ГУСЬКОВА (1). 1. Инфинитив в функции определения
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9. They have seen the future, and they aren't very interested Lucky Hong Kong. Its citizens have access to the Internet «in a more powerful form than 99% of users in the world», marvels Microsoft's Bill Gates. Last year Hong-Kong Telecom launched the first commercial interactive television (ITV) service in the world, offering video and music on demand, along with high-speed Internet access, to 70% of the city's homes. Mr Gates was impressed enough to fly in and announce that this network would become the chief testbed of Microsoft's efforts to merge the television and the PC, allowing users to gain access to broadcast-quality movies, PC games and pay-per-use software from the network nearly as quickly as from their own hard drives. Mr Gate's presence threw Hong Kong into a technotizzy as the government announced a lot of Singapore-rivalling projects, from a $1.6 billion «cyberport» to efforts to make Hong Kong the region's e-commerce 212 hub. But the city's planners do not seem to have noticed that the Microsoft deal is better evidence of the service's problems than of its potential. Ever since ITV was first put together in the early 1990s, virtually every trial has shown that viewers are not keen enough on video-on-demand to pay the cost of receiving it. Hong Kong reckoned it was different: its 6m relatively affluent and gadget-mad people are packed tightly into easy-to-wire apartment buildings, most within a few miles of Hong Kong Telecom's video servers. When the company launched the service last March, it predicted that it would have 250,000 subscribers by the end of March this year, paying an average of around $50 a month. Instead, it has only 80.000 subscribers, paying an average of $35 each, less than half of what it costs to provide the service. It seems that although Hong Kong may be a uniquely cheap place to roll out a commercial broadband network to the home, its people are all too typical of guinea pigs everywhere: unimpressed. Like others who have dipped their toes in the ITV waters only to have them bitten off, the firm now acknowledges that movies, music, even interactive karaoke and horse racing are not enough: it still needs the elusive « killer application». This is where Microsoft comes in. Today, Hongkong Teleco's broad-band service offers two options, each inadequate in its own way. The service on television does not offer e-mail or PC-quality games, while the high-speed Internet service provided to PCs does not offer movies. Microsoft hopes to solve the problem by fixing the limitation in the PC service. This would be more exciting were it not for an uncomfortable parallel in Singapore, Hong Kong's smaller wired-island rival. Around the same time Hong Kong telecoms was launching its television-based service, Singapore was rolling out its own broadband network, called Singapore ONE, based on PCs. It has been even less successful, with just 14.000 subscribers, and its video-on-demand part, Magix, has struggled. « Most people just don't want to watch movies on their PC,» explains a spokesman. So Singapore Telecom is now thinking about taking the service over to television, just as Hongkong Telecom appears to be moving in the opposite direction. Hongkong Telecom has compounded its problems with a big strategic mistake. It chose to make the service available to lower-income apartment complexes first, because they are more tightly packed and thus cheaper to reach, and because lower social classes tend to watch more television. Since those households were also targeted by the city's cable-TV provider, they already have as much television as they want. Worse, many 213 higher-income consumers, who tend to be more spread out, cannot get the service yet. Of course, any new technology takes time to establish itself, and telephone companies are not the obvious choice to package and market entertainment and information. But Asians are normally enthusiastic early-adopters of the latest gizmo. Western executives thrilled by the vision of an interactive future should note the apathy in Hong Kong, and beware. 10. Backwards and forwards in China Much of the outside world believes China's reform programme has been slammed into reverse by the East-Asian financial crises. But in some respects it has sped things up. The direct economic costs of the region's problems are not the issue. Despite doubts about the accuracy of last year's GDP growth of 7.8%, China is far from being in recession, unlike many of its neighbours. Certainly, China's exports will be badly hit this year, and previous high levels of foreign investment will fall. Yet the export sector remains relatively small. It is China's domestic economy that counts, and this is shielded from external shocks by a largely non-convertible currency. The impact of the regional crisis has more to do with expectations. A belated recognition by China's leaders that the corporate models of Japan and (particularly) South Korea are now bankrupt marks a profound change. China, most of its rulers now admit, can no longer simply count on state-guided growth to get out of trouble. Even though few, if any, yet believe in outright privatisation the consensus at the top is that much more reform is needed. Hence the urgency of recent policies that aim to get the state out of business. Some of the most powerful bureaucracies, such as the Ministry of Information Industry and the Ministry of Communications, have had their business wings clipped. Indeed, the total number of ministries has been shrunk by a quarter. The armed forces, deeply involved in business, were given until the end of last year to quit commerce. China's legions of small and medium-sized state enterprises have been told to fend for