I am a pensioner with five different professions, refrigeration technician, electrical mechanic, fine instrument technician, household appliance technician and welder. I had my own business for 35 years, sometimes with 20-30 employees. I think I have quite a lot of experience. I see that the fundamental problem between the developed West and the East, mocked as backward, is that the West became comfortable, it did not have to deal with any problem solving, as it received ready-made complete units for repairs, while the "stupid" East had nothing, the components had to be taken apart the fault had to be found and repaired, since the mechanic was paid for the working units.
Miracles had to be performed every day !
In the West, if a car's transmission breaks down, the complete unit is replaced, while in the East, it is quite normal for the mechanic to disassemble the transmission and repair, say, the faulty bearing. Does anyone know a western car mechanic who can take apart a gearbox, identify the fault and repair it ? :) Show me ! :) If so, then it is a newly immigrated Eastern European or, say, an Afghan !
What we have now in the West (respect for the few exceptions) is not a professional job, but an apprentice or assistant worker !
I heard a story that in 1993 a US military radar broke down in Hungary and a " committee " from overseas came to determine the fault and order the complete :) faulty unit for the repair technicians. Well, a Hungarian technician, who once served in the army of the Warsaw Pact, identified the error in half an hour and repaired it with a few dollars worth of electronic parts bought in a shop similar to Radio Schack in the local Hungarian town ! The Americans told him that he was a genius, to which he replied that it was just a daily routine job, since he had enough practice repairing Russian radars ! :)
Regarding R&D specifically, nowadays people tend to forget about the so-called "Project management triangle": Time - Cost - Quality.
Today everyone wants a product that it is good, cheap to build and they want it NOW.
Sorry, that is not how things work: you can only choose two - it is either:
- cheap and good, but it will take time to build;
- fast to build and good, but it will not be cheap;
- fast to build and cheap, but it will not be good (probably the worst option!).
Somehow the West, especially the US, has managed to do even worse that option 3: nowadays they develop things that are expensive, take a long time to develop and won't work - see the Bradley fighting vehicle (they even wrote a book and made a movie on it: "The Pentagon Wars").
I write from South Wales, an unsung part of Britain that was literally the engine of the Industrial Revolution and the British Empire in the second half of the 19th century. Modern steel production and the steam locomotive were invented here while our (still in the ground) abundance of coal and iron ore enabled railways to be be built throughout Britain and later the world,
South Wales in the 21st century, after decades of government intervention and social engineering, is nothing to behold, Only a shadow of its former industry remains, little if any innovation, with a state education system that produces largely illiterate dummies.
This shift from West to East in technological competency is not just confined to military technology but also the systems we use daily in the digital world. I left the bloated mess of an operating system, Microsoft Windows, for cleaner and more efficient Linux-based systems some 20 odd years ago. Linux-based systems got its start in Finland and then went international with developers spanning the globe. Nevertheless, Eastern Europeans seem to write the best code in the Linux ecosystem. I am currently writing this comment on an operating system developed and maintained by a team in Poland.
Innovation: Building new problem-solving framework.
Profitable Business: Increasing efficiency of existing problem-solving framework.
You need a profitable business to live, and you consume the profits in pursuit of innovation. If you don't make profit, you can't have innovation. It's the circle of life. :)
Sep 25, 2023·edited Sep 25, 2023Liked by Alex Krainer
I began college in 1974. Punch cards were still in use at the Jr College. I started out with the idea of becoming a medical doctor. That never worked for me. FYI, basic calculators were $150 to $240 depending on if you wanted a TI or a HP. After I ran out of money, I quit college and worked as a retail store manager and carpenter for several years. I was able return to college in 1990 at the beginning of the personal computing age. My new degree program was civil engineering. I graduated in 1993 and went went to work for the Army Corps in environmental research and eventually earned a PhD at age 50 (Thank you tax payers). In undergraduate and graduate school it was common for engineering problems to take 3 to 7 pages each done on engineering paper. In 1990, I purchased an HP48SX calculator ($250) and learned how to program it. It was a fantastic tool and much faster than using the primitive Lotus 123 on the computer with dual 5 1/4 floppy drives. Carly killed the HP calculator program ending the use of reverse polish notation (RPN). Algebraic calculators stick.
