501–510 of 651 posts
Watching a bunch of arm-chair experts guess that this building means more than it is is a wastes of time. (Approx) 3% of comments here make sense, are enlightening, 97% are just self-assured "Dunning Kruger effect" amateurs guessing they can deduct real info from this is weird. Good waste of 10 minutes for me though.
Folks, those buildings can be empty, either as a mind!@#% or just crazy future capacity forecasts that may not be real. Watching a bunch of arm-chair experts guess that this building means more than it is is a wastes of time. (Approx) 3% of comments here make sense, are enlightening, 97% are just self-assured "Dunning Kruger effect" amateurs guessing they can deduct real info from this is weird. Good waste of 10 minu…
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The doubts about the size of the investment in that Wikipedia article are funny. It's a bit like "We cannot afford to invest in education", but the Chinese are saying "We cannot afford not to invest in education" (Famous quotes, it's more about R&D here). China's leadership is probably terrified of falling into the middle-income trap. It might be the biggest issue on their minds right now. At least I am watching from…
Education has always been important in Chinese culture.
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> it has never invaded outside its traditional borders Your notion of "traditional borders" is where this becomes nonsense. With a little bit of revisionist history you can justify all sorts of invasions, such as the 1959 invasion of Tibet, or the desire to retake Taiwan. In reality, China is an empire, with several of its regions very unhappy to part of it (Tibet, Xinjiang, and probably more if you could only ask it…
Only empire which exists right now is the western empire lead by US, its days are numbered, then when the propaganda curtain falls, it will be a shock. I had people of Xinjiang as my class mates, they laugh at your propaganda.
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They have had that reputation for a long time and it persists. Assuming companies like BYD do things correctly, they'll come from the bottom up and improve quality as they go while working to keep their volume position. Pretty much all the major automakers should be terrified, as China is likely to have two or three juggernaut auto companies, they'll be permanently cash loaded by their gigantic domestic market, and t…
Other countries, maybe. But China is never gonna conquer or do reasonable business in India for geopolitical reasons.
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> US auto makers have been on the ropes since the 1980s. Without a doubt. In about 2000 the US automakers sued the EPA because their proposed clean air regulations for about 2009 were "impossible". They were actually more lax than what Japanese automakers were already selling cars for in the year 2000. So the automakers sued the US government to admit that in 2009 they couldn't build cars that were as clean as cars J…
They were right about those regulations. The CAFE is why we now have the proliferation of huge trucks and SUVs instead of sedans. Cars from Japan, 2000 or current that are clean aren't street legal here because they don't meet the safety standards. Those safety features add weight, which in turn drive down the efficiency.
I've seen this repeated for 25 years now, and to be honest I think it's simply not true.
Can you list one safety standard they don't meet?
The GT-R is identical as sold in Japan and the USA (well, actually, the US version has wider seats - true story).
Even when that one guy homologated the R32 Skyline into the USA he barely modified the front bumper at all and it met crash safety standards as it was.
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> There's a type of Western mind that gets distracted by their scale, and getting to build things we built a century ago Where in the US can one find the secret, cross-country high-speed rail built in the roaring twenties?! There's also a type of western mind that automatically dismisses the odds of a different country succeeding, based on nothing but the fact that they are using a different approach (on the surface)…
For those old enough to remember, we heard it all before in the 1980's about Japan so experience has made us circumspect. But even more so, markets enforce discipline on capital that state directed firms don't have. Everyone decries executives who "only look as far as next quarter's profits", and while admittedly at the margins that can have perverse incentives, in the large it demands that management put capital to…
> But even more so, markets enforce discipline on capital that state directed firms don't have
I struggle to reconcile this with stock buy-backs.
Also, China seems to have deployed a hybrid strategy: the national and regional governments provide incentives to industries, but the individual companies compete against each other. Product-wise, US defense contractors have done surprisingly well under a more extreme version of this regime (cost-plus contracts) for decades.
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Yeah but Japan has long had a cultural obsession with delivering high quality products. I don't know if China ever did, but if it did, much of it was wiped out during cultural revolution and replaced with succeed at all costs. And there is a difference between success and excellence. For example there have been zero bullet train fatalities in its entire history, and several Chinese HSR fatal accidents already. For po…
Please show the news of several Chinese HSR fatal accidents, except the 2011 wenzhou hsr accident which happened during the early days of operation that everyone knows about, and it has been a decade since. "For political reasons the quality of the HSR wheels in China took a sharp downturn so expect more accidents in the coming two years." if this doesn't happen, are you going to apologize for your lies, propaganda,…
IIRC there were three derailments in 2020, I'm not certain any of them caused fatalities.
> except the 2011 wenzhou hsr accident.
Reminder. Bullet train: zero fatalities. Even during the "early days". No excuses. How to be safe is a solved problem since the last century.
> wheel issues
There are leaked videos of HSR in china shaking.
BYD succeeds in places where quality and safety doesn't matter. It's why they've taken off in Asia but have made minimal inroads in countries with strong automobile safety regulations.
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They are prima facie wrong, their overcapacity is bad and actively harmful, this isn't a sign of it succeeding, its a sign of desperation from it failing. There's a type of Western mind that gets distracted by their scale, and getting to build things we built a century ago. Dazzled by the spectacle, this misses that their economy is characterized by deflationary headwinds due to a massive, massive over-investment in…
> There's a type of Western mind that gets distracted by their scale, and getting to build things we built a century ago Where in the US can one find the secret, cross-country high-speed rail built in the roaring twenties?! There's also a type of western mind that automatically dismisses the odds of a different country succeeding, based on nothing but the fact that they are using a different approach (on the surface)…
Thinking whether you're a Sinophile is a subject of discussion, and then most damningly, your closing thought being whether other people think "the west will prevail" shows there's a lot more going on here than the idea that maybe overcapacity is good. Way more than I expected, so I'll leave it at "overcapacity is bad". :)
* n.b. for future arguments I'd avoid this, a map shows china's is cross country in that you can piece together, exactly one route that is high speed only, requires multiple transfers, and leaves you about 20% short of a full horizontal trip cross country while taking a winding route that wasn't designed for it.