posted
I think we're all still waiting for Mal's explanation of how America invented the loo-roll. Maybe the US just invented it better. Maybe he meant ultra-soft, moistened and quilted.
Although now I think of it, those might not have been invented in the US either.
Posts: 1528 | Registered: Nov 2004
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posted
While mal is wrong about us producing the most food, we are the most efficient producers of food (with the possible exceptions of some small countries that don't produce much food at all). We have fewer workers producing far more food per worker.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
Oh, I don't doubt that eventually Mal could* move and mangle his goalposts from most food to most efficient and then from most efficient to most efficient above X million number of workers, but I like to see that process.
* That said, I'm not even sure if Mal would prefer to find an appropriate source or just move onto the next random buckshot of random points
Posts: 7593 | Registered: Sep 2006
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posted
Once the rest of the world has learned from the US....they make our products and sell them at WalMart.....to the US.
Economic advancement isn't so different than military advancement.
Where was the toaster oven invented? The light bulb? Radio? TV? Nuclear Bombs? Flight?
The rest of the world should worry when the US decides to declassify something like the stealth bomber. Once it's outsourced,....we've got something better.
We've got something better. China.....keep making cheap toasters.
From the tube to the IC chip....from electricity to nuclear power....US invented.
These inventions were due to the greedy capitalistic innovators sprouted from this fee nation, while the rest of the world was (is) subject to government, nobles or sharia law.
posted
And I'm sure those historical accomplishments will carry us as leaders of innovation into the indefinite future.
We are falling behind in development, innovation, and production. I don't think there is a good chance that the U.S. will be the sole leading nation in the next 50 years.
Posts: 1711 | Registered: Jun 2004
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posted
Nothing we can do about that. Too many other countries have numbers and time on their side. But that's fine. America needs to give up its love affair with American exceptionalism. Looks like we might have to do it the hard way.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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quote:Originally posted by The White Whale: And I'm sure those historical accomplishments will carry us as leaders of innovation into the indefinite future.
We are falling behind in development, innovation, and production. I don't think there is a good chance that the U.S. will be the sole leading nation in the next 50 years.
Past accomplishments can't carry you forward. I spent months in Cairo...it's sad that that nation clings to their glory from three thousand years ago. The height of their civilization is now covered with water bottle trash.
You're right...the Tea Party is arising among people who understand history. The Tea Party knows,...this nation, especially under Obama is headed the wrong way.
Private schools still teach actual history.
Name one nation that has an older governmental system...name one that has contributed as much to the advancement of mankind?
Compared to the US, France is in junior high and Greece is an elementary school flunky.
If America fails, it's because we began to emulate Europe.
Posts: 1495 | Registered: Mar 2009
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quote:Originally posted by malanthrop: Name one nation that has an older governmental system...
Repost
quote:Originally posted by Mucus: Quick thought.
If we use your apparent goalposts which are government continuity, unbroken by occupation or revolution (whatever that is supposed to mean in the larger scheme of things), the American government would seem to date from 1776.
However, the last British revolution was in 1688 with the constitutional monarchy uninterrupted since then.
quote:Originally posted by fugu13: While mal is wrong about us producing the most food, we are the most efficient producers of food (with the possible exceptions of some small countries that don't produce much food at all). We have fewer workers producing far more food per worker.
kind of a petroleum-heavy system, though.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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quote:If America fails, it's because we began to emulate Europe.
You've said this before. Any student of history knows that while America did away with things like kings and titles, it still founded its system of government by borrowing ideas from European nations, and philosophers.
If you asked any of the founding fathers if we could ever look to Europe for ideas down the road, they would have looked at you like you were illiterate.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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quote:You're right...the Tea Party is arising among people who understand history.
Like how America is a Christian nation founded on Christian law!
You'd rather live in a Christian nation than a muslim one.
Christians teach, turn the other cheek....(Post Edited by Janitor Blade, don't disparage Islam Mal.)
Of course, I believe following others is human nature. The royals of the old world have been replaced by the people who are famous for being famous. American policians have handed down congressional seats to succeeding generations longer than royals could hope for, in a monarchy. People want royals, people want to be lead. If not politically,...you have Paris Hilton.
