Separatism is born of a sense of ethnoracial exceptionalism:
1) we're a genealogically different ethnic group from the rest of the country
2) we're better than the major ethnic group of the rest of the country
Both bits are absolutely essential. I can't recall a single instance of a separatist movement based on purely political differences gaining serious ground, Alberta included.
It would be kind of a stretch to argue this as the reasons for separation of the US from the UK - I can see some of it, but I think the argument is a stretch.
Why just ethnic? It can also be religious, ideological, or based on some economic interest. The US revolution was a mix of tax revolt and ideology. The British were the same ethnic group as most of the leaders of the revolution.
I don't think that's true at all. A lot of problems are purely technical. Once someone figures out the technical part, you realize the politically savvy people waiting on the sidelines for a solution were always a dime a dozen.
at every level, we face political problems that "STEM" provides bad or wrong answers to.
here's a simple one: what is the right answer for how to use a road? more parking? more bike lanes? exclusive use for busses? we do not bid on roadway land, there is no market solution to this. you can come up with a lot of metrics for efficiencies and optimize for them, but which metrics matter? journey times? environmental impact? there are real disputes about waymos, it isn't enough to invent autonomous vehicles, there must be leadership on adopting technology. these are all political issues. okay, and you probably spend 30m to an hour on roadways every day of your life, you can't say, this isn't a real problem.
the greatest irony is it is exactly the families with this fairly myopic "all problem solving is math problem sets" point of view who disengage from political life, and despite their fixation on cultural hegemony, they have disproportionately little representation in politics. to be real, the reason parents care about math is because money. which should tell you everything you really need to know about its power to "solve problems."
Imposter syndrome is extremely common and a lot of people in high-paying tech jobs don't believe they can get something just like this elsewhere.
Also, Meta interviews are generally not regarded as too difficult, which further fuels the imposter syndrome (everyone has a sense that they're overpaid considering how easy it is to get in). I almost suspect this is a deliberate strategy.
>I build production-ready TypeScript and Python systems that integrate LLMs into real workflows, with particular focus on RAG, agent orchestration
On a tangent, roughly nobody needs this skill. I don't know why some people think "LLM integration" is some kind of deep career specialization that's in high demand. Any ordinary generalist SWE can integrate LLMs into an application. It's literally just calling an API and doing some string concat.
When people say "AI skills" are in huge demand in the SWE world, it refers to being able to leverage LLMs to improve the speed of your regular software development, not literal AI integration. Don't brand yourself as an "AI engineer" unless you're targeting clueless seed-round founders or are a literal MLE; the bulk of the jobs aren't here.
>they will do what they are told and they are usually told “make this as cheap as possible” by whoever is paying the bills
It's more complicated than this. Historically, Chinese manufacturing has been notorious for quietly undermining the quality of the product to improve their margins over time, in a way that the commissioning brand doesn't notice. If a Chinese manufacturer quotes you a price too good to be true, they're probably quoting you at-cost and will build in their margin later, once the orders start flowing in.
High amount variance of quality is a daily reality and as any chinese consumer we are very used to that since the beginning of e-commerce. However there are multiple aspects to the quality feel. Production of high quality items is one thing (e.g one can do better QA etc), what I heard from some local car garages in China is that standardisation in the industry is still quite poor. E.g Parts to replace and bolts and nuts are not as standardised say as the German counter parts (purely from a mechanics point of view).
Having said that a lot of German car suppliers are in China, and the German car manufacturing industry evolved over a significantly longer period of time.
Also the enforcement of standardization is really poor, almost to the point nobody cares.
Chinese manufacturers can make quality stuff and can be rather honest to work with once you show certain knowledge of the field, they will even tell you which products are to avoid.
A really good example of this is the luxury watch market. China manufactures a heap of shitty knockoffs. They also manufacture a heap of the high end legitimate brand watches. And they manufacture some nice and obscenely expensive high end luxury watches.
>Chinese manufacturing has been notorious for quietly undermining the quality of the product to improve their margins over time
Famously Gemtek Technology (https://www.gemteks.com/en/about/about), Apples small obscure modem OEM at the time, when presented with contract to manufacture 1999 AirPort Wifi cards made first batch of complete duds because factory owner saw picofarad smd caps and decided it will be more profitable to for him to GLUE tiny plastic rectangles instead, after all picofarad is like nothing so nobody will tell the difference.
