In article ,
"Robert Green" wrote:



Kurt would insist it's just manufacturing that actually employs people and
used to provide middle class jobs. (-: China's time will come, and it may
be coming soon. They ramped up to meet what they thought was insatiable
world demand and now that demand has slackened. They just posted an
enormous trade deficit. The mighty rise and fall in ever-shorter spans of
time. You wouldn't want to be a life insurer for empires and superpowers.
The days of empires with lives measured in the centuries is long gone. The
EU will be lucky to see a 100th birthday.

Could you clarify what I am insisting?
I am not as sanguine about China as others. First of all with the
one-child mandate, they are about to see a retiree to worker ratio
shrink that will dwarf ours. Of course with a billion or so people they
probably have more give in the system, but still.
As the workforce shrinks, this will go a long way to (relatively
quickly) increasing the demand for scarce labor and much of the cheap
labor will go away. In fact, you already see that internally with some
of the mfr jobs going to the interior as wages are bid up in the cities
and coastal areas.
The other wild card that people seem to ignore (and what could be a
wild card on so many levels) is that the civilian government has largely
bought off the Army by letting them own businesses. Be interesting to
see how that works out internally (and externally) when there is the
inevitable really deep rescession and the Generals have to cut back on
their spending.


People have no choice. With stagnant wages, they have to stretch their
dollars and that means buying cheaper quality goods from abroad. It's the
perfect example of a vicious cycle.

Yet WalMart has been really really big for years before the
stagnating wages. We WANT cheaper goods and have for years. Many forget
that many of the things we are saying today we were saying about Japan
in the 60s and 70s.



I've always thought a current events and maybe even an IQ test might be in
order for voting. We test and license people to drive. I've read that a
lot of US citizens can't pass the naturalization test. That's scary.

You can't get the use of a photo ID past the Dems, how are you going to
get any kind of test?


Definitely yes to the first. But I have reservations about the second.

Way back when I used to photograph diplomatic functions for a living, there
was always food left over after a big catered event. If you knew where to
be and when, you could indeed dine at no cost.

That is probably one of the things it is hardest to get through to a
journalist. We know there IS such a thing as a free lunch since we
experience them 2-3 times a week (grin)

--
People thought cybersex was a safe alternative,
until patients started presenting with sexually
acquired carpal tunnel syndrome.-Howard Berkowitz