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Guest Post: Imagine Grand Central Station After A Flesh-Eating Virus Outbreak And You Get Guangzhou South Station
Submitted by Tim Staermose of Sovereign Man
Guangzhou South Station: Something Out Of A Zombie Movie
When I left my hotel bound for the new Guangzhou South Station the
other day , I didn’t know much about the station– where it was, how far
from the hotel, etc. After about 25 or 30 minutes in the cab, I still
hadn’t seen any signs for the station and grew concerned that the cabbie
was just taking me for a ride.
As we eventually approached the station, I began to understand why it
was so far out of town. Clearly, the only way they could find enough
contiguous land to build this monstrosity was to go WAY into to the
outskirts of the city.
In the end, it was a 27.82 kilometer (17.39 miles) cab ride from my
downtown hotel, and took 49 minutes to get there. I know this because
Chinese taxis are very efficient and give you a highly detailed receipt.
Guangzhou South Station is absolutely COLOSSAL. By comparison, it is
much bigger than any of the 3 international airport terminals in Manila
where I live… and I’d say it’s over 8 times larger than the Central
Airport Express Station in Hong Kong.
For a start, the Guangzhou South Station is built on THREE levels. I
was dropped off at level 2. When I entered there was an “Information”
booth straight ahead. It was unstaffed. In fact, the entire second
level was completely deserted. Very spooky. It was something out of a
low-budget zombie movie.
I went downstairs to the ticketing area where there were a few signs
of life. Of the forty or so ticket windows, well over half were closed,
and there were only a few dozen people mulling about. To give you an
idea of density, imagine the largest football stadium you can think of
with only a few hundred people inside. Ghost town.
With
ticket in hand, I went up to the departures area… it defies logic that
you have to go upstairs to departures even though the trains are at the
ground level, but my guess is that the Party really wanted to build a
third level just to heighten the grandeur of the train station.
Now, you’d think that if they spent so much money building a station
this large, they would be expecting hundreds of trains steaming in and
out at all hours of the day. Not by long shot. There was only one train
at the platforms. Mine.
It was the same zombie movie theme– areas the size of multiple
football fields with hardly any passengers standing around. And yet,
throughout the entire station over all three levels was expensive, high
quality marble tiles and artistic finishings, all polished to a mirrored
shine.
Guangzhou South Station is truly a monument to excess, exemplifying China’s ruinous “build it and they will come” attitude.
When I arrived to Wuhan about 4-hours later (going 300 km per hour on
the high speed bullet train), it was the same theme: acres of empty
space, hardly a soul in sight, yet all very modern and marbled with
dozens of elevators and abandoned information booths. When my train
pulled in, it was the only one at the platforms.
Frankly, the whole episode reminded me of Bangkok and Hong Kong
airports during the SARS epidemic back in 2003. I observed this
firsthand– passenger traffic cratered because most people were scared
silly of catching the deadly virus, and major airports were practically
empty.
Similarly, it’s what you would expect Grand Central Station to look like after a flesh-eating virus outbreak.
It’s interesting to note that China’s National Audit Office (NAO)
recently published a report which says the country’s outstanding local
government debt is now equivalent to $1.7 TRILLION. That’s a huge figure
— about 27% of China’s GDP in 2010.
Because the NAO’s figure was based only on a sampling of 6,500 local
government-backed financial vehicles (out of more than 10,000 such
vehicles nationwide), the actual magnitude of local government
indebtedness is likely to be much greater. China’s own Central Bank
estimates the number to be 30% higher than the NAO figure.
All of this certainly begs the question– how many more empty
buildings and unused train stations can they possibly build? More
importantly, what happens to China’s economy when all this fixed asset
spending starts to subside? I’ll explore these questions more in the
coming days… but in the meantime, I’d like to hear what you think about
it.
»
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Zombies bitchez!
The presence of Silver kills Zombies. Considering how much Silver the Chinese are buying leads me to the conclusion they have effectively removed Zombies from all public places. Our public places would also be effected in the same way if Americans purchased physical Silver in vast quantities as well.
I thought silver was supposed to kill werewolves?
