February 17, 2022

As the economy globalized it acquired new characteristics and a high degree of complexity much like biological evolution, where each element became interdependent.

The nature of development in recent times involved drastic change in many dimensions. It's now at a plateau stage. The origins were vaguely in the 1970s and 80s. So it needs a name, sort of like, generation x of development.

Of course, the central factor was the shift from mechanical devices to silicon-based devices. But something similar would have occurred in a much slower and smaller way without the silicon.

Everything that happened is misinterpreted in descriptions. The erroneous assumptions tell a lot about the subject. Bringing the manufacturing back is the broadest bit of disconnect from reality. Where do you put the four billion workers and their parking lots in the U.S.? Or do you just manufacture for 331 million persons, while everyone else manufactures for 7.9 billion persons?

Which is of course inseparable from globalization. The second bit of disconnect is talking about globalization as if there were a switch for turning it off. That's like feeding a hundred bears every day and then deciding to just feed five.

The general perspective that keeps getting missed is the nature of evolution. Even biologists often get it wrong. Evolution is shaped by environments. Dinosaurs didn't get large because their physiology improved; they got large because their environment required it. They had to tromp through endless brush that took over the lowlands, and huge size was required to do that.

The same thing is true of the "off-shoring" that feeble-minded persons decry. The corporations moved off shore, because the environment required it. The need wasn't just for more labor, it was also because the supply chains relocated.

The main factor preventing re-industrialization in the U.S. is that the supply chains are five thousand miles away and coded in language which westerners cannot learn.

It wasn't a good idea to beat up competitors to get a better deal. Buying cheaper and selling higher was an 1890s idea. It didn't work then.

What holds the U.S. economy together is not the manufacturing but the ability to manage complexities. The origins and management of computers and smart phones is in the U.S. Nowhere else can such a degree of complexity be managed.

And yet, the U.S. is shrinking in global significance. It's not because the purpose of managing complexities is shrinking. It's because the demands of the complexities are out-stripping the results.

Managing complexities requires higher standards, as the complexities increase. Yet the required standards have been shrinking in the western would, as incompetent power mongers take over the social structures.

Technology corporations in the U.S. are dependent upon hiring foreigners, because they can't get enough highly trained personnel domestically. It isn't a numbers problem; it's a standards problem. The U.S. education system is not competitive on a global scale.

Here's why. One day when I was prowling around in a library (something only losers do), I encountered a biology book that looked like it was written for teachers colleges. It was referring to aerobic fermentation and anaerobic fermentation. There is no such thing as aerobic fermentation (in a general sense). Scientists define fermentation as a final electron acceptor other than oxygen. Other-than-oxygen is not aerobic.

What they were doing was crossing out the concept of glycolysis (breakdown of sugar) and substituting in the word fermentation, seemingly reflecting upon the eighteenth century concept that anything biological that bubbles is fermentation. The two branch points after glycolysis are respiration and fermentation. But with the term fermentation already used, the branch points were labeled aerobic and anaerobic.

So the students are taught a terminology that doesn't exist in real science. That problem wouldn't be a stand-alone problem. It goes with "the new math" (new decades ago) and reading without phonetics, which often leaves lower-class persons without the ability to read.

In other words, there are forces trying to screw up the heads of students. That isn't happening in far-away countries. So trained persons are more available from foreign countries. Yet the Trump Administration tried to put an end to foreign-trained hiring claiming foreigners were taking jobs away from Americans. The corporations trying to fight back weren't as relevant as they were in burning tax dollars to prevent government resources from being used for social programs.

Another example of the problem is that private inventors must do their own patenting, manufacturing and selling. Industry will have nothing to do with them. In part, it's jealousy; but it's also due to an inability of incompetents to integrate outside ideas into their own processes.

In 1989, I created a method of measuring capacitance with close to infinite precision. The higher the frequency, the more precise. Necessity required it, because the method engineers used was so slow and cumbersome that it would not measure the smallest capacitor at one picofarad, while such a capacitance meter cost $400 dollars.

The circuit was ignored until Steve Jobs needed it for touch screens almost twenty years later. Steve Jobs was not part of the subversive power structures having only a few months of college education and being shoved out of his own company until it went bankrupt and let him back in.

After the circuit was used for touch screens, it entered the university system, where it was used to produce accelerometers. Dozens of accelerometers can be put on a single printed circuit board to measure motion and determine location, which greatly improved navigation over old fashioned gyroscopes.

There is another circuit that I created in 1986 which improves amplifier performance by a factor of ten by solving the output problem of amplifiers. It is needed for almost all types of amplifiers including chip amplifiers called operational amplifiers. Those amplifiers are used to handle and condition signals. The amplifier circuit is still ignored by engineers. Only a few hobbyist were interested in using it for audio amplifiers.

Handling complexities and deriving complexities are two different things. Engineers replicate. That means someone else has to do the inventing by applying science to a subject. Physicists supposedly add the science needed for forward progress. But physics is not real science due to endless errors. So physicists are not keeping up with the improvements that are needed for technological development.