Also this stuff was figured out and built once before, other than the effort and resources involved (which China has lots of), why wouldn't someone else be able to figure it out again?
They came back the next day. It was finished, the Chinese had done it overnight.
Atleast as far as hours clocked in at work is concerned, no?
They feel working hard brings benefits.
In America, working hard brings your manager benefits. We are multiple generations into this. Most people have learned to not work hard because it is just free benefit to your employer.
Sure, we could pressure Americans to work harder by making the entire country even more afraid of losing their jobs and terrified of not overworking themselves, but even then, all that hard work will just be captured by a spoiled managerial class playing bonus games and extracting all that wealth for themselves, not for American advancement.
Even in the shithole that is American managerial culture, you can still find young Americans working hard, often in spite of themselves, because they get into some project. In the past, projects were small and your team had substantial agency, so this sort of "The team really gets into the project" outcomes paid huge dividends, and resulted in a lot of success. Things like the IBM PC, lots of stuff at Bell Labs.
If the belief was genuine, would this be necessary?
It's ironic that a lot of western domestic manufacturing takes place using machines that were engineered and manufactured in China.
What do you mean by "The West"?
Because in Western Europe, nobody serious is underestimating China, quite the contrary. We know that there's no going back, and quality is no longer a criteria to choose local over imported.
Only bigotted people are still viewing China as a country mass-producing cheap crap.
I think that's the EVs that definitely sealed the deal in lots of people's minds.
Unless you are talking about Israel :P
It's the propaganda that nobody questions that is most insidious.
I occasionally think about software that has truly transformed the trajectory of humanity. So much software is just disposable or is only useful for a small group of people. But the folks at TikTok should be commended in some ways for the drastic changes their algorithm made to the views of worldwide youth. Was it altruistic or nefarious? I suspect we won't know for sure until its written in the history books but man did it have an impact. Even though TikTok is probably gone now that its been taken over by the same people who used to shape the narrative its impact wont be easily forgotten.
How many of us developers get a chance to write software that really changes the direction the world takes?
Western propaganda works in mysterious ways.
If anything the constant underestimation of Chinese capabilities caused "the west" to react way to late.