**I had to turn off the comments on this node because spam bots are attacking it. It is literally the only node that gets hammered on my site???****
I had a surprise chance to hang out with some good friends last night over a beer. The guest of honor was our good friend who went to live in China last year and is home for a visit. He lives in the busiest of the Special Economic Zones set forth by Deng Xiaoping in the early 1980s. I visited Shenzen in 2001 when my friend was just starting to visit the country. There were 7 million people there and if you climbed a hill, all you could see were construction cranes. Today there are 18 million people rapidly adopting an american flavor of urbanization; cars and fastfood with a distinctly Chinese style of space efficiency. This morning, after a long night of light sleeping, I am counting my blessings as an American.