Yup, the US has a long way to go to repair workers' rights.

> By the way, true 5G towers are starting to sprout up all over the US. They are big and disfiguring to neighborhoods.

"True" 5G towers have been deployed in dense areas for the last two years. C-Band is great and offers an improvement in the US specifically (most other countries had already allowed this band). mmWave isn't useful outside of niche cases. Neither of these are going to fix the coverage problem and only mmWave is fast enough to do all the high-bandwidth things touted for 5G. Of course it doesn't reach far enough to be particularly useful.

> So your thesis is that: workers that simply participate in a system that they can neither opt out of nor had a hand in creating are “capitalists too”…. So this makes them even culprits with the corporate goal to slash worker pay, raise consumer prices and beat up suppliers and competitors up the supply chain to shave as much profit off and pass it all to shareholders? > > > > This sounds an awful lot like blame the slaves for slavery. Not saying your average worker is a slave per se, but their ability to opt out is just as futile.

The leverage of business owners over their employees is exactly why strikes are legal in the US. They prevent the owner from operating the business (or at least make it substantially more expensive) until they come to the negotiating table.

What you describe as "socialism" exists in capitalism. Employees can be compensated with a portion of the company that grants them voting rights (which is exactly what these companies do).

> Ever heard of capitalism? The idea of profit sharing evenly amongst workers is diametrically opposite the stated goals of capitalism. This is the main choke point as to why this idea will not scale.

Workers are capitalists willing to sell their time and effort valued by experience (college, real world experience, or both) for an agreed upon price. Employment is also a market. In many companies they can be partially compensated with a portion of the company (probably most common in Silicon Valley but exists elsewhere).

Hint: mostly sugar (which is why it's not legally bread)

Start playing around with tinkercad, it's an easy way to learn 3d modeling. If you don't need big prints you can find cheap 3d printers from manufacturers like monoprice.

Basically already exists for agriculture.
https://www.deere.com/en/news/all-news/autonomous-tractor-reveal/

Frankly if residential prices for battery+solar keep coming down and energy markets stay volatile we'll see the transition come from the masses rather than major producers.

> why does 5G suck so bad

Mostly because carriers universally suck so bad. The only meaningful improvements in 5G are protocol changes and the addition of C-band/6GHz frequencies (in the US). mmWave is a joke and always has been for wide-area communications. It's easily blocked by every building material including glass.

> why are people so excited by it?

Pandering by tech journos who don't actually understand the technology and the physics behind it.

Huawei is notorious for security vulnerabilities, literally any other choice is a better one.

> They simply have the power of numbers working in their favour right now.

Not anymore, their working-age population started declining in 2015 and overall population as early as 2020.

> They have the technological base because we gave it to them.

They still have to import all critical technologies.
Zhaoxin uses Via designs (which are based on Cyrix designs).
The Sunway chips are based on the DEC-Alpha.
Hygon licensed AMD's Xen architecture.
The recent "Chinese" GPUs use stolen IP from AMD and Nvidia.
HiSilicon used barely-modified ARM designs.
EspressIf uses Tensilica designs.
SMIC can't reliably build on modern process nodes.
HSMC failed.
Thousands of other Chinese chip companies have failed.

> They have the people to run all of it because they graduate engineers and other tech nerds by the boatload, and many of them are western educated.

Look at youth unemployment numbers in China, those who aren't burnt out are giving up.

> The only spark they're missing is a dysfunctional capital markets system that allows $$ to finance crazy stupid ideas.

Getting money for anything in tech in China has been trivial for the last 10 years, it's why you see a hundred copies of dumb ideas all over sites like Ali Express.

You seem to be under the impression that China has the capacity to actually catch up and beat the west.

They've just gotten better at copying/stealing. China has already peaked and has zero chance of legitimately catching up.