Even then, Clarkson was too thick to work out how to use the charger so didn't get maximum benefit from it.
And he wasn't able to run a Reliant Robin more than a 100 yards without rolling it over either. He's Clarkson... his persona for like 15+ years is to be a bit of hooligan gorilla. Taking his on-screen and off-screen antics seriously... says more about the viewer than it does about Clarkson. Its not fair and balanced journalism. Sit back and enjoy the spectacle.
Actually he had to drive the Reliant Robin a 100 yards before he succeded in his intention to deliberately roll it over to amuse his audience. Not that there is anything wrong with amusing your audience with slapstick but rolling a Reliant Robin in 100 yards is pretty lame driving. Any experienced sports car driver, like Clarkson claiks to be, could roll a Reliant Robin over inside of 50 yards. As for 'antics', punching somebody in the face isn't 'off-screen antics', it's assult with intent.
I figured I would try it. I signed up for it, Amazon happily took my credit card details and, after they were potentially billing me (yeah I know first month is free), they tell me I can't watch it from my location. Now, I know they have my address on file. I know they can figure out what country my visa card was issued. You would think they would warn me that I cannot view their apparently 'world wide' service from Australia.
The best part is that you will now be getting regular e-mails from them informing you of 'deals' available to you on their world wide service that you cannot subscribe to from your location.
This is just the beginning of another five years of the Tories and their rural mafia shoving their crappy conservative values down the throats of the 63.9 percent of the UK population that did not vote for them and now that the Scottish national party has split the Labour vote it looks like this is how things will stay this way for the foreseeable future. It is an utter travesty that a political party can achieve a parliamentary majority with 36.1 percent of the population behind it and that a party that gained 12.9% of the popular vote (UKIP) gets one parliamentarian. I'm no fan of UKIP by any means but they should have gotten more seats.
Seriously, read what happened. Yeah, BBC has done plenty of bone-headed things in the name of PC. This, however, is not one of those things.
Clarkson has been at odds with the BBC's director of TV, Danny Cohen since he became Director of TV.
There is somebody that Clarkson has met that he didn't end up being at odds with?
This ended up being about the fact that the same rules need to be applied all through the pay scale.
That's a cop out.
The BBC is not above applying double standards and if this happened at a lower rank, you can bet your arse the person involved would be sent off for "anger management" and that would be the end of it... But as I said, the BBC is not above applying double standards.
I don't think that this hullabaloo about the firing of Jeremy Clarkson (aka. the unjustified politically motivated attack PC attack on Clarkson) is entirely about him punching that producer. It is also about other incidents of him punching people and just generally being a pain-in-the-ass arrogant diva who has gone out of his way to make enemies. He had it made, all he had to do was think before he talked and not punch people over food deliveries or because they published photos of him snogging a woman who isn't his wife but Clarkson being Clarkson had to screw it up by being a dick. It's nobody's fault but his own.
There's also the matter that current Linux users need to jump through hoops for now in getting the code into a working state with the latest kernel and forked versions...
Seems the usual way Linux works.
AMD still beats Nvidia for stability. The Nvidia community driver that ships with the Linux kernel is unstable and the proprietary driver is a pain in the a**. I have never had stability issues with AMD drivers on Linux as long as I kept clear of the very bleeding edge.
Trust me, if you want to solve the problem of bad English, don't go to an engineer.
Bad use of English usually boils down to some pain in the ass traditionalist who has nothing better to do complaining that languages have a tendency to evolve. People here delight in complaining about how non US forum members speak horrible English and yet from a British perspective the quaint English dialect spoken in the USA is a big steaming pile of bad English and quite franky I put more stock in their opinion since they invented the language. Having said that also think that talking about preserving the 'purity' of the English language is pretty funny since English is a pretty good example of a linguistic mongrel.
There are less poachers than buyers, so it's easier to kill the poachers than the buyers.
There are fewer drug suppliers than there are drug addicts so it's easier to put the onus of fighting the war on drugs on the countries where the suppliers are located. The resounding success of this the ongoing war on drugs bears this out. Year after years drug production has decreased and the drug problem in the USA an Europe has diminished to the point of......uh..... never mind.
This poor kid had a real life "Mars Attacks" skull. Afterward, she looks almost normal, with a slight forehead bulge that could be covered with bangs. Job well done by the doctors.