Around 2010-2013, I tutored two Jr College students in Algebra. All the homework was on computers and they struggled to select the right multiple guess answer. I taught them to write and solve the problems on paper. I told them to work the example problems first before attaching the homework. This worked for them and both began the year with a D on the first test earned A's for the remainder of the year. Using paper and pen/pencil is an integral part of learning and cannot be avoided.
Currently (2023) all 3rd graders use computers for everything, and are unable to do anything without at least a handheld. My granddaughter was learning her multiplication tables the other day. I pulled out paper and pencil and showed her about multipllcation patterns. She was struggling with multiplying by 7. I told here than 7 was a prime number and the repeated pattern is different from the other numbers. She did well on the test because she remembered about patterns in multiplication.
Math education in the US is archaic. No new math concepts are taught between grades 6 and 8. Students become bored with math and begin to hate it. It's by design. Educations is taught by educators that do not understand what math is and why it is needed.
The college students I knew from Asia had to compete to get into high school and college. That drives them to excellence. No wonder the are smarter and better, they learn calculus and differential equations in high school. It's much more rigorous that in the US.
US taught engineers are now taught less engineering so universities and subsidize the humanities. Everything is on computer. I find them lacking in basic knowledge of fluids, electricity, or most every basic physics concept.
Sep 24, 2023·edited Sep 24, 2023Liked by Alex Krainer
Hi Alex,
If you or your readers want a superlative autopsy of a MIC, I really recommend Adam Tooze's (h/t Alexander Mercouris btw):
The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy
“An extraordinary mythology has grown up around the Third Reich that hovers over political and moral debate even today. Adam Tooze's controversial book challenges the conventional economic interpretations of that period to explore how Hitler's surprisingly prescient vision--ultimately hindered by Germany's limited resources and his own racial ideology--was to create a German super-state to dominate Europe and compete with what he saw as America's overwhelming power in a soon-to- be globalized world. The Wages of Destruction is a chilling work of originality and tremendous scholarship that set off debate in Germany and will fundamentally change the way in which history views the Second World War.” https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/711592.The_Wages_of_Destruction
The narrative is great for those not versed in economics, but for those with an economics background, it is "jaw dropping".
“We stood up a tank army without the tank factories, thus relegating our best weapon to a skeleton force.” ~ Herman Balck
When you hear our present Western leaders complaining about MIC price gouging, you will understand why. Each weapon system they want to develop or expand the production of requires a new factory (in the Western JIT/Kaizen economies unused extra space simply does not exist) and then the manufacturer must take a guess about how many orders will come out of it and for how long. If the manufacturer thinks that the program will only last a few years, it then must "front load" all its costs ...resulting in wildly expensive weapons.
So many of the novel economic schemes that we see today, were pioneered and tried by the Germans between 1933 and 1945. And as the war drew to an end, the German economic managers realized that, even if the war ended on favorable terms for them, almost the entire German economy at that point was foreign owned (by the same peoples and nations they had conquered earlier in the war).
When you talk to Alexander Mercouris next ask him about the book, I think he will tell you that is a "must read". IMHO
*I am a new reader here, so I apologize if this has already been discussed in the past.
Hypersonics are stealthy because at speeds like mach 5 the air gets superheated around them and forms a plasma. Any radio signal into them decoheres and cannot reflect back to the receiver. However, very few can maintain that speed lower in the atmosphere and when we cant see it with radar they cant see anything either. So the engine throttles down, drag reduces speed and plasma goes away. Still going fast (mach 3) but then terminal guidance.
At that time the anti-missle defense must identify location, identify threat, aquire and fire. Not much time if you do the calculations.
"Given that research and development (R&D) is a cost which cuts into profitability of these very powerful contractors, they’re incentivized to reduce it as much as possible to maximize the profiteering. The more profits, the higher the stock price and the higher the executives’ bonuses."
Another, infrequently-mentioned drain on corporate R&D investment, is revenue used for *stock buy-backs* (which is not deducted from bonuses).
