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100 Useful Tools to Teach Your Child Chinese

Whether illustrating a family’s rich cultural heritage, homeschooling, or... more

eva2
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Wu-Yi tea- is it the world’s most effective weight loss system?

If you have ever went to a Chinese restaurant and drank tea, you have probably drank... more

Merlyn_Seeley
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Feng Shui for the bathroom

Need a new look in the bathroom? Consider Feng shui.

Merlyn_Seeley
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820 lbs. Cocaine Bust in Hong Kong: Raw Video

Hong Kong police made their largest single seizure of drugs so far after discovering... more

mdirenzo
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The Surprising Reason Why Americans Are So Lonely, and Why Future Prosperity Means Socializing with Your Neighbors | | AlterNet

Access to cheap energy made us rich, wrecked our climate, and made us the first people on earth who had no practical need of our neighbors -- that has to change.
April 27, 2010 |

Community may suffer from overuse more sorely than any word in the dictionary. Politicians left and right sprinkle it through their remarks the way a bad Chinese restaurant uses MSG, to mask the lack of wholesome ingredients. But we need to rescue it; we need to make sure that community will become, on this tougher planet, one of the most prosaic terms in the lexicon, like hoe or bicycle or computer. Access to endless amounts of cheap energy made us rich, and wrecked our climate, and it also made us the first people on earth who had no practical need of our neighbors.

In the halcyon days of the final economic booms, everyone on your cul de sac could have died overnight from some mysterious plague, and while you might have been sad, you wouldn't have been inconvenienced. Our economy, unlike any that came before it, is designed to work without the input of your neighbors. Borne on cheap oil, our food arrives as if by magic from a great distance (typically, two thousand miles). If you have a credit card and an Internet connection, you can order most of what you need and have it left anonymously at your door. We've evolved a neighborless lifestyle; on average an American eats half as many meals with family and friends as she did fifty years ago. On average, we have half as many close friends.

I've written extensively, in a book called Deep Economy, about the psychological implications of our hyperindividualism. In short, we're less happy than we used to be, and no wonder -- we are, after all, highly evolved social animals. There aren't enough iPods on earth to compensate for those missing friendships. But I'm determined to be relentlessly practical -- to talk about surviving, not thriving. And so it heartens me that around the world people are starting to purposefully rebuild communities as functioning economic entities, in the hope that they'll be able to buffer some of the effects of peak oil and climate change.

The Transition Town movement began in England and has spread to North America and Asia; in one city after another, people are building barter networks, expanding community gardens. And they've paid equal, or even greater, attention to suburbia; in the developed world, after all, that's where most people live. Though our sprawl is designed for the car, the sunk costs of those tens of millions of houses mean they're not going to disappear just because the price of gas rises. They'll have to change instead. "Suburbia, not as a model for material consumption, but as a legal and social lattice of decentralized and more uniformly distributed production land ownership, has the potential to serve as the foundation for just such a pioneering adaptation," writes Jeff Vail, a widely read economic theorist who envisions "a Resilient Suburbia."

In fact, quite sober economists have begun to insist that even in our seemingly globalized world, our economies are actually far more local than we realize. Despite the "pervasive image of a single U.S. economy," the economists William Barnes and Larry Ledeber write, "local economies -- primarily metropolitan-centered and strongly linked -- are the real economies in the United States." They build, with rich statistical backing, on the original insights of thinkers like Jane Jacobs, who always insisted that the city was the fundamental building block of our economic life. These "Local Economic Regions" comprise the web of transportation and communication links, the chain of educational institutions in a region, and the web of emotional ties. (My Vermont neighbors may not care much how many gold medals the United States captured at the Olympics, but they are deeply involved with how many runs the Red Sox scored last night.)