themselves. Many of them have stopped receiving state funds. Many have been merged or «privatised» in all but name. Almost all of them have been sacking workers, or sending them home on unpaid leave. Remaining workers have been put on notice that they will have to pay higher rents or buy their homes. Medical costs will rise. Policymakers also admit to the dangers in the financial system. The People's Bank of China has been restructured along regional lines. The 214 hope is that local barons will no longer be able to bully local central-bank officials into providing ill-judged credit. Finally, state banks have been «ordered» to lend according to strictly commercial criteria and to private companies. The goverment says it wants to spur the development of consumer credit, for which there will be a great appetite. And it is determined to crack down on the welter of arbitrary fees and taxes imposed by local party bosses on farmers and on people living in small towns. This is probably the chief source of sporadic unrest in the provinces. The trouble is, once the stimulus money is spent, there will be a further pile of shoddy infrastructure projects, redundant factories and unrecoverable loans to show for it. And all the while, the government's bill — for the banks' bad debts, for social-welfare costs and for the stimulus package — will continue to mount as China takes two steps forward and one back. 11. Talking peace, preparing for war Time supposedly waits for no man, not even an American politician. So in an ideal world the House and Senate would present an agreed proposal for next year's budget by the statutory deadline of April 15lh . There would then be good-humoured, well-intentioned debate with the administration and, just in time for the fiscal year, beginning this October 1st , the country would know exactly how much its federal government was going to spend, and how it was going to raise the money. So much for the ideal. The reality is that the election cycle is inexorably turning and catching President proposed $1.8 trillion budget in its spokes. In other words, for all the promises of bipartisanship, for all the determination of the speaker of the House (where all spending bills originate) to make the trains run on time, Republicans and Democrats are still at odds. Moreover, both parties have their squabbling factions, and everybody knows that legislative deadlines can come and go without everyone necessarily dying. The April deadline, for example, has been met only three times since 1975; and last year, thanks to the electorally mistaken obduracy of the tax-cutting zealots among the House Republicans, Congress failed for the first time in 24 years to pass a budget resolution even after the deadline. Political deadlines are another matter. In just under a year from now the primary season — for a new president and a new Congress — will 215 come into bloom. To be ready for that season, all candidates need to start raising money now. That in turn means they must be careful in what they do and say in this political cycle. The worst problems are for the Republicans. With a budget surplus now expected by the Congressional Budget Office to be around $133 billion, the party's instinct is to return the excess to «hard-working Americans» in the form of a tax cut. But tax is low on most people's list of concerns (even though the right-wing Heritage Foundation points out that this year's federal tax take, 20.5% of economic output, is the highest peacetime level ever), whereas saving Social Security is close to the top. So House and Senate Republicans agreed last week to a plan from the Senate Budget Committee: taxes would be cut by up to $900 billion over the next decade, but the cuts would not be taken from the surpluses in the Social Security trust fund. The plan neatly blunts the Democrats' charge that Republican tax cuts would be at the expense of Social Security. But since next year's overall surplus is expected to be mostly, if not entirely, accounted for by the Social Security surplus, it also means tax cuts later rather than sooner — which is not what the Republican faithful really want. Meanwhile, the party risks looking mean to the electorate in its professed determination to keep the budget within the spending caps agreed in the balanced budget legislation. Last year Congress approved an omnibus spending bill that broke through the caps to the tune of $21 billion — which was conveniently deemed «emergency» spending outside the law's scope. Doubtless the same will happen this year (the President's budget proposals, even with the most favourable arithmetic, will break the caps by at least $18 billion) unless the ceiling is raised. Given bipartisan enthusiasm for more spending on education and the armed forces, that would seem a plausible solution, but one that will annoy Republican conservatives, involve haggling over other spending programmes, and strain the unity of the Republicans' six-seat majority in the House. All this highlights the perennial Republican rift between ideologues and pragmatists, and leaves the Democrats chortling at the prospect of regaining the House and even the Senate. But not all Democrats are encouraged. The triumph of the current presidency was the triumph of the «New Democrats», adopting Republican notions of fiscal responsibility. Yet the administration's travails over illicit campaign finances have made it more dependent on «old Democrats», notably organised labour and minorities. And in the meantime? With the Republicans trying hard to avoid the label of another «do-nothing Congress», optimists have trailed the notion of bipartisan cooperation on Social Security, education, defence and heaith-care. Some hope. This week a supposedly bipartisan position on federal aid to the states for education fractured into partisan wrangling, and there will be more of the same. After all, because gridlock in Congress hurts the Republicans, it helps the Democrats. But that is a zero-sum game for now, not the future. One well-known Democratic strategist, speaking sensibly off the record sees only a Pyrrhic victory ahead: a protectionist-inclined Democratic Party with outdated regulatory instincts that will trap minorities in poverty. 