THE GLORIOUS RETURN

[J Bananas]

of me to train of thought. out of retirement like hov to set this board back on the right track. to start, i thought i'd share with you an article from newsweek about America's place in international competition. entitled:

Seeing the Bright Side its surprisingly interesting for such a long read, and America critics can use the time to think of a something clever so they can scoff at us.

A panel of foreign observers are cautiously optimistic about America's ability to weather global competition

To get a sense of how the rest of the world judges America's prospects, NEWSWEEK spoke to several of the World Economic Forum's Young Global Leaders, a group of several hundred decision makers in fields ranging from politics to technology, business to entertainment. Our ad hoc group included the U.S.-educated president of Georgia, Mikhail Saakashvili; Indian IT Minister Dayanidhi Maran; Colombia's former minister of Culture María Consuelo Araújo; Jack Ma, the CEO of China's largest e-commerce company, Alibaba.com; Nokia's chief technology officer Tero Ojanpera; Die Welt editor Jan-Eric Peters, and Harvard history professor and author of "Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire" Niall Ferguson, a Brit. Excerpts:
What's the first thing that comes to mind when you think of the U.S. economy? Peters: Competition, flexibility and creativity, pressure to perform and social harshness. But above all its sheer inexhaustible, admirable, positive energy. Saakashvili: When I think of the American economy I think of my own experience in the U.S. My wife and I started as students in a basement in Astoria, Queens, and within two and a half years I had a nice apartment [near] Central Park, I had a nice job at a law firm, and I knew that I basically had an unlimited range of opportunities. That's what you don't find anywhere else in the world.

Does America still lead the global economy?

Araújo: Yes, but it can't let down its guard. I was in China last year and I was incredibly impressed by the people's capacity for work, their discipline, and their ability to put collective interests ahead of individual ones.
Ojanpera: The U.S. is still the world leader in technology. That said, I go to Silicon Valley regularly, and when I was there about 12 months ago, a lot of engineering managers were looking for jobs, because so much of the research and development work that they used to manage has moved to India and China. Only the core ideas are now starting in Silicon Valley.

Ma: American people feel very confident. And if they keep on doing that, they'll probably still lead economically. But if they always look backward, and say "Somebody's catching up, we're losing," then that probably will happen. It's a psychological thing.
Ferguson: The U.S. dollar is still the world's reserve currency of choice, and the key institutions in global financial management are still headquartered in the U.S. But this is conceivably going to change over time. It is hard to be a hegemon if you are simultaneously the world's biggest debtor.

What are the strengths and weaknesses of the American model?

Ma: Five or 10 years ago, everyone said this is great and that is great about America. Everything sounded good, right? But when you really calm down and look into it, you see a lot of problems. They're strong, they're confident. And their weakness is also probably that they think they're strong, and they're too confident. The thing they believe is right and good, they always want to impose on other countries.

Araújo: Among the strengths is unquestionably America's social mobility, the fact that an American can climb the social ladder and achieve a higher standard of living through hard work. And among its weaknesses, at least for me, is its excessive obsession with consumption and the great extent to which its military and economic policies are linked. You look, for example, at the U.S. involvement in Iraq, which is linked to some extent with the issue of oil, and you see some of the reasons for America's poorer economic performance in recent years.

Peters: People don't want to accept that a system whose weaknesses, in their eyes, should long ago have led to American society's collapse still works after 200 years—and better than any other. People see the economic success but feel it comes at too high a price—the gap between rich and poor, quick hiring and firing, citizens without health insurance. But the strengths outweigh the weaknesses by far. Give me a green card and I'm there.

What do you think the States has to do to maintain its leadership position?

Araújo: It has to be more flexible with things like immigration, both as a way of maintaining the American tradition and taking advantage of the enormous fount of creativity, labor and professional capacity that immigrants represent for the American economy. To try and ignore Spanish speakers, for example, and their increasingly important role in the U.S. economy as creators of new businesses and new markets, is not only offensive to Mexicans and other Latin Americans with family members in the U.S., but a big mistake for the development of the country.

Ma: The risk is that Americans know the outside world much less than people outside know the U.S. Americans believe "this is the way, we are the world." When I watch TV interviews with [Americans] talking about China, I say, "My God, they know nothing! They're just pretending to know everything." That will seriously damage U.S. leadership in the future, because people will say, "You don't know me, but you're thinking about leading me."

Do you think that the rise of Asian economies will diminish America's stature?

Maran: No, the global economy is not a zero-sum game [such] that the rise in one region will come at the cost of another. In an interconnected and interdependent world, no economy would like to damage others.

Ma: I think of the Chinese philosophy of Taoism, which says: if you want to be the leader, it all depends on you, not on others. It has nothing to do with Asia's rise or Africa's rise or Europe's rise. As Asia grows, if the U.S. can take advantage of it, can adjust its strategy, then maybe it will grow even more. But if [Americans] feel insecure, if they turn inward, then they'll be in trouble.
Ferguson: We will no longer be able to talk about a unipolar world, and in that sense something is changing. But there is so much interdependence between the U.S. and China at the moment that it's hard to see this as a source of serious difficulty. The U.S. economy is still so much larger than China's, and Americans are so much wealthier than Chinese on average—you've got to project quite far forward into the future to see a great shift in the balance of economic power.

Are American universities still the best in the world?

