I trust the Chinese government more than ADM or Monsanto.

"...but teach your kids to speak Chinese."
===

Best advice ever.

High schools big and small (Palo Alto on down) are teaching Mandarin. Learn well, grasshopper.

""...but teach your kids to speak Chinese.""

Too late, we're spending lots of dough on teaching them Spanish. Whoops. Perhaps a century from now, America will be a place of cheap Hispanic labor and Chinese/SE Asian commerce, with a MandarSpan language. The Chinese will promote Catholicism and Santaria amongst the natives, because it means they'll continue to breed prolifically and provide lots of future indentured servants.

Meanwhile, maybe the Native Americans, whites and blacks will hightail it to Canada.

The Chinese Central Bank holds 8% of outstanding Treasury bonds. I think they are more worried about feeding a growing middle class population. Farms in China get very high yields, so they will have problems expanding production. Of course they could sell those bonds and buy American wheat, but if they do that in a big way it might be inflationary.

They ran out of oilfields in Africa to buy. It seems obvious what they are doing and no one says anything. The Japanese wanted glam properties (which when tha collapsed stuck them in a 20-year rut) and everyone screamed.

Everyone knows land is worth more than more T-bills which are wasting assets. The Chinese want natural resources, so I'll give them points for that. Doesn't hurt that our politicians want to dive-bomb the value of the dollar and make everything cheap for guys like the Chinese.

Besides if you're Chinese and you get a deal like sending us cheap plastic toys in exchange for hard assets like land, wouldn't you take it?

"I trust the Chinese government more than ADM or Monsanto."

Yeah right. I dare you to eat food imported from China with all the interesting chemicals they tend to include in it.

URUAÇU, Brazil — When the Chinese came looking for more soybeans here last year, they inquired about buying land — lots of it.

Frank's point about ADM and Monsanto, well taken, information about Chinese problems on links below.

http://www.focusire.com/archives/379.html

Various food problems have let the Chinese people suffering for a long time. According to information provided by the Ministry of Health, in the year of 2003, the Ministry of Health received the 379 reports of major food poisoning with 12,876 people were poisoned and 323 people were killed. Compared to 2002, the number of major food poisoning ,the number of poisoned people and the number of deaths increased by 196.1%, 80.7%, 134.1% respectively [4]. That is a horrible thing.
The food problems of China not only make the Chinese people living in fear, but also let the other countries worry about the future of trading with China, considering whether to import the material or products.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/24/AR2007042402539.html

As globalization of the food supply progresses, "the food gets more anonymous and gradually you get into a situation where you don't know where exactly it came from and you get more vulnerable to poor quality," said Michiel Keyzer, director of the Centre for World Food Studies at Vrije University in Amsterdam

Globalization of food and vested interests in food commodities, have moved safety away from people and brought increased prices. Not good at all to have corporations in control of our food.

Will China be looking at our farmland that we were told would be saved outside the UGB?

I have written before, outside the UGB I see McMansions and estates, street tree production, and where I used to see food growing, I see our best fertile farmland within our UGB has been taken for development.
Filling up all the pieces of land within our UGB and more people living in high density "cells" without space to grow food doesn't make much sense anymore.

Now I understand smart growth -- it's about building up in urban areas to keep arable land free from development so the Chinese can buy it up. It is smart for someone after all.

There's one thing about the UGB that everybody must understand: It does not exist to prevent growth or determine where it ultimately goes; it exists to slow development down and guide it.

In other words, the UGB is *not* a boundary that delineates where growth happens, it simply says "develop on this side first".

My question has always been: Why? If you're going to pave over the farmland anyway, if you're going to promote ultra-high density anyway, what are you doing other than just trying to pack the sardines tighter and more systematically?

Why? It has turned out to be a huge money making venture for some.

Ever notice how when the UGB gets extended we get the same "step and repeat" sprawl anyway?

Some go along with all this mantra of "save farmland and congest inside" as OK to use inside the UGB, Portland as a sacrifice zone for "the plan."
Hardly heard a peep out of anyone such as environmental groups or the Coalition for a Livable Future when a complete park in N. Portland was sold for housing. We can thank Vera Katz and Charlie Hales for that. . and he claims now to be proud of his park achievements?

How smart is it to make the very place most people live, by dictated policies, unlivable?

What clinamen said. I'd add this: when does growth and development of farmland and open space come to a stop? It's a rhetorical question, because our current way of life answers "when we run completely out of resources and encounter long-term (or permanent) disaster." We're not going to stop before the cliff; we're going to be walking in the air like Wle E. Coyote until the bitter end. That is, unless you're in the whack job camps of either Rapturists or Infinite Resourceists.

What does everybody else think? Do you think growth and land development can go on forever? If not, when does it stop? And who stops it?

Another one to ponder: how many people can water resources of the metropolitan area support? Hint: *way* less than you think.

Interesting question, sounds like a good topic for a people to have a conversation about.

Am thinking...
It might stop if people were more in charge of making decisions OR be in charge of our government to take directions that would be good for the people. It certainly won't stop if vested interests "own" our government and continue on with plowing through their agenda, and the corporations take charge.

It is all about the money and profits then, and gulping up resources and land for their benefit, not for the people. They as evidenced don't care what they soil, via gulf killing of fish supply or via making people sick, and now sick with radiation. This is road we are on, and people I believe for the most part would be more careful of how they live, if they weren't caught up in this system. I have heard that the loggers in our area, were interested in logging practices with the future taken into consideration, while some corporations, will just take for the taking, cut and run.

So as long as we are under certain types who do not care about people per se, we are simply not in a good position to continue on. It does not help that people are propagandized in so many ways to keep up with what "the plan" directs people to do. We are removed in so many ways from the essence of what can mean so much in life.

Look I am not a philosopher nor do I have answers here, but am at least trying to deal with a mess we have. I realize that there are complexities involved, but a start of a conversation at least. Last night I heard on the radio where in the gulf area a group of people really wanted to assist in cleaning their beaches, they weren't allowed to, instead trucks brought in sand to make it look good for tourism.

It will stop when shareholders say "Enough!" and back it up with action.

Otherwise, it will stop just prior to the sun going nova.

Another one to ponder: how many people can water resources of the metropolitan area support? Hint: *way* less than you think.

Are they planning to bring Willamette River and possibly Columbia River into the fold if they can get away with doing so?

People are conserving and using less here.
I doubt that the "millions" more are coming, who would move in with the 85%/5yr water rates increasing?

No, I suspect this is all about some dream by someone to take hold of our water to "sell" to other areas. Very profitable indeed, for all of us ratepayers to pay for the set up costs and then have to default because of all the debt and just great for the private ones and stockholders someday. Is that what our PWB wants and is heading for?

What a sellout we have in our Council on this matter!! They apparently have no conscience to even feel ashamed.

People are conserving and using less here.

Not really. For "retail" water small meter consumers--that's homes, really--the 09-10 average was 61 gallons/day per customer. In 2005-06, it was 62. Statistically, it's the same.

http://www.portlandonline.com/water/index.cfm?c=29881

Where consumption "dropped" was amongst wholesale customers, but that wasn't due to conservation, it was due to other intangibles. 303 gallons/day in 09-10, 324 in 05-06.

For both, there's a semi-mysterious "drop" in 07-08, which I attribute to simply more detailed recordkeeping and data compiling. And keep in mind--both these figures are *per capita per day*, not total consumption. Total consumption is *increasing*: 34.3 billion gallons in 09-10, 33.9 billion in 05-06. Really, the variations of the past several years are quite small, and no honest person would attribute per capita reduction to "conservation".

In short? We're consuming more water every year, and creating more sewer discharge.