Troubled welds on the Bay Bridge

Also, can somebody explain to me those flight prices? Spending over 10K on flights to Shanghai within a single month seems outrageous.

"Caltrans employees and U.S. contractors who supervised the job lived fulltime in Shanghai, and top officials flew there often. Tony Anziano, toll bridge program manager, alone spent more than $300,000 on travel.

"Part of that cost was for Anziano’s room at the five-star JW Marriott Shanghai Tomorrow Square for up to $470 per night, according to his expense reports."

The travel costs are an obscene waste of American tax dollars. Moreover, the fact that so many tax dollars were paid to a foreign company is offensive. Even if that company was at all competent, it shows a disregard for the American economy. For a project that puts American lives at risk, a demonstrated concern for the wellbeing of Americans is rather important.

The People's Republic of China is a country of many races. The one race that most people in the US think of when they hear "Chinese" is more specifically known as Han Chinese ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_Chinese ).

This piece is more nationalistic/jingoistic in spirit than racist.

Furthermore, countries (and their people) do typically exhibit identifiable differences relative to other countries (and their people). A piece about American-made cars relative to Japanese-made cars probably describes perfectly valid generalizations as the cultures of the countries, companies and people involved are probably markedly different.

Had this piece talked about work for hire done by a firm located in the US (or any country besides the PRC) where the owners and most or all of the employee were of ethnic Han Chinese, then you could fairly call it racist, since the focus would then be on their race and not all the attributes (culture, regulatory environment, business practices/norms, etc.) that go along with identifying them by their nationality.

I would have found the piece far more balanced had their repeatedly identified the management as "American management", since all the failings of this project exhibit traits somewhat typical of American management styles. It would have been as fair (i.e. statistically valid generalizations based on facts) as repeatedly identifying the source of the goods as Chinese since historically there have been noticeable quality issues with products produced in the PRC relative to countries like the US, Germany, Japan, etc.

Seems pretty important.