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Post by sigurdur on Jul 24, 2014 3:04:25 GMT
Thank you SLH1234. How very interesting. And it would appear that it must work, as the population hasn't decreased.
With the ratio of men/women in China, it would be a woman's market to choose. I bet that families have figured out that having a successful son in law is not such a bad thing.
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Post by douglavers on Jul 24, 2014 6:19:31 GMT
Fascinating commentary on China from a Korean/US perspective.
I think China's problems are immense, but so is the capability of the people.
Where I think the West has an advantage is that its political and legal systems are much more developed. Having said that, the current crop of Western politicians appear distinctly substandard, but that is what was democratically voted.
Overall, I think China is returning to the position it has occupied through most of human history.
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Post by sigurdur on Jul 28, 2014 2:37:32 GMT
This is not acceptable! The idea that seems now so pervasive amongst law enforcement.......offffffta.
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Post by nautonnier on Jul 28, 2014 18:17:07 GMT
It will probably be 10 years. Our debt is escalating so fast now that we won't be able to afford to put fuel in a jet fighter. What jet fighter - the new F-35 is not allowed to fly supersonic, or near thundershowers, they often explode just before takeoff, the pilot's helmets create disorientation as the computers can't keep up, the aircraft has no rearward vision..... and DOD is buying 2500 of them and they each cost as much as nearly a squadron of F-15. See Will it Fly?At the same time the Chinese Economy is one of the few that makes Spain's look good. Multiple empty towns with a housing bubble that is all ready to burst. And all its customers are drying up at the same time that the cheap industry in India and Indonesia is undercutting the Chinese industry. The world is not a stable place.
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Post by glennkoks on Jul 28, 2014 23:02:38 GMT
Nautonnier,
Very well said.
The fact that China is the worlds second biggest economy should be enough to frighten everyone. The true value of their currency, GDP numbers, real estate bubble and shadow banking system is the very definition of smoke and mirrors.
The world is most certainly a very unstable place. If the colder climate shift that Theo and many others have been forecasting actually occurs it will probably be the straw that breaks the camels back. Most of the worldwide economy is just not based on reality and food supplies are very, very real.
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Post by sigurdur on Jul 29, 2014 0:01:04 GMT
Nautonnier, Very well said. The fact that China is the worlds second biggest economy should be enough to frighten everyone. The true value of their currency, GDP numbers, real estate bubble and shadow banking system is the very definition of smoke and mirrors. The world is most certainly a very unstable place. If the colder climate shift that Theo and many others have been forecasting actually occurs it will probably be the straw that breaks the camels back. Most of the worldwide economy is just not based on reality and food supplies are very, very real. If we keep producing food at the current pace, there won't be any solvent farmers left to produce it.
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Post by Ratty on Jul 29, 2014 0:11:22 GMT
"If we keep producing food at the current pace, there won't be any solvent farmers left to produce it."
Can you elaborate please Sig?
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Post by sigurdur on Jul 29, 2014 0:39:25 GMT
World wide food production in the 2014 crop year is going to be huge. Record production all over the globe. The world currently has the largest wheat stocks on a daily use to stock ratio.
World is awash in oil seeds. The projected 2014 production, along with the potential Brazilian production is huge.
Corn has changed from being short to very burdensome supplies.
This global warming is damn good for food production.
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Post by sigurdur on Jul 29, 2014 0:40:32 GMT
The corn market has dropped 50% from 7.00+ to 3.50
Wheat has gone from 10.00 to 5
Soybeans have gone from 17.00 to 11.00
And that is only the beginning.
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Post by glennkoks on Jul 29, 2014 13:18:33 GMT
sigurdur,
I'm sorry about the low prices. Farming is and always will be a challenge. Mother Nature can be extremely fickle and it is an economic roller coaster ride. If the cooling Theo and many others have forecasted actually occurs you won't have to worry about record production and low prices. The AMO is just about due to flip to its negative phase, the sun is extremely quite and the PDO has already switched. Last years nasty winter may be the canary in the coal mine and a sign of things to come. Good luck, hopefully you will have record production to help ease the pain of low prices.
