It got told as: the evil English made it illegal to even import blueprints for factory machinery, to keep the colonies in resource-extractive poverty, so they'd have to send raw materials overseas to get processed, then import the finished goods. (My other history teacher, the Anno / Dawn of Discovery video game series, also cemented this bit about resource extraction in my head at a young age.) But then thanks to heroic ingenuity and cunning, I was told, the US was able to outwit the colonizers and process its own raw materials, eventually gaining full economic, military, and political supremacy.

Sounds familiar.

And Apple played a huge role in teaching them. We should all thank Tim Cook and team for almost single handedly bootstrapping China 2.0, the China that runs circles around the west in terms of production and development.

Peter Zeihann really got it wrong in his latter books.

Yes, but "the US" is reductive. The exploitation wasn't done by the towns having their tentpole industries shipped overseas, it was done by the people shipping them overseas and pocketing the profit. US capital owners made a deal with the Chinese Communist Party that was good for both of them and bad for the US.

Jet engines, proximity fuzes, radar, how to make a nuclear weapon, etc. are all examples of British / Commonwealth technology "gifted" or "traded" to the USofA during the WWII years in exchange for production.

So, not IP theft .. but absolutely foreign ideas taken in by the US and built upon.

But I think we underestimate the Chinese diaspora. They had been running factories, shops and banks from Singapore to Suriname for generations and answered the call from the PRC to share that knowledge base.

I personally have little issue with countries doing that for domestic use (I hate using term "IP theft"), but to re-export so quickly you can't run a viable business in your own country is not fine.

It plays this way: you're behind, you ignore IP rules. You're ahead: you create them to defend your newly-gained status.

Also please no moralizing here on IP when the entire OpenAI/Anthropic playbook has been "massive straight up IP theft". The irony.

You could be right! But I do see this claim come up every time Chinese tech comes up. It might be a valid concern but it might also just be folks attempts to try and undermine the technology gains of the nation.

The ISA they have developed with based off years of with with MIPS and RISC V, so it isn't entirely new but they are definitely pushing it forwards. I have no idea if any of their developments could be back ported down the RISC V.

Capishe?

We failed you somehow, kids. I'm not sure where, but we failed you.

I'm absolutely opposed to illegal immigration and have a more extreme position on how to deal with it than most Americans.

What I'm irked by are Trump's attacks on legal immigration and the general worsening of the environment. ICE's kidnappings, the 100k H-1B fee, and the recent Green Card thing have deeply eroded America's attractiveness to legal immigrants.

I think when MAGA came after H-1Bs, it became pretty clear that it's not about law and order, it's just a race thing.

And if you want to go gloves off, I'll just say it: the main problem in America is that its 3 major ethnic groups are infected by anti-intellectualism and slothfulness, whereas the Chinese and various other cultures are not. The direct benefit from skilled immigration is so that we can increase the ratio of people who actually value education and hard work vs the failing old stock Americans whose broccoli-headed kids dream of becoming YouTube influencers instead of astronauts.

Ethnic diversity is neither really here nor there in terms of the measurable needs that immigration fulfills. Immigration keeps economic and population growth rates trending up. Having high skilled immigration to bolster science and research is nice, but it's still mainly about the growth.

Yea, Obama deported lots of people, but even then we still had net positive migration. Now under Trump, we have net negative migration for the first time in decades. The very public terror campaign waged by the Trump admin was in part to deter immigration in the first place.

> Sounds like open-borders immigration was never necessary in the first place, given that we're being beat by a country with a similar demographic skew that we had like 80 years ago.

1) Economic growth is possible with stagnating/declining population levels if you overcome those deficits with commensurate increases in productivity per capita. Otherwise, you're cooked.

2) The US is actually far more productive per capita than China - in fact, the US is one of the best in the world, as far as that goes.

With those points in mind, we can begin to see why China has an easier time growing economically with little immigration. The US has a much harder time doing the same. We need more population, since it's just harder to squeeze more productivity out of our already very productive workforce.

Once China achieves similar productivity levels, they will need to rely more on growing the population.

We were actually on track to catch up to China's population levels in a few of decades (thanks to immigration). So unless China successfully pivoted to mass immigration or expansionism, the US was likely to remain dominant - easily so - for the foreseeable future.

That's why the MAGA anti-immigration push is so tragically stupid and suicidal (if it persists). They're killing America's golden goose.

As an aside: I wish the "open borders" canard would die. We've never had open-borders immigration in recent history. Definitely not since 9/11. Not even under Biden. Border laws were enforced. Biden has the same apprehension rate at the border as both Trump and Obama.