Posts: 1495 | Registered: Mar 2009
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quote:You're right...the Tea Party is arising among people who understand history.
Like how America is a Christian nation founded on Christian law!
You'd rather live in a Christian nation than a muslim one.
That's incredibly presumptuous, and it's also irrelevant, since I live in the United States, a secular nation.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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quote:"You'd rather live in a Christian nation than a muslim one."
Christian nations only became more tolerant than Muslim ones when they began to stop primarily believing in Christianity; putting the ideas of the Enlightenment first instead.
Before then, it was the Muslim nations that were more tolerant (e.g. the Spanish evicted Muslims and Jews from the Spanish peninsula, but the Ottomans never evicted the Christians from the Balkan peninsula).
quote:Christians teach, turn the other cheek....
And occasionally burn you at the stake like they did with Jeanne D'arc or flay you alive like they did with Hypatia or put you in rape camps like the Bosnian Serbs did.
Posts: 676 | Registered: Feb 2003
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quote:Most religious do tend to have people who don't practice what the religion teaches.
When the people who don't "practice what the religion teaches" are the heads of the church for hundreds of years, dismissing it this way seems pretty weaselly to me.
Posts: 5656 | Registered: Oct 1999
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quote:We are falling behind in development, innovation, and production. I don't think there is a good chance that the U.S. will be the sole leading nation in the next 50 years.
By the measures of development, innovation, and production, Japan's been at about our level for a couple decades now (and that's with some crippling economic problems). Hasn't seemed to have been a major problem. Actually, it has been a source of considerable economic growth for us.
What makes us a superpower is having a very good economy (the best in the world, overall, but not that different from most other first world economies,, except in the details) and having military might. Sole superpower status will only go away when a military from a similarly strong economy can challenge us successfully (there are no signs of significant economic decline relative to other nations for the next few decades, at least, so that option is out).
Interestingly, all the places with similar economic status don't seem to want much military, and all the places that want a lot of military are still nowhere near us in terms of overall economy (note: total size of the economy is not a useful measure beyond a certain minimum; that's just a property of having a lot of people. Per capita measures are what matter here). Let me know when China passes the poorer countries in eastern europe by that economic yardstick.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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Blayne Bradley
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posted
Actually fugu your wrong, the USA has been declining economically in relative terms since the 1980's and is actually fairly noticible.
Think about it, is the US as strong militarily, economically, and politically on all fronts now as it was in 1950? The answer is "no".
The fact of the US's decline has been readily apparant to anyone willing to comb through the economic data, as Paul Kennedy has done so in his book "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: The United States The Problem of Number One In Relative Decline"
Every structural problem with the US he pointed out then have actually become worse now, mounting debt, a sluggish economy, uncompetitive in trade with the NICs, mounting political pressures across the globe with less and less resources to meet them, spiraling costs of the military with less to show for it etc.
quote:Interestingly, all the places with similar economic status don't seem to want much military,
There aren't that many countries with a large enough economies to significantly invest in the military, with the US putting some 5-6% of GDP into it any other country would relatively speaking need to invest 10 to 20% to match it, of which only Japan, the EU as a whole and China have economies anywhere close.
quote:and all the places that want a lot of military
How are we defining 'want' every country has their own specific national defense needs and considerations, simply willing to purchase arms in the last 5-10 years or planning to purchase arms in the next 5-10 isn't indicitative of an 'arms buildup' especially with nations that say like Russia are significantly behind even in small arms procurements, whose Strategic deterrent has decayed and whose SSNs and boomers need significant upgrading and replacements... Etc. It becomes difficult to be critical of a nation that to all appearances is simply bringing their forces to the same readiness as anyone else.
And China well, they've been significantly underfunding their military for 40 years now, the "Four Modernizations" placed the military as the lowest priority in order to focus on economic modernization, its current increases are a result of their nation's economy naturally pulling its military along the modernization path that the economy itself went.
And still needs to be stated that in absolute terms the PLA of today is actually smaller then it was 20 years ago.
Finally, actually your kinda wrong again Per capita measures of economic performance are not good indicators of a nation being able to have a sustainably large military, what you need to look at is PPP for that of which China does significantly better.
