intermission 2: “okay, but will it get me a phd?”

A couple of guys from the Urban Planning Department explained to me the global ethnic hierarchy of construction competence the other day, while we were walking around the ‘urban plan area.’ Germans and Japanese care about both process and product: you have to get the correct result, and you have to get it by taking the correct steps. Americans care about product, but not process: as long as you end up with the results they want, they don’t really care how you got them. Taiwanese care about neither process nor product. “Taiwanese: we’re all chabuduo xiansheng, Mr. Good-Enough. That’s why everything we build is so lame.”