Hello Elmat, <<bag of money keeps circling the world>> is about right.
How to loot more of it and not get looted is what we all try to do, some with more success than others, at looting, and getting looted. The nature of game scoring is all about the ‘net’, as in what we get to keep, and not how much of it flowed through our fingers. People should understand the rules better.
<<Money bag is passed on to China by Japan right now under your eyes, Jay>>
Yup, I see it, but the competition to get at the money is intense. The easier picking were definitely on the various financial markets, as opposed to having to work for it on the mine face, in the cereal paddy, and at the desk.
On this …
Message 17827011
<<The capital economy is important only to people who lives off capital ... The rich man should envy the poor man, for the poor man doesn't have to worry about capital>>
Given the path of the active work economy, we are all sliding towards having to depend more on our capital, even as the capital is slowly evaporating.
Maurice does not realize the full extent of the danger he is in, as each percentage loss he incurs on QCOM is equal to multiple months/years of active savings (lower active savings during retirement, or large QCOM allocation relative to annual active savings). He will figure out the math soon.
BTW, about your topic of immigration and my topic of Japan, it appears that the Japanese are going back to their roots, in order to save themselves:0)
iht.com
Vogue in Japan: Chinese brides
Howard W. French The New York Times Wednesday, July 31, 2002
OTSU CITY, Japan With his 50th birthday just around the corner, Masakazu Takagi faced a problem shared by legions of Japanese men in their late 30s and 40s: he had still not found a bride.
In a culture that celebrates youth like few others, where divorces were uncommon until quite recently and mid-life marriages even rarer, Takagi's bachelor status might once have been permanent. But, determined to preserve his family line, he scoured virtually all of East Asia on the Internet and settled on a bride in distant northern China.
They shared no language. They came from vastly different backgrounds, she being of modest social origin in a remote provincial city, Wuchang, and he of solid Japanese middle-class roots from this town near Kyoto. But after an intricate, long-distance courtship, they married last October, and if the "ever after" has not been so long yet, they both still enthusiastically proclaim themselves happy.
If America's national myth involves a melting pot, Japan's has long revolved around a near-classless mono-ethnicity. But with its population shrinking, more people are concluding that marriage with a foreigner is the best answer for their loneliness - and, in consequence, they are a new force for the opening of this quintessentially insular country.
What is more surprising still is that China, which traditionally aroused more prejudices and suspicions here than any other nation, has become the country of choice for foreign spouses. "By the time a man reaches his 40s, it is almost impossible to find a Japanese bride in her 20s or early 30s," said Takagi, a groundskeeper for an industrial company in Otsu, explaining why he settled on a Chinese wife. "Besides, to attract a Japanese woman these days requires a high standard of living.
"What I discovered is that Chinese actually resemble Japanese quite a bit: the food is somewhat similar, they use chopsticks, the languages use many of the same characters."
Takagi's courtship was conducted through an Internet marriage agency and cost him nearly $20,000, including several visits to her. He said his only reservations involved Japan's imperial conquest of Manchuria, including his wife's hometown, in the 1930s, which he feared might make her family hate him.
Blushing throughout a lengthy interview in which she spoke through a Chinese interpreter, the bride, Yang Takagi, said the only prejudice she held toward Japanese people before coming here was that "they all think alike." The couple communicate through fragmentary sentences and written phrases using the Chinese characters their languages share.
Such entente is a far cry from the xenophobic bile of one of Japan's most popular politicians, Tokyo's governor, Shintaro Ishihara, who calls Chinese immigration a source of "genetic pollution."
Every day, news reports blame Chinese people for crime in Japan, often without substantiation. International marriages get copious bad press. The reports often focus on the duping of unsuspecting husbands through Chinese visa scams, on the violations of student visas (the biggest source of Chinese newcomers) and on the divorces and broken homes in mixed marriages.
But such negativism has done nothing to discourage the trend. In 2000, there were 36,263 international marriages in Japan, or 4.5 percent of the total registered, according to official data. The number is six and a half times the figure just 30 years ago. In the last decade, the number of Chinese spouses rose about tenfold.
According to Kimiaki Kogure, the owner of the Internet agency that Takagi used, the international marriage boom is just beginning.
"Already there are over 200 international marriage agencies in Japan, and at least 107 of those specialize in Chinese introductions," said Kogure, who has brought together 10 couples in the last 18 months.
"Ten years ago, Korean women were very popular here, but Korea has become much stronger economically, so they aren't so interested in Japanese men anymore. These days it is Chinese people who cause Japanese to dream."
International marriage began to grow in the 1980s in response to the emptying of the countryside as Japan became increasingly affluent.
Rice farmers, unable to find Japanese brides, started marrying women from poorer Asian countries, particularly the Philippines.
Today's growth in international marriage, however, is mostly urban, with exchange-student liaisons accounting for many romances.
Many Japanese women marry outside of the country, typically when studying or working in the United States or Europe. Although no official statistics are kept on such marriages, many of those women are thought to live permanently outside Japan.
Japan has 1.5 million foreigners, a tiny figure for a country of 126 million. Almost a million are Koreans and Chinese, most of whose families have lived here for generations, but because of Japan's exclusive cultural practices and arduous naturalization laws, they are still considered outsiders.
"If you look at it from the national bureaucrat's point of view, China is a big problem, a major challenge to Japan," said J. Sean Curtin, an expert in family studies at the Japan Red Cross University, in Hokkaido. "If you look at it from the point of view of most young people, though, China has become an interesting place, with a fairly positive image.
"What we are seeing with these marriages looks like the beginning of a more multiethnic Japan, and that is the only way Japan will get over its isolationism."
For a country whose population is expected to decline by 20 percent over the next 50 years, many specialists say, overcoming prejudices against foreigners and opening the doors to immigration are rapidly becoming matters of national survival. Already, 1 in 10 Japanese marriages in Tokyo involves a foreigner. |
