[rurp]

The American Empire is gone and not coming back. It rose in a very different world and once these competitive advantages in science and elsewhere have been squandered they won't ever get back to the same level; there's too much competition from other countries now and too little faith that the US won't do this again.

As much as I hate it, we're heading into a more violent and less prosperous world. Whatever that morphs into long term almost certainly won't be as nice for Americans as the recent past was.

Our capitulation to Iran, a third rate military power that we chose to attack and then lost to, is really driving home the point at the moment.

[xnx]

American exceptionalism is regressing to the mean.

[josephg]

Strangely enough, america's tech sector is still exceptional on a global stage. I'm not entirely sure why. There's something magic that happens in the bay area as a result of funding and talent density.

Its weird - I'm australian. We have the same caliber of software engineers here. But there's not the same ambition amongst skilled engineers to solve problems at the world stage. And its far more difficult to convince investors to give you the capital to try.

The technology sector is propping up the US economy. The AI race is - so far - making this even more true.

[runako]

> The technology sector is propping up the US economy

Probably more accurate to say the healthcare sector is propping up the US economy. The only sector broadly hiring through all the layoffs of recent years.

Tech grabs the headlines and has extremely valuable firms concentrated in a handful of cities. On the other hand, those firms tend not to employ a lot of people. Healthcare is less flashy, but every city has a hospital (or a few) that (each) does a few billion $ in revenue while providing thousands of recession-resistant jobs.

[Peaches4Rent]

"But before you start snickering at those stupid Americans, know this: every other country in the world has passed a law just like this in the years since."

[Peaches4Rent]

The reason is copyright law keeping the monopoly going

See https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2026-01-01...

Quote: ``` Anticircumvention law originates in the USA: Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 establishes a felony punishable by a five year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense for bypassing an “access control” for a copyrighted work.

