205
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
205 points (98.6% liked)
World News
38977 readers
1811 users here now
A community for discussing events around the World
Rules:
-
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
-
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
-
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed. Sources that have a Low or Very Low factual reporting rating or MBFC Credibility Rating may be removed.
-
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
-
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF 10/19
-
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
-
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
-
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
Lemmy World Partners
News !news@lemmy.world
Politics !politics@lemmy.world
World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world
Recommendations
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
- Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
And in that he's 100% right. And you're also correct about the context. Belt an road is a post rebranding of wasteful infrastructure spending to prop up the countries economics. Not that governments shouldn't spend on infrastructure. But the way China has been doing it has been a method to prop up a very unstable house of cards. Literally just throwing around money all over the place with very little return. In the end, just making things worse really.
IIRC China denominates their loans in USD because they have a massive USD surplus due to the US-China trade imbalance. It's aligned with China's policy today of rapidly shrinking US Treasury holdings.
Which is only going to cause them more problems long run. In a state capitalist society, or any other capitalist society for that matter. Worthless debt is worthless. Capitalism is unsustainable. But if it was sustainable it would require healthy trading partners. So they're really shooting themselves in the foot on that front. And none of the giant fancy ghost stations or high speed rail lines built out to the rural parts of China. The party has largely ignored and failed to benefit for most it's existence is going to change that. Especially with the population disparity.
If they were truly socialist/communist, at this point they'd be pretty secure. Instead of slowly heading for an inevitable crash. It isn't just them though. The west is getting ready to crash again soon. And we can't be bothered to mitigate it.
I mean, isn't there pretty substantial evidence that those "ghost cities" are just speculative development that, most of the time, is productive?
See: https://youtu.be/SR4EYQ6JFUI?si=brfvaXCezqVI0hiL
The party's approach to dealing with the marginalized rural population is to just urbanize as many people as possible. That's also why they speculatively build out housing. In 2023, at least, rural people are getting more disposable income growth than urban ones:
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/SR4EYQ6JFUI?si=brfvaXCezqVI0hiL
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I wasn't talking about the cities per se. But their overspending on high speed rail etc. In terms of housing. There is no one size fits all. And urbanization is not acceptable for everyone. There will always be people who reject it and they aren't necessarily wrong for doing so. You have to build infrastructure where people are. And the infrastructure they need. Not just where you want them to be or think they need. So in that sense they may have housing for everyone. But they are still occupied by ghosts seeing it's not the housing they need or want. But one size fits all thinking, along with social oppression and a healthy dash of torturing and murdering those that disagree. Have always been core problems of leninism and those inspired by it. So it was always going to be the sort of mistakes the party makes. Because they don't, and have no need or incentive to actually serve the people.
I mean, objectively Chinese HSR is cheaper per unit distance than California's or London's by... I think an order of magnitude? They can afford to build additional infrastructure at scale.
China connected basically all major Chinese cities for less than 10x the cost of California HSR or HS2.
I'm not decrying investment in infrastructure. But rather the types and ways China has done it, specifically with propping up their faltering economy in mind.
I'd also love to see nationwide build out of quality desirable public housing in the US. To put landlords out of business and bring housing costs back to reality. But it would be silly to build it all in Wyoming where most people don't want to live. Or as Brutalist architecture which most people don't enjoy.
High speed rail and public transportation too. But building high speed rail to villages that don't need or want it. Just to prop up the economy. Is again wasteful, not actually serving their needs, and only going to make their problems bigger in the end. The party is serving the party and not the people.
I mean, I think it's just a completely different development model.
China develops for future demand, while the US develops for past demand.
Invariably, developing for future demand sometimes leads to poor development, but those cases are not the norm. What it does allow is taking advantage of economies of scale to improve net efficiency (again, in the HSR example, China incurred 10x the debt to build 50x the rail of California and 150x the rail of the UK). Even if half of your buildup is useless, it's still more efficient than the American approach.
I'm sure there's some optimal point in the middle and I don't think China's hit that, but I think you're conflating different issues to justify the lack of infrastructure investment in the US. The thing is, with the massive rural-urban migration in China, it was always better to have excess capacity than insufficient capacity: the urban population is the key driver to economic growth.
For what it's worth, you can ask people in SF if they'd prefer to live in brutalist buildings for $500/month or pay the exorbitant rents in the area...