I’m glad somebody said it. I don’t think it’s a good thing or a bad thing, but it’s certainly more important than the hysteria around Obama’s appointments (geez, has there ever been so much attention paid to an elect’s appts?).

In fact, having said that, I think it’s smart. They get to see how choices play in public opinion, and that may even give them room to throw political bones without having to pay the political consequence. Seems smart to me.

In fact, I suspect the HRC appt was in that mold, except they found it to be workable…

Smart politics so far. Some of the more conservative appointments so far are a little disturbing, but… if he thinks it’s easier to manage an experienced old hand than a newbie on top of an existing bureaucracy, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt for now. Particularly because the policy side, where that’s been leaked, looks better than I’d hoped for (health care and net neutrality come to mind).

Just give ‘em Buick. That brand is selling well in China, at least. If I’m buying an Asian car, it’s going to be either a Nissan 370Z or a Hyundai Genesis Coupe…

If they want to leapfrog, they’ve got more than 4x the engineers we have. They can do it.

What they don’t have is strong background in commercialization.

Frankly, I don’t know that this is about leapfrogging or acquiring contemporary market skills they don’t have. There’s a very good chance that this is a way to prop up their existing investments in American debt.

In other words, they are buying up the toxic assets to stop the free-fall of their value, rather like the plan that idiot Paulson was supposed to do. Instead of holding a lot of worthless American debt underpinned by failing assets, they’d own a mess of manufacturing capacity and the free-fall would stop.

And they’d be able to turn around some of that capital into their own country’s progress.

but we are willing to exploit their cheap labor, lack of protection of worker’s rights, and non-existent pollution controls. And we get all bent out of joint when they send us lead painted toys for our children to suck on.

And that’s my point, the policy of the United States should not be to promote these policies. By imposing tariffs on said goods, we regain some of the costs to our overall economy while allowing us to compete on a more level playing field. That takes a little bravery and leadership on the part of the United States and its leaders who unfortunately who have been bought and paid for by the Wal Marts of the world. Right now, only a select few are benefiting from the export of jobs and technology oversees which has a direct cause to the financial crisis we see today.

I would like to point out that I have to say that that article is pretty poorly translated, and it is a difficult read.

What I was talking about was the initial portion of the Delta project, which was to shut off the estuaries in the southwest, that was completed in the late 80s.

It appears from your second link that an additional phase was to build a lock on the Rhine river near Rotterdam proper to prevent a storm surge up the river and to prevent one of the largest harbors in Western Europe from being decimated.

I saw evidence of this just yesterday in an email from the president of a major state-funded university that warns that bad times are coming. Fasten your seatbelt, and so on.

Yes, well as I have often said, universities only raise tuition in two circumstances: times are bad and they need to or times are good and they can.

Universities and colleges have turned their attention more and more to commerical enterprises and creating hybrid institutions, putting themselves in beds with corporations and becoming stakeholders in the corporations’ survival. As a result their survival continues to be assured. At the same time, their fees and tuitions only creep up. The campuses have tended to take on country club atmosphere, providing comforts and other attractions for students who otherwise would drop out. It’s really disgusting.

Even so, at the present time, state-funded institutions are running out of money. They’re facing stringencies that threaten the future of faculty, tenured and otherwise, staff, and academic departments, let alone all the accouterments to make life less academic and more just plain fun for the yuts that go there.

I saw evidence of this just yesterday in an email from the president of a major state-funded university that warns that bad times are coming. Fasten your seatbelt, and so on.