Oh oh. While we are arguing about coal, gas, oil, the PRC is passing us by. Heed Napoleons warning.[thehistoryville.com]
I just bought a electronic mother board for a project. I had to pay a tariff on it and it came from China. What I really wanted was not available and would not be available for a year. So we have to wait for China to make what we developed and first produced. We might have a war with China, NOT, how the hell does one have a war with someone who holds all the electronics needed to run it. That is only one concern about our problem with China.
Another problem is the fact that we are educating the Chinese, allowing them access to our technologies and then kicking them out of the country as they are foreigners. I am really glad we have our heads so far up our butts that we do not see an opportunity for us to make our own stuff here. There are a great number of people who need jobs, instead of investing in factories in China and Vietnam perhaps we should keep our technologies to ourselves and allow our country to do better than it is. This is what I heard from Trump, but he could fail at playing with himself. No one else is giving this more than lip service as the profit is off shore not here. We are screwed.Two or three from Arabia, a number
Also I took C++ programming at Portland State and found it full of foreign students. I found that the best study group was one with a number of different foreign students. The group I was in had one person for Iraq, one from Vietnam, one from Japan, three from China, and one from Taiwan, There were also three from Portland. This group was great as the common language was English. Other groups where a number of the students were from one country did not do as well as ours as they did not use English as their common language. It was not the fact that English was the language, it was that those people knew the best way to succeed back in their home land was to learn English and practice it as much as possible. One student I befriended was from China, had taken English in China for six years and came here as her husband was working on a Ph.D., she could hardly speak and make sense, but as I talked with her it improved quickly. I finally found that she had a chance to come here and take classes and if she did well she could write her own ticket back in China. I could not believe the pressure on her and her husband. She was a great student and made straight A's. Nothing else was acceptable. If the rest of the population, has the same work ethic and the same attention to detail, we have no chance against them, they are eating our lunch, and all we are doing is serving them whatever they ask for.
I won't be around for the conclusion.
If the Chinese can get this to work they will be so far ahead of us it is not funny. The possibility of them doing this is eventually a certainty. The rest of the world has been working on this since the late fifties. It is hard to do and takes a lot of research and materials that are hard to come by. I would not be surprised if the success as they are the closest to the source of the metals to do this. Afghanistan is that place, the Chinese already have had a mine there that has been working for years.
@dalefvictor Dictatorships are a faster form of government. Comply or die. I am not an optimist.