A few days ago, I attended a candidate forum (for upcoming elections to statewide office) that was hosted by a Chamber of Commerce affiliated business group that bragged about how they successfully stopped various public transportation projects. The reality is many Americans have been informed that public transportation is incompatible with a growth oriented economy so they naturally vote against it (or fund groups that file lawsuits and other tactics to slow down the development of public transport infrastructure).
I don't think high-speed rail is what the future looks like. The platform to beat is the transit agency-owned robo-taxi. Calling it a taxi is a disservice, though. It's really a 1-, 2-, 5-person bus. If needed, it can scale to 10-, 15-, 20-person and so on.
Consider the following:
- Door to door is massively more convenient than door to hub to hub to door. What's usually overlooked is that it's often more efficient, too.
- In many cities, transit can't compete with cars unless it's in sub-15 minute wait range. But to provide that service level with buses/trains, you need to move around 20000lbs/350000lbs of steel whether there are 5 passengers or 50/500.
- Once a city offers municipal robo-taxi service, it can completely ban privately-owned cars. This means it can remove all non-commercial parking spaces and convert them to lanes. It also means robo-taxis can travel 1 or 2 feet apart and use optimized routing. This can multiply effective road capacity by 2 or more.
IMHO, the real question is whether we need any regional trains at all. Robo-taxis and planes might be enough.
I am afraid we might be too late for maglev party with self driving on the horizon. Non-functioning last mile transportation and ruined cities (as in for pedestrians and density) are another shadow.
India is pretty far behind. There is a lot of progress economically and socially in India but I doubt it’s at the cutting edge of anything besides digital financial networks.
If you read nothing else from the article, read table 1. I’ll summarize it here.
The US leads in the following industries: IT and Information Services, Pharmaceuticals, Other Transportation
China leads in the following industries: Computers and Electronics, Chemicals, Machinery and Equipment, Motor Vehicles, Basic Metals, Fabricated Metals, Electrical Equipment
The authors mention that although China’s workers are still less efficient than American workers, this is changing, and by the time Chinese workers are 80% as efficient as their American counterparts the Chinese economy will be 2-3x the size of America’s.
China's population is rapidly aging and forecast to shrink by 1/3 by the end of the century. This is the primary reason why I think they might not overtake the US.
This is the geopolitics of scale that West is playing against at the moment which easily showcases the intent behind “unrestrained” immigration that is taking place in certain parts of the world. Make no mistake, it’s all planned.
Simply put: you need to throw many many bodies at the problem to even have a shot at keeping up with China. Collectively, the West is way behind in this regard.
China has historically always been a leader in Asia. At its peak, it controlled an empire as vast as the entirety of the EU. Its cultural influence in Asia rivals that of Rome in the West, except that Rome is no more, but China still is.
The US is younger than a single Chinese dynasty. And like all great historic empires, with Chinese ones being great examples, the US is fracturing from the inside. Corruption, apathy, a false sense of exceptionalism, etc.
China has went through this rise and fall dozens of time. This might be the first time for the US.
The reports of the US's death are greatly exaggerated. It's still the world hegemony. China is a regional power. The US is a global one. The US's force projection, alliances, economic integration are and will be unmatched for decades at the very least.
These analyses don't make any sense. The people born in China right now are much more influenced by a combination of contemporary Western and Chinese media/tech than anything having to do with ancient Chinese dynasties.
> The US is younger than a single Chinese dynasty.
Eh? There are like 60 Chinese dynasties throughout history. The US has been around longer than most of them. And some of the dynasties that were around longer than the US has been will lose that title if the US lasts another ~30 years. The Qing, Ming, Tang, etc. dynasties all lasted ~275 years, and the US has been around for 248 by now. But the vast majority of the Chinese dynasties lasted like 10 to 50 years.
I mean, China _was_ _the_ poster child for exceptionalism, they called themselves the middle kingdom and still call themselves the central country. For much of their existence they despised the outside so much they became very insular --and still are, yet they thrive and thrive despite no superficial diversity we so clamor in the West. Their strength is their unity and long-view.