I can only express my admiration for the father, the mother ran out on them but he didn't give up raised the money and saved the life of his daughter. He showed more determination and humanity than many other people would have been capable of in this situation including the child's own mother.
Since when does the FBI have jurisdiction over citizens of Romania ?
Where in the summary or the news piece does it say they have jurisdiction in Romania? The original article even quotes Romanian prosecutors statement that this was a cooperative investigation. There is nothing that prevents the FBI from helping out the Romanian authorities by providing the intel and expertise needed to shut down these sites except the refusal of the Romanian authorities to accept FBI assistance. The FBI, DEA, Scotland Yard, Germany's BKA, France's Police Nationale and many other law enforcement agencies all participate in operations abroad and provide assistance to law enforcement in other countries. If you are going to chew out the FBI for cracking down on software pirates at least RTFA please feel free to exercise your 1st amendment right to do so, just try to find a more potent argument than that the FBI is engaging in the mundane every day task of *SHOCK/AWE*-cross border law enforcement cooperation!!
European leaders keep pretending that they are giving Greece new money, when they are merely shuffling old debts around.
The money that was loaned to Greece has been lost. The whole crisis is about everyone involved being unwilling to accept this reality and thinking that the money will somehow magically come back once the Greeks have been punished sufficiently.
It is the same theory behind debtor's prison. It should be abolished for the same reasons.
There will be no "haircut" for treaty reasons but it has been suggested that the start of repayments will be postponed even more and the repayments will be made over an even longer period which allows inflation to gnaw away at the loans which in principle is the same thing as a haircut. IIRC they call that debt restructuring. That having been said while I acknowledge that Greece needs yet another haircut or something that boils down to a haircut, I have very little sympathy with Greece anymore. They have a bloated public sector, a completely unfunded state pension system, the country is completely overrun by corruption and patronage politics and don't even get me started on their asinine arms race with Turkey. Greece is the sick man of Europe and the country desperately needs reform but expect the EU to reserve the opportunity to force Greece to comply at every turn because nobody trust the Greek government anymore.
Software Justice Warriors. The SJW are people who are mad because they were born too late to fight the actual software injustices of the past, such as the Netscape debacle or the decision to call the unix command "umount" instead of "unmount", so they join digital lynch mobs at the slightest hint of possible software controversy, hoping to fill the void in their existence with strongly worded paragraphs of significantly misinformed opinions about problems that either don't exist or that are blown out of proportions.
Well, today they are all just sitting there with sparks flying out of their ears and their limbs spasming randomly going "Microsoft donates to open source.... does not compute.... dzzzt... does not compute...."
It's not "Chinese exceptionalism" (whatever that means), it's just that since 1989 the Chinese economy HAS been on a constant upward trend. Your girlfriend was basing her mentality on observed reality. She DID understand how financial markets work...in China. Sort of sad you couldn't get out of your own mind, extrapolate, and figure it out. Criticizing her for being trapped while doing the same yourself has a name in English, I forget what it is. Seriously, except for a dip in 2008, it has been up, up, up for as long as anyone can remember, certainly a post-90s girl like your ex. Everybody DID get wildly rich.
So basically economics DO work differently in China than they do elsewhere? Well at least we now have proof that spectacular stock market crashes happen in China as well as in the rest of the world.
What you are seeing is the market correcting itself. Prices are returning to what they should be. The problem is not the crash, the problem is the high prices that exist right before the crash.
Correction, prices would be returning to what they should be if the Chinese government had not inteceded to keep prices from getting there.
The whole "Chinese ghost city" bubble tends to be misunderstood. Sure there are boondoggles in Mongolia but a lot of those ghost cities are basically extensions of boomtowns. And it is tough for people to understand just how big a boomtown in China is; Shenzen is adding almost 300,000 people every year, Tianjin almost 600,000. So the general area of Shenzen needs to build a city the size of Pittsbugh, and Tianjin needs to build a city the size of Boston *every year*. Most of those empty cities were built in anticipation of people relocating from elsewhere and have filled up quickly. And for those that haven't, with building on that massive a scale, if they build residences for an extra 100,000 people in the wrong place here and there it's hardly a sign of foolhardy building that isn't necessary *somewhere*.
It isn't just about empty houses, China's problem is debt, bad debt. The debt to GDP ratio is 105% and climbing, a healthy GDP to debt ratio in a developed economy is between 50 and 60%. Chinese municipalities have been racking up close to a trillion dollars of debt, loans scured with land parcels at bubble prices. Now, what happens when the realestate bubble bursts/deflates and land prices plummet? Loans backed by overvalued assets, massive writeoffs, insolvent banks.... Ring any bells? Real estate bubbles like other bubbles do not exist in isolation, their bursting has a concussive effct.
