Subscription required for China Makes, The World Takes: "One engineer pointed out that because [Windows] Vista requires up to 10 times as much disk space as Windows XP, the assembly line had to be altered to allow a much longer, slower passage through the burn-in station."

Intriguing. Apple's Leopard has increased in size from Tiger, but not by ten times.

Further in the article: "The woman from the hinterland working in Shenzhen [in China] is arguably better off economically than an American in Chicago living on minimum wage. She can save most of what she makes and feel she is on the way up, the American can't and doesn't. Over the next two years, the minimum wage in the United States is expected to rise to $7.25 an hour. Assuming a 40-hour week, that's just under $1,200 per month, or about 10 times the Chinese factory wage. But that's before payroll deductions and the cost of food and housing, which are free or subsidized in China's factory towns."

Provocative. It is something to think about, and can be argued against. In some houses bound up by poverty, you can find a nice, apparently affordable 30" HDTV, which says something about priority of the families. People need entertainment. On the other hand, there may be a culture of low expectation and aversion to challenged. Racism is a complex, but contributing part. A classroom in San Francisco can have a diverse number of students, yet a pattern always emerges with people of Latin- or African-American descents doing worse than white or Asian-American peers.

The question is why? It is the same classroom. We can reasonably expect some students to be "misfits." But why do we see such demarcation of scores parallel the racial boundaries? Needless to say, racial boundaries are superficial. They are also indifferent to the underlying similarities in personality, intelligence, and empathy that tie the human race together. How does and why should historical and socioeconomic factors play a huge role in American achievements?

Could there indeed by some flaws in the American system of individualism? Could individualism benefit immigrants more because they usually have support of their families, heritage and culture, and ironically hurt the American-born most because the fixation on mobility and the belief in self-reliance lead them to live a life of fruitless myth-making? In other words, could the American Dream of a nuclear family in a nuclear house in an exurbia, livable only by freedom of access to a car be hurting the American potentials?

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