If they offer me 3% of $34,000, versus 9% of $4,000, as with the US versus China, I certainly will take the 3% of $34,000. It's an old mathematician's trick. d8-)
Hey, baseball is an international sport, pard'. The Yankees have two Japanese players, a Venezuelan manager (who played for them until last year), two players from the Dominican Republic and one from Panama. They've had two Cuban starting pitchers over the last couple of years. Boston has a Korean closer, somebody (maybe Boston again?) has an Australian relief pitcher. There's at least one Frenchman in the Major Leagues, several Mexicans, and so on.
And there are a bunch of American players playing in Japan.
FWIW, there isn't a yachtsman in the world who fully trusts the Kiwis after that escapade. It may be the greatest example of poor sportsmanship in the annals of international sport.
Of course Dennis Conner & his catamaran was the "real thing"? Real sporting and in the spirit of the deed! Yeah, right!
By the way, it's interesting that Dennis doesn't share your views on Kiwi yachties, isn't it? But then he's man enough to admit that Kiwi skippers have proved to be the best in the last
3 Cup regattas...
As for poor sportsmanship, I think we're quite happy to abide by world opinion, lets face it, it's more informed..
I'll suppose next, you'll want to bring how we told the US to f*ck off with their nuclear armed navy?
That was in response to the 128-footer. They weren't going to let those jerks get away with it, and they didn't. More power to him. It may have saved the Cup for the rest of the world, because the holder of the Cup set the rules in those days. In the case of the US, holding the cup after that little Kiwi adventure, they worked out a plan with the IYRU that kept it from happening ever again.
They're excellent skippers. And Dennis is too much of a gentleman to say what's been on the mind of long-time international yachtsmen ever since. I know a few.
You no longer have a choice.
Not likely. I don't recall ever having initiated a flame with you, Tom. That's your specialty, armed as you are with an endless stream of anti-American resentments. As for my opinion of New Zealand, I happen to like lamb quite a lot.
This topic is a lot more complicated than the two of you make it out to be. However, economic growth measured as money is not something economists tend to care much about. Rates of growth are what matter in the long run -- a rich country in stagnation is in a much worse situation than a poor country experiencing rapid growth. The USA is certainly the largest, single economy in the world, and it experiences healthy growth these days (although there are worrying aspects too, such as the lag in the job market, the budget deficit, and the ugly average savings/earnings ratio). However, China's economy is growing at an incredible rate, and looks poised to take over, within a few decades, America's role as primary engine of the world economy. There are downsides in China too, of course, and a lot rides on the ability of the administration to complete the controlled transition of the country into a capitalist democracy. So far, they're at least doing a heck of a lot better than the poor Russians did...
OBmetal: my new 7x12 is on a slow boat from China right now! :-)
All my friends DID laugh at me in '78 for doing exactly that with the phony-niners. A few years later *everybody* was a "die-hard, old-time 'niners fan" :-)
That part is easy. If the cost of living is going down the $330 increase means a better life. If the cost of living is going up, the $1064 just means you don't go backwards quite so fast. Would you like to look at the figures for house prices in Marin County over the past ten years ? I know, I know ... the US has no meaning- ful inflation. This is why the exact same loaf of bread that was $.89 two years ago is $2.19 now. And the house that my mom sold in 1970 for $24,000 would cost you a nice round $850,000 or more today. In 1978 I was charging $60/hour for cnc turning time (I didn't have a Sheldon, so it was okay :-) Sure, inserts are better now, but you can *not* make the same part I was doing in 1980 in ten minutes in two today ... and even if you *could*, there's no way that would overcome the huge increases in housing, food, health, and transportation. Oh yeah, I think Kaiser cost something like $75/month in 1980, too. When I crashed and burned, it cost five bucks to stay in the hospital for ten days. They didn't cancel me the day after, either. Then, whether YOU and/or the rest of us dumbo machinists even SEE that fricking $1064 is another question entirely ...
I took the 9% of $4,000 and I'm happy. If you'd been here the other night you'd know there are things you just can't buy. Freedom, for one. Human relationships, for another.
Conner may not have started that series of shyster games but he wasn't far behind with the catamaran trick. After a few of those silly seasons the America's Cup kinda came back down to earth ... but imo it's shit since it's become so commercial. BTW, it wasn't really a "64-foot class," ever. The cup-holder was always the one who decided what kind of boat to race. It had just been in NYYC hands for so long that they thought they owned the thing. They also pulled some *very* shady maneuvers a few times in the past : Lipton would have won if he hadn't been cheated. He was just too much the English Sportsman to complain.
Hey..just using a page from the Demonrat playbook. Argue using the best possible spin or the worst possible spin, depending on who and what youa are arguing with.
Its worked fine for 40 + yrs with the Demonrats..so why bitch?
Gunner
"As my father told me long ago, the objective is not to convince someone with your arguments but to provide the arguments with which he later convinces himself." David Friedman
Of course it is. I spent the last year of my life researching it and writing a couple of lengthy magazine articles about it.
I beg your pardon, Tom, but it is *indeed* something economists care much about.
It depends upon what the economist is thinking about. If he's projecting long-term economic growth, he's more interested in rates of growth. If he's looking at the current world economy and what is influencing it, he has little interest in percentage rates of growth. He's looking at current patterns of production and consumption, wealth generated over a contemporaneous span of time, exports and imports, and so on.
