China Set To Surpass US In R&D Spending In 10 Years 233
dcblogs writes "China is on track to overtake the U.S. in spending on research and development in about 10 years, as federal R&D spending either declines or remains flat. The U.S. today maintains a large lead in spending over China, with federal and private sector investment expected to reach $424 billion next year, a 1.2% increase. By contrast, China's overall R&D spending is $220 billion next year, an increase of 11.6% over 2012, a rate similar to previous years. This finding is shared by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. 'China's investment as a percentage of its GDP shows continuing, deliberate growth that, if it continues, should surpass the roughly flat United States investment within a decade,' it said in a report last month."
Why not? (Score:3, Insightful)
America has become an anti intellectual society. Particularly when talking about STEM. All the pundits like to scream how we need to hire eleventy zillion teachers and then turn around and pout and scream that they're not all social workers focused on bullying, eating disorders and special needs. And if anyone so much as suggests that all the MFA's in Italian poetry pay more in tuition to offset the cost of the courses in engineering we're told we're all redneck knuckledragging philistines.
Someday, soon, a bunch of Federal grant wielding puppeteers will put on a show in Esperato about how we used to have fire but the inventor died.
Re:Why not? (Score:5, Insightful)
America has become an anti intellectual society
That much is obvious even to the densest dim-wits since the appointment of a "Christian Scientist" as the head of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.
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At least we won't have to worry about those space aliens that are chained in the mountain, or on our bodies, or whatever those whackos believe.
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People should be asking "What changed?" since then. As I see it, a lot of society requires vast amounts of knowledge, some with a short shelf life. And humans haven't gotten a whole lot better at learning. So I think a big part of what's going on is that people are creating sub-societies with a lower knowledge
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Re:Why not? (Score:5, Informative)
Just to be clear, he wasn't just saying "a scientist who is a Christian". Lamar Smith is a member of the sect called "Christian Science", which is an anti-science movement. Among other things, they believe that researching into disease is one of the main CAUSES of disease- that the way to reduce disease is to reduce the number of doctors and medical researchers in the world. They teach their members to avoid medicine and surgery at all cost, and to rely instead on the power of prayer and psychic healers to cure illness.
Lamar Smith isn't one of these by accident of birth; he wrote for the church newspaper, and is married to a "practitioner". His religious beliefs are directly related to his ability to do his job. If your job involves figuring out the national strategy for funding scientific research, and you believe that scientific researchers are the cause of all the world's ills, you may just have a small conflict of interest.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamar_S._Smith [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Science [wikipedia.org]
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I think it's worth drawing addition attention to the predatory nature of the Christian Science theology. It's not just that they believe in 'mind over matter', which can be a defensible position if sensibly qualified. They set it up so that top church members grow rich from the fear and suffering that their theology causes among their followers. When you're seriously sick, believing that the cause of your sickness is your faith in doctors, they'll pray for you, but for a fee. Ostensibly the fee is a 'gi
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Using social science and liberal arts as your examples of anti-intellectualism shows that you are, yourself, an anti-intellectual. Have fun with that.
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I'm sure that in your mind, that's relevant to the main point, somehow.
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Right. And what the hell does that have to do with your original complaint about anti-intellectualism?
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Particularly when talking about STEM
The politicians like to talk about STEM and how we need more of it, but once again they ignore the basic economics. A STEM profession requires years of rigorous education and training and very often an advanced degree which means several more years at the minimum of post-graduate education. Most students who begin such a program don't complete it. Indeed, the graduation rate for undergraduate degrees in STEM is below 50% of students beginning the program and even then it often takes more than four years to
Focus on science and science education (Score:5, Insightful)
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I haven't heard anything like that, and in fact it seems to be the opposite:
When I attended Texas A&M, the engineering department charged lab fees that made their classes more expensive than any others. And the lab fees included almost nothing. A little time on the Cray (access to it, any actual time was still billed separately) and other things like that, mostly useless. Well, that and access to the engineering store, where they sold bread boards and components for profit.
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China (Score:4, Informative)
Well, of course. China has 3x the population of the US.
And the interior provinces aren't even fully industrialized yet. That will change rapidly as the expressway and high speed rail networks are built out.
