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steinrokkan posted:Tsarist Russia wasn't medieval. For instance the giant hydroprojects realised at the Aral Sea were originally drafted by a Tsarist commission. And there was an industrial basis already present throughout Russia - how else do you think the country survived the WWI? Russia manifestly did not survive World War I. The government collapsed, everything became warring factions from before the end of WWI all the way up til the 20s. Numerous components of former Imperial Russia had their independence, already secured by force of arms in 1917 and early 1918, confirmed by the same terms that brought the November armistice for the central powers.
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Apr 7, 2014 14:38
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You're making the unfounded assumption that they will care about there being more unemployed people than there are now.
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May 10, 2014 04:43
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FrozenVent posted:You're assuming the massive amount of starving unemployed won't start poo poo. They don't have room to start poo poo if they're hustled back to the rural areas. It's easy to not hear from them that way.
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May 10, 2014 05:38
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And having the Bering Strait rail crossing be to China solves the typical issue with proposed Bering Strait connections - typical ones are just links to Russia, and Russia uses a different track gauge, meaning lengthy waits on one side or the other changing over to other gauges before things can go on their way. Meanwhile a China-funded route would safely stay standard gauge all the way through.Fojar38 posted:I wouldn't, particularly since it offers no tangible benefit over flying. Freight from Chinese factories arriving in the Americas faster ships, but still significantly cheaper than air freight isn't exactly insignificant. Sure they talk up the passenger stuff, but fast freight would be pretty major. This will never happen without China dumping masses of money into building the thing, but once it was in place it would be pretty heavily used. Nintendo Kid fucked around with this message at 22:39 on May 11, 2014 |
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May 11, 2014 22:36
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There would be much more significant issues building rail from China to Japan than across the Bering Strait. It would be relatively short between South Korea and Japan, but you'd need to go through North Korea or engage in truly massive crossings from China to South Korea across the Yellow Sea. You'd need about 240 miles of sea crossing for the shortest route between China and South Korea that doesn't enter North Korean territory, and then another 50 miles of sea crossing between South Korea and Japan. The Bering Sea crossing is "only" 120 miles total of sea crossing.
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May 11, 2014 23:01
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FrozenVent posted:Bingo. Yeah but air cargo is even worse for price and ability to carry but it still gets used. Freight rail would be a middle ground in terms of price and speed. And China doesn't really have to actually recover the costs of building it, it's the kind of out-there prestige project where they're just building something to employ people if it ever actually happened. Also, acting like Canada and the US are ever going to really disagree is a bit silly. And if China actually built the thing Russia would have a major opening to sell the fuel or electricity to run trains on the thousands of miles through its territory, a sort of thing where Russia would get too much out of it to do more than threaten closing it when they get pissy.
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May 12, 2014 00:59
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Dusseldorf posted:Is it actually that much faster? Freight trains don't run that much faster than cargo ships and over a much longer distance. Freight trains run pretty fast when you have no stops to make for hundreds of miles and good braking systems. Freight rail runs at 60-70 mph in many places in the US thanks to that. Edit: and for instance, a route from Shanghai to Seattle by rail through their plan would be about 6000 miles. By sea, it's about 5600 miles. If you run the train at 50 mph that's 120 hours versus about 220 hours for a container ship trundling along at 23 knots. And to say nothing of the common trend of freighters slowing down further because you can recoup major fuel savings. caberham posted:Isn't most of China's high speed rail network mostly for passengers? Do they actually slap freight on it at night? What China's proposing to build is not the same as their current network at all. It's a pie-in-the-sky program and if it was just for passenger rail it'd be sitting idle most of the time. Nintendo Kid fucked around with this message at 01:28 on May 12, 2014 |
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May 12, 2014 01:13
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The thing is the whole scenario already assumes China following through on its wacky plan to build a good 4000 miles of new rail and over 120 miles of undersea tunnels. It would be safe to assume that if they're going to go that far their whole prestige project thing is going to mean they're the ones worrying about paying the maintenance expenses, and unlikely to put some ridiculous charges on their new rail system to recover the costs - that'd lead right to it sitting there unused and making them look bad. You're also not going to have them build this whole project and not have it carefully engineered to avoid as much risk of landslides or whatever breaking it as possible. You don't get to the point of constructing a 120 mile set of undersea tunnels if you're just going to have bare track sitting unprotected on either side. Also trucks aren't really going to be a valid comparison here, there is definitely not going to be individual vehicle highways constructed instead. Edit: Again, there is absolutely nothing practical about building it in the first place, and it doesn't make any sense to do it except as an over-the-top national bragging rights thing. But once it was in place it would be reasonably useful. Nintendo Kid fucked around with this message at 01:42 on May 12, 2014 |
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May 12, 2014 01:34
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FrozenVent posted:Do you know of any track anywhere that isn't just sitting unprotected? It's what tracks do; they sit there. You must have never seen railroads through mountainous areas before to be saying that. You don't just slap some track down and wait for it to have a landslide on a running train. Breaks are really rather infrequent. Sea ports can get shut down too. You also don't shut down an entire railroad system over one break, nor do you ever have 100% usage of the rails. We're talking about a project that might seriously cost over a trillion dollars all told (and honestly would take decades to build). It's pretty much impossible to recover the costs associated from the traffic that would use it in any sort of short-term period, so you can bet your rear end it would effectively massively subsidize transport along it.
