I'd best get fluent in Russian!

[thør]

I suppose the current administration might decide to cut losses and just give Alaska back to Russia?

Linkage

"Newswise — Sarah Palin has a new book out, and the former Alaska governor's rise to fame has brought more notoriety to her native state than it's had since the United States dropped $7.2 million in gold to buy it from Russia in 1867.
But a new analysis by a University of Iowa economist suggests the investment hasn't been worth it for U.S taxpayers.
"Cash flow from Alaska to the federal government since 1867 has certainly exceeded the initial purchase price, but this fact is not sufficient to demonstrate the purchase was a sound financial investment," said David Barker, an economist and adjunct professor of finance in the Tippie College of Business. "The economic benefits that have been received from Alaska over the years could have been obtained without purchasing the territory. In financial terms, Alaska has clearly been a negative net present value project for the United States."
Barker acknowledges that Alaska provides many benefits to the country. It's a rich source of natural resources, especially oil; its vistas, open spaces and wildlife provide unmatched natural beauty; and, for many Republicans like Barker, there's Palin herself.
But Barker argues that the federal government spent so much money to acquire Alaska (the $7.2 million in gold had the value of about $10 million in greenback currency at the time), then govern the area and build the infrastructure needed to access its resources that whatever financial benefits the state has provided have been far offset by the costs.
By Barker's calculation, the state has cost the federal government $13.4 million in 1867 dollars, which translates to a $16.5 billion loss in today's dollars, adjusting for the size of the economy.
"A good example is the Alaska Railroad, built by the federal government at a cost of over $53 million from 1915 to 1924, and operated at a loss until 1938," Barker said. "The railroad showed some profit from 1938 through the end of World War II, but then required another $100 million in rehabilitation. The 1964 Anchorage earthquake caused $30 million in damage to the railroad. In 1983 the railroad was valued at $22 million before it was sold to the State of Alaska. It now shows a small annual profit, but mostly as a result of large subsidies from the federal government."
He said the purpose of the railroad was not military, but to improve the Alaskan economy and, in turn, federal tax revenues. "The federal government clearly would not have made these expenditures if Alaska had not been purchased."
As for revenues, Barker said the federal government has collected many forms of them from Alaskans over the years, including income and excise taxes, a seal fur tax early in the territory's history, land leasing and sales, and, most significantly, taxes on oil. But he said that revenue can best be described as "occasional spikes followed by long periods of net federal subsidy" and have never offset the costs to the American taxpayer of purchasing, financing and paying to develop Alaska. Even today, no state collects more federal aid than Alaska, Barker said.
Barker also acknowledges that Alaska has been helpful strategically to the United States. For instance, its North Slope reserves provide an important domestic source of oil for the country.
But Barker points out the belief among many historians that if the United States had not purchased Alaska, Great Britain would have acquired it and made it a part of Canada. Given the historically close and friendly relationship between the United States and Canada, Barker said Americans still would have had access to Alaska's resources, just as Americans today have largely open access to Canada's resources, including its oil.
But that access would have come at a much lower cost to Americans, Barker notes, because the costs of developing the region's economy with roads, rail, port facilities and other infrastructure would have been paid by Canadian taxpayers, not American."

[SaintPeter]

Maybe Canada would take you off our hands.

[thør]

Originally Posted by SaintPeter

Maybe Canada would take you off our hands.

The Canadians would want to be paid for the trouble. And that's not in the budget. And we don't have enough curling sheets to be included into Canada, now.

[miles]

If it will make them like us more, I say go for it.

[torchthebitch]

With the population in Siberia declining and that in China expanding, maybe you'd be better learning Chinese for when China annexes Siberia.

[thør]

Originally Posted by miles

If it will make them like us more, I say go for it.

"them"??????

[thør]

Originally Posted by torchthebitch

With the population in Siberia declining and that in China expanding, maybe you'd be better learning Chinese for when China annexes Siberia.

They've already infiltrated our university system.

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Mandarin...






I think, using the same logic, KANSAS should be cut loose. The only thing we exported to the Union was John Brown...

[thør]

Originally Posted by thør

"them"??????

Ooohhh!

People from Iowa........I get it......

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Originally Posted by thør

They've already infiltrated our university system.

Damed skippy! Had to learn Chinese to figure out what the fucker wanted us to do for our assembly programming project.

Then I wrote a virus for his computer.

He flunked me!