Either way, I'm trying to procure a little more as my budget allows.
Silver does kill werewolves. On a more serious note, China builds some rather impressive structures, and then they start to rapidly decay. My parents went on and on about stuff China built that just turned to crap with all the corner cutting the builders do.
Silver kills both zombies and werewolves but is, sadly, ineffective against zombie werewolves.
duly noted. thanks.
That would explain Lindsay Lohan's durabiity.
imagine GCS filled with people who are infected with ongoing flesh-eating strep and you have the condition of a lot of people in industrial cities LIKE Guangzhou. I thought this was gonna be a pollution in China article when I read the headline lol
I've heard a theory that these massive people moving operations are not for the general population but for the military. They are very afraid of their own population.
like the U.S. interstate system modeled on WW II Germany autobahns, to ensure free movement of tanks and personnel?
Actually, yes. Good call.
I've been to quite a few cities in China, Guangzhou is the absolute worst for air pollution and city-wide grime.
The only place I can recommend for a tourist detour if you happen to have a few hours to kill there...
http://chinapositive.blogspot.com/2011/05/guangzhou-yuan-xuan-taoist-temple.html
...a ghost town the afternoon I was there, but maybe that was because of the intense heat.
Looks full to me.
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTUxMDg5MjMy.html
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God bless excess...
Who says its excess? Some people need ALOT of elbow room.
"Two pyramids, two masses for the dead, are twice as good as one; but not so two railways from London to York."
~John Maynard Keynes
Pyramids were monuments to make work projects.....of course Keynes would approve ! Slaves doing make work ! It's a Keynesian ideal to stimulate the economy ! Monedas 2011 I'm very wary of those who try to put a human face on Keynes ? He was so witty, so profound ...... maybe we should take a second look at his work ! Maybe he was just too damned smart for the rest of us ?
Short term stupidity, long term genius!
Maybe. It is a gamble at best. The assumption is that they're going to be able to "grow into it." It is highly debateable whether that is reasonable.
marble deteriorates slower than $$$
Given the general surprising tone of developments world over, I'd say we have NO CLUE why these empty cities and extra large everythign is being built.
None. Us plebs have only 20% operating information, enough to get by every day safely. No more.
These cities could be housing/hosting any number of soon to be displaced diaspora.
ORI
http://aadivaahan.wordpress.com/2011/07/04/a-year-and-a-day-later/
Bingo :-)
Bet them sneaky Chineses made a deal with the space aliens to provide housing and rail-service when they come to colonize the planet.
Hah! You mean the Ha'aaaaan from Chibixa? Or is it proxima anehou now?
ori
Reticulans. They're coming for our livers. They're having galaxy-wide hemoglobin shortages because of a market-collapse engineered by their bankers.
in Toledo, Ohio, several of our major grid streets go on and on, like 10 miles west of town, as if Toledo were going to be Chicago. Some of these grid streets serve as excellent boundaries for cornfields. So I guess we've got long term genius here too.
... they'll ... make zombie movies?
Maybe i should move? The UK is terribly overcrowded.
Rail systems to nowhere.
And in America, we made a big deal out of one bridge to nowhere. Though that fails to appreciate the level of fail that will ensue when we no longer have fuel to put cars and trucks on our 4 million miles of asphalt.
Talk about nowhere.
In DC Metro, they are rebuilding the entire Capital Beltway at once! Huge traffic snarls, planning for a future...that won't come. It's the busiest roadway in the US, but they could have built a lightrail around the loop for way cheaper. The insanity of it all is mindboggling...maybe they will all be Nissan Leafs? There won't be more cars needing more roads because there isn't more oil to power more cars.
If only GM had made lightrail cars instead of trucks, the future might have been so very different.
The scope and depth of our collective failure of the imagination will probably be lamented by subsequent generations for a thousand years.
I'm gonna be at a big family reunion this weekend and I'm sure the topic will come up at some point. I'll hear the same shit, technology, oh "they" will just think of something.
How the fuck can you get anywhere when the people in "consensus" aren't smart enough to grasp the problem? I struggle to come up with analogies, even at my level of intelligence, that can get the ordinary intellects to get their minds around the problem.
