The damage is done. Unless there’s a sudden reversal of cultural attitudes, the US has given up. The only way I see this happening is if the space race sparks another push for STEM.
Like, actual STEM. It seems like nobody has noticed but all anybody has cared about anymore is watching the stock market go up. It’s no longer about the pursuit of science and technology but how that can be used to make money.
They need to land some people on the moon again. Make it a big deal about sci-fi type shit. Orbit space stations around the Earth and the moon. Make it a daily life kind of thing that the population can get engaged with.
It’s apparent that people are weary of technology anymore cause all we’ve had is brain rot designed to extract value from us. People need to see science and technology as something hopeful again.
With the price of tuition now a days, and an already poor education system as it were, I don’t think the US is getting back to anything.
Only reason for an education seems to be to join a tech company. I have a hunch that too much IT has sapped all other sectors of the best graduates, hence why everything else is so understaffed and expensive.
it seem everyone was getting into tech like 10 years ago, it might finally be bursting? but i dont think they will have severe lack of jobs, like stem would right now or even 10 years ago. biotech has been kept small as far as the job pool goes, but the field seems to have shortages in those areas, maybe they figured out they dont want to compete with scientists salaries so they gatekeep BS/MS graduates.
the only stem that is doing really well is bio> to nursing degree, or some health related same kind of demand, buts its extremely skewed towards 1 demographic.
the tuition is one of the least problems, the job field prior to AI, pandemic was pretty bad for stem as it is. and its badly gatekeeped for research. they go to great lengths to avoid hiring domestic applicants.
The only way I see this happening is if the space race sparks another push for STEM.
A major reason the space race resulted in US technological superiority was because they didn’t Gulag former Nazi scientists.
USA is very much cooked.
yup, we got some of thier rocket scientists and russia got other group. we though it was a deal to get Japanese bioweapon scientists but turned out it wash just pseudoscience or very objective experimentations.
Stem jobs are noticeably stagnant as far as they way they hire especially how much bs they pull to keep people form applying online. more often than not your application will never seen by a person, especially with AI in the mix now. even before AI they had software to just randomly screen people anyways. ghost jobs, fake listings in order to have an excuse they cant find anyone, or had hire one with extremely specific skills that they had int he company(like you cant even get those experience in a normal university)
Not just in science. In everything.
America is being lapped by a fascist Pooh Bear because 30% of Americans are mouthbreathers with Bible kinks.
Intelligent people aren’t going to stay in a country that doesn’t respect intelligence.
They’ll take their knowledge elsewhere. It’s in high demand in other first world countries.
Sometimes I forget one of Trump’s first agendas was nuking research funding and using a keyword filter against grant submissions that had words like “trans” without conntext.
Seems like so long ago compared to an active war with Iran.
Was that in 2017 or 2025? There’s been so much terribleness that it’s hard to sort out…
The people who control capital and the levers of power in the west no longer care about the primacy of the United States in any sense. It was only ever just a mechanism they used to consolidate their power by using our economic system and our military for their own ends (see: “War is a Racket”)
Now they’re pulling up the drawbridge, boarding their super yachts, the escape plans drawn up decades ago. America is left a hollow shell with only the sad remnants of broken promises left behind.
It is not just cutting research funding, but also making migrating to the US much much harder. The US has amazing pay for the absolute top researchers, which makes it attractive for even migrants from other developed countries. However life in most other countries is better then one of the new migrant concentration camps the US is building with ICE.
Probably the Anglosphere apart from the US and then other rich developed countries will benefit fro this the most. They all have somewhat working migration systems in place to attract talent. China so far lacks that, but they probably set one up soon.
While the states is busy overtaking Turkmenistan as Worlds Weirdest Dictatorship
But how many variations of “peace” prize did Turkmenistan’s “dear leader” solicit? What’s his ratio of “peace” prizes to wars started?
What is so weird about Turkmenistan? Is it where they have a huge shiny statue of their previous “leader”? Not too weird…
A wonderful series of photo-heavy blog posts about Ashgabat, Turkmenistan can go some way to answering this question.
Wow, thanks so much for sharing this. I value this small glimpse into a part of the world I know next to nothing of. I loved how the low amount of text in these posts enhanced the surreal feeling of the images, e.g. an image captioned by “[place] empty at noon”, followed by an image captioned “[place] empty at night”
you forgot “[place] empty in the evening” between these two :-)
Most countries have that, no? Mount Rushmore comes to mind
That’s just America’s fascism peeking out to remind you it was always there.
They just ran out of large populations of local brown people to oppress so they go over seas to do it now.
I think it’s the guy obsessed with horses.
To be fair, those are some very fuckable horses. For people into stuff like that, I mean,
It’s like that movie based on real life, “the death of Dick Long”
“Is overtaking?” Sorry buddy, that point lies in the past. China dominates nearly all of the relevant future technologies and is still ramping up its investments. There’s no stopping them now.
China sent their best and brightest to be educated in American colleges, which American kids can’t get without taking on a lifetime of student debt. Most American kids aren’t rich enough to deserve to be smart.
