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Comment by dsq | Hacker News Reader

This is a main selling point of having a high proportion of your politicians having an engineering background. They will have an understanding of technical subjects and more willingness to authorize technical projects, unlike lawyer based government in the West.

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Not just that, Chinese politicians also understand what key technologies (or even whole companies) to prioritize buying or stealing from the West, like EV and battery tech, renewables, networking, robotics, AI and semiconductors.

While German politicians still ask for the internet to be printed for them.

The lack if strategic thinking, and subjugation by the US, of Germany has been made painfully clear with the Covid vaccine. While the UK made sure that the Oxford vaccine went to British pharma, the German let Pfizer take over BioNTech's vaccine.

Germany got through the pandemic with about half as many infections and deaths per capita as the UK. The vaccination rates are almost the same as the UK by now.

So I wouldn't call this a great strategic victory for the UK. Especially since it also cost them quite a bit of goodwill in Europe.

All the blaming of the UK seems to have been really blatant scapegoating that went unchallenged because it fit with what the media wanted people to believe, though. The UK suffered the same shortfall in yield of the AstraZeneca vaccine as everywhere else, though to a slightly lesser extent early on as the production line here got funded earlier and the early teething troubles sorted out sooner. We were also far more reliant on the AZ vaccine than the EU, as they themselves liked to point out in order to argue they actually did a good job. This meant the yield and blood clot issues had a much bigger impact here. The UK government just did a far better job of limiting the impact of this by ordering more vaccines early on, basing their rollout on what AZ could actually deliver, and better public communications about the safety of the vaccine. There's no reason the EU couldn't have done the same other than their own decisions - AZ was quite keen to set up larger-scale manufacturing for the EU, and they could easily have negotiated a provision like the UK's requiring timely notice of how much vaccine would actually be delivered. They just didn't because they didn't seem to understand why this was necessary.

BionTech needed a large partner for clinical trials and initial prodcution. The IP is still largely Biontech, they now have a significant production footprint as well. Not to bad, plus huge global sales. And the mRNA know-how mostly stayed with Biontech. For once I don't see any lack in strategy here.

Germany has large pharma companies and could have made sure one of them was picked in the same way the UK did.

Plainly, this was a war situation with countries brought to their knees and Germany handed production of a key weapon that they had developed to a foreign entity. In such a situation IP means nothing if you don't control the factories. Compare to the UK who very clearly understood the situation and intervened. That's serious lack of sovereign strategy and assertiveness on Germany's part, but, again, I don't think they are willing to, or even can, say 'no' to the US.

which subjugation? BioNTech is a German company based in Mainz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioNTech

Yes and AZ fumbled the clinical tests (still not approved by the FDA) and production (not "their fault" to be fair, they had little experience in vaccines, and the viral vector ones are hard to scale up).

Pfizer seems to be much more on point on the fabrication and regulatory aspects, it was a much needed partner.

> While German politicians still ask for the internet to be printed for them.

Just as a funny little tidbit here, I've been trying to gather documents to apply for my permanent residence here in Germany. When I got to one document proving I had been contributing to retirement, I was lucky to find that the German authorities had an online service for it. So I went to request my documents, but, in the name of saving paper, they were going to mail me a copy.

> While German politicians still ask for the internet to be printed for them.

Austrian here, but its funny how Europe in general is still so walled from technology, I'm not just talking about people don't know how to use apps or that. Im a developer and I've worked remotely with clients from Silicon Valley and now I work with local companies and I must say the wiligness to learn something new and to explore new things is just not there.

The current company has a product almost 20 years old and still runs on old Java code. Which is fine, dont fix what is broken, but now we need to rewrite everything in new Tech stack, and thats where I come in, I got hired to help the transition. However, the people are so not in to work on something new.. they just want their Eclipse and Java. I dont know if this is a culture thing or what, but they are just not fans of technology as it seems.

Don't fix something that is NOT broken* Typo

Hey, I've had clients in California who decided two years ago to rewrite a Rails app in PHP because it's too expensive to find rails developer, so switching to a LAMP (litterally, postgres and nginx are also out) is cheaper...

It's what their new CTO was familiar with and he wanted to get something more familiar.

>While German politicians still ask for the internet to be printed for them.

as a tech guy, I must say I don't like reading anything on screen. Not even retina display. Something about having light emitting to my eyes makes it uncomfortable. Paper are just more pleasant to read. Hope they come up with better E-Ink type of tech soon.

While I understand (and agree) that reading is more comfortable on paper than on a screen. I hope this doesn't mean you print out every e-mail and pdf and even sometimes websites, which still happens surprisingly often here.

> Something about having light emitting to my eyes makes it uncomfortable.