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May 12, 2014 01:48
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Cultural Imperial posted:I'm confused. Are you guys suggesting that this proposed HSR is going to carry freight? There isn't an HSR in the world that carries freight. This would be revolutionary and I sure as hell wouldn't want to be on it. As well, HSR track maintenance cycles are crazy frequent compared to conventional rail. You do understand that you can run slower trains on the same lines? Even in the fantasy world where China manages to build this minimum 6000 mile system between major Chinese cities and the lower 48, you're still not going to have hourly departures for your 2 day passenger service.
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May 12, 2014 04:39
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Cultural Imperial posted:I'm not aware of any HSR in the world that does this but it sounds like it'd be quite an engineering feat. The next time I see my dad, I'll ask him. He used to be the director of safety and maintenance of an HSR. There's also no HSR in the world that travels through at least 3000 miles or so of no population centers or regular stops or has hundred mile plus long undersea tunnels built into it. If you were to build such a crazy big system, you'd certainly stick freight trains on because you'd not have both directions of track with full schedules from passenger services, and you'd have plenty of room in your new build to shift the freights out of the way of the high speed passenger trains if you needed to do so. FrozenVent posted:You'd need a second siding just for the HSR trains, or have the HSR slaloming between the freight trains. It would be unconscionable to build the very long HSR system and not have plenty of places for sidings, or even just building it as 3 or 4 track all the way through. You end up needing third track enough on short distance medium speed rail. Nintendo Kid fucked around with this message at 05:27 on May 12, 2014 |
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May 12, 2014 05:22
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Cultural Imperial posted:So one of the really cool things about an HSR is that the tolerances for the sinking of a section of track are incredibly small. Building an HSR in a seismically active area is a nightmare. So much so that sections of track are built so that they can be literally jacked up if they've sunk too much. I'm no civil engineer, much less a geotech or an expert in rail transportation, but I have a feeling it'd be really expensive to engineer a rail line that can deal with multiple types of payloads. You don't need to do anything special to run freight. There's simply no current rail systems where freight can't just run along parallel trackage. You don't stick freight on bullet train rails because there's 3 parallel routes at hand. Building this China to America by bering strait line on the other hand, most of the route will have absolutely no alternative path. You just build enough room in your system and it's golden for freight.
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May 12, 2014 05:36
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TheBalor posted:Unfortunately, plains agriculture isn't something that can be relied on in the long term. Most of the plains are reliant on aquifers to irrigate, and these are all being drained at a rapid clip. We don't do most of our agriculture on the plains. If the plains go than so what? We're down to only producing 2.5x the food we need instead of 4x.
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Jun 28, 2014 16:45
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TheBalor posted:I was specifically responding to a comment about the North American plains. :P China will still be able to eat heartily from our still massively overproducing country even with the entire great plains reduced to dust. In fact we might get better meat out of it since grasslands are much less water intensive and you can go bull-wild raising cattle across that.
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Jun 29, 2014 02:04
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The main thing with global warming is that most areas that are already hosed over will get hosed over harder, and most poor areas will not be able to adapt or move the way richer areas will be able to. It will significantly ruin people all over the planet, but large countries have more room to maneuver in these situations.
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Jun 29, 2014 05:37
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computer parts posted:Well, someone literally named their nutrition shake as "Soylent" not too long ago. To me, the funniest part of that is that they weren't aware that the Soylent company in both the book and the movie makes food that isn't from people (in fact in the book, Soylent's food is solely made from super cheap crops and trash/sewage, depending on the level fo the product).
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Aug 18, 2014 02:10
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Slaan posted:I would drink from both your labials, to be honest. Sure they hate the Japanese, but they recognize world-renowned brands at the same time.
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Dec 29, 2014 20:57
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Fojar38 posted:So there's lots of hemming and hawing about China having the largest economy when adjusted for PPP. But when I look at nominal GDP and GDP per capita China is still way behind. How meaningful is the PPP adjustment? It's not very meaningful. PPP is most designed for comparing what an actual person can buy out of normal goods among countries, it kinda stops being sensical for whole countries except for meaningless dickwaving.
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Dec 29, 2014 23:52
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Cultural Imperial posted:lol at the implication that Chinese retail investors are sophisticated, financially savvy market actors. I'd say they're on par with 1920s American mass investors, which puts them decently far ahead of 90s Russian "investors" even if they're still going to get owned.
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Apr 10, 2015 16:50
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Femur posted:Why does cutting your hair cost a quarter in China but 20 dollars in the us? No system can quite explain this other than it just is, its history. Because an average Chinese person makes about $1000 a year while the average American makes 30 times that. Also $20 is pretty expensive for a hair cut in the US, most places you can get it done for $15 or less.
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Apr 13, 2015 19:26
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Fojar38 posted:Also China is heading over a demographic cliff and there is no way to mitigate or change that. Stepping up the execution vans on crimes committed by old people might. 
