OT - Cheap Mics and Human Rights

[mikemc]

You guys REALLY need to stop regurging Tom Friedman. He sounds dumb enough on his own.

LOL, oh yeh, and we think that we thought of everything we say first, even though we heard most of it on TV. But how is that dumb? Dumb, like, naive dumb, or dumb like uninformed dumb? I had disclaimed my armchair opinions, so I'm not worried about the second.

I'm China. I lend you $100 so as you can pay me $100 for a new MP3 player.

I sell you the MP3 player; so I now have $200 in my favour on my balance sheet - a loan to you for $100 and cash $100 you gave me to buy my item.

US has an MP3 player, a liability of $100 that you owe me, and has spent $100 (that has gone into my pocket)

China has the inward cashflows, the purchase of raw materials, the labour utilisation, the interest payments from the US.

This is a great illustration, thanks. It's a little flawed, because there were some costs incurred to build the player, right, so it's not $200 free and clea but still there is an imbalance.

So, referring to another thread, is this the end of humanity? Or at least a new dark age? Because the basis for the other cultures that the US owes, these are all based on rigidly stratified feudal systems. Rigidly stratified feudal systems do not support the notion of widely available education, upward mobility, leisure time, freedom of communication and artistic expression.

But if the US has to adopt a rigidly stratified feudal system and lead the new dark age, we'd have to have a leadership concerned only with their own special interests, a new set of controls on civil liberities, an interminable and costly hundred-years-type war....

[stephenlnoe]

Don't worry DJPrecious, half of the country knows it and this clown will be gone soon enough, but I don't think they'll ever get anyone up on the hill that is not a liar. The closest they've come in the last 50 years is Carter.

[anonymouse]

It's a little flawed, because there were some costs incurred to build the player

flawed !?! I was going for extremely simplified!

I suppose that the costs involved in manufacture could be said to be environmental damage and the physical depletion of China's natural resources now transformed from a few grams of plastic and tin into an MP3 player.

But most other costs I can imagine don't involve any net loss of wealth for China. so I didn't include them. (e.g. salary paid to the factory worker is not a net loss to China Inc. It is just a transfer of money within China)

[dazzer]

I'm just surprised computo knows the result in France before the vote has actually happened

[computo]

mmmm...A wiseguy, eh?

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0, ... 72,00.html