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China's $1T Plan to Shake Up the Economic Order

nytimes.com

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Re: China's $1T Plan to Shake Up the Economic Order

#191

Post by epynonymous »

taway_1212 wrote: post #108
marcell wrote: post #77

I'm struck by China's ability to attempt large, ambitious projects like this, compared to America's inability to do, well, anything really. The largest infrastructure project I'm aware of in the USA is California's High Speed Rail (~$60B+), was approved a decade ago and is barely making any progress. The federal government is in complete gridlock. The most ambitious legislation passed in the last decade, the ACA, cau…

Aren't the projects in China executed at complete disregard to the rights of individual citizens? I.e. if your house is in the way, sorry, we'll give you some laughable amount of money and send police over to brutalize you until you leave. Under such conditions, it's easy to make lots of change quickly (in such spirit, Stalin was even more efficient - he essentially enslaved a part of his nation via Gulags and used t…

false, the chinese government cannot directly use police or government agents to force people out of their homes during what's called (cai fang/house demolition). instead i've heard the use of 3rd party mercenaries to clear the way, but dont quote me on that. for the record, the government does reimburse the individuals which is quite significant, but usually the amount pales in comparison to the land rental price. typically the reimbursement is some stipend per person living under the domicile plus the right to pruchase, at a significant discount, a new home farther away. for example, say you lived in san francisco and the government was re-zoning for a highway, you'd get cash plus the right to buy something in a suburb of sacremento at a pretty nice discount. agree with some comment about it being the equivalent of a lottery.

Re: China's $1T Plan to Shake Up the Economic Order

#192

Post by contingencies »

noisy_boy wrote: post #180
contingencies wrote: post #140

From about 2005-2008 I used to live and own a house on the Laos and Burma borders of far south-western China and still often travel in the area. Laos is simply poor, being a landlocked mountainous country with minimal infrastructure or education surrounded by larger and more powerful neighbors. In the last 16 years, Laos has begun to get some better roads (largely with foreign investment), mobile telecommunications,…

There are repercussions of China's aggressive market hunting. Taking an example of Northern Laos, the Chinese have been buying farmlands and converting them into Banana farms. Lots of farmers have sold their land for good money. If you don't sell you land, you'll be a fool because a) the size of land isn't that big so you are dependent on your neighbours good will for letting the water flow into your patch b) the nei…

{{citation-needed}} but perhaps. In my observation land has predominantly been used for rubber plantations rather than bananas. However, the rubber price crashed in recent years so a lot of the profits never materialized, maybe they are switching. Also, there are vast tracts (literally mountain after mountain as far as the eye can see of monoculture) of bananas inside of China (particularly in Wenshan prefecture, close to Vietnam), so on the fact of it it makes little sense to import them over bad roads from bad infrastructure regions in Laos.

Re: China's $1T Plan to Shake Up the Economic Order

#193

Post by FooBarWidget »

ximeng wrote: post #155
FooBarWidget wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some Chinese products are better, but PLEASE remove Baidu from that list. Baidu has been ridiculous for the past few years: I can't find anything on Baidu, pretty much the entire first page is full of irrelevant ads; all my Chinese friends are complaining about that too. I use Baidu Maps every time I visit China. Heavily disappointed, it comes nowhere near Google Maps's quality.

Baidu often gives me better results than Google for Chinese search queries, particularly when looking for pages not blocked in mainland to share with people there.

I (as well as my Chinese friends) were looking for Chinese queries. Couldn't find useful stuff. I ended up using Bing. :(

Re: China's $1T Plan to Shake Up the Economic Order

#194

Post by narrowrail »

myrandomcomment wrote: post #174
narrowrail wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to be pedantic (It's an unfortunate consequence of nuance), but just so you know, there is no country called "America." We have north, central, and south American continents with many countries; the U.S is one country in North America.

The name of the country is "United States of America" or you could say America as a shorted version, so there really is a county called America. If you said America to most people in the world they are pretty much going think the USA. BTW, you in your post used the other shorted version "U.S.". Not to be padantic or anything :) There is no other country on the American continents with America in its name.

That's fair, but many of my fellow American's in other countries within the continents think it is arrogant (I now realize that typing 'America' into wikip redirects to the US).

