Originally Posted By: PandaBear
Originally Posted By: mpvue
does this really surprise anyone? EVERYTHING out of Asia has been originally copied from somewhere else. from DVDs to missiles, it's all copied.
lest you think I am stereotyping, give some examples that prove me wrong.
Flash Memory (Toshiba, Japan)
Walkman (Sony, Japan)
A majority of the DVD patents (Sony and Toshiba, Japan)
..but that was a result of selling them the transistor in (iirc) 1955 or something. Within a very few years, we couldn't afford to make them ourselves. The evolution started there in consumer electronics. There was no such thing as a consumer electronics market in the USA before the Fair Trade Laws were abolished. You had to be a serviceman to enjoy cheap stereo ..or an upper middle class person here. Otherwise, Radio Shack (Realistic) was about as good as you could afford.
All developing economies go through this. You send them your antiquated, lower yield, technologies ..give them currency ..and they buy your otherwise too expensive or unattainable leading edge technologies.
The unfortunate consequences to this is that you've got way more lower ROI yield technologies than you do leading edge ..at least in terms of direct employment. No hard core domestic capitalist "needs" domestic car production. They need ROI. When Japan got too expensive to employ their own people, they had to build assembly plants here.