Smeagol
DP Veteran
- Joined
- Jun 14, 2012
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I wish I read the article before voting. We're in trouble. If it were just Russia, I'd say no. If Russia gets China and Western Europe to join them in rewriting the global trade model leaving the US dollar out of the picture, heck yes we're in trouble.
One thing we have going for us, is our ability to come up with new innovations. We need to supercharge our drive to innovate. I think part is giving statutorily guaranteed minimum percentage points on patent royalties so that our nation's brainiacs will have greater incentive to create new life-changing products and concepts and not be concerned that the stock holders of the company for which they work will own their billion dollar idea leaving them with nothing but a nominal paycheck and maybe a pay cut. If the incentive to create jobs is allowing the job creators to keep more of the wealth they build, its only logical and fair to say the incentive to create breakthrough products and ideas is allowing the inventors to keep more of the wealth build too.
I think some sort of international system of punitive action needs to be built into global trade. If a country steals our or anybody else' intellectual property, they pay through the nose. Maybe require trading partners to put up security deposits that are forfeited if they steal patented products or forfeit loan repayments, etc.
I think there are a few next big things out there I hope Americans will be the first to figure out.
1. A new super-cheap method of desalinizing huge amounts of sea-water.
2. A breakthrough in inexpensively harvesting hydrogen energy.
3. A breakthrough in solar electric technology. The present technology only utilizes a small spectrum of sunlight to create electricity. Last I heard a European research team were only one discovery away from increasing the efficiency of solar electric panels by 500%. This means almost everyone everywhere could generate enough electricity to run their homes most of the time while creating hundreds tens of millions of jobs. I hope we beat the Europeans to it.
4. Inexpensively creating super-strong lightweight composite material that could cheaply replace steel and other metals used in manufacturing, from automobiles to shipping to machinery to building construction.