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Apr 13, 2015 20:03
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Xibanya posted:Indians will complain about how every time they call customer service they'll get "Manish" from "Bangalore" who is obviously Chad from Phoenix. When China's economy craters, it will probably greatly reduce real estate pressure in a bunch of North American cities as the biggest effect on America.
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Apr 14, 2015 16:42
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Fojar38 posted:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/china-business/11533317/Three-ways-the-rise-of-Chinas-stock-market-will-change-the-world.html Overinflated expectations of the results of Hong Kong being taken over allowing the rest of China to become the same?
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Apr 15, 2015 01:56
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Femur posted:I understand the principles of supply and demand, but I was asking a more simple question why that imbalance There be a billion people there and they were all dirt broke 40 years ago or so with vastly inferior infrastructure plus the disastrous effects of things like the cultural revolution and other Mao stunts.
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Apr 20, 2015 00:27
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Femur posted:Again, I don't care about historical answers, I would rather a systemic one. History is the system, kid. Nobody started from an even playing field, and you can't hope to explain any country's current economic situation without relying heavily on its historical conditions and actions.
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Apr 20, 2015 01:47
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Are there any quick Chinese summaries on the 1929 stock market crash in America? If you could find one of those that should be enough for her. Also maybe find a way for her to invest in like generic American municipal bonds if that's possible, if she insists on investing in something.
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Apr 24, 2015 01:15
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VideoTapir posted:My sister in law is saying that the situation that happened in the US won't happen in China because the government will stop it. Inform her that China's government stopping it means you at best only lose a small amount, but more likely lose most of it. Because the only way to stop it is to clamp down so hard that there ain't gonna be any easy money.
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Apr 24, 2015 02:55
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Ofaloaf posted:China-Moscow isn't a thing? Back in 2012 I looked at a trip like that, and I could've sworn that it was already possible to take the Trans-Siberian to Irkutsk, then switch to a Trans-Mongolian line which runs all the way down to Beijing, probably with a gauge change in there somewhere. The current route is rather slow speed and quite old and circuitous in parts. The new plan is a brand new route that goes much more direct and higher speed, thanks to rail technology and bridge/tunnel stuff improved since the 1940s.
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May 21, 2015 04:39
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Looking it up, the current route used is 4,735 miles and takes about a week. The proposed line would cut the length by nearly 400 miles and reduce it to 2 and a half days. That's average 72 miles an hour versus about 30 miles per hour now.
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May 21, 2015 05:17
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Kassad posted:But isn't it a high speed line? Those aren't for cargo trains. It's a line that will average ~72 miles per hour. That's really not high speed, it's just more than double the current, ~30 mph overall speed. In America we run long distance freights as fast as 70 mph or more in some places.
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May 22, 2015 20:55
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FrozenVent posted:Chinese coal imports for the month of May are down over 40% year on year... So I don't know how the gently caress they're growing. Mining more of their own coal? Using other power sources?
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Jun 10, 2015 00:27
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GhostofJohnMuir posted:I'm really making an effort to see $3.2 trillion in equity lost in three weeks and a market that still has an average p/e of 55 as a situation to be optimistic about, but I just can't see it. I'm willing to buy that the effects of the bubble bursting might not be that ruinous due to higher rates of saving among the Chinese, but painting a rosy picture of a 27% seems like being intentionally obtuse. I'm sure they'll make it up in volume!
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Jul 8, 2015 04:27
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Al-Saqr posted:Can someone give me a quick and dirty on how stock market crashes like this can just magically happen out of thin air? or did a major housing bubble burst or something even happen that I missed? It's not really out of thin air anymore than the dot com crash was out of thin air, or the 1929 Wall Street crash was.
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Jul 8, 2015 14:57
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im gay posted:When was the last time NYSE went down? 2012 due to Hurricane Sandy.
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Jul 8, 2015 18:58
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Willie Tomg posted:What the loving poo poo is happening in St. Louis that the east coast of China hates so goddamned much? Maps like that tend to use that as a generic "couldn't find its location but it's in the US somewhere" point, since it's one of the closest major metro areas to the geographic center of the contiguous US.
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Jul 8, 2015 20:37
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Inferior Third Season posted:Why would an auto dealer care if a buyer tries to evade Chinese taxes? Because they don't want to have investigators coming around thinking they might be seeking out money laundering type business.
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Jul 28, 2015 20:38
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mobby_6kl posted:What the gently caress are you guys even arguing about? It's not like this poo poo is trivial to check or anything This is a better one to use because it goes newer: 
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Aug 5, 2015 18:12
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Crashrat posted:Distillate pricing generally changes about 2.4 cents per $1-per-barrel change according to the EIA. To get down to your $1 gas, from the average $2.79 we have now crude would have to go negative. To even get below $2 would require a $33 drop in the price of oil, which would put it down at $12 per barrel on Brent - and that's just not going to happen. But the national average for gas in the US dipped to $2.02 earlier this year when crude oil was at $45-$46 a barrel, why does it need to go to $12 to go to $2 again