Cyrus
06-24-2005, 11:37 AM
That thread about the "Chinese threat" is interesting. I wonder why would people refuse to acknowledge that, of course, China is a big player. And, as a big player, it is a threat to every other player.
Numbers will be the determinant of the future, at least in the foreseeable future, IMO.
The end of the Cold War meant that the old camps are not held together by ideology any more. We are all in one camp right now. Everybody is a capitalist. Some are (or pretend to be) pure and unadulaterated capitalists, others are quasi-capitalists. But everybody is doing business with someone else in strict capitalistic terms.
It used to be that a superpower's Cold War interests dictated that it supports some small country which offered no net economic benefit but was "ideologically affiliated" or strategically important. These notions of quality are, more or less, obsolete right now and are being replaced by strict notions of quantity.
When all is said and done, China has some 1.7 billion people and Taiwan only a fraction of that. Turkey has 80 million people - while the Turkish Kurds or the Armenians are not even registering on the map! India is a continent in itself while Pakistan is not. Iran is a huge country - with a youth anxious to get going on the consumer road.
...Need I bring up Israel? I will let gamblors elaborate.
I was pitching a change-up the other day to a regional "business development" exec who works for a corporation that "spans the globe". He was cutting to the chase: Anything that concerns the US, China, India, Brazil, or the EU's G3, or you-get-the-picture, gets past the door and can be X-rayed. The rest of the world is needed to refuel the jet. I was not to waste their time with puny figures of puny NPVs in puny countries.
Numbers will be the determinant of the future, at least in the foreseeable future, IMO.
The end of the Cold War meant that the old camps are not held together by ideology any more. We are all in one camp right now. Everybody is a capitalist. Some are (or pretend to be) pure and unadulaterated capitalists, others are quasi-capitalists. But everybody is doing business with someone else in strict capitalistic terms.
It used to be that a superpower's Cold War interests dictated that it supports some small country which offered no net economic benefit but was "ideologically affiliated" or strategically important. These notions of quality are, more or less, obsolete right now and are being replaced by strict notions of quantity.
When all is said and done, China has some 1.7 billion people and Taiwan only a fraction of that. Turkey has 80 million people - while the Turkish Kurds or the Armenians are not even registering on the map! India is a continent in itself while Pakistan is not. Iran is a huge country - with a youth anxious to get going on the consumer road.
...Need I bring up Israel? I will let gamblors elaborate.
I was pitching a change-up the other day to a regional "business development" exec who works for a corporation that "spans the globe". He was cutting to the chase: Anything that concerns the US, China, India, Brazil, or the EU's G3, or you-get-the-picture, gets past the door and can be X-rayed. The rest of the world is needed to refuel the jet. I was not to waste their time with puny figures of puny NPVs in puny countries.