[Swenrekcah]

That’s quite the fantasy you’ve costructed for yourself.

In it Europe hasn’t invented anything.

Quality of life is just a sham invented by politicians to keep the plebs from demanding... quality of life?

And since you mentioned a 747 as an example of Americas greatness. Well the 747 is but we have been witnessing the real life consequnces of the ‘greed-is-good’ approach to business on a once-great engineering company.

[npip99]

I'm not sure what you mean by "Quality of life is just a sham invented by politicians to keep the plebs from demanding... quality of life?". I don't think politicians invented anything like that? I remain confused.

[npip99]

I mean, I can be more lenient. Europe had good researchers. They were the Athens, between the Germans ones of the 20-50's, and Turing, there was a lot. The Russians got a lot done too. But again, all research. Nothing profitable. It was never self propagating. Rome was self propagating, they conquered. Athens, only sustained intellectualism until it bled away.

(I'm not counting the mathematicians of the 1700s that did amazing work, I'm referring to modern Europe and the US, 20th century and beyond)

It's kind of sad that a huge market for businessmen is taking an American business, and just doing the same thing in Europe or Latin America. It's, it's sad. There's uh, absolutely no foreign competition in most situations that we have to meet. The ratio is clearly wrong, and we compete with more companies than we can found so Europe should statistically be represented in the other direction. It's not even that profitable, American consumers are a gold mine they're so price insensitive. And the modern world is mostly what was invented in the roaring 20s in the US, and computing technology that was developed almost entirely in the US.

(The Japanese were trailing along in the 80s I guess, but they were mostly our China, they were just a factory line that we abandoned when China caught up and their GDP has stagnated for 20 years. They had a few great companies, and they still do. South Korea is the only actual one that goes toe-to-toe but they're too small to profit off 300 million people like we can, per capita I do think they are more entrepreneurial and inventive than us though)

There's not even VC money in Europe it's almost impossible to get funded, you need American or Chinese money which means they own most of the business anyway. Like in the US, take the money away, you can get started again. But in Europe? You better buy a plane ticket. No one will fund you. The non-tech companies are mostly incumbents. Or brands like WeWork that are much more expensive than other co-working spaces but they have the brand to hold them up.

[npip99]

This is kind of what I touch on at the end, with the getting the kids into business, there is a moral concern there. The first executives are intelligent, and caring. They're the engineers. Once you have MBAs flooding in, which HR doesn't know how else to hire people, it just becomes horrible. Feynmann famously ripped NASA a new one after asking the engineers "What's the probability of the Shuttle exploding?". They say: 1/100, 2/100. He asked the executives at NASA, they say 1/100000, 1/1000000. How, how is that even possible? You need the executives to be the engineer, or they fuck everything up. An engineer warned them about the o-ring, the executives ignored it because they were stupid. Same with the max:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/former-boeing-manager-s...

Notably: "For the first time in my life, I’m sorry to say that I’m hesitant about putting my family on a Boeing airplane," Ed Pierson wrote to a company executive before the first tragedy.

This would never happen if the executives were engineers. Every time we, humanity, eventually gets stuck in a rut. The Romans invent the most unbelievably complex and well structured government of their time, while the gauls hunt like animals, and they conquer the world, they develop all of the technology (Well, the greeks were even better with their near idealistic Athens, but like the PhDs it never gets implemented or spreads). So the Romans do this, they win. Then...., nothing happens. It goes to shit. The Patricians murder the Plebians who protest, they become corrupt, the people have less and less control, it becomes awful. Then, dictatorship. Then, emperor. Who were the people who drafted the first setup of the roman government? They're 600 years dead, and those who replaced them made it shit. Took 1000 years to recover. The founding fathers. Compare George Washington, and his morality, to our modern politicians. No one had any reason to do anything other than create the perfect government, everyone helped, it was collaborative. Now they're cutthroat. It always goes to shit. Corporations are the new target. The founding fathers tried so hard to put every single failsafe they could, because they knew. They knew they knew. They knew those who would come after them would make it shit. While the founding fathers intentionally put failsafes - the entire article is a big ass fail safe you just read it (It just says exactly what the restrictions are - if people acted just like the founded fathers did they would never need restrictions in the first place), our modern politicians research every possible exploit to the system as if they're in infosec. Gerrymandering, oops! Jefferson forgot about that one, it took 300 years to discover the buffer overflow, but if it's discovered it's abused. Every metric becomes a target. The target of "leading the revolution" gave people who were intelligent and passionate about saving their country. The target of "becoming a politician" in 2020 is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Stone I highly suggest you read just the paragraph about high school. It shows what you need to be, what the selection criterion is. The only selection criterion that works is: Coming up with something new, a new business, a new idea, a new government. After that, they hunt. They get their MBAs to overthrow you with credentials so that they can squeeze themselves in, even though they didn't found Boeing. The patricians bribe who they had to to squeeze even, even though they never came up with the original government. The politicians cheat what they must to squeeze into what the founding fathers tried to prevent. Someone has their eyes on the prize.

Mind you, the French are just as intelligent as the Italians, they're nearly identical at birth, only culture separates them. A french man who grew up in italy is an italian man. It's the system that is what separated the gauls from the romans, and it's survival of the fittest, you're the first to have an opposable thumb then you win. Whoever figures out how to create a self propagating government wins, a couple people did, got a few thousand followers, and it propagated. Business is the new self propagating system, until stability is reached. Only the new people have what it takes. It's not really too genetic either, it is in some way have 4 kids one of them will work, what of the other three? Kahn couldn't stop it, Alexander the great couldn't stop it, Romans worked for 300 years because of adoption, but it was still bleeding. Go through the history. Each half century involved more failures by the plebians and more success from the corrupt patricians, it was slow but sped up, more and more restrictions were put on the people by the incumbents. You always need fresh people. Carnegie? Vanderbilt? Compare to the modern CEO of BP...., of Boeing, stability kills. In hackernews, for people in IT, no one knows shitty bosses and executives more than they do.