Even when they do copy, they excel. I remember reading an article in Wired 15-20 years ago about counterfeit cloth. Not regular cloth, but the kind that is highly sought after by premier designers. They took a copy to the original manufacturer, and they were blown away by the quality, saying it was better than their original.
It takes tremendous capability to accomplish this, and I thought to myself, What happens when they realize that they can lead?
This meme is based on a premise that copying others is bad. But I would argue the opposite: why keep reinventing what already exists?
Take software engineers, for example. Most spend their entire lives rewriting code that's already been written at many companies simply because sharing is verboten. They might go their entire lives redoing what's already been done for a revolving door of bosses, without ever creating something truly new. The scale of wasted potential is stupendous.
If we all agreed on a mindset of more sharing and copying, those engineers could focus their efforts on real innovation and build the future. And there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of them.
This is not a radical new idea. This was the mindset many software engineers had in the gaming industry (my industry) in the 90s and 00s. Carmack famously released his code under what you might call a "have fun" license[0]. Around late 90s it was re-licensed under GPL to promote open-source/hacker development. This is why DOOM (and Quake) has been hacked to run on everything and used as a base for many games and game engines – real innovation instead of reinventing the same game.
Today game companies guard their code fiercely. I'm not only talking about serious trade secrets, but most frivolous basic libraries, like they would go bankrupt if they shared. Well, guess what, EA shares EASTL[1] and that didn't make them any less dominant in games. Source Engine is also available under a fairly permissive license, as is Unreal Engine's source code. What's the common denominator? They both were written by people very closely aligned with Carmack's hacker culture. Source was born out of Quake, for example.
The hubris of this closed-off approach is evident when new tech like Copilot arrives. Many tech companies panic about it "using their code" when in reality, that code already exists in numerous open-source libs. And Copilot can write 80% of what a mid level engineer writes in games anyways. Even for a principal/fellow level engineer, it is helpful in boilerplate. You can't escape the absurdity of rewriting what's already been written.
How many ways can you allocate memory for a dynamically allocated array anyways? How many ways to implement the PID controller to steer an AI car in games? How many ways to do occlusion culling in graphics? A few, but not many. Yet every company guards it like it's their own secret sauce.
So yeah, it would be pretty mature to revisit our values and go back to what worked in computing.
I am frustrated by the West. In my country alone (Australia), there will probably never be high speed rail between cities. The entire market investment is dominated by bloated real-estate. There is almost no progress. We're pretty much in decline.
A leading innovator (not the leading) on metrics that you can disagree. Article's stats are about patents, "top 100 innovators", unicorns, number of supercomputers, number of innovation clusters(?) and almost everywhere China is behind US and sometimes Japan.
But also some of these stats do not show to me the amount of actual innovation. Approaching US on "share of highly cited researchers" seemed to me like maybe the biggest deal but then I thought how easy it is to cheat that metric...
> Foreign companies still dominate many key areas, but their IP has been eroded over time.
China has been and is being shut off from the West's most innovative industries. The goal is to slow China's progress. I suspect that it's only a matter of time before they innovate their way into technology that will surpass what they lack now. A great advantage they have is that they can focus their resources on single points of need. There is a great advantage in that but there's also the danger that they choose the wrong technology and they get lost and never get anywhere. We'll see what happens. One thing for sure is that they won't just wait and see what happens. They are going to work hard to move forward.
They'll respond by having their politicians (both sides) ban or add 100%+ tariffs on superior Chinese goods.
The whole new Cold War narrative the natsec state in the US has adopted about China is not moored in reality.
The realpolitik is that neither side of the strait wants a significant disruption in commerce. Both sides should figure out a way to practice detente and reduce militarism. The US should do this in good faith.
Many of the industries mentioned in the article are heavily regulated union industries in the U.S.
China also has zero independent unions.
I'm not a union hater, but there was a post here recently about unions in shipyards, with one commenter saying something like "we need to prevent any automation and broaden unions across all shipyards".
That's just not helpful in the long run and if that's the mentality of unions in this country then we're doomed.