How do you feel about dark mode with an OLED screen for true black (pixels off)?

The ecosystem has improved a lot in the past few years and most major OSs and applications now support it. For browsing the web, there's DarkReader[0] which works very well (on Android you can use it with Firefox).

While I've never been particularly sensitive, most of my book reading nowadays happens at night with the lights out, on a 6.67" OLED display with low brightness, pure black background, and amber text.

[0] https://darkreader.org/help/en/

DarkReader is great but the slow down is huge.

I use it in Static mode which is a lot faster (afaik it just applies a CSS style). Doesn't look too bad either.

An exception is Angela Merkel, who holds a PhD in Quantum Chemistry.

And she's done amazing work we need in order to stop climate change now hasn't she

It actually surprises me a lot how little effect it seems to have, at least in her case, to understand what science is telling you

It's almost as if she's not a dictator and the majorities both in her party and the German population are not in favor of appropriate measures to lower emissions.

That's why she worked so hard on getting all German nuclear plants phased out and ended up having the tax payer pay huge fines for that decision to power companies right?

That's also why she recently said: "Das Internet ist Neuland" right? There are technical people and then there are people that grinded through their PhD. Sometimes those two are the same, sometimes they're not.

Jezz isses halt da...

The Red/Green "environmentalist" government legislated the nuclear phase-out. in 2002 before Merkel's time.

She initially reversed it when she came to power, but she had to reverse the reversal when German public opinion overwhelmingly rejected nuclear power due to the huge risk of tsunamis in Germany after 2011.

> While German politicians still ask for the internet to be printed for them.

That's actually somewhat reassuring. I still print of long PDFs, because I actually want to read long documents rather than skim.

I worked for Canada's largest telco and colleagues would regularly print emails they had sent to me and then bring it to my desk asking if I'd seen it... also the newly hired Director of Network had to stop an all-hands meeting to ask what IPv6 was and the final straw for me was being told in a meeting of VPs that a huge push for 2016 would be to get a fax line into every business.

You wonder how stuff gets this way in some companies...

... and then you realize it's because everyone who knew better saw it as a dumpster fire and found another job.

That is so untrue!1!! Our State Minister for Digitällizäyshun appeared in hot attire at a gaming convention, and one can, or at least could talk/meet with her on Clubhouse.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothee_B%C3%A4r

VORRSICHT! (gräphicäll contännt, mäntäll präppärräyshun äddvyzzed!)

[1] https://www.klatsch-tratsch.de/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/do...

[2] https://www.gameswirtschaft.de/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Do...

[3] https://images.derstandard.at/img/2019/04/10/dorotheebaer.jp...

Vee häff ze paua to shrink wrap all of you!

Jaja. So is dat. Echt jetzt.

Jawollja!

I guess that's the silver lining for us Indians. We are so poor we can't afford printer paper or toner. So we have to use a digital display.

Actually I am kidding, both paper and toner are cheap here but we are not luddites like you guys :)

>> unlike lawyer based government in the West.

Maybe for state-backed projects. That "lawyer-based" government means very strong and predictable rules that protect investments. It starts with property law. People building big things, thing bigger than skyscrapers, want strong ownership rights enforced by a responsive legal system. The west has that. China does not. Protecting fixed assets in placed like China or Egypt means keeping politicians and soldiers on side, most often by giving the government a large ownership stake in the project. That limits innovation. That limits mobility.

"Owning skyscrapers" is kind of the opposite of innovation.

This is apparantly one of the reasons actions around the ozone hole got broad support. Margaret Thatcher had been a chemist before getting into politics, she understood the science that was being presented to her when the issue first became apparant. She was able to convince Reagan that this was a real issue that was going to affect us all and was something we could fix. Obviously there were lots of other factors at play (there were technical solutions that were largely ready to adopt), but it helped.

I often wonder how different things might be right now if Al Gore had been a well known republican, whether acceptance of anthropogenic climate change wouldn't have been such a political issue, or if all the other forces at work would have been the same.

The Soviets also had many engineers as their leaders, it was something of a fashion; didn’t seem to help much.

It worked quite well at first - I mean they had Sputnik, Gagarin etc. not bad for a country that was some backwards serfdom just half a century before.

But then they lost their ambition - a major point being when they stopped trying to develop their own computing technology and just reverse engineered IBM chips instead.