Fortunately for China, this is a bubble that formed as the usual speculative excess on top of a building boom. Unlike our own latest market bubbles, the Chinese boom has created enough durable infrastructure - dams, power plants, rail lines, freight terminals, water systems - that the financial effect of this crisis will be muted and temporary. For years now, China has done all the building we have not been able to break ground on. China can build bullet train lines thousands of miles long, while we can't even start a research telescope.
When our current tech bubble pops, the dollar will have been backed up by...social media apps?
Have you actually taken a close look at the insanity that is China's property bubble? All that construction, much of which is based on questionable logic and planning, has largely served the purpose of creating growth where there would else have been none. They have massively over invested in real estate and industrial facilities because of poor planning and corruption.
I think it should be noted that before anyone gets to exited Chinese markets still are higher than even a few years ago. Its pretty hard to call this a crisis. Until the bank runs starts and business actually close their doors its just the evaporation of money for which no wealth ever existed in the first place.
The Chinese market makes the US stock market look down right rational. When you consider the lack of reporting requirements, the level of state involvement in many enterprises, the fact that so much of the financial media there is state owed and therefore a propaganda arm; there isn't a value investor in all of China. Investing without information is actually just gambling no matter which side of the Pacific you happen to be on. The thing about China is there are only gamblers because the government made real investing impossible.
I think overall this will prove to be non-story when the dust up settles in another week or so. If anything the big story will be how the Chinese government blinked and interceded to soon and their intervention failed. The economic story will simply be: Market values will return to something that is at least moderately reflective of the real economic situation. The illusion of China's authoritarian system being a run-away success will be shattered. The reality is though that they will still have perfectly respectable growth, they will still be the worlds second largest economy. etc. So rather than 8% it will be the same 2% that western economies are perfectly happy to see.
Every time I see an economy grow by double digit percentages, when there are stock market bubbles a-plenty, they have a massive real estate bubble going on and people tell me this is sustainable in the long and that these people have invented some sort of new brand of 'free lunch' economics run I get skeptical. Especially when these events are happening in environments like the one you just described. What is happening in China is not sustainable and it will end in tears. If people think a suspension in the trading of half the companies on the Chinese stock market, a drop of 30% and 3.3 trillion dollars lost is bad the bender that China will experience when the party finally ends will be even worse. Yes this is the unwinding of a legendary government sponsored stock rally but no, China is not immune to falling on it's face like the US and EU did in 2008 and let's just hope they donð't fall on their face the same way the US and Europe did in 1929. The only thing authoritarianism with a government micro-managed market does for you is allow you to make the problem worse before it blows up in your face.
Oh it's gonna get better, there's a lot and I do mean a lot of bad debt in China. A lot of banks over the last two years have been trying to claim it, and suddenly find there's no assets to seize and in some cases assets have been used upwards of half a dozen times under different names. When it pops it's going to be massive, and exceptionally nasty.
I've been waiting for this for a long time. It is pretty amazing how long the Chinese government has been able to keep this thing going. It will certainly be interesting to watch these bubbles burst. Then there is their 'shadow banking' system which is an unknown quantity. It seems to me that if western governments could sweep a bunch problems under the carpet before they lost control of the situation in 2008, an autoritarian regieme can sweep a whole lot more crud under the carpet and make things way worse before they loose control of the situation. Perhaps we will now get a period of silence from those here in the west who have been singing the praises of the economic policies of the authoritarian states (mostly Russia and China).
Your family have lived in a house for generations. A few years ago the house needed a bunch of work adding rooms and generally upgrading it to fit your new status as members of the respectable middle class. You didn't have the cash but you had the status and rates were cheap, so you took out a bank loan to cover it. As that loan came due, your husband lost his high paying job and had to take a cut.
So you begged with the banks and eventually they agreed to lend you more money, but at a higher interest rate. Paying more interest on less money is tough, the house continues to need work to keep it in good repair and you continued to not quite make ends meet. You go to the banks and beg for more money so you can keep paying the interest and repairs but the banks say no, they say you need to live within your means.