The USA, overall, does not encourage the development of high-tech engineering, improved infrastructure, cultural growth, appreciation for academic rigor, etc. By a mixture of miracles we became the world's superpower, but many of our fortuitous circumstances were accidental (mass migration of talented Europeans/Asians in the wake of famines/persecutions, WWII decimating manufacturing in Europe and Asia, abundant natural resources and perfect geography).
However to improve as a country we have to abandon the puerile notion that the US is special for some metaphysical, divine reason. We got lucky and became a perfect environment for the development of the world's leading industries, but that providence is being quickly ceded to China. In terms of overall lifestyle quality we are far behind much of Europe anyways.
The only thing America has that are the best in the world are its research universities (due to money and being able to take advantage of brain drain from around the world), its tech industry and high cultural soft power, areas it once held an overwhelming lead in that are evaporating fast.
Bingo. You hit the nail in the head. Most people who have never been to the US will be surprised when they land as it lacks many features of the developed world (as in comparing to Europe and Japan). What the US has right now is particular access to capital that enables it to attract talent from across the globe. It also has a relatively open system, so you can trade. This made it possible for highly innovative and powerful companies to exist. If you remove these companies and this capital; something that could happen rather quickly (most of them are in Software), a US citizen will probably have the same purchasing power as someone from Brazil.
"To enable those policies, America should embrace a “national power capitalism” suited to the current existential competition. Government must identify key sectors that are critical for national power and invest adequately to win the techno-economic war."
One could even call it capitalism with American characteristics. These days China is often framed as lacking soft power but the degree to which the US is basically adopting Chinese developmental policy, the sentence above could come out of a party study session if you reversed the actors, is kind of funny. I saw someone joke that Jake Sullivan moving the semiconductor factories to Ohio is his version of Mao moving the factories to the hinterland.
From a realpolitik standpoint, China has embraced elements of capitalism as a key strategy for economic growth. If I were to offer a speculative (and somewhat tongue-in-cheek) recommendation for Xi Jinping, it might be to create a free zone modeled on Western liberal traditions to compete more effectively with Silicon Valley and the U.S. Of course, Hong Kong was arguably positioned for this role, but given its recent trajectory, it raises the question of whether such a zone could exist within China's current political framework. Could a new experiment along these lines reconcile liberal economic freedoms with centralized political control?
It won't work. Even if some carveout is made so that it is not "within China's current political framework", after Hong Kong, who can be sure that it would remain so? A "new experiment" along these lines won't be trusted enough to work, at least not during Xi's lifetime.
New experiment is Hainan Free Trade Port FTZ but that's not really vs silicon valley. IMO software/services downstream of hardware/silicon, and geopolitically, PRC competing on that would really spook US. But medium term, need to be done, especially via industrial policy vs US encumbants whose been around for decades. I think once PRC gets a whiff that entire domestic semi supply chain secure they're going to push hard on 5 year plans for software... i.e. go after microsoft, adobe, autodesk... the productivity suites that run the world, and everything else in between, if only as jobs program for stupid amount of software engineers they'll churning out.
Also HK won't won't work because it's been tried and failed. HK existed for 20 years post handover and continued to double down on being financialization with very little technical/innovation relative to her resources. There were explicit efforts to try to build out HK tech / silicon valley and they failed. IMO liberal economic freedoms is also why HK has some of the worst tertiary enrollement stats relative to OECD... it's a city of to be blunt, lazy kids (referring to new gens under liberal education vs their mainland immigrant parents). At least relative to east asia. Propped up by importing foreign and mainland talent. If it sounds like I just described the state of America education and the various indigenous problems this report covers, then bingo.
[+] [-] melling|1 year ago|reply
China has 28,000 miles of high-speed rail. United States? Close to zero. Low-speed maglevs look interesting: https://crrczelc-europe.com/medium-low-speed-maglev-changsha...
For some reason, we just want to drill more oil and make our highways wider.
Who's getting to Mars first?
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/09/china/china-mars-mission-tian...
[+] [-] Loughla|1 year ago|reply
It has always happened to some extent. But technology has enabled it to grow out of hand.