Consensus is the enemy of the truth. Normal minds can only get linear growth. That's how their lawn does it, how trees do it, how hills are shaped. They have nothing they can compare compounding growth to and therefore it just doesn't exist and is beyond their comprehension.
They think technology will save the oil problem...look, mfers, technology is what permitted us to RAISE our extraction rate to meet the next doubling epoch. It didn't create more oil, it pulled supply forward faster. The technology did the opposite of what it was supposed to have done. It just enabled faster consumption (Jevon's Paradox).
"How the fuck can you get anywhere when the people in "consensus" aren't smart enough to grasp the problem?" Well said. You're still a piece of shit though.
You can't. That's why I own 3 assault rifles and thousands of rounds of ammunition to protect my family and procurements.
since no one will attack when you are asleep or just wait you out... they will just charge like a '90s FPS in set waves of attack that you can take breaks from
Well.. Aren't you the genius.. Grasp this.. Me and 2 family members with 5 full clips each shooting at mobs.. With more family refilling clips.. Now, if you were part of a mob, would you redirect yourself to someone/somewhere maybe not as well prepared or continue like a WW1 style suicide charge?
I'm not doing all of this preparing so it can be taken without a fight.. Regardless of what idiots like you think..
The mob just need some grenades, improvised explosives, some Molotovs or tough vehicles, then it won't matter how many shells you have; you get blown up, burnt out or crushed, unless you have a tough and defendable position!
I think you just need to fucking relax about the peak oil meme, okay?
Well I think you need to get your head out of your fucking ass because you don`t realize that everything you eat, drink and do is completely and wholly dependant upon oil. He can`t relax because of simpleton shits like you ignore and downplay the predicament. If everyone could at least read the exec. summary of the Hirsch report or even anything by Dmitry Orlov then I think individuals like Trav wouldn`t be so adament on how fucked we are.
um, compounding growth = mold or say rabbits
It's funny. My 13 year-old son gets things that my wife refuses to contemplate. Yesterday in the car he mentioned (for some reason) that medicare was going broke. She got into an argument with him insisting that medicare would always be there because otherwise old people wouldn't have any medical care. Same with peak oil. Many people assume that because there is a desire that there will be a supply.
The problem is not imagination, it is the institution, which thrusts imagination out.
Tysons corner is out of control, but that is nothing new. Bumper to bumper traffic at 12 am.
Now they're redoing nearly all of 66.
That may be the worst road I've ever driven on... sorry it has gotten no better.
The Beltway is the mother of all cluster f---s. I once spent 3 1/2 hours driving from the American Legion Bridge to I-95 North. I smoked a whole pack of cigarettes. D.C. is the East's answer to L.A., hot, overcrowded, with insane traffic. No surfing, though.
Icanhaz zombie apocalypse, bitchez?
I joompinit, I hasit.
ROTFLMAO!
The bankers have already took alot of flesh off our collective asses.
Wish the eaters would invade some special places in the fraudstreet area.
Zombies are dead meat, but still tasty. Just like aged beef.
GDP! GDP! GDP! GDP! GDP! GDP!
Go Keynes! It's ya birthday! Go Keynes! It's ya birthday!
Gotta love that Communist-Keynesian economic philosophy!
Perhaps someone who junked this post can explain why. If the Chinese are doing anthing its performing a massive keynsian experiement on a scale unimaginable .
Who owns the debt on this station? Payments much be a bitch.
And I always thought that China is overcrowded.
Good to see there are also empty spaces left.
Freddie Mercury had this to say:
"Empty spaces - what are we living for ?
Abandoned places - I guess we know the score.
On and on !
Does anybody know what we are looking for ?"
And I always thought that China is overcrowded.
Chinatown is overcrowded. repatriation, bitchez..
Rule #1: Cardio
Rule #2: The Double Tap
Wrong question. What should be asked is, how many more malinvestments can society afford before it breaks everything?
A: 42
Douglas Adams would have had a field day with this stuff. Our looming situation reeks so much of Vogon poetry that I think my brain might explode.
So long and thanks for all the fish.
