The truth is that by doing so you're just forcing your population to subsidize (through work) the purchases made by foreigners. Why? Because if a gadget would sell for 'x' (in the foreign currency) under a market generated exchange ratio, now it'll sell for, let's say, 'x/2'. So, you'll have to produce 2 of those gadgets to obtain the same 'x' value, hence, to work double to gain the same real compensation.
This presumes that foreigners would buy goods at price x from China. It quite clear that the market supports buying twice the goods at x/2, but the demand curve may be more elastic than you think. Doubling the price and slashing production in half isn't necessarily going to result in the same amount of revenue for the Chinese. Especially because the Chinese deal specifically in low-skill commodity manufactured goods (the market for which is *extremely* competitive, because nearly any unskilled third-world workforce can make them) and because commodity goods usually face very elastic demand, keeping the price low is of primary importance. It's not some nefarious scheme, or subsidizing U.S. consumer purchases, it's just how the market works.
And this is even more so, since by doing so and thus increasing exportation, you also diminish the amount of goods available in the internal market, thus producing inflation in the local currency (less goods, same amount of bills, more bills needed to purchase a given good).
You're saying this as if the Chinese wanted to hurt their internal market. This is manifestly not the case, and they're trying to increase internal demand for their goods. The problem is that A) most are still too poor to engage in larger amounts of consumption, and B) there's a cultural/confucian tendency to save far more than you consume/invest. Exports are the only real driving force in the economy, and China can't afford to give them up. Furthermore, there's no real dangerous phenomenon of internal inflation of the currency. China has a very respectable GDP per capita (PPP) for a developing country of its size: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
Now, China is a completely different matter. It uses the economy as a weapon, so much as to employing slave labor to make many export goods even more cheap. If they get to the point that using the "money weapon" becomes a reasonable option, they won't mind their people starving by using it.
This is paranoid conspiracy theorizing. China certainly is interested in very high levels of growth. It is not reaching the same levels of high growth that Japan, South Korea, or Taiwan reached in their high growth development phases 20 years ago. China has no interest in using the money weapon because the CPC is very well aware of its precarious position. There were over 80,000 riots involving 10,000 people or more in China last year. If there were a serious economic downturn we would see the CPC overthrown, and they know it. That's why President Hu has been engaging in a number of new initiatives to increase growth in rural areas, as opposed to just the coasts. The national party congress, going on right now, is addressing this. Wen Jiabao just made a speech on the topic. They know that since they've lost communism as an ideological jsutification for their rule, the only thing they have left is economic growth and competent governance to continue the CPC monopoly on political power. They would never be so foolish as to endanger that unless the United States supported Taiwan independence (that's really the only red line the Chinese government has).
3) A liquor license, even just wine-beer, for R-rated evening showings after 8pm. I'd love to be able to drink a cold one while I'm watching a movie in a room full of grownups. I already have a local theater that does this with second-run films, but I'd love it if I could get this kind of service in a first-run show with a kick-ass sound system.
There was a 'premium' theater near me in Owings Mills, MD that had this kind of setup. They served nice food and had an alcohol license. It was 21-over only to get into the theater. They had nice big wide leather seats that reclined, stadium seating, areas between the seats where you could set down your drink and food tray. Guess what? It went out of business and was bought by the AMC chain. Now it's normal and profitable. There aren't enough adult-only crowds to make a 'first class' theater worthwhile.
all those foreign central banks believe that having tons of dollar bills stored equals their countries being "rich"
This is incorrect. China doesn't buy U.S. dollars for shits and giggles. It buys U.S. dollars in order to manipulate the exchange rate between the yuan and the dollar. Buying dollars with yuan keeps the yuan low (large supply of yuan, increased demand for dollars == dollars high, yuan low). Goods made in China are sold in yuan. As long as one dollar buys a lot a yuan, American consumers can afford to buy lots of cheap Chinese-made goods. This makes China an extremely competitive exporter when compared with any other third-world manufacturing economy. There's no intrinsic reason why the U.S. should buy so much from Chinese manufacturers, as opposed to Indian or Indonesian or Malaysian manufacturers. But Chinese goods end up much cheaper because of the exchange rate. Hence, the U.S. buys lots from China.
