> Old-school, driven by craft, not obsessed about clicks and profit.
While this has been the prevailing sentiment for Germany, I wouldn't be so sure after the Volkswagen emission fiasco. At least Volkswagen seems pretty eager to work around QA laws...
"""The U.S. remains the world's R&D factory, but when it comes to building, we're plainly going backwards."""
"""For many decades, the American government has focused overwhelmingly on discovery rather than deployment."""
"""And then, around 1980, we basically stopped building,” Jesse Jenkins, who researches energy policy at Princeton, told me. In the past 40 years, he said, the U.S. has applied several different brakes to our capacity to build what’s already been invented. Under Ronald Reagan, the legacy of successful public-private partnerships was ignored in favor of the simplistic diagnosis that the government was to blame for every major problem. In the ’70s, liberals encouraged the government to pass new environmental regulations to halt pollution and prevent builders from running roughshod over low-income neighborhoods. And then middle-class Americans used these new rules to slow down the construction of new housing, clean-energy projects—just about everything. These reactions were partly understandable; for example, air and water pollution in the ’70s were deadly crises. But “when you combine these big shifts, you basically stop building anything,” Jenkins said."""
Note: If you skim the above article, be aware that "Bush" refers to Vannevar Bush (not George #41 or George #43) in several places.
Japan and Germany have also demonstrated terrifying war-making capability and willingness not so long ago. This is consistent with part of your comment ("old-school, driven by craft") but problematic w.r.t. "utility to society and civilization", given the goals of authoritarian regimes, under both a secular demagogue and a supreme divine ruler. The U.S., through IBM, sold Nazi Germany tabulating machines, which made atrocities more "efficient".
My point is not to assign blame or simply comment on geopolitics. Rather, I just want to raise awareness that technology and craft exist in a broader context, easily misappropriated and distorted.
I hope the technologists of today (us) are the leaders of the future. We should not abdicate key decisions about technology to others. We must get involved with investment, ethics, safety, and regulatory decisions.
Old-school, driven by craft, not obsessed about clicks and profit. Just incredible utility to society and civilization.
Thank god for these countries.