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
Douglas Adams
Duplicate, sorry.
No problem. Sell it to a shell company at 3 times replacement value, pay back the loan, then do an IPO at, say, 6 times actual replacement cost before shutting the doors. Then the reversion clause kicks in.
Or do a reverse merger stock placement in the US and sucker in Paulson.
Actually, sell it to an american shell corporation in which they will lease it back to you. The shell corp gets to use it as a tax shelter (ala KPMG) but shoulders the risk of you not paying the montly lease payment. Yes, this is (or was?) a real tax shelter strategy in the days before risk and depreciating property values.
i think the strategy is, build it, and i can reverse ipo it to some dumb americans, and who knows, it might even work out anyways
Awesome! I love me some China Ghost City stories - more, more, more!
It is very interesting but I will tell you I have given up on laughing at grandiose Chinese methods.
how come the skaters haven't taken over the place?
All of that space is to run circles around the zombies and line them up for more efficient use of ammo.
I have a simple question. Have you bothered to study the rail network that is being built and how the HK Shenzen corridor relates to it?
If you want to post something intelligent spare us this kind of sensationalist low hanging fruit and deliver a thoughtful product.
And yes I remember SARs very well, but it has nothing to do with empty infrastructure waiting for the rail links to be commissioned.
Banzai - are you saying that once the rail network is completed, this station will get better use and more travelers? I am just trying to understand the "overbuilding" situation in China. It seems to be common knowledge that China has overbuilt its infrastructure, which makes me suspicious it may not be true. It takes a lot to move/feed/house 1.33 billion people.
I hear this all the time, that China has overbuilt. Maybe for today theyhave. But what about in 20 or 30 years. Maybe they understand that the world's economic system is collapsing so they are getting while the getting is good. Meaning they are building using resources that are available today paid with dollars that won't have the same 'value' tomorrow.
Just a thought. Not everyone thinks quarter to quarter.
Their marbled floors are all shiny now, yes.
The provincial governor who had this thing approved wasn't thinking quarter to quarter. He was thinking NOW. He was thinking... How much dough can I line into my pockets, using steel that is lighter than iron, using construction standards that guarantee this whole structure falls apart in 2 years, never mind 20-30... Using migrant workers that will still be working at 3 am, upside down, hanging from a rope held by a guy at the roof of the building, with a blowtorch...
I've seen that shit in Beijing. Seriously. Dudes outside my apartment hanging upside down on ropes with blowtorches, being held by another dude at the top, at 3 am. I doubt this was any different.
You see as bad and worse in India. All the time Everywhere.
The sounds of construction are a given in and around any major and half major city now. Clang clang.....
Sad. Industrialization has been such a waste of human potential.
ORI
http://aadivaahan.wordpress.com/2010/06/13/machine-strong-human-weak/
There are many things I admire about India, but its modern construction techniques are not one of them. Was near Ahmedabad after the 2001 Gujarat earthquake, and I remember how so many of the new high rise buildings were literally pancaked, whereas the historic quarter was hardly touched. There was one building that collapsed where the guy on the top floor had installed a swimming pool on the roof, which ended up crushing every floor beneath.
One of the key errors made in these developments is the reason they are empty before is because they are on flood plains, and building miles and miles of concrete really screws that up. I think there's an area outside Delhi (The Colonies?) where the flooding was so bad, the residents were stuck in their buildings with no water or electricity and 10 feet of water on the ground level.
I can see the same thing happening in China...
Are these upside down dudes with blowtorches a bad thing, or a sign of progress? I'm honestly not sure. A lot of guys died building Hoover Dam, and it wasn't a sign that America was about to go downhill.
Now that was a a very perceptive observation, Cognitive Dissonance. China is long in the Great Game Play and easily able to decimate the naked short sell marketeers and wannabe ponzi pioneers who have destroyed the western financial and phantom stock markets with their now out of control algorithms which are front running their computerised scams. The machine has taken over. :-) and hasn't been programmed to stop whenever it is outed. And pulling the plug will collapse the System like a set of cascading dominoes.
