Everybody's watching what's going on in Beijing right now with the Olympics. Think about the amount of money that China has spent on infrastructure. Their ports, their train systems, their airports are vastly the superior to us now, which means if you are a corporation deciding where to do business you're starting to think, "Beijing looks like a pretty good option." Why aren't we doing the same thing?
Yeah, Beijing looks pretty good. But only from certain angles.
Hugh Hewitt in this bit at Townhall sums it up nicely:
I suppose so. Provided you don't mind de minimus pollution controls, employing people under Chinese labor conditions, and you don't mind construction standards in the countryside that allow the collapse of thousands of buildings including schools when the earthquake hits, killing tens of thousands.
Obama has said a lot of stupid things recently, but the idea that totalitarian eye-candy engineering proves Beijing is the better than America is near the top of the list.
To be honest, I'm amazed that world records are falling the way they are at the Olympics in swimming and track given the pollution in the air. The swimming venue is indoors so I'm assuming its air is filtered. But the track and field venue (the "Birds Nest") is open air. Still it wouldn't surprise me if they expended the effort to install air filtration systems that provide relatively clean air at the level of the field and lower seating, not to mention the power it takes to run them.
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