Lots of interesting thoughts here. Some questions:
What gives you the impression that Russia has the best weapons? They started their fugly war in Ukraine with a "send tanks to the capital" play right out of the 1950's, and have been entirely reactive to Ukraine's tactics ever since.
What gives you the impression China is the "word's first economy"? Or do you mean, first among non-Western-oriented nations? The US GDP is still about 50% higher. Perhaps that order will change in the next 10 or 20 years, and there are good indicators that it will, but even if that's the case... Why does that concern you?
Technology supremacy is an interesting topic. I think China should be doing a lot better than it is, frankly. In the past 20 years or so China's high-tech industry exports have primarily been low-skilled labor rather than innovation. E.g. Foxconn assembly plants. You might be conflating the semiconductor fabrication and design output of other Asian countries, e.g. South Korea, Japan, and Taiwain, with China. Chinese companies have been trying to get out ahead of innovation in design - hardware and especially software - for quite a while, and it's a difficult prospect because the engine of the country's modernization has often been gray-market copycat products, produced at great speed and sold on slim margins. Shifting from that to actual innovation is pretty awkward -- but it is happening. The question I find interesting is, why isn't it happening much faster? I have a pet theory.
I spend a fair amount of time with scientists doing esoteric research. Recently it's been with people pushing the boundaries of materials science. People come from all over the world to run experiments in the lab where I work because there are only a handful of places in the world with the hardware we have. But from my perspective, there is something about the social environment in the Unites States, the EU, Japan, Korea, and dare I say in democratic countries in general, that also makes for a better collaborative research environment. If I had to boil it way down, it would be this: People believe they are entitled to get involved in whatever strikes their interest, and they're likewise more tolerant of fielding that interest from others.
Compare and contrast this with, say, the situation in Soviet Russia, where if you were a scientist (and very lucky) you were sent to live in a "closed city", and you could talk relatively freely about your research when inside, but you risked jail or a firing squad if some apparatchik even suspected you were leaking information over the walls. A constant need to worry whether you're saying the wrong thing to the wrong person, or asking too many questions about a system that's none of your business, puts a massive drag on the pace of collaborative research and development. The incentive is against "disruption" unless it's taken and run all the way up the chain of command, then allowed to come back down again, lining the neccessary pockets along the way.
Now I ain't saying that modern China is the same as Soviet Russia. But in a society that accepts that the role of the governing party includes the right - the need - to crush dissent via massive, all-consuming censorship, ... there's a similar dragging effect. And that will slow the pace of innivation and design for them, for just as long as you please.
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Date: 18/12/24 01:29 (UTC)What gives you the impression that Russia has the best weapons? They started their fugly war in Ukraine with a "send tanks to the capital" play right out of the 1950's, and have been entirely reactive to Ukraine's tactics ever since.
What gives you the impression China is the "word's first economy"? Or do you mean, first among non-Western-oriented nations? The US GDP is still about 50% higher. Perhaps that order will change in the next 10 or 20 years, and there are good indicators that it will, but even if that's the case... Why does that concern you?
Technology supremacy is an interesting topic. I think China should be doing a lot better than it is, frankly. In the past 20 years or so China's high-tech industry exports have primarily been low-skilled labor rather than innovation. E.g. Foxconn assembly plants. You might be conflating the semiconductor fabrication and design output of other Asian countries, e.g. South Korea, Japan, and Taiwain, with China. Chinese companies have been trying to get out ahead of innovation in design - hardware and especially software - for quite a while, and it's a difficult prospect because the engine of the country's modernization has often been gray-market copycat products, produced at great speed and sold on slim margins. Shifting from that to actual innovation is pretty awkward -- but it is happening. The question I find interesting is, why isn't it happening much faster? I have a pet theory.
I spend a fair amount of time with scientists doing esoteric research. Recently it's been with people pushing the boundaries of materials science. People come from all over the world to run experiments in the lab where I work because there are only a handful of places in the world with the hardware we have. But from my perspective, there is something about the social environment in the Unites States, the EU, Japan, Korea, and dare I say in democratic countries in general, that also makes for a better collaborative research environment. If I had to boil it way down, it would be this: People believe they are entitled to get involved in whatever strikes their interest, and they're likewise more tolerant of fielding that interest from others.
Compare and contrast this with, say, the situation in Soviet Russia, where if you were a scientist (and very lucky) you were sent to live in a "closed city", and you could talk relatively freely about your research when inside, but you risked jail or a firing squad if some apparatchik even suspected you were leaking information over the walls. A constant need to worry whether you're saying the wrong thing to the wrong person, or asking too many questions about a system that's none of your business, puts a massive drag on the pace of collaborative research and development. The incentive is against "disruption" unless it's taken and run all the way up the chain of command, then allowed to come back down again, lining the neccessary pockets along the way.
Now I ain't saying that modern China is the same as Soviet Russia. But in a society that accepts that the role of the governing party includes the right - the need - to crush dissent via massive, all-consuming censorship, ... there's a similar dragging effect. And that will slow the pace of innivation and design for them, for just as long as you please.