Now is the perfect time to offer China anything that they need so that they can purchase it with as many of those toxic paper dollars as are mutually agreed upon from the pile that that they have been loaded with, and that effectively means that they are supplied with their needs .... for virtually nothing?
And if they are buying cutting edge technology and/or highly disruptive virtual methodology which renders to them a leading global position in the field, does it also then strengthen their own currency, even as they spend depreciating dollar$.
That is win win, big time, ...... but not for Uncle Sam.
The problem with the "build now for the future" meme is that infrastructure, like everything else in the world degrades over time and needs more and more maintanance over time until you get to the point where the maintenance costs exceed the marginal value of the train station/airport/shopping mall/etc. I suspect that the vast majority of those empty cities and railroad stations were built so local political leaders could meet near-term GDP targets and skim off a certain percentage to buy that luxury condo in Vancouver, B.C.
+1
someone sees the truth instead of buying into the garbage about the Chinese planning for decades ahead and not just planning quarter to quarter
A train ticket, for the average Chinese, is pretty big outlay. When I travelled from Shanghai to Nanjing once in 2004, in hard-seat class or whatever they call it today (plain old train ticket), I was impressed by how few people were travelling between these two huge cities (roughly, like travelling between New York and Philadelphia). There were some passengers in the waiting rooms for sure, but nothing resembling the insane overcrowding that I've seen in the New York Subway. The officials may be planning for the day when Chinese can travel as often as, say, Koreans.
CD, an interesting thing that everyone misses is that how ill-suited that skyscraper style architecture is for the places it's being built.
In India, glass covered building everywhere, dust splattered. millions of gallons of saop and water and man hours wasted every day, keeping those square miles of ill-suited glass shiney.
That is what stands out for me. Ill suited, non localized, sub-optimal, wasteful, in-efficient waste of all kinds of resources.
india is replete with scenes of the harsh mix of the indian mentality, still largely of th ebullock cart speed in their genes, scraping with technology's ill-regulated, bleeding, often polluted edge. It's quite a sight to behold. 7 years in the hills of marin county had me ill prepared for the cacophony of hauled by it's nose and "civilized" India.
Therein lies a story and a tragedy.
I spent 8 hours in smokey, loud and downright dangerous Bangalore traffic today. At th emercy of a driver who believed that an inch was all the clearence he needed from a pedestrian's toes.
IT will crumble, as it should, it's a monsterosity.....Greek Villas in Bangalore if you please.
Please!
ORI
http://aadivaahan.wordpress.com/2011/03/05/driving-india-crazy/
http://aadivaahan.wordpress.com/2010/07/13/whither-india/
I am looking at the fog-enshrouded Marin Headlands beyond the Golden Gate Bridge, as I type this. Sorry to hear about the rush to build in India. I have never been there and hope to before they lose their collective Mind a-la the PRC.
The people on the street do not want to live this way. Everywhere in China (that has not been chosen by the mandarins to be a human wildlife preserve and tourist trap, like 'quaint' Tibet) they tear down the old neighborhoods and force people to live vertically, in defiance of natural community evolution.
It is not sane and my Chinese wife, who remembers the old country, hates it 10 x more than I do.
the U.S., however, has passed its peak in verticality and is returning to sanity imvho. We have bicycles appearing everywhere and the real green shoots of community synch showing up.
I hear you Saxxon and I do miss Marin. It was a rather formative energy for me, personally. I'm sure you've been to Fairfax.
And seeing the momentum here in India, I'd say the already overbuilt cities are just going to keep on sprouting. Already out of space, air and clean water. just a mass of tankers emptying surrounding lakes and rivers to feed/bathe the city. All pulled by extermely fuel in-efficient tractors.
it's just crumble time. And I can see the bicycle/sommunity aspect taking off in the bay area. It's got that energy. Good luck though. I think we're all going to need it.
ORI
We complain about the wastefulness of our government (legitimately), with stimulus dollars repaiving roads that don't need it, but at least we haven't built cities for no one (ok, maybe some neighborhoods in Las Vegas).
