It's much smaller. It's not quite artisinal anymore, but it's not where the mass-produced jeans the world prefers come from. It's where the high-quality $300-a-pair jeans come from.
It's alive and well! But in size and scale, it won't compete with US/China just because of the fact that most people don't care about the quality of their jeans. Like most things, the premium market is much smaller than the "good enough" market. The top brand names for raw denim enthusiasts are still chiefly Japanese companies.
I've bought 5 pairs of Japanese denim from 5 different manufacturers over the past 7 years. If anyone has questions about raw denim, feel free to leave a comment or send me a message.
Those are just some very limited examples. Being "American" means a lot of things, in fact it's very difficult to define what being American really means, considering the diversity of culture here. For a country with only a couple hundred years of history, the depth of culture and society here is truly astonishing.
Sorry for not being able to provide better examples, but I guess if there is a Turing test for "being American", I think I would have done OK at it.
Cut him some slack. According to his comment he's 16. He's viewing it from a high school lens. Whether or not being an "American" 20-something year old requires you to do what was mentioned above, some of his points are interesting.
Immigrants make choices constantly -- subconsciously or otherwise -- on how much to indulge in the local culture, and how much to stick to your familiar roots. Unfortunately, there can be strong feedback loops that develop quickly; one immigrant group is tightly knit because they find it harder to bridge the gap and the gap gets harder to bridge because Americans find the immigrant groups "too ethnically knit" and closed to bother. Not to mention that there's a natural tendency to be a little apprehensive towards someone new with their own set of customs.
I don't know whether you are just being facetious, but I'm not 16. I was simply comparing my brother to other "engineering nerds" in his age group, and I find him sharing very limited hobbies or interests when compared to kids who grew up here. It's not like he doesn't like social networks, he just doesn't use American ones. It's not like he doesn't watch TV shows, but just not the American ones. It's not like he doesn't eat out, just that he strongly prefers Chinese food.
My examples were very limited, they are only used to illustrate a point, but not to make a broad statement.
I think the bigger point is that high school is a bigger influence on how 'assimilated' people are. College is definitely a time of personal growth, but I think high school is even more so a time of growth.
Maybe at 14, your friends aren't locked into FB/WeChat/etc, and the network effect isn't as strong to attract you to one cultural set or another. The other theory I have is that with how much larger colleges are, and in particular how many more international students there are at the collegiate level, there is less pressure to 'assimilate' and find 'American' friends. I've definitely noticed that international students hang out with other internationals a lot in college. It's really common to hear Portugese or Korean in my library, for example. Having some support base probably makes it easier to hang out only with those who are super similar to you.
From what I know, all the blue collar labor is imported, and the Saudis don't work that much (or at all?). So, there is no worry of generations of workers getting trained etc.
Can someone tell me what problem it solves that other architectures don't? All I see is a lot of buzzwords and very little technical details on why it is better...
I don't understand this about healthcare in the USA. Why not import a few thousand doctors from Asia through H1Bs, and drive down the cost of medical care? Remove artificial caps on licenses imposed by the AMA while at it.
Not trying to undermine your point, but I believe it won't take much long to re-train those "imported" doctors. Only those who are ambitious and bright would come to the US and I have at least a handful of friends from the medical school in Myanmar, who were in the same class year as I was, already doing their residencies. Most of them took ~2-3 years of taking the USMLE and applying for hospitals in the US which sponsors H1B (mostly the rural ones). They seem to be liking what opportunity they've been given to as far as I can tell. I actually regret quitting med school there and leaving for college in the US after my 2nd year just because I want to be an aerospace engineer (turns out, I cannot because there's almost no company that would hire an H1B aerospace engineer, so I had to change my studies back to comp sci).
If the world made sense we would have doctors working 6 hour shifts at 100k a year rather than having one doctor work 12 hour shifts for 200k a year. But then you need people to actually want to be doctors rather than MBAs or financial accountants or lawyers, and strangely enough when the money isn't better and the work is way harder pressure to remove the artifical doctorate of medicine graduation rate caps is lacking.
Culturally, I suspect this would not go over well. There are a shocking number of people that would be less than impressed to be served by a doctor with a non-Anglo-Saxon last name, even if they spoke perfect English.
Especially older people, who are the largest consumers of healthcare.
I don't think this is true. A "shocking number" doesn't mean "the majority" or anywhere close to it in this case, but rather more than there should be(none).
Why should citizens be treated differently when H1Bs pay the same income and other taxes as citizens? H1Bs even pay into social security, even though they are on a temporary visa.
Anyone who pays the same tax as citizens should be treated the same as citizens.