To convert economic strength into military strength you need to look at the State's ability to in a dirigist fashion direct national resources effectively towards that goal, that the average person in China is still poor is irrelevent if the economic contributions of over a billion Chinese can be effectively directed towards the goals of the State.
Conscription to be able to access skilled and trained personell, a vibrant scientific community able to develop the tools of national defense without over relying on imports, a huge manufacturing and resource materials base, a huge trading volume that provides China with the hard currency in which to be able to do significant arms procurements over the long term, a transportation network for the quick movement and deployment of troops and resources, shipyards for the construction and laying down of warships, etc etc etc.
By all indicators as long as China's economic growth continues without catastrophic interruptions there's no doubt that the era of the Pax Americana is soon over 'officially' de jure, it's already over de facto, the US's economic base simply can't let it do the things it could've done even 20 years ago.
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quote:Originally posted by malanthrop: Compared to the US, France is in junior high and Greece is an elementary school flunky.
If America fails, it's because we began to emulate Europe.
Umm....Didn't Greece invent the Democracy? I guess I didn't know that we have been failing for over 200 years. Totally Obama's fault.
Posts: 1937 | Registered: Nov 2006
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quote:Where was the toaster oven invented? The light bulb? Radio? TV? Nuclear Bombs? Flight?
The toaster oven is American, although toasting things is definitely not.
The principle behind the light bulb was originated by Joseph W. Swan, a UK inventor, and he demonstrated a working glass lamp in 1878, but vacuum pumps weren't good enough at the time to reliably make them. Edison devised the first practical light bulb using a filament with a high electrical resistance, but he did so by building on Swan's idea.
Radio? Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell predicted the existence of radio waves in 1860; an American dentist Mahlon Loomis, an American dentist, successfully demonstrated "wireless telegraphy"; the German physicist Heinrich Rudolph Hertz demonstrated that rapid variations of electric current could be projected into space in the form of radio waves similar to those of light and heat in 1886; Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi sent and received his first radio signal in Italy in 1895 and sent the first wireless signal across the English Channel in 1899 and was credited for decades as the inventor of radio; Nikola Tesla was the first person to patent radio technology.
Nuclear bombs? They were developed jointly by the U.S., Britain and Canada in response to news that the Germans were already working on theirs.
Flight? I assume you mean airplanes; balloons, zeppelins and gliders have been around for hundreds of years. What the Wright Brothers demonstrated was powered, manned flight, which was built on the discoveries of many other people.
I don't wish to demean the works of Americans, and all of these items were breakthroughs borne of genius and perseverance, but your initial post implied that Americans whomped them up from whole cloth and sheer Americanness and it just ain't so.
Posts: 7790 | Registered: Aug 2000
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posted
Blayne, I'm not going to bother responding to the beginning of your post, because most of it is just you reading things that feed your existing fantasies and then taking them as truth. I will, however, respond to some later parts.
quote:Think about it, is the US as strong militarily, economically, and politically on all fronts now as it was in 1950? The answer is "no".
Let us see. Our standard of living is much, much higher than it was in the 1950s, along with pretty much every indicator of economic strength, so I'm going to say we're stronger economically. Our military, while smaller in absolute terms due to having fewer people we need to match against, severely outmatches everyone else's military, so I'm going to say we're not weaker in any meaningful sense militarily. Politically? Well, there are no Soviet bloc countries to be unable to influence, so our influence extends quite a bit further in many ways that it did in the 50s. We've lost some influence due to a particularly boneheaded administration, but that's happened before, so I'm not too worried. Plus, a lot of our "political" strength in the 50s was really economic: every country in Europe owed us huge sums of money.
quote:There aren't that many countries with a large enough economies to significantly invest in the military, with the US putting some 5-6% of GDP into it any other country would relatively speaking need to invest 10 to 20% to match it, of which only Japan, the EU as a whole and China have economies anywhere close.
You seem to have grasped the concept. Remember, I'm giving the reasons we are a superpower. Being a small country is a good reason one cannot be a superpower.
quote:How are we defining 'want' every country has their own specific national defense needs and considerations, and then a lot of irrelevant stuff that seems to think I was somehow attacking China
I said it pretty clearly: "want a lot". A lot is the level of want I was talking about. At the very least, enough to extend military influence globally (since that is sort of a prerequisite for a superpower).
quote:Finally, actually your kinda wrong again Per capita measures of economic performance are not good indicators of a nation being able to have a sustainably large military, what you need to look at is PPP for that of which China does significantly better.