Another China miracle, Mao Zedong beach ball turns desert into water.
http://iconicphotos.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/u1524274.jpg?w=394&h=480
well, you could throw away money waging wars here and there in the world. At least by now China is using its printing presses to build cathedrals in the desert. One result is the same. Their fiat currency debasement.
Somewhat off topic, but these are Paul Krugman endorsed projects. He highly recommends that at least 100 more facilities like these, or larger, be built in the next 12 months within China. He also recommends thousands of these be built immediately around the world, especially in Spain, Ireland, Portugal, Greece, Italy, Grenada, Aruba, Jamaica, Haiti and Mongolia.
If these fail on an epic scale from a financial perspective, Krugman says they will live on as a testament to Keynes' brilliance, and that in any event, Bernanke & Trichet can buy them up and stuff them in Maiden Lanes and Madam Soleil Levants all the Central Banksters' sludge funds over.
On topic - I am in talks with the top brass at AMC's China subsidiary to write and direct the Chinese version of 'The Walking Dead.'
These stations will make perfect settings for many of my most visceral scenes now germinating in my brain.
I am also in talks with a client I am not able to disclose to write and direct an even more cataclysmic Feature Series for many world markets titled 'The Walking Debt.'
These stations will also make perfect backdrops for many of my visceral scenese now germinating in my brain.
Sorry, those are not scenes in your brain that are germinating, but rather the spores of brain eating space fungi! You will direct the filming of a zombie thriller ... as a zombie!
I know a great screenwriter, too.
I really don't know how you could do better than "Shaun of the Dead", the greatest zombie movie of all time.
Sorry I don't have a criminal mind but, if you don't have money how do you sell it to your own shell company and expect them to pay 3 times for it?
A private loan, of course. With a 100 year term.
better to be early with infrastructure than late. if you believe in exponential growth, that station will be filled sooner than you think. trying to catch up to growth is difficult. there are cities, such as atlanta, that have not been been able to keep pace. it creates gridlock, stifles economic growth and causes inefficeiency.
Yeah, that will be great for China; exponential growth. Going from 1.3 billion to 13 billion Chinese will be awesome, and there will be enough of everything in terms of resources to ensure these stations run smoothly.
/sarc/
didnt say it was great, but it is what it is.
Anytime I enter a Chinese resturant I imagine a flesh eating virus.
Which is why you couldn't drag me into one. I spent a week in China, lost 5 lbs.. next time, i'm taking (2) protein bars for every day there.
I'm guessing you don't like the taste of cat?
if you build it they will come.
They will come when the advancing desert in the north pushes them there.
Bingo, Snakehead. A lot of Japanese may look to re-settle as well.
Great movie sets. Keep in mind though that all great projects go through their "it'll never fly" stage. People love to poo poo big infrastructure and then switch their poo poo to the next project when the previous one starts to pay off. Take Grand Central Station, the Panama Canal, Apollo, trans-continental railroad, Suez Canal, etc. As they got rolling the doubters came out everywhere. Give the Guangzhou South Station a few years and everyone will love it. As for the hissers and poo-pooers go back to your log-cabins and let others build the monuments to the future.
Build it and they will succumb...
Build it with no regard to expense, pay for it with debt, and the Keynesians will cum.
They built it for hedge fund industry and hopefully they'll come.
http://img1.gtimg.com/0/0/97/9759_1200x1000_0.jpg
http://www.hkip.org.hk/SymposiumRegionalPlanning_GPRD/Theme3/Albert%20yuen.pdf
My experience with construction inside China, is that it ages very quickly, like before its finished. If it was built to last, like the great train stations of North America and Europe, its a good investment in the future. The Chunnl was always a wink and nod to financally sanity, but its there forever now.
Three Gorges Dam would support your impressions.
China's admission spotlights Three Gorges woes
and they were the cheapest contractor for shit like the Bay Bridge...awsumz!
Can't wait to drive on that thing LOL
Unsafe span - GlobalPost
Grapes are sour.
A China-based constuction company just abandoned a project in Poland - couldn't finish it as they bid too low and the government didn't approve additional funding. One can only imagine how corners are cut in Chin where things are more "flexible".
Currently and unnoticed of many, in Germany there is a fierce fight in the Bundestag about a tank delivery deal with Saudi-Arabia.