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Post by sigurdur on Jul 29, 2014 17:57:27 GMT
If we keep producing food at the current pace, there won't be any solvent farmers left to produce it. Don't you mean there won't be any independent small farmers left to produce it? The small farmers will prob survive. It is the mid and large farms that will face the most duress.
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Post by nonentropic on Jul 29, 2014 19:01:12 GMT
Lets hope there is a production response down as a result of low prices. My fear is that the governments of the world respond with price support and blunt the signals.
Cooler weather will be great for prices a 10% fall in volumes will be a massive support for prices. What we don't need to worry about is the cold as there is a massive connected world market and 2 very cold years will save the world one trillion of stupid spending.
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Post by slh1234 on Jul 30, 2014 7:30:26 GMT
I'm very tired tonight, but I want to respond. If I misspell more words than normal, please understand ... I won't have time early tomorrow morning.
Why should I be scared that China is the second largest economy? By at least one story, China may actually be a larger economy than the US. Why should that really scare me? I'm not afraid of global warming. I'm not afraid of global cooling. I just don't get panicked that easily any more, and part of the reason is that I have been around enough to realize how people like to exaggerate, distort, misrepresent, and curiously, how people like to be afraid of something. Americans in particular seem to need a big bad guy they need to confront, and it seems to me that in many Americans lives these days, China is the big bad guy they need to confront. However; I suppose it's one of those things that you have to see for yourself. If you're predisposed to believe the stories you hear about China, then it's what you're going to believe about them. If you go to see for yourself, take off your pre-formed ideas before you get there, and go to learn, then I would encourage that.
It seems that Americans need to see China as a great, oppressive monstrosity. As someone said to me in China, from the perspective of many Chinese, they are wealthier, and have more freedom than they have ever had in their history. Don't mistake that for me saying that everything is perfect, nor for that person saying that everything is perfect, but it is an interesting perspective ... and when I took the time to think about it, I had to agree. Where do they go from here? That's up to them to decide.
I was able to read the newspapers printed in China (mostly the English Language papers, although I did use newspapers to work on my reading in Chinese.), and did so enthusiastically mostly because I wanted to see if the newspapers were really what I had heard about Communist newspapers. Surprisingly, I found them to be nothing like I expected. I actually categorized the stories into 3 categories that made sense in my mind:
1) The communist party cheering articles. These articles were about what you would expect. They weren't really critical of the US, but instead, focused much of their time in talking about how the Communist party was the fastest growing political party in the world (without telling why), and gave reports about the good things the government was doing. They were not the over-the-top rhetoric of the North Korean press releases, but it was obvious what they were, and everybody (and I mean EVERYBODY) knew it.
2) Solid news stories. They were probably better at this than US newspapers, and they did not spare government officials when they were in an inglamorous light. One story that really got my attention was one where a government official was accused of raping a young woman. The man was convicted, removed from office, and jailed mostly because of the tireless fight the young woman's mother put up against him. When he was jailed, the government offered her an apology, and she refused the apology. The woman's mother was never condemned in this article for opposing the government officials like she did. It was simple telling of the story. I found these to be pretty common, and even handed.
3) Wire stories. You can read AP or Reuters stories from the west, and in the English language articles, they are word for word in every case where I compared them (and I compared them - I wanted to know for myself and not take someone's word for it). Some of these get translated into Chinese articles, too. In that case, I did what I could, but there is no word-for-word comparison that can be done because the languages are quite different. The best I could read them, though, they were correct and not abridged.
I also found that people generally do not feel unable to talk. My Mandarin teacher and I often turned our language session into a session where we talked about culture, or other things that had happened. It turned out that my Mandarin teacher's grandfather was killed in the martial law at Tiananmen square since he wanted to go outside to smoke a cigarette like he had done every day of his adult life, and being 60, he didn't like being told to stay inside. She was able to talk to me about this without fear. She also was able to relate different individuals opinions in her family and other people not in her family about the Tiananmen square massacre, and was able to talk pretty freely about differences in opinion. I also found my colleagues very capable of talking about things they agreed with, and things they did not agree with, including one stating to me that 70% of what Mao did was good, and 30% was bad, but that 30% that was bad was VERY bad. There are exceptions to where people feel free to speak, and what I seemed to see was that they were very comfortable speaking as individuals. However; opening a blog that criticized the system of government, or assembling people in large numbers for rallies are risky activities.
