[0xWTF]

What's even more important is how solar, and to a lesser extent other tech, served as a gateway for China to accumulate electrical engineering, physics, and chemistry talent the US seems committed to offshoring by incentivizing universities to hire the cheapest available grad student talent (inevitably from China). We are training them and not our own.

[mekdoonggi]

I don't think the engineering talent was the bottleneck. The difference was the long-term planning and industrial policy of China.

I think you're giving the US Universities far too much credence, and the US myopic political situation far too little scrutiny.

[asdff]

>incentivizing universities to hire the cheapest available grad student talent (inevitably from China)

That isn't how that works. Domestic students are just as cheap.

[linkjuice4all]

Domestic students sometimes get a local/in-state discount so they actually cost more since they aren't paying as much tuition upfront. GP also alluded to international students coming to the US to learn and then taking their big brains back home instead of starting a company here. This was already an issue before Trump II but has been exacerbated by ICE's gestapo tactics along with all of the other roadblocks that Trump and team are trying to insert via executive order, strategic defunding, and all the other mob/shakedown behavior.

[asdff]

>GP also alluded to international students coming to the US to learn and then taking their big brains back home instead of starting a company here.

I'm not sure this is such a big issue. If the research environment is poor in their home country, the VC environment is probably even worse. Also consider every foreign professor teaching in the US right now is essentially a modern Operation Paperclip victory against their homeland. And there are a lot of them. Plus the student is still contributing to American research efforts as a grad student here. It isn't all unilateral effort unilateral benefit. They are advancing their PIs grant effort. They are probably teaching and mentoring.

[0xWTF]

> Operation Paperclip

Even without internet, many of the scientists of Eastern European extraction were able to share secrets to the Soviets. I don't believe any Operation Paperclip scientists were directly implicated as atomic spies (and there may be some reasons the US wouldn't want to bring attention to that), but plenty of other operations occurred, and plenty of other scientists did in fact share secrets with the Soviets.

Now, with the Internet and strong crypto, it's trivial for Chinese professors to send IP back to collaborators in China. That is the basis of the 1000 Talents Plan (1), one of 200 Chinese "talent recruitment" plans.

This is not at all hypothetical. I used to swim with Kang Zhang, who has done amazing work to cure chlamydial blindness, but also took that IP from the US to China (2). Another ophthalmologist would drive all the way from UCLA (the north end of LA) to San Diego to swim with us. I asked him why. He said it was to keep an eye on Kang: he had more macaques in China to run experiments on than anyone in the US could possibly access.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_Talents_Plan

(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kang_Zhang

[selimthegrim]

It was also the case at MIT that students on an NSF fellowship cost the PI more to hire.