Bulletins and News Discussion from September 2nd to September 8th, 2024 - We Love Our Trans Comrades - Chemicals of the Week: Estrogen and Testosterone

Image is of the Cuban flag and the Pride flag on the Havana Health Ministry building.

Inspired by a highly upvoted recommendation by @Commiejones@hexbear.net:

We need to kill the Mega Posting Wars meme. It wasn't very funny to start with and now I get the feeling some people are taking it way too seriously. Clogging up the news thread with bullshit just to try to out post the trans mega is just dumb and annoying.

The News Megathread is now under trans martial law:

Loving trans people on this site and elsewhere is strictly mandatory.
Posting about the "comment wars" between the trans and news megathreads is now strongly discouraged inside the news megathread. No shame in it - I also recently made jokes about it - but though they were almost always just jokes, it was unrelated to current events and was beginning to feel more like padding the comment count instead of trying to improve the quality of the thread. If you want to boost comments and engagement here, then post articles and analysis!

The COTW (Chemical of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific chemical every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied chemicals. If you've wanted to talk about the chemical or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don't worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.

The Chemicals of the Week are Estrogen and Testosterone! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants.

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Latest report from ASPI, who produced that widely talked about report early last year about how China has taken the lead in 37 out of 44 critical technologies that they track, or about 84%. They have expanded their scope this year to 64 technologies, in which China leads 57 of them, with the US leading the other 7. Just 20 years ago, the numbers were essentially reversed.
ASPI notes that, in the US, "private-sector research is increasingly concentrated in US technology giants"; back 20 years ago, the technological lead was spread across several more (typically US-based) corporations, but now only the largest corporations/monopolies truly matter when talking about the private sector. Massive Chinese corporations do not play nearly as big a role in this regard. In the public sector, US institutions like NASA still matter greatly, but the Chinese Academy of Sciences is an absolute colossus, by itself leading in 31 out of 64 technologies.
China is the top player in the following categories of technologies:
Advanced information and communication technologies (7 technologies)
Advanced materials and manufacturing (13 technologies)
Energy and environment (8 technologies)
Unique AUKUS‑relevant technologies (3 technologies)
China is only mostly the top player in the following categories of technologies:
Artificial intelligence, computing and communications (China leads 5/6, with the US coming out ahead in Natural Language Processing, presumably due to ChatGPT)
Defence, space, robotics and transportation (China leads 6/7, with the US coming out ahead in small satellites, presumably due to SpaceX)
Quantum technologies (China leads 3/4, with the US coming out ahead in Quantum Computing)
Sensing, timing and navigation (China leads 8/9, with the US coming out ahead in Atomic Clocks)
The competitive field is:
Biotechnology, gene technologies and vaccines (4 for China, and 3 for the US; the US leads in vaccines, nuclear medicine and radiotherapy, and genetic engineering)
I count 14 technologies in which China is bigger than every other country put together.
Other findings were:
India is gaining in a variety of fields, but is still quite far from being the top player in any particular technology; their best shot for a top spot in the next few years is biofuel research.
The UK is falling fairly quickly, though they have made a couple gains in things like electronic warfare.
If you consider the EU collectively (as some hilariously did for the Olympics) then they are still quite competitive and even take the lead in two technologies (small satellites and gravitational force sensors). In the EU, Germany is ranked first, then Italy, then France.
South Korea is doing much better than Japan.
Iran has gained significantly over the past 20 years in defence-related technologies; now in the top 5 of eight technologies, when around 2003, it struggled to reach even 17th place in a single technology.
The combined power of AUKUS can just about match China in some technologies (like adversarial AI), but still trail China in others like advanced robotics.
- There are about 55% the number of publicly traded companies in the US compared to 1996. There is less than half the number of public companies per million people than there was in 1996. The GDP has doubled in that time (inflation adjusted) and the so-called "Buffet Indicator" that tracks the total market cap of US public companies against the GDP has a ratio of 202%. In 1996 this number was about 100%, during the height of the dot-com boom it didn't reach 150%.
  So I guess what I'm saying here is there has been a massive consolidation of corporations over the past few decades and if we take at face value the capitalist line that competition drives innovation -- well the competition is drying up in a lot of cases. Taken together with the neoliberal tendency to cut literally every public service to the bone and it's no surprise we're falling behind a country that has essentially done the opposite over the past 30 years.
  
  A side effect of the Varoufakis idea that we are in fact ceasing to be public governments, replacing the actual functions of government with private corporations and vesting actual power in corporate offices, a side effect of that means government is less coordinated and effort is duplicated.
  Instead of NASA plowing billions into the Saturn rocket program, now SpaceX and whatever Bezos’ space company is called and Boeing are all duplicating effort.
  Which runs counter to the consolidation argument. Like, I think both arguments are true to different extents. Part of the problem is of course consolidation and the direction of effort to extracting rents rather than competing absolutely that’s a huge possibly even bigger part of it. An economy that’s being strangled by all these rents being collected by monopolists and the highest achieving maths whizzes going into finance and tech instead of science. 100% true.
  But another part is ironically the decentralization of research effort as it is privatized.
  
  But another part is ironically the decentralization of research effort as it is privatized.
  A slight side-track, but this always pisses me off when people say things like "well, war might be terrible, but it does drive scientific progress..."
  No it doesn't! It just centralizes research! It forces a bunch of disparate capitalist scientific institutions to be directed by a central body, with the goal of actually making breakthroughs instead of just finding new ways to make profit.
  
  But another part is ironically the decentralization of research effort as it is privatized.
  A negative decentralisation of research into redundant and insular walled gardens, alongside techbro cults? Clearly this is a precursor to the Adeptus Mechanicus.
  
  Praying to my CyberTrukk’s machine spirit that it will work today
  
  “Still love the car, m’lord!”
  
  Critical support to capitalism's contradictions in the imperial core.
- It's interesting that the US government is funding this work to be delivered by an Australian "think-tank" (third last from bottom below)
  
  Yeah ASPI has long been a rabidly anti-China propaganda arm of the US. They're the think tank that floods
  politics with rationales to destroy their own export economy, spend impossible amounts of money on nuclear subs they'll probaby never recieve, etc. But they've also been used in the past much more broadly. They were one of the outfits laundering Adrian Zenz's bullshit and the nonesense 'satallite imagery' from Xinjiang after people started realising that Zenz was a complete crank. The UK and European press also used them while doing long 'investigations' into why actually it actually definitely wasn't Israel who bombed the al-Ahli hospital (until they admitted it and bombed a load more).
- Unique AUKUS‑relevant technologies (3 technologies)
  What in the white Jesus could that be?
  
  From the report:
  Autonomous underwater vehicles: China has 67% share, next highest is the US at 7%
  Electronic warfare: China has 52% share, next highest is the US at 12%
  Air‑independent propulsion: China has 44% share, next highest is the US at 8.6%

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