Re:China (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, maybe.
Trouble is, they're building ghost cities [google.com], they build railroads with subpar concrete [nytimes.com] (hint, since it's not explicit in the NYT article: to make proper high speed rail concete you basically need a derivative of volcanic ash, and the amount thereof produced per year is lower than the amount needed to fit the needs of China's yearly consumption, which dwarves the consumption by that of all other countries; in other words, their railway infrastructure's lifespan is roughly 10-20 years, vs 50-100 in developed countries), they need to rebalance [mpettis.com], and so many other things can go wrong...
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Where's our high speed rail? I'd be very happy with something like Japan had in the 1960s, it does
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If you are right in ten years they'll be facing a huge bill to try to do it all again with the extra complication and expense of doing little bits at a time between trains or something.
Liu Zhijun got sacked precisely because these complications were already there insofar as I've been following.
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I think you can get that sort of ash from fly ash as well (pozzolanic), but it's been a couple of decades since I read a decent text on concrete.
Fly ash (which is a byproduct of coal-burning power plants with pollution control gear) has been widely used in US concrete since the 1970s. Currently, Texas reports a shortage because of cheaper natural gas replacing coal, while China, which is building and operating many new coal-fired power plants, is producing about twice as much as they can use. [asiancoalash.org]
Bad concrete is a generic problem in construction. It requires constant testing and hard-ass inspectors to keep concrete quality up.
Emerging technologies tend to get away with cutting corners drasticly anyway, so if you are right in ten years they'll be facing a huge bill to try to do it all again with the extra complication and expense of doing little bits at a time between trains or something.
The US Transcontinental
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China has had 4+ times the population of the US for a very long time. The real reason they haven't been ahead of the US in production for many decades is that the productivity of the people was squandered by political forces within the country. It was corruption at the highest level, trading the productive potential for political stability.
We have corruption too. Bad politicians who do sweetheart deals with contributors, crappy patent or copyright laws, lawsuits over unreasonable things with unreasonable se
it only makes sense (Score:5, Funny)
There no point for the US investing in R we get everything we need from China.
Better focus on what we're really good at: creative financing
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There no point for the US investing in R we get everything we need from China.
Better focus on what we're really good at: creative financing
You are the doctor that suggests waking up the patient to give him sedative drugs
Financial economy without a real economy beneath is the problem, not the solution
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Nonsense... (Score:2)
China will slow down [mpettis.com] or have crashed by then.
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They eventually did, after a world war that destroyed half of the world's production capacity -- the other half being, for all intents and purposes, in the US. I dearly hope that such a scenario isn't on the table today.
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Some people like to point out that Japan eventually slowed down, which true, but only after it had a per capita GDP that was comparable America. The top developed nations aren't that far apart when it comes to that number. You can put up great growth numbers while catching up, but once y
That is not a fair comparison... (Score:2)
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China's labor is 1/10 the cost of the USA so in comparison, China is spending 5x times as much on R&D as the US or $2 billion if we compare actual wages.
That's only true if you assume that the entire R&D budget goes towards pay wages. In some cases this may be true, but there are an awful lot of technologies required for certain fields that don't magically get cheaper in China. Biotech equipment and consumables are good examples: a lot of these simply aren't produced anywhere besides the US, Japan
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Free trade with no tariffs is causing the economic collapse and closure of manufacturing due to the unfair wage difference between China and the Western world.
What is this "free trade" you speak of? Look into China's trade practices and you won't find much freedom. What you will find is a lot of Chinese government pressure on foreign companies both politically (try speaking out against China in America and then trying to do trade with them) and for money (build a factory with cool new technology, then lose it to the party officials' children).
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The reference to "free trade" means that China faces minimal barriers to trade with the US - i.e. exports can flow freely into the country, and there's no punishment for companies offshoring their manufacturing (or R&D, for that matter). Reciprocity isn't necessarily part of the deal.
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Unfair? Who were the guys who removed tariffs? You know the opposite of free trade? You say it like china has all the control and you're just riding yourselves to the bottom. No. Ther US deliberately weakened their controls over trade balances in order to encourage trade. Well, now you have it and you're finding that there's lack of value that you're bringing to the world markets... troubles ahead me thinks.
