yogthos

I largely agree, the whole taxing the rich thing is fundamentally a measure designed to preserve existing capitalist relations.

I think health impact might be the biggest concern, but I can't imagine that's an insolvable problem.

not sure what environmental conditions it needs, but definitely incredible tech

I think he wanted to make it sound scary, but not as scary as it actually is, so he went with a compromise. Most people will hear 3x, and not do the math.

I added the archived link in the body of the post.

I do think that educated people who won't have interest in moving to the global south will likely still choose to leave the US and move to other global north countries. That's still going to cause harm to US tech sector in the long run.

I largely agree, and it may be a necessary result of a transition to an increasingly financialized stage of capitalism in the west. Back when industrial capitalists ran things, they had a fairly well developed understanding of how things like supply chains and factories worked. They knew what it takes to spin up production for a product, do design, testing, and so on. Now, things are run by people who predominantly deal with abstract numbers on spreadsheets, and they have little understanding of what's involved in material production.

I imagine a large part of it comes down to stock market dynamics. Companies always want to look like they're growing and doing well to keep their stock price up. Admitting they're not hiring is a sign that they're not showing growth, and so they try to hide that. It's the similar situation with companies using AI as cover to mask layoffs. They can't admit that they need to cut people, so they mask it by saying they're becoming more efficient thanks to AI tooling.

Even if educated people start moving to other global north countries, that's still a problem for the US. Meanwhile, it's also worth remembering that a lot of people in STEM are immigrants to the US from the global south. They may leave the west entirely and go back to their home countries where there is growing demand for their skills. Meanwhile, China has already largely caught up in terms of education. Chinese universities are taking top spots in global ranking, China is now producing both higher quantity and quality of research than the US, and China has far more STEM graduates. I'd argue we've already hit the inflection point where Chinese technological progress is outpacing the US in most areas.

The language barrier is definitely a problem, but it's also worth remembering that a lot of top scientists in US are ethnically Chinese. There's already been numerous cases of high profile scientists moving to China, and the trend will only accelerate as a result of growing sinophobia. Each expert leaving to China is a big deal because they bring their expertise with them.

The US is barreling toward open fascism, and the consequences for its talent pool will be catastrophic. Educated professionals are precisely the people who find this political shift most intolerable and who also happen to be the ones with the means to leave. Historically, the U.S. has compensated for its weak domestic education system by poaching global talent. But as the country becomes an increasingly unattractive destination, that pipeline will collapse.

Meanwhile, domestic talent can’t fill the gap given the current state of the US education system. On top of that, a wave of retirements among scientists and engineers is already thinning the ranks. The cracks are already forming with Raytheon recently having to recall retired engineers because no one left in the workforce knows how to produce missiles anymore. It’s the inevitable result of a system that prioritized short-term exploitation over long-term investment. When the talent leaves and the retirees aren’t replaced, the decline will accelerate.

an apt analogy