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Comment by oceanplexian | Hacker News Reader

The US for sure knows how to build things. SpaceX alone delivered over 80% of mass to orbit while China’s entire space program can’t keep pace with a single American company. We are also killing it at EVs, again, all the great might of the Chinese economy is playing catch up to Tesla.

The thing is, we know how to build things.

Those things aren’t crappy block apartments or faster trains. They are: space ships, artificial intelligence, robotics, cutting edge medicine, etc. The name of the game is individuality, entrepreneurship, and freedom (The ingredients that built the most powerful economy in the world). These are antithetical to both their political system and their culture.

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"As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it -- talking trade balances here -- once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here -- once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel -- once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity -- y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else

music

movies

microcode (software)

high-speed pizza delivery"

-- Neal Stephenson, Snowcrash, 1992

Most of what you mentioned is research & development, not building. I don't know why you say we're killing it at EVs, when there's many competitors, and Tesla churned out dreck for years until it finally produced a decent car without defects, and had to be floated constantly on US government subsidies. SpaceX is the only thing that seems to work reliably, probably due to sheer will from passionate engineers and a ton of QA (and a whole lot of NASA experience).

Anyone can come up with a new sandwich, given enough time and money. Not everyone can churn out 1 million sandwiches, quickly, perfectly, every time. That's what building is about.

Pst; all of tech is floated by government. It wants to keep a pipeline of engineers around.

IBM refused to risk its old tube business on transistors so Uncle Sam paid for it, gifted tech to IBM.

Internet was a government defense project.

Capitalism is just people. The euphemism is getting too deep. We need waders.

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