Posted on 03/06/2005 7:51:17 AM PST by HolgerDansk
I'm not dissing the Germans or their advancements. I'm just saying, if you accept that raw aerospace intelligence capacity is spread uniformly among societies that are beyond merely pursuing food and water...then the US has bested all others in the EXECUTION of raw brash innovation. And I think the socialist mentality in Germany and later east block countries was no match.
many of us have tried to explain to the freeper free trade contingent these same basic points again and again. its hopeless. once the US loses an industry to offshoring, they also lose any future innovations and economic growth that would have come from it. innovations take place where engineers are employed, and investments are made. if china and india are those places, then that's where its going to happen. who do people think are going to come up with these technology innications in the US - all the lawyers and public school teachers and finance majors the colleges are turning out?
Judging by some posts here...it seems that people who dont work in technology dont know what high tech is, or what it takes to develop it.
That in itself is symptomatic of an awareness problem.
The point I should have made...but didnt get across...is that the Carly Fiorinas of the world dont arise out of a vacuum...they are the natural end product of a certain type of cultural and business mindset.
Google is doing the same thing techically as AltaVista was ten years ago, but different as a business (until recently).
Ebay is doing almost exactly the same thing that it was in 1998, both technically and as a business.
Nothing new technically over at Amazon either, and they're still on the same business play as they were in 1997 (expand out of the books niche).
The underlying technology in all three commoditized years ago (in the case of Google, more recently, but yes, search is very much a commodity technology now). Not exactly my idea of "cutting edge".
Ebay, Amazon and Yahoo don't have any connection with govt or corporate R&D that i know about.
All three run on top of technology that was funded heavily by D/ARPA at Stanford and Berkeley, as well as the the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at UIUC. The infrastructure of the Internet, which (when it does its job) is largely invisible, large databases, superscalar CPUs, RISC microprocessors in and of themselves....the list goes on for a long, long time.
No, it's not hopeless. I bought into the Free Trade argument under Reagan, because of the Smoot-Hawley history fiasco. But, as an Engineer, I have to respect empirical data over theory. "Free Trade" hasn't been fair trade, thanks to currency manipulation and non-tariff barriers, amongst other things. I don't think it's benefitting anyone in the US long term, except for the legal profession.
Having said that, I think there's still hope, but the country has to get off its collective hindquarters and restore innovation to its formerly enshrined postion in our society. That means valuing both the innovations from basic and applied science, as well as the people who do the work.
About fifty years ago, the Kremlin kicked our butt with Sputnik. It hurt, and we had enough societal pride to go out and do something about it. It's time again.
YOU SAID..."Having said that, I think there's still hope, but the country has to get off its collective hindquarters and restore innovation to its formerly enshrined postion in our society......."
Amen...coudn't have said it better.
"Uh. Wright, Curtiss, Martin, Douglas, Loughead, Boeing, Hughes, etc etc....were better than the German and Soviet scientists...."
It takes nothing away from the great American aircraft designers to acknowledge that things like rocket-powered aircraft and jet-powered aircraft were first accomplished in combat by German aircraft designers.
We wouldn't have been able to develop the rockets that got us to the moon and back without those German rocket scientists, esp. Von Braun. They were simply the best.
"We wouldn't have been able to develop the rockets that got us to the moon and back without those German rocket scientists, esp. Von Braun. They were simply the best."
I meant we wouldn't have been able to develop rockets that got us to the moon and back WHEN WE DID without Von Braun, et al......
"AT&T is all but dead because they couldn't adapt beyond their monopoly past.....and their managers almost universally have failed when they left AT&T."
AT&T is dead because top management and the Board of Directors, did not have the testicular fortitude to tell the feds to go to hell when the government first went to break up the Bell System.
And, don't forget Lucent. They are dead-in-the-water because of McGinn and Fiorina and their clones as well as a, similar to AT&T, lack of guts.
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