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I find it really funny the US are trying to maintain their global position as tech leader while in the midst of a fascist take over. You know what's incompatible with a thriving tech industry? Fascism. You can survive a little while after a take over, but eventually your rigorous little Christian commune of a society isn't going to produce enough* engineers, scientists or anyone with a taste level worth a damn.
Okay, counterpoint: If fascists can't produce decent engineers, then why did the US hire the nazi rocket scientists after WW2?
Those scientists weren’t born during the Third Reich. They had always been there.
Most of them predated the Nazis, the rocketeer community was thriving in the Weimar Republic. Also fun fact my great grandfather was part of one of the R&D projects that worked on V1s and V2s, his notes were looked over by Von Braun after the war. He got an angry thank you letter because my great grandfathers notes were basically him insulting the engineering and material quality while making suggestions for improvement.
Edit: I failed to mention my great grandfather was in the US Navy, he was in Florida at the time he wrote the notes I think.
Good question! Leonardo DaVinci was born in the 16th century and he came up with flying machines too. It's a very different problem to have a key person, or five, who have vital engineering and design knowledge versus the numbers needed to uphold an industry. I was more talking about the latter.
You might produce a few geniuses to write your whitepapers - but you need scores of them to manufacture vehicles, bridges, roads, buildings, etc. I've updated my original comment with an asterisk alluding to this point.
Donald Trump's Gilead is not going to inspire a lot of people to become a software engineer in a time when we're celebrating AI replacing jobs. Trump and MAGAs vision will not drive the world to do business with America - it will drive investors and new customers away, shrinking the US tech industry and eroding American dominance.
Right and the scientists leave for places that are happy for the bump in experts.
Also if trump tanks the US dollar IMF loans will become cheap to pay back so large borrowers will see a nice bump plus be allowed to make more independent decisions.
It's already happened. Seriously, think about the last major innovation that came from a U.S. tech company. They've all gone to enshittification to try and extract as much value as they can from their consumers, because none of them are making good products. Now, with products like DeepSink coming out that clearly are focused on iterating and pushing tech forward, we're starting to see the effects of American tech stagnation.
Public companies aren't capable of innovation, only acquisition.
I don't know if I agree with this statement. If one of the main goals of the fascist state is technological superiority, they'll prioritize it. Nazi Germany was on the cutting edge of science, to the point that the US hired a bunch of their scientists. They made technology a priority at the expense of other sectors. Luckily, being incapable of trade or producing the resources they needed, they didn't outstrip the rest of the world, but the same likely can't be said for the US. I think other factors will get in the way of tech research in the US far more than fascism, like moronic trade wars and disincentives for higher education, which while being enacted by fascists, aren't necessarily fascist tenets, as proven by history.
A lot of Nazi technology were just useless Wunderwaffe, while technologically impressive, mostly useless in the field. The V2 rocket was an impressive achievement, but not a price effective bombing system. The jet planes came too little too late. The big tanks were impressive, but too few to make a difference.
That may be the case, but they made significant progress on rockets, nuclear, and discoveries in physics. Whether or not they were war effective, the scientific progress was there. Fascism isn't incompatible with technological progress, but resistance to higher education and anti-science sentiments are. In the long run, the loss of knowledge due to book burning and genocide may have caught up to them, but we thankfully don't know. The government could have continued to fund and focus on science.
Yes, but also who knows what millions of jews who didn't survive the genocide could have accomplished in science and art if they stayed alive?
That's what I was referring to from the loss of knowledge due to genocide. Unfortunately, we'll never know.
The problem with fascist and other authoritarian states and science is that it no longer becomes scientific when the authoritarians don't like the evidence.
Chernobyl is an example of authoritarians running science and engibeering. Hiding things they don't like and refusing to accept reality with the full weight of the government behind it.