jbrun

That is all true. However I would say that the divisions within US society (black vs. white, guns vs. no guns, abortion vs no abortion, tax rich vs. tax no one,...) and the horrible public education system will be its biggest challenge going forward. At the end of the day, empires are build on economic / technological advantage - Roman army & aqueducts, British longbow, French knights, British steampower, US microprocessors,...

If you are interested in a more detailed portrait of the shifts happening, this book is excellent. If the US loses its technological advantage and its reserve currency status, it is very difficult to know what will happen.

https://www.amazon.com/Shadows-American-Century-Decline-Disp...

China's biggest problem will be demographics, second only to their political system.

US will likely due to tax / deficit issues, not so different than the French aristocrats who refused to pay taxes in run-up to the revolution.

How about the clothes you are wearing, do you think they get your the same wage as a worker in the US or Europe? But I bet you like the cheap clothes...

Your Amazon warehouse workers... the aviation repair people in El Salvador... the list is endless. Offshoring can make certain products cheaper and software is no exception.

Software is particular because it is not tied to production location, but that does not mean you are not subject to market forces.

Email me anytime about FightClub, have not organized one in a while, but they can be fun!

When we bought the company it was losing about -20% of revenues and had never made a profit. We are up to -10% after 6 months and I think we will get breakeven in 4-5 months. So, we are not profitable yet, but we will be!

Japan is a pretty good place to be born. Better than many places. Talking about debt without talking about assets and ownership structure of debt is incomplete.

For example, we pay out team in Shanghai between 3000 USD and 1000 USD per month. They represent the middle class. Yes, it is less than many in the US, but it is still high enough to enjoy consumer products, travel, and invest in their future and their children's. Plus salaries are increasing 2-3% a year. Government spending on infrastructure is a huge part of GDP, but if you take the high speed trains in China you will see that every seat is sold out and they are not that cheap and if you go to a Chinese tourist location, it is packed, and tickets to enter can easily be 30-40$. This is anecdotal evidence of course, but I would recommend a trip to China - both coastal and interior - if you are so skeptical. Flights are cheap!

You have to marry Chinese.

Having lived, worked and now running a B2B SaaS company there, the growth is real. Are the numbers exactly right, of course not. China is a massive, complex and not entirely transparent mesh of interests. Long story short though, there is a real middle class in China that is driving real consumer demand. This is starkly different to India, South Africa or Brazil where no real middle class exists.

Much longer thoughts on America vs. China http://www.jonathanbrun.com/who-will-lead-the-world/

We are seeing increased action on environmental compliance in China. Our SaaS company offers tools to help businesses comply to environmental (and safety and quality laws). We recently bought a company in China that is in the same business and I can tell you that the citizens are very happy with government initiatives and companies are taking this seriously. (Separate post coming about SaaS in China).

I have lived in China for 1.5 years in 2005, 2010 and returning a lot now and I have travelled pretty much everywhere in the country, in my humble opinion, China is on a very interesting path that will make it hard for the US and EU to compete in a variety of sectors. We shall see. https://www.nimonik.com and http://www.envitool.com are the companies in question.

Isn't bitcoin limited in the number of coins that can be issued?

That was much later on. I am talking about basically end of Roman Empire to 1600.

We had privately created money in Europe for centuries. It was a disaster.

You are just delaying the problem, not actually fixing it and who forks and when? Unless you change the way crypto currencies are made and allow for unlimited creation of new money, it cannot work as a general purpose currency.

Then you would not have an economy.

Crypto currencies can exist for those who want them, I don't see any reason to block them beyond ponzi scheme and marketing issues - similar to stock issues. So probably they need some regulation to not defraud unwitting people.

Bitcoin is not an alternative to Euros. That is the whole point. If you switched all euros to bitcoins and asked people to trade those, the economy would collapse as no one would want to trade their bitcoins because mathematically, they increase in value due to the limited issuance of them. Without modest inflation, the economy cannot grow as no one would spend money for investment purposes.

No, that is not at all the argument. The argument is that you cannot have an economy run on a deflationary currency, which bitcoin is. An effective economy requires a bit of inflation and the ability to issue new money when necessary for socio-political reasons. Crypto currencies are a cult, though the underlying tech is interesting.

A police officer screams at a lady whose three year old child is running all over the place.

Excellent book indeed.

Quebec has gone about 50 years.

If you are in Quebec - join us at http://revenudebase.quebec In Canada: join us at : http://biencanada.ca

Call http://equalit.ie/ - they have a free open source tool for exactly this!

And then all of them could not go to college due to immigration status and lack of money. They do manual labor now. Great American Underdog Story.

Javert

We tried this about a year and a half ago, and it has been fairly popular:

http://www.makeyourgirlfriendhappy.com

The idea could be taken much further, lack of time on my part really. Feedback welcome.

We are putting up a pretty good fight here in Canada to keep it 'civilized', though there is some nasty lawful access legislation being discussed.

Thanks, you're right, and I was hoping people would continue to the actual job posting linked from the bottom of my post. This one was more of a personal appeal for partners and passionate product developers and I then have a more technical job posting on the corporate site - nimonik.ca with the stack, our history, growth and other information.

Thanks for the comment.

Canada has a fairly good prison system that has often been emulated abroad. However, our recently elected Federal government has plans to increase obligatory sentences, prison sizes and reduce costs - which all leads to a very bad mix. Zed, any comments on Canada?

I live in Montreal and can attest to our growing ambitions in the startup tech community. Great place to start a company.

I will have to add an API to my site http://makeyourgirlfriendhappy.com so people can track for breakups as well. Great idea though, definitely relationship 2.0