You promise to do that, and you quickly 'adjust' your finances to show how it's all going to work out. The bank sees through the farce immediately but he's a greedy fellow and with you agreeing to add 200 more basis points onto the rate, it's gotta be good for him. If you default, your cousin will probably cover it anyway so it isn't much risk.
You keep struggling, and you have to beg the banks for money every month. This starts to annoy and worry the banker, so he starts taking an increasing interest in your life. Don't do a good repair here, just leave the window broken... Don't send your kids off to uni, educate them at the local community college. These things save a little cash, but they also lead to you having to spend a whole lot more time looking after the house instead of making money. Even worse, your kids having a lower level of education means they can't get such a high paying job to help out which is a real problem since your grandparents have now retired and are moving back in.
You get desperate and crawl to the bank begging for more and more. They look over the situation and say, well, maybe, but you have to cancel all expenditure. House repairs, who needs them? Further education, completely abolished!
You hold a family conference. What to do? Give in to what the bank wants and destroy your family's future? Or default and have the bank potentially take possession of your family home. Put like that, it isn't such a hard call, you tell the bank to f. off and wait too see what will happen.
Who's at fault? You for living beyond your means? Yep. You for lying to the bank? Yep. The bank for accepting such an obvious lie? Yep. The bank for loaning money to someone that couldn't possibly pay it back? Yep. The bank for insisting on austerity measures that will have a negative long term fiscal impact, yep.
Does that help?
Blah, blah... the Greeks are victims... blah, blah.... the poor Greeks... blah, blah... those evil Germans... blah blah. I listened to the prime minister of Poland a few days ago giving his thoughts about the situation in Greece. He said Poland went through a long series of painful reforms after the fall of communism and is now experiencing a measure of economic recovery and how there is zero sympathy for the Greeks pissng and moaning about having to reform entitlement systems that the Poles can't even dream about implementing today. I don't know how generally the Polish people agree with him but I sure did. I'm getting really sick and bloody tired of the Greeks. Many nations around Europe have implemented painful reforms and here are the bloody Greeks going: We want to keep the our time tested system of bribery, political patronage, corruption, systematic benefits fraud, we'd like you to bankroll our totally marode and unfunded pension system while our politicians fish for votes by promising pensioners a 13th month of payouts (this is a totally unfunded promise by the Greek govt. and also keep in mind that pensioners in countries funding the aid packages to Greece don't get a 13th month) on top of
The ones you glossed over just because it's Apple.
He does cross platform development, why are you defaulting to accusing him of glossing over faults in OpenGL on OS X? For all we know he's a life long Linux user or a die hard Windows nerd. If you are trying to Troll us that is a pretty pathetic effort.
I'm guessing equipment purchased on the used market. Cuba's still pretty poor right now. Thanks to Castro and his little shit-fit revolution, he drove that nation into the ground via COMMUNISM! And no, Cuba's survival didn't depend on trading with America; or the lack of in this case. The financial wounds were self-inflicted by Cuba for Cuba. It truly is a sad story and need not have happened.
You are trolling. Take the deeply held beliefs of the GOP+Tea Party and shout them from the roof top in a relatively liberal heavy crowd like slashdot and watch the sparks fly. At least it's a clever troll I'll give you that so I'll bite. Can some GOP voting admirer of the Cuba embargo please tell me what is the purpose of maintaining it 30 years after the end of the cold war? Do yoy really think the Cubans yearn to have the Batista elite that fled to Miami back? Rest assured that most of them don't. I've been there and my impression was that Cubans may want a better life but they don't want their island to bcome America's whorehouse again. You can try to tell me the Castros are a cruel dictatorship that killed a bunch of people and you'd me right. But then so are some of the USA's most trusted friends aroud the world who have regularly been recieved in the White House for decades with open arms by Democrat and Republican presidents alike. The Cuba embargo is a stupid anachronism, all it does in make an international laughing stock out of GOP senators and leaders who block the lifting of the Cuba embargo. This is especially true since at the same time these politicians are maintaining the embargo they are whoring for favors with Saudi oil princes who are functionaries in an athoritarian theocracy and some of whom financed the Iraq insurgency and are now bankrolling ISIL.
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Even then, Clarkson was too thick to work out how to use the charger so didn't get maximum benefit from it.
And he wasn't able to run a Reliant Robin more than a 100 yards without rolling it over either. He's Clarkson... his persona for like 15+ years is to be a bit of hooligan gorilla. Taking his on-screen and off-screen antics seriously... says more about the viewer than it does about Clarkson. Its not fair and balanced journalism. Sit back and enjoy the spectacle.