Merkel obviously got an order from the Bilderberg meeting, that if Germany abstained from the Libya war, than the least thing it would have to provide is some tanks to George H. Bush's old buddy King Abd Allah al-Sa Ud.
To be precise: 200 Leopard II A7
Since Saudi-Arabia is a beacon of democracy and human rights and equality for all. Lol !
Of course, that couldn't possibly pass the Bundestag.
Gregor Gysi is already up in arms about this.
Interesting, when it is about China (hint: has no oil), then human rights violations are criticized in the sharpest manner, but with Saudi Arabia, home to the 9/11 hijackers and terrorists, oh that of course is something totally different, right ?
SA is even invading neighboring Bahrain !
Not that China is any better at caring about free speech, don't get me wrong.
But the double standard displayed here is so brazen,
they don't even pretend to hide it anymore, let alone hide it anymore.
What a farce.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGgrlaWKFJo
"Blitzkrieg" in Arabic. Anyone? Bueller?
I have no idea, but I am willing to bet that the word "suicide" is part of it.
So I guess I need to re-think my plan to open a little shoe shine booth there.
Its called planning for the future. Should they have built it for the demand in the next 3 years or next 10. I remember all that extra capacity for broadband and too much international capacity during the dotcom era. Hmm seems it the capacity was taken up pretty quickly in the coming decade. Usual western thinking and planning for the now and the next quarter or year. willing to bet within 3-5 years that station hits reasonable capacity I have taken it especially when the line gets extended to SZ later this year.
China recently announced the completion of the line.
How do you think they are going to fill a functioning city? Cities grow around areas of commerce. You can't builda city and then move people in. There has to be a need for a service. And what happens to all the empty infrastructure as they hope farmers and peasants will move in from the country side and start a successful business? How do they maintain all that?
It's too soon to declare that these projects are boondoggles. The part about the impact on GDP once the building slows down is more relevant. Why shouldn't China invest in infrastructure? Building railroads and stations at least makes sense versus the "ghost cities" which are probably pure corruption plays.
The basic problem in China is modernization of agriculture to increase yields. This leaves less jobs in the country. They try to build destinations for these workers.
For an architect, China must be the closest thing to Nirvana this side of UAE.
This reminds me of that article I recently read about the huge abandoned international airport they recently built in Spain, which is now essentially abandoned and unneeded.
Boondoggles galore in this time of phantasmagoria.
"how many more empty buildings and unused train stations can they possibly build?"
Or unused cities for that matter. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out over the next 5-10 years. Each of these massive investments means new fixed costs whether they are used or not. makes me wonder if we will see massive decaying unused infra-structure in China within a decade.
Squatters China style.
JPM led the way.
"More importantly, what happens to China’s economy when all this fixed asset spending starts to subside?"
They wont be struttin' that ass no more. This guy knows what's up.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nft9Y51IOfc
I really like the idea of a deadly, flesh eating virus with a 100% fatality, raging its way through NYC.
And then you trip over the shiny bones lying around everywhere?
The world reminds me of a toddler.
When my son was two years old, at night his eyes would grow heavy and he could barely keep his head up. But when told he needed to go to bed and sleep, he would insist, "I'm not tired!" Shortly thereafter, he would collapse in a heap, and I would pick him up and tuck him into bed.
Economies have cycles - they expand and contract, breathe in and breathe out, wake and sleep. It's time for the world's economy to go to sleep, but rather than prepare like adults, by recognizing the need for - and inevitability of - sleep, its decisionmakers and strategists say "I'm not tired!" before the whole thing chaotically shuts down.
The world will soon need all the adults it can muster to deal with the aftermath of chaotic collapse. I wonder when, if ever, such adults will comprise the majority of the world's population.
The adults seem to have left the building. Since the 1960's, it's all about staying "forever young," physically, mentally and emotionally. Nobody wants to have their toys taken away.
China is making the same mistakes Dubai made.
Meanwhile..
http://www.swfinstitute.org/fund-rankings/
Per Bloomberg - Satyajit Das, a derivatives consultant
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10XuqZuJqi8
Dubai was a ponzi scheme just like USA. China is large scale of JAPAN but without Japanese mistakes.
