From: gaussianblue@asymptote.invalid   
      
   harley@yazzy.com writes:   
      
   >As for this AI stuff, what the hell is it?  I can find on the Web how   
   >to do Python, C++ and other languages. Where is the page showing what   
   >in the hell this AI stuff is?  I'm rather inclined to believe the   
   >whole AI thing is a hoax. I'll be 90 in a few months, and from what I   
   >observe of this country, and the world in general, the entire human   
   >race has gone insanely demented. "Progress" sucks.   
      
   You'll be 90? Wow! That's amazing! You've whitnessed things first hand   
   and I haven't because I'm just a kid. For example you've whitnessed the joy   
   at the end of WWII, but also the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.   
   The Human Rights Movement. The Cuba missile crisis. How man step by step   
   became more familiar with getting into space and the first man on the moon.   
   The Vietnam war and the protests against it. And the birth of the personal   
   computer. I'm forgetting many of them, but there is the Commodore 64, the   
   Apple II, the Macintosh. How it started as a hobby for a few nerds totally   
   unknown to the greater public to reach the point where almost everyone   
   had a personal computer. All these things, I only know them from tales.   
   You also remember what your grandparents told you about their lives.   
   I think you have something very valuable here   
   and I hope you stick around on usenet.   
      
   I just want to respond to your view of the world. You know in the era   
   of globalization it's tough to survive as an economy. Globalization is   
   described in the 1996 Samuel P. Huntington's book "The Clash of   
   Civilizations". So not really new, but still relatively new. In   
   the present era of globalization I see three types of economies.   
   Those of countries like North Korea. North Korea wants to cut itself   
   off from the rest of the world both as a country and as an econony.   
   And to be fair to North Korea I must say the world has chosen to cut   
   off North Korea too. The Country is unable to buy anything from any   
   other country in the world and has to rely solely on what it is able to   
   produce itself. Then there are countries like the US and the countries   
   of the global north. UK, European Union, Australia, Japan and so on.   
   These countries are not barricading themselves from the outside world   
   like North Korea does. A company in Japan or China can invest in something   
   that is located on the US soil and open a company there.   
   For countries like the   
   US it makes less and less sense to talk about the US economy. It's a global   
   economy encompassing the whole world. Same for Japan and so on.   
   So for example goods sold in the US are produced elsehwhere, where labor   
   is cheaper. Clothes in Bangladesh. Sneakers in China. Consumer electronics   
   again are assembled in China. And the third type of country would be   
   countries like Brazil, Russia, the countries of South America,   
   Africa, basically any country that doesn't cut itself off from the   
   rest of the   
   world like North Korea does. Well these countries participate in the   
   global economy but are struggling as soon as they need to supply   
   themselves on the world market because they don't produce something   
   inside the country or the thing isn't avilable locally for whatever   
   reason.   
   They struggle because as soon as they have to buy foreign goods, the   
   prices are high and their economies are not very strong. Ending here   
   what I see as the three types of economies or countries in the world.   
   So what should the US or any other country in the global north   
   do if it wants to keep the high level living standard of its citizens   
   relatively unchanged?   
   Well it's the same as trying to remain   
   a country of the second category. In other words to try to remain   
   a country with a strong economy so it doesn't have to struggle   
   when it has to buy foreign goods as countries from the third   
   category mentioned above are.   
   But if you compare the rate at which China's economy grows versus   
   the US, you can see that China is going to catch and beat the US   
   economy quite soon. And there is no way to stop China.   
   On the other side cutting itself off from the world as a country   
   is not really a solution. I don't see any real plans of the US   
   cutting itself off from the rest of the world so I'm not   
   talking about that any longer.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)