[+] [-] basementcat|1 year ago|reply
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_2
A few days ago, I attended a candidate forum (for upcoming elections to statewide office) that was hosted by a Chamber of Commerce affiliated business group that bragged about how they successfully stopped various public transportation projects. The reality is many Americans have been informed that public transportation is incompatible with a growth oriented economy so they naturally vote against it (or fund groups that file lawsuits and other tactics to slow down the development of public transport infrastructure).
[+] [-] worstspotgain|1 year ago|reply
Consider the following:
- Door to door is massively more convenient than door to hub to hub to door. What's usually overlooked is that it's often more efficient, too.
- In many cities, transit can't compete with cars unless it's in sub-15 minute wait range. But to provide that service level with buses/trains, you need to move around 20000lbs/350000lbs of steel whether there are 5 passengers or 50/500.
- Once a city offers municipal robo-taxi service, it can completely ban privately-owned cars. This means it can remove all non-commercial parking spaces and convert them to lanes. It also means robo-taxis can travel 1 or 2 feet apart and use optimized routing. This can multiply effective road capacity by 2 or more.
IMHO, the real question is whether we need any regional trains at all. Robo-taxis and planes might be enough.
[+] [-] FlyingBears|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dyauspitr|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] janalsncm|1 year ago|reply
The US leads in the following industries: IT and Information Services, Pharmaceuticals, Other Transportation
China leads in the following industries: Computers and Electronics, Chemicals, Machinery and Equipment, Motor Vehicles, Basic Metals, Fabricated Metals, Electrical Equipment
The authors mention that although China’s workers are still less efficient than American workers, this is changing, and by the time Chinese workers are 80% as efficient as their American counterparts the Chinese economy will be 2-3x the size of America’s.
[+] [-] oezi|1 year ago|reply
China's population is rapidly aging and forecast to shrink by 1/3 by the end of the century. This is the primary reason why I think they might not overtake the US.
[+] [-] stonethrowaway|1 year ago|reply
Simply put: you need to throw many many bodies at the problem to even have a shot at keeping up with China. Collectively, the West is way behind in this regard.
[+] [-] tomohelix|1 year ago|reply
China has historically always been a leader in Asia. At its peak, it controlled an empire as vast as the entirety of the EU. Its cultural influence in Asia rivals that of Rome in the West, except that Rome is no more, but China still is.
The US is younger than a single Chinese dynasty. And like all great historic empires, with Chinese ones being great examples, the US is fracturing from the inside. Corruption, apathy, a false sense of exceptionalism, etc.
China has went through this rise and fall dozens of time. This might be the first time for the US.
[+] [-] halfmatthalfcat|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] gerash|1 year ago|reply
Same is true for most nations these days.
[+] [-] csomar|1 year ago|reply
> This might be the first time for the US.
The great depression could be considered a soft-mini fall for the US. Although it wasn't a hegemonic power at that time, so maybe it doesn't count.
[+] [-] TylerH|1 year ago|reply
Eh? There are like 60 Chinese dynasties throughout history. The US has been around longer than most of them. And some of the dynasties that were around longer than the US has been will lose that title if the US lasts another ~30 years. The Qing, Ming, Tang, etc. dynasties all lasted ~275 years, and the US has been around for 248 by now. But the vast majority of the Chinese dynasties lasted like 10 to 50 years.
[+] [-] yumraj|1 year ago|reply
It’s more connected, broader alliances, different laws and so on.
[+] [-] mc32|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] janalsncm|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bdcravens|1 year ago|reply
It takes tremendous capability to accomplish this, and I thought to myself, What happens when they realize that they can lead?
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] caseyy|1 year ago|reply
Take software engineers, for example. Most spend their entire lives rewriting code that's already been written at many companies simply because sharing is verboten. They might go their entire lives redoing what's already been done for a revolving door of bosses, without ever creating something truly new. The scale of wasted potential is stupendous.
If we all agreed on a mindset of more sharing and copying, those engineers could focus their efforts on real innovation and build the future. And there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of them.
This is not a radical new idea. This was the mindset many software engineers had in the gaming industry (my industry) in the 90s and 00s. Carmack famously released his code under what you might call a "have fun" license[0]. Around late 90s it was re-licensed under GPL to promote open-source/hacker development. This is why DOOM (and Quake) has been hacked to run on everything and used as a base for many games and game engines – real innovation instead of reinventing the same game.