John Kennedy offered tuition-free edkucation to students who wanted to focus on STEM courses. Unfortunately the very people who would profit from President Kennedy's program assasinated him
Percentage of STEM students says it all. But that is a response to the offshoring of production. There is no quick fix for it but I am not sure we have a time for real solution. One thing we can be sure: wokeness, DIE and gender bs are not helping but sinking us.
The west has definitely squandered 2 generations of human capitol. It will be difficult to dig our way out of it.
Russian and western military capability are very asymmetric. Russia is primarily a land power, the collective west an air and naval power. Neither side can beat the other at their own game.
The golden BB weapons stuff I have mixed thoughts on. The Germans went this route in WW2, and couldn't afford to build enough of them to make a difference. Cruise missiles at a million a pop are a psychotic way to deliver 1000 or 2 pounds of explosive. You only do it for high value targets too dangerous for an airplane. Hypersonics are 10x or more the cost. I think there only value is a decapitation strike, and propaganda.
Maybe we can talk Vlad into selling us a few, delivered of course. City of London, Wall st, DC, Brussels, etc.
Ultimately the Globalisation project has hollowed out the West of its manufacturing and industrial base all industrial intrests of international finance capitalism.
Great article, thank you Alex. My daughter graduated recently from UCL London ( applied medical science), the vast majority of graduates were Chinese( at least 70%), Indians, middle eastern, some Eastern European( mostly Russian surnames) and maybe up to 6 UK graduates...
Now, that i look back i coming to conclusion that Putin stopped bluffing( if he ever did) while ago. He’s last try was in 2004, when he offered Russia join NATO, to avoid confrontation in the future. He knew that it will happen eventually and he was preparing for it.
Brilliant article Alex! I'm a romanian who is working in IT atm. I caught the period in which we still had to do hard maths in highschool. Today's children don't know about that and still complain that their school curiculae is too hard... It's hard because of all these useless new things they have to learn nowadays.
I am a pensioner with five different professions, refrigeration technician, electrical mechanic, fine instrument technician, household appliance technician and welder. I had my own business for 35 years, sometimes with 20-30 employees. I think I have quite a lot of experience. I see that the fundamental problem between the developed West and the East, mocked as backward, is that the West became comfortable, it did not have to deal with any problem solving, as it received ready-made complete units for repairs, while the "stupid" East had nothing, the components had to be taken apart the fault had to be found and repaired, since the mechanic was paid for the working units.
Miracles had to be performed every day !
In the West, if a car's transmission breaks down, the complete unit is replaced, while in the East, it is quite normal for the mechanic to disassemble the transmission and repair, say, the faulty bearing. Does anyone know a western car mechanic who can take apart a gearbox, identify the fault and repair it ? :) Show me ! :) If so, then it is a newly immigrated Eastern European or, say, an Afghan !
What we have now in the West (respect for the few exceptions) is not a professional job, but an apprentice or assistant worker !
I heard a story that in 1993 a US military radar broke down in Hungary and a " committee " from overseas came to determine the fault and order the complete :) faulty unit for the repair technicians. Well, a Hungarian technician, who once served in the army of the Warsaw Pact, identified the error in half an hour and repaired it with a few dollars worth of electronic parts bought in a shop similar to Radio Schack in the local Hungarian town ! The Americans told him that he was a genius, to which he replied that it was just a daily routine job, since he had enough practice repairing Russian radars ! :)
Great article! I totally agree with it, as I am engineer/scientist and I can relate.
I think you may like the first and latest article of Gaius Baltar’s Substack on the same topic, if you have not read them already:
- https://gaiusbaltar.substack.com/p/why-is-the-west-so-weak-and-russia
- https://gaiusbaltar.substack.com/p/what-is-wrong-with-the-western-political
Regarding R&D specifically, nowadays people tend to forget about the so-called "Project management triangle": Time - Cost - Quality.
Today everyone wants a product that it is good, cheap to build and they want it NOW.
Sorry, that is not how things work: you can only choose two - it is either:
- cheap and good, but it will take time to build;
- fast to build and good, but it will not be cheap;
- fast to build and cheap, but it will not be good (probably the worst option!).
Somehow the West, especially the US, has managed to do even worse that option 3: nowadays they develop things that are expensive, take a long time to develop and won't work - see the Bradley fighting vehicle (they even wrote a book and made a movie on it: "The Pentagon Wars").
