![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Hanging around
Jan. 18th, 2008 08:52 pm
Currently at Toronto Pearson: -5. High today: 3, at 2 a.m. Fifteen-degree spread in the dewpoint today. Going back up tonight, supposed to crash again tomorrow.
I was at a talk in the philosophy department at York today when it suddenly struck me: I've been at York longer than anyone else in the room (since 1998; next up would probably be about 2000), and most people in the room (mostly grad students) don't know who I am. Insofar as there is a community here, these people are it, and I'm an alien. This is disconcerting.
I just saw the other day that the York Philosophy Graduate Students Association website, which I created, has gone through its second complete makeover since I handed it off--now it's done up in that blog-style format that people think websites should have nowadays. I'm surprised, and of course a bit pleased, that so much stuff I wrote is still there. There are some random rotating philosophy quotes down the sides of the pages; two out of the four I saw came from me. (They were solicited on an e-mail list for an entirely different purpose; the second-most-recent webmaster just decided to stick them on the website.) It's possible that no one but me would be aware that there's so much me there. I also saw that, while the constitution I wrote (because it was a condition of our becoming a formally recognized "club", which was a condition of our getting York webspace) is still up there, and apparently hasn't been amended, they've extra-constitutionally changed the executive structure--further evidence that writing constitutions for small organizations is really a useless exercise. (The graduate-worker/contract-faculty union at York is perpetually re-writing its constitution to reflect what it has actually been doing.)
This article in the Atlantic--linked off of bookforum.com, the former politicaltheory.info, which I have gone back to looking at because I have given up aldaily.com because its sneeriness was making me unhappy--clears up some of the basic mysteries about the fact that China owns the US. Apparently, every US$ that any Chinese company pulls in has to be turned over to the central bank, and almost every US$ the central bank pulls in is plowed into US treasury bills. This is how you increase your foreign reserves from $100 billion to $1.4 trillion in eleven years. And they do it for two reasons: to keep the US afloat as a customer, and to keep growth in the Chinese standard of living to a steady and manageable pace. The problem isn't really that China might call in the mortgage; the problem is that this is a pyramid scheme, and eventually the US is going to get to the peak and fall off. Half of the growth in the Chinese economy is being lent to the US to keep China growing. You get to the peak of the pyramid when the Chinese are as rich as the Americans, and you don't need the Americans as customers anymore. Of course, at that point, production will have moved from China to Africa, and the cycle will repeat.
Of course, I have no idea what I'm talking about.
I was at a talk in the philosophy department at York today when it suddenly struck me: I've been at York longer than anyone else in the room (since 1998; next up would probably be about 2000), and most people in the room (mostly grad students) don't know who I am. Insofar as there is a community here, these people are it, and I'm an alien. This is disconcerting.
I just saw the other day that the York Philosophy Graduate Students Association website, which I created, has gone through its second complete makeover since I handed it off--now it's done up in that blog-style format that people think websites should have nowadays. I'm surprised, and of course a bit pleased, that so much stuff I wrote is still there. There are some random rotating philosophy quotes down the sides of the pages; two out of the four I saw came from me. (They were solicited on an e-mail list for an entirely different purpose; the second-most-recent webmaster just decided to stick them on the website.) It's possible that no one but me would be aware that there's so much me there. I also saw that, while the constitution I wrote (because it was a condition of our becoming a formally recognized "club", which was a condition of our getting York webspace) is still up there, and apparently hasn't been amended, they've extra-constitutionally changed the executive structure--further evidence that writing constitutions for small organizations is really a useless exercise. (The graduate-worker/contract-faculty union at York is perpetually re-writing its constitution to reflect what it has actually been doing.)
This article in the Atlantic--linked off of bookforum.com, the former politicaltheory.info, which I have gone back to looking at because I have given up aldaily.com because its sneeriness was making me unhappy--clears up some of the basic mysteries about the fact that China owns the US. Apparently, every US$ that any Chinese company pulls in has to be turned over to the central bank, and almost every US$ the central bank pulls in is plowed into US treasury bills. This is how you increase your foreign reserves from $100 billion to $1.4 trillion in eleven years. And they do it for two reasons: to keep the US afloat as a customer, and to keep growth in the Chinese standard of living to a steady and manageable pace. The problem isn't really that China might call in the mortgage; the problem is that this is a pyramid scheme, and eventually the US is going to get to the peak and fall off. Half of the growth in the Chinese economy is being lent to the US to keep China growing. You get to the peak of the pyramid when the Chinese are as rich as the Americans, and you don't need the Americans as customers anymore. Of course, at that point, production will have moved from China to Africa, and the cycle will repeat.
Of course, I have no idea what I'm talking about.