If China were to stop buying U.S. dollars, or to start selling U.S. dollars, their economy would collapse. The yuan's value would skyrocket compared to the dollar. Chinese exports would cease to be comepetitive. China's weak internal demand would be wholly insufficient to make up for the loss of export revenue. International investment from the U.S. and elsewhere would dry up. The banking system would then collapse under the weight of the 40% or higher bad loans that their banks have been giving out (because of the corruption of CPC officials pressuring the banks to give loans to their favorite old-boy-network projects). This would be a catastrophe several orders of magnitude worse that the U.S. savings and loan scandals, with no possibility of a bail-out or recovery. Of course, the U.S. economy would be hurt severely as the dollar's value dropped and the price of our imports rapidly rose, but not hurt nearly as badly as the Chinese economy.
In sum, the Chinese buy dollars for survival, not some fanciful notion of conspicuous consumption.
You'll notice that half of the countries on your list are the size of a postage stamp. Honestly, Monaco, Andorra, and Luxembourg? These are principalities. Monaco is a tax haven--of course it has "highest salaries". These are not real countries with real problems. Kuwait is a tiny kingdom sitting on top of some of the largest oil reserves in the entire world--can you really attribute their highest "wealth per capita" to the effecitiveness of their society? Hardly. Sweden has the lowest gap between rich and poor, but they also have less then half the GDP per capita of the U.S.--so you can either be unequally rich in the U.S. or equally poor in Sweden. Excepting India (which is apparently best in the undefined metric of "economic wealth", whatever that means), the largest country is France, with one sixth the population and one sixteenth the area. This absurd comparison list is filled with countries that couldn't possibly have analagous experiences or challenges on the same size that the United States possesses. Finally, these metrics have little or nothing to do with how "republican" the selected states are--they measure standards of living, not the effectiveness of liberal civic institutions.
That's a fine idea, but what happens once an article is edited? Say I add a rather large amount of information to an article that was rated poorly for being incomplete. Should all the previous low ratings for incompleteness remain? Or should all the ratings be wiped now that the article is substantively different? What if my edit is only very minor--perhaps a typo fix. Should all the ratings be wiped then? Probably not. What about controversial articles, like the one on Terri Schaivo, or on Abortion, or on George W. Bush. These would be maliciously rated without a doubt. A ratings system seems to be nearly unworkable.
USIA wasn't just renamed, its budget was drastically cut, and it was folded into the State Deptartment, instead of remaining an independent agency. This move by the Clinton administration all but gutted the capabilities of USIA, as the State Department is too large and clunky to pay USIA any real attention, and it no longer had enough money to operate like it once did during the Cold War. There have been dozens of subsequent op-eds in prominent newspapers from former USIA employees pleading to bring back the old USIA.
I assume you're referring to the Cuban Missile crisis. That wasn't an embargo, it was a naval blockade of a distinct group of Soviet ships (carrying the nuclear warheads) for a distinct duration of time (long enough for the ships to arrive, see the blockade, turn around, and go home). No one is suggesting that the U.S. enact a naval blockade of China. A limited trade embargo is a completely different animal, and their are dozens of them currently in force (e.g. Jackson-Vanik restrictions on Russia and Ukraine) yet there is no threat of an imminent nuclear war.
It's not like U.S. police went sauntering around Afghanistan with a clipboard and a questionnaire interviewing Afghans about their religious or political beliefs. The vast majority of the people in Guantanamo are there because they were fighting on behalf of the Taliban or Al Qaeda during the initial U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in November 2001. It's the fact that they were fighting U.S forces, and that their capture and interrogation could lead to valuable intelligence, that they were taken to Guantanamo. If the U.S. based its detention of Afghans solely on political or religious beliefs--as you seem to think they do--it would have to store nearly the entire population of Afghanistan in Guantanamo.
[Sirens wailing as police pull Peter over] Police Officer: You're that black guy I saw on the news conference, ain't you?
Peter Griffin: Yeah, that's me.
Police Officer: This is Car 15 needing backup. I got a stolen car here.
Peter Griffin: It's my car.
Police Officer: Suspect's getting belligerent.
Peter Griffin: What?
Police Officer: Officer down.
/.ers get giddy about making computers and technology do things they aren't supposed to be capable of doing. Like running linux on an XBox, running XP on a Mac, running Windows programs in linux, and making scanners play music. Of course, Microsoft's XP offends everyone's sensibilities here, but that doesn't mean they not going to challenge themselves by trying to get it to boot on a lawnmower.
In the first example, the Chinese surfer sees that these webpages exist and knows that they are being blocked from viewing them. In the second example, the Chinese surfer has no indication that other sites about Tiananmen exist and does not know that they are being blocked from viewing them. That's the difference.
