Paul Allen, Richard Branson, James Cameron, John Carmack, Andrew Carnegie, Michael Dell, Barry Diller, Walt Disney, George, Eastman, Thomas Edison, Larry Ellison, Henry Ford,  Bill Gates, David Geffen, J. Paul Getty, William Randolph Hearst, Steve Jobs, Ingvar Kamprad, Kirk Kerkorian, Ray Kroc, Ralph Lauren, Craig McCaw, Gabe Newell, John D. Rockefeller, Charles Simoni, Steven Spielberg, Dave Thomas, Ted Turner, Ted Waitt, Steve Wozniak, Frank Lloyd Wright, Orville and Wilbur Wright, and Mark Zuckerberg.

Some lesser known billionaires: Eike Batista, Ronald Burkle, Richard Schulze.

A couple things to keep in mind:

• These are set of by everday people, not a publicly sponsored presentation
• The fireworks were being set off from just about everywhere as far as the eye could see
• When you’re down on the street walking around it sounds like a war zone
• This clip is the couple minutes surrounding midnight, which was the peak
• This is from the window in my apartment in Chaoyang district looking north

I thought my reply was worth posting here:

On a purely anecdotal level, I don’t see that it has reached the level of saturation the article would have you believe. This is based simply on my own experience in Shanghai and Beijing. I don’t think a true reckoning has happened yet; my educated guess is that worse is coming.

I have seen new buildings that are entirely vacant. Having been in both Shanghai and Beijing, it’s not quite so extreme as the 3:1 ratio, in fact it ostensibly seems like at most 1 in 10 is unocupied.

At the market vendors do mention they are having a slow day. There is quite a bit of foot traffic and sales are happening. They are not offering desperately low prices. While the deals are cheaper than what I would pay in the U.S., I am well above their own cost basis.

In Seattle, Northwest Air has chosen to delay indefinitely opening up a Beijing flight they had bid for and secured. Hainan Airlines, which has a direct Seattle/Beijing flight, has mostly empty seats I hear.

It makes sense that China would be lagging behind the U.S. economy, since we import so much from them.  And even in the U.S. the worst has not come yet.

This is telling and indicates just how much seniority in the family matters.

In practice though, I have found talking about siblings is a fruitless conversation topic, because all my coworkers have no siblings.  The family plan limits parents to a single child.  This is only now starting to loosen.  For example if both wife and husband come from families with only one child, then they can have two kids.  Or if you have three years salary laying around, you can buy rights to have a second kid.

In the meantime, memorizing these four words is low on my priority list.

I thought it was worth chronicling this as a way to help me commit things to memory.  Also, if you have friends or work with anyone that has a Chinese name you are probably butchering the pronunciation.  There are a few letters that sound radically different:

To put that in practice, here are some common last names and their pronunciation:

Speaking of last names, it is customary to say someone’s last name first, then their given name.  If you say someone’s first name only, it means you are good friends–giving new meaning to ‘on a first name basis’.

Those are the biggest gotchas.  For more details on pronounciation see Introduction to Pinyin which explains Tones and also has a recording of every phonic.

This guy is pretty cool.  He’s set up his own site at http://starbuckseverywhere.net/  My favorite quote is a note about a store he visited in Bellevue, “By the time I visited this store, in late 2001, there were plenty of intersections throughout the continent boasting multiple Starbucks locations. But as near as I can remember, this is one of the few, excluding shopping malls, in which the two Starbucks locations are in the same outdoor strip mall.”