"Ed Huntress" wrote in message et...
"Excitable Boy" wrote in message
om...


let's get one thing straight - China is NEVER going to be a capitalist
democracy. NEVER. They do not intend to be and they will not be.

Yeah? I hear you, but China's economic pressures are going to be bigger than
you or the Chinese government could possibly contain.


It's not me or the government. It's the culture. China has what works
for them. This has been what worked well for several thousand years,
slightly updated.

What obviously DOESN'T work is when you let Gunner run things. The US
keeps getting things just about straightened out, then some bunch of
robber barons comes along to swindle the rest of the country again
to the applause of your very own mental midgets. Oh, but they have
guns in case the gov't does something bad, like take qaway your freedom !

Jsesus H Krist, whatta crock. If those dorks had guns for that reason,
now is the time to use them but oh no, Georgie is the cat's meow. He's
their man, so what's all that freedom crap good for anyway ? just
encourages more mexicans and ******s to move in next door. Don't
really need freedom, just wanna talk about it.



It's just too big, with too many weird features and too many unknowns, for
anyone to be able to predict.


sure. But between the ability of the Chinese to make things work for
ALL their people and the observed behaviour of Americans, I'll pick
China. That can change, of course, but Chinese people are nowhere near
as mentally retarded as right-wing Americans.


Right now their unemployment is so high (25%), their underemployment in
government-owned plants is so high (another 25%) and their productivity
sucks so very, very bad (it's 1/15 that of the US), that there's no way
anyone can predict how they'll get from where they are to where they're
going to wind up.

can't even predict where they'll wind up, in fact ... but unemployment
and underemployment and lack of productivity aren't necessarily the
problems you make them out to be. As long as people can live on not
very much money, then the lack of a huge income isn't the negative
it is in the US. Just what's so great about "productivity" ? All I
saw it do in the US was make fewer and fewer people do all the work
for less and less money while more and more people sucked off our
labour like leeches. Machinists and factories make the goods that
drive the bus ... but who gets the money ? Lawyers and insurance
compamny execs and stock market shysters. What the **** is so great
about tremendous productivity ? Three people get to do all the work
so that twenty-five can wallow around like pigs in a trough off our
eighteeen-hour-days at ten bucks an hour ? USA can bite me on the
productivity scam. If productivity is so wonderful, tell me why the
US is buying so much stuff from China.


There is no precedent, especially because the country
itself is so large, and will dominate markets to a degree never seen before.


After WW II the US did the same thing ... maybe that's a precedent. Don't
know ... but China is .. China. It's a strange and unusual place.

Capitalist democracies are invariably FAILURES.

So are command-and-control socialist economies. In fact, the former seem to
last around four times longer than the latter.


My ass. China has been around for at least twenty-five hundred years.
What we got now is what we had since slightly after the Warring States
period. When your capitalist democracies get up to ten thousand years,
let me know.



Makes you wonder why the US did ....

No choice, really.


Right, You had no choice because a bunch of greedy donkey-dick-sucking
*******s who don't give a **** about anyone but themselves run your
country. If you had a decent government you wouldn't be in this position.
Europe won't cut their people's throats to make an extra nickel for Sam
Walton. Next biggest problem is that you have voters like Gummer who
have the long-term reasoning powers of a polecat. deTocqueville put his
finger on it 200 years ago - when they figger out they can get into the
cookie jar, it's all over. What is surprising is just HOW strong ideology
is. The proof is all around them yet the Gummers refuse to accept that
the Robber Baron right-wingers are the worst thieves of the bunch. Even
the goddamned Wall Street Journal says so, but ask Gummer or Glen ... :-(



Try it around 100 miles to the west of where you are. Those people are going
to have to buy stuff, too, if China is going to be able to fuel itself with
domestic consumption.


Farthest west I've been is nan ning. It's pretty west ... not as
up-to-date as Shanghai but probably about the same as Huzhou. Plenty
stores, plenty of stuff. Unfortunately, they are building roads to
try to bring tourism to the unspoiled areas :-(

I don't know what else you can do to bring some modern assets to
antique cultures, but making them into a zoo exhibit doesn't seem
so great to me :-( That's not exclusive to China, however. San
Francisco and Sausalito are in the same situation.


One doesn't like to assign superhuman attributes to the Chinese
planners - they have made some pretty big blunders, after all - but ...
well, they seem to be putting the profits back into the company rather
than ****ing it away, which sounds good to me.

They have little choice. They simply can't keep up their rate of growth
unless they build up their infrastructure. Their economic officials are very
open and blunt about it.


Maybe a lack of choice is sometimes good :-) If the US didn't have so
many 'choices' maybe you'd act more responsibly.


What happens when a country
has nothing to offer except a strong military coupled to a fascist busy-
body populace ? Rome, anyone ?

Wrong analogy. It will be interesting, but there is nothing in history to
draw from.

Oh ? I think an analogy with Rome is in many ways quite apt ....
trite, of course, but there are more parallels than divergences ....
oughter be fun to watch for a bit, anyway. As Sinuhe the Egyptian
would say, "We're living in the sunset of the world."

Maybe :-)