PPP is better for China because of land and food. Since land and food are much cheaper in China, the basket of goods used to estimate PPP for the average Chinese person shows how the exchange rate undervalues their economy.
Modern military technology, however, is not cheaper in China. PPP is a useless comparison for the purposes of military calculations.
Also, while exchange rate-based comparisons are not true relative measures of economic situations, they do give fairly accurate rankings. In other words, use PPP all you want, but China's still not passed the poorer countries in eastern Europe for the economic measures that matter for being a superpower. (Oh, and nothing I said specified I wasn't talking about PPP-based measures instead of exchange-rate based measures, though you seem to have assumed that. Or misunderstood what "per capita" means -- you can measure PPP per capita perfectly fine).
People in China, while accelerating greatly, with a few of them (compared to the rest) achieving high standards of living, are on the whole very poor compared to the "first world". It will take a very long time to overcome that, though China is doing an admirable job.
This is all an aside, of course. You have agreed China's military isn't especially large, and seem to be asserting they have no desire to make it large. That makes them not a superpower, and not a future superpower. That was the entire point of my post: none of the candidate places people put forward as replacing the US as a global superpower seem to be interested in it. That isn't too surprising: being a superpower is complicated and expensive.
quote:By all indicators as long as China's economic growth continues without catastrophic interruptions there's no doubt that the era of the Pax Americana is soon over 'officially' de jure, it's already over de facto, the US's economic base simply can't let it do the things it could've done even 20 years ago.
Really? List the things we could've one 20 years ago we couldn't do today. I'd be happy to show how they'd all fit within the modern budget.
As for being "de facto" over, don't make me laugh. The economic downturn recently made quite clear that when the going gets tough, faith in the strength of the US economy is still very strong. At least, the decision makers in Beijing clearly have a lot of such faith (no matter what they say in speeches): they're still making billion dollar bets that America's economic future is bright.
And take note of your use of the qualifier "without catastrophic interruptions". Please name one major economy that never has catastrophic interruptions.
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Blayne Bradley
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posted
Come back to me when you've actually read the book fugu as I'm not in the mood to transcribe the whole chapter just because you feel like staying ignorant.
You completely fail to understand the definition behind relative decline, it's completely irrelevant that in absolute terms the US is a whole order of magnitude stronger now then it was in 1950, what matters is that relative to the economic and military strength of the emerging superpowers and power blocs the US's strength is nolonger anywhere nearly as in a strong as a position as it was 50 years ago, this is historical fact.
relative vs absolute and your making the simplistic mistake of conflating the two.
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quote:You completely fail to understand the definition behind relative decline, it's completely irrelevant that in absolute terms the US is a whole order of magnitude stronger now then it was in 1950, what matters is that relative to the economic and military strength of the emerging superpowers and power blocs the US's strength is nolonger anywhere nearly as in a strong as a position as it was 50 years ago, this is historical fact.
Yes, considering a devastating war that destroyed most of the then-first world other than the US, when many parts of the world were still industrializing, the US is not in quite as good a place as it was relative to that time period. This is a natural consequence of the fact that the world hasn't had another industrial revolution.
I thought it unnecessary to state extremely obvious things such as that.
Again, I'm making a very simple argument that you seem to be failing to read: being a global superpower requires a very strong economy and a very strong military (see the sketch of a definition I gave in my last post). There is no country that is on track for attaining both of those positions. Even if more countries are on the top of the economic heap with us, we will still be the only country on the top of the economic and military heaps.
Also, the idea that someone else being better off makes us worse off is a fallacy. As I pointed out, Japan being competitive with us economically turned out to be great for our economic situation, not bad. China becoming stronger economically is good for the US.
quote: Most religious do tend to have people who don't practice what the religion teaches.
When the people who don't "practice what the religion teaches" are the heads of the church for hundreds of years, dismissing it this way seems pretty weaselly to me.
Most religions also tend to have churches that, at least during periods of history, don't practice what the religion teaches.
Of course... my perspective on this is as a guy who believes in a God that came down in the flesh and rebuked religious leaders for not following their religion correctly.
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