You can watch CNN on cable news in China. You can also watch BBC and a number of other foreign news sources on cable TV. There are also a lot of other foreign movies and shows you can watch in theaters or on TV there. My son, wife, and I watched the latest Superman movie while we were there for example. Pretty much all American movies get shown in theaters there - they're VERY popular. However; Facebook and Youtube are blocked. There is a Chinese version of Youtube that you can post to and watch, though. I will say that the Great Firewall that blocks Facebook and Youtube is rather porous for people with technical acumen, and even for some who don't have it. For that matter, some companies even buy outside connections and their employees are able to see Facebook and Youtube while at work. One of my colleagues told me that there isn't a penalty for using it, it's just that Government tries to keep it blocked for most people, and sometimes, they may actually block what was previously a way through the Great firewall. I actually used Facebook and Youtube while I was in China - making frequent updates and posting frequent videos for my American friends who follow the cultural things that fascinate me so much.
People have full access to newspapers from the outside world, and you will find they know very well about what is going on in the US, in Europe, and elsewhere. This is especially true of the educated people. People have to show an ID card to buy a train ticket (and I had to show my passport to do the same), but did not seem to be restricted from travelling. This seems to be true of people who travel outside the country as well. I have Chinese colleagues in the US - some quite senior in fact. There are many Chinese students in the US, so it seems that China isn't afraid of them learning our ideas. There are MANY Chinese tourists in my current home of Busan, Korea ... and some who have settled here. I can hear Chinese spoken much more commonly than I hear Russian, Japanese, or English here (the other main foreign languages you can hear here). The people struggle a bit with their perception of themselves as they generally think of themselves (Chinese) as being very rude travellers, and they really want to change that image of themselves ... a curious discussion I had with a good number of acquaintances in China, and an idea I saw reinforced in the signs on their subways instructing people on what is considered to be common courtesy (but is also recognized as something they often violate.
We want to see them as hollow economically, but when I was there, one of the big discussions in newspapers was a recognition that they had overbuilt in infrastructure, and a redirection of resources into other sectors of the economy, thus shifting away from the building of new buildings, etc. However; the picture of a China full of empty buildings that is given in the west is just not what I observed. Shanghai proper is a city of about 24 million people, and the area is not as large as you might think with that number. Beijing is a city of about 22 million, but it is sprawling - you can believe that about it. Walk through the markets, or to any of the popular places in Shanghai and the sheer volume of humanity is just overwhelming sometimes. Try finding an empty building ... I don't know where those are. I'll believe them that they have overbuilt, and we'll see whether they grow to fill it or not, but they have recognized the situation, and in fact, I find it likely the western papers would not have even picked up on the story had the Chinese officials not pointed that out first. I think it's been greatly exaggerated in the West, though. I certainly didn't see empty spaces in Shanghai ... (BTW, if you're someone who doesn't get stressed by a crowd, then when people are out relaxing in the evening, the older ladies are dancing, the performers performing, people going to the parks with family, etc., it's actually quite pleasant. I like being among the pleasant busy-ness like that. Don't think people aren't generally happy in China, because I found they generally were.)
Obviously, I'm pointing out things that I think people in the west just have no true concept of, or things where their concept is completely distorted. That makes me sound like I don't recognize anything else. I actually do recognize the other things, but I would say that generally, the people do not feel oppressed there, and they have MUCH more freedom than I think most American's think they have. China is not North Korea, and they're not the old Soviet Union. (And I've never been to North Korea, nor was I in the Soviet Union. The statement was just meant to say "Check how much spillover from other situations you are applying in your perception of China.")
BTW, that investment in infrastructure resulted in some of the most beautiful parks in China that I have seen anywhere. Pictures would be posted if requested, but I'm too tired to attempt it tonight. Just let me know if you're interested. I'm at a team meeting in the US tonight, and I'm very jet-lagged ... goodnight all.
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