[bmitc]

Why do people always bring up state support when it comes to China? As if the U.S. doesn't provide massive tax breaks and explicit funding to industry?

It's on every tech post about China, as if it gives them some sort of "unfair" advantage.

[blackqueeriroh]

Because the scale of the subsidization is unimaginably different.

[TitaRusell]

The US is trillions in debt pal. Talk about unfair advantages!

[petcat]

Debt doesn't really mean anything at this scale. Especially when the debt is denominated in US dollars and the debtor operates an extraordinary number of aircraft carriers.

It's that old saying "if you owe the bank $1,000 then you have a problem. If you owe the bank $1 trillion the the bank has a problem.

[bmitc]

The grandparent mentioned debt, but the U.S. spends over a trillion every year in defense spending, which doesn't include other funding and tax breaks. Nearly every major technological innovation and thus corporations that use those have been born out of government defense research. Even entire universities, such as MIT, were created for this reason.

Chomsky has argued this, that we dump public funds into entities that end up being completely private. This is even worse than what happens in China. Because the government loses the return in investment and ends up being "purchased" by these corporations and their ilk. It's really a sick system.

[danny_codes]

The scale of public spend is probably much higher in the US..

[Danox]

From a distance, the Chinese spending seems to be more focused and spread out across their infrastructure at all levels. Is that a difference between engineers running the system and lawyers running the USA?

I certainly would like to see Thorium get some love after basically 50 years of being mothballed moth, and the same goes for the rail system within the United States.

[danny_codes]

Probably. I mean I don't think anyone would choose Lawyer as the leading profession for leadership. It's a "largely useless" profession outside of it's very narrow context.

[shmel]

Are you saying that publicly funded fundamental research is somehow a bad thing now?

[deadfoxygrandpa]

yep. the ppp loans alone dwarf any state subsidies any other country has ever done

[bmitc]

How much is it?