Today game companies guard their code fiercely. I'm not only talking about serious trade secrets, but most frivolous basic libraries, like they would go bankrupt if they shared. Well, guess what, EA shares EASTL[1] and that didn't make them any less dominant in games. Source Engine is also available under a fairly permissive license, as is Unreal Engine's source code. What's the common denominator? They both were written by people very closely aligned with Carmack's hacker culture. Source was born out of Quake, for example.
The hubris of this closed-off approach is evident when new tech like Copilot arrives. Many tech companies panic about it "using their code" when in reality, that code already exists in numerous open-source libs. And Copilot can write 80% of what a mid level engineer writes in games anyways. Even for a principal/fellow level engineer, it is helpful in boilerplate. You can't escape the absurdity of rewriting what's already been written.
How many ways can you allocate memory for a dynamically allocated array anyways? How many ways to implement the PID controller to steer an AI car in games? How many ways to do occlusion culling in graphics? A few, but not many. Yet every company guards it like it's their own secret sauce.
So yeah, it would be pretty mature to revisit our values and go back to what worked in computing.
[0] https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM?tab=readme-ov-file – still has the "have fun" readme.
[1] https://github.com/electronicarts/EASTL
[+] [-] devilsdata|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway290|1 year ago|reply
But also some of these stats do not show to me the amount of actual innovation. Approaching US on "share of highly cited researchers" seemed to me like maybe the biggest deal but then I thought how easy it is to cheat that metric...
> Foreign companies still dominate many key areas, but their IP has been eroded over time.
Oooh I wonder how!
[+] [-] WheelsAtLarge|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] geenkeuse|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ok123456|1 year ago|reply
The whole new Cold War narrative the natsec state in the US has adopted about China is not moored in reality.
The realpolitik is that neither side of the strait wants a significant disruption in commerce. Both sides should figure out a way to practice detente and reduce militarism. The US should do this in good faith.
[+] [-] ugh123|1 year ago|reply
China also has zero independent unions.
I'm not a union hater, but there was a post here recently about unions in shipyards, with one commenter saying something like "we need to prevent any automation and broaden unions across all shipyards".
That's just not helpful in the long run and if that's the mentality of unions in this country then we're doomed.
[+] [-] atleastoptimal|1 year ago|reply
However to improve as a country we have to abandon the puerile notion that the US is special for some metaphysical, divine reason. We got lucky and became a perfect environment for the development of the world's leading industries, but that providence is being quickly ceded to China. In terms of overall lifestyle quality we are far behind much of Europe anyways.
The only thing America has that are the best in the world are its research universities (due to money and being able to take advantage of brain drain from around the world), its tech industry and high cultural soft power, areas it once held an overwhelming lead in that are evaporating fast.
[+] [-] csomar|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] _DeadFred_|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] beej71|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] stonethrowaway|1 year ago|reply
Well done lads, well done!
[+] [-] Barrin92|1 year ago|reply
One could even call it capitalism with American characteristics. These days China is often framed as lacking soft power but the degree to which the US is basically adopting Chinese developmental policy, the sentence above could come out of a party study session if you reversed the actors, is kind of funny. I saw someone joke that Jake Sullivan moving the semiconductor factories to Ohio is his version of Mao moving the factories to the hinterland.
[+] [-] aurizon|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] _DeadFred_|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] wslh|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] AnimalMuppet|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] maxglute|1 year ago|reply
Also HK won't won't work because it's been tried and failed. HK existed for 20 years post handover and continued to double down on being financialization with very little technical/innovation relative to her resources. There were explicit efforts to try to build out HK tech / silicon valley and they failed. IMO liberal economic freedoms is also why HK has some of the worst tertiary enrollement stats relative to OECD... it's a city of to be blunt, lazy kids (referring to new gens under liberal education vs their mainland immigrant parents). At least relative to east asia. Propped up by importing foreign and mainland talent. If it sounds like I just described the state of America education and the various indigenous problems this report covers, then bingo.