high speed train in china is fuck planes, not fuck cars.
imagine what happens when a plane ticket is half or a third of the price, and you land down town at subway station...
now the subway... that's fuck cars.
if you think that the high speed rail in china is a net negative, i have a ghost city to sell you.
Fun salad fingers story. When it first came out it was a hit in our circle of friends. It was also hosted on a website called fat-pie.com
One girl wanted to show her friend and her friends mum at their place, so she just googled "fat pie" on front of everyone.
Salad fingers was not above the fold in the search results. It was especially bad because her friend was a bit tubby.
There's like a 15% tariff on imported cars (from memory), they're definitely over priced there and always have been. There's foreign brands thar aren't imported, ie produced locally. For a while GM Shanghai was making a fuck load of cars there but its slowly been tapering off. My CN Telsa was bit cheaper than the same one in the US. But I couldn't tell you that it's apples for apples, sometimes the local model of something is cheaper because it's made of cheaper stuff.
The bigger issue for big city china when buying a car is the plates. If its an ICE the cost of getting plates can be 100x that of a EV. Regardless of where it's made.
As for stuffing products in a friendly customer or by some kind of stupid regulation is not common but happens. There is a complex web of incestuous company ownership and an equally complex web of influence and indirect ownership by the government. If someone needs to hit their numbers real bad it's possible they'll ask / insist / regulate that another company buys up to help make it happen. There are a few laws that are supposed to prevent it, but if nobody complains then probably nobody investigates.
I've seen this happen a few times with stuff much cheaper than diggers.
China was briefly an observer state to Warsaw Pact and then pretty quickly completely withdrew.
After sino-sovet split in the early 60s Sino-soviet relations did not really normalize until Gorbachev.
hello~
westerner tech guy in China here. they haven't thrown me out yet, but then they haven't grown up an equivalent of we do yet either. they haven't tried to steal it or learn our secrets either.
nope for the last 3 or 4 years they've asked to license it to a local firm or better yet sell it outright to them. each time the price goes up and I suspect at some point it will become so irresistible that the founders will do it.
interestingly the sanctions closed us off from a lot of big institutes and companies who faced with losing the capability entirely just went ahead and acquired a bunch of Japanese stuff and jerry rigged it together. so that sucked.
because that's it, if we don't sell it to them someone else will and that'll be the end of the party for everyone.
pretty sure this has played out in history before.
Boom, headshot.
I know what happens. I put on a bunch of weight, the automatic immigration gate wouldn't let me through and I got sent to the desk with a person. they told me it was because my face has changed too much grin they made a new picture and I was fine after that.
I lost a bunch of weight recently and while the machines let me in they wouldn't let me out without going to the big desk again for a new photo.
The real estate market doesn't account for 30% of the economy. Though I suppose there's a bunch of way to measure "the economy".
There is pent up demand for housing yet property marketing is dropping. Actually it may have bottomed out but who knows. Beijing wants to correct it and that's what's been happening.
I have property in tier 1 and tier 2, it dropped to pre covid levels. I wasn't doing property for quick flips but I definitely noticed it.
The scars of covid are everywhere in China just like most countries. its going to take a while for it to recover. just like everywhere else.
China collapse remains a click bait dream for the time being if you ask me.
my mum bought me a vic-20. it was beat up and didn't have a tape deck.
I had type my games in from a magazine in basic for a summer, I was hooked.
My uncle gave me a photocopy of a book about assembly for c64 and showed me intros on his c128. He had no idea about programming, he just figured I'd be into it. I worked my heart out to get the cash together for a c64 AND a disk drive.
We probably wouldn't want AI CEOs. Think about what they'd use for training data.
This feels more like he has contractual obligations to be on stage for a certain number of minutes.
it's one of those pop idol malicious compliance tantrums. "so I have stand on stage for the full 90 minutes?"
"ill show them...."