I think of the United States as a reasonable shorthand because I believe in state sovereignty as supreme; Still unlike anything else in the America's. My terminology and ideas are considered antiquated, but I like to believe nuance is important, and the history of the terms we use can inform how we think about these concepts. "Often copied, never duplicated."

Re: China's $1T Plan to Shake Up the Economic Order

#195

Post by Doxin »

petra wrote: post #60
Animats wrote: post #21

The "Belt and Road" scheme is well known. The first container freight train from Yiwu, China to Barking, England, arrived January 15, 2017. Coast to coast travel time: two weeks.[1] Conveniently, China uses a 4' 8.5" track gauge, unlike Russian metric gauge, so they can move freight cars all the way without a gauge change. Soon, of course, heavier rails, longer trains, faster trains, more trains, better gradients, mo…

With that timetable,compared to sea shipping we're talking about 3-5x faster time, but the cost will be about double - $8K-10K/container. But of course that saves money in warehousing and financing. So financially, today it makes sense for the more expensive goods, at $1.5M per container. And it's best because there's not a lot of capacity vs sea routes. But i wonder: could those prices, with more/better trains etc,…

> aliexpress, which is extremely cheap but uses very slow sea shipping

This depends on the destination country. Recently the dutch postal service has entered some sort of agreement with aliexpress, all my stuff is here within a week nowadays.

Re: China's $1T Plan to Shake Up the Economic Order

#196

Post by kcanini »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #187
kcanini wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google copied baidu not the other way around How so?

The founder of Baidu Robin Li published his RankDex paper in 1997, a year before Larry Page's PageRank in 1998. And Larry was clearly aware of RankDex when he founded Google. Here's what Wikipedia says in its PageRank entry: >A small search engine called "RankDex" from IDD Information Services designed by Robin Li was, since 1996, already exploring a similar strategy for site-scoring and page ranking.[16] The technol…

Today I learned. Thanks.

Re: China's $1T Plan to Shake Up the Economic Order

#197

Post by astebbin »

dang wrote: post #178
astebbin wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What absolute falsehoods. Ask Woodward and Bernstein if they got "suicided." America has not yet fallen to China or Russia's level of cynical censorship acceptance.

It looks like your account has been HN primarily for political arguments lately. Would you please not do that? It's an abuse of the site. HN is for the gratification of intellectual curiosity, and political argument—especially the flamewar kind, which it inexorably degrades to—is destructive of that.

Hey, just saw your comment. I agree with your reasoning and am happy to comply. I assume you will pass the same message along to users who start such discussions in the first place.

I generally only comment on issues I know about. Outside of technology, history and civics is a focus of mine, hence the comments.

Perhaps deleting comments like the parent (made on a throwaway account, apparently) would be a good idea. It would stop folks like me who feel compelled to reply to perceived propaganda from doing so.

The alternative is for everyone who feels strongly about political issues to create throwaways for such HN discussions (see parent), to avoid retribution on their main accounts. I doubt that's a world you'd want to moderate, or that I'd want to live in. (Not suggesting I'd go in for such sock-puppet account shenanigans, but it's the limiting case that comes to mind.)

Anyway, I suspect political stories will always provoke political discussion. If you'd prefer not to have this on the site, I'd humbly suggest flagging and removing such stories.

EDIT: Your point about flame wars is well-taken, however. I could certainly have highlighted the history and facts of American press freedom in a more constructive way here.

Re: China's $1T Plan to Shake Up the Economic Order

#198

Post by podviaznikov »

xfs wrote: post #159
podviaznikov wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a well put thought: > But what is dangerous about it is that this mode of propaganda is smarter than the people. In states with state-run propaganda, the people are smarter than the propaganda. Your own or inspired by some book ?

It had been my hypothesis. Julian Assange said it better: > The west has fiscalised its basic power relationships through a web of contracts, loans, shareholdings, bank holdings and so on. In such an environment it is easy for speech to be "free" because a change in political will rarely leads to any change in these basic instruments. Western speech, as something that rarely has any effect on power, is, like badgers…

Good quotes. Thank you. Reminded me of Neil Postman's comparison between Orwellian world in "1984" vs huxleyan in "brave new wolrd". I Postman made a lot of similar comparison in his book Amusing ourselves to death.
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