Seriously, the idea that we know all the practically important physics there is is the kind of thing only somebody who's never done science or engineering would believe.

Wow, I had no idea you were dumb enough to fall for the Red Scare.

Industrial R&D is important, but it is in a distrant third place with respect to importance to US scientific leadership after (1) Universities operating with federal grants and (2) Federal research institutions.

It's hard to convince politicians with a zero sum mentality that the kind of public research that benefits humanity also benefits US competitiveness. The mindset shows in launching a new citizenship program for anyone who pays a million bucks while at the same time discouraging foreign graduate students from attending universtiy in the US or even continuing their university careers here. On average each talented graduate student admitted to the US to attend and elite university does way more than someone who could just buy their way in.

It's quite amusing that some troll follows me around modding down any comments where I suggest humans should cooperate with one another. They are literally proving my point by moving things backwards with their solitary cowardice.

If your basis for judging research is truth in propaganda why would you trust science from the USA? The current president is a pathological liar and his regime is trying to convince the world that Venezuela's government is a cartel of narco-terrorists so the USA can invade and hand Venezuela's oil wells over to American oil companies. Truth has no value in the USA.

China wanted to lead on science, and made the effort. Now that's paying off, and relatively fast as well it seems. China sent out promising students to foreign universities, to return with valuable learning. They court scientists to move to China, and fund a lot of research. And they have a decent school system with highly motivated students. They have plans and policies in place that work.

What does the West have? Science is beginning to have a bad name here. They tell you you're a sucker if you take a STEM major in college, except perhaps if you study to be a doctor or a dentist, or "something something AI". You're even dumber if you actually pursue a career in academia. Meanwhile we have New Math (a US thing, I know, but here in Europe schooling in mathematics is just as dire), or whatever new nonsense they cooked up. In my country, they are again lowering the nr. of hours per week spent on STEM subjects in high school. More focus on humanities and civics... as they say: "teaching children to be good citizens". Dumb AF, but... good citizens, sure. Taught to challenge everything, and not given the tools or knowledge to do so effectively. One in three kids aged 15 here is functionally analphabetic. Because even reading comprehension and accurate spelling are now optional. Chinese kids work and study hard, ours are taught that being on time is a "white construct", and that STEM education needs to be "decolonized".

No, we're not going to catch up with China. Unless we change our focus.

China taxes the rich and spends money on educations. The US gives the rich tax breaks, the rich hoard their wealth, and in many parts of the country schools are literally falling apart while good teachers leave the profession because they cannot afford to live on a teaching salary. Thanks to Reaganomics and MAGA the USA will not be a leader in anything in a few decades.

Tariffs or outright bans on Chinese cars won't keep them out of the USA for long. Those companies can open the same factories in the USA that they have elsewhere. They'll be vertically integrated dark factories that can crank out cars with a fraction of the labor costs of other brands. The cars will not be as inexpensive as they would be coming from China, but they will still be less expensive than comparable cars made in the USA by anybody else. Chinese brands are already building factories in South America and Europe, so they'll know how to do it well when they set up shop in the USA. Xiaomi built up it's electric car program, from initial research to having a car on the market, in only three years. Think about how little time it will take them to just build a factory in the USA.

Like nearly every product in this area, these podcasts are scams.

The equivalent of all those LLM-spam "books" you see on Amazon.

They are product pumped out with no regard to quality control, dependent on potential consumers mistakenly thinking there's something like fact checking or editing going on because of the name on the tin.

Worse, this is all "hello world" style LLM programming - give it your cute little prompt ("That's where the real engineering goes!"), throw it a couple links to RAG in, and slap an ad on it. There's nothing here a vaguely competent teenager can't build for themself or the robot can't build for them.

That itself is a nested scam - pretending that any of this crap is difficult, that you need your betters at WaPo to write it for you.

And that's just the tool itself - the next problem is Bezos made it clear that anyone with integrity should hit the road, and those folks did. So all the source material may as well be robot poop already, quality-wise.

That it's a competitive system is the problem. The world advances through cooperation.

Plus on many chains, the transaction fee is significant.

You seem to have forgotten we have read your comments.

Good. Fuck off and don't come back, hypocrite.

I see that you are ignorant of the USA's entire history in Central and South America. This is my surprised face.

That's what the second bill is for, apparently. Isn't this already covered in US laws though? Here in the Netherlands we have had "portrait rights" for over a century, basically it means that you have a say in how your likeness is being used in publications, and you can forbid publication if you have a good reason. Reasons include protecting one's reputation, but also the use of a famous person's likeness without their permission. The law also protects persons after their death, but only for a period of 10 years. Because of AI, they are now considering extending that period.

It's going to collide with their bilateral agreement with the EU that provides freedom of movement between Switzerland and the EU. Will be interesting to see how that works out.