Can't Compare (Score:2)
Until the cost of living and the cost of labor in China is at parity with the US you can't compare $$ for $$; you also have to assume that the R&D talent (Engineers, Project Managers are equal); assuming that the talent is of a high quality.. if the talent costs less over there, than they don't have to spend the same $$$ to get the same results.
IF the talent is equal and the cost is 1/2 to 1/3 cheaper than they are probably already at parity. If the talent isn't equal than no amount of $$ can really get
Re:Can't Compare (Score:4, Interesting)
If the talent is better and equal or cheaper in cost then this game is over
I guess the next question is "does this game actually matter?" Germany's population is about the same fraction of the US population as the US is of China, and presumably their R&D budget is much smaller than ours. But you never hear the Germans wailing about how the US has surpassed Germany in R&D spending; indeed, Germany's economy is one of the strongest in the world (especially Europe), with a large manufacturing sector and excellent technology, despite relatively high labor costs. Which doesn't mean that Germany is perfect or doesn't have problems - just that being overtaken in R&D spending doesn't automatically turn you into a third-world country.
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This maybe stereo typing but I think in general German engineering is really top quality in terms of building products to a set specification in a reliable and predictable manner. Given that they have been able to hold onto manufacturing jobs is also a plus..
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Given that they have been able to hold onto manufacturing jobs is also a plus..
You can't talk about German manufacturing without talking about unions.
And you can't talk about German unions without mentioning the positive and cooperative relationship that management has with them.
The USA could emulate the German model, but it'd require a seismic shift in the way private business interacts with unions.
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I know in Japan that Union management is more aligned with company management.. is it similar in Germany?
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Remember that we are first citizens of the world, though we divide ourselves into countries as a matter of practicality.
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Or maybe we should be happy that investment in scientific research is going up, and put petty patriotism behind us.
Except that one of the main reasons why we invest in scientific research is that it helps advance our economy. Obviously everyone benefits to some degree, but typically the country responsible for a new innovation benefits the most. As a citizen of the USA, I want our country to make new discoveries and technologies first, not because of petty patriotism, but because I will (probably) persona
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and put petty patriotism behind us./quote> Too bad that doesn't work both ways. At the sociopathic international level, nobody else will look out for your interests. If someone else is doing all the research, then you can bet good money, assuming you have any, that will work out to your detriment sooner or later.
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Is "the world" going to give me a post-doc?
Amazing what a decade or more ... (Score:2)
How dare they? (Score:2)
When the US surpassed Europe - How dare they?
When the China surpasses US - How dare they?
Of course they dare. It is their 'obligation' to try. And if they win out big we won't hear about those embarrassing inbreds from Alabama and Kentucky discussing evolution any more. From what I have understood, Chinese are more pragmatic than any Bible reader, or?
Value for Money (Score:2)
$424 billion USD in the US buys much, much, much less than $220 billion USD in China.
If you had a value for what 1 USD is worth in China with regard to purchasing power, relative to what 1 USD is worth in the US then you could make a realistic comparison.
China passed the US in R&D and military spending long ago.
The US needs more tech / trade schools to free up (Score:2)
The US needs more tech / trade schools to free up the us universities for real higher edu / research
Not worried (Score:2)
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that they never get close to the bang-for-buck that the US gets.
Quite true, but what happens when China spends, say, twice as much on R&D ? They will overtake US at some point, if the current trends in both US and China continue.
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Oh bullshit, the last 10 techno remixes I listened to on Youtube were made in either the US or Europe.
Also, no, their quality standards are crap. They're like a 12 year old kid showing off or an inner city Asian person ricing out their Honda. They'll build the world's biggest _____ or fastest ______ just to say they have it but it's a hastily made, poorly designed piece of crap
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"Give us a product at the lowest possible cost so we can maximize our profit. Damn the consumer." ...They make crap because American corporations ask them to make crap.
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No intelligent person would accept that statement. They make very good optics (once upon a time not so but now very good) - go buy a good telescope in the USA - it is most likely made in Mainland China or Taiwan.
They make all sorts of good electronics, do circuit fab etc at very low prices.