[thør]

Originally Posted by Frisco_Slug_Esq

Mandarin...

I'm more of a Szechwan kinda guy.

[thør]

Originally Posted by Frisco_Slug_Esq

Damed skippy! Had to learn Chinese to figure out what the fucker wanted us to do for our assembly programming project.

Then I wrote a virus for his computer.

He flunked me!

You signed the virus, didn't you......

Of course, you were proud of your work.

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Originally Posted by thør

You signed the virus, didn't you......

Of course, you were proud of your work.

Didn't need to. As soon as he inserted the floppy (yes, we still had floppies! ), every drive was re-formatted.

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Originally Posted by thør

I'm more of a Szechwan kinda guy.

Yeah, I don't like cat and monkey...

[thør]

Originally Posted by Frisco_Slug_Esq

Didn't need to. As soon as he inserted the floppy (yes, we still had floppies! ), every drive was re-formatted.

hey, I used to work with boxes of punched cards!

Floppies were awesome.

[thør]

Originally Posted by Frisco_Slug_Esq

Yeah, I don't like cat and monkey...

We aren't talking about the White House, here!

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

[tone=snide]

*snicker*




Our first night in Beijing, I ordered chicken in chili sauce.

As the first bite neared my lips, the wife hissed from across the table...

"That's the HEAD!"

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Originally Posted by thør

hey, I used to work with boxes of punched cards!

Floppies were awesome.

My dad was at the railroad when the first IBMs came on line. We used the cards and tape for all our Boy Scout projects!

[thør]

Originally Posted by Frisco_Slug_Esq

[tone=snide]

*snicker*




Our first night in Beijing, I ordered chicken in chili sauce.

As the first bite neared my lips, the wife hissed from across the table...

"That's the HEAD!"

I have not been to Beijing although I have been invited. It seems that the group who extended the invitation has all to gain and I have naught. It's not sound business.

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

We went the week prior to my daughter's adoption.




She was in the South, so we took the time to see the North. That's one long freaking flight from KCI!

Forbidden City, Temple of Heaven, Tienanmen, the Wall, the Tombs, I mean, why go to China and skip all that? Getting there ws a lot more expensive than being there. We even stayed in the Peace Hotel.

[thør]

Originally Posted by Frisco_Slug_Esq

We went the week prior to my daughter's adoption.




She was in the South, so we took the time to see the North. That's one long freaking flight from KCI!

Forbidden City, Temple of Heaven, Tienanmen, the Wall, the Tombs, I mean, why go to China and skip all that? Getting there ws a lot more expensive than being there. We even stayed in the Peace Hotel.

An old friend of mine was born in China and got out before Mao took over. I remember talking to him before his trip back in about 1990. He was so excited. The next time I saw him, it was a couple of months after he got back. He was so sad. Most all of his classmates had been purged. Those that remained, were in menial manual labor jobs with broken spirits. He had nothing good to say about his trip.

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

You should try talking to Godmother's Father.

What do you do at Beijing University?
I'm a scientist.
What field are you in?
I'm in the Army.
What do you do in the army?
I work at the University.
What do you do at Beijing University?
I'm a scientist.

Rinse, lather, and repeat.

He survived Mao...

[trysail]

It is amazing to see the changes that can occur in comparatively brief periods of time. Young pups don't understand these things.

"Wisdom can't be told."
-Balzac


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?p...d=aWv7lRFfMUzI

Chinese 103-Year-Old Wall Street Emigrant Sees End of Communism
By Bloomberg News

Sept. 29 (Bloomberg) -- Zhou Youguang was a child of 6 when a revolution toppled China’s last emperor in 1912. He was 43 when he says he left a Wall Street banker’s job to help Mao Zedong’s Communists create what he thought would be a democracy after decades of warlord rule, occupation and civil war.

Now 103, he has seen China transformed from a country of 368 million being carved up by foreign powers to a nation of 1.3 billion and the world’s fastest-growing major economy, expanding at an average annual rate of 9.9 percent from 1978 to 2008. He says he still believes China will eventually become a democracy -- in spite of communism, not because of it.

“China will follow the mainstream of the world, sooner or later,” the pajama-clad Zhou said during an interview in the book-lined study of his third-floor walk-up apartment in central Beijing.

His experiences encapsulate the complicated legacy of the Communist Party, which celebrates 60 years in power this week with a military parade past Tiananmen -- the Gate of Heavenly Peace -- where Mao proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic on Oct. 1, 1949.

