Internationalization

Has anyone else had problems with Google since they started using https by default? The war on encryption seems to mean that sometimes the google homepage, htttps://www.google.com/ncr, just takes a really long time to load. It eventually does, and then works fine, until the next bout of seizing.

China is a spoiler, it seems to me. This country acts to spoil ordinary benefits. That way of doing things can't honestly be making this country better. It can't honestly mean China is some kind of valuable place to be. It can mean there remain good things here despite the people's efforts to make conditions worse for others.

I don't know enough history to know if every country does this just as part of a normal life cycle. But it bothers me how China apparently seeks to undermine rather than to build. The aim of reducing the constructions of others is not admirable.

The bosses probably don't agree. That's all I can say.

The notion of the middle income trap applies, I think. It's even present in political vision - the "modestly well off society" - and apparently it's a good thing to not be creating pathways to greater wealth.

"Avoiding the Middle Income Trap entails identifying strategies to introduce new processes and find new markets to maintain export growth."

This "identifying" and "finding" is a creative task, and as such is destabilising. I susect new markets to exploit are welcome in the short term. Longer term discovery and actions taken to sustain new markets are far less welcome. It seems to me, and I'm just projecting here, that there is a striking difference in short and long term goals, and in particular there is a striking difference in who keeps and protects the goals. The people are allowed short term goals, such as "get rich soon". But there is some other collection of goals present in the construction of institutional China, political goals, and they are different.

" Ramping up domestic demand is also important—an expanding middle class can use its increasing purchasing power to buy high-quality, innovative products and help drive growth"

And this, in China, is ultimately a joke. I don't think "high quality, innovative products" are welcome. If they can be used as black boxes without much understanding, then yes. Otherwise, no. Adequate concepts of "quality" and "innovation" carry with them a freight of bad thoughts that imperil the nation.


I think it is intended that the country develop along a certain path. (Which, as a thought, is kind of "well, duh!" - but it's still kind of shocking to realize the traditional virtues of, say, democracies, are not meant to come into play here.)