Yuk!
I hate those flesh eating things...they are so hard to warsh out of the clothes....Yuk...Yuk!
Seriously, I expect China to have a major slowdown after this Huge RE Bubble. It will spread to Australia which is another Bubble looking for a Pin...the median house price in OzLand is over $635,000 USD.....unsustainable and we see more and more defaults there....i don't know if it will get as bad as the States but it will be bad.
Major slowdown = revolution in the PRC. The Party will do everything in its power to avoid that.
These megabuilds are in part to keep people employed; to move troops; to keep the kickbacks coming in.
The PRC is a seamless fascist corporate dictatorship. It has its weak points though - too many males, not enough arible land, terribly polluted water. I wish them a lot of luck. I think this fever will get played to the hilt and hyperinflation is where it will break. Hedged accordingly/
The hardest part of the zombie apocalypse is waiting for it to happen..
Think about the greatest economies, the raging good times and all the countries we associate with these thoughts and the subsequent hangover.
Now think China here and now.
Fucked...
du, dum dum, dum.....
School of Rack and Shell ready to travel.
they all bought new cars and are zooming around, smoking.
Something tells me China is making preparation for WW3. Empty city ready for the towns that will be evacuated, etc etc.
just a though
Agreed. Nothing better than a socially engineered event to force migration into a newly built city.
correct.
there are two colors on the chinese flag, red for war and gold for wealth accumulation.
Nothing happens in chinese without a purpose. The question is always what is the timeline?
Well at least the Chinese build some infrastructure.
In the USA we'd just shovel the borrowed excess to c**ts like Lloyd Blankfein or JD.
viruses don't eat flesh. bacteria do.
Bingo ! A bacteria that eats the flesh of viruses ? Monedas 2011 Comedy Jihad World Tour
von Mises stated that the expansion of credit by any means (fiat money printing, GSE lending like with Fannie/Freddie, ever-smaller fractional reserve banking), causes the "appearance of prosperity". These are photographs of "mal-investment", another effect von Mises warned about. The next phase is the value of these assets will become rational in light of how much the contribute to the economy. Of course, governments (and especially socialist ones) will do all they can to effect denial of any rational value. But in the end, economic value cannot be hidden. And neither can the effects.
I'm still looking for a government that is not socialist ! I'll settle for one that has been right of center in legislative body and administration for 10 years running ! Can't find it ! Monedas 2011 It's worse than even Monedas imagined !
I think you'll find America's answer to China's Ghost Cities, Guangzhou South Station, Three Gorges Dam and Bullet Trains to Nowhere in one simple five-sided building on the Potomac. We've spent more money on generations of weapons that do nothing to make us more secure than the Chinese ever have or ever will build on civilian projects like these beautiful, useless boondoggles. Talk about insane spending - I give you the US "Defense" budget. As Dwight Eisenhower warned us, the Military/Industrial complex will be the ruin of America, and it has been. Although Ike didn't mention the international Jewish banking cartel, no doubt because the atrocities of the nazis were too fresh in everyone's mind to float that phrase, we now know that they along with Corporations and "Defense" have wrecked the future for all people on the planet, not just the USA. So leave the Chinese alone and let them build their enormous "Pleasure Domes" if it makes them feel better temporarily. It's all over anyway.
Absolute balderdash. You might just as well ask why Tyler Durden's laptop sits all night *doing nothing*. At one time, withing living memory, that much computer power would service the IT department 24x7 for a major corporation. The Chinese are doing exactly the right thing: building infrastructure. Plus a train station has to be built for nearly worst-case scenarios (rush hour plus major sporting event). That's exactly what Obama should be doing.
--bks
Monedas' new book: "John Maynard Keynes - A collection of his best mediocre, puzzling and rather lame observations !" They only served to distract us from what an insidious economic idiot he was ! Monedas 2011 Economic theory for novice counterfeiters and bed wetting Utopians !
I still prefer the empty train station to the crowded "New World Airport Commission's" Denver Int'l Airport and its murals of death.