US post WW2 boom is over and they squandered it.
We have been running on old money for decades. We used China for our slave labor, and now they make the best stuff and don’t need us. That’s why the US is 70% service industry now. We are basically two rich trust fund babies jerking ourselves from off surrounded by slave labor, but eventually we run out of money. We are at the running out of money phase
Yeah but this is round two: science boogaloo. We have a government actively hostile to science and research, throwing away where we still had a leading position.
In particular, we’re reversing the brain drain from China. If they’re becoming slightly less repressive and welcome science while we’re cutting research, cutting legal immigration, driving cuts by racism and judging research by whether the ai classifies it as “woke”, too many researchers who would have come here may no longer feel welcome
Yes, that little bump the Americans got after the 1940s because of some, er… “immigrants” has long since run out.
Let’s call it a prolonged international exchange program.
This is part of why I am (slowly) learning Mandarin.
I’m so tempted to, tbh. I wonder how hard it’d be to go from joyou Kanji to hanzi.
I can read probably 1000ish kanji (maybe more), and some are super easy. Others are less so 漢 -> 汉 is … what?
I have a feeling I’ll have to learn traditional and simplified at the same time and that feels a bit daunting. 😅
Wo ye xuexi hanyu, yi dian dian
“Is overtaking?” Sorry buddy, that point lies in the past. China dominates nearly all of the relevant future technologies and is still ramping up its investments. There’s no stopping them now.
Even in the AI sector they seem to be only a pace or two behind. Their models are as good and require less compute. It really does feel like we are falling behind in everything.
Even in the AI sector
they said relevant future technologies
Solid burn
“Their models are as good and require less compute.”
In a sense, this is exactly why I think that China will inevitably overtake the US in this field too. Even besides things like Deepseek, which distills LLMs dominant in the US into a more streamlined model, China also seems to be putting more resources into researching AI that doesn’t need to start out with mahoosive amounts of data.
Who knew that taking funding for scientific research away from government institutes and universities and giving it to ketamine-addicted con men would have negative consequences.
it’s not negative to the con men. a nation of science-averse suspicious uneducated half wits is exactly what they need to stay in power
but also stagnate
China already did long time ago, and US were already finished before they put Trump on the spot.
All the insanity from ‘Trump’, was planned by think tanks years before, so ALL lib/dem presidents just played the big think tank game just like Trump, and he is just showing the real face/intents of the US fascist dictatorship. None of them - no matter ‘side’ cared about causes or people, and all of them played the pre-set game dictated by the US Oligarchs.
Current US behavior are just ‘mask off’ that shows who is really in charge in the US “Democracy” and what they think of anything else than keeping their property/power.
While the states is busy overtaking Turkmenistan as Worlds Weirdest Dictatorship
What is so weird about Turkmenistan? Is it where they have a huge shiny statue of their previous “leader”? Not too weird…
A wonderful series of photo-heavy blog posts about Ashgabat, Turkmenistan can go some way to answering this question.
Wow, thanks so much for sharing this. I value this small glimpse into a part of the world I know next to nothing of. I loved how the low amount of text in these posts enhanced the surreal feeling of the images, e.g. an image captioned by “[place] empty at noon”, followed by an image captioned “[place] empty at night”
you forgot “[place] empty in the evening” between these two :-)
Most countries have that, no? Mount Rushmore comes to mind
That’s just America’s fascism peeking out to remind you it was always there.
They just ran out of large populations of local brown people to oppress so they go over seas to do it now.
I think it’s the guy obsessed with horses.
To be fair, those are some very fuckable horses. For people into stuff like that, I mean,
Already done, bruh. 10 years of Republicans tearing down everything led to this. Not a shocker.
It’s been more like 40 years of Republican rule.
It’s truely a team effort the Republicans and Democrats are the ratchet effect manifested.
The FPTP system ensures you will only get those two choices so if you want to effect change its probably easiest to do it at the primary level.
People always say ‘progressives can’t get elected nationally’ or whatever forgetting FPTP ensures things will swap back (under the assumption that one side doesn’t flip fascist before that happens, big assumption in this climate I know) because eventually people will tire of the person in power and either vote for ‘change’ or stay home.
They’re banning books, that says a lot.
Maybe because China is not exclusively focusing on Improving AI?
It’s because they make everything and have spare money to spend on research.
The US runs on debt, and we are running out of debt.
Also because China is not experiencing a religious movement that rejects science.
The evangelicals made a deal with a grifter.
Maybe?
Possibly?
I feel as though the low standard of living of the average Chinese national is a more decisive factor. The resources that could be spent on public welfare programs are spent on research and subsidies instead.
I mean, resources aren’t being spent on public welfare programs in the US either. We only have a higher standard of living because of the legacy of (roughly) the New Deal era, when we were investing in it as well as unions winning a lot of labor reforms. Those preexisting advantages have only been slowly eroding for the last 40-odd years.
They absolutely are.
Let’s say I get into a car accident or have cancer. Treatment involves expensive chemotherapy, blood transfusions, and multiple rounds of major surgery.
