Real estate giant China Evergrande will be liquidated • Hacker News Board

Re: Real estate giant China Evergrande will be liquidated

#281

Post by everforward » Tue, Jan 30, 2024, 1:48 PM UTC

leoedin wrote: post #274

pmontra wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The defaults changed, at least in the West. When I was little it was still married-with-children by default, probably at relatively young age, and people had to decide not to have children. That was in part helped by the lack of widespread use of contraceptives. The norm in my primary school was two or three kids per family. I remember only one classmate with no brothers or sisters. Of course zero children families w…

> When I was little it was still married-with-children by default, probably at relatively young age, and people had to decide not to have children. Don't ignore selection bias. When you're a kid, almost everyone you know is a child, and so almost every adult you know is a parent. I don't know how old you are, but most of those societal changes - no need to marry and contraception - have been in place for decades. I'm…

My feeling is that it's heavily friend-group or clique dependent, or potentially geography-dependent (metropolitan vs rural).

I'm also in my early 30s, but the majority of people I know are not married. I know about the same number of people who are polyamorous as married despite not running in those circles.

I know I'm an outlier because the stats don't hear anything close to that.

I will say that in the major metros, marriage still feels relatively uncommon. I think I've been to one wedding in several years, and it was a work acquaintance more than a friend (I was surprised to be invited, really). Most of the people I knew that were married were in their late forties and beyond.

> I don't think I know anyone who's completely checked out of the idea of a relationship yet - the single people are still dating, often with the expressed desire of finding someone.

I think it's important to delineate between people who want a relationship and people who want to get married. Relationships can exist absent a marriage, and marriages can exist absent a relationship. Some people don't want to be single, but don't want to be married.

That's the demographic that I've seen growing. I don't see people pulling away from relationships so much as marriage. Marriage comes with so much baggage, and a lot of the traditions are based around historic assumptions that don't hold true anymore.

Re: Real estate giant China Evergrande will be liquidated

#282

Post by nvm0n2 » Tue, Jan 30, 2024, 1:52 PM UTC

saiya-jin wrote: post #248

bArray wrote: post #239

> Months after China Evergrande ran out of cash and defaulted in 2021, investors around the world scooped up the property developer’s discounted I.O.U.’s, betting that the Chinese government would eventually step in to bail it out. One thing investors should always be clear about with the CCP - as a foreigner you will always be screwed over if it benefits the CCP. The CCP is extremely hostile, even having strained re…

Neither China nor Russia are communist countries for very long time. Folks here with more experience can describe better than me what actual regime there is, to me it seems like some mixture of brutal capitalism and regulated markets, dictatorship of the elite, all drowning in corruption. What labels they put themselves on doesn't really matter, does it.

How can you have both brutal capitalism and regulated markets? Those are normally presented as opposites, as in, "we regulate markets to soften the impact of raw capitalism".

China isn't really a capitalist country. It's more capitalist than it used to be in the 70s, but as this refusing-to-liquidate nonsense shows, the basic rules of capitalism don't really work there. China ignores many things that are required to really do capitalism properly:

- IP rights aren't enforced

- Other kinds of property rights aren't enforced (see the ARM subsidiary that simply declared independence)

- Staying out of private business (see Ant Group)

- Many companies and industries are state owned

- Industrial policy is still the standard in China (compare to the USA)

- Markets aren't informed (rampant censorship, bad data)

and so on.

Re: Real estate giant China Evergrande will be liquidated

#283

Post by red-iron-pine » Tue, Jan 30, 2024, 1:53 PM UTC

thomasfl wrote: post #259

Just as serious is the problem of poor quality concrete used in many buildings in china. Due to corruption, many new buildings have been built of concrete made with normal beach sand. Sand with salt causes iron to corrode and the concrete becomes brittle. It is commonly known as tofu dreg. Lots of buildings have already collapsed. If the bubble burst, and the property market collapses, it will hopefully make houses m…

like the national and maybe global economy will collapse and resulting economic shockwaves will screw over millions (billions?).

but robust houses, man. in the future. eventually.

Re: Real estate giant China Evergrande will be liquidated

#284

Post by corethree » Tue, Jan 30, 2024, 1:55 PM UTC

KptMarchewa wrote: post #267

saiya-jin wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with that shrink part, you must be living in a bubble for the family part. Literally all my colleagues in past 5 jobs (that few hundreds guys) have kids if they are over say 35. All colleagues of my wife. All of our friends. I cover western (Switzerland) and eastern Europe here. Same for Swiss colleagues and foreigners. Folks with nannies or family close but also raising their kids just by themselves, l…

I'm 30 and literally none of my friends that age have kids.

Where do you live?

Re: Real estate giant China Evergrande will be liquidated

#285

Post by hector_vasquez » Tue, Jan 30, 2024, 1:56 PM UTC

barrysteve wrote: post #258

pmontra wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The defaults changed, at least in the West. When I was little it was still married-with-children by default, probably at relatively young age, and people had to decide not to have children. That was in part helped by the lack of widespread use of contraceptives. The norm in my primary school was two or three kids per family. I remember only one classmate with no brothers or sisters. Of course zero children families w…

Porn and contraceptives did a lot of damage. It used to be that deciding to conceive made parents get their child into schooling and a lifelong career. Instutions were built and maintainted to support inflow of children and stable corporations were kept alfoat by a growing populace. Making conception optional for sex has knocked over most of the stability there was in the west and people are scrambling to replace it…

> And immigration on top to plug the gaps.