While Zhou endured three years of forced separation from his family during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, he survived a purge of intellectuals that led many of his colleagues to commit suicide. He was also given the opportunity to devise a new system of spelling out Chinese characters with the Roman alphabet that helped hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants learn to read.

‘Lucky Ones’
“There were very few who returned from America who escaped the catastrophe,” Zhou said. “I was one of the very lucky ones.”

Like China’s leaders, Zhou divides Communist rule into two periods: the first three decades dominated by Mao, who died in 1976, and the second characterized by the opening of China to the world by paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, who died in 1997. While Deng’s era sparked rapid growth, Zhou, an economist by training, considers it a mixed success.

Deng “reformed the economy but didn’t reform politics,” Zhou said. “In the political scene, there was absolutely no change; it was an autocracy.”

That wasn’t the outcome Zhou Enlai promised Zhou in the late 1930s. The two, who aren’t related, met in Chongqing when the Yangzi River city became the wartime capital following Japan’s occupation of Nanjing in 1937.

Meetings of Intellectuals
Zhou Enlai -- who would become China’s premier in 1949 -- held monthly get-togethers with intellectuals, including Zhou, who worked for Sin Hua Trust & Savings Bank, which was founded in 1914 and became part of the Bank of China Ltd. in 2001.

“Zhou Enlai told me at those meetings that the Communist Party was a democratic party,” Zhou said.

Zhou left China for New York at the end of 1946, where he represented Sin Hua at Irving Trust Co., the bank’s U.S. agent, at its Art Deco headquarters on 1 Wall Street. He and his wife, Zhang Yunhe, returned to Shanghai in June 1949, as the Communists neared victory.

“We thought that with China liberated, there was hope; everyone wanted to come back home and do something,” Zhou wrote in a 2008 autobiography.

When he arrived, Shanghai -- occupied by the People’s Liberation Army the previous month -- straddled the communist- capitalist divide. Zhou lived in both worlds: working at Sin Hua and at what is now the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics as a professor. There he and his colleagues, most of them scholars who returned from the U.S., watched as textbooks were jettisoned for new ones reflecting Marxist theories of class struggle.

Common Language
In 1955, Zhou, whose hobby was linguistics, was asked during a Beijing conference to lead a group creating a standardized system of writing Chinese phonetically with Roman letters. The project would supersede a hodgepodge of Romanization systems and was part of a drive that included simplifying the way thousands of characters were written and teaching a common language, Mandarin, in schools throughout the country.

“I said no way, I’m an amateur,” Zhou said. It was too late; the premier, who remembered his avocation from their days in Chongqing, had already called Zhou’s colleagues in Shanghai and told them he wouldn’t be coming home.

Zhou’s pinyin system, which turned “Peking” into “Beijing,” uses markers to identify which of Mandarin’s four tones to use. It became the national standard in 1958 and has helped reduce China’s illiteracy rate to 10 percent today from about 80 percent in the 1950s.

Mao’s Purge
His new career also kept him relatively safe when economics professors, especially those who had lived in the U.S., became targets of Mao’s Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957 to purge anyone he thought opposed his revolution.

“Every day there were people killing themselves,” Zhou wrote in his autobiography.

Zhou didn’t completely escape persecution. He was branded a “reactionary academic authority” in 1969 during the Cultural Revolution and sent to northwestern China’s Ningxia region, where, already well into his 60s, he spent a year toiling in rice paddies. He was allowed to return to his family in 1972. Since then he’s helped make pinyin a global standard and published books on linguistics.

Zhou never expressed regret in the interview for giving up his New York lifestyle. In 1949, the “common people trusted the Communist Party,” he said. Looking back over 60 years, he now believes the party, which he never joined, “cheated the Chinese people. They destroyed everything, especially the intellectuals.”

That doesn’t stop Zhou from saying that China’s economic boom will someday be accompanied by the democracy he had hoped to help create.

“I’m always optimistic,” he said.

[Peregrinator]

Originally Posted by thør

The Canadians would want to be paid for the trouble. And that's not in the budget. And we don't have enough curling sheets to be included into Canada, now.

What are you talking about? Half of Alaska is one big curling sheet.

[thør]

Originally Posted by Peregrinator

What are you talking about? Half of Alaska is one big curling sheet.

The problem with outdoor curling is that your beer freezes.