P.S.: Keep up the good work! :)
I write from South Wales, an unsung part of Britain that was literally the engine of the Industrial Revolution and the British Empire in the second half of the 19th century. Modern steel production and the steam locomotive were invented here while our (still in the ground) abundance of coal and iron ore enabled railways to be be built throughout Britain and later the world,
South Wales in the 21st century, after decades of government intervention and social engineering, is nothing to behold, Only a shadow of its former industry remains, little if any innovation, with a state education system that produces largely illiterate dummies.
This shift from West to East in technological competency is not just confined to military technology but also the systems we use daily in the digital world. I left the bloated mess of an operating system, Microsoft Windows, for cleaner and more efficient Linux-based systems some 20 odd years ago. Linux-based systems got its start in Finland and then went international with developers spanning the globe. Nevertheless, Eastern Europeans seem to write the best code in the Linux ecosystem. I am currently writing this comment on an operating system developed and maintained by a team in Poland.
Excellent analysis.
Sadly, I suspect this will take at least 2 generations to repair.
Lets hope the East, as they rise to ascendance, does a better job as global stewards then the West did during their dominance.
Innovation: Building new problem-solving framework.
Profitable Business: Increasing efficiency of existing problem-solving framework.
You need a profitable business to live, and you consume the profits in pursuit of innovation. If you don't make profit, you can't have innovation. It's the circle of life. :)
More layman's thoughts on money below.
https://open.substack.com/pub/argomend/p/bite-size-brain-teasers-3?r=28g8km&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I began college in 1974. Punch cards were still in use at the Jr College. I started out with the idea of becoming a medical doctor. That never worked for me. FYI, basic calculators were $150 to $240 depending on if you wanted a TI or a HP. After I ran out of money, I quit college and worked as a retail store manager and carpenter for several years. I was able return to college in 1990 at the beginning of the personal computing age. My new degree program was civil engineering. I graduated in 1993 and went went to work for the Army Corps in environmental research and eventually earned a PhD at age 50 (Thank you tax payers). In undergraduate and graduate school it was common for engineering problems to take 3 to 7 pages each done on engineering paper. In 1990, I purchased an HP48SX calculator ($250) and learned how to program it. It was a fantastic tool and much faster than using the primitive Lotus 123 on the computer with dual 5 1/4 floppy drives. Carly killed the HP calculator program ending the use of reverse polish notation (RPN). Algebraic calculators stick.
Around 2010-2013, I tutored two Jr College students in Algebra. All the homework was on computers and they struggled to select the right multiple guess answer. I taught them to write and solve the problems on paper. I told them to work the example problems first before attaching the homework. This worked for them and both began the year with a D on the first test earned A's for the remainder of the year. Using paper and pen/pencil is an integral part of learning and cannot be avoided.
Currently (2023) all 3rd graders use computers for everything, and are unable to do anything without at least a handheld. My granddaughter was learning her multiplication tables the other day. I pulled out paper and pencil and showed her about multipllcation patterns. She was struggling with multiplying by 7. I told here than 7 was a prime number and the repeated pattern is different from the other numbers. She did well on the test because she remembered about patterns in multiplication.
Math education in the US is archaic. No new math concepts are taught between grades 6 and 8. Students become bored with math and begin to hate it. It's by design. Educations is taught by educators that do not understand what math is and why it is needed.
The college students I knew from Asia had to compete to get into high school and college. That drives them to excellence. No wonder the are smarter and better, they learn calculus and differential equations in high school. It's much more rigorous that in the US.
US taught engineers are now taught less engineering so universities and subsidize the humanities. Everything is on computer. I find them lacking in basic knowledge of fluids, electricity, or most every basic physics concept.
Hi Alex,
If you or your readers want a superlative autopsy of a MIC, I really recommend Adam Tooze's (h/t Alexander Mercouris btw):
The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy
“An extraordinary mythology has grown up around the Third Reich that hovers over political and moral debate even today. Adam Tooze's controversial book challenges the conventional economic interpretations of that period to explore how Hitler's surprisingly prescient vision--ultimately hindered by Germany's limited resources and his own racial ideology--was to create a German super-state to dominate Europe and compete with what he saw as America's overwhelming power in a soon-to- be globalized world. The Wages of Destruction is a chilling work of originality and tremendous scholarship that set off debate in Germany and will fundamentally change the way in which history views the Second World War.” https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/711592.The_Wages_of_Destruction
The narrative is great for those not versed in economics, but for those with an economics background, it is "jaw dropping".