Actually he had to drive the Reliant Robin a 100 yards before he succeded in his intention to deliberately roll it over to amuse his audience. Not that there is anything wrong with amusing your audience with slapstick but rolling a Reliant Robin in 100 yards is pretty lame driving. Any experienced sports car driver, like Clarkson claiks to be, could roll a Reliant Robin over inside of 50 yards. As for 'antics', punching somebody in the face isn't 'off-screen antics', it's assult with intent.
I figured I would try it. I signed up for it, Amazon happily took my credit card details and, after they were potentially billing me (yeah I know first month is free), they tell me I can't watch it from my location. Now, I know they have my address on file. I know they can figure out what country my visa card was issued. You would think they would warn me that I cannot view their apparently 'world wide' service from Australia.
The best part is that you will now be getting regular e-mails from them informing you of 'deals' available to you on their world wide service that you cannot subscribe to from your location.
This is just the beginning of another five years of the Tories and their rural mafia shoving their crappy conservative values down the throats of the 63.9 percent of the UK population that did not vote for them and now that the Scottish national party has split the Labour vote it looks like this is how things will stay this way for the foreseeable future. It is an utter travesty that a political party can achieve a parliamentary majority with 36.1 percent of the population behind it and that a party that gained 12.9% of the popular vote (UKIP) gets one parliamentarian. I'm no fan of UKIP by any means but they should have gotten more seats.
Clarkson has been at odds with the BBC's director of TV, Danny Cohen since he became Director of TV.
There is somebody that Clarkson has met that he didn't end up being at odds with?
That's a cop out. The BBC is not above applying double standards and if this happened at a lower rank, you can bet your arse the person involved would be sent off for "anger management" and that would be the end of it... But as I said, the BBC is not above applying double standards.
I don't think that this hullabaloo about the firing of Jeremy Clarkson (aka. the unjustified politically motivated attack PC attack on Clarkson) is entirely about him punching that producer. It is also about other incidents of him punching people and just generally being a pain-in-the-ass arrogant diva who has gone out of his way to make enemies. He had it made, all he had to do was think before he talked and not punch people over food deliveries or because they published photos of him snogging a woman who isn't his wife but Clarkson being Clarkson had to screw it up by being a dick. It's nobody's fault but his own.
There's also the matter that current Linux users need to jump through hoops for now in getting the code into a working state with the latest kernel and forked versions ...
Seems the usual way Linux works.
AMD still beats Nvidia for stability. The Nvidia community driver that ships with the Linux kernel is unstable and the proprietary driver is a pain in the a**. I have never had stability issues with AMD drivers on Linux as long as I kept clear of the very bleeding edge.
The sheer amount of activity generated by apps with fake ads was what initially exposed the scam.
It is positively amazing how many criminals manage to wreck a good scam by getting greedy.
"Is that problem the bad use of English?"
Trust me, if you want to solve the problem of bad English, don't go to an engineer.
Bad use of English usually boils down to some pain in the ass traditionalist who has nothing better to do complaining that languages have a tendency to evolve. People here delight in complaining about how non US forum members speak horrible English and yet from a British perspective the quaint English dialect spoken in the USA is a big steaming pile of bad English and quite franky I put more stock in their opinion since they invented the language. Having said that also think that talking about preserving the 'purity' of the English language is pretty funny since English is a pretty good example of a linguistic mongrel.
There are less poachers than buyers, so it's easier to kill the poachers than the buyers.
There are fewer drug suppliers than there are drug addicts so it's easier to put the onus of fighting the war on drugs on the countries where the suppliers are located. The resounding success of this the ongoing war on drugs bears this out. Year after years drug production has decreased and the drug problem in the USA an Europe has diminished to the point of......uh..... never mind.
So they are back to where they started?
Don't worry about this patent. I'm pretty sure the NSA has prior art on this.
People like this guy are why we cannot have nice things.
However, this thing could have some potential in the development of an extreme form of skeet shooting....
Tired of normal skeet shooting? Craving some excitement? Well come over to Jim Bob's EXTREME skeet range, on our range the clay pigeons SHOOT BACK!!!
This poor kid had a real life "Mars Attacks" skull. Afterward, she looks almost normal, with a slight forehead bulge that could be covered with bangs. Job well done by the doctors.
