A brief and ragged assessment of China's role in the current global economic situation

Due to various factors, including the recent credit crunch in the USA, the US economy is slowing. The value of the American dollar in proportion to the currency of other countries is decreasing. This week the dollar dropped further, so one euro is the equivalent of about US$1.40.

At the same time, the economies of both China and India are growing. China's economy is currently growing at a faster rate (based on GDP) than any other country. One situation affected by this growth is China's purchasing power. In addition to many small personal goods being bought by the people, China's government is building infrastructure. To do this, the government needs to buy stuff. The stuff in question when discussing infrastructure tends to be big manufacturing stuff. At this point in time, China is buying most of these items from Western manufacturing companies. For example, France just sold some Airbus (planes, I think) and some nuclear power generators to China.

Lots of big American industrial manufacturing companies are also getting into the game. GE is working hard to sell its products in China and India. Without these sales, profits and total sales numbers at GE would increase at a much slower pace than they have done in the past few years.

If global business continues in this vein, the growth of China's and India's economies should somewhat alleviate the slowdown in the American economy. This should be good for the US, because it means that money will be coming into the economy from outside. It is also good for the global economy, because most other countries have a lot of their holdings in American dollars, which are beginning to lose much of their value these days. The combination of factors described above should keep the global economy growing, and that's what the economists say we want.

Ok, so now I understand it. Now it's a question of finding examples, coordinating numbers, and making this information clear, light, and relevant. I have 10 days. Wish me luck.

a little of this and a little of that

Gah. Forgive me, writing skills, for it has been 20 days since I last wrote.

I'm down to the last 3 weeks of the semester. In that time, I have to write a total of 4500 words on 3 different graded assignments, take 2 assessments and a take-home test. Plus go to class and such.

Last week was the American holiday of Thanksgiving. We celebrated by cooking a full-on Thanksgiving dinner, with a 16-pound turkey and 3 pies, among other items. 6 non-American guests attended the dinner, and they all ate and said that they liked the food. Most importantly on our end, we finally had guests to our home, and it was a successful evening.

Dan and I are going to Paris on December 18, to celebrate our 30th birthday and Christmas with Amy and Tzuchien. I don't know what will happen on the trip. I predict we will eat and drink. That's really all I know. My cousin Sara will be in Paris at the same time, so we will catch up with her. She knows French pretty well, so she will be a good person to have around. This is in addition to the fact that she's a cool person, of course.

It's so hard to write anything interesting when all I can think about is my schoolwork. I'm reading a book on international prostitution (preparation for my dissertation) and I read a piece last night on beach boys (prostitutes) in Barbados. I read a teen fiction book (The Fabulous Five something something) when I was younger, in which 5 junior-high aged friends went to Barbados for a vacation. A Barbados boy flirted with all of them and acted as though he was dating each of them individually. The study I just read had a lot of similarities to that book, so I suppose the fiction author knew all about this situation.

I'm off to newspaper class. Today we learn more about layout, I believe. Yippee!

The six serving men

When I was young, I was a voracious reader. One of my favorite fictional characters was a girl called Anastasia Krupnik. Her mom was a professional painter and her dad was a poet and a college professor. When I think back, it’s one of few images of family life that make me think I might want to have children someday. But to make things relevant to my life today...

Anastasia’s life was chronicled in a series of books—not a numbered series, like the babysitters’ club or something, but there were probably about eight books that described different points in her life. In one of them, one of the main plots was that Anastasia had decided to become a journalist someday. Every chapter ended with a news story intro: who, what, where, when, why, how. She turned conversations with her mom into news stories—well, she made her mom ask those questions of her, and Anastasia answered them to create her intro. I’m beginning to think she had the right idea. If I can spend the next 6 weeks encapsulating the event of my day into news intros, I will be able to news-intro-ify anything!

So here’s one from today:
Dan cooked a sundried-tomato-tastic pasta dish in our kitchen this evening because he had time and because it was fun.

Hmm. I think these are going to need to get better. Maybe dinner is not really a newsworthy event. Let’s try again.

This afternoon, four international journalism students at Cardiff University debated the pros and cons of liberal democracy in front of 85 classmates as part of an assignment.

That’s better, but it should include who won, should it not? I can’t figure out where to put it. I think it would have to go in a subsequent paragraph. But in case you’re dying to know, the opposition won the debate. In other words, liberal democracy ASAP lost.

