Wake up, America!

The more I saw at work and home, the more I feel the US has been slipping into a lazy country and most people born here are resting on one's laurels.

I once worked at a client where a guy used to spend most of his time watching online videos He really made things worse when he so laughed upon some "exciting" moments in the videos that everybody walked pass his cubicle knew what was happening over there.
Eventually he was let go. The client is not that dull.

There is another working situation that I feel is the craziest environment I've ever experienced so far in my 10 years of working history.
My project brought several new graduates to assist the client with QA testing. All of us sit in a big cubicle. I admit these guys could get their assigned work done.
However when they had down time,  they just spent most of time watching online videos, chatting online or browsing internet. This may be ok for some project mangers.
But I really had a hard time when I found they chatted to each other almost every 5 minutes about such personal stories as car model, lunch, dinner, sports and movies etc. Sometimes they even had a very long leisure chatting in spite of the client being next to us.
These guys were leaving bad impression to the client and eventually damaging the company's reputation.

My company had 2 career paths. One was business analysts; another was coding developers. The above talkative guys all followed the business analyst career path. They should be talkative. But they should talk to the clients intelligently because they eventually would be the sales guys for the company. How could they be intelligent if they didn't take advantage of their downtime?

I also had a co-developer who used to do things much like the first guy I mentioned before.
While this survey shows most developers find hard to learn new technologies, they guy instead wasted most of his downtime watching games and talking.
If you are also in the IT industry, you know you will definitely be a loooooser if you can't find time to update your existing skills or learn new technologies.
I really felt quite dark for such guys' future!

One of my neighbors probably lost his job for almost 2 years. Not long ago the Congress extended unemployment insurance to an unprecedented 99 weeks.
Oh man, the US is encouraging you to lose your jobs and nourishing the lazies. Even I was born in a socialist mainland China, I have to tell you the US is much much human and considerate, and has a much better common wealth (of course).
But why couldn't those people make a resolution and labor themselves to learn some skills during the 99 weeks??

My wife successfully finished her Ph.D in 5 years and also conducted about 3 years post-doc researches. Looking at her school, most Ph. D are either Chinese or Indians.
What is more interesting is her adviser just can't find any American students and actually doesn't like American students at all because he thinks they don't work hard (The adviser is of Israeli origin and his wife is a typical American white).

You should not be surprised when you read the news that China just surpassed Japan to become the 2nd largest economy in the world and will probably overtake the US as early as 2010.

But it is still not too late and the US is still  holding quite a large advantage. But Americans, you need to wake up, forget about your past glories and work hard right now!