I feel this is true of Americans and Europeans. And as an American, I've been migrating myself more and more into the European mindset. I put in my 8 hours, and I'm done, then I do non-work related activities for the next 8 hours, then I sleep for the next.

It's the story the new generations tell themselves that's taken hold last few years. IIRC context is SMEE chairman (maker of PRC litho machine) said EUV is made by man, not god. Became rally for PRC industry and national confidence. X is made by man, not god for anything PRC needs to catchup on. Which circles back to Qian Xuesen, foreign people can build rockets, why can't we. Or more recently, foreign people are good at XYZ events, why can't we. AKA anything they can do we can do.

The bigger undercurrent is divide between faction of people who think EUV impossible or possible. Between boomer/doomers (older, never do better than west types) and young techno-optimists, faction generation/education divided. TLDR PRC technical talent skews young, and techwar as spurned wave of scifi optimists, techno nationalists and industrialist party way of thinking. It's not homogeneous but it's dominant, especially in S&T after quick ascendancy.

Long term is after you and I die, before that they'll reap the greatest high skill demographic dividend in human history that can put everyone else in a bad place long term first.

Which developed country doesn’t have a demographics problem?

Regarding your last point, back when my political views were "evolving", I had thought about if, instead of handing foreigners diplomas and kicking them out of the country as fast as possible, we should do the opposite: have student visas require that the recipient stay in the US at least five years after graduation, and then fast-track them through the permanent residency -> citizenship pipeline. It made no sense to me why we'd educate someone to get a degree in chemical engineering, possibly from a rival nation, and then send them back to where they came from. We should "brain drain" other countries, not the other way around.

Show me these magical cities where an extra $750/mo in rent lets you both move from the suburbs to downtown, and increase your sq footage!

Diversity is just short hand for US needs to brain drain from around the world, the success is system that disproportionaly increase size of US skilled workforce vs rest, so people better play nice with each other (worked well until not). When PRC went from making 1% of of global technical talent to 50%, and able to retain them or in this case redrain them, they win talent game for generations (at least until 2070s). They will output more stem in next 20 years than US will increase population, births + immigration, i.e. their technical workforce will be 2-3x US. "Diversity" can't brain drain enough to make a dent on those ratios.

"diversity" is an overbroad concept that covers many disparate social practices, a lot of which have nothing to do with technological progress.

I guess that the more focused question is whether China needs to import some amount of tech talent to succeed, at least temporarily. The reporting on this EUV prototype does suggest that that is what they did, giving foreign researchers special visas and whatnot.

It's always felt pretty intuitive to me that shared goals in a culture should have some real effect on outcomes.

It doesn't mean absolutely everyone takes part, of course, but it does mean it's a 'thing' that people may take part in with support from many of those around them if they choose.

Looking at the inverse: If you're going against the cultural wind, you're just going to have a much harder time doing whatever it is.

It just seems like this must show up in outcomes, it would be strange if it didn't.

VC still requires startups to find themselves and prove something first. China basically has a program to do X and anyone can sign up to be a part of that program. All are funded and the winners emerge. I’m broadly generalizing that process but that’s not how VC approaches it.

China has this process at the city state level. They can leverage their pegged currency to keep their citizen’s purchasing power lower than it should be to fund anything.

A downside is that their consumption economy is low, all their geo neighbors view them as a threat (reducing exports long term), and this contributes to high unemployment as productivity increases.

Yes but thats not the copyers problem is it? Risk is inherent in all things the second order requires that you keep advancing by attracting resources.

> What I would consider as the most impactful inventions of the last decade would be things like mRNA, Generative AI, and reusable rockets - all came from the US and the US is maintaining the lead in them.

This so myopic. The covid mRNA vaccine that Pfizer made billions from was done by BionTech a company in Germany led by immigrant turks.

Sure some American's recently got the Nobel prize for the pseudouridine modification - and whiles that's enabling it's not sufficient - you also need LNPs and a whole bunch of other stuff to make it all work - some of which was invented in America and some of which wasn't.

The nature of international science is collaboration.

The danger the for the US right now is it's cutting itself off from one of the biggest sources of innovation right now - China.

All of the US military is a waste including 6th generation fighters. We hope china copies our disinformation campaign. In fact as the usa has been taken apart almost all of our big secrets are just disinformation

- stealth (not really) - aliens (sure....) - 6th gen jets (where are the jets?)

The reality is that everything that you do in peacetime is just to scare the enemy and will have very little effect in war. Since the US doesn't have as much industrial capacity the only winning war is nuke from space first or learn to get along

> Can you clarify what are you talking about? The US has been developing 6th-gen fighter since the mid mid-2010s - not that I'd consider it as an important new original invention.

So you think that, as an advanced military project that should have been kept under the strictest secrecy, the Chinese somehow obtained it and, based on that, developed their own sixth-generation fighter—and even managed a successful test flight while the U.S. is still at the PowerPoint stage? I don’t know which scenario would be worse for the United States.

Nobel prizes in physics are awarded typically with lag of 20-30 years. In early 2000s China was still a relative backwater economically (and academically). In 2000 US R&D spending was over 8 times China's. Now China has likely surpassed USA. It surpassed EU already in about 2014.

Working in academia, the rise of China academically is palpable. There's an avalance of Chinese research published, and a reasonable chunk of it very high quality, and getting better.

https://www.statista.com/chart/20553/gross-domestic-expendit...

https://itif.org/publications/2025/06/30/china-outpacing-us-...

Nobel prizes are almost as sus as Oscars now. Corina Machado tells you all you need to know.

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, but it will happen sooner or later.

That depends heavily on where the cost saving came from. For a long time China made cheap copies with extremely cheap labor, though that may no longer be the case as it seems they're innovating on the manufacturing process these days.

That's a fair point! I am myself wondering how much of this is policy and how much is the "natural way".

It's also the foundation of the US economy. Look up the cotton gin patent some time. And the early days of Hollywood.

I'd rather be in China than the USA right now.

It's most accurate to say that China is still run by folks who are committed communists. These planners, by virtue of their decades of experience, understand the social value of markets and broad based technological growth, and want to wield those even better than liberal planners.

Yeah but then again most people think "if it's not capitalism it's communism", there is a whole spectrum and China definitely does not belong in the communist part of the spectrum anymore. It's a mix of authoritarian socialism and state capitalism, you can add many other words to the mix but communism isn't at the top of it anymore

New things deserve new definitions, we have to get out of the ww2 lingo where everyone is a nazi, a fascist, a communist or a capitalist, it's overly simplistic and muddies the water. 2025 China is completely different than 2000 China which itself is completely different than 1980 China.