If I’m in the poorest 10%-30% of the population, the care is provided free of charge. If I’m poor-but not that poor- I have the option to receive the expensive treatment and just not pay. It will just negatively impact my credit score, but I can also get away with “paying what I can afford.”
…this is just one example. Everything from our food to our electronics are subsidized by the government. Most of the resources are more or less taken from poorer nations. If they don’t play ball, we withhold aid, bribe officials, loan their enemies weapons, or finance a coup.
Saying ‘It will just negatively impact your credit score’ like it’s nothing in a capitalist nation where nearly all financial trust is based on how effectively you pay back your creditors is a pretty wild take.
Especially when a car and home are the bare minimum for most people to be able to function in the US (public transport is laughable anywhere outside a metropolis) and the average person isn’t getting either without a loan.
I wouldn’t be so quick to ignore medical debt. The average retired couple spends $350000 on medical expenses in the US. The system is a lot more dysfunctional than you make it out to be.
It could be better, but even the person with crippling medical debt lives luxuriously relative to the global norm. I think it could be better, but I think it’s important to understand exactly how much we have.
Where we got it is also important. I think it’s important to understand the exact role that weapons manufacturers and corporate chronies play in bolstering our lifestyles. At the end of the day, I don’t think the average citizen wants to know.
Running up medical debt, declaring bankruptcy, and expecting the inflated costs being charged by the insurance system to just sort of absorb it is entirely different from the government having public welfare programs!
You do see how it’s different, right?!
It’s not a difficult concept. Conservatives only want money and power. So, religion everybody to death and kill education…specifically science. They require an uneducated population. See MAGA as an example.
Here’s the thing a lot of MAGA aren’t uneducated as in they aren’t lacking an education, they’re stupid, brainwashed, propagandized, cultish, and manipulated but not necessarily any more uneducated than your average progressive or lib. The problem with a lot of them is environmental, you can have the most well educated person but if they grew up in say Seventh Day Adventism then there’s a pretty good chance they’re borderline braindead outside of their specific field due to things like thought terminating cliches.
Conservatism at least in the US has all the hallmarks of a social cult, basically the insidious twin side of the coin a general social movement is part of. It’s reinforced through dozens of different vectors with possibly billions of dollars thrown into it just to maintain the damned thing.
Reminder a lot of fascists have been educated but they were still stupid due to the blind spots created by their ideology. Same exact thing as now.
The US forfeit that race when they elected drumpf…
Let’s see them try to keep up with incarceration rates per 100k people. USA is truly a world power in that regard.
Yippee.
I wouldn’t say Yippee, both suck.
I wish Europe picks up the pace
We already saw what happens when Europe picks up pace, twice. I think they are fine with the current pace. They just need to kick Putin’s face in.
I hope African countries will have a great leap forward with everyone else busy with geopolitics, without China or the west interfering. They already have the materials, they only need innovative people to utilize it without exploitation.
Nigeria has more births than the whole of Europe.
Hopefully they can do something good, I also have a lot of hope for South Africa, but big things are probably not going to happen in my lifetime
That’s why it was a deadpan “Yippee”, it doesn’t show well in written form.
I think the full stop at the end did the trick
“yippee”
“Both sides” lol cope
Is gay marriage legal in china?
Is china currently bombing anyone?
Is china currently engaged in a genocide of a minority?
No, and the only countries pretending otherwise are involved in non-fictional genocide. Xinjiang is open to the public you fucking moron.
As they should be. They’re investing more in it and have a larger population to work with.
You can’t compete with a nation that doesn’t feel bad about exploitation of workers. If the workers cooperate then you can get a crazy amount of productivity out of them. The united states is losing its power because we aren’t willing to work as we used to. It’s a tradeoff, but I’m fine with it except that I’m not sure I trust China/Xi Jinping as the world’s superpower. He eliminated term limits when he took power, and I’m sure has no intention of going anywhere for a long time. Everyone so busy celebrating Trump looking bad, but forgetting that it could be and will be a lot worse for the western world under a Chinese dictator.
“The US exploits its workers just as much, but at least it feels very sorry about it!”
What a stupid take! Americans are working longer and harder for less pay and disappearing benefits, with a bleak future and risk of financial ruin of you get sick or terminated.
China is funding research universities and subsidizing Chinese students, while the US is killing scholarships and starting fights with top universities over politics.
Americans are working longer and harder for less pay and disappearing benefits, with a bleak future and risk of financial ruin of you get sick or terminated.
I mean you’re right and that’s bad; I’m just pointing out that China has had gruesome 996 working weeks (72 hours/week) for decades IIRC and i’m not sure if chinese people work that much voluntarily or involuntarily.
The point of the article is that of you stop investing in science, you are going to fall behind in science.
Wait, you claim the US feels bad about the exploitation of workers? That the workers productivity hasn’t skyrocketed while wages are stagnant?
Oh let him have his little China meltdown, he’s got football to watch Monday.