So practically speaking, if you design a device or service with even the flimsiest of systems to prevent modification of its application code or firmware, it’s a felony — a jailable felony — to modify that code or firmware. It’s also a felony to disclose information about how to bypass that access control, which means that pen-testers who even describe how they access a device or system face criminal liability.

```

[sunrisetiger]

Likely because California is not beholden to other interests. Even rural voices in California are subdued when it comes to big city politics, especially San Francisco.

[fwipsy]

My half-baked sense is that America is good at making the best things for the highest cost, but tends to be meh at making good or adequate things at a competitive price. Our military seems like the strongest example, but I feel like it also describes healthcare/biotech, education, and maybe housing.

This works well for tech, because a good design can be scaled to serve the whole world, and we can outsource manufacturing to companies like China or Taiwan who are better at cost-effectiveness. (And have lower wages. Maybe that's the entire explanation.)

[edg5000]

@josephg Being from the EU myself, I'm surprised in the same way you are. There is certainly something good going on there as well, at least when looking at certain technologies in isolation, where the US leads.

How come there's still no better desktop processor than Intel/AMD on a per core basis? This is just one example. Nobody's made anything at that level still.

[runako]

These are companies built in the heyday of American hegemony. The concern is not around dominance of existing science. Rather, the issues are:

- science that simply will not get done, and may be lost to humanity altogether. There is research the US would have done this year that will not get done elsewhere this year. Once the individual researchers leave the field, there is no guarantee the research will get done this decade, or the next, or the next.

- Intel and AMD lean on technology developed in the 1950s. US science and R&D done in 2026 similarly will underwrite US industrial success in the 2050s and beyond. This is like the classical warning against eating your seed corn (instead of saving it to plant). Pressing pause will have an impact, but one would not expect it to show up in the industry league tables for some time.

[edg5000]

I see. So some of the damage done today will materialize decades from now. So we have to plan for that.

[KennyBlanken]

> Our capitulation to Iran, a third rate military power that we chose to attack and then lost to, is really driving home the point at the moment.

Uh....that's more the fault of a president who thought a totally normal thing (arms treaties with expiring restrictions) was a "scam" (not to mention, a black man he hates was responsible for said treaty) and ripped up said treaty. We literally were in a treaty, with Iran, that was doing all the things Trump said he wanted.

Then thought he could bully a country he probably thinks of as "a bunch of sand", ignoring the fact that a quarter of the world's oil drives right by them. I've heard foreign policy analysts say that it seemed like Iran never realized how much power they did until Trump pissed them off, they responded, the shipping industry universally said "ohhh hell no" and dropped anchor....and Iranian leadership looked around and said "........wait. We've been able to do that THIS WHOLE TIME?!!!" and then their plan become to outlast Trump's administration.

Iran realizing they can cripple the world economy is a genie that will not be put back in its bottle, even as countries scramble to decarbonize. Oil is still required for lubricants, plastics, and chemical production.

Add in the fact that the US military is being run by a guy who is more concerned about people being clean-shaven than actually running the military as an organization and by all accounts, barely managed ~2 dozen soldiers, then in civilian life failed, repeatedly, at managing businesses. Who has kicked out or pissed off dozens of senior military leaders, as well as pissed off anyone who was remotely debating whether to reenlist.

[esarbe]

It's more than just "that one president". It's the whole system that brought him to power, where a large part of the population has been trained to hate and fear for almost half a decade now.

That the US military is run by a clown is a feature, not a bug. That an incompetent buffoon like Trump is at the steering wheel is not an accident.

Trump is doing exactly what the moneyed interests behind him have put him in power for - dismantling the system of checks and balances, of regulations and restrictions that prevent the oligarchs from thoroughly screwing the population.

Good luck trying to restore any of your civil institutions after Trump and his ilk - and I don't expect that to be after 2028.

[lonelyasacloud]

> Uh....that's more the fault of a president

Who so far has been put into office twice by?

[Terr_]

Voters, but a minority of them.* Then kept in office by a minority (43%) of Republican Senate legislators.

* Yes, that is the correct term. In each election >50% chose "Not Trump".

[lonelyasacloud]

Yes, largely the fault of a people's imperfect system that their ancestor's elected representatives largely built and they inherited.

There are only one people that have any chance of changing that system though.

[grey-area]

By your figures, about 50% chose Trump, twice.

Enough to condemn the US forever in the eyes of the world. It’s no longer seen as a reliable ally or a desirable destination by the majority around the world.

[Terr_]

Strictly speaking, that Presidential race was not enough, since Trump alone would have been far-more survivable. A mere repeat of 2016-2020 would have been shameful and humiliating, but not the same kind of diplomatic self-implosion.

What is enough involves the outcomes of other elections/candidates, where almost all the Republican party decided that this time around they were going to go into full-steam ahead with Trump's whims and crimes.

[grey-area]

He has, as predicted, destroyed the very idea of America, and all those who voted for him and are collaborating with him deserve the consequences, particularly his followers who he reliably uses then betrays. I feel sorry for the people who didn’t vote for him though, the slide into fascism is beginning and many don’t recognise it yet.

[try_the_bass]

> Yes, that is the correct term. In each election >50% chose "Not Trump".

Uhhh... Not voting at all doesn't count as "Not Trump". It counts as "I don't care," which implicitly means "whatever everyone else thinks".

This is such a dumb thing to try to play semantic games about. A majority of voters elected the clown, and the population of non-voters is complicit in that.

[Terr_]

Your comment is supercilious and confidently-incorrect. The most-charitable interpretation is that you have been misinformed ever since the last election from some preliminary estimate of incomplete counts.

1. Of all ballots, only 49.7961% were for Trump. [0]

2. Of ballots where someone made a non-blank choice for President, 50.1976% were for candidates who were not-Trump.