Those local economies were originally shaped by geography -- a port, a river, a low place in the mountains where you could build a canal. For a while those assets seemed less important; with endless cheap energy, you could always put something on a truck or a plane. But the cities built on those early patterns persisted; they were a sunk cost, too. No one was going to move Buffalo, with its museums and universities and square miles of housing stock, just because the highway had bypassed the Erie Canal. (And now some of those original assets may be returning to prominence. The Erie Canal, for instance, has seen a marked upswing in business as the price of oil rises, because a gallon of diesel pulls a ton of cargo 59 miles by truck, but 514 miles in a barge.) Shanghai is 7,371 miles from New York. It's true that Chinese workers cost you a dollar an hour, but at some point the math shifts.Access to cheap energy made us rich, wrecked our climate, and made us the first people... more

Monkey_Films
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Chinese Water Fight: Raw Video

Drought cut the new year celebrations short for China's ethnic Dai minority in... more

mdirenzo
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Huan Chen: Bayview Gathers for Anti-Violence Vigil

Huan Chen: Bayview Gathers for Anti-Violence Vigil On Friday, April 9, residents of... more

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Chinese coal ship's paint bringing instant death to Great Barrier Reef

The Chinese coal ship that ran on to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef last week... more

HowdyDo
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Chinese Grandmother Zhang Ruifang Has One Horn, Growing Another

April 9) -- A 101-year-old Chinese grandmother just might be the world's horniest... more

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If you can hardly speak English, welcome to WAFANGDIAN English School!!!

i *think* this is a joke and he is using a fake accent.... but you never know

anyhow1020
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2 years ago
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RE: Who you calling a turkey?

RE: http://blogs.current.com/comedy/2009/11/25/who-you-calling-a-turkey/ I've... more

joshuaheller
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2 years ago
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Some FAILs, that I don’t think are FAILs #4

Sometimes people decide to call things FAILs, when they aren’t really that FAIL.... more

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Hummer's fate as a Chinese Humdinger

Each day this week seemed to bring news about the fate of Hummer, America's polluting elephant in the room. Early in the week it seemed that an obscure Chinese machinery company called Sichuan Tengzhong would buy the General Motors marque for $150 million.

But as it turned out, Tengzhong couldn't get its act together. Chinese banks withdrew lending offers and American banks are weary of becoming involved. Tengzhong even tried to go through a subsidiary outside China to buy Hummer, according to Chinese media.“The deal is on the ropes, if it’s not on the canvas yet,” Michael Dunne, the president of a Hong Kong auto consulting firm told The New York Times.

Also, the Chinese government didn't approve regulation for the deal. Why, you might ask? The New York Times reports, that it's in large part because "senior Chinese officials are trying to put a new emphasis on limiting China’s dependence on imported oil and protecting the environment."

And to think that in the early days of the Iraqi war, the Hummer epitomized pro-America. Now that sustainability is on our radar, it would seem that things have changed. Now everyone wants in on a piece of the sustainability pie.

As of Wednesday, the bid is off. Hummer could be destined for the junkyard. A New York Times editorial said, "We suspect the deal collapsed because the Chinese Communist Party — which rarely shows much shame — is worried about China’s image as the most polluting nation on the planet."
GM said it would shut down Hummer after the Tengzhong's bid collapsed.

Then on Thursday, Hummer had a come-back when news broke that GM contacted four Chinese companies to gauge interest in the brawny military-derived SUV.

It’s unlikely a Chinese firm will buy the entire unit, analysts said, but the firms may only be interested in buying parts of Hummer's assets (i.e. tooling and equipment at Hummer's Louisiana factory.)

In response to GM's announcement, Detroit Free Press joshed that "flags across oil-rich Saudi Arabia were lowered to half-mast while the entire Exxon/Mobil board of directors were seen at a group grief counseling session. On Wall Street, oil speculators were jumping from windows while in Michigan, some people were mourning the possibility of a world without Hummers."

Photo: All Right Released.
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Modern Art Flourishes in Shanghai

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Great Wall of Chocolate

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The basics of Feng Shui

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Chris Martin: the Barack Obama dildo

"Some people are returning their Christmas gifts... the Barack Obama dildo,... more

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Google attacks 'traced to Chinese schools'

Chinese authorities have not commented on NY Times reports that intelligence has... more

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Hot and Beautiful Chinese Model Wang Yi Bing Photos

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100 Free Tools & Resources to Teach Yourself Chinese

If you plan to major in business and may be working with the Chinese in your career,... more

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