Tuesday, June 29, 2010

First Manufacturing, then Engineering, and Finally Research

Map of sinitic languages
When will it become obvious that FREE ENTERPRISE MEANS FREE, and that wherever THAT IS, capital flees.
Ethics are not applicable, this is a LAW OF NATURE ..amoral, darwinian, and final.

I don' know what is made in USA on the shelves of Walmart, but you can bet it's not of much future employment value.
And of course we then have the story of the engineering going to China by municipalities in the USA, and farming.

But our fine labs and schools meant that research was still a province of the US pioneering.

FORGET IT.

"If I had stayed in America, the chances of making a discovery would have been lower," he said. "Here, people are willing to take risks. They give you money, and essentially you can do whatever you want."

China pushing the envelope on science, and sometimes ethics

By John Pomfret
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 28, 2010; A01

SHENZHEN, CHINA -- Last year, Zhao Bowen was part of a team that cracked the genetic code of the cucumber. These days, he's probing the genetic basis for human IQ.

Zhao is 17.

Centuries after it led the world in technological prowess -- think gunpowder, irrigation and the printed word -- China has barged back into the ranks of the great powers in science. With the brashness of a teenager, in some cases literally, China's scientists and inventors are driving a resurgence in potentially world-changing research.

Unburdened by social and legal constraints common in the West, China's trailblazing scientists are also pushing the limits of ethics and principle as they create a new -- and to many, worrisome -- Wild West in the Far East.

A decade ago, no one considered China a scientific competitor. Its best and brightest agreed and fled China in a massive brain drain to university research labs at Harvard, Stanford and MIT.

But over the past five years, Western-educated scientists and gutsy entrepreneurs have conducted a rearguard action, battling China's hidebound bureaucracy to establish research institutes and companies. Those have lured home scores of Western-trained Chinese researchers dedicated to transforming the People's Republic of China into a scientific superpower.

"They have grown so fast and so suddenly that people are still skeptical," said Rasmus Nielsen, a geneticist at the University of California at Berkeley who collaborates with Chinese counterparts. "But we should get used to it. There is competition from China now, and it's really quite drastic how things have changed."

China has invested billions in improving its scientific standing. Almost every Chinese ministry has some sort of program to win a technological edge in everything from missiles to medicine. Beijing's minister of science and technology, Wan Gang, will visit the United States in early July and is expected to showcase some of China's successes.

I am reminded of Bernard Lewis' unmeant warning about Tycho Brae's muslim counterpart. The muslims had lead in all branches of research, certainly since the times of the end of the Dark Ages. But as Brae published his theses his co-repsondent in the Caliphate watched as the ulema ordered the end of his research, and the dismantling of his observatory and equipment after it was ruled to be unethical and religiously not 'correct'. No matter what we think about Islam there can be no question that religious restrictions of any kind, and the use of bio ethicists as a substitute for common sense, the valuing of some abstract wiccan Gaia above the lives of humans here and now, will drive what must be (human progress) elsewhere, BECAUSE IT CANNOT BE STOPPED ANY MORE THAN THE MOTION OF PLANETS.

You can mark the emergence here of this kind of thinking as a superior power with the ridiculous and needless war over stem cells. Stem cell research CAN HELP CURE HORRIFYING DISEASES - PERIOD - and we will have to deal with that - BUT CURE HUMANS. Anything else is, IMHO, reasoning which sanctifies IGNORANCE as ETHICAL. IF all this was going to be easy we could hand it to trained dogs. But you can bet THIS RESEARCH WILL GET DONE, ONE WAY OR ANOTHER. SOMEWHERE.

As these asian researchers are documented returning home for an economically better life, YOU CAN BE CERTAIN American companies from Pfizer to Fluor, from Procter and Gamble to Intel, Sun and Oracle will start labs (as they have) and then MOVE facilities to China, and then departmental, and finally corporate headquarters.

This will proceed until they endow Chinese universities with more than american ones and we will be sending our gifted children to learn Mandarin and Cantonese in 3rd grade so that they can attend graduate and post doctoral schools in Shenzen.

There is no good or bad attached to this process. It's PHYSICS.

In every field, in every facility, in every law, in every motion we move towards national suicide by many names.

We may have the most individualism and freedoms on earth TODAY, but the force of nature known as CAPITAL doesn't care if we use religious reasoning and cultural ethical considerations to make believe what must be will not happen if we do what some consider 'right'.

China and what they are doing is REAL. It is not a military threat, it is far more serious.

It is a threat of intellectual, engineering, agrarian, and manufacturing dimensions. It is not a drive for world hegemony, it is a BY PRODUCT of few limits, enterprise and human nature, and we have NO ANSWER which will make our children's lives better and more optimistic than ours.

UNLESS- like it or not we free our research, manufacturing, marketing, design and FINALLY EDUCATION to ACHIEVE again.

READ IT ALL

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2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Guys.
Glad to see that you put this story here.We should have stopped the emerging Chinese market 25 years ago from coming in our countries ,now it's to late "Das Kapital"has sold us out and the US and Europe are doomed to limp behind .

Epaminondas said...

Will the point of this article is that there is NO WAY to stop what capital does. It is a force of nature. The Chinese have decided to adopt themselves to the needs of capital and inventiveness, and human nature, we are going in the opposite direction.

We have the problem, not the Chinese