Ferguson: Oh, I think there's no question. And the very top universities, like the one where I work, are really so far ahead of the competition that it's really hard to see how non-Americans can catch up. On the other hand, that could change, too. After all, it's not inconceivable that Asian universities could get an enormous financial injection. But it's going to be a huge mountain for them to climb.

Saakashvili: An American university seems to be a chaotic place. At first, when I was a student, I got overwhelmed by the fact that I wasn't regulated or controlled. Nobody told me how many hours I should read, what kind of courses I should go through—things they used to tell me in Europe. It's not easy. But that's their advantage, as with chaos comes more innovation and more freedom.

Ojanpera: The U.S. educational system isn't keeping up with demands for scientific talent. We haven't done enough in the West to make science attractive to students as a career choice. They perceive it as a field in which they'd be solving difficult technical or mathematical problems, but not necessarily as one in which they'd have a chance to start and interact with exciting new businesses, which of course it is. But in developing countries, students are more likely to go for the scientific paths. That brings you to the question of migration, and how open we in the West are to these people. It's not helping things that it's tougher these days for outsiders to get places in Western universities.

How overwhelming is the U.S. lead in high-tech innovation? Who has the best chance of overtaking us?

Maran: I find that the ecosystem sup- porting high-tech innovation is very robust in the U.S. Naturally, it has built a significant lead in the area. I would not hazard a guess [on who will overtake America]. I would rather say that in different areas, clusters of high-tech innovation are developing. However, innovation is essentially a collaborative phenomenon and is a win-win situation. Both the U.S. and such clusters elsewhere should reinforce each other for common benefit of both.

Peters: I don't consider Americans to lead in innovation—but they're the best at taking innovations to the market. If other innovative countries like Germany acquired that ability, Americans would have a much harder time. Another success factor is the huge, integrated domestic market. In this regard, China and India have the best chance of catching up.

Do you think that the rise of the anti-Americanism in the world could influence American competitiveness?

Araújo: I think it could, because while economic fundamentals may be the most important for trading partners, more subjective and intuitive factors like one's admiration and sympathy for a culture also come into play. My perception of the Chinese, for example, is that they make an enormous effort to show interest in other cultures, to be receptive and to bridge cultural gaps. It's an effective way of selling their country.

Maran: No, not really. U.S. foreign policy may have some opponents, but anti- Americanism has not translated into economic anti-Americanism. At any rate, economic interests are generally not rooted in ideology.

Ferguson: I doubt it, rather. After all, there have been spates of anti-Americanism in the past. The people who are expressing anti-Americanism are very seldom economic decision makers.
Peters: Even at an anti-Bush demonstration, people drink Coke.

Will people look back on the age we're living in as an American age?

Saakashvili: Look, it's obvious there is no longer any classical unipolar world anymore, but of course in terms of setting values, in terms of being an example, in terms of [establishing] rules for the game, certainly, the influence of the United States cannot be underestimated.

Ojanpera: The past 20 years have certainly been shaped by American culture. But now we're entering an era that will be less defined by nationality than by global communities enabled by digital technology. Several of the trends driving this have developed in the U.S.—things like content sharing online, social networking and blogging. That said, the era itself won't be defined by geography, but by the Internet itself, and its users.

Maran: This is an age of global interdependence. I think posterity will look back at this age as one of transition from the world of atoms to that of bytes, from an industrial and manufacturing age to one of information and knowledge.

Ferguson: It was a bit of an illusion to call the 20th century the American Century, or the Western Century, because the long-term trend from 1900 forward was the renaissance or revival of Asia, beginning with Japan. I think we'll look back and 2006 will seem possibly like the middle phase of what you might call the Great Reconvergence, the Great Rebalancing, of world economic power, which had becoming incredibly unbalanced from 1750 to about 1900 as Asia declined and the West, including the United States, dominated.

[King Tech Quadafi]

banana boys comeback= young mcs comeback

[J Bananas]

tech commenting on comeback = lil cease talkin shit about cam and jimmy

[King Tech Quadafi]

tech commenting on comeback = lil cease talkin shit about cam and jimmy

we need a new banana post like we need a new fu schnickens album

[jeromechickenbone]

tech commenting on comeback = lil cease talkin shit about cam and jimmy

we need a new banana post like we need a new fu schnickens album

Fu Schnickens is dope.  Good article.

[King Tech Quadafi]

tech commenting on comeback = lil cease talkin shit about cam and jimmy

we need a new banana post like we need a new fu schnickens album

Fu Schnickens is dope.  Good article.

yeah and banana boy is not that bad himself, but do you REALLY NEED a new fu schnickens album?

think about it

[jeromechickenbone]

tech commenting on comeback = lil cease talkin shit about cam and jimmy

we need a new banana post like we need a new fu schnickens album

Fu Schnickens is dope.  Good article.

yeah and banana boy is not that bad himself, but do you REALLY NEED a new fu schnickens album?

think about it

As long as they can bring heat like this...


<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/N58K8JULaKM&amp;search=fu%20schnickens%20" target="_blank" class="new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/N58K8JULaKM&amp;search=fu%20schnickens%20</a>

[King Tech Quadafi]

lol you know damn well youre not anticipating a new fu schnickens album

i mean i loved me lords of the underground and camp lo back in the days, but im not looking forward to their album