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The village and the girl

bbc.co.uk

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Re: The village and the girl

#31

Post by derefr »

blackbagboys wrote: post #26
rthomas6 wrote: post #22

Could we stop talking about the fucking layout and talk about the article? China's culture, people, and most of all economy is opaque to most outsiders and I think it's fascinating. They built an entire city from nothing in just a few years, just... on a whim. Because the leaders thought that would be best for the country as a whole. It's fascinating and scary and amazing, and I can't think of another place that work…

Well, it was probably also built because massive construction projects are an easy way to boost the GDP of administrative sub-regions and the career prospects of the CCP officials in charge of those administrative units depend upon whether or not they can show that they boosted GDP. The motivations and dynamics at play are not really all that alien.

> the career prospects of the CCP officials in charge of those administrative units depend upon whether or not they can show that they boosted GDP

I would say, then, that it seems like this is a good idea so far!

Re: The village and the girl

#32

Post by blackbagboys »

derefr wrote: post #31
blackbagboys wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it was probably also built because massive construction projects are an easy way to boost the GDP of administrative sub-regions and the career prospects of the CCP officials in charge of those administrative units depend upon whether or not they can show that they boosted GDP. The motivations and dynamics at play are not really all that alien.

> the career prospects of the CCP officials in charge of those administrative units depend upon whether or not they can show that they boosted GDP I would say, then, that it seems like this is a good idea so far!

Well, the problem is that this does not really incentivize the sort of uniquely long-term thinking that the parent seems to think is at work here.

Re: The village and the girl

#33

Post by Paul_S »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #23
nfoz wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I used to think about all-flash websites. They did go away, more or less, but only because the Web became that same pixel-per-pixel full-designer-control application platform, with all the same obnoxious problems that made us hate Flash, minus the binary blob. The overwhelming majority of websites would be better served by simple HTML3 with no javascript at all. Or rather, their users would be better serv…

> the Web became that same pixel-per-pixel full-designer-control application platform, with all the same obnoxious problems that made us hate Flash, minus the binary blob. Browsers now disable right click?

And disable copy&paste in really clever ways so you can't just edit an attribute on a textfield to paste your text. Browsers helpfully expose a on paste event that can be hijacked from various places and text manipulated during paste. I'm an embedded dev and I can't get my head around it so I'm happy for a webdev to correct me if I'm wrong.

Re: The village and the girl

#34

Post by rthomas6 »

blackbagboys wrote: post #32
derefr wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the career prospects of the CCP officials in charge of those administrative units depend upon whether or not they can show that they boosted GDP I would say, then, that it seems like this is a good idea so far!

Well, the problem is that this does not really incentivize the sort of uniquely long-term thinking that the parent seems to think is at work here.

I did not mean to imply a motive to building a brand new, mostly empty city. Just that it's incredibly foreign, yet fascinating, and I can't imagine another country doing anything like that.

Re: The village and the girl

#35

Post by [deleted] »

blackbagboys wrote: post #32
derefr wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the career prospects of the CCP officials in charge of those administrative units depend upon whether or not they can show that they boosted GDP I would say, then, that it seems like this is a good idea so far!

Well, the problem is that this does not really incentivize the sort of uniquely long-term thinking that the parent seems to think is at work here.

[deleted]

Re: The village and the girl

#36

Post by kansface »

derefr wrote: post #31
blackbagboys wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it was probably also built because massive construction projects are an easy way to boost the GDP of administrative sub-regions and the career prospects of the CCP officials in charge of those administrative units depend upon whether or not they can show that they boosted GDP. The motivations and dynamics at play are not really all that alien.

> the career prospects of the CCP officials in charge of those administrative units depend upon whether or not they can show that they boosted GDP I would say, then, that it seems like this is a good idea so far!

Its great when you actually need to get shit done (see San Francisco), but rather terrible in the case you don't (see multiple empty million unit cities in China). In the very best case, this sort of spending is merely wasteful. I'm reminded of the crazy incentives in the Soviet Union.

EG, from SSC [1]

> A tire factory had been assigned a tire-making machine that could make 100,000 tires a year, but the government had gotten confused and assigned them a production quota of 150,000 tires a year. The factory leaders were stuck, because if they tried to correct the government they would look like they were challenging their superiors and get in trouble, but if they failed to meet the impossible quota, they would all get demoted and their careers would come to an end. They learned that the tire-making-machine-making company had recently invented a new model that really could make 150,000 tires a year. In the spirit of Chen Sheng, they decided that since the penalty for missing their quota was something terrible and the penalty for sabotage was also something terrible, they might as well take their chances and destroy their own machinery in the hopes the government sent them the new improved machine as a replacement. To their delight, the government believed their story about an “accident” and allotted them a new tire-making machine. However, the tire-making-machine-making company had decided to cancel production of their new model. You see, the new model, although more powerful, weighed less than the old machine, and the government was measuring their production by kilogram of machine. So it was easier for them to just continue making the old less powerful machine. The tire factory was allocated another machine that could only make 100,000 tires a year and was back in the same quandary they’d started with.

[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/24/book-review-red-plenty/

Re: The village and the girl

#37

Post by speeder »

kansface wrote: post #36
derefr wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the career prospects of the CCP officials in charge of those administrative units depend upon whether or not they can show that they boosted GDP I would say, then, that it seems like this is a good idea so far!

Its great when you actually need to get shit done (see San Francisco), but rather terrible in the case you don't (see multiple empty million unit cities in China). In the very best case, this sort of spending is merely wasteful. I'm reminded of the crazy incentives in the Soviet Union. EG, from SSC [1] > A tire factory had been assigned a tire-making machine that could make 100,000 tires a year, but the government ha…

By the way, the cities are empty because they built them to be used later, and many are not empty anymore.

The Chinese government is slowly moving people from some places, to already built cities (while building other cities).

For now they can keep what they are doing, but I believe they will have to someday stop (otherwise they will build faster than the population increase), then is a matter of seeing how they will handle that stoppage.

But for now they have plenty of people to move, For example example the article here has a graph showing that in 2015 only 51% of the population is urban compare that to Brazil, Brazil is a country with a economy that relies on rural exports much more than china does, industry in Brazil is very weak, yet Brazil has 85% of the population being urban according to the World Bank, in some naive calculation, assuming China wants to match Brazil urbanization, this means they still have 462 million people to move... Projects like the one in the target aim to house 200.000 people, this mean they can do 2310 of such projects without wasting money on unused capacity.

EDIT: Running those numbers made me realize how China is mind-boggling huge and populated. China population that they intend to move, is bigger than Brazil + Russia summed population...

Re: The village and the girl

#39

Post by cbd1984 »

rthomas6 wrote: post #22

Could we stop talking about the fucking layout and talk about the article? China's culture, people, and most of all economy is opaque to most outsiders and I think it's fascinating. They built an entire city from nothing in just a few years, just... on a whim. Because the leaders thought that would be best for the country as a whole. It's fascinating and scary and amazing, and I can't think of another place that work…

> Could we stop talking about the fucking layout and talk about the article?

This is hard when it's unreadable.

Re: The village and the girl

#40

Post by cbd1984 »

cbd1984 wrote: post #39
rthomas6 wrote: post #22

Could we stop talking about the fucking layout and talk about the article? China's culture, people, and most of all economy is opaque to most outsiders and I think it's fascinating. They built an entire city from nothing in just a few years, just... on a whim. Because the leaders thought that would be best for the country as a whole. It's fascinating and scary and amazing, and I can't think of another place that work…

> Could we stop talking about the fucking layout and talk about the article? This is hard when it's unreadable.

I can't be the only one who found it unreadable.
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