The most infamous example of this is hip implants made in China that had to be recalled due to being made wrong. This is also why Chinese structural steel is rarely used in North America and Europe.
the key component of ASML is invented and manufactured by the US, that is how the US can force ASML not to export its EUV machine to China. it is an American tech.
Airbus is not the result of high tech manufacturing, it is the result of setting up regulations to stop others to join the competition. The entire EU is not capable of building any 5th gen fighter jet on its own, that is the best proof that its aerospace industry is about 20 years behind China's, same as the space industry.
> Airbus is not the result of high tech manufacturing
I LOL'ed.
> The entire EU is not capable of building any 5th gen fighter jet on its own
Saab is, but there has been no need to develop 5th gen fighters if there are reliable international partners that can provide them. Recent development made it clear the US is no longer a reliable partner and the European aerospace industry is working on reducing the dependence on US equipment.
An aircraft doesn’t need to be modern - it needs to shot down the other before it gets shot down.
And, as we have seen with cheap drones, all that money spent on making great stealth aircraft has not stopped Iran from blocking access to 20% of the world’s supply of crude.
So, how effective are your fifth generation fighters based on your nuclear carriers again?
> An aircraft doesn’t need to be modern - it needs to shot down the other before it gets shot down.
not on its own, but by having a combined AEW&C and high performance ultra long range air to air missiles.
Europoor just doesn't have any of these.
> all that money spent on making great stealth aircraft has not stopped Iran from blocking access to 20% of the world’s supply of crude.
that doesn't change the fact that Europoor doesn't have anything. Does Europoor has such drones? or the ability to knock them out of the sky at costs lower than drone production?
to get your some further idea on the gap - Shahed 136 is estimated to cost Iran $20-50k USD each, Chinese manufacturers are quoting less than $1k USD each including fuel.
> how effective are your fifth generation fighters based on your nuclear carriers again?
you don't have to pick which one is more effective when you can build and operate both at large scale. a few carrier strike groups fitted with fifth gen fighters and drone carrier-amphibious assault ships are a pretty good combination.
feel free to google Type-076 drone carrier-amphibious assault ships.
again - Europoor doesn't have any of these, so please stop pretending to be "advanced economy", you are no longer one.
> you don't have to pick which one is more effective when you can build and operate both at large scale. a few carrier strike groups fitted with fifth gen fighters and drone carrier-amphibious assault ships are a pretty good combination
Have you invaded Iran already? What’s stopping you? Didn’t Trump mention something like annihilating the current regime? Is it working?
> Have you invaded Iran already? What’s stopping you? Didn’t Trump mention something like annihilating the current regime? Is it working?
I am Chinese, why should Chinese be invading Iran?
Please just stop pretending to be an "advanced economy", scientifically, economically and militarily, Europoor is the modern textbook definition of failed states.
The military don’t exist in a vacuum - and the equipment they need varies with mission requirements. That’s why the A-10s had its life extended: because it is a better fit than the F-35 for ground support missions. Same applies to the B-52 and the B-2.
The operational cost of the F-22 and F-35 alone make them a poor fit unless you are engaging highly sophisticated air defenses, something the US haven’t done since WWII.
The requirement to be able to neutralise American aircraft is a new one for European (and Canadian) air forces, but one that’ll be tackled.
The US-made Ultra UV light source is important, but there is quite a bit more than that to a $380 million lithography machine. (Otherwise someone would have created a competitor by now.)
Considering decent portions of the F35 are built by BAE, Leonardo, Rolls-Royce and Martin-Baker - all of which are working on a 6th generation fighter which is due to be flight tested next year - this doesn't really ring true.
I didn't say where the steel the US and EU uses comes from, just that they don't use Chinese steel. So this is a very bad trolling attempt. You also use the word "woke" like the Nazis used the word "Jewish"
Outsourcing of knowledge workers didn't work out because at large enough scales, the geographic arbitrage disappeared. Companies mostly always got what they paid for.
