Algae is teh new oil...
http://earth2tech.com/2008/03/27...-to-fuel-tanks/
that's pretty darn interesting.
Love the "some algae will be re-educated" bit. Very funny in an ironic way (I'm up for some irony today).
this is why china will replace us as world superpower in the next decade or so...infinate supply of manpower..
look say every one in a million people are enstine level geniouses...china has thousands of them...one in a billion people have x ability, china has a few of them.
infiante supply of manpower, and a central org to oversee its application.
I for one welcome our new chinese overlords 
Now i jsut need to teach me kids "please dont' beat me" and "can I have some food" in manderin.
Moonglum
Qing bu pou wo and Qing gei wo fan
As for the the cleanup I'm guessing they didn't have to order people to do it at all. I spent two months in Qingdao about three years ago (it is a really great city BTW) and I can't express how excited people were that that they Olympic sailing events would be in their home. The entire city center was being rebuilt and everyone I met asked if I was planning on coming back for the games. My guess is the government just mentioned that they needed people to clean up the bay and thousands of people showed up on their own. China is serious about putting it's best foot forward for the games and so are the Chinese people. You could argue it is the result of propaganda or such but I don't think you can argue that it isn't now a sincere desire on the part of the Chinese people.
As a brief linguistic aside Pou3 is the general to hit but for beat you could also you Chi4 (which carries more of the connotation that the english flog would) or Da3 (which is more like strike) These little details will be important when our new chinese overlords take command
thanks Gabe
but his comments hit the hart of my point...onyl a small percentage of peopel are ever willign to do thigns liek voluintary polution cleanup....china has billions of people, so that small percentage is an army of workers.
infinate cheap labor, we can't compeate with that.
moonglum, since when does more equal infinite?
Isn't there a point about over population to be made here? Or the effect of the one child rule on demographics?
I'm not an expert on China but so much of the discussion about China reminds me of the awe/worrying/saber-rattling/xenophobia/etc... about Japan in the 80's.
Some was right. A whole hell of alot was wrong.
At this point I've pretty much started to tune people out whenever China is mentioned.
baltogeek in a gerneation or so the one child rule will start to greatly adversily affect china...that hasn't happened yet. Right now china is dealing with a workforce so massive that from any other poitn of view it may as well be infinate. they are right now what america was before the world wars...
Commenting by HaloScan