It’s okay, though, we’ll need those bodies for the war. Trump is competing against Putin numbers for sacrifices. 1.2 million so far in Ukraine. Trump has some catching up to do. He wants to be able to brag to his Sociopathic Oligarch buddies at dinner at Maralago about how many soldiers have died for him, and the higher the number the better. That’s how much they love him.
American students don’t need college, that’s for the Chinese who build our stuff. The Draft is coming for American students. They should be willing to die to protect American Freedom.®
The US paid the best and brightest foreigners to teach in American colleges.
Even in the AI sector they seem to be only a pace or two behind. Their models are as good and require less compute. It really does feel like we are falling behind in everything.
Even in the AI sector
they said relevant future technologies
Solid burn
In some ways their AI might even be better at this point. I’ve talked with Claude users complaining that their AI kept skipping steps and I haven’t had that problem with GLM 5.
“Their models are as good and require less compute.”
In a sense, this is exactly why I think that China will inevitably overtake the US in this field too. Even besides things like Deepseek, which distills LLMs dominant in the US into a more streamlined model, China also seems to be putting more resources into researching AI that doesn’t need to start out with mahoosive amounts of data.
US post WW2 boom is over and they squandered it.
We have been running on old money for decades. We used China for our slave labor, and now they make the best stuff and don’t need us. That’s why the US is 70% service industry now. We are basically two rich trust fund babies jerking ourselves from off surrounded by slave labor, but eventually we run out of money. We are at the running out of money phase
Yeah but this is round two: science boogaloo. We have a government actively hostile to science and research, throwing away where we still had a leading position.
In particular, we’re reversing the brain drain from China. If they’re becoming slightly less repressive and welcome science while we’re cutting research, cutting legal immigration, driving cuts by racism and judging research by whether the ai classifies it as “woke”, too many researchers who would have come here may no longer feel welcome
The US still holds the reserve currency, that they force other countries to use via military force. Which allows them to export their inflation, and to print money to build up the military they use to protect its usage.
I think the problem is the population got too heavy into taking in debt via this mechanism, always asking for more and more tax cuts and more social programs, and China themselves stopped buying US treasuries in 2016. Then locking Russia out of US bonds further exacerbated the issue, as its no longer seen as a neutral asset, so bond yields rise as less people buy them.
Then the tariffs and higher interest rates cause debt crisis in other countries by limiting their access to USD, which makes them attempt to move away, which is likely how gold prices nearly doubled in a single year. Its pretty wild whats happening.
Where are these social programs?
The US federal government is a well armed pension fund.
Well technically social security is a social program, as it medicare, given they are funded by debt. Those are the vast majority.
This is exactly what is happening with gold. Everyone dumping usd for gold right now
Most boom was due to the cold war, US got rid of its only rival and went rogue and shot itself in the foot
Supremacy in most if not all fields of endeavor by 2049 is a high goal, only accelerated by American political chaos and regression to traditionalism whereupon global disillusionment leads to realignment towards the Middle Kingdom.
Who knew that taking funding for scientific research away from government institutes and universities and giving it to ketamine-addicted con men would have negative consequences.
it’s not negative to the con men. a nation of science-averse suspicious uneducated half wits is exactly what they need to stay in power
but also stagnate
Kings of ashes are worth less than the ground they stand upon.
Already done, bruh. 10 years of Republicans tearing down everything led to this. Not a shocker.
It’s been more like 40 years of Republican rule.
It’s truely a team effort the Republicans and Democrats are the ratchet effect manifested.
The FPTP system ensures you will only get those two choices so if you want to effect change its probably easiest to do it at the primary level.
People always say ‘progressives can’t get elected nationally’ or whatever forgetting FPTP ensures things will swap back (under the assumption that one side doesn’t flip fascist before that happens, big assumption in this climate I know) because eventually people will tire of the person in power and either vote for ‘change’ or stay home.
They’re banning books, that says a lot.
Usually I would agree with you, but in this context, I am fairly sure China bans more book than the U.S.
Yes, that little bump the Americans got after the 1940s because of some, er… “immigrants” has long since run out.
Immigrants? You have no idea what you are talking about, Von Braun is a good old American name.
Wasn’t his original surname “Merkwürdigliebe”?
Let’s call it a prolonged international exchange program.
Europe might just get back the scientists that brain drained to the US. if china stopped fuding thier results, and opening thier research to criticism, and peer review internationally it would improve thier innovation. right now its mostly controlled by the CCP.
I mean, in the long run, this should be inevitable. The scientific revolution was a lightning bolt that happened to strike in Europe. And all western countries inherited that head start. But in the long run, we would expect all the world to converge to a similar science, and wealth level. And if China has triple the population of the US, why wouldn’t you expect them to dominate the US in raw scientists output? That should be the default condition.