The determinant of success was only whether the task needed American-tier labor or could make do with sub-American quality labor.
I am not sure this feels right. I agree that the US currently has leading minds in terms of tech, but I am not sure it is too big of difference with the EU knowledge workers. EU is still a lot cheaper then US in terms of wages you would need to pay.
EU workers themselves get a lot less, but the EU is expensive because of 1) the huge payroll tax (45% in France) and 2) the challenges with hiring and firing mean you are carrying people that aren’t contributing.
Sure is an interesting thought. None of this is sarcasm: why do US companies deal with the time zone differences and language barriers they won’t need to bother with so much by outsourcing to say, Ireland?
The mechanism is often that they'll actually outsource to someone like Accenture, who have teams everywhere, and whose contract managers will try to get their cheapest viable team onto the contract to maximise their margin. If the buyer can't judge the quality of what they're buying, or doesn't know why the resulting hand-offs, delays, mistakes and rework will cost them more than keeping everything in-house ever would have, they're going to have a bad time.
Basically every big tech has large offices and employ a lot of people there.
The limitation is that Ireland is a relatively small country, and most Irish developers are already employed (which is why Ireland end up being one of the main destinations for tech workers being hired from abroad).
Ireland isn't that much cheaper than, say, Oklahoma. And the cultural differences with Ireland are not a lot smaller than those with India or the Philippines or what have you, once you try to actually start working together.
(Yes, all the good developers from Oklahoma move out, but the same is true of Ireland)
That's certainly part of it. But the other part that I've heard time and time again is that in order for outsourcing to be successful you basically needed an american engineer in the mix hand holding everything, clarifying requirements, and vetoing bad code.
That part of dev work, the requirements gathering, attention to details, clarifying requirements, is something AI also struggles with. A lot of companies basically waste time and money on outsourced devs because without a clear path forward they effectively will sit and do nothing, waiting for a prompt.
I would not agree on that point. It really depends on company's structure. I mean it also depends with people that makes the team. I would say there are a lot of unknowns but I would certainly not generalize.
How I find your argument is that one distinguished engineer from US could do the same with the use of AI.
I worked with both and I know great and bad engineers from both sides. Only thing is that US has a bigger pool of great engineers.
I think the mechanism here isn't that American engineers are magic. It's that you need that contextual knowledge really close to where the work is actually being done, so that the turnaround for questions, blockages, clarifications, "we've got no work to do", quality level-setting and so on is on the scale of minutes, not time-zones.
It doesn’t have to be an American but it does have to be a direct employee of the company ideally working in the same time zone as management and the people defining the requirements.
Outsourcing of knowledge workers is still ramping up. The issue in the past was the skills were few and far between internationally. Facilities were also not built. That has changed now in a lot of fields. New campuses have been built in places like Bangalore and Hyderabad, even Singapore. The skills are there now, the training is decent, and you can see that the hiring is going on for very skilled titles in these cities. It is a different animal than just 10 years ago in this.
The “American tier” labor of course is distributed across the world and the top performers in every nation find ways to get paid at something approaching American salary levels. Look at all the international FAANG offices paying high salaries, in purchase pricing parity terms.
Why do you think of knowledge workers as a fungible commodity?
What makes you think the people who used to build (or would have built) software will switch into the industry of "knowing that the thing was the right thing to build", as opposed to something cooler like surgery, city planning or experimental physics? The roles within a tech company are not the only jobs in the world.
> Why do you think of knowledge workers as a fungible commodity?
I don't.
> What makes you think the people who used to build (or would have built) software will switch into the industry of "knowing that the thing was the right thing to build", as opposed to something cooler like surgery, city planning or experimental physics?
Because it's probably already part of the job. It's a change of emphasis, not a change of career. Your boss can already ask you to do it. If you're producing code, you're probably also reviewing code, checking it matches the acceptance criteria, testing it, sanity checking that it was the right code to have been written, today.
1) we're a genealogically different ethnic group from the rest of the country
2) we're better than the major ethnic group of the rest of the country
Both bits are absolutely essential. I can't recall a single instance of a separatist movement based on purely political differences gaining serious ground, Alberta included.
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