12. Schooling and the New Illiteracy Recent developments in higher education have progressively diluted its content and reproduced, at a higher level, the conditions that prevail in the public schools. The collapse of general education; the abolition of any serious effort to instruct students in foreign languages; the introduction of many programs in black studies, women's studies, and other forms of consciousness raising for no other purpose than to head off political discontent; the ubiquitous inflation of grades — all have lowered the value of a university education at the same time that rising tuitions place it beyond reach of all but the affluent... What precipitated the crisis of the sixties was not simply the pressure of unprecedented numbers of students (many of whom would gladly have spent their youth elsewhere) but a fatal conjuncture of historical changes: the emergence of a new social conscience among students activated by the moral rhetoric of the New Frontier and by the civil rights movement, and the simultaneous collapse of the university's claims to moral and intellectual legitimacy. Instead of offering a rounded program of humane learning, the university now frankly served as a cafeteria from which students had to select so many « credits». Instead of diffusing peace and enlightenment, it allied itself with the war machine. Eventually, even its claim to provide better jobs became suspect... At the same time, the student movement embodied a militant anti-intellectualism of its own, which corrupted and eventually absorbed it. Demand for the abolition of grades, although defended on grounds of high pedagogical principle, turned out in practice — as revealed by experiments with ungraded courses and pass-fail options — to reflect a desire for less work and a wish to avoid judgment on its quality. The de- 216 217 mand for more «relevant» courses often boiled down to a desire for an intellectually undemanding curriculum, in which students could win academic credits for political activism, self-expression, transcendental meditation, encounter therapy, and the study and practice of witchcraft. Even when seriously advanced in opposition to sterile academic pedantry, the slogan of relevance embodied an underlying antagonism to education itself— an inability to take an interest in anything beyond immediate experience... In the seventies, the most common criticism of higher education revolves around the charge of cultural elitism... Two contributors to a Carnegie Commission report on education condemn the idea that «there are certain works that sjiould be familiar to all educated men» as inherently an «elitist notion.» ... The Carnegie Commission contributors argue that since the United States is a pluralist society, «adherence exclusively to the doctrines of any one school... would cause higher education to be in great dissonance with society.» Given the prevalence of these attitudes among teachers and educators, it is not surprising that students at all levels of the educational system have so little knowledge of the classics of world literature ... Those who teach college today see at first hand the effect of these practices, not merely in the students' reduced ability to read and write but in the diminished store of their knowledge about the cultural traditions they are supposed to inherit. With the collapse of religion, biblical references, which formerly penetrated deep into everyday awareness, have become incomprehensible, and the same thing is now happening to the literature and mythology of antiquity — indeed, to the entire literary tradition of the West, which has always drawn so heavily on biblical and classical sources. In the space of two or three generations, enormous stretches of the «Judeo-Christian tradition,» so often invoked by educators but so seldom taught in any form, have passed into oblivion. The effective loss of cultural traditions on such a scale makes talk of a new Dark Age far from frivolous. Yet this loss coincides with an information glut, with the recovery of the past by specialists, and with an unprecedented explosion of knowledge — none of which, however, impinges on everyday experience or shapes popular culture. The resulting split between general knowledge and the specialized knowledge of the experts, embedded in obscure journals and written in language or mathematical symbols unintelligible to the layman, has given rise to a growing body of criticism and exhortation. The ideal of general education in the university, however, has suffered the same fate as basic 218 education in the lower schools. Even those college teachers who praise general education in theory find that its practice drains energy from their specialized research and thus interferes with academic advancement. Administrators have little use for general education, since it does not attract foundation grants and large-scale government support. Students object to the retntroduction of requirements in general education because the work demands too much of them and seldom leads to lucrative employment. Under these conditions, the university remains a diffuse, shapeless, and permissive institution that has absorbed the major currents of cultural modernism and reduced them to a watery blend, a mind-emptying ideology of cultural revolution, personal fulfillment, and creative alienation. КЛЮЧИ К УСТАНОВОЧНЫМ УПРАЖНЕНИЯМ ЧАСТИ I |