Over the last month I ordered more than 100 different component assemblies from 100+ different suppliers for a little project of mine - so far it all works, seems well designed etc.
Bury your head in the sand if yo
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No intelligent person would accept that statement. They make very good optics (once upon a time not so but now very good) - go buy a good telescope in the USA - it is most likely made in Mainland China or Taiwan
Well which country makes the optics? If Taiwan then it is irrelevent to the discussion. Although Taiwan was a colony of China in the 1800s the two countries are now very different places. You can't claim China is advanced simply because a colony 100 years ago makes good optics!
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As for your characterization of Taiwan you should talk to some Chinese about that.
It's irrelevant what mainland Chinese think about Taiwan: like it or not, they've been under entirely different governments for the last six decades, and have followed much different courses of political and economic development.
Their problems isn't research spending (Score:5, Insightful)
It is cheating. Basically the culture in China right now is one of do whatever you want to get ahead. Cheating, lying, all ok, expected even. So it goes on in research all the time. Straight out fabricated results and such. The problem is, as Feynman said, Nature cannot be fooled. So you can have all kinds of results that say X causes Y, but if X doesn't in fact cause Y it isn't helpful.
It is a societal thing that will need to change before they start to produce more useful research.
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How is the iPhone crap?
Keep in mind that if it weren't for the iPhone, you'd probably still be using some piece of shit Samsung flip-phone right now.
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Android was announced before the iPhone. Apple wasn't the only one working on smartphones at the time, they were just the first to release.
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How exactly are we destroying capitalism?
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Re:Just think... (Score:5, Insightful)
What does debt have to do with capitalism? There is nothing about debt that precludes capitalism.
Had we let the auto companies fail, what would have been created in its place? Nothing. The expense of setting up a new car company is unbelievably expensive. All we would have gained by letting them fail was the loss of over one million jobs and the death of the American auto industry. I fail to see how that helps capitalism.
You make a point of singling out unions but fail to mention all the banks that were too big to fail and have no unions. Should we have let them fail? By your logic, we should have. But by all accounts we would have entered a full blown depression (ala 1939). Keep in mind we were losing over 700,000 per month at the time. Are you pro capitalism at the cost of a depression? I hate to tell you this but unrestricted capitalism is what caused the problem in the first place. Saving the banks (as disgusting as that feels) is what saved capitalism. The reason social programs like medicare exist is to save capitalism. Study history and you'll understand why.
What most capitalism purists fail to get is that there are no pure systems and that includes the economic system of capitalism. Do you think the stock market is a free market? Not even close. Such things just don't exist.
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But by all accounts we would have entered a full blown depression (ala 1939).
You mean a la 1929. 1933 happened anyway.
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Note that you assume that there is a free market behind. Which is probably fair enough for the auto industry but is not exactly the case everywhere. Let's see for example rare earth. Well, it could have been useful to bail out the mines considering that the competition was using state sponsored dumping. Also there are strategic sector. The world is not quite happy poney world yet and you cannot rely on other countries for stuff like food and anything that would prevent you maintaining the infrastructure an
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Only 3 of them got in serious trouble with the credit crunch, and all 3 of them were the ones battered by union demands for more than the 'decade' you elude to.
Did these automakers make bad choices? Sure. The question is, how much influence did the unions have in those choices? Clearly the UAW is one of the most powerful unions in the country, and has extremely significant influence.
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Did these automakers make bad choices? Sure. The question is, how much influence did the unions have in those choices? Clearly the UAW is one of the most powerful unions in the country, and has extremely significant influence.
Did these homeowners make bad choices? Sure. The question is, how much influence did the banks have in these choices? Clearly Citi is one of the most powerful banks in the country and has extremely significant influence.
Now, tell me how homeowners who signed contracts for mortgages th
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Now, tell me how homeowners who signed contracts for mortgages they couldn't afford is different from companies who signed contracts for labor they couldn't afford?
You mean something different besides the fact that the UAW spends millions of dollars annually in order to get what it wants?
You mean something different besides the fact that the UAW actually actively lobbies to maintain the bankruptcy laws that allows home owners to get out of their debts?
Citation not needed [opensecrets.org]
Yeah.. these things are exactly the same.
