Agree with Kongming.

@dolphin: All rodents are mammals.

dazzer, got a point there. But what if the bike companies were restricted as to the number of new bikes they could put on the street, per month or year?
It just seems to me that in a world where the human species produces increasing amounts of junk, a bit less imagining that NEW is necessarily GOOD would be a worthwhile idea to implement.

Seems to me there should be a law requiring the companies to repair all bikes that are reparable.

The SIT program was started in Kunming by the late Sam Mitchell and his wife Lu Yuan, and as far as I know it is still going. It's a very good program, though I can perhaps be accused of prejudice because I was associated with it for some time. The thing that inspired me to become so was the fact that many mere undergraduates, some with virtually no previous knowledge of China, were able, within a few months, to turn out such good field studies, the best of which approached work done on a Master's degree level. There are 3 published collections of the best of these studies available at Mandarin Books, all edited by Sam Mitchell (the 1st 2 of the series perhaps better than the last one, in my, and in Sam's, opinion).