Chinese Streaker!
Posted on 05/31/2005 4:06:20 AM PDT by aculeus
EDMONTON - China's doing things the rest of us don't even know about, and unless we change quickly they will streak past us, futurist Frank Ogden says.
"They are speeding ahead in so many areas because they have the ability to get big things done very quickly," the man known as Dr. Tomorrow told the Construction Specifications Canada conference here.
"They're very smart, they think differently from us, and they have no restrictions on anything," said Ogden, an 84-year-old world traveller who lives on a high-tech houseboat in Vancouver.
In three weeks they relocated the residents of a large city block in Shanghai, bulldozed the buildings and built a 1,000-bed isolation hospital using 10,000 conscripted workers, Ogden said.
On the last day of construction, a stream of ambulances was bringing in patients.
"They work 15 hours a day, every day, with no union interference, and that's what's going to beat us," Ogden told the gathering of architects, engineers and other construction-related sectors.
Their wages have also doubled in the last couple of years to 28 cents an hour, so the workers think they're making big money.
And China's not only manufacturing pots and pans any more. It's producing quality, intricate items such as scientific instruments, he said.
"The infrastructure stinks, but they're working on that. And when they decide to do something it happens in a hurry."
They also have no restrictions on reproductive technology so they could clone people and rent them out to North America, which is facing a shortage of workers, said Ogden, with a wink.
North America's future will be vastly different as China's economy grows and the world keeps moving ahead at warp speed, he said.
Nine-to-five jobs will become a piece of history as we put in almost full days on the job, he predicted.
"We also have to learn much faster or other countries will do it and sell it back to us. The current, inefficient university lecture system will have to replaced, and he sees a day when we're all using new Sony technology that puts information into our brain patterns while we're asleep. "That was in the realm of science fiction for years, but just imagine how quickly you can absorb information that way."
Companies will also have to become incredibly creative to compete globally, Ogden said.
"Don't even think of a box, never mind outside it. Every company should have a smart 12-year-old who thinks off-the-wall. In China they've just grown a monkey's heart, and if you can do that you can do anything."
dfinlayson@thejournal.canwest.com
© The Edmonton Journal 2005
Naah, last week was All-kneel-down-before-Islamists week in Canuckstan.
Haha so were the pyramids.
Which is why the Soviet Union is now the world's largest economy and the only remaining superpower!!!
didn't miss that, just don't believe it will work too well.
Besides their baby factories over there seem to work just fine already. I mean look at all the damn folks over there already.
Yup, time for some quick slave labor here so we can compete. Nothing like getting rid of private property and liberty rights too. That'll show those Chinese commies...oh wait that's what they want.
Somethings are just so good they're every day. At least from the Canadian perspective.
Free market bump!
"If they don't self destruct through pollution. Most of their rivers and ground water is incredibly polluted and you don't want to breath in their big cities. Read somewhere that the average mainlander gets less than 1/3 the average clean water of the rest of the world, and it's getting worse."
Good point. There are cities in China that our State Dept won't post employees who have asthmatics in their family because the air is so bad.
"Actually, the rug can be pulled right out from China if their cheap labor becomes too pricey."
I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for Chinese labor rates to catch up to the rest of the world. The Chinese had been preventing their poor in rural areas from migrating to the cities until recently. Now there are hundreds of millions moving to the large cities where the jobs are. They are delighted to work long hours under conditions that no American worker would tolerate for pennies per hour. The supply far, far outweighs the demand, even with China's hyper economy. This is the largest human migration in world history by a wide margin - hundreds of millions of them.
I'm not as doom and gloom as this author seems to be, but China and India represent a huge economic challenges that we as a nation will have to address in the very near future. I just saw an article about Brazil's rapidly expanding agriculture sector. They are sueing the US through the WTO to get us to remove cotton subsidies. If that goes through, they will clear millions of more acres to be put into agricultural production over the next few years.
Newt Gingrich has said that 3 types of reform are critical to meet the new economic challenges that we will face in the 21st century
1. tort
2. health care
3. tax
That would certainly be a good start.
Christianity would have gotten along very nicely with slavery here had it not been for those darn liberal Quakers.
Chinese Streaker!
I recently heard that the number of just the unemployed Chinese workers surpasses all the factory workers in the world outside of China.
Let's see . . .
Terrorism . . .
China and India putting Americans out of work left and right . . .
Our country overrun with starving economic fugitives (aka, illegal aliens) from Mexico and all over the world, displaced by free trade . . .
Skyrocketing medical costs and insurance . . . .
Social Security in danger . . . .
Less and less security of all kinds . . .
And they say it's all our fault for not working or studying hard enough.
Living in the old days of the Cold War just doesn't seem so bad anymore.
I agree with you 100%. A totalitarian govenrment can get things done quickly, but not very efficiently. 10,000 workers to build a hospital? Too much innefficiency. Also, central planning, communist style, may help with short term, specific and obvious problems, but only with freedom economically and politically, can probelsm be solved efficiently without having to go through a state beaurocracy to gather and prioritize the resources. It's the grass roots economies and the diversity of enterprises under free captialistic systems that keep the economy both growing and capable of dynamic change. Specific problems get local, specific solutions, for example.
Chinese can pray to ancestors now.......cuz the same crowd who brokered the North American Law/Fiscal extortion run.
The one that has Government in its pocket,
The Insurance company and its evil blood sucking sister the Bank.
They have discovered China.......and are set upon eating their flesh to the bone.
China will also be offended........as they will be dined on with forks and not chop sticks : )
You can bet he will get the dog mess beat out of him when they catch him.
"I recently heard that the number of just the unemployed Chinese workers surpasses all the factory workers in the world outside of China."
I haven't heard that specific statistic, but the scale of China's population is staggering. For example, it is believed that China's actual population is about 1.5 billion, well above the official government census of 1.3 billion. Put another way, if China's margin of error in counting its population were a country of its own, it would be about the 4th largest in the world.
The USA has 9 cities with populations above 1 million. Eastern and western Europe have about 35. China has between 100 and 160.
"The other bad news is that almost half of the U.S. voting population is also decadent--the Left: the "Mainstream Newsmedia", academia, Hollywood, the Democrat Party, et al."
I got news for you, Hollywood is one of the few areas that America has a huge competetive advantage over China and Asia. Hollywood is one area I don't see being outsourced to China.
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