Posted on 11/04/2007 2:02:22 PM PST by shrinkermd
Until January 20, 2009 if they win the election - then it immediately drops to zero along with homelessness.
The literacy claim is absurd. If you understand what is required to learn to read and write Chinese, you realize that a huge percentage of the population doesn’t have the natural memory required to be anything more than semiliterate (no population does, for that matter). Moreover, away from the cities, the rural poverty is quite extreme, and the amount of time people have for memorizing characters is not great even if there is a teacher.
My sons read and write Chinese - we know the effort and the ability involved to achieve a reasonable degree of literacy.
Sounds like they'll need to import our food as much as they'll need us to buy their cheap exports for the forseeable future.
Are you Chinese? Would you recommend I have my young children learn Mandarin? Opinions vary on this.
Wow! Those 800 million peasants in the rural area are all middle class now. Gee. Great! What about the tens of millions in the "floating population?" How are they doing?
China's floating population has increased from 70 million of 1993 to 140 million of 2003
Hey! Turn around you guys are going in the wrong direction! Can't you read? Dummies.
Feed Corn.....
Well, instead of going up 130% in 2007 and 2008, why not just go up 300-400% in one year, just get it over with? High rates of return like that, indicate that something is grossly undervalued. Seriously, is China undervalued at this point? And while they are importing, exporting, consuming goods, how do we know that their financial underpinnings are actually sound? If the Chinese market is not a bubble, then it is a first of a kind, a marvel, an economic abnormality of the HIGHEST proportions.
Our own Fed, limits growth of our GDP, to avoid these boom busts, because they think a model like China leads to ruin? Maybe our fed should just stimulate our economy, so it grows at 8% a year, for many, many years? They could you know.
Why is Germany cleaning our clock in exporting?
Would you recommend I have my young children learn Mandarin?
I think Christianity is growing faster in China than any other country.
The last estimate I saw was 80 to 100 million Christians in China.
Silage is generally harvested on corn that hasn't produced all that much in the way of Ears. While I don't know what all farmers do, this is what all the farmers I know did. I know that silage general came from corn that was sorta short growth(like 60 day corn or whatever) and was harvested after 45 days.(something like that)
I just love those "You can't lose, it's a sure thing and money in the bank" pronouncements on stock market bubbles.
I imagine you are correct. I was assuming that it was for silage.
For years I have seen corn being harvested when it looks like it has died. I assumed it was for silage as it was just harvested whole.
Maybe they let it dry in the field for cornmeal or popcorn.
Field corn for feed is harvested long after the corn is dead and brown. It gives time for the water to dry out. Silage is green, wet and heavy. Has a very distinct smell too. Tends to mold and can catch fire if not managed properly.
So what I was seeing is feed corn.
What is silage used for except to blow up silos? (a little humor there)
Well, my friend's uncle "Chic"(his nick) lost his calf muscle to the silage "blower". Silage is a good mutilator :). I wasn't there, thankfully. He recovered and passed a number of years ago, not due to that injury.
Silage is feed, but not nearly as dense as pure corn. It's green wet stuff for cows to chew on since it's stalks and all. If you feed them corn, it's a few pounds or so per cow...silage..they probably chow 20 pounds per feeding.
I grew up on a farm, but didn't have cows...what I saw however(all my friends were farmers), was that in fields that needed a good liming or after a wheat/oat/soy harvest, the farmers would plant some fast grow corn on the cheap and grind it for silage. Also, when there was a drought during prime grow, some long breeds, like 100+ that won't make it got ground up for silage.
Neither my wife nor I is Chinese. Mandarin is useful, but it requires a very serious commitment. Most children of Chinese here are wasting their time playing at learning Mandarin in Chinese school. Unless you are going to hire a tutor and your children are prepared to work on Mandarin 3 hours a day, I would invest my time and money elsewhere. I also think that it would be difficult to pull this off unless you homeschool. Please bear in mind, my attitude is that having the sort of competence that typically results from taking language classes in school is useless. No language is worth investing time in unless you are serious as a heart-attack about complete fluency. Fluency constitutes an asset. Anything less is useless diletantism.
Our sons have been doing Chinese since infancy. The earlier you start the better.
Another possibility is that the European markets are much more open to German products, given that Germany is in the EU, and US exports to the EU have to jump through hoops - meaning that it is less troublesome for US companies to open plants in the EU to cater to the EU markets. These sales don't show up as US exports, of course, even though they are sales of products made by US companies. It's kind of like Toyota and Honda sales in the US don't show up as Japanese exports.
Just some additional trivia, for the month of August, China surpassed Germany to become the largest exporter and is expected to be the third largest economy for 2007 in nominal GDP.
Some estimates predict China will have the largest nominal GDP by 2025.
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