This is western Capitalists trying to blame the Chinese for the fact they sold us out.

The sad reality is that the west has stopped investing in new tech and innovation.

It started with outsourcing the manufacturing of non essential parts... that could be made at lower cost in Asia (aka more profit for the Capitalists).
As the Chinese learned how to do this with coaching and investment by those same western capitalists they figured out how they could do more complex things.
At this point the greedy western Capitalists outsourced the manufacture of critical and essential parts to China.
After this they found out they could no longer find the talent they needed to design hard to manufacture or material / technology specific harder to make components in North America (as those skills are built during the intereaction of designers with manufacturing).
Again the Chinese had progressed and invested in training engineers etc... at this point the logical _profitable_ last step was to move some of the design and sub-assemblies to China.

Frankly the capitalists sold our asses and hand our tech to the Chinese. They were just hungry and willing to work harder and as such easier to exploit for profit.

The Capitalists now realize they no longer control the process and the Chinese have them by the balls. At this point they are worried what the rest of us will do to them when we finally figure out how badly they screwed us, so they are trying to blame the Chinese a possibly start a war to bomb the Chinese back into the stone age.

Capitalists will sell you the rope you hang them with.

Make no mistake about this. This is all about "MBA" strategic choices and quarterly thinking that lead us to this dependence and lack of investment in research, innovation and education. Reality is even in the past many of the best and brightest have come from outside of North America. At the time we still recognized that and took care to integrate those people and make them part of our society. Now with restrictive immigration those people will go else where as well.

You don't need to look far to figure out who has sold you out. Just look who the billionaires are that aren't paying their fair share of taxes either.

There's a much deeper potential Ethical Holly Shit here, this is a big can of worms being opened. That of synthetic (read "made up") with unverifiable claims to credibility, through AI and a real data set.

The reason medical data is needed in research is to _verify_ the effectiveness of treatments, drugs, or patterns that are later ultimately used to justify treatment plans or decisions about what medicines to legalize, prescribe and use.

Feeding real data to AI and then asking it to "make up a data set that's the same" breaks the link between real hard data collected by physicians and clinicians, which is _verifiable_ and _trustable_. There is no way aside from repeating the work with real data sets to verify that the data in the "synthetic data" set is representative of the real world.

If this synthetic data set is used to make decisions, there will be a significant risk that can be introduced in the AI process, as 1) there is no verification possible and 2) the potential to "ask AI" to "help clean up the data" raises potentials for either open abuse, or accidental skewing of the data. Even non malicious but hopeful AI prompts may cause the AI to deliver the results the researcher or pharmaceutical company "wants to find".

That could lead to incorrect results or desired or not which would lead to bad decisions about patient treatment or diagnosis potentially leading to wasted money at best and patient harm at worst.

Ethically, I think this is standing unroped on a slippery slope uphill of a cliff...

but he'll happily take "investors" and help with his crypto coin $Trump.

Transactional presidents are so much easier to deal with if you're a billionaire crypto bro...

It's also convenient if you could use a pardon.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/mone...

As a licensed Engineer in North America, who also has a Business degree, having working both in Canada and in Europe, as well as having exposure to China through travel...

Engineering as a profession has the same recognition as law and medicine in Europe... In China, Engineering is neck in neck with Medicine. In North America and in the UK engineers are looked down on by other professionals and management.

When I worked in Europe as an Engineer in tech companies Management was made up of Engineers that had worked there way up, many of them had Phds in Engineering. Engineers in society have good paying jobs and its a desired profession.

Decisions were made not just based on quarterly financials, but with leaders that understood innovation, value, and technology as well as the financials at the table.
Planning and R&D in Germany where I worked and in China have budgets and time frames of years if not decades. Companies compete not on cost but on quality and innovation.

I think North America is being left behind at the moment in a number of areas, and will continue to do so until it starts thinking long term again and investing in science and engineering talent and projects.

This David Mayer? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

He certainly is well enough positioned to perhaps have someone working to make sure he's forgotten.

Anyone facing this issue where they work? What have you looked at?

(fingers crossed first post).

Tell him to go to apply to university in Germany. It's free including for foreign nationals, and they often provide a stipend to cover cost of living.