And there it is. This narrative that immigration hasn't been a constant and deciding factor in the development of the West (and pretty much everywhere else) is so wild. Stability of an insular population is the absolute exception of history.

Re: Real estate giant China Evergrande will be liquidated

#286

Post by argiopetech » Tue, Jan 30, 2024, 1:58 PM UTC

KaiserPro wrote: post #242

pmontra wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The defaults changed, at least in the West. When I was little it was still married-with-children by default, probably at relatively young age, and people had to decide not to have children. That was in part helped by the lack of widespread use of contraceptives. The norm in my primary school was two or three kids per family. I remember only one classmate with no brothers or sisters. Of course zero children families w…

The "west" and china have _very_ different demographic pressures. For example china famously had(has?) the one child rule. This meant a deliberate shift in how children were raised (all your eggs in one basket) > Now the default is single-no-children and you have to make an explicit choice to marry (you used to be nudged into it by society) and to have kids, by stopping to use contraceptives and to do all the things…

If you look at the historical birth rate through the 20th century (hard to find data before 1950, but not impossible), the birth rate hovered around 5 children/woman or 35 children/1000 population. These numbers drop immediately and precipitously starting in 1960, the year "the pill" became publicly available.

Lots of people, young and old, take pills every day. People forget and unwanted pregnancies still happen, but a) that's not suggestive that the pill doesn't work or that it isn't responsible for a significant drop in realized fertility (the birth rate data makes that clear), and, b) the medical advances and cultural shift the pill enabled (casual sex is okay, sex outside of marriage is okay, children outside of marriage still pretty undesirable for most people) also paved the path for emergency contraception and the widespread acceptance and availability of abortion (to the extent that we now end the lives of 73 million unborn per year - that's a top-20 country, by population, per year).

In summary, is it more complex than "the pill did it"? Yes, but not much more. Birth control (of all types) is responsible the bulk of the reduction in birth rate.

Re: Real estate giant China Evergrande will be liquidated

#287

Post by akarlsten » Tue, Jan 30, 2024, 2:00 PM UTC

fnordian_slip wrote: post #280

dathinab wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the default is changing in China too, their population is going to shrink no matter what. yes, that might actually be _the_ biggest incoming issue china has (through much much less because of housing prices). Basically by combining one child politics with various cultural and economic effects lead to a very strongly favor for having a boy over a girl. Combine that with natural reduction in birthrate due to reduc…

Maybe I missed something as a European who doesn't always see what's happening over the great pond, but the sentence "hey we just copied Canada why are you complaining" confuses me. Did I miss Canada embarking on a policy of euthanasia? I know that the treatment of native people had quite a few scandals in recent decades, did you want to allude to that? Without wanting to make light of that situation, I think it is r…

Canada allows medically assisted suicide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia_in_Canada

Re: Real estate giant China Evergrande will be liquidated

#288

Post by red-iron-pine » Tue, Jan 30, 2024, 2:01 PM UTC

fnordian_slip wrote: post #280

dathinab wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the default is changing in China too, their population is going to shrink no matter what. yes, that might actually be _the_ biggest incoming issue china has (through much much less because of housing prices). Basically by combining one child politics with various cultural and economic effects lead to a very strongly favor for having a boy over a girl. Combine that with natural reduction in birthrate due to reduc…

Maybe I missed something as a European who doesn't always see what's happening over the great pond, but the sentence "hey we just copied Canada why are you complaining" confuses me. Did I miss Canada embarking on a policy of euthanasia? I know that the treatment of native people had quite a few scandals in recent decades, did you want to allude to that? Without wanting to make light of that situation, I think it is r…

canada legalized it, euthansia that is. first in i wanna say 2017? and then another law expanded it fairly recently, or rather removed some barriers.

Re: Real estate giant China Evergrande will be liquidated

#289

Post by xwolfi » Tue, Jan 30, 2024, 2:08 PM UTC

mrjin wrote: post #223

EZ-E wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the long term, the bursting of China's property bubble is probably good news, affordable housing is in the interest of everybody except property developers. I unironically think a property bubble pop is a great way to defeat the demographic slump in the long term. That and the recent crackdown/reforms on private education makes me think the party is aware that property bubbles and education costs are a liability

I doubt that's going to help. The decades of property bubble has changed the mindset of the people. Just look at Japan, it's property bubble burst was decades ago, but till now, are there any signs of turnaround? Young people have enough trouble just to get a shelter and feed themselves, and now you want them to have kids which add more pressure onto what they are already struggling to coup with. How likely is that?

But Japan has a population crumble, a long LONG tradition of home price devaluation (earthquakes destroy everything, why build super high quality stuff and why maintain, after 10 years your protection is more fragile or obsolete) and prices are extremely low.

In China, they had a speculative bubble sure, but what s gonna kill the market is that in 20 years a lot less young people will exist to even buy the houses, like in Japan.

Re: Real estate giant China Evergrande will be liquidated

#290

Post by xwolfi » Tue, Jan 30, 2024, 2:10 PM UTC

valgaze wrote: post #226

In downtown Los Angeles directly across the street from Staples Center/crypto where the Lakers play and a stone's throw from The Palm steakhouse is an imposing yet unfinished skyscraper. The idea was retail on the bottom, hotel in the middle, and $$ residences higher up It has languished incomplete-- basically rotting-- in part because of EB-5 financing trouble + Oceanwide. It's expensive to finish, expensive to demo…

[flagged]