If you count Europe, including all the territory from the Atlantic to the Urals, then yes it is 10,030,000 km^2. But that includes all of European Russia. If you look at just the European Union, for example, the size is 3,976,372 km^2. When people refer to "European countries" they usually don't include half of Russia in their measurements. Thus, grandparent is probably still correct.
Capitalism combined with dictatorship is not fascism. Fascist thinkers subscribed principally to a third-way economic model called Corporatism. In practice, their theories weren't realized because of the exigencies of establishing a war economy to prepare for WWII.
In the case of Germany, if you read Mein Kampf or the unpublished sequel to Mein Kampf which focuses on foreign policy, you'll see that Hitler opposed the fundamental tenets of capitalism. For instance:
he argued for the nationalization of key industries instead of purely private ownership;
did not believe in the free market and wanted substantial protectionism to protect German industry;
did not support self-interest as a motivation but argued solely for the primacy of the interest of the German race;
did not support private enterprise, but instead supported the Corporative guild-like organization;
did not believe in the ability of industry to continuously increase productivity levels;
did not believe in economic mobility, but supported traditional societal roles and jobs;
did not support self-organization of the economy, but rather top-down directions from the Nazi party, organized around the "national rejuvenation" of Germany;
In sum, he was about as openly anti-capitalist as one could get. Mussolini only slightly less so. Both decried the bourgeois liberal capitalist system, especially as it manifested in Britain and the United States.
There are many instances of capitalist or mixed-economy systems run under dictators, Chile under Pinochet for example, or Spain under Franco. But there is no consensus within academia that these could be called fascist countries. There is certainly no consensus that China could be called fascist either. Saying "dictator + capitalism = fascism" simply reveals a profound ignorance of both capitalism and fascism.
Fascism BY DEFINITION is a partnership of government and private concerns acting in concert.
This is absurd. Scholars recognize no common definition of fascism. Some include only Italy and Germany. Some include Italy and the Eastern European fascist imitator states, but exclude Nazism as something different. Some include all the fascist states, plus Germany, plus contemporaneous conservative dictatorships such as Franco's Spain and Indonesia.
It's quite obvious that you've never actually studied fascism. Your "definition" is so wide that it would include nearly every government that has a significant planning component: socialism, communism, social democracy, dirigisme, etc--all of which are manifestly not fascist.
There is no similar "Dirty Thirty" list for extreme right-wing professors.
That's because there are no extreme right-wing professors at UCLA. In fact, I would wager that you could count the nominally conservative professors at UCLA on one hand. And they would be considered rather milequetoast conservatives at that.
Yes, and Pixar is well known for it's films featuring biting and incisive political and social commentary. Disney will surely bowdlerize Pixar's critiques of social alienation caused by the consumerist hysteria openly inculcated by the "managed democracy" of our hyper-liberal capitalist world system.
"I know what you're thinking, 'cause right now I'm thinking the same thing. Actually, I've been thinking it ever since I got here: Why oh why didn't I take the BLUE iTablet..."
Slashdot Mirror
This presumes that foreigners would buy goods at price x from China. It quite clear that the market supports buying twice the goods at x/2, but the demand curve may be more elastic than you think. Doubling the price and slashing production in half isn't necessarily going to result in the same amount of revenue for the Chinese. Especially because the Chinese deal specifically in low-skill commodity manufactured goods (the market for which is *extremely* competitive, because nearly any unskilled third-world workforce can make them) and because commodity goods usually face very elastic demand, keeping the price low is of primary importance. It's not some nefarious scheme, or subsidizing U.S. consumer purchases, it's just how the market works.
You're saying this as if the Chinese wanted to hurt their internal market. This is manifestly not the case, and they're trying to increase internal demand for their goods. The problem is that A) most are still too poor to engage in larger amounts of consumption, and B) there's a cultural/confucian tendency to save far more than you consume/invest. Exports are the only real driving force in the economy, and China can't afford to give them up. Furthermore, there's no real dangerous phenomenon of internal inflation of the currency. China has a very respectable GDP per capita (PPP) for a developing country of its size: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
This is paranoid conspiracy theorizing. China certainly is interested in very high levels of growth. It is not reaching the same levels of high growth that Japan, South Korea, or Taiwan reached in their high growth development phases 20 years ago. China has no interest in using the money weapon because the CPC is very well aware of its precarious position. There were over 80,000 riots involving 10,000 people or more in China last year. If there were a serious economic downturn we would see the CPC overthrown, and they know it. That's why President Hu has been engaging in a number of new initiatives to increase growth in rural areas, as opposed to just the coasts. The national party congress, going on right now, is addressing this. Wen Jiabao just made a speech on the topic. They know that since they've lost communism as an ideological jsutification for their rule, the only thing they have left is economic growth and competent governance to continue the CPC monopoly on political power. They would never be so foolish as to endanger that unless the United States supported Taiwan independence (that's really the only red line the Chinese government has).
There was a 'premium' theater near me in Owings Mills, MD that had this kind of setup. They served nice food and had an alcohol license. It was 21-over only to get into the theater. They had nice big wide leather seats that reclined, stadium seating, areas between the seats where you could set down your drink and food tray. Guess what? It went out of business and was bought by the AMC chain. Now it's normal and profitable. There aren't enough adult-only crowds to make a 'first class' theater worthwhile.
This is incorrect. China doesn't buy U.S. dollars for shits and giggles. It buys U.S. dollars in order to manipulate the exchange rate between the yuan and the dollar. Buying dollars with yuan keeps the yuan low (large supply of yuan, increased demand for dollars == dollars high, yuan low). Goods made in China are sold in yuan. As long as one dollar buys a lot a yuan, American consumers can afford to buy lots of cheap Chinese-made goods. This makes China an extremely competitive exporter when compared with any other third-world manufacturing economy. There's no intrinsic reason why the U.S. should buy so much from Chinese manufacturers, as opposed to Indian or Indonesian or Malaysian manufacturers. But Chinese goods end up much cheaper because of the exchange rate. Hence, the U.S. buys lots from China.
If China were to stop buying U.S. dollars, or to start selling U.S. dollars, their economy would collapse. The yuan's value would skyrocket compared to the dollar. Chinese exports would cease to be comepetitive. China's weak internal demand would be wholly insufficient to make up for the loss of export revenue. International investment from the U.S. and elsewhere would dry up. The banking system would then collapse under the weight of the 40% or higher bad loans that their banks have been giving out (because of the corruption of CPC officials pressuring the banks to give loans to their favorite old-boy-network projects). This would be a catastrophe several orders of magnitude worse that the U.S. savings and loan scandals, with no possibility of a bail-out or recovery. Of course, the U.S. economy would be hurt severely as the dollar's value dropped and the price of our imports rapidly rose, but not hurt nearly as badly as the Chinese economy.
In sum, the Chinese buy dollars for survival, not some fanciful notion of conspicuous consumption.
You'll notice that half of the countries on your list are the size of a postage stamp. Honestly, Monaco, Andorra, and Luxembourg? These are principalities. Monaco is a tax haven--of course it has "highest salaries". These are not real countries with real problems. Kuwait is a tiny kingdom sitting on top of some of the largest oil reserves in the entire world--can you really attribute their highest "wealth per capita" to the effecitiveness of their society? Hardly. Sweden has the lowest gap between rich and poor, but they also have less then half the GDP per capita of the U.S.--so you can either be unequally rich in the U.S. or equally poor in Sweden. Excepting India (which is apparently best in the undefined metric of "economic wealth", whatever that means), the largest country is France, with one sixth the population and one sixteenth the area. This absurd comparison list is filled with countries that couldn't possibly have analagous experiences or challenges on the same size that the United States possesses. Finally, these metrics have little or nothing to do with how "republican" the selected states are--they measure standards of living, not the effectiveness of liberal civic institutions.
That's a fine idea, but what happens once an article is edited? Say I add a rather large amount of information to an article that was rated poorly for being incomplete. Should all the previous low ratings for incompleteness remain? Or should all the ratings be wiped now that the article is substantively different? What if my edit is only very minor--perhaps a typo fix. Should all the ratings be wiped then? Probably not. What about controversial articles, like the one on Terri Schaivo, or on Abortion, or on George W. Bush. These would be maliciously rated without a doubt. A ratings system seems to be nearly unworkable.
Yes you can: [edit].
USIA wasn't just renamed, its budget was drastically cut, and it was folded into the State Deptartment, instead of remaining an independent agency. This move by the Clinton administration all but gutted the capabilities of USIA, as the State Department is too large and clunky to pay USIA any real attention, and it no longer had enough money to operate like it once did during the Cold War. There have been dozens of subsequent op-eds in prominent newspapers from former USIA employees pleading to bring back the old USIA.
I'd be much happier if everyone (including those of us in the U.S.) learned the difference between democracy and liberty.
What acute little premise for a game.
Or putting the Shut Down script in the Startup Items folder. That one got announced at assembly the next day ;)
I assume you're referring to the Cuban Missile crisis. That wasn't an embargo, it was a naval blockade of a distinct group of Soviet ships (carrying the nuclear warheads) for a distinct duration of time (long enough for the ships to arrive, see the blockade, turn around, and go home). No one is suggesting that the U.S. enact a naval blockade of China. A limited trade embargo is a completely different animal, and their are dozens of them currently in force (e.g. Jackson-Vanik restrictions on Russia and Ukraine) yet there is no threat of an imminent nuclear war.
It's not like U.S. police went sauntering around Afghanistan with a clipboard and a questionnaire interviewing Afghans about their religious or political beliefs. The vast majority of the people in Guantanamo are there because they were fighting on behalf of the Taliban or Al Qaeda during the initial U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in November 2001. It's the fact that they were fighting U.S forces, and that their capture and interrogation could lead to valuable intelligence, that they were taken to Guantanamo. If the U.S. based its detention of Afghans solely on political or religious beliefs--as you seem to think they do--it would have to store nearly the entire population of Afghanistan in Guantanamo.
[Sirens wailing as police pull Peter over]
Police Officer: You're that black guy I saw on the news conference, ain't you?
Peter Griffin: Yeah, that's me.
Police Officer: This is Car 15 needing backup. I got a stolen car here.
Peter Griffin: It's my car.
Police Officer: Suspect's getting belligerent.
Peter Griffin: What?
Police Officer: Officer down.
/.ers get giddy about making computers and technology do things they aren't supposed to be capable of doing. Like running linux on an XBox, running XP on a Mac, running Windows programs in linux, and making scanners play music. Of course, Microsoft's XP offends everyone's sensibilities here, but that doesn't mean they not going to challenge themselves by trying to get it to boot on a lawnmower.
Perhaps, but I highly doubt a housing organization's lawyers have enough juice to take on eBay's bevy of retained, fuck-off lawyer-ninjas.
In the first example, the Chinese surfer sees that these webpages exist and knows that they are being blocked from viewing them. In the second example, the Chinese surfer has no indication that other sites about Tiananmen exist and does not know that they are being blocked from viewing them. That's the difference.
Here's a start. Now all they need is a user comments forum, a broken moderation system, and some sort of loop code for dupe-generation.
You misspelled "p\/\/nz0r3$!!!111!1eleventy!".
If you count Europe, including all the territory from the Atlantic to the Urals, then yes it is 10,030,000 km^2. But that includes all of European Russia. If you look at just the European Union, for example, the size is 3,976,372 km^2. When people refer to "European countries" they usually don't include half of Russia in their measurements. Thus, grandparent is probably still correct.
In the case of Germany, if you read Mein Kampf or the unpublished sequel to Mein Kampf which focuses on foreign policy, you'll see that Hitler opposed the fundamental tenets of capitalism. For instance:
In sum, he was about as openly anti-capitalist as one could get. Mussolini only slightly less so. Both decried the bourgeois liberal capitalist system, especially as it manifested in Britain and the United States.
There are many instances of capitalist or mixed-economy systems run under dictators, Chile under Pinochet for example, or Spain under Franco. But there is no consensus within academia that these could be called fascist countries. There is certainly no consensus that China could be called fascist either. Saying "dictator + capitalism = fascism" simply reveals a profound ignorance of both capitalism and fascism.
This is absurd. Scholars recognize no common definition of fascism. Some include only Italy and Germany. Some include Italy and the Eastern European fascist imitator states, but exclude Nazism as something different. Some include all the fascist states, plus Germany, plus contemporaneous conservative dictatorships such as Franco's Spain and Indonesia.
It's quite obvious that you've never actually studied fascism. Your "definition" is so wide that it would include nearly every government that has a significant planning component: socialism, communism, social democracy, dirigisme, etc--all of which are manifestly not fascist.
That's because there are no extreme right-wing professors at UCLA. In fact, I would wager that you could count the nominally conservative professors at UCLA on one hand. And they would be considered rather milequetoast conservatives at that.
Yes, and Pixar is well known for it's films featuring biting and incisive political and social commentary. Disney will surely bowdlerize Pixar's critiques of social alienation caused by the consumerist hysteria openly inculcated by the "managed democracy" of our hyper-liberal capitalist world system.
"I know what you're thinking, 'cause right now I'm thinking the same thing. Actually, I've been thinking it ever since I got here: Why oh why didn't I take the BLUE iTablet..."
Here's the picture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Tianasquare.jpg