I can only express my admiration for the father, the mother ran out on them but he didn't give up raised the money and saved the life of his daughter. He showed more determination and humanity than many other people would have been capable of in this situation including the child's own mother.
Since when does the FBI have jurisdiction over citizens of Romania ?
Where in the summary or the news piece does it say they have jurisdiction in Romania? The original article even quotes Romanian prosecutors statement that this was a cooperative investigation. There is nothing that prevents the FBI from helping out the Romanian authorities by providing the intel and expertise needed to shut down these sites except the refusal of the Romanian authorities to accept FBI assistance. The FBI, DEA, Scotland Yard, Germany's BKA, France's Police Nationale and many other law enforcement agencies all participate in operations abroad and provide assistance to law enforcement in other countries. If you are going to chew out the FBI for cracking down on software pirates at least RTFA please feel free to exercise your 1st amendment right to do so, just try to find a more potent argument than that the FBI is engaging in the mundane every day task of *SHOCK/AWE*-cross border law enforcement cooperation!!
We're not Vulcan, we're human, and being considerate to each other is a good thing.
Spoken like a 24 carat nerd...
European leaders keep pretending that they are giving Greece new money, when they are merely shuffling old debts around.
The money that was loaned to Greece has been lost. The whole crisis is about everyone involved being unwilling to accept this reality and thinking that the money will somehow magically come back once the Greeks have been punished sufficiently.
It is the same theory behind debtor's prison. It should be abolished for the same reasons.
There will be no "haircut" for treaty reasons but it has been suggested that the start of repayments will be postponed even more and the repayments will be made over an even longer period which allows inflation to gnaw away at the loans which in principle is the same thing as a haircut. IIRC they call that debt restructuring. That having been said while I acknowledge that Greece needs yet another haircut or something that boils down to a haircut, I have very little sympathy with Greece anymore. They have a bloated public sector, a completely unfunded state pension system, the country is completely overrun by corruption and patronage politics and don't even get me started on their asinine arms race with Turkey. Greece is the sick man of Europe and the country desperately needs reform but expect the EU to reserve the opportunity to force Greece to comply at every turn because nobody trust the Greek government anymore.
what does SJW mean?
Software Justice Warriors. The SJW are people who are mad because they were born too late to fight the actual software injustices of the past, such as the Netscape debacle or the decision to call the unix command "umount" instead of "unmount", so they join digital lynch mobs at the slightest hint of possible software controversy, hoping to fill the void in their existence with strongly worded paragraphs of significantly misinformed opinions about problems that either don't exist or that are blown out of proportions.
Well, today they are all just sitting there with sparks flying out of their ears and their limbs spasming randomly going "Microsoft donates to open source.... does not compute.... dzzzt... does not compute...."
It's not "Chinese exceptionalism" (whatever that means), it's just that since 1989 the Chinese economy HAS been on a constant upward trend. Your girlfriend was basing her mentality on observed reality. She DID understand how financial markets work...in China. Sort of sad you couldn't get out of your own mind, extrapolate, and figure it out. Criticizing her for being trapped while doing the same yourself has a name in English, I forget what it is. Seriously, except for a dip in 2008, it has been up, up, up for as long as anyone can remember, certainly a post-90s girl like your ex. Everybody DID get wildly rich.
So basically economics DO work differently in China than they do elsewhere? Well at least we now have proof that spectacular stock market crashes happen in China as well as in the rest of the world.
What you are seeing is the market correcting itself. Prices are returning to what they should be. The problem is not the crash, the problem is the high prices that exist right before the crash.
Correction, prices would be returning to what they should be if the Chinese government had not inteceded to keep prices from getting there.
The whole "Chinese ghost city" bubble tends to be misunderstood. Sure there are boondoggles in Mongolia but a lot of those ghost cities are basically extensions of boomtowns. And it is tough for people to understand just how big a boomtown in China is; Shenzen is adding almost 300,000 people every year, Tianjin almost 600,000. So the general area of Shenzen needs to build a city the size of Pittsbugh, and Tianjin needs to build a city the size of Boston *every year*. Most of those empty cities were built in anticipation of people relocating from elsewhere and have filled up quickly. And for those that haven't, with building on that massive a scale, if they build residences for an extra 100,000 people in the wrong place here and there it's hardly a sign of foolhardy building that isn't necessary *somewhere*.