So when I explicitly wrote about a "minority" of "voters", that really does mean an an actual mathematical minority of the people who actually voted, thankyouverymuchdamnit.

[0] https://www.fec.gov/resources/cms-content/documents/2024pres...

[try_the_bass]

Wow, you're pretty obnoxious.

Guess you're right, though

[slater]

Grifty ignoramuses...?

[lenerdenator]

The world didn't want American leadership.

[onetimeusename]

I think this is an offensive and self fulfilling view. Americans are too dumb to do science so we need to rely almost entirely on foreigners from almost entirely the same two countries to do it for us. There's lots of holes in this scheme. I don't really want politicians to control funding for science but then again we've become somewhat of a degree mill and there's a lot of useless careerism in academia.

I will give an example. Did we need years and years of funding for a lab to work on an obscure programming language for multiprocessing that basically only that lab ever used? Probably not. How much of funded science is just useless waste for a group of people to play with things like this? A lot, I would speculate. There isn't really a good way to spot what's useful and what isn't but let's not pretend academia is a purely selfless institution.

[ajmurmann]

A story Steven Kotkin recently told in an interview:

"And so the anecdote goes that Xi Jinping bragged that they were going to — China - was going to win the competition because they had 1.3 billion people to choose talent from. They had the biggest talent supply.

And the elder statesman, Lee Kuan Yew, said, 'You're wrong. You have 1.3 billion to draw from, but the United States has 8 billion to draw from, and so they have the upper hand, and don't forget that."

[bratbag]

And if you are any kind of strategic thinker when faced with that problem, you will do two things

1. Invest in propaganda to ensure the US becomes hostile to immigrants.

2. Invest in opening yourself up to immigration.

China is openly doing 2. It would be foolish to assume they are are not also investing in 1 and secretly cheering on the current administrations hateful stupidity.

Immigration is the US superpower, and everyone who wants to knock them off the number 1 spot is eroding it.

[cloche]

R&D is hit or miss. And a lot will miss. It's really no different from the VC model where 90% of their startups will fail but the 10% that succeed will make up for the rest.

Pointing out a few examples that didn't go anywhere is a meaningless argument. You need to look at it holistically.

[onetimeusename]

I am not arguing that all R&D must succeed. That's hugely different from someone who deliberately builds obscure nonsense and masks it behind publications and tenure. What you're saying is there is no waste in academia. If anyone questions the merits of some research, they are anti-science. I think people who think academia is a bastion of science would be disappointed with the reality.

[Ar-Curunir]

Almost all advances in deployed PLs come from academic research. Not sure what kind of point you’re trying to make

[ribosometronome]

The majority of your argument has little to do with your initial complaint about China and India. What does poaching less of the world's best and brightest to contribute to our market and universities have to do with ensuring people are working on meaningful projects?

[onetimeusename]

They are about 50% of all foreign grad students. Can you explain why the disproportionate representation? Why aren't more US citizens in grad school for STEM if it is so valuable to us?

The thing about the academic job market is it's paper thin. I argue we produce too many PhDs. People seek out prestigious degrees. Our immigration system rewards more highly educated foreign students, sensibly, but that means there's more incentive to get advanced degrees. There's absolutely not just pure science going on in academia. Grad student wages are depressed and more foreign grad students does not help that.[1] There's a lot of careerism. I would argue some people exploit grad students. I don't think this is even very debatable. So I think put together, we likely print too many PhDs. One could argue that's not true relative to the overall job market but relative to tenure track positions, it is absolutely a fact.

[1]: https://www.nber.org/digest/dec06/impact-foreign-students-ea...

[watersb]

> Why aren't more US citizens in grad school for STEM if it is so valuable to us?

Graduate research in the United States is often an exercise in exploitation of cheap labor.

China and India have a large pool of highly educated workers who can qualify for graduate research. Their visas specifically prohibit them for seeking alternative employment in the United States.

You can demand long hours and very low pay. The payoff to them is a chance at long-term employment in the US for more money than they could earn at home, and in any event increased status and employment opportunities when they return.

The payoff for native-born kids is not at all the same. Even for those who can afford graduate school, opportunity cost may be prohibitive.

The US has decided that creating new scientists out of its own citizens has no economic value.

[onetimeusename]

Ya that's a big part of my point. I think there's very obviously economic exploitation going on which comes from putting degrees on a stick. There's that link to a (2006!) paper about depressed grad student wages.

[quantified]

The same is roughly true for Silicon Valley investments once the herd mentality sets in. Yet it is celebrated as being the best way for commercial progress.

[watersb]

Even with perfect information regarding R&D outcomes, capitalism is competitive.

Capitalism is duplication of effort.

I've never been particularly convinced by the crusade to eliminate alternatives to capitalism in the name of eliminating a society's wasteful behavior.

[onetimeusename]

Because I criticized academia does not mean I support political types ripping up funding nor scrapping it altogether. My thought is that academia has had a reckoning coming for some time because their practices are not sustainable. It relies on a huge number of foreign grad students to prop itself up, it's costs have become very expensive for Americans. There's a number of credible arguments to be made. The nicest way I could put it is that the impact of a lot of work that academics do is not that high. But it's prestigious being a professor and there are high incentives to keep publishing for some, gaming citations with mediocre results is perhaps a path to tenure.

At some point this was not going to continue to sustain itself, something would give. Now, I think it's unfortunate that it became political. That means that my criticisms will be viewed through partisan lenses. I am not a fan of political types deciding what to fund. But I also think academia can be full of itself and this shield they can hide behind of "just doing pure science" is baloney. Some are. Definitely not everyone. So I personally think there should be a reduction in the number of PhDs granted and the overall size of academia but that is not in favor of getting rid of it or the way it's being done presently.