Crash bang

I could hear the fireworks in the nearby park, but we often hear sounds like fireworks in this area, so I didn’t think much of it. And by the time I realized there was a firework event, I didn’t know where to go and figured it would be too late anyway.

Well, I deserve to miss sweet-ass fireworks for not knowing what the hell is going on in the country where I live. The event in the park was Guy Fawkes Day. In a nutshell: Guy Fawkes was a non-Protestant man in Britain in the early 17th century. King James, a Protestant, imposed fines on people who did not go to the Protestant church.

In retaliation, Guy Fawkes and some other rebels attempted to blow up Parliament, hoping to destroy King James in the process. The attempt was defeated. In celebration of this defeat, people in Great Britain build Guy Fawkes statuesque models out of sticks, burn them, and set off fireworks. This is a big deal and happens every year.

I suppose I should make some sort of effort at evaluating what I have described. I guess that I think Guy Fawkes and his companions had a right to be annoyed about the fines on non-churchgoers. Maybe not enough to blow up Parliament or anything, but it seems to me that if this were an American holiday, we’d be celebrating Guy Fawkes for fighting for freedom of religion. But I am not in the USA, and here piles of sticks that represent such a fighter are burned. I think I am missing something, and I am going to try harder to understand.

yuckety yuck

I feel yucky right now. I have been having this problem a lot on Sunday nights. The situation is this: I always have really high expectations for a weekend. I plan a little bit of fun, a lot of schoolwork, and some errands or housecleaning or something similar. And now I have had a little bit of fun (halloween party on Friday, dim sum and Mandarin lesson with classmates today, and of course hanging out with Dan throughout), Dan and I have done a thorough cleaning of the flat, BUT I hardly did any schoolwork.

I spent a few hours at the library yesterday and picked up a few books that will help me begin to "read around" my dissertation topic, but today--nothing. I am scheduled to be part of a group presentation this week, and I really have very little research to do, but I can't get through it. Ridiculous. In addition to this, I have only gotten to about page 30 of this week's Economist (after not even getting halfway through the issues for the last two weeks) and haven't even opened the book on how to get started on a dissertation, which I bought on Amazon a few weeks ago. And I was also planning to revise an article I wrote last week, based on the comments from my instructor, and I haven't done that either. And I haven't read through the paperwork that same instructor gave me because I joined that section late.

And it is nearly bedtime and I feel like I have been a wasteoid for the past two days, and it makes me feel yucky. YUCK EEEEEEE.

On the plus side, I talked with many loved ones this weekend.

Also on the plus side...I got a really sweet phone last week. Did I mention that yet? It's cool; I like it.

What else? Things aren't that bad, I suppose. Tomorrow I'm going to cook a butternut squash, thanks to some cooking tips from my friend Sarah, who is a stellar cook. I'm still sick, but I have a doctor's appointment tomorrow. Prescriptions are free in Wales.

Ok, going to read some economist now. talk to you soon.

Aww, my clean city

I am a little behind the times, but apparently Minneapolis, MN, was recently voted the 5th cleanest city in the world by Forbes magazine. (glow of pride) http://www.forbes.com/2007/04/16/worlds-cleanest-cities-biz-logistics-cx_rm_0416cleanest_slide_6.html?thisSpeed=15000


I noticed the distinct cleanliness of Mpls in comparison with New York City when I first moved from the latter to the former, but I still don’t know if it really is the 5th cleanest in the world. Yes, bicycling, parks, lakes and outdoor sports/activities are extremely popular there, and yes, the city does have a fairly extensive bus system and a burgeoning light rail system (only one line so far), but a LOT of people continue to drive cars regularly in the city. That being said, the recycling is decent, but I have to say Cardiff, Wales, has a better city recycling program, as far as organization and how much material can be collected and recycled.

In other cleanly news, my flat is a disaster area. I have vacuumed once in the last month and two days, and that’s it. We’re doing well on keeping dishes clean and taking out trash (and recycling), but vacuuming, sweeping, bathroom cleaning—all of these have fallen by the wayside. It’s so easy to ignore cleaning when there is news reading, studying, windsurfing, 35mm film developing, writing, sleeping, mad pinting, cooking and eating to be done. Though to be honest, I’ve done very little mad pinting—it’s going to have to wait for school breaks for me to do it properly. Anyway, Saturday is the day. The itemised agenda is as follows: library to do some general dissertation research, video skype with mom and dad, and CLEAN THE FLAT! Sunday is currently reserved for windsurfing, but I imagine I will do some news reading then, too.