"Be careful what you wish for, number EIGHT."
I am not a number. I am a free man.
Yer barely a rounding-error where the US and China compete.
The US doesn't compete with anyone. It's all a game of Monopoly between the fifty people who own the world. They don't compete either. They spend a Thursday evening moving the markers around for a fun way to pass the time before dinner.
Sales Value of Total Manufactured Goods for the United States
This might have some meaning if Ben Bernanke hadn't printed up fifty trillion pieces of paper. A dollar is now worth nine cents. The actual value of all that stuff is in fact about three baskets of apples and a box of Cheerios.
Plus they add stocks and bonds and other financial fantasies into their gdp numbers. What a joke.
All this shit is meaningless. Ignoring the looming menace of global warming for the moment, which country is healthier mentally ? That's what counts.
Face it. The US is totally fucked up. China is a zoo but at least people here are, for the moment anyway, mostly sane.
Made in China? - Global manufacturing
These kinds of stories are interesting, and other people's views are also interesting, but what I see in every one of them is el-strangeo values. For instance, they act as if all this shit matters. Numbers here, numbers there, they think they can quantify everything. But in reality you can't quantify what you can't qualify and you can't qualify the quality of life. It's just numbers pulled out their ass.
What's more, all their numbers can be shown to be meaningless. These people have been belittling Japan's "stagflation" for decades now. But when you look at real live video of Japanese people, things sure look okay. Nothing like Detroit or Compton. I talk to people who live there and they seem much happier than the average 'murrican, but according to economists it's desperate measures needed for desperate times.
Alan Greenspan fed us cauldrons of pig shit for decades. He was the most revered economist in the most powerful country in the world. He was also an ignorant ass. It's hard to take 'economists' seriously after that experience. Kind of like false prophets, their words ring hollow.
And then, and
then, these people have the unmitigated gall to say shit like, "India’s IT-services sector shows what can be achieved, but it is high-skilled ... " How many of us have had the privilege of talking to Raj on the help line ? These
Economist assholes talk to us with a straight face about the "high-skilled India tech industry" ? That's enough right there to discredit the writers, the paper, and their ancestors five generations back. Raj couldn't pour piss out of a boot with instructions written on the heel.
Other platitudes we are immersed in include 'the only thing that is constant is change ! We must deal with it ! We must accept it !' Yeah well, tell that to ancient egypt that didn't change much for 6,000 years. North American Indians lived happily for thousands of years without fucking the place up. We trashed it in two hundred. Maybe 'change' wasn't that great a plan.
The stuff they feed us as received truths is pretty much horse droppings if you look at it carefully. So I don't put much stock in that crap. I just listen to my experiences and accept that. At least as far as my own life goes, that seems to work out better.
Again, in my own life, I've found about three competent people in the US over the past ten years. I'm not gonna shake in my boots over this Trump fiasco changing that situation. People can rant and rave and swagger all they like but does the word Nicopolis mean anything to you ? Or closer to our own time, the Eastern Front ? la Grande Armee ? or even pride goeth before a fall ?