this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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Quick, let's sell this US funded tech to the Chinese or Japanese or Germans and not actually benefit from home grown research. This has happened so many times over the decades it's disgusting.
Wouldn't this benefit everyone? Presumably the implications are far wider and more important than who makes the most profit from it.
Not if capitalists have anything to say about it.
Then why shouldn't "everyone" be funding it??
Funny how the same people who (rightfully so) complain about privatizing profits but socializing risks, don't see a problem with research that will benefit everyone should maybe also be funded by everyone.
If one group is funding that research, then you better believe they should be the ones who overwhelmingly see it's benefits.
Japanese government has a huge investment in battery tech alongside toyota and other Japanese companies. Solely to boost their economy in the long term
Yeah when other countries do it, it is seen as a smart move to help their country and employ their own people for years to come.
When the US does it, it is somehow demonized as being "nationalist" or labeled as being greedy capitalism or some other negative term.
You know you have the top comment right now, right? I think most everyone agrees that the US should be seeing the benefits of its publicly funded research - except some buttsore Europeans who will never miss an opportunity to piss on / armchair general the US.
Not that I care about internet points, but I have a -3, so if that is the "top comment" then how badly downvoted are all the other posts?! LOL
And I know a bunch of Europeans will be a little bitter, but the worst are fellow Americans who have this angry anti-American chip on their shoulder. I'll be the first to say that we need to fix this, that and the other thing, but there is a ridiculous anti-American sentiment out there that covers anything and everything dealing with the US. You can hate on politicians like Trump - guess what, so do it! - but they do not represent the US and what the US can be.
I’m talking about your “quick let’s sell this….” comment at the top level.
Many large discoveries by research in Australia in universities and CSIRO didn't get funding they needed in Australia, and the engineers and researchers simply found funding and moved to the United States. Then the US benefited from all that education and university research investment simply because the economy and startup funding was better.
I guess you know America is on a downturn if they see the same thing happening to them.
If that's true, why aren't the Chinese, Japanese and Germans running around with amazing futuristic technology while "we're" over here still stuck in the stone age?
They manufacture it and sell it to us. The US led solar research. China organizations certainly contributed to research as well, but they're a much larger manufacturor than the US, despite the significant research advancement contribution by the US. US politicians failed to put any backing into domestic effects to manufacture solar and now it's second fiddle in an industry its research helped create. So, it's not in the stone age, because it's paying out the ears for it while other countries profit heavily.
So then we actually do "benefit from it", right? If we actually wanted to assemble the batteries, place thousands of components on circuit boards, whatever, we could.
If it's so disadvantageous, why don't you start a company to manufacture solar panels or whatever in the US and become super rich? Why doesn't insert random rich person do so if it's so obvious? The answer is because it's probably not so obvious: lots of regulations, expensive labor, etc.
What's your point? My comment was that the US missed out on the opportunity to be the dominant financial beneficiary in this sector. Is you point that it gets something out of it should and that should be good enough? That's silly.
It is obvious. For years the Chinese government has provided significant financial incentives for companies to manufacture solar panels. The US until recently has provided almost nothing, instead heavily subsidizing fossil fuels. The US does now subsidize solar, and people are making panels. Solar is one of the fastest growing industries in the US. A rich guy has gotten involved - Elon Musk, who owns Solar City. If the US has acted earlier, it would dominate the solar industry, and now it's a second-rate player. It's so tiring talking to people on the Internet. Did you look up any of this before forming your hypothetical questions? "Why doesn't a rich guy do it?" Ugh.
You didn't say that, you just said "benefits" in general as though you were talking about all the benefits. I was just responding to what you wrote: that was my point.
Fine though, now I understand you were just talking about a part of the potential economic benefit of manufacturing those products. In the future, you could make these kinds of misunderstandings less likely by being more specific.
Is it your position Solar city 1) currently manufactures its own solar panels and 2) doing so is currently profitable and the business is thriving? Because as far as I can see it's not even clear they're still manufacturing solar panels. They had a deal with Panasonic but Panasonic exited a year or so ago, presumably because they couldn't get enough of a compensation for their investment even with the subsidies. Even at that point, it seems like they were just assembling components at the most, they weren't doing anything like fabricating the chips themselves.
"A New York State Comptroller’s audit found just 54 cents of economic benefit for every subsidy dollar spent on the factory, and external auditors have written down nearly all of New York’s investment. Most of the solar-panel manufacturing equipment bought by the state has been sold at a discount or scrapped." — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigafactory_New_York
Regarding effects after Tesla acquired Solar City: "By 2019, Tesla's solar panel market share was falling, prompting the company to cut its sales force. Revenue from Tesla's energy generation and storage operations from January to September 2019 fell 7% from a year earlier to $1.1 billion." — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SolarCity
My take away is Musk tried to milk as much as he could from the subsidies and generally for society the thing was a net value loss. That's in line with my conception of how he operates.