Or, to return to reality for a moment, China has invested in new technologies and education for the prupose of having new technologies and an educated population while the US has long engaged in innovation only if it will make money(while actively stifling new things if it means competition) and in dumbing down its own population so that they’re easier to control. The US exists as a machine to enrich, in the short-term, a handful of people and anything that does not work to that end is seen as a waste. No public infrastructure, no investing in science for advancement’s sake, no education poor people, no nothing.
The US has failed because of deliberate effort by itself to shoot its own feet and legs before diving head-first into an intellectual wood-chipper. It is 100% voluntary and you cannot hide behind “it must’ve been inevitable!”.
This read as very narrow euro centric view of the world.
Your post reads as a vapid grievance-centered view of the world.
It is in no way related to population number. I bet there is high correlation with politics
You pointed out an obvious and irrelevant fact but neglected my main point. This isn’t that complicated. If there are two countries with equal technology and education levels, the larger one will have a greater scientific output. All other things being equal, bigger countries should produce more science. And the things that prevent everything from being equal are largely historical aberrations that will decrease with time.
Obviously, there today isn’t a direct correlation between population and scientific output. But that’s not what I argued. My assertion is that all other things being equal, a larger country will be able to produce more science. This shouldn’t be controversial. More people. More resources. More ability to employ scientists to do science.
Yes, there isn’t a direct correlation today between population and scientific output, but different countries have radically different levels of development, wealth, and education. But these differences tend to average out over time as the world as a whole becomes more industrialized and developed. For most of human history, China was the leading scientific and technological power. And this was largely because they were simply had the largest population able to invent and discover things. For a time, small European countries had an advantage. But that’s just because Europe got lucky and happened to be where the scientific revolution happened to start. That was never a stable position that could be maintained forever. There is no timeline where tiny England continued to control the world forever.
My point is not that, today, there is a direct correlation between scientific output and population size. You pointed out this obvious fact, but you missed the entire point of my comment. My point is that China overtaking the US in scientific output is not unexpected at all. It’s exactly what we would expect to happen. It’s a returning to the historical norm, the end of an anomalous period of history. A regression to the mean.
scientific revolution
You mean the rise of rationalism over religion in Europe that came out of the renaissance that only happened because they reopened trade routes and actually started paying attention to what had been going on in the islamic golden age?
Look, I get not being Euro centric, but you’re just looking for grievances. Performative wokism taken to the point of farce.
The scientific revolution was a new invention. There was philosophy and rationalism before, but it’s incredibly reductive to just collapse the entire scientific method to be no different than the methods of inquiry that came before. It clearly had vastly different and more dramatic real-world consequences than the eras that came before. The Islamic Golden Age did not produce a self-reinforcing series of technological advancements that completely altered the lives of every living human being. The life of a peasant living in an Islamic country was virtually unchanged from before the Islamic Golden Age to after the Islamic Golden Age. I get rejecting imperialism. But you’re being so performatively anti-imperialist that it’s clouding your judgment.
The scientific method was something that was invented in its modern form in a particular place and time. Yes, it had precursors, but so what? Humans evolved from creatures that are a fundamentally different species to ourselves. Every invention and discovery has precursors, but that doesn’t mean they’re the same thing. You have such an anti-West axe to grind that you can’t recognize a truly remarkable discovery, simply because it happened to be invented by Europeans.
It was not normal for a tiny peninsula on the edge of the Eurasian landmass to, in a few centuries, go from being a global backwater to dominating the world. It’s a historical aberration. To explain it, you have two choices;
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Be a racist and conclude that there is something particularly different about European genetics that makes Europeans either particularly intelligent (positive racism) or particularly evil (negative racism) that allowed them to achieve this feat.
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Recognize that it was an accident of history and that a uniquely powerful discovery/invention, the modern scientific method, happened to be invented in Europe.
Personally, I don’t like Eugenics-based explanations. Maybe you do. But I reject racism, even for the sake of anti-imperialism. Maybe you think Europeans are just genetically evil geniuses. But my default assumption is that everyone is the same, and Europe just happened to roll a natural 20 when it came to where the scientific revolution would happen.
Sure, you can pretend that it was no different from other methods of rational inquiry that came before. But then you have to explain why the modern scientific method produced a knowledge explosion while previous methods didn’t.
Performative wokism taken to the point of farce.
Oh you silly little biscuit.
Western science never formed in a vacuum. It’s always been a continuance of knowledge. Imperialism plays a huge part, because a stable empire with security tends to rise the life of its citizens and result in a greater scholarly presence, but scientific advancement and knowledge is not some strange, magical thing that only appeared in one place at one time due to magical butt fairies or whatever the hell else you’re ascribing. It’s standing on the shoulders of the ones who came before you, who stand on the shoulders of those before them.
It was not normal for a tiny peninsula on the edge of the Eurasian landmass to, in a few centuries, go from being a global backwater to dominating the world
It absolutely is if you understand your history. That pissy little kingdom around the Palatine hill did exactly that. That tiny spit at Aigai surrounded by the big boys. And also I think you’re conflating “scientific revolution” with shipbuilding and trade there bud.
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