🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1990Mar13.023805.24765@athena.mit.edu>, pshen@atrp.mit.edu
(Paul Shen) writes:
> In article <2694@sactoh0.UUCP> mfolivo@sactoh0.UUCP (Mark F. Newton) writes:
> >....
> >OUr companies should save the money, and come up with better and
> >less expensive HDTV sets, rather than spend money onsomething
> >completely different, thus making early HDTV sets incredibly
> >expensive, as the US companies try to recoup development costs,
> >thus making the sets very unpopular.
> >....
> You are right. We have to develope low cost HDTV sets. But this will be
> possible, only if we knows about the detail of the technology. It is
> doubtful that we can easily get them from them. After the cold war,
> the only market can keep our semiconductor industry running is the
> consumer market. I don't think we can afford to lose it.

This isn't the place for this, but I can't stand it anymore.

Reagan's (and now Bush's) protectionist measures benefit the
semiconductor industry, but only at the expense of the computer 
industry as a whole.  Who cares if the Japanese are better at 
building chips?  The U.S. still produces the best computers 
(using Japanese chips) and the best software.  The cheaper and
better the chips (no matter where they come from) the better the
computers we can build.

The U.S. shouldn't try to redo what the Japanese have done (and
force the consumer to pay for it), but rather should leverage 
off it.  For example, the potential HDTV industry doesn't just 
stop at building consumer television sets.  There is a lot of
leveraging that the computer industry, as well as the 
entertainment industry can be doing right now if it wasn't for
the FCC.  

It was the television industry got the fucking FCC
to shoot a lot of new technology development in the foot in order
to save their own investments in older technology and get consumers
to pay for it whether they wanted to or not.  (It's exactly 
as if the record industry outlawed CDs.  The difference is that
the record industry didn't have an FCC to do it for them.)

The U.S. industries are incredibly innovative when it comes to
creating new technology.  Almost everything is invented here:  
the transistor, the VCR, the photocopier, Sony's trinitron 
technology, all invented in the U.S.

Yes, the U.S. has to learn some things from the Japanese about
manufacturing, but it isn't what most people think.  There was
a Scientific American article (sorry, I can't be more specific)
that pointed out that a car designed in Japan and manufactured
in the U.S. has the same high quality and low defect rate that
one built in Japan has.  They are very good at designing things
with manufacturing in mind.  They are also very good at refining
technology (which realy is what their HDTV technology is).  
These are the lessons that need to be learned, and are being 
learned, from the Japanese.

The worst thing the U.S. could do is to set up retaliatory 
trade barriers because they almost never work to reduce
foreign trade barriers.  (e-mail me for a more detailed article
on this.)

Also, government subsidizations of technological development
does more harm than good to the economy.  And just like 
trade barriers, all it is is a thinly disguised subsidization 
of a single industry or even a single corporation, at the 
expense of the economy as a whole.

A much more healthy approach would be to just lower taxes so
consumers could afford all this technological development, and
investors would be more likely to invest.  And as a side-effect,
investors would invest based on potential consumer demand.  (Gee,
what a novel idea!)  (By the way, taxes during Reagan's 
administration went up by 50%, not down.)

Canada holds far more investments in the U.S. than Japan does.
All this Japan bashing is a government/media fabrication,
because the government needs an enemy to use as a scapegoat 
for what the government itself has done to the economy.

thant