"Someone" or "someones" must have been helping me out. The last one hundred pageviews happened very, very quickly. It should have been another couple of hours before we hit eleven million -- but I'll take it -- I was ready to call it a day/night.
It doesn't quite work this way, but counting back from 11,000,005, on this screenshot, all we know about the 11 millionth visitor, someone from the "United States."
So, let's look at Ennis, Montana:
near Yellowstone National Park
far southwestern part of the state
US Route 287
population: 838 (2010)
destination for trout anglers
at least three fly shops
home to Willie's Distillery, known for its bourbon; one of the growing number of micro-distilleries in Montana
Note: US 287 is the shortest route between Denver and Dallas-Ft Worth (for newbies, I live about a miles west of DFW) -- I bike to the perimeter road often); from Denver, US 287 goes north to Choteau, MT, about 100 miles south of the Canadian border.
Honeywell - an aromatics unit; would convert benzene and paraxylene into feedstocks for chemicals and plastics; would produce 2 million tons of feedstock
Technip FMC - to produce polymers from ethane; would produce 2 million tons of ethylene from ethane, then used for plastics
benzene, paraxylene: byproducts of gasoline production
***************************************** The US: the Southern Wall China: the Southern Gate
Deng Xiaoping And The Transformation of China
Ezra Vogel
c. 2011
951.05 VOG Chapter 14: Experiments in Guangdong and Fujian, 1979 - 1984
Guangdong: mainland, opposite Hong Kong, Macau
Fujian: mainland, opposite Taiwan
The opening paragraphs are remarkable.
1977: Deng Xiaoping, visited Guangdong; there for military conference; briefed on the problem of young men trying to escape across the border from China into Hong Kong
Deng immediately saw the problem; saw the solution
the problem arose from the disparity of living standards on either side of the border
20-mile fence with thousands of troops: to no avail
socialism/communism on the Chinese side of the border not working
foreign investment not yet allowed
1978: Xi Zhongxun appointed provincial party secretary
of the "old school"
the problem was "class struggle" -- he said, sticking to Marxist theory
he was schooled by a "brave local party secretary"; Xi Zhongxun fired him on the spot; the secretary said, "too late, I already quit"
Xi Zhongxun continued to listen
the next day he undertook a self-criticism at his own initiative and apologized to the local official, asked the latter to stay and pledged to enrich the economy
over the years, things turned around
Xi Zhongxun was originally from Shaanxi province (see map below); he retired in 1989; chose to retire in Guangdong
his son, XI Jinping, born in 1953, was selected in 2011 to be come the president of China beginning in 2011 to become the president of China beginning in 2012
China's Southern Gate: once Deng allowed Guangdong to open its doors, Hong Kong became a source of investment capital, entrepreneurial dynamism, and knowledge about the outside world
Hong Kong was full of entrepreneurs, including tens of thousands who had fled there after 1948 when the Chinese Communist armies began taking over the mainland
special economic zones (SEZs) established in 1980; "regulated primarily by the market"
during Deng's era, mainland officials in Guangdong and Fujian, especially in the SEZs, learned valuable lessons from the cosmopolitan Hong Kongers -- from their increasingly open television shows, newspapers, personal contacts, and from the factories, hotels, restaurants, and stores that they built in Guangdong
by the end of the Deng era in 1992 many mainlanders in southern Guangdong were indistinguishable from the residents who had come from Hong Kong
within three decades after Guangdong and Fujian were granted special status, Chinese exports had multiplied over one hundred times, from less than US$10 billion per year in 1978 to more than US$1 trillion, with more than one-third from Quangdong
in 1978 there were virtually no factories in Guangdon with modern assembly lines; within three decades, a visitor to southern Guangdong would see skyscrapers, large industrial sites, apartment buildings, world-class hotels, superhighways, and traffic jams
On a non-energy note, but one that will affect the Bakken, Williston set a new all-time "cold" record this past week. It broke the record last set in 1936.