"But then they lost their ambition"

I rather say, it has to do with economic realities: there was a joke in eastern germany something like:

we got no toilet paper, but a cosmonaut, hurey.

edit:

"Keine Bretter für die Laube

Für das Auto keine Schraube

Für das Klo kein Papier

Aber Kosmonauten haben wir"

non rhyming translation:

"No wood for the hut

no screw for the car

no paper for the toilet

but a cosmonaut we got"

Weird parallel with this American Song:

"A rat done bit my sister Nell. (with Whitey on the moon) Her face and arms began to swell. (and Whitey's on the moon) I can't pay no doctor bill. (but Whitey's on the moon) Ten years from now I'll be payin' still. (while Whitey's on the moon) The man jus' upped my rent las' night. ('cause Whitey's on the moon) No hot water, no toilets, no lights. (but Whitey's on the moon)

-- Gil Scott Heron

Probably not so surprising: those who struggle with their bare existence, are not so thrilled with money shot into space, compared to the better off.

(but Bezos on the moon)

Nah, they run out of German engineers + without futher commercialization of science there is no way forward. There is many good concepts, but almost none got out research phase.

That's because the Soviet leadership made the error to slip into the cold war confrontation, as a result, most of their science and industry was narrowly focused on developing military hardware. The Chinese had Zhou Enlai, who made the effort to avoid such a turn of events (incidentially Zhou Enlai wasn't an engineer at all).

However there were alternatives: once in office, Beria made an effort to get rid of East Germany, in an effort to end the cold war. However the rest of the polibureau ousted and executed Beria, because they feared that all this was too destabilizing (then they got the Hungarian uprising under Khrushchev, which was much worse; also Krushchev later fired his co-conspirators in the coup against Beria - Malenkov and Molotov) See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavrentiy_Beria#First_Deputy_P...

I am not entirely sure about it, but the question of who is on top seems to make a big difference, when talking about a very authoritarian political system.

They were lacking a market economy, which China has largely had since the late 1980s.

They also had questionable engineers and scientists a leaders, that's why horrors like Lysenkoism and the RMBK reactors became a reality.

Lysenkoism was a fully political distortion: a politician (Stalin), not the scientists community, decided (for political reasons).

The RBMK wasn't an horror, it was simply meant to exploited in a certain way, and containment was integrated. At the Chernobyl plant the guys committed a serious boo-boo (the very possibility of a disaster is common to all designs, there is no absolutely full-proof design, especially if the guys can shunt actuators/fiddle with captors/whatever).

Not really. It was a combination of factors, including the usafe operation by its staff. Disregard for safety had been a generalized problem with this reactor during all stages of its development, before the accident occured.

"According to the Soviet experts the prime cause of the accident at the Chernobyl NPP was “...an extremely improbable combination of violations of instructions and operating rules committed by the staff of the unit” [3]. This conclusion sets a full responsibility for the accident at the Chernobyl NPP on its staff. Participants of the Post-Accident Review Meeting [2] also accepted the Soviet version. However, it was incorrect. This was demonstrated in 1990 by the commission of the State Committee for Atomic Safety Survey of the USSR which concluded that the main reasons of the Chernobyl accident were serious shortcomings in the design of the Chernobyl reactor as well as inadequate documents regulating a safe operation of the reactor [4]. Various errors, that were made during the turbogenerator testing by the personnel of the fours unit of the Chernobyl NPP, according to the commission, could only contribute to the development of the accident."

  https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:1490526
  https://www.rri.kyoto-u.ac.jp/NSRG/reports/kr79/kr79pdf/Malko1.pdf

> This is a main selling point of having a high proportion of your politicians having an engineering background.

At what price for democracy and for human rights? And how is China progressing on transitioning to renewable energy? Hint: it doesn't [0].

(Not that western lawyer-led nations do better...)

Having promised a reduction of 65% by 2030 [1], I guess they do count on those nuclear projects working out in the end, but at their scale and with 85% of their energy consumption coming from fossil fuels [2], they do seem to have their work cut out for them.

[0] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-carbon-emissions... [1] https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/china/targets/ [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...

In China (I live there since 201708) the nuclear program is winding down (the most recent nuclear plant, Taishan, started 14 months ago and already has one reactor stopped after a leak). Nuclear plants produce less than 5% of the gridpower, and they plan for it to produce 7.7% of the gridpower by 2035!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China#Future_...

Renewable energy plants produce 27.32% of the gridpower, and projects are everywhere.

Carbon emissions are growing simply because the economy is booming even faster.

Although wanting to agree, it just isn't clear that it is a sustainable advantage. America has traditionally crushed opponents by having a small aggressive government on top of a large, free & wealthy population. If someone competes with the US by having a more competent government that is only exceeding the US in the area where it is weakest.

The best nuclear engineer in the Chinese government isn't going up against the US political establishment, they are facing off against people like Bill Gates or the US nuclear industry's Elon Musk equivalent. Although the US population isn't as relatively wealthy as they once were so the traditional strategy might not work out.

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