Gday Jay. <I do not smell a whiff of recovery or see a hint of bottom. Do you?>
Well, not if I take our great and glorious hero, Uncle Al KBE, at his word. But I tend to be ahead of him, so yes, I do see a whiff, hint, suggestion and prospect of the end of the end of the world.
Unemployment is dropping. New Zealand's unemployment is at a decade-long low. And look:
newsday.com
Not only a recovery, but already the first glimmerings of the next big problems:
<... Unlike her grandparents, and even her parents, Shiyi will be raised to be independent. "We'll let her make her own decisions," her father said. "Starting with kindergarten, she decides if she wants to take extra classes, painting, drawing, violin. She has everything we never had as children.">
Lack of social discipline and integration and sense of "We were all like that" will burgeon.
<"I grew up near the Huangpu River," Xia said, his eyes alight behind wire-rimmed glasses, chuckling as memories came burbling back. "We all lived, eight of us, in two rooms. Everybody lived the same way we did. I remember that my sister used to take me to parades and demonstrations during the Cultural Revolution, but for me it was more fun than anything. Nobody really thought of themselves as poor. Everybody was the same.">
See how despite poverty, he was well brought up and was well-socialized [he might say over-socialized and might be determined that his own little darling have her very own everything].
I got excited by the reference to Huangpu River, because a few decades ago, I asked my mother if she could speak Chinese. She would jokingly rattle off a couple of words I can't remember, and Yangzte ki yang, wang hi wang, and what I thought was Wong Pu River. Now I realize it was probably Huangpu River. So this guy grew up in Mum's old stamping grounds. [She couldn't speak Chinese, but her older brother, now 93, had gone native].
<His parents, who had immigrated to Shanghai in the late 1940s from an impoverished village in Jiangsu Province >
Where's Jiangsu?
<Shanghai boasts the country's finest opera house (designed by a French architect), its best museum, and its most glorious promenade, the Bund along the Huangpu River, lined with a procession of stolidly noble colonial-era edifices that give the Chinese city a European face. >
I guess one of those noble buildings is the one I have in a photograph which was the old homestead back in 1920. It was on the junction of two rivers.
Anyway, the article gets me thinking about trade, integration, colonialism and all that stuff, which is old as the hills. Here we are again. That guy is working for Oracle. You are now a shareholder in QUALCOMM, which is setting up shop in China and right now has got those amazing cdma2000 phragmented photons zipping through cyberspace, in 1xRTT form, in Shanghai, right there at the bund.
It seems that we are back to where we started. Now, let's keep an eye on the Japanese - oh, no worries there, they are older, richer, happy to send yen to you to fund QUALCOMM's development [even if it's only carrying the risk] and to Kyocera to fund production of the Kyocera 7135, which is going to sell like hot cakes [or whatever sells well in Shanghai].
So, where's the worry? We seem to be heading into a golden age for humanity, despite the exigencies of a minor ideological skirmish over some 2000 year old superstitious ideas and chimpoid territoriality in Palestine. Also, I hesitate to use the word 'golden'. You might misconstrue my meaning. I merely mean stability, peace, light, harmony, happiness, prosperity, longevity, fun and love. As you know, gold is stable as an element, but Aztec life is not.
All this colonialism business is fun don't you think? You are literally colonized, right there in your DNA. One Trinidadian spiral of DNA carting around the other Hakka half, which is being carted around by the first half in happy harmony of symbiosis, synergy and synchronicity.
We are colonizing us! It seems to work okay.
I really will have to go and walk the bund this year to see for myself what's up. I've got a really old silk wedding banner thingy, with storks and stuff embroidered, which newly-married would hang over their bed. It's about 3 metres long. Maybe I should take it and present it to Hu Jintao in recognition of the happy melding of China and the cdma2000 colonial world.
Yes, I really do get quite a whiff of recovery.
Oh, they are also installing cdma2000 in India. There are a lot of people there. The recolonizing process is underway there too.
Not only there, but in Iraq as well. It hasn't been colonized for decades. It all went wrong when the Ottomans lost it after WWI. Globalstar is ready to provide service in Iraq and cdma2000 will roll out quick as anything.
Yes, things sure are looking good.
I will have waited 12 years for my first dividend cheque from QCOM. You will have waited 12 weeks. We colonialists have to work really hard to bring civilization to the not always appreciative bare-bum barbarians. It's a long, arduous process. The locals tend to forget the hard part, like Globalstar! They think it's easy.
Noblesse Oblige,
Mqurice |