To use your country, the US, and China as examples, China absorbs roughly
1.1% of your exports, while the US absorbs 7.7% (2001 figures, which are the latest I have). So every 1% rate of growth in the US economy has seven times the effect on YOUR economy as a 1% growth in China's economy. That 3.1% we grew last year represents roughly three times as much effect on YOUR economy as China's 8.2% (a more likely figure than China's claimed 9.1%). This is a simplification, of course, but any measure you apply to it produces the same pattern, whether you base it on the total size of our economies, the per-capita figures, our total volume of exports and imports, or whatever. You always get roughly the same result.
This is why I scoff at Tom's silly "can't keep up" remark. To the world economy as a whole, the important issue about one country's economy is how m uch actual growth or shrinkage occurs in the factors that have an *external* effect. What it may represent internally, as a *rate* of growth in percentage terms, is all but irrelevant. Its relevance is in long-term trends but not in current accounts. And, of course, it matters domestically, to China itself.
Well, your last comment suggests that you're looking at the US economy through a European filter. In fact, what you identify as "ugly" may be an important factor in why Japan's economy has been stalled for so long, and why Germany keeps slipping back a half-step for every step they take forward. Large economies may need very high rates of consumption, and heavy reliance upon international capital flows as opposed to domestic savings, in order to produce the kind of leading growth that the US economy usually provides to the world as a whole, when it's been in a slump. From one fairly angular perspective, domestic saving is a market distortion to international flows of capital -- recent months of foreign investment figures in the US providing evidence of the possibility. And it's questionable what harm low savings rates actually do to a dominant economy.
Many world economists are worried about the US's current accounts, including some prominent ones of our own (I'm currently reading _In An Uncertain World_ by Robert Rubin, one of our most respected economists, and *he's* certainly worried about it). My own background in economics is fairly traditional and conservative and I'm worried about it, too.
But many prominent economists disagree. There is the cautionary tale of the US in the early '80s and again in the mid-to-late '90s. Actual growth completely swamped negative positions in our current accounts on both occassions, in flat contradiction to what traditional economics said was possible. When anyone tells me they have the answer to this, my response is skeptical. I don't think that anyone knows.
Very possibly. However, looked at from a current perspective, China's growth is the growth of a plant just beginning to bear noticeable amounts of fruit, compared to the production of a mature plant. A 10% rise in their tomato production isn't going to give you enough tomato juice to make a difference.
I've developed a great interest in what is going to happen to China's economy over the next five years. We've seen all the trendlines and projections, and the enormous size of China's population, to a marketing person, is enough to make his lips smack with delight. The growth rates of China's economy over the past decade, if they actually do project for two decades more, indicate that it will be the dominant economy.
The reason I'm interested in the next five years is that China is about to run into a brick wall with its exports. Europe and Japan will never stand for the kind of wrenching, dislocating effect of $100+ billion trade deficits the US is experiencing now. The question is what China will do when its mercantilist economy has to make the transition to one that depends on domestic consumption to sustain growth. Projecting the growth in China's current domestic consumption is not valid; much of that growth is based on deficit spending of their import profits, as Hamei points out in another message in this thread. When that can no longer be counted on to supply sufficient growth, China's economy will experience its moment of truth.
Watch out for sand pockets in the castings. And good luck with it.
Oh, Hamei, don't be silly. Conner defended with the catamaran because Michael Fay was trying to exploit an ancient quirk in the rules by challenging with a 128-foot boat against 12-meter yachts that had less than
60 feet on the waterline. You know what that means in terms of boat speed, right? Fay's boat had a natural hull speed that was 1.4 times that of a
12-meter. It was the biggest cheat in America's Cup history, and Conner just wasn't going to let him walk away with it.
I'd still like to know what Fay was thinking. What kind of a greedy bastard is he, anyway? What does he think he would have won?
Well, if that was the case, how did a 128-footer sneak in? You may have read the ancient Deed. What happened was that there was no hip-pocket challenger, so the terms defaulted to let the challenger decide the type of boat, with no need for agreement. When the US had the cup and there was a hip-pocket challenger, the rules said that the two sides had to agree on the type of boat.
It's always been a rough game. We never saw Lipton OR the NYYC show up with a boat that was twice as big as the competitors', though. That was a new low.
Touché -- oversimplification on my part there, colored by the fact that I, personally, find long-term trends and effects much more interesting. (And, in the case of China as an evolving economy, I'd contend that the long-term effects are much more important than the immediate ones.) Besides, you were being deliberately obtuse in your exchange with the other Tom, weren't you? ;-)
Thanks -- I will. Based on what I've heard and read, I think I'll take it apart completely, and clean and lube everything, before I start using it. mini-lathe.com will be my friend! :-)
Probably. Except for right now. Job-shop owners call me and ask me what to do right now. I tell them that, if I knew, my phone number would be unlisted and I'd be on the beach at Aruba.
It seemed appropriate for the circumstances.
That sounds like a good approach. There's some decent iron down there somewhere. Have fun.
I quit running, um, er....... actually, probably right after the last PE class I took. Hmmm. Perhaps during the Johnson administration (not Andrew). Sue
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