On Sat, 01 Dec 2007 15:20:46 -0600, F. George McDuffee
wrote:

On Sat, 01 Dec 2007 20:06:40 +0900, Stealth Pilot
wrote:
snip
I have to hand it to the chinese. they are absolute artizans when it
comes to making thin cast iron castings. trouble is though that it is
a totally useless skill to boast of.
snip
Don't confuse a very useful manufacturing technology [thin wall
casting] with poor product design and/or optimization for lowest
possible price. Detroit did this for years with widely known
results.

Some interesting insights on the Chinese labor shortages!!!!!!!
and ==problems with their educational system.==

It appears they caught up with the US in less than 10 years......

(Pandemic obesity is also a new problem in China)

http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Pub..._1685_abstract
snip
# While university graduates are plentiful there, new MGI
research shows that only a small proportion of them have the
skills required for jobs further up the value chain—and
competition for these graduates is becoming fierce.

# China must undertake a long-term effort to raise the quality of
its graduates by changing the way it finances its universities,
revamping curriculums to meet the needs of industry, and
improving the quality of English-language instruction.
snip

http://www.china.org.cn/english/MATERIAL/172145.htm

http://marketplace.publicradio.org/d...tage_in_china/



I have worked with chinese undergraduates on university exercises.
the language seems to be key to their problems (and I'm not being
racist here)
the effort to be fluent in chinese requires the memorisation of about
6,000 different squiggles. you can see that the mind gets arranged
into a huge array.

I've watched students memorise incredibly prodigious amounts of
information into the memory array and spew it back at the teachers in
assignments. it seems to key into a weakness in our western teaching
where the teachers equate the recall of lots of information as
knowledge learnt. in the case of the chinese students it is just a
prodigious recall ability in operation. give them an actual problem
with no rote answer possible and they fall in a heap. I've seen this
time and again.

in the west our language structures our brains differently. we may
have just a percentage of the chinese ability to rote learn but we can
think! we can get all the subtle bits of a vague problem juggled in
the head in such a way that we can pop out a viable solution to the
problem. time and time again we westerners can find solutions to
problems that totally evade the concerted efforts of the chinese.

they will waste considerable effort in attempting to solve the two
hash bullet points you make above. which is good it will keep them
from waging war. in my considered opinion, one garnered from watching
chinese minds in action, china will never find a solution to the two
problems until they drop the chinese language and replace it with
something constructed in the manner of english.

while the chinese speak and write chinese we in the western world will
remain supreme as the world's problem solvers.

Stealth Pilot