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Well, I was going to say "try living in China for a year and see if you like all that 'economic growth' and '4.5% unemployment' but Aestu pretty much showed me up. THANKS A LOT BRO.

But yeah, China is not better off. The numbers are simply numbers without proper understanding of context. It's analogous to removing units from consideration when doing calculations. If you asked someone how tall they were and they said "85" you would be like wat. Devoid of context, numbers hold no meaning.

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Chinese growth har har

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... empty.html

Now let's play pretend.

What if people *did* live there?

Look closely at the image. Those buildings probably have enough space to house a good 10,000 heads each. And there's at least two dozen of them in that image. That's at least 120,000 people.

Now look again: there are no parking lots...no mass transit...no stores...no facilities whatsoever.

Can you imagine rush hour? You see that avenue on the far right side of the image. Rush hour, there'd be a good 20,000 people going around that rotary in the space of 90 minutes or so. 250 people a minute, on a narrow two-way street. What if any one of those 20,000 cars has a breakdown? What if there's a traffic accident?

What about getting groceries? What if there's a medical emergency? What if there's an infrastructural failure and power or water cuts out?

Those apartments are totally unlivable.

Never mind they're probably made of cardboard anyway. Do you really think China builds this filler housing to anything resembling US code? If the floor collapses under your feet, do you think you're going to hear your county representative try to earn kudos by making the land developer look bad? Or will the Communist party cover it up as if nothing happened lest they look bad?

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

Oh, cool! We're pretending we're image analysts! I've kinda had a bit of exposure to image analysts and their processes since I've worked with a few of them and their software.

1) Most of the livable spaces have a depth of about ~25ft, or the width of a two-lane road. (Use the road-ways for reference) Looking at the few vehicles in the image can help judge size, too.
2) Judging by the dark lines on the center picture, the structure appears to be a four or five story building. Measuring the shadow of that center structure, and then the shadow of a larger structure, we can determine the height of the larger structures...
3) Another point of reference would be that sports field at the top-right corner. If you knew what type of field it was (and we don't), then we can use that to determine the area of each floor. Multiply that by the suspected height to get an approx. Sq. Ft. for the building. We could assume the approx. living space per appartment to get a better idea of how many heads each building holds.
4) We can't make judgement about medical facilities, groceries, parking or anything else since a lot of those services might be in the buildings. Look at the buildings on the left, they have a larger first-level area... perhaps parking, shopping, medical or entertainment? Parking could be underground. Parking could be in the first couple floors of some buildings. Parking might even be in that center structure. (Also, not all Chinese drive and if you build a community that has the necessities, you won't need a car.) Just by looking at that picture, we can't tell if there are any bus stops, underground railways, etc. What is that 20ft. wide dark square in the lower-left quadrant of the image? It's heavily shadowed... perhaps an underground road or passageway? Who knows...
5) China might not build to our standards, but that doesn't mean they build 20-story buildings out of cardboard, either. That's a large leap.

I'm not sure I'd buy the 120,000 person mark. That setup looks nothing more than inner-city projects that you'd find in any major city... or maybe a college setup with a bunch of dorms and stuff. It means nothing.

In another of those images, they highlight a building on the left of the image and say, "It's completely empty" but there's cars all around it. Just some of the things I notice when I look at this stuff.

You're arguing for the sake of arguing.

You don't seriously have a case that there isn't a serious problem in China with the creation of vast tracts of vacant, sub-code, speculatory housing developments, and it's not relevant either to the larger topic of the thread or the narrower topic of China's growth because housing bubbles are one problem amongst many.

You want to contest each and every element of the article on the basis of second-guessing aerial images and an article stuffed with citations by people with absolutely no reason to lie. Fine. Google a dozen other articles or read media, Chinese or Western. There's a broad consensus it's a problem.

If you're not contesting that such a serious problem exists - and it is a point beyond contention - then there's no use second-guessing the article and associated images.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

its fucking weird that they're throwing up cities with no one to live in them.

also, its weird that out of 1.5 billion no one wants to live there.

hell I'd LOVE to be the only person in my city sometimes.

It's been said that there are 18.5 Million homes in the states that are vacant. Did you know there are whole apartment buildings in some of our cities that are completely empty or have just a couple tenants in them? Are we now some communist country that makes up numbers simply to make up numbers because of that fact?

