Re: Hilarity of the Day

wrote

That really seems like a stretch. How do you know that its not because they eat too much rice, or not enough red meat, or maybe because its because they didn't watch enough John Wayne growing up. Maybe its the lack of good Bugs Bunny cartoons.

Their innovation is way down there. I think they are now behind Zimbabwe, Pakistan, Tchad and Bolivia. I think they are still ahead of Suriname, thank goodness.

How did they learn to make cars, cameras, robots, tractors. You know, they even built a first class navy some 60 years ago, If I recall correctly. They must also have pretty thick skin to endure all that criticism.

Brent

Agreed.

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I don't. You'd have to ask the commentators.

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he job had been done

hey

Learning to make cars, cameras, robots, tractors and battleships doesn't require innovation, if you can find somebody else who is already making them. Making them better than the originals by a process of steady refinement presumably does involve lots of small innovations, but these don't criticise the way other Japanese chose to do the job in the past. There is an implicit criticism of the improvisations of the slap-dash round-eyes who invented the stuff in the first place, but the Japanese are perfectly happy to criticise foreigners.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

wrote>

(This is a rhetorical statement) If you knew it was a stretch, then why did you post this as an argument about using toilet papaer?

I have to disagree with you here. All the tooling and planning and material sciences required to do any of these things require innovation from the technicians to the machinists to the engineers the the welders and builders.

I think that it shows an entire workforce that is capable of substantial innovation.

I do not know how the Japanese view competition from say Nisson to Toyota, but based upon their successes and based upon human nature, they must fiercely compete with each other and not be afraid to criticize their Japanese competition. Their success would lead me to believe they are all to happy to criticize and out do one another. Now, you could convince me that during the Russian Communist economy in the USSR that one tractor factory was not allowed to criticize another. Their lack of innovation seemed to show, but I suspect that in reality the Russians are good innovators too, they just suck at politics.

Brent

I suspect this might have had more to do with whether or not there was any

Absolutely they are.

"John Fields" wrote

I suspect that the Rosenberg's got them to the party quicker, but they would have made it there themselves. Time was a precious commodity for the Russians at that time.

I believe we used Von Braun to get our rockets up.

Brent

"> "John Fields" wrote

Here is an opinion of Russian innovation that lines up with your opinion:

Brent

The right-wing nits-wits had gotten excited about toilet paper, and this gave me an opening to be rude about their group-think.

Disagree all you like, but do try to find some justification for your own opinion.

to

Check the history. The Japanese initially copied what other people were doing, then went on to improve on it.

Then you need to think about what I've written. They are perfectly capable of improving on stuff done by anybody else, but improving on something created by one of their more senior colleagues is much more difficult.

Your view of human nature, which regards competiton as a biological necessity, which ingores the salient fact that humans and the social insects have put a great deal of effort into devising mechanisms for cooperation.

Japanese society does seem to put a little too much emphasis on obedience and conformity. Americans do seem to put a lot of emphasis on social conformity, but rather less on obedience.

their

The brake does seem to be on innovations that implicity criticise memebers of the same team of developers.

Based on your own indoctrination about the importance of competition. They'd see theri success as a reward for good team work.

Granting the way you seem to have miss the point of my argument, I suspect that I might be able to persuade you that black was white. In fact in Communist Russia the economy was centrally controlled, and the bureaucrats doing the controlling weren't into innovation because they were too far away from the shop-floor to see the problems that needed solving, let alone the possible solutions.

he Russians are good

Check out the history of the AK-47 sometime, or the TU-34.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Tom Lehrer's song is funny, but his Russian was copying from other Russians, and Tom Lehrer was an academic at Harvard, and probably had an American example in mind - plagarism is problem in every country.

The real Lobachevsky was spectactularly innovative and didn't have anybody to copy from.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen