The Chinese chick who didn’t let her kids have any fun has gotten tons of media attention. That is exactly what she wanted when she wrote her book. Only the extremes get attention in the MSM. It makes great TV. The facts are that Chinese students kick the shit out of American students on test scores. The apologist America is number 1 people like Freesmith claim that our scores are low because we have to include the inner city black kids in our scores. Bullshit.
The best Chinese students get higher scores than the best American kids. Our population is 310 million, while China’s is 1.3 billion. If you exclude their peasants and our inner city dregs, China has millions more smart kids graduating school every year.
There is no secret to their success. Even when I was in college in the mid-1980s, the Asian kids were in the library studying at 10:00 at night. I, along with my American friends, were at the Alpha Pi Fraternity party killing brain cells drinking grape and grain from a tub in the middle of the room.
Chinese, Indian, and other Asian students work harder than American students, so they get better marks. Simple. Life comes down to hard work. The Chinese are driven to be the best. Americans have gotten satisfied, fat, and lazy. We are an empire in decline. The Chinese are an empire on the rise. They may be derailed by demographics, peak oil, or other environmental reasons, but it won’t be because they didn’t work harder than Americans.
Will China’s work ethic whip us?
Published: Wednesday, February 16, 2011
By Jay Ambrose
An old acquaintance of mine lived near the University of Denver, regularly rented out a room to students at the school, once welcomed a young Chinese man as her scholarly guest and was stunned by his work ethic.
He studied, studied, studied, refusing to turn his lights off more than a few hours a night because he could not study in the dark. He spoke freely of the grades he made — straight A’s — as well as his attitude toward American students: contempt.
He found them lazy leisure lovers who abused the privilege of higher education, if I correctly recall a summation that came back to me when reading a recent piece in The Wall Street Journal.
It was by Amy Chua, a Yale law professor who pointed to rules for her own two daughters in explaining why it is that Chinese families so often include “math whizzes” and “music prodigies.”
She allows no sleepovers, TV, computer games or personal choice of extracurricular activities. On the piano and violin, she requires three hours practice a day. On grades, she requires A’s and that the girls beat everyone else in performance in every class but gym and drama.
Western parents don’t operate that way, she said, noting that in surveys they worried that emphasizing academic success is too stressful on their children. To Chinese parents, she said, anything but the best is not enough.
I read all of this and could not escape the fleeting thought that, sure enough, China wins, a view that seemed confirmed by charts in a nearby story.
They showed results of International Student Assessment tests for 15-year-olds. Shanghai, China comes in first in reading, the United States 17th. In science, Shanghai is first again, the United States 23rd. Then we get to math. Shanghai is still number one, while the United States rounds the bend slowly, huffing puffing, looking sickly, coming in at 31st.
My worries need qualification, but first let me worry some more. Too many American schools consider competition a bad thing. It’s not. It motivates. Unearned self-esteem is identified as the gateway to bliss. It’s not. It is the gateway to mediocrity.
Practice matters. In “The Outliers,” the author Malcolm Gladwell says several hours of practice a day, beginning very young and adding up to 10,000 hours by the teen years, is needed to shine in almost any field. Our youngsters too often skip the practice but get more hours than that having their brain cells eviscerated by television shows, such as a new one about teenagers on MTV in which there seem to be four themes: sex, drugs, sex and drugs.
I believe in hard work and in mothers who tell you what mine did when I was evading Saturday chores, namely, “The world doesn’t owe you a living.” I believe in preachments about self-reliance, self-discipline and the importance of school, and I believe in reading to children constantly and then having them read to themselves constantly when they are able to.
But while regimentation may be the Chinese way, it is not ours, and I also endorse the ideas of Anthony Esolen, which I found on the Internet.
He is a professor of English at Providence College and has written about ways to destroy the imagination of children, such as by not getting them outdoors often enough, of insisting that all their play be supervised, of not giving them a sense of the transcendent.
Creativity flows from the imagination and imagination flows from using it.
My guess is that we are more creative than the Chinese, although we may be slipping.
I know we play by the rules more than they do, and I believe that opportunistic carelessness on their part will hurt them as time goes on.
I don’t really suppose that winning and losing per se is what life is all about, anyway, although we’ll surely regret it if we turn lazy and stupid and quit striving for excellence.
The price will be very high.
Jay Ambrose is former Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay@aol.com.
Axel says:
If your measure of a good life is what your productive capacity is, then yes, the Chinese whip our collective asses. But, ask yourself, what kind of life is that?
I think a life should be balanced, with some capacity for pleasure in addition to capacity for work. I remember when I was interviewing for med school, that one of the features that was sought after was someone who was well-rounded, with both social skills as well as academic skills. Too many med students were like the Chinese students that you acclaim; they were good at taking tests, but had little ability to relate to real life people with real world problems.
I read the same article about the Chinese mother, but not her book. I disagree with much. I don’t want my son or daughter to be like that. I was too much like that, a hard studying straight A student (I was both a high school AND University valedictorian, and I didn’t go to some podunk university), and look at me now–I’m so unhappy as to actually join you other malcontents as a member of TBP!
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
12 
0
16th February 2011 at 12:07 pm
Administrator says:
Pa. teacher strikes nerve with ‘lazy whiners’ blog
FEASTERVILLE, Pa. — A high school English teacher in suburban Philadelphia who was suspended for a profanity-laced blog in which she called her young charges “disengaged, lazy whiners” is driving a sensation by daring to ask: Why are today’s students unmotivated — and what’s wrong with calling them out?
As she fights to keep her job at Central Bucks East High School, 30-year-old Natalie Munroe says she had no interest in becoming any sort of educational icon. The blog has been taken down, but its contents can still be found easily online.
Her comments and her suspension by the middle-class school district have clearly touched a nerve, with scores of online commenters applauding her for taking a tough love approach or excoriating her for verbal abuse. Media attention has rained down, and backers have started a Facebook group.
“My students are out of control,” Munroe, who has taught 10th, 11th and 12th grades, wrote in one post. “They are rude, disengaged, lazy whiners. They curse, discuss drugs, talk back, argue for grades, complain about everything, fancy themselves entitled to whatever they desire, and are just generally annoying.”
And in another post, Munroe — who is more than eight months pregnant — writes: “Kids! They are disobedient, disrespectful oafs. Noisy, crazy, sloppy, lazy LOAFERS.” She also comes up with a colorful list of comments that she felt should be available on student report cards.
Munroe did not use her full name or identify her students or school in the blog, which she started in August 2009 for friends and family. Last week, she said, students brought it to the attention of the school, which suspended her with pay.
“They get angry when you ask them to think or be creative,” Munroe said of her students in an interview with The Associated Press on Tuesday. “The students are not being held accountable.”
Munroe pointed out that she also said positive things, but she acknowledges that she did write some things out of frustration — and of a feeling that many kids today are being given a free pass at school and at home.
“Parents are more trying to be their kids’ friends and less trying to be their parent,” Munroe said, also noting students’ lack of patience. “They want everything right now. They want it yesterday.”
One of Munroe’s former students, who now attends McDaniel College in Westminster, Md., said he was torn by his former teacher’s comments. Jeff Shoolbraid said he thought much of what Munroe said was true and that she had a right to voice her opinion, but felt her comments were out of line for a teacher.
“Whatever influenced her to say what she did is evidence as to why she simply should not teach,” Shoolbraid wrote in an e-mail to the AP. “I just thought it was completely inappropriate. As far as motivated high school students, she’s completely correct. High school kids don’t want to do anything. .. It’s a teacher’s job, however, to give students the motivation to learn.”
A spokesman for the Pennsylvania State Education Association declined to comment Tuesday because he said the group may represent Munroe. Messages left for the Central Bucks School District superintendent were not returned Monday or Tuesday.
Sandi Jacobs, vice president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, said school districts are navigating uncharted territory when it comes to teachers’ online behavior. Often, districts want teachers to have more contact with students and their families, yet give little guidance on how teachers should behave online even as students are more plugged in than they’ve ever been.
“This is really murky stuff,” she said. “When you have a teacher using their blog to berate their students, maybe that’s a little less murky. But the larger issue is, I think, districts are totally unprepared to deal with this.”
Munroe has hired an attorney, who said that she had the right to post her thoughts on the blog and that it’s a free speech issue. The attorney, Steven Rovner, said the district has led Munroe to believe that she will eventually lose her job.
“She could have been any person, any teacher in America writing about their lives,” he said, pointing out that Munroe blogged about 85 times and that only about 15 to 20 of the posts involved her being a teacher. “It’s honest and raw and a little edgy depending on your taste. … She has a deep frustration for the educational system in America.”
Rovner said that he would consider legal action if indeed Munroe loses her job.
“She did it as carefully as she could,” he said about her blog. “It’s so general that it applies to the problems in school districts and schools across the country.”
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
10 
0
16th February 2011 at 12:19 pm
StuckInNJ says:
I went to Barnes&Noble on Valentines Day to buy Ms Freud a large box of Godiva chocolates. I saw the book, picked it up, and read several chapters. Good writer. Interesting reading.
Any parent of any nationality who becomes that involved with their children should produce similar results. Look at the Jews. Love ‘em or hate ‘em they sure have a helluva lot of Nobel prize winners in virtually every field.
Q: According to Jewish mothers, when does a fetus become a human being?
A: When it gets a Doctorate Degree.
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
5 
0
16th February 2011 at 12:22 pm
jmarz says:
Axel
I agree with you on the fact that it is more beneficial to be well rounded than a great student but on the issue of work ethic, the Chinese have it right. Their work ethic is extraordinary. The US has become very lazy and greedy. We have lost that work ethic and real spark that has made our country so great in the past. I believe we have created this sense of entitlement that has affected our work ethic. The Chinese may not be the most well rounded but they certainly have a better work ethic than the US currently. It is hard to argue that. The question is can we turn this shit around and pull our heads out of our asses.
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
5 
0
16th February 2011 at 12:24 pm
Administrator says:
Just to give you some perspective, Central Bucks school district was ranked 4th out of 500 in the state of PA. These are the smart kids. LOL.
Like or Dislike:
3 
0
16th February 2011 at 12:39 pm
Axel says:
Ok, ok, maybe American kids could be a LITTLE more like the Chinese…
Like or Dislike:
4 
0
16th February 2011 at 12:42 pm
Smokey says:
In international trade, worldwide commerce, and foreign policy in general, the Chinese have an extraordinary competitive edge that has transformed their society and assured them global dominance for the next several decades:
THEY CHEAT.
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
6 
0
16th February 2011 at 12:48 pm
Axel says:
One of the problems illustrated so often on this site, is that even with a good work ethic, the typical American has been FUCKED by circumstances beyond his control. (I know my ass sure hurts.) I posted something about this last week regarding the new American “holy trinity”–instead of education, working hard, and saving, what gets people ahead in America today is having connections, possessing a loose moral compass, and a coming from a moneyed background.
People who have worked hard all their lives have lost everything thanks to the likes of the CEO of that “giant vampire squid”, Goldman Sachs. I wonder if the young of today are in part so apathetic because they learned that hard work is for suckers?
Like or Dislike:
4 
1
16th February 2011 at 12:50 pm
Pirate Jo says:
“It’s not that I’m lazy. I just don’t care.”
Maybe it’s at least worth asking the question of whether something is WORTH doing. These Chinese kids seem to have all of their sense of self-worth tied up in their grades and the amount of money they make. How is that any more “successful” than the douchebag who only cares about impressing other people with his flashy car or his Wall Street job? Frankly the student mentioned in the article sounds like an asshole with non-existent social skills. If I was interviewing him for a job, I’d be turned off by his “contempt” for Americans, since he would get on my team and make everyone miserable.
I’m not a lazy person – when I get into a project I zone in on it and tune out everything else. I’ll crank out work like there’s no tomorrow and not quit until it’s done and done right. I’ve never griped about overtime, as long as it didn’t go on for TOO many months. But there comes a point, whether it’s chasing money or chasing good grades, or trying to climb the corporate ladder, or whatever, that if you are rational and smart you ask yourself why you’re doing it. If you’re going to make money, make it FOR something. If you’re going to work hard, work FOR something. Otherwise you’re nothing more than a hamster on a treadmill.
Set aside, for a second, all the grandma and grandpa voices in your head telling you that it’s immoral to sleep past 5:00 AM and the most virtuous man is the one who works 20 hours a day and only sleeps for four. Now ask yourself, using reason and common sense, what you would do all day if you could do what you WANTED to do and not what you HAD to do. Yes, we all have to eat our vegetables, but what happens when you get old, life ends, and you didn’t do anything you wanted to do? You’re going to be just as dead as all the people who had fun. Is there any logical reason why you should work any more or any harder than you have to? Slouching off at work is a form of stealing, so I can’t condone that. But why work any more than you have to in the first place?
So somebody told you it was important to get straight-A’s and make a lot of money. Do you just pursue those things because you lack imagination and the ability to think for yourself? Because it’s much easier to do what OTHER people think is important than ask the tough questions, right? It sure enough makes those OTHER people happy when you do what THEY want. It’s very validating for their own choices, and maybe they even benefit directly. But whose life is it? When someone starts telling me I’m not “successful” unless I [fill-in-the-blank], I have to wonder what their motivation is. The Chinese lady doesn’t give a shit if her daughter is happy. She just wants to be able to brag to her friends. I’d tell her to go pound sand.
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
5 
0
16th February 2011 at 12:53 pm
Administrator says:
Smokey
You are right. We heard from Harvard that they were robbed blind when they opened a facility in China and hired local Chinese. The Chinese were probably laughing their asses off as they picked the pockets of Ivy Leaguers.
Like or Dislike:
3 
0
16th February 2011 at 12:56 pm
Administrator says:
Extremism regarding anything is bad, including education and work. The Chinese mother was too extreme in not letting her kids have some fun.
But, let’s face it, the vast majority of American kids, including my own, spend far too much time playing PS3, staring at Facebook, tweeting, texting, and watching the boob tube. There are consequences. If Asian kids are studying 3 hours per day and American kids are studying 30 minutes per day, the Asians will get the better jobs, better income, and better lives.
Simple.
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
5 
0
16th February 2011 at 1:04 pm
MikeinAZ says:
Jim,
That’s the district I went to elementary school in, must’ve gone downhill because I left.
Like or Dislike:
2 
1
16th February 2011 at 1:09 pm
StuckInNJ says:
Pirate Jo — Your BEST post EVER!! Many, many thumbs up.
Exactly when did working your ass to the bone become a virtue??
When did Chinese Work-ship become a new religion? A Chinese peasant slogs in his rice field for 18 hours a day …. and I’m supposed to think thats great?? A Chinese factory worker slaves away at a menial brain-deadening assembly job all day for ten bucks ……… and I’m supposed to think thats great?? A Chinese white collar worker gets to his position by studying 12 hours a day, even as a FIRST grader …………… and I’m supposed to think thats great?? Fuck that bullshit.
From a historical perspective, the cultural norm placing a positive moral value on doing a good job because work has intrinsic value for its own sake was a relatively recent development. Work, for much of the ancient history of the human race, has been hard and degrading. Working hard–in the absence of compulsion–was not the norm for Hebrew, classical, or medieval cultures. It was not until the Protestant Reformation that physical labor became culturally acceptable for all persons, even the wealthy.
Like or Dislike:
2 
3
16th February 2011 at 1:12 pm
Axel says:
Yeah, but our kids will be so militarized and so numbed to killing by continuously playing Call of Duty Twelve that by the time they are adults, they’ll be ready for armed forces indoctrination, and can whip the Chinese in the upcoming Peak Oil Wars. Hoo-Hah
Like or Dislike:
2 
0
16th February 2011 at 1:15 pm
ssgconway says:
Two points:
1.) The 10,000 hours observation is telling. we excel at turning out world-class NBA stars because those with talent in basketball are encouraged to apply themselves. I expect that the Michael Jordans got that way because they put in in excess of 10,000 hours. Ditto Tiger Woods in golf. We don’t push our best minds in academic fields the way we encourage them in sports.
2.) Our public schools are violent and do not emphasize academics. Fights are common. Time is wasted on pep rallies and teaching is often corrupted by ‘teaching the test’ to meet NCLB standards.
Tom Wolfe’s “I Am Charlotte Simmons” makes the same point about our universities. Among undergrads, a 1600 SAT is nothing compared to being a jock or being socially elite.
We are digging out own graves.
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
5 
0
16th February 2011 at 1:20 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
Didn’t we just have a “Chinese Brainiacs Kick Butt” thread last week? How often do we rehash this one? Its getting to be like the 30 Blocks of Squalor.
The Chinese are kicking nobody’s asses but their own. Their Ph.D.s are working in retail, if they have a job at all. The country is an industrial sewer, the currency is hyperinflating, they hold a lot of irredeemable debt from years of slave labor to the west which will never be paid off, they have too many mouths to feed and not enough water and they have nobody to sell their indestrial products to who isn’t in debt up to their eyeballs.
HTF do you call this “kicking ass”?
RE
Hot debate. What do you think?
5 
5
16th February 2011 at 1:38 pm
howard in nyc says:
to elaborate of smokeys concise response:
*slave labor
*poisoning of the air and water (dumping industrial waste costs a lot less and fuels profits)
*printing money faster than the ben bernanck
that is how china is kicking our ass.
but obama wants us to meet the challenge by being more innovative, with more hustle, and being more edumacated.
too bad our school system gave up on actual education of the masses in favor of churning out dumb, socially conditioned consumers who can sign a credit card but not calculate compound interest. and television ‘educates’ kids to be good americans by buying shit you can’t afford and haven’t worked to earn the money to buy.
bet chinese tv looks a bit different than ours.
as for professor chua. when her media exposure hit, cspan reran an interview with her from several years ago, when she had written a book about minority groups in economically dominant positions. i had seen that interview years ago, stopped to watch because you don’t see too many chinese-american female harvard law professors writing books on economic issues.
her presentation of ideas from that earlier book was garbage. intellectual claptrap, dressed up with pseudo-sociology and economic nonsense. two of her topics (korean grocers in south central la, and ethnic minority market dominance in the nation of liberia) were coincidentally ones i was familiar with. (my parents, americans working abroad, lived in and met in liberia, and soon thereafter moved to los angeles). so by chance, i was readily able to reject her meanderings as nonsense.
i did not immediately recognize her when her wall street journal article touting her parenting method came out. but then i saw this cspan repeat. and saw this as more lightweight silliness from her. by the time she appeared on steven colbert, she was backing off from her own bullshit in her book. ever called the book a ‘self-parody’. well, i’ll give her that; too bad it was unintentional.
however, to jump to another tangent, i have seen asian american kids kick our white and black asses in the classroom. in california, asian achievement became so drastic in the 80s and 90s, the university of california (berkeley) was able to fill every freshman spot (except for the football and basketball team) with kids with perfect 4.0 high school GPAs. except, a lot more of those kids with perfect high school records were asian rather than white.
you never heard such shrill complaints, that actually admitting kids on numerical merit alone would destroy diversity, make the university all asian bookworms. you never heard such demands for using standards beyond just grades and SAT scores for making admission judgments.
best defense of affirmative action i ever heard. when white kids were threatened with being squeezed out by asian kids with 4.0/1600 numbers. about the same time the SAT added a written essay component.
yet it had been blasphemy just a few years later to look deeper than just grades and test scores to decide admission.
heh.
one thing professor chua has done with her book is expose some insecurities about our failures in education and in societal priorities. that’s good i suppose.
Like or Dislike:
2 
0
16th February 2011 at 1:40 pm
Administrator says:
RE’s knowledge of finance shines through.
HTF do call this kicking our ass?
Like or Dislike:
4 
1
16th February 2011 at 1:55 pm
Axel says:
One thought about hard work for hard work’s sake: wasn’t it the Nazis that posted , Arbeit macht frei (“Work will set you free”) at the front gate of their concentration camps? Hard work alone is not a virtue.
A corollary: in physics, if energy is expended, but no change occurs on an object (such as travelling a distance), “work” is not done. Similarly, if people expend energy, but it is fruitless, I do not consider that expense of energy to be “work”. Does that then mean that the majority of Americans, who expend energy, yet ultimately achieve nothing, do no work? Food for thought.
Like or Dislike:
3 
0
16th February 2011 at 2:02 pm
Administrator says:
Axel
The problem is that too many Americans expend no energy. An object not in motion is lump of protoplasm.
Like or Dislike:
4 
0
16th February 2011 at 2:35 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
@Admin
Great GDP, which is of course measured in inflated dollars which will never be paid off. They have 1.3B people, and $1B of them live on $3500/year or less. Your graphs are the kind of bullshit a shill CPA shows to the stockholders to convince them the company is doing great while the workers are committing suicide and your bottom line stinks because you hold a lot of off balance sheet worthless toilet paper that will never be paid off.
RE
Like or Dislike:
2 
4
16th February 2011 at 2:39 pm
Administrator says:
RE
You prove your complete ignorance of anything financial.
China just passed Japan as the 2nd largest economy in the world.
There economy grows between 7% and 10% per year and has for decades.
You hate facts, but they are what they are, and they are indisputable, except of course in your made up world of illuminati.
Like or Dislike:
4 
1
16th February 2011 at 2:45 pm
Lark Williams says:
A good read on this is Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Lays the blame on FSoA mothers who want their kids to be full of self esteem and “social” skill nonsense instead of learning the how, what and whys.
And you can help the Admin make some money buy buying it through his affiliate link
http://www.amazon.com/Battle-Hymn-Tiger-Mother-Chua/dp/1594202842
Like or Dislike:
2 
0
16th February 2011 at 3:11 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
The economy grows because the Population grows, and because they moved from an agrarian subsitence economy to an industrial one measured in dollars. As usual you show your complete ignorance of the full picture an look at the situation only from the limited perspective of a numbers cruncher who sits behind a desk and doesn’t give a shit about the lives of the people who are destroyed by his numbers.
RE
Like or Dislike:
2 
4
16th February 2011 at 3:11 pm
Kill Bill says:
China has taken some 300 million of its citizens out of poverty.
While Americas poverty level is rising.
Hot debate. What do you think?
6 
2
16th February 2011 at 3:18 pm
Kill Bill says:
The economy grows because the Population grows -RE
How come that isnt so in say, Africa?
Like or Dislike:
5 
1
16th February 2011 at 3:23 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
Because they didn’t Industrialize and collect a lot of worthless debt. They merely got the continent raped for resources.
RE
Hot debate. What do you think?
4 
4
16th February 2011 at 3:25 pm
Kill Bill says:
Because they didn’t Industrialize and collect a lot of worthless debt. They merely got the continent raped for resources.RE
So you are agreeing that population growth isnt economical growth?
Like or Dislike:
2 
0
16th February 2011 at 3:29 pm
Kill Bill says:
The problem is that too many Americans expend no energy -Admin
I blame Walmart and Hoveround® for that.
Like or Dislike:
1 
0
16th February 2011 at 3:32 pm
Kill Bill says:
China is a creditor nation, RE, not a debtor nation.
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
6 
0
16th February 2011 at 3:33 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
Not by itself. The country also has to have participated in the game of industrialization and measured the growth in petrodollars.
RE
Like or Dislike:
1 
4
16th February 2011 at 3:36 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
Yes, and they hold irredeemable debt which will never be paid off. Its worthless toilet paper.
RE
Like or Dislike:
2 
4
16th February 2011 at 3:36 pm
Smokey says:
RE expounding as usual on shit he knows nothing about. It is fucking sad when a loser like Kill Bill can vaporize RE’s ignorant position with a couple of lines.
RE—You’re one to talk about looking at a situation from a limited perspective. Very few people could look at the transformation in China, the biggest economic boom in the history of the world, and see misery. China investing in hard assets all over the world– land, oil, precious metals, companies—and you see a failing country amidst squalor and despair.
Hot debate. What do you think?
4 
4
16th February 2011 at 3:38 pm
Kill Bill says:
Smokey I did not solicit a reply from you.
heh
Like or Dislike:
4 
0
16th February 2011 at 3:39 pm
Kill Bill says:
When Smokey claims I am stalking him I know I have obliterated his point.
Like or Dislike:
3 
0
16th February 2011 at 3:41 pm
Kill Bill says:
Yes, and they hold irredeemable debt which will never be paid off. Its worthless toilet paper. -RE
Nixon shut the gold window in 1971 IIRC. China buying our debt was a free lunch. Now that they have started buying metals and other resources instead of fiat then they are redeeming USD for actual material assets.
Like or Dislike:
2 
0
16th February 2011 at 3:44 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
They still hold about $2T in worthless toilet paper.
RE
Like or Dislike:
2 
4
16th February 2011 at 3:52 pm
Administrator says:
They are using that worthless toilet paper to buy long term oil streams, copper mines, coal mines, gold and other commodities in the Middle East, Africa, and South America. Sounds pretty wily to me.
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
9 
0
16th February 2011 at 4:00 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
Tell that to the Chinese Factory Worker who can’t feed his family and jumps off the top floor of the factory.
RE
Like or Dislike:
2 
4
16th February 2011 at 4:02 pm
plato_plubius says:
Munroe said, “They are rude, disengaged, lazy whiners. They curse, discuss drugs, talk back, argue for grades, complain about everything, fancy themselves entitled to whatever they desire, and are just generally annoying.”
Amen! Good for her!! Her observations, for the majority, are accurate in my experiences as well. She falls short to add to the list of groups who are at fault!! You cannot forget the superintendents and administrators of the school districts who prefer to coddle the students because they have had such “hard lives.” I ask, “Who hasn’t?”
I was speaking to a substitute teacher I had the pleasure to work with the other day and asked him about the job market. He said he has noticed a decline in available jobs. He usually steered clear of my school because of the behavoir of students on our campus! I don’t blame him!
He told me about another story where he was at an elementary school subbing for a 6th grade class. This kid was being a real ass the last 15 minutes of school and instead of suspending him he had him stand outside the classroom. After school he saw the principal of the school and ran the scenario by him and asked him what he (the principal) would have recommended? Should he have suspended him or not?
The principal looked him square in the eyes and told him,
“We pay you to keep the kids in the classroom.”
In California, each school site, gets roughly $125 dollars per student attending school that day. It’s gotten so crazy that they have created “in school suspension” at the high school I used to work at. Something that normally would have had you home suspended now lands you in a room with all the other deginerates where you stay all day long until that final bell rings to let everyone out of school! They go through inschool detention teachers like the Bernanke does dollars!
Like or Dislike:
4 
0
16th February 2011 at 4:02 pm
Administrator says:
Do you really think the Chinese authorities care if a few hundred or even a few thousand Chinese workers commit suicide? There are 1.3 billion of them. The only thing that can derail China is peak oil. But that will derail the whole world, so it’s all relative.
Like or Dislike:
4 
0
16th February 2011 at 4:07 pm
Robmu1 says:
All that stuff above in nice, but China is ‘kicking our ass’ in some areas because it has no soul. The government doesn’t give a fuck about the people. Individuals are expendable. If there is an earthquake that destroys a whole town, bulldoze it. If schools collapse and hudreds of kids die, give the parents $100. If there is a protest, get the tanks out and squash them like grapes. If you don’t have enough rice to feed the poor, add plastic. Pour waste into the rivers; who gives a shit if thousands of peasants have 3 eyes? Build a skyscraper without a sprinkler system – oops, yeah, sorry about that. Just wait a while – the hundreds of million of poor people will get tired of it some day.
Like or Dislike:
4 
1
16th February 2011 at 4:08 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
Of course the Chinese Elite don’t care about their Chen Rice Wine’s any more than our Elites care about J6P. That however is not making a case for an economically successful society, but rather for a horrifically inequitable one where most people suffer for the enrichment of a few Pigmen.
RE
Like or Dislike:
2 
3
16th February 2011 at 4:13 pm
Administrator says:
RE
I didn’t say how much I loved China and their methods. The article is about Chinese students working harder than American students and becoming more successful because of their hard work. You can blather about them then working low paying jobs, but 50% of our graduates are Asians and they are going back to China and making good money. They have a choice to stay here and make big bucks on Wall Street and 98% go back. I wonder why? Because they like rice?
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
6 
0
16th February 2011 at 4:21 pm
Administrator says:
Robmu1
The Chinese have been ruled by emporers for centuries. They are used to being poor. They’ve been poor for centuries. The article isn’t about whether they are nice guys. It is about the Chinese working harder than Americans and wanting to succeed. They work harder, therefore they will succeed.
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
5 
0
16th February 2011 at 4:24 pm
Robmu1 says:
Maybe it’s because they make $10 a week.
Like or Dislike:
1 
0
16th February 2011 at 4:32 pm
Administrator says:
Not the Chinese graduating with MBAs from here.
Like or Dislike:
3 
0
16th February 2011 at 4:35 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
They go back because 98% of them are the children of the Elite there, and they live mighty good. Why do they need to prticipate in our corrupt banking system on Wall Street when they can do the same thing in Shanghai or Hong Kong?
If you go to an Elite Unversity and have good connections, you can go work on Wall Street or to Singapore, WTF cares? You are so wrapped up in this idea of success you don’t recognize how destructive it all is and you laud the Chinese for being smart hard workers when in fact all they are doing is repeating the same mistakes made here with industrialization and capitalism, just they are a Day Late and a Yuan Short.
RE
Hot debate. What do you think?
3 
6
16th February 2011 at 4:37 pm
Axel says:
Administrator said: “…They have a choice to stay here and make big bucks on Wall Street and 98% go back.”
My perception is not that hard work makes the big bucks on Wall Street. It is what I stated before: connections, willingness to suspend morals, and coming from money. The Chinese students may not have any of these things, so that even if they are hard workers, they could flop on Wall Street.
Like or Dislike:
0 
0
16th February 2011 at 4:38 pm
Robmu1 says:
That’s .0000000000001 % of the population.
Like or Dislike:
1 
1
16th February 2011 at 4:38 pm
Administrator says:
Number of millionaires grows in China
By Paris Franz.
China had the world’s fastest growing group of millionaires last year, an elite club that rose 31 percent from 2008 to encompass 477,000 people.
The robust growth helped China overtake Britain as the world’s fourth largest home to rich people, the Shanghai Daily reports. It also led Asia to exceed Europe in the rich population’s total wealth.
In the World Wealth Report 2010, published by Merrill Lynch Global Wealth and Capgemini SA, the United States still leads with 2.87 million rich people, followed by Japan’s 1.65 million and Germany’s 860,000.
With the gradual recovery of the the global economy the population of rich individuals with assets of more than $1 million rose to 10 million globally.
“The rebound has been driven by emerging markets – especially India, China and Brazil – and the trend will continue,” said Bertrand Lavayssire, managing director of Capgemini’s Global Financial Services.
The world’s richest people also got richer in 2009. Their combined assets gained 19 percent to US$39 trillion, the report said. The super-rich, or those with assets of US$30 million or more, represented only 0.9 percent of the global millionaires, but accounted for more than a third of the wealth.
The number of millionaires in the Asia-Pacific region rose 26 percent to 3 million, catching up to Europe for the first time. Wealth in the region surged 31 percent to $9.7 trillion, erasing the losses of 2008.
“Going forward, the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) nations are expected to be the drivers of each region again in the future,” the report said, “while China and India will lead the way in Asia with economic expansion likely to outpace more developed economies.”
China, along with France, Japan, Britain and Germany, led in global spending last year, helping to boost global consumption confidence indexes. China also contributed greatly to the 49 percent growth in the global luxury market for such things as private airplanes, limousines and luxury housing.
The report attributed China’s fast wealth growth to the government’s economic momentum drives which generated a growth of 8.7 percent last year in gross domestic product. The nation’s bustling economic growth was also seen in the arts market, which rose 25 percent to $830 million. The report found that high net worth individuals see themselves as “investor-collectors”, seeking out those items that are perceived to have tangible long-term value.
While the figures differ, the report’s findings echo those of the 2010 Hurun Wealth Report, published in April, which found that the numbers of China’s wealthy have rebounded after the losses of 2008.
Like or Dislike:
2 
0
16th February 2011 at 4:47 pm
Administrator says:
Report: China’s wealthy households number to rank world 4th by 2015
BEIJING, April 2 (Xinhua)– China was expected to have more than four million wealthy households by 2015, making it the world’s fourth-largest country in terms of the number of wealthy families, trailing the United States, Japan and Britain, an industry report revealed Thursday.
The number of wealthy households whose annual income exceed 250,000 yuan (36, 574 U.S. dollars) living in urban areas topped 1.6 million last year, according to a research report released by McKinsey & Company Thursday on its Web site.
While the wealthy currently accounted for less than one percent of urban Chinese households, the number is expected to grow at an annual rate of 15.9 percent in next five to seven years, said the report.
The wealthy in China were concentrated in the country’s more prosperous eastern and southern regions, with around 30 percent of the wealthy families living in China’s four largest metropolitans — Beijing, eastern Shanghai, southern Guangzhou and Shenzhen.
Vinay Dixit, director of McKinsey’s Asia Consumer Centers, said the current global economic slowdown would affect the spending of even the rich, but that did not lower the importance of China’s wealthy consumers to manufacturers, retailers and service providers in many sectors.
The report also showed that most affluent Chinese consumers were younger than their global peers.
On average, wealthy consumers in China were 20 years younger than those in the United States and Japan. About 80 percent of those were under 45 in China, compared with 30 percent in the United States and 19 percent in Japan.
Like or Dislike:
2 
0
16th February 2011 at 4:51 pm
Administrator says:
Only RE would motherfuck students for studying hard.
You are really a piece of work.
Like or Dislike:
5 
1
16th February 2011 at 4:53 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
China rice laced with heavy metals: report
(AFP) – 19 hours ago
BEIJING — Up to 10 percent of rice grown in China is contaminated with harmful heavy metals but little has been done to highlight the possible public health risks, a report said.
This week’s edition of the New Century magazine cited studies showing that large amounts of Chinese rice have been tainted with heavy metals like cadmium due to years of pollution stemming from the nation’s rapid economic growth.
“During China’s fast-paced industrialisation, activities such as mining have sprung up everywhere, releasing into the environment chemical elements like cadmium, arsenic, mercury and other harmful heavy metals,” the report said.
“These harmful heavy metals have spread through the air and water, polluting a rather large area of China’s land… a complete chain of food contamination has existed for years.”
The report cited academic studies since 2007 focusing on several rural villages in southern China near mines and industrial areas where health problems such as bone diseases have emerged, mostly among the elderly.
Pan Genxing, a scientist who carried out some of the key research cited in the report, said the percentage of tainted rice was even higher in some specific localities.
“In areas with acidic soil that are known to be badly polluted, we have found that up to 60 percent of the rice samples gathered there surpass cadmium standards,” Pan, a scientist with Nanjing Agricultural University, told AFP.
However he added that while cadmium levels were sometimes five times higher than government standards, the problem represented a “potential health risk” rather than dangerous “acute toxicity”.
Most at risk from high cadmium levels were subsistence farmers in polluted areas who mainly live on the rice they grow, Pan said.
Of the major grains, rice has the strongest ability to absorb cadmium, which often seeps into water used for irrigation near mines, especially those that extract lead, tin and copper, the report said.
The magazine report said, however, that no major investigations into the possible public health impact have been carried out.
Rice, which is widely grown in south China, is the nation’s staple grain with about 200 million tonnes produced annually, the report said.
Food safety is a major problem in China, where scares regularly emerge including recent scandals involving contaminated red wine, bleached mushrooms, fake tofu and recycled cooking oil.
In 2008, at least six children died and around 300,000 fell sick after consuming powdered milk laced with the industrial chemical melamine, which was added to make products appear higher in protein.
Rapid industrialisation over the past 30 years helped China become the world’s second-largest economy last year.
But the focus on growth, combined with lax environmental protection, has saddled the country with some of the world’s worst water and air pollution.
Like or Dislike:
0 
3
16th February 2011 at 4:53 pm
Administrator says:
RE
Look at what graduating from Columbia did for you. FUCKING ELITIST!!!
Like or Dislike:
3 
1
16th February 2011 at 4:54 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
China’s Economy and the Water Crisis—A Fresh Take
Posted on Wednesday, February 16, 2011
by Elizabeth C. Economy
The algae-filled Chaohu Lake is seen in Hefei, Anhui province, on August 3, 2010. (Stringer/Courtesy Reuters)
While China’s economy continues to grab headlines, a new report, “Choke Point: China,” suggests that we ought to be spending a bit more time on an often-ignored economic fundamental: water. China’s environment has been a long-standing passion of mine, both as a research focus and as an area to promote U.S.-China cooperation. While China’s poor air quality has received a lot of attention in the West—we can all see the pollution in Beijing or read about the pollution clouds that travel from China across the Pacific to the United States—the issue of greatest concern for China is access to clean water.
We know a fair amount about China’s water challenge already. Both municipal and industrial demand for water continues to grow, as both the economy and middle class expand, and levels of pollution throughout many of China’s major river systems and largest lakes make the water unusable even for agriculture or industry (forget about fishing or drinking). China is sinking as underground aquifers are drawn down, with the result that buildings are tilting, highways cracking, and people relocating as their coastal villages sink beneath sea level. Water is a source of societal concern: the public health costs from polluted water are mounting, and water pollution remains a source of significant social unrest in rural China. Civil society in China, in the form of environmental NGOs, has made enforcement of water pollution control regulations one of their top priorities.
However, there is always more to learn, and the new web-based media report, “Choke Point: China—Confronting Water Scarcity and Energy Demand in the World’s Largest Country,” produced by the NGO Circle of Blue, takes a fresh look at this issue. It leads with good news: Some cities, such as Beijing, for example, are beginning to recycle wastewater for use in toilets or other grey-water applications. Yet, the bulk of the initial report—and this is the first in a series of twelve postings yet to come—underscores the challenge the country faces, particularly from the nexus of energy and water. Almost 20% of China’s water consumption goes to the mining, processing, and consumption of coal. Coal consumption has tripled since 2000, and Chinese analysts project another 30% increase by 2020. To meet the water demand will require ever more costly, large-scale, and technologically complex river diversion projects—a plan of action that many view as untenable over the long term.
“Choke Point: China” doesn’t yet explore the broader ramifications of such growth, such as discussions in Beijing of diverting water from the Yarlung Tsangpo (which flows into the Brahmaputra), which would likely lead to serious political tensions with India or the implications of growing water scarcity for global agricultural commodities. However, I would bet that these issues and many others will be discussed in the rest of the twelve-part series. I, for one, will read each eagerly to see what the water future for China and the rest of the region might hold.
Like or Dislike:
1 
4
16th February 2011 at 4:55 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
HP reins in Depression-era PC factory Paul Bibby
![]()
February 9, 2011
Security check … workers at the Foxteq factory. Photo: Carlos Furtado
A large western Sydney computer packing company, which forced workers to wait until the night before to find out whether they had work the next day, and reportedly subjected them to poor working conditions, has agreed to offer staff permanent contracts.
Late last year this website revealed Depression-era employment conditions in which staff from the Foxteq factory in Rydalmere would be forced to wait anxiously for text messages telling them whether or not there was work for them the next day.
The entire workforce is made up of casual employees engaged by an outside labour hire company to assemble and pack hundreds of Hewlett-Packard computers, which then go to dozens of organisations including the Department of Defence, NSW Fire Brigades and banks.
http://images.smh.com.au/2010/11/08/2032881/Sokhemara-Ngo-420×0.jpg/img
“Robots, not human beings” … Sokhemara Ngo spoke out about conditions at the computer factory last year. Photo: Domino Postiglione
Workers said sometimes the text messages didn’t arrive until 8pm, less than 10 hours before the next day’s shift starts.
When the workers arrived at the factory they were often told they would only be working for four hours – barely enough to cover the cost of their travel.
But Foxteq and labour hire company Resco – which has just taken over the previous holder of the Foxteq contract, Weststaff – have reached an agreement with the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union.
Foxteq workers will now vote on an agreement that offers them permanent full-time or part time status, improved working conditions, and the ability to elect union delegates.
“This agreement offers a transition from medieval practices to a modern manufacturing workplace,” the NSW secretary of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union, Tim Ayers, said.
“We’ve been working hard behind the scenes in an effort to reach an agreement. We’re hopeful that a large number of these workers will take up the offer to go full-time or permanent part-time.”
This website understands that Foxteq’s decision was driven partly by pressure from Hewlett-Packard, the company whose computers they are responsible for packing.
Senior management were understood to be very concerned about the negative publicity brought by revelations about HP’s connection to the company.
“Following the completion of HP’s onsite audit of Foxteq’s Rydalmere site, a number of areas for improvement were identified and a corrective action plan was put in place to address issues related to management systems and labour rights,” an HP spokeswoman said.
“All eligible Foxteq workers have been offered permanent temporary positions and HP has taken steps with Foxteq to provide greater production visibility and to stabilise work schedules.”
Particularly damaging to HP were revelations that Foxteq is the sister company of the infamous iPhone manufacturer Foxconn.
Foxconn made headlines this year when 13 workers in China attempted suicide at its plant in Shenzhen.
The multibillion-dollar manufacturing empire is notorious for demanding long hours for low pay and its workers are driven by the insatiable demands of consumers hungry for technology
Like or Dislike:
2 
4
16th February 2011 at 5:00 pm
Administrator says:
RE
That looks like your lake after you take a dip.
Like or Dislike:
5 
1
16th February 2011 at 5:03 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
Its not the working hard I object to, its what they are studying and how they figure they will use it to make a living as Singapore Pigmen.
Anyhow, if you are going to start the napalm “motherfucking” me (isn’t family off limits?) I will be dropping out of this debate. Later.
RE
Like or Dislike:
1 
6
16th February 2011 at 5:06 pm
Administrator says:
Are you your family?
Aren’t you an Ivy League elitist?
I only work at an Ivy League school. Thank God I didn’t graduate from one. Because once you graduate from an Ivy League school it makes you an elitist prick for the rest of your life. I think it actually makes you an official lifelong member of the Illuminati.
You object to what someone studies? Why do you give a fuck what anyone studies? The Asians are also dominating the medical schools and the engineer schools. Do you object to that also? You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. You just have your warped concept of the world spinning around in your head.
