this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2026
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[–] Windex007@lemmy.world 19 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Remember when transistors were invented, and the rest of the world shrugged and said "we lost the race" and then never invented them and still plow fields by horse and candlelight?

Of course not.

Framing this as a race introduces the idea that if you don't win you're fucked. As if time stops. It's a bad metaphor and it only serves to undermine rational thinking. It's designed to convince people they need to sacrifice something. Datacenters spiked your electricity bill? That's ok because we have to win.

The space race is pretty similar. Also worth pointing out that by every metric besides man foot+moon, the USSR won. First suborbital flight? Orbital? Satellite? Animal in space? Man in space? Moon flyby? Moon landing? USSR. Did the USA quit? Did it matter?

You can throw money at whatever you want. Framing it as a race is nonsense designed to convince people to work against thier own interests so someone else can get rich.

[–] JasonDJ@lemmy.zip 0 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

I think the "race" part of it is somewhat necessary as long as we have a world that revolves around a handful of economic powerhouse nation-states.

It's a conditional requirement of capitalism. If we were unified in working towards the advancement of humanity as a whole, money be damned...sure, that'd be great. Got a little work to do before we're there, though. In the meantime, we're competing towards pursuit of the all-mighty dollar. And yeah, that will always mean that the individual loses out, because dollars gotta come from somewhere.

But as long as we have a capitalistic society, we are always going to be at odds with the competition, i.e. China, which means no cooperation.

Furthermore, they seem to be way better at not giving a fuck about stealing IP than we are...if we make something, they clone it and make it cheap, but that never, ever happens in reverse.

Partly because they are a bit better equipped at this point for obtaining raw materials (to put it lightly) and they have a much less expensive labor force (to put it lightly).

[–] Windex007@lemmy.world 8 points 3 weeks ago

China is where it is very explicitly because it spent a lot of time not trying to win any race. They're still not trying to win it.

It's massively more cost effective to fast follow in the wake of whomever is breaking new ground. Orders of magnitude.

China has been strategically losing races. Over and over. They understand there is no value in getting there first if you can be there 6 months later cheaper.

The race is made up. It's an excuse to fuck YOU. YOU.