It isn't just about empty houses, China's problem is debt, bad debt. The debt to GDP ratio is 105% and climbing, a healthy GDP to debt ratio in a developed economy is between 50 and 60%. Chinese municipalities have been racking up close to a trillion dollars of debt, loans scured with land parcels at bubble prices. Now, what happens when the realestate bubble bursts/deflates and land prices plummet? Loans backed by overvalued assets, massive writeoffs, insolvent banks.... Ring any bells? Real estate bubbles like other bubbles do not exist in isolation, their bursting has a concussive effct.
The Chinese stock market has dropped 26% in a month and The Chinese stock market is up 83% over the last year. Both are factually accurate.
...and both are symtoms of a problem.
Fortunately for China, this is a bubble that formed as the usual speculative excess on top of a building boom. Unlike our own latest market bubbles, the Chinese boom has created enough durable infrastructure - dams, power plants, rail lines, freight terminals, water systems - that the financial effect of this crisis will be muted and temporary. For years now, China has done all the building we have not been able to break ground on. China can build bullet train lines thousands of miles long, while we can't even start a research telescope.
When our current tech bubble pops, the dollar will have been backed up by...social media apps?
Have you actually taken a close look at the insanity that is China's property bubble? All that construction, much of which is based on questionable logic and planning, has largely served the purpose of creating growth where there would else have been none. They have massively over invested in real estate and industrial facilities because of poor planning and corruption.
I think it should be noted that before anyone gets to exited Chinese markets still are higher than even a few years ago. Its pretty hard to call this a crisis. Until the bank runs starts and business actually close their doors its just the evaporation of money for which no wealth ever existed in the first place.
The Chinese market makes the US stock market look down right rational. When you consider the lack of reporting requirements, the level of state involvement in many enterprises, the fact that so much of the financial media there is state owed and therefore a propaganda arm; there isn't a value investor in all of China. Investing without information is actually just gambling no matter which side of the Pacific you happen to be on. The thing about China is there are only gamblers because the government made real investing impossible.
I think overall this will prove to be non-story when the dust up settles in another week or so. If anything the big story will be how the Chinese government blinked and interceded to soon and their intervention failed. The economic story will simply be: Market values will return to something that is at least moderately reflective of the real economic situation. The illusion of China's authoritarian system being a run-away success will be shattered. The reality is though that they will still have perfectly respectable growth, they will still be the worlds second largest economy. etc. So rather than 8% it will be the same 2% that western economies are perfectly happy to see.
Every time I see an economy grow by double digit percentages, when there are stock market bubbles a-plenty, they have a massive real estate bubble going on and people tell me this is sustainable in the long and that these people have invented some sort of new brand of 'free lunch' economics run I get skeptical. Especially when these events are happening in environments like the one you just described. What is happening in China is not sustainable and it will end in tears. If people think a suspension in the trading of half the companies on the Chinese stock market, a drop of 30% and 3.3 trillion dollars lost is bad the bender that China will experience when the party finally ends will be even worse. Yes this is the unwinding of a legendary government sponsored stock rally but no, China is not immune to falling on it's face like the US and EU did in 2008 and let's just hope they donð't fall on their face the same way the US and Europe did in 1929. The only thing authoritarianism with a government micro-managed market does for you is allow you to make the problem worse before it blows up in your face.
Oh it's gonna get better, there's a lot and I do mean a lot of bad debt in China. A lot of banks over the last two years have been trying to claim it, and suddenly find there's no assets to seize and in some cases assets have been used upwards of half a dozen times under different names. When it pops it's going to be massive, and exceptionally nasty.
I've been waiting for this for a long time. It is pretty amazing how long the Chinese government has been able to keep this thing going. It will certainly be interesting to watch these bubbles burst. Then there is their 'shadow banking' system which is an unknown quantity. It seems to me that if western governments could sweep a bunch problems under the carpet before they lost control of the situation in 2008, an autoritarian regieme can sweep a whole lot more crud under the carpet and make things way worse before they loose control of the situation. Perhaps we will now get a period of silence from those here in the west who have been singing the praises of the economic policies of the authoritarian states (mostly Russia and China).
Let's continue whoever57's analogy.
Your family have lived in a house for generations. A few years ago the house needed a bunch of work adding rooms and generally upgrading it to fit your new status as members of the respectable middle class. You didn't have the cash but you had the status and rates were cheap, so you took out a bank loan to cover it. As that loan came due, your husband lost his high paying job and had to take a cut.
