China suffers worst wheat harvest in 55 years

Lemeran

Lord Nagafen Raider
77
10
I stand corrected brother Eomer, makes sense they need to get a head start building. Vice did a good job presenting the issue and I didn't look into it further.
 

khalid

Unelected Mod
14,071
6,775
The ghost towns in those reports were already falling apart from lack of maintenance from what I recall. I doubt they are going to be useful for people trying to move into them in 10 years.
 

Borzak

Bronze Baron of the Realm
24,641
31,999
Yeah we see how well Chinese shit is made. The Chinese did the new Panama Canal widening and locks. This is what happens when the Chinese build shit. They still haven't come up with a plan.

panama_canal_locks.jpg
 

Palum

what Suineg set it to
23,439
33,681
RE: ghost towns, if you have not used Google Earth to view the industrial areas of China, you need to. If you think America has 'cookie cutter' cities, good lord. It's like one square mile town carbon copied 8,000 times per city.
 

iannis

Musty Nester
31,351
17,656
Theres some sense in it. Rather than let it freefall for however long it takes, they eat 7% chunks per day.

It doesn't fix anything, in fact it probably makes the trough lower than it would have been naturally, but it does make it slightly more manageable. If you get out before the other guy. Those 7%ers on the last day sure are fucked, ain't they.
 

AngryGerbil

Poet Warrior
<Donor>
17,781
25,896
That's part of the game though isn't it? Push it towards 7 gently then trade-rape the system by being the guy who dumps and sells right past the line and trigger the breaker leaving other sellers holding their dicks.
 

AladainAF

Best Rabbit
<Gold Donor>
12,864
30,813
Yeah we see how well Chinese shit is made. The Chinese did the new Panama Canal widening and locks. This is what happens when the Chinese build shit. They still haven't come up with a plan.
My favorite is the bridge stuffed with garbage.

rrr_img_122463.jpg


Shanghai Wonder: Bridge Made of Trash Collapses

Completed in 2009, the bridge replaced a much older one with a more modern design. It began to collapse after being in operation only a short period; just after Christmas, when cracks appeared in the structure. Some thought the ground might have become unstable or that it might have been the result of the inefficiency of the original construction company.

Subsequent inquiry revealed the latter to be the case. Styrofoam, bags of garbage, scrap wood and plastic waste were used as construction materials in the structure. By using less concrete in the construction, results were completely counter- productive. Short-term savings were obliterated by the estimated costs of eliminating the rubbish and starting the construction all over again! This lack of foresight makes sense only if the sobriety of the construction company management was an issue (a fact which remains unknown).
 

khorum

Murder Apologist
24,338
81,363
Lol those ghost cities aren't just a real fucking economic time-bomb, virtually none of them are actually habitable or even suitable for the party's urbanization 5-year targets----that's because the properties weren't designed for human habitation, THEY WERE DESIGNED TO GRAB A PIECE OF THE SNOWBALLING REAL ESTATE SPECULATION BUBBLE.

China's media had even recently started reporting on the hazards of those investments. And since their media can't report anything without tacit state approval, it's obvious that's their treasury trying to put the brakes on the retail investment spikes that are driving their markets bonkers.
 

ohkcrlho

Silver Baronet of the Realm
6,906
8,941
Yeah we see how well Chinese shit is made. The Chinese did the new Panama Canal widening and locks. This is what happens when the Chinese build shit. They still haven't come up with a plan.

panama_canal_locks.jpg
Chinese don't care about quality, they want to make it fast and cheap.
They are building almost every infrastructure in Angola. But the construction is so damn poor and sometimes recycled materials are used. New 5-star hotels with less than a year, in the country's capital, Luanda, look like they have 15-20 years.
Not to mention Luanda's General hospital. A chinese construction company built it in 2006, 4 years later was about to COLLAPSE and in 2012, was RECONSTRUCTED lol Forgot something important , it was reconstructed by.....another chinese company ahahah

But angolan authorities are not dumb. Big and important works, like the renovation of Luanda bay area and the construction of the new Parliament, were given to portuguese companies, which are there since colonial times and know how to do things.
 

Borzak

Bronze Baron of the Realm
24,641
31,999
I think the deal they put in where you had to hold stocks for 6 months expires this week. That should be interesting.
 

Agraza

Registered Hutt
6,890
521
They're trying to cultivate domestic demand, as opposed to being an export economy, so their GDP can withstand international weakness better, but they're not letting the market they need to do it stand on its own. There are economic fundamentals that must be observed to allow a market economy to succeed, and one of them is low/no intervention from the state. China wants to have its cake and eat it too.
 

Ukerric

Bearded Ape
<Silver Donator>
7,926
9,576
There are economic fundamentals that must be observed to allow a market economy to succeed, and one of them is low/no intervention from the state.
Depends on the nature of the "intervention". A state must regulate markets; fully unregulated markets lead to inefficients/dysfunctional markets due to various effects, including monopolies, cartels, monopsonies, and all kind of funky and unexpected stuff and so on. However, deciding what the market "must look like" and trying to make it so is always inefficient at best, and a disaster usually.

(a good example on market intervention is the regulation of labeling. Labels are a way of conveying the information on a product from producer to buyer, and efficient markets rely on buyers being able to accurately evaluate products to set their price limit on purchases. A bad example on market intervention is price regulation, setting arbitrary limits on goods/services, both minimum or maximum reduces efficiency of the market)
 

AngryGerbil

Poet Warrior
<Donor>
17,781
25,896
So when you're most fundamental basic assumption about the world of man is, "capitalism is always bad." What are you supposed to do when faced with the final realities of markets and economies, once the gut feeling of the revolution wears off?

It must be like a pure-bred Mormon coming out of Utah believing all black people are evil and then meeting like, Morgan Freeman or Kevin Hart.
 

khorum

Murder Apologist
24,338
81,363
As China's Privately-held debt approaches almost 50% more than the leveraged private debt in the US prior to 2008, the Chinese are absolutely scrambling to shift to an investment vehicle that will yield better results than building ghost cities-----COLONIZATION!

The rang-rangs have been not-so-quietly turning huge tracts of Africa and some parts of South America into Chinese colonies. And they're making the European Colonialists look like fucking saints in comparison. I just saw a documentary about it and if you think hyper-disciplined Chinese technocrats building cities in Africa is a recipe for lulz... you're right:

 

Agraza

Registered Hutt
6,890
521
The chinese dude is definitely lulz. I do some similar work if the trailer is any representation. I'll just say my anecdotes probably don't contradict his very often.

Had it not been for WW1 and 2, I think Africa would be much better off atm. The de-colonization wave was more about downsizing empires than anything else, so infrastructure designed for export and interdependence with a farflung mother country was rarely suited well for trade with neighboring countries. Like all the railroads don't connect to the neighbors, or even necessarily to each other. They just go from plantations to the port. Often these African colonies produced similar goods as one another for export to Europe. Your neighbors making the same shit as you don't need to work with you. The whole economy just melted, and only a few were able to catch themselves before they fell over. Once the house of cards starts to go, it's easy to death-spiral. Hence the recent financial bailouts and depression era work programs.