My comment did not say that the US did not benefit. My first comment did not even use the word "benefit" or any of it's varants. I've stopped reading your comment here, as you obviously are not doing people the curtousy of reading theirs.
My mistake, I thought you were the person I originally replied to. My post was also specifically criticizing how they said we didn't benefit:
"Quick, let’s sell this US funded tech to the Chinese or Japanese or Germans and not actually benefit from home grown research. This has happened so many times over the decades it’s disgusting."
I'm not sure why you'd reply to my post if you're talking about something different, but I'll admit I assumed responses wouldn't be non sequiturs.
Wow, what a crazy coincidence. You stopped reading right before the strong counterargument. Seems to happen a lot on the internet, people just randomly get bored right at that point or find some other reason to be offended and blame the other party.
LOL have you seen where all our futuristic tech is manufactured? Why don’t you look into solar panels for a great example. Who’s making and selling them? Hm? Hint: it’s mostly not the US.
Also, if you think life in the US is “futuristic” compared to Germany and Japan, then it’s obvious you haven’t traveled there.
Because solar and chip making is pretty hard on the environment. We don't do it here cause you need to process the waste to make it less toxic, so instead we buy from places that don't care.
Other countries have lots of advantages over the US, but let's not pretend that it's a utopia over there. Japan is so overworked and makes immigration so difficult they basically don't have a next generation.
Germany is great and all, but they also have a lot of imports, heck they almost froze last year due to their over reliance on cheap Russian fossil fuels.
Do you enjoy not knowing what you're talking about?
Intel, GloFo, TI, Micron, ON Semi, and NXP all have semiconductor foundries in the US.
One of the ten largest photovoltaic companies is based in the US.
Biden just dumped untold billions of USD into building out more domestic semiconductor and photovoltaic manufacturing capacity.
To be fair the majority of those things are still produced abroad, particularly Vietnam has a lot of semiconductor manufacturing, and biden dumping money into domestic production is specifically to try and fix the problem of outsourcing
Now you’re just naming any off topic problem you can think of with those countries.
Japan’s immigration policy is a choice, and they’re paying the price. It has little to do with how advanced they are in terms of research and technology.
Germany’s insufficient domestic fossil fuel supply is fucking geology. Hooray the US has rich fossil fuel resources. So does Venezuela.
So what does any of this have to do with how high tech life is in any of these places?
Gosh we’d better not look at high end manufacturing or the state of public infrastructure or rail transit in these same countries, you know, something actually on-topic having to do with level of technological advancement.
Germany gave you the COVID vaccine, by the way. The words you’re looking for are danke schoen.
So somewhere else is doing the dirty, laborious part and we're getting the benefit?
The other person said "and not benefit from it". That's what I responding to. Just to be clear, I'm not saying that kind of outsourcing to places with exploitative treatment and lax environmental regulations is a good thing in general.
I didn't say anything remotely like that.
Of course you did. It’s right there. You balked at the idea of Germany and Japan enjoying “amazing futuristic technology” compared to the US.
You have a very active imagination.
You also 100% missed the point I was making, which is that western countries like the US didn't lose the benefit of that technology. Nothing I said had anything to do with 1) saying other countries have relatively less technology or 2) being opposed to other countries having equivalent technology. Is it possible I have some kind of opinion on that? Maybe, but I didn't share it. If you want to know what I think about something, you could try asking me instead of just fabricating an alternate reality out of the ether.
With some exceptions (like trade embargoes, military secrets) if you can pay for it, you can get your hands on any technology that exists in the world.
Silly me for thinking I was learning your opinion by reading words you wrote. Don’t wait around too long for me to come asking for more of your opinions.
Yes that notably cheap Japanese and German labor is going to undercut Boeing.
Japan has access to lots of cheap labor in Asia, and the Germans have Eastern Europe which has salaries a fraction of what Germans get.
Which is becoming rather untrue more and more. An good engineer in Wrocław costs about the same as in Germany. So many factories and offices there, it's hard to find people...
Source: am German, have a competing plant in Poland near Wrocław
This is what the US does to Swedish companies, only with the added benefit of running them into the ground (I'll never forgive what they did to Saab)
Oh please, who are you kidding? SAAB would have been dead at least a decade earlier if GM didn't try to save them. The only reason they lasted as long as they did was because of GM's injection of money into the company.
They are still a thing, just not in the car world.
So you claim that SAAB was already lost when GM heroically decided to step in and do some charity?
You are very wrong and of course GM saw a value in SAAB that was more intellectual property than manufacturing cars.