See, my problem wasn't with the article; my problem was with you playing make believe with some images, giving us a bunch of random numbers based on whatever, then trying to over-blow the issue by saying it's a completely uninhabitable area because there isn't a grocery store or hospital in the picture... or giving us some random numbers on how many people are going to pass through that avenue in an hour. You essentially said, "China makes up numbers", then in the next breath did the same damn thing to advance your opinion on an issue.

I'll throw you a life preserver so we can get back on point...


What's the trap door law? The requirement for there to be a BBA drafted before future ceiling increases? Legislative triggers aren't new. Even if you're right in that the amendment won't get signed by the states right away, the amendment can just chill for a couple years. Fielding it to the states doesn't hurt anything and it can sit for a long, long time.

It's not the case that nobody wants to live in these homes, it's that most Chinese people are too poor to afford them. The government builds them to keep GDP growth up and speculators buy them as an investment, but it's all a huge property bubble.

Laelia Komi Anomalocaris

I was in guangdong between 2005-2007 on a few trips, and they had deadzones then too.

A trap door is a door with hinges that swing only in the direction of ingress. You walk in, and the door snaps shut behind you.

Making a law that says, "We're doing this, and to make any contrary decision you have to do something really difficult," is a trap door law. Congress passes it, and future Congresses can't easily undo the law. Again, if that were legal, lame ducks would hold the government hostage at the end of every term.


Assuming you're talking about a literal constitutional amendment and not merely an amendment to a bill - what would be the point? There's a ton of constitutional amendments already in that legislative limbo, including the Equal Rights Amendment which has been there for decades. None of them are going anywhere.

At the very least, you're talking about wasting Congress' time to draft a law which won't ever even go into effect. Does Congress really need to waste more of its time making spectacles?

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

I dont think congressmen work hard enough as it is.

Assuming!? Does the BBC not report on American politics or are you purposely being obtuse. If you had an ounce of knowledge about the current political discussions, you'd know that the BBA is intended as a constitutional amendment. I've told you that twice already. Also, despite the hundreds of amendments that never make it out of congressional committees, there were a few dozen that have. Of those, 27 have been ratified. You don't know if the bill will ever get ratified or not - you're talking out your ass and that's the same talk that stalls any progress on the subject. To answer your final question, this amendment could be one of the things that saves our economy from that slippery slope we're currently on. How many more down-gradings do you expect we suffer before congress just pulls off the band-aid and eats our peas and finally solves our financial problems?

Counting the bill of rights? lol.

Of the remaining 17, most deal with social issues much larger in scope than this budget crisis.

Don't give me this "I don't know" bs. The world we live in has certain political realities.

This amendment isn't going to happen. There isn't the kind of nationwide super-majority consensus required or even nearly and that's not going to change no matter what because the underlying reasoning, if not fatally flawed, isn't going to ever gather the kind of consensus needed because right or wrong, a lot of people will make the same arguments against it that I listed here.

Seriously, do you really think you can get 75-80% of the US population to agree on anything, let alone this issue? I say 80% because the consensus has to be so strong to convince all legislators, everywhere, to commit to this. There has to be majorities in favor in both GOP and Democrat districts, and given the herd mentality of American politics that means that the party blocs as a whole have to all agree, not just a simple popular majority.

EDIT: Nuts and bolts - 38 state legislatures would have to approve. Now there's no legal compulsion for any state legislature to even CONSIDER the amendment, and a lot of them just won't touch it because it's political dynamite. That ALONE is enough to stop this amendment in its tracks even if there were no other issues and the amendment was totally innocuous and non-controversial.

38 states would mean a broad consensus across pretty much every region of the US, between states that have dramatically different political visions, and also a lot of states that might be inclined to support it on ideological grounds but their legislatures won't support it because they know that it would mean the end of their world when federal revenue stops coming in - states like Alaska or Michigan or Mississippi or Virginia that are heavily reliant on federal spending even though they're traditionally solid GOP/Tea Party supporters.

Conversely, a lot of the states that would have the most to gain from this - strong, net contributor states like California or New York or New England - aren't going to support it because they don't agree in principle.

Now because it requires ratification by both Congress and state legislatures, that means that, like I said, the consensus needs to be very nearly unanimous nationwide and that's not going to happen. My point here is that you're not talking about unanimous consensus at any given level of our political system (e.g., the Iraq War, which was approved by Congress even though the nation as a whole was far less sanguine), you're talking about consensus at EVERY level of the system. 75% of all counties AND all electoral districts AND all whole states is a political impossibility on ANY issue.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

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