Dude!!!

Random Act of Culture

Scattered, Like Brains

Good golly. Yeah I've been spending way too much time on Facebook being social. I feel happier, but stupider for it. Okay, not stupider, but less studious. I should really be reading articles.

I am trying to form an opinion about what I think the effects of the de-pegging of the Chinese RMB to the dollar and the inflation it is causing in China and the likely ripple effect of inflation in America. And also the changing work culture there. I've heard that many young people are leaving rural areas to move to the cities and work in the service industry and many of the people who went to Beijing to work the Olympics never went back home and that's causing labor shortages in the factories. And change is going very quickly. The currency rate bump up is going to be like 4% soon. So I think import prices from China are going to increase a lot and I wonder what effect that will have on the North American economy. In the latest DOL numbers, the Producer Price index is up .4%, the Consumer Price Index is only up .1% but wouldn't the PPI directly influence the CPI, uh, causally? Will we recover our domestic production capacity? In time? Will we increase imports from India and Mexico? Will this fluctuation affect the entire globe? What areas will benefit? Am I a citizen of the world or of America? I want to tell my friends what to do...

And you guys both probably know I am in over my head. Which leads me to: How do I form opinions? I feel like... you know, this is a little raw. But for whatever reason, I feel like a noob. I've avoided having opinions because I didn't want conflict or criticism or have to defend myself or even to make waves. So I've got some issues with this. But I feel like I have pretty good intuition and a good sense of "how things are", I've got a good position to monitor different market segments like advertising, collectibles and restaurant supply, which behave differently, so I have quite a bit of national data to work with. And I think most essays do start with a certain hypothesis in mind. I think I have anough flexibility to change my opinion if I find I'm wrong. How do I analyze things without trying to read 5 huge books and falling into a morass, trying to become an economist? I don't know to what standards I have to hold myself personally accountable for? I know the standards of journalism are strict. It's just there is an incredible amount of space between Perfect and utterly stupid and I'm not even getting on the board anywhere because it won't be "correct". How do I find my place?