kids, math

Neat trick.The solid surface of the earth, or outer crust, is drillable but

Not always.

Kamyr were reluctant to admit it - their resident genius

Don't worry. The Chinese will take over. USA is toast anyway.

There are quite a few math heads hired in the assurance industry. They are responsible for enormous amounts of money. Also they are at the heart of speculation like hedge funds and Ponzi schemes. Epstein was enormously wealthy, more based on math than sex trafficking. The UK royals didn't pay millions per child. Do not restrict math to engineering math.

Compare to Chinese education. The untalented are brutally weeded out, before they enter the university. OTOH a talent in rural areas seldomly gets unnoticed.

The US figure is now 39% down from 41% in 2012. China isn't doing as much weeding out as the US does. But quite a lot of the US weeding out involves providing poor and discouraging primary and secondary education for the children of the less well-off.

The Chinese Universities may well be more concentrated on finding people with the talent to complete a university education, though I doubt that they are any better at it than Western universities who admit a lot of students who don't end up completing any university course.

The secondary school examination system does produce a few elite students who have a 95% chance of completing their university studies, but nowhere near enough to provide the number of college graduates an advanced industrial society needs.

My only encounter with the Chinese education system was when Cambridge Instruments hired a brilliant Chinese mechanical engineer, who had just completed a Ph.D. at Cambridge University. The Cambridge Instruments personnel department had tossed his CV into the waste bin, but the guy's wife played badminton with the wife of one of our engineers, and his CV got passed on to our chief engineer despite the personnel department.

We hung onto him for a couple of years before he got head-hunted by an American firm who could offer him and his family American citizenship.

He did some brilliant stuff in the time he worked for us.

His history was interesting - he'd worked as machinist for a bit until his bosses realised how good he was and sent him off to university, where he did well enough to be sent off to Cambridge to get a Ph.D.

Talent spotting exceptional people isn't all that difficult - they do tend to stick out. Spotting the bread butter talent that keeps the system running takes more work.

Western society doesn't seem to put all that much effort into it.

I expect some major turmoil in China. It's a financial house of cards, ultra-corrupt, and not making babies.

The USA has good long-term basics, I think. The political parties are pretty balanced, actually compete for votes, and police one another for corruption.

Around here, I see all sorts of interesting people getting along, doing cool stuff, inventing things, having cute multi-racial kids.

So many guys have Chinese girlfriends and wives. I hear that the poor Chinese guys can't get a date.

Good food here too.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Absolutely but you have to be one of the best, otherwise it might be food stamps one day. It's similar with journalism or film-making. I know some successful people in both domains but I also met a much higher number who are barely scraping by. With engineering that usually isn't the case, you'd have to be quite dumb not to land a decent job.

That is not the norm. As a consultant I get around a lot and I know for sure it is not. The number of folks with a math degree I encountered in dozens of high-tech companies over >40 years is ... exactly one. And that was a person who also had a CS degree.

And Bell Labs is ... gone. So is Cambridge Instruments.

But who are the leaders in phased array ultrasound? That happened to be my bread-and-butter for more than a decade so I know. It's certainly not EMI, they never really existed in the marketplace. In the end that's the only metric that counts.

Except this was a family that was financial already seriously under water.

That is not what former students told me. They were rather open, as long as you do not totally oppose faith.

I wasn't hungry. 'Til now. Ed

A case I did decades ago required us to gain at least some understanding about the firmware. Documentation? Zilch. They remembered who did it but said he left many years before and had cancer back then. Luckily he had survived that and we were able to find him, despite him having a fairly common name. Then we encountered problem #2. The source code was on an

That is not at all how charter schools work. Where do you live? Example California where I live:

Many skills are not easy to pick up. For example, trying to figure out what's wrong with a complicated piece of electronics where the manufacturer is unwilling to furnish schematics. This is a highly valuable skill later in the job because there you usually get schematics but then are way faster in diagnosing than others. Or maybe the only one able to do it which can result in guru status, along with a commensurate income.

One example, years ago: Discussion with a client, big meeting. The problem was likely in a circuit with a very large tube. One manager exclaimed "Well, good luck, nobody knows tubes anymore" ... <gently raising hand> ... "Ahm, I've built some stuff with tubes when I was a teenager because we could get those for free" ... "WHAT?!" ... and we fixed it. No course work involved here, this was all self-taught. Had to.

Don't let that person walk to the parking lot without an offer letter in hand.

Maybe ok to hire unless there is a #1.

Not a good candidate.

Don't hire.

You don't have to because it isn't done during lecture time.

No need to.

Exactly. Either that or have an electronics hobby. In my case that was ham radio but I also repaired lots of radios and TVs. The point is, if someone isn't doing any of this and thus hasn't acquired basic skills such as soldering or trying to figure out how a circuit is supposed to work but doesn't, maybe he or she should not head into an engineering career.

Call Halliburton, leave a big check and wait until someone calls from China complaining about weird stuff coming out of the ground :-)

Industry certainly has not. Latest when something really hits the fan they learn the lesson. Then the phone at people like me rings.

Yet, even our professors 40+ years ago said that. "You are only learning this for the exams. By the time you graduate all this stuff will be handled by ICs and processors". Phhht ...

Almost all my mates believed that nonsense and went into digital and software. I did not. My parents have always instilled in us not to pay much attention to opinions or to predictions by others.

Absolutely not. There aren't nearly enough good analog HW designers and that problem is worldwide. It is being execerbated by two trends. One is that us old farts are retiring and the other is that digital turns into analog when you get into the gigeehoitzes. "Why do we see several pulses here where only one went out?"

"Total opposition" is a rather extreme position. Most authoritarian regimes will tolerate all kinds of opinions, as long as you keep on doing what you are told to do.

Bell Labs was quite productive while it lasted, as was Cambridge Instruments. Long term investment has fallen out of fashion

EMI went bust and got taken over by Thorn shortly after I left in 1979. Thorn weren't interested in exploiting the long term investment embodied in the EMI Central Research labs. When the Bell Telephone monopoly was broken up (at much the same tine) Bell Labs fell under the control of the AT&T Company, and the AT&T bean counters were no more conscious of the long term value of the asset than the Thorn bean-counters had been.

The EMI ultrasound machine was on the verge of commercial exploitation when EMI went bust - I built the clinical trials machine that went out to hospitals for clinical trials, but putting the production version into volume production would have cost more than Thorn was prepared to spend. My clinical trials machine was put together at the same time as the production prototype, but turned out to be a lot more reliable, if bulkier (though lighter - I went for some very quiet switching power supplies). The EMI magnetic resonance scanner was less advanced at that point, but Thorn manged to sell that off as a complete project.

A taste for expensive hobbies can be financially lethal.

There's one crucial difference. The parents of the charter school kids have to be interested enough to go to the trouble of sending their kids to a charter school. And that means that they will pressure their kids to behave well enough to avoid getting expelled.

I know enough teachers to be well aware that some parents will devote most of their energy into trying to intimidated the teachers involved rather than the offending kids, but it is still a crucial difference.

The one child policy wasn't a great idea. Combined with cultural preference for male children, it has produced a generation which is short of females.

The "financial house of cards" doesn't matter so much with an autocratic government. Ultra-corrupt would be a problem if it were true. The US probably has a bigger problem at the moment - when Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk get front seats at the presidential inauguration the image isn't great.

Or claim to. America's elected representative are older and richer than their counterparts in more advanced industrial countries,

In China that will be true at the moment.