So you begged with the banks and eventually they agreed to lend you more money, but at a higher interest rate. Paying more interest on less money is tough, the house continues to need work to keep it in good repair and you continued to not quite make ends meet. You go to the banks and beg for more money so you can keep paying the interest and repairs but the banks say no, they say you need to live within your means.
You promise to do that, and you quickly 'adjust' your finances to show how it's all going to work out. The bank sees through the farce immediately but he's a greedy fellow and with you agreeing to add 200 more basis points onto the rate, it's gotta be good for him. If you default, your cousin will probably cover it anyway so it isn't much risk.
You keep struggling, and you have to beg the banks for money every month. This starts to annoy and worry the banker, so he starts taking an increasing interest in your life. Don't do a good repair here, just leave the window broken... Don't send your kids off to uni, educate them at the local community college. These things save a little cash, but they also lead to you having to spend a whole lot more time looking after the house instead of making money. Even worse, your kids having a lower level of education means they can't get such a high paying job to help out which is a real problem since your grandparents have now retired and are moving back in.
You get desperate and crawl to the bank begging for more and more. They look over the situation and say, well, maybe, but you have to cancel all expenditure. House repairs, who needs them? Further education, completely abolished!
You hold a family conference. What to do? Give in to what the bank wants and destroy your family's future? Or default and have the bank potentially take possession of your family home. Put like that, it isn't such a hard call, you tell the bank to f. off and wait too see what will happen.
Who's at fault? You for living beyond your means? Yep. You for lying to the bank? Yep. The bank for accepting such an obvious lie? Yep. The bank for loaning money to someone that couldn't possibly pay it back? Yep. The bank for insisting on austerity measures that will have a negative long term fiscal impact, yep.
Does that help?
Blah, blah ... the Greeks are victims ... blah, blah.... the poor Greeks... blah, blah ... those evil Germans... blah blah. I listened to the prime minister of Poland a few days ago giving his thoughts about the situation in Greece. He said Poland went through a long series of painful reforms after the fall of communism and is now experiencing a measure of economic recovery and how there is zero sympathy for the Greeks pissng and moaning about having to reform entitlement systems that the Poles can't even dream about implementing today. I don't know how generally the Polish people agree with him but I sure did. I'm getting really sick and bloody tired of the Greeks. Many nations around Europe have implemented painful reforms and here are the bloody Greeks going: We want to keep the our time tested system of bribery, political patronage, corruption, systematic benefits fraud, we'd like you to bankroll our totally marode and unfunded pension system while our politicians fish for votes by promising pensioners a 13th month of payouts (this is a totally unfunded promise by the Greek govt. and also keep in mind that pensioners in countries funding the aid packages to Greece don't get a 13th month) on top of
The ones you glossed over just because it's Apple.
He does cross platform development, why are you defaulting to accusing him of glossing over faults in OpenGL on OS X? For all we know he's a life long Linux user or a die hard Windows nerd. If you are trying to Troll us that is a pretty pathetic effort.
I'm guessing equipment purchased on the used market. Cuba's still pretty poor right now. Thanks to Castro and his little shit-fit revolution, he drove that nation into the ground via COMMUNISM! And no, Cuba's survival didn't depend on trading with America; or the lack of in this case. The financial wounds were self-inflicted by Cuba for Cuba. It truly is a sad story and need not have happened.
You are trolling. Take the deeply held beliefs of the GOP+Tea Party and shout them from the roof top in a relatively liberal heavy crowd like slashdot and watch the sparks fly. At least it's a clever troll I'll give you that so I'll bite. Can some GOP voting admirer of the Cuba embargo please tell me what is the purpose of maintaining it 30 years after the end of the cold war? Do yoy really think the Cubans yearn to have the Batista elite that fled to Miami back? Rest assured that most of them don't. I've been there and my impression was that Cubans may want a better life but they don't want their island to bcome America's whorehouse again. You can try to tell me the Castros are a cruel dictatorship that killed a bunch of people and you'd me right. But then so are some of the USA's most trusted friends aroud the world who have regularly been recieved in the White House for decades with open arms by Democrat and Republican presidents alike. The Cuba embargo is a stupid anachronism, all it does in make an international laughing stock out of GOP senators and leaders who block the lifting of the Cuba embargo. This is especially true since at the same time these politicians are maintaining the embargo they are whoring for favors with Saudi oil princes who are functionaries in an athoritarian theocracy and some of whom financed the Iraq insurgency and are now bankrolling ISIL.