“We stood up a tank army without the tank factories, thus relegating our best weapon to a skeleton force.” ~ Herman Balck
When you hear our present Western leaders complaining about MIC price gouging, you will understand why. Each weapon system they want to develop or expand the production of requires a new factory (in the Western JIT/Kaizen economies unused extra space simply does not exist) and then the manufacturer must take a guess about how many orders will come out of it and for how long. If the manufacturer thinks that the program will only last a few years, it then must "front load" all its costs ...resulting in wildly expensive weapons.
So many of the novel economic schemes that we see today, were pioneered and tried by the Germans between 1933 and 1945. And as the war drew to an end, the German economic managers realized that, even if the war ended on favorable terms for them, almost the entire German economy at that point was foreign owned (by the same peoples and nations they had conquered earlier in the war).
When you talk to Alexander Mercouris next ask him about the book, I think he will tell you that is a "must read". IMHO
*I am a new reader here, so I apologize if this has already been discussed in the past.
The half of the country that believes America is a terrible place is not mentally equipped to defend her.
Hypersonics are stealthy because at speeds like mach 5 the air gets superheated around them and forms a plasma. Any radio signal into them decoheres and cannot reflect back to the receiver. However, very few can maintain that speed lower in the atmosphere and when we cant see it with radar they cant see anything either. So the engine throttles down, drag reduces speed and plasma goes away. Still going fast (mach 3) but then terminal guidance.
At that time the anti-missle defense must identify location, identify threat, aquire and fire. Not much time if you do the calculations.
"Given that research and development (R&D) is a cost which cuts into profitability of these very powerful contractors, they’re incentivized to reduce it as much as possible to maximize the profiteering. The more profits, the higher the stock price and the higher the executives’ bonuses."
Another, infrequently-mentioned drain on corporate R&D investment, is revenue used for *stock buy-backs* (which is not deducted from bonuses).
John Kennedy offered tuition-free edkucation to students who wanted to focus on STEM courses. Unfortunately the very people who would profit from President Kennedy's program assasinated him
Percentage of STEM students says it all. But that is a response to the offshoring of production. There is no quick fix for it but I am not sure we have a time for real solution. One thing we can be sure: wokeness, DIE and gender bs are not helping but sinking us.
The west has definitely squandered 2 generations of human capitol. It will be difficult to dig our way out of it.
Russian and western military capability are very asymmetric. Russia is primarily a land power, the collective west an air and naval power. Neither side can beat the other at their own game.
The golden BB weapons stuff I have mixed thoughts on. The Germans went this route in WW2, and couldn't afford to build enough of them to make a difference. Cruise missiles at a million a pop are a psychotic way to deliver 1000 or 2 pounds of explosive. You only do it for high value targets too dangerous for an airplane. Hypersonics are 10x or more the cost. I think there only value is a decapitation strike, and propaganda.
Maybe we can talk Vlad into selling us a few, delivered of course. City of London, Wall st, DC, Brussels, etc.
Ultimately the Globalisation project has hollowed out the West of its manufacturing and industrial base all industrial intrests of international finance capitalism.
Great article, thank you Alex. My daughter graduated recently from UCL London ( applied medical science), the vast majority of graduates were Chinese( at least 70%), Indians, middle eastern, some Eastern European( mostly Russian surnames) and maybe up to 6 UK graduates...
Now, that i look back i coming to conclusion that Putin stopped bluffing( if he ever did) while ago. He’s last try was in 2004, when he offered Russia join NATO, to avoid confrontation in the future. He knew that it will happen eventually and he was preparing for it.
Brilliant article Alex! I'm a romanian who is working in IT atm. I caught the period in which we still had to do hard maths in highschool. Today's children don't know about that and still complain that their school curiculae is too hard... It's hard because of all these useless new things they have to learn nowadays.