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"We are in a death spiral because we treat our elections like another episode of American Idol."
...and because the rest that doesn't go to elections at all treat American Idol like another round of elections.
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Think of all the wonderful things the USA could afford to do if we weren't so busy destroying capitalism. We've got record numbers of people out of work and on government assistance and an administration who only knows how to grow Washington DC in response. We are in a death spiral because we treat our elections like another episode of American Idol. We have a blueprint of how to be free and prosperous, but nobody pays attention to it anymore.
The administration did spend some money on R&D. It gave the money to a company that did some R&D and was then sold, presumably along with the R&D, to China. ( http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/12/09/us-a123-sale-confirmation-idUSBRE8B80I420121209 [reuters.com] )
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So we are destroying capitalism to be overtaken by the People's Republic of China, the largest nation run by a Communist Party? Where the Party in effect controls the economy and capital is an arm of the government?
A country that destroyed capitalism in 1948 (if it ever had it)?
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You are a free market nutjob. Capitalism is what destroyed the U.S. industrial might and prosperity of 40s-60s. Especially the extreme unregulated capitalism as practiced since saint reagan. You still keep blaming the government when now-international (started in the U.S.) corporations openly loot American economy by offshoring wealth and jobs.
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Uhh, how about both? They steal all the R&D possible, but at the same time, their economy is growing, while ours is shrinking. I clicked the link, just to ask, "This is news?" Of course China will overtake the US in genuine R&D sometime soon. We've lost what it takes to lead the world in much of anything.
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Methinks you're fantasizing. China needs the US and the EU as much as the US and the EU needs China for cheap wares. If the the US and the EU go down and crash, China will crash even more. They've no interior market/consumption to speak of, and need to rebalance [mpettis.com].
Re:R&D Stealing (Score:4, Interesting)
Fantasizing, you say? Whatever. The fact is, the wealth of the world is being redistributed, and the US and EU are coming up losers. China is gaining. The real catch to all this redistribution is, the world's central banks are reaping the lion's share of the profits. For each ten dollars we lose, China gains a dollar, and the banks steal nine dollars.
But, the situation with the central banks don't affect the fact that China is ascending, while we descend.
China may be dependent on us today, but what happens in fifty years, or a hundred? We're selling off our great grandchildren's future.
Re:R&D Stealing (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact is, the wealth of the world is being redistributed, and the US and EU are coming up losers.
The wealth of the world being rebalanced so everyone has more equal wealth is a good thing, in my opinion. I'm not sure how it isn't, in any way at all.
Now, if you're saying that corporations are taking most of the money, and distributing the wealth unequally, that's a different issue, which is a result of our current system, which they've adopted to some degree.
More equal wealth will allow manufacturing and farming to actually exist in the west without subsidies, too. At the moment we're clinging on to high tech specialised manufacturing, but I doubt that will last for that long.
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The wealth of the world is not being redistributed. China is making more money because they are manufacturing more, not because the money is being redistributed from the US or EU.
We are not descending. The US and EU economies have continued growing (albeit slowly) during China's ascent. The reason is because the world economy is not a zero-
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and it's got absolutely nothing to do with spending. Instead the problem is with our educational system preferring to not teach our kids how to think for themselves. The continual dumbing down of America is happening each and every day in our schools when they refuse to teach Civics, Geography, Math - when so called high school grads working at McDonalds can't even count back change w/o the damn computer telling them how much of what type of change to give back. Hell I've watched the same kids getting their
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2) Population is more relevant to GDP as Japan can amply demonstrate.
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So the OP's point to "look at a map" was a little pointless then. Russia and Canada are the two biggest countries in the world.
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Hmm. The approach being taken towards free speech these days, in the States, is likely to put a damper on R&D. You simply can't have it both ways -> you can't have people designing your next generation weaponry, all while forbidding them from discussing its elements with their colleagues.
What more, our approach to Iran is somewhat whack at the moment. We're making it harder for people to come here to learn, people who (often-times) even up living here for the rest of their lives. At university, I kne
well out side of the usa health care is not tied j (Score:2)
well out side of the usa health care is not tied to your job and well out side of the usa health care is not tied to your job and they have less overhead as well.
also they don't have the big loans for schools as well.