALWAYS the market leader regardless because the rest of the world was too busy recreating their own physical infrastructure ..."

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. 


"ARPANET was nothing more than a concept. The internet as we know it today is largely thanks to the contributions of many private investments and work from large corporations such as Bell Laboratories and Cisco but many of them had very few state subsidies work with as well. The internet wasn't created mostly by some government funding like you seem to believe but it was created in collaboration with many corporations all over the world ..."

ARPANET was not just a concept. It was built, and actually existed. A concept is something that only exists as an idea. https://www.internetsociety.org/internet/history-internet/brief-history-internet/

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. 

"Yeah, I'm not sure if making a comparison between military technology like nuclear bombs to consumer technology is a great idea when the former has to face no market competition ..."

The point is that government research does help technology move forward even if we are a market leader (or technological leader in this case).

Sorry, but it doesn't work that way in the real world ... 

increased enrollments =/= proportionally increased prices 

And not to mention, post-secondary schools were far less advanced back then but they also had fewer facilities as well ... 

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.

They're a "mixed economy" for the right reasons, you have the wrong reasons to implicate why America should model it's mixed economy like China's for totally different reasons. China's system is optimized for growth and self sufficiency. Trump realizes a weakness with America's system is that it's not optimized for holding on to global monopolies and he's trying to fix this but it's proving to be very hard to prevent the transfer of power to China ... 

Trump NEEDS to reel in China otherwise silicon valley as we know it may deindustrialize like the rust belt did and we won't see American brands like Apple, Google, Facebook or the others out there anymore in the future if they get ousted by Chinese competitors ... 

Silicon valley performing well is good for America's interests but performing badly threatens American interests and to a lesser extent their allies interests as well ... 

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. 

No us Australians will pay more even if you add 25% to US rrp for the PS5 there are two reasons the first is the dollar difference is around 30% the other is price  gouging the accc have stated in the past that console and games rrp sits well  above the conversion rates and that's factoring in import costs for the consoles and peripherals, something that the actual games don't have since Sony's has one of the worlds largest blu-ray plant's in Sydney that covers Oceana and parts of SouthEast Asia.