Like or Dislike:
3 
2
16th February 2011 at 5:14 pm
Smokey says:
China has 825,000 multi-millionaires along with a strongly rising upper middle class and middle class.
Ponder the GDP chart that the Administrator posted. Huge growth is occurring and will for years continue to occur in the vast majority of China’s cities, towns, and villages.
China’s GDP has grown from $1 trillion in 2000 to $9 trillion in 2010. By 2020, China will have six provinces with an annual GDP of USD $1 trillion, equal to six countries the size of Russia (or Canada or Spain ).
In the USA, only New York City has a population of over 5 million. In China, eight cities have a population of over 10 million and ninety-three cities have a population of over 5 million.
Beiing is China’s Silicon Valley. It’s Zhongguancun area saw 23 high-tech IPO’s in 2009, compared to 1 for Silicon Valley. In 2010, it saw over 40 high-tech IPO’s.
China has $2.8 trillion in reserves.
USA has $14 trillion in DEBT now, projected to reach $24 trillion by 2015. Plus another hundred trillion $ in entitlement owed.
The USA has no intention whatsoever of dealing with it’s debt at any time prior to total collapse.
The situation will reach crisis proportions within the next 15 years or so and there WILL be a meltdown. And there will be much finger-pointing and blame spread around. It won’t make much of a shit then whose fault it is or who is to blame.
Like or Dislike:
4 
3
16th February 2011 at 5:15 pm
Kaylin says:
so if the Chinese are drinking polluted tap water, breathing polluted air, eating contaminated food, and playing with lead toys, all of which kills brain cells or so we have been told, then why are they still smarter than us? We must be really dumb and lazy to be losing to a country that is playing with that many strikes against it. It also begs the question, “if lead filled, polluted Chinese brains can kick our butts, then surely our clean, green brains of even the average child can learn if they were only taught to self control and discipline.”
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
5 
0
16th February 2011 at 5:17 pm
bigargon says:
the thing is China has a limited window of time . Thanks to Mao they have a demographic time bomb in the “One Child Policy”. Most Chinese families had boys and aborted their girls. In about 20 to 30 years the population of China will crash (not unlike Japan but to an either greater extent) so they will have a whole lot factories with no workers. Labor will be very tight so wages and working conditions will have to improve. I think China wants to try to be the worlds economic overlords before their population crashes.
http://countrystudies.us/china/34.htm
http://www.socsci.uci.edu/node/1750
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMhpr051833
Like or Dislike:
0 
0
16th February 2011 at 5:28 pm
StuckInNJ says:
Smokey gets a hard-on at the mere mention of China.
The blood-flow to his massive cock results in severe oxygen depletion to his brain. Granted, his brain is only the size of a walnut, but still ….
Lack of brain activity results in him posting pro-China propoganda.
However, this does not come from the thinking logical part of the brain. It comes from the brain stem, which controls involuntary functions such as breathing. In other words, his thoughtless posts are pure knee-jerk reactions. Like taking a shit, he can’t control it. It just happens.
A lot of people post pure bullshit here. But Smokey ‘s China-dick-sucking posts are the most despicable of all. Do not listen to him.
Like or Dislike:
3 
2
16th February 2011 at 5:43 pm
Welshman says:
I don’t side with RE on many things, but there is no fucking way China is going to bring 840 million or 60/70% of their population into the middle class, even if we did not have peak oil. Bringing 300 million out of poverty if one thing, but the earth does not have enough resources to support a Chinese middle class of that size.
China will have a couple of good decades, and it is their turn. Peak oil, water, food, debt and too many Chinese to feed does not pencil out. The Chinese are working overtime to be just like us,
you see how well that turned out. China will go bankrupt long before they achieve middle class nation status.
Like or Dislike:
2 
4
16th February 2011 at 5:58 pm
Smokey says:
Stuck,
Please show some mercy. You are ruthless.
Like or Dislike:
2 
1
16th February 2011 at 6:08 pm
llpoh says:
Oh, boy, where do I start.
Stuck says: “Work, for much of the ancient history of the human race, has been hard and degrading. Working hard–in the absence of compulsion–was not the norm for Hebrew, classical, or medieval cultures.” The compulsion was work or starve. Not sure how that is degrading. That didn’t change until perhaps the last 100 years in the U, and is still largely the case in much of the world. I believe that it is a universal truth and it still should apply. The idea that one can live just fine without working is an abomination, and will be the ruin of us. The FSA is exhibit #1.
Admin says – “Because once you graduate from an Ivy League school it makes you an elitist prick for the rest of your life.” That is possibly true – depending on which definition of elitist is used.
I do not know precisely what a humane yet acceptable level of work really is. I do know that, in general, our students fall far short of the mark.
Like or Dislike:
3 
0
16th February 2011 at 6:49 pm
Lark Williams says:
Right outside of Admin’s home..
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110216/ap_on_hi_te/us_teacher_suspended_blog
Like or Dislike:
1 
0
16th February 2011 at 8:31 pm
Goldorack says:
Chinese can work hard, who really gives a shit?
the problem is not there. their middle class will grow wether we help them or not, because they invest in education domesticaly also.
once they will have a decent middle class, they will have to protect a lifestyle to ensure the stability of the country. because if educated people drag the poorest with them in a revolution, their system is toasted. and protecting a system is the main goal of China.
the same way America relies on cheap energy to continue the American way of life, protected itself by an oversized military segment that depends vastly on oil.
the network of harbors Chinese are currently developing in key spots of the world clearly show they know a war for ressources against western countries can’t be avoided at some point.
the question is what do we do to prepare this confrontation?
Like or Dislike:
2 
1
16th February 2011 at 7:50 am
Robmu1 says:
Goldmember – what do you mean ‘we’? You’ll be hiding under the bed. The rest of us will be preparing.
Like or Dislike:
2 
1
16th February 2011 at 9:34 am
Anonymous says:
Forget collectivist China and look at social democratic Germany. They have a better quality of life than anybody and their exports are 22% of their GDP as compared to 1% for us. Their un-employment rate is 6%. How can a Welfare State like that kick our collective ass?
Read “Were you born on the wrong continent ?” and weep.
Like or Dislike:
0 
0
16th February 2011 at 4:23 pm