http://www.nnseek.com/e/talk.politics.misc.misc/ Posts for talk.politics.misc.misc Fri, 24 Nov 2006 10:21:57 PST http://www.nnseek.com/ http://www.nnseek.com/img/64.png 64 64 NNSeek http://www.nnseek.com/e/talk.politics.misc.misc/affordable_economics_4545814t.html http://www.nnseek.com/e/talk.politics.misc.misc/affordable_economics_4545814t.html example.com> wrote in
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> Gene wrote:
>
>>> 1. Accept lower wages to be competitive in wage with them
>>> 2. Boost your productivity to be able to produce much more with few
>>> workers
>>
>> No you left off the most important way to compete. INNOVATION - the
>> most important reason for America's success. If we ALWAYS make a
>> better widget we don't have to lower wages or be more productive.
>
> Correct. But for INNOVATION you need 2 factors:
> - Motivation. To innovate you need educated people. If the students
> see that all good paying jobs that require education are sent offshore
> and for the few remaining here the pinhead bosses ask the engineers
> and scientists to accept lower and lower wages to compete with India,
> do you believe the students will be motivated enough to waste 4,5-6,10
> years to get a BS, MS or PhD ?

Education doesn't happen without motivation - that is true but I run
across young folks all the time that are full of hope and motivation but
without any means or direction.

Our society is the most innovative society ever for a reason. We look to
the future - mainly because we are not incumbered with a past. Societies
like Japan, China and India are through their religions and their society
intently focused on the past and this has resulted in numerous well
trained individuals fully capable of maintaining and fowarding current
techonologies but incapable of finding the new technologies of the
furture. This does exclude those raised in western societies who ability
to innovate is at least on par.

We need a man with a vision to provide direction. Today we get men with
frayed and wornout ideas who think yelling them louder makes them
different. America need a FDR or a JFK now.

Perhaps that is why I am not as for down the road yet. I still have an
inexpilcable hope that once again the perfect man will arrive with the
perfect solution at the perfect time. The next president must be that
man.

> In the last 6 years for example the wages for cutting edge IT
> professionals dropped at more than twice the rate for unskilled (HS
> dropout) jobs. In the same period, the job security for having this
> hightech skills is the lowest. Why would anyone be willing to get a
> degree in math to scoop poop ?
>
> http://www.ihatemycubicle.com/2005/05/bright_future_w_1.html

Well that is to be expected in some new fields that can be as well
trained in India and China as here. But we still have the graduate
schools to out strip the world if we start teaching American kids instaed
of foreign students - a trip down the halls of any good graduate school
will point out the problem quickly.
>
> - Infrastructure. You need laboratories and research centers to do
> research. A for proffit company is always going to invest where they
> can get the cheaper workforce. Read the news posted on the IT blogs:
> IBM open a new research center in India, Microsoft invest x billions
> in India, Cisco open a new research center in India, Dell move design
> team in India, ..... You don't see anymore news like: IBM open a new
> research center in US.
>
NIH, NIT(National Institute of Technology)? Sounds like a great idea.

> While I fully agree with you that INNOVATION is the key to progress,
> it is obviously that US can not rely anymore in innovation comming
> from private corporations. They are going to move all their research
> and development offshore leaving US in the dust. The only private
> companies that US can trust anymore are small businesses unable to set
> up an offshore operation. If you read my post, I said there this as
> part of the solution:
>

Sure we can, we just have to use the tax code and access to our market to
bend the corporations to our will instead of them using bribary to buy
our elected officials and making us dance to their tune.

> """"
> - publically financed research centers which will transfer the new
> discoveries to domestic small businesses with a contract of not
> offshoring that technology for a couple of years
> """
>
> That is. No more research grants to multinational or large
> corporations. Set up publically funded (from taxes on untrusted large
> corporations ) research and development centers, and once this centers
> develop a new technology, they will transfer it to small businesses to
> be manufactured.
>
Research grants are already going in large part to American universities.
Universities that are training the next generation of foreign scientist.

>> In the past we produced a product and sold it well until a foreign
>> company reverse engineered it and made it on the cheap and recently
>> with Japan - better. If we were smart we would put as much importance
>> in technology secrets as we do military secrets. We should protect
>> trade secrets and patents and copywrites like we do the secrets of
>> WMD's because loss of our economy will devastate us just as surely as
>> a designer bug or a nuclear armed terrorist. We spent the 50's, 60's
>> and 70's leaping from consumer innovation to consumer innovation
>> today we are graduating kids who can not innovate their lunch out of
>> their lunch pail.
>
>
> That is actually an obsolete concept.
>
> US actually did that with the encryption technology, but they were
> forced to lift the embargo in the latest years of Clinton
> administration since after a international congress on cryptography
> become clear that the researchers around the world cooperating freely
> on the subject overpassed US tightly controlled crypto technology. And
> by following old regulations, it was actually US harmed by lack of use
> of modern crypto technologies.
>
> The embargo/ban can be very usefull for a limited period of time.
> Let say 5..7 years until they are capable to reverse engineer all the
> process. Then it is obsolete and doesn't make any sense anymore.
>
> I actually favor even a reduction on the time a patent is granted.
> Because the corporate greed use trivial patents or patents based on
> prior art to discourage innovation comming from smaller firms.
> Companies like IBM or Microsoft fill for thousands and thousands of
> patents each year, only less that 1%% of them actually bring something
> somehow new or usefull and less that 0.1%% are actually innovations.
>
> However, they do that just to build a warchest pattent portfolio to
> discourage smaller companies that came with an innovative idea to
> enter their market. If a smaller company came with an innovative
> product and take the market share from a gigant, he is slapped with a
> hundred of trivial patent infringements. The legal costs may be
> prohibitive for the smaller company so they are practically coerced
> into accepting a buyout despite the fact that if the process go thru,
> all the charges would be dismissed.
>
> That is, the abuse in US patent system makes it a huge brake against
> innovation instead of encouraging innovation anymore.
>
>
> The single reason US is so advanced in military technologies is
> because they do invest huge amounts of money there. US research
> spending for military tops the research in military technology of all
> rest of the world combined !!!
>
> However, in civil industry US companies do not invest anymore in US.
> So, the government must get involved and do with civil research in US
> what they do with military research. If you expect private companies
> to invest in research and development they do so ..... in India.

I don't think US corporations are inherently bad or good they follow the
path of least resistance to the greatest profit - that is neither good or
bad any more than a shark is good or bad. But the corporate sharks can be
herded into a path benificial to both Americans and their intersests if
courage and conviction to do so can be found in any of next presidential
candidates.

Again I can agree to most of this. But I think you are a step further
down the road than I am willing to go yet.

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