Hard to believe but, Germany does this as they get the best and brightest, and have figured out that if just 1/2 stay 5 years the contributions they make to the Germany Economy pay back the cost of education.

https://www.studying-in-german...

We also need people to know if ChatGPT is giving us correct answers or just stating authoritative BS.

  Reality is were going to start seeing more and more AI produced BS that sounds right. I expect "working with AI" will mean knowing when and how to know the AI response is full of errors.

Combine this with humans laziness and inability to gauge risk we'll be seeing "death by AI answer" soon.

I'm also curious what will happen to the internet once Special interest groups, Scammers and Spammers will start using AI to scam people... I think we'll have an even bigger problem where many people will have trouble telling "truth" from "BS".

I think there's a very real chance the internet will get overwhelmed with AI generated content... the questions will be will they be correct or not...
I may very well be a big change the question is will it be for the better?

Anyone working in automation or with AI+automation knows if you can succeed "at scale" you can "fail at scale"...and knowing the difference if you've succeed or failed may be hard in some cases, in which case laziness will likely trump caution.

Google, Facebook etc... are rent taking privacy violating parasites

When corporations seek to undermine democratic created laws there need to be questions.

Frankly they have far to much influence already with "custom search results".

There are good alternatives...

Where you aren't the product...
eg: https://duckduckgo.com/
eg: https://www.signal.org/

That said I'm still working to reduce my dependence on "free" isn't "free" apps / sites, as they are pervasive...

If you thought code was hard to get working before, wait until it starts "fixing" itself while you're trying to update it.

It's kind of like trying to clean up a toy room with a bunch of 4 year old kids loose, running around taking toys off the shelf again...

Good luck... especially if you're working with hardware drivers etc....If the code gets out of the sandbox or starts coding disallowed values it could literally get your hardware to "commit suicide"...

The real problem is much more terrifying.

The reason the Chinese are catching up is because the US has slowed or even ceased to innovate in a number of areas. There are too many MBAs, accountants and lawyers in charge who don't understand what is needed to support innovation and invention.

All of this blocking exports is really just misusing government for international competition in business. In addition to that capitalism has lead them to seek cheaper sources and even helped transition tech to Asia where cheap labour can produce the products. Realistically the only way to compete in tech is to continue to innovate. That requires long term strategic spending on R&D and product development. If your business model for competing has become to outsource to lower costs and litigate (patents / copyright) or lobby for protected markets then its only a matter of time before someone comes up with a disruptive technology and puts you out of business.

Much of the recent innovation in the US corporate world has all been about "rent taking", turning products into subscription services and turning customers into products (advertising, eg google and facebook). Amazon is basically rent taking for building an online catalog and delivery service (which brings some value), but there's limited or no invention there.

Greed and self enrichment has taken precedence over investing in the future for many US companies and share holders. The resulting loss of capability and talent has also hamstrung the US. Realistically you cant even produce complex products like the iPhone in the US anymore as the know how for manufacturing no longer exists here, you cant hire engineers that know what to do.

The Chinese on the other hand have people working hard to understand the technology, a strong focus on engineering, and considerable number of scientists and engineers in leadership roles. There are long term strategies for technical development and innovation. Unless the US seeks to change this its simply a case of the fact that accountants and lawyers will never and cannot out innovate scientists and engineers.

Frankly I expect the Chinese to copy stuff. This is nothing new. The US space program was built based on stolen tech (V2) and poached German engineers. The US is just crying because this time they are not doing the stealing but getting robbed instead.

The solution is real investment in R&D and innovation. Something quarterly Capitalist thinking is unlikely to do enough of, and government in the US is captive to the Military Industrial Complex (which is about finding excuses to turn US tax dollars into private profit) and isn't spending much money on real research.

There are some small exceptions... but the reality is in the west one needs to look to Europe (mainly Germany) for leadership in innovation at this point. I don't see it coming out of the US.

The Capitalist will sell you the rope you hang him with.

Optimizing only for "profit" (a nicer word for greed or self interest), has left resilience by the way side, along with solidarity with the rest of humanity, sustainability and common human decency.

Its time to realize when you accept the market on faith... and neglect the other variables that drive history its only a matter of time before you're on the losing side of history.

Climate change, COVID-19 and other large unforeseen challenges will test the resilience of not only our supply chain, but also our infrastructure and values. Many key factors to succeed in these challenging times do not show up in current accounting balance sheets, and blind faith in the market to solve all problems is just that: Blind. We are capable of so much more than self-interest / greed. We should not let the greed of a few define us as a society.

As long as Americans worship the almighty dollar / wealth as the highest achievement, they will remain unprepared for the real world, and truly be poor.

You can pry my passwords from my cold dead hands... wait

You cant.

Maybe that's the point...

I need to retain control of 1) access 2) separation of parties / websites etc 3) not tide to anything that cant be reset / thrown away (eg no biometrics) 4) transferable to those I trust (in emergency or death). any other form of authentication that does not include those features is a no go.

The real reason the big players are all pushing MFA is that they want device IDs so they can combine data an create profiles for tracking for commercial purposes. (Which can and will be misused by other actors).

I get constant security warnings from google on "new device logins" as some of my devices rotate mac addresses.

Don't for a moment think the big players care one iota about your privacy. They only care if you walk away from their service, and its the one lever (along with laws) we have to change their behaviour. Most recent changes have come as a result of European privacy legislation.

Passwords will be around for a long time. So learn how to use them and manage them properly.. anything else is just giving up control to someone else.
I treat them as my legal signature (and so do the courts BTW), unless its a throw away account.

The answer for the password problem is a good password manager (with secure backups).

Next.

Its true that most of Europe including the Germans bought Russian gas and coal...

My questions are: 1) do you pursue a policy of engagement and trade with countries in a hope to change them / help develop... or ignore them completely and give them no means to develop / improve? (aka buy something from them and sell them goods? )

Note: EU membership and NATO membership growth for eastern European countries has been _Very_ successful in this regard of development through engagement (perhaps to successful).

2) Until recently, where the fuck are you going to get Natural gas and Clean Coal in Europe, if not from next door? In case you haven't noticed Natural gas is hard to ship in any significant quantities. Resources inside Western Europe are all in active use, depleted or Dirty Coal. Note: USA wants to ship gas from NA to Europe, (for their profit) but infrastructure still needs to be built, its way more expensive, if it can be scaled up to the point where it can provide for Europe's needs at all.

3) Oh BTW significant shale Natural gas reserves where found recently in Ukraine in the sea next to Crimea, in the Donbas region and near Moldova.... They where starting to be developed by western companies (as Ukraine did not have the expertise or means), until Russians invaded eastern Ukraine and annexed Crimea destabilizing Ukraine and causing the developments to stop.

Also wrt to Germany doing something it looks like your getting you wish. Germany announced 100 Billion in extra defense spending, (now exceeding 2% of GDP), also Note: Ukraine is not a NATO member so Article 5 defense obligations are not relevant. Frankly I think _not escalating_ and showing some disagreement inside EU and NATO is important to leave the door open for negotiation with Russia on a possible de-escallation... the alternative is an escalation possibly leading to global nuclear war with NATO on one side and Putin's Russia on the other side. Given most of the fighting will happen in Central Europe (aka in Germany) I don't blame the Germans for being hesitant to further escalate things. Being brave when you ass is sitting in North America when the war is happening in Europe is much easier...

First off looking at _European Union_ defense in terms of Germany is utter nonsense.

Starting with historical context... after losing WW2 there have been considerable restrictions on any non-defensive German army capabilities.
Also Germany is _not_ a nuclear power as they were encouraged to join NATO instead of building their own capabilities.

Germany's armies have been mostly defensive, since WW2 and the specter of a economically Strong Germany being armed to the teeth has lead to a European defense strategy and NATO.

Despite that, lets look at the numbers...

There are 38K US troops in Germany ( https://www.dw.com/en/us-milit... )
and
183K German Troops ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... )

What do you think is the main non-nuclear deterrent keeping the Russians out of Germany?

Neither Germany, the EU nor NATO are under attack here (at this point) so a defensive role / obligation does not exist for Germany beyond supporting NATO defensive deployments.

Calling Germans gutless is naive and ignorant at best... also anyone that thinks that a war on Europe's door step is desirable is either not European or a fool. Germany's government is seeking a diplomatic and economic solution to this problem and ( and correctly so ) see's a military response as a measure of last resort.

This is not a penis comparison contest.. Despite what the Boris or the Americans and Putin think.