Seems like it’s getting chic to rant about the decline of the US among US intellectuals, it’s all very entertaining with valid points here and there but it doesn’t make it the truth of our times, far from it. I’m not gonna even try figuring out why otherwise smart people are paranoid and pander half truths or view the “problem” only from negative angles, recent events must’ve turned them emotional, they can’t think straight, as good an explanation of their behavior as any other, apart from herd psychology.

Latest in the long list is Pete Trbovich which I enjoy reading, and this time it’s the lack of engineers and the lazy stupid US population, which seems to get more stupid by the hour. To some extent Pete might be right about the engineering situation, as in a lack of American born engineers. Fact is though that the best talent is drawn to the US and stays there, adopting the US culture and so on, problem kind of solved at the expense of other countries that paid for the basic secondary and tertiary education. The easiest solution would be to make it easier for them to come and stay so they don’t have to work out of Toronto.

Secondly, why hasn’t other countries come up with stuff like Google, Twitter and a lot of other popular services originating in the US? Could it be that people in other countries instead lack the marketing skills etc. to actually get people to use the services? I think the only service I use a lot at the moment that wasn’t invented in, and didn’t take off in the US to begin with, is Skype. So what the hell is wrong with the rest of the world when they can’t retain their own talent or launch successful stuff?

It’s not the states that are having real problems, it’s the rest of the world, which is experiencing massive brain drain. If nothing else then that shift of knowledge is going to solidify the US hegemony on the internet even more. As long as the situation is the way it is in countries like China and India, no sane person there is going to turn down an offer to go work in the US, no fucking way. The problems these countries have makes any crap in the US seem insignificant in comparison, people accept working out of Toronto just to get the hell away from there!

Corruption is a hidden tax that is not benefiting the community, it’s unbelievable what a massive productivity buster it is, let’s not forget that, and let’s not forget that the US and west Europe has orders of magnitudes less of it than much of the rest of the world. That’s why we’re still going strong and they’re not, and as long as it stays like that we’re going to outperform them any day. They will bleed talent until they’re dry. If they don’t shape up they’re going to be so up over their heads in crap that it’s going to be a problem for us too, but that’s another story…

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