There are many numbers in the Science 2.0 post. What I’m quoting will be the “Arguably reasonable projections”, which is an estimate meaning that if they are wrong, we might run out sooner.
The earliest the world may run out of oil is about 2070 and the latest by 2105.
Natural gas depletion would be between 2061 and 2095.
For the end of coal, that estimate is between 2079 and 2155.
However, if nations like China and India continue to create the American lifestyle for as many as possible, those dates may be much shorter.
Sustainable Development says that water wars may be coming sooner. In case you haven’t heard, there is a growing shortage of fresh water in the world so this is another cause for concern.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to this Blog, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
I admit that that I was surprised when I saw this video of a group of Americans finding enlightenment in China.
The popular stereotype about someone searching for change and enlightenment fits the plot we find in Eat, Pray, Love, a best seller that was made into a movie with Julia Roberts, where Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir takes her to Italy for pleasure, India for enlightenment and Indonesia where she discovers love again – not China.
In this video, we see a group of Kung Fu and Tai Chi students from the U.S. in search of Kung Fu wisdom in China.
While in China, they visit Chinese families, schools, temples and universities. They travel through both ancient and modern China visiting Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai.
After surviving personal conflicts and emotional struggles, the group returns to America as Elizabeth Gilbert did in her journey—to be compassionate and harmonious with others and the environment.
In three weeks, this group went places few foreigners have seen.
Of course, after breaking bones twice during martial arts training earlier in life, I’ve stayed away from that form of discovery.
I still climb mountains but not as often as I once did.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to this Blog, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
The East Asia Forum (EAF) reported September 1, 2010, on the impact of the global financial crises on China’s migrant workers.
It turns out that the impact wasn’t as significant as first thought in 2009 as most laid-off workers went home to the rural, collective village farms.
Two years after the world economy collapsed, the EAF was surprised to discover that migrants who stayed in the cities suffered very little.
Instead, workers who stayed in the cities continued to work while about 15 million migrants, about 10% of the workforce, went back to the farm, where they had already worked on average 52% of the year helping grow the food China eats.
The EAF suggested that small landholders, since most Chinese in rural China cannot own or sell the land they farm, should be allowed to sell their land and that China should move toward a universal welfare system.
Huh?
In America, which has a universal welfare system, when a worker loses his or her job, he or she collects unemployment benefits until those benefits run out. The next choice is to become a homeless beggar.
A report on PBS says that since 2007 there has been a 12% increase in homelessness and that about 2.3 to 3.5 million people in the U.S. experience homelessness.
The suggestion from the EAF that China must allow rural peasants to sell the land they farm is wrong.
As long as those farms exist, few people have to go homeless in China. Being a poor peasant farmer may not offer many choices in life, but it has to be better than sleeping in an alley in Shanghai and going hungry.
It was difficult to discover how many homeless people there are in China. It appears that most who are homeless lost their homes through floods, earthquakes and other acts of nature and live in tent cities while the government has new homes built.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to this Blog, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
A new comment appeared on my Blog linked to another Blog, A Modern Lei Feng, which is also about China but seems to focus mostly on what happens in modern Beijing.
I followed that link back to see whom or what had left tracks to my Blog, which I often do.
I only read the one post that complained about my Blog, so I cannot pass judgment on the rest of the content.
What I discovered was interesting—an opinion that disagreed with an opinion I wrote in Changing Names.
I clicked the “About” link to discover who the Blog master was behind A Modern Lei Feng and learned that he was a “young guy” living in Beijing who knows a little something about China and is willing to freelance on that topic but not for free.
Since I couldn’t find a name, I will call him “Lei Feng”.
I asked my father-in-law, who lived in Shanghai when the Japanese invaded China, what “A Modern Lei Feng” might mean.
My father-in-law, who is Chinese, doesn’t speak English fluently, but he did what he could to translate what “Lei Feng” might mean.
He said there were many translations but this one might refer to a young solder in the PLO that Mao praised to the nation in the 1960s. This soldier’s name was Lei Feng. Mao said everyone must learn from him because he is an excellent role model.
It seems that Lei Feng helped everyone else for free instead of helping himself.
The modern Lei Feng said in his post, “I’m no tech genius, but I’d imagine it wouldn’t be that hard to add the character to a word processor and input program, especially considering the government sent out a circular last year to strictly recognize such names, though it appears this one was left off the list.”
My response, Since I took a class in HTML, program my Websites, and know a professional programmer who made his money (he is retired now) programming for the U.S. defense department and commercial airlines, I know a little bit about what it takes to update software and it isn’t as easy as it sounds.
The programming part would probably be easier than implementing it. The difficulty comes when one program is replaced with another. To do that often means shutting down security systems, loading in the new program and rebooting the computer then turning the security back on. Then, as sometimes happens, the new program might cause the system to crash, and I’m talking about one computer.
In China, we are talking about several hundred million computers, which might operate on different systems. Each system would need another program and a different update.
Besides government computer systems, which may not all be linked since China’s government is decentralized more than most foreigners know, there are more than four hundred million personal computers linked to the internet in China.
I suspect that the decision not to go back and add the Chinese character for this family name that represents 200 people was due to the scope of the project to fix the error and the time it would take.
If it was easy and cheap, why not do it?
However, the issue isn’t over yet. If enough people in China Blog about this and express opinions that the government should make the change, it might still happen, although I doubt it.
China’s central government doesn’t care much about what foreigners think, but they do listen carefully to the people even if they do not always do what “most” of the people want.
In China, small groups do not have as much power as a majority of the population does.
Why there shouldn’t be an “American with Disabilities Act”
As for the Americans with Disabilities Act, I used that as an example to show how expensive it is to cater to a small segment of the population at the tax payers’ expense.
Lei Feng mentions that new buildings in Beijing offer ease of access to people with disabilities.
That’s understandable.
In recent years, most Chinese cities were rebuilt and many new cities mushroomed across China.
During the construction phase, it isn’t that expensive to add a ramp or a wider door but it is labor intensive and expensive to go back and fix something like that after construction ends just as fixing that Chinese language computer program for a nation of 1.3 billion might be too expensive and fraught with problems.
Although I agree with Thomas Paine about Social Security and a few other limited social safety nets that help people survive during hard times, America has a HUGE deficit threatening the nation’s economy and any expensive, unnecessary program should be examined carefully and cut or shrunk.
Idealistically, doing all we can as a nation to help as many people as possible is a good thing but realistically idealism doesn’t always work.
Lei Feng also quoted a phrase from The Declaration of Independence to support his opinion. He said, that there was a promise in the U.S. Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equally” and that we all have the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”.
In fact, the United States Declaration of Independence is a statement adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4th, 1776, which announced that the thirteen American Colonies were at war with Great Britain. That is all it was.
The (first) law of the United States was the Articles of Confederation. This document was so weak that in May 1787, a Constitutional Convention was held in Philadelphia to present a new Constitution that was sent to the States for ratification later that year, which is the law of the U.S. today—not the Declaration of Independence.
Nowhere in the Constitution of the United States does that document say that the government and the taxpayers are responsible to pay for the “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness” of other citizens who cannot afford to pay for his or her dreams or easy access to cross a street in a wheelchair.
Adding more ramps to make it easier for people in wheel chairs to cross intersections might be a nice thing to do, and I wonder of Lei Feng would like to chip in and donate enough money to build a few and help reduce the U.S. deficit.
I’m sorry to say, I cannot afford to do that. My taxes are too high.
______________
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
Imagine a diplomat in China who will influence future generations to love America and see it as a peaceful fun nation to be friends with. That’s what is happening and Walt Disney is doing it.
The Financial Times says that Disney Publishing Worldwide is opening English language schools in China and plans to have 148 schools in the country by 2015 earning well over $100 million.
The curriculum features Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, the Little Mermaid and other Disney characters.
Enrolling children in this privately funded Disney language school is not cheap. It costs between $1,800 and $2,200 annually depending on which publication you read.
The Economist in Middle Kingdom meets Magic Kingdom pegged the price at $1,800, and says, “(Disney) has ten schools in Shanghai, five in Beijing and plans to double that number in the next year, slowly extending from China’s two largest cities to surrounding areas.”
I’ve written before about how important an education is to Chinese parents so it shouldn’t be a surprise to learn that Disney isn’t having problems finding students. The challenge is to find enough qualified teachers. Each classroom has “a local and a Western instructor.”
Disney’s language schools are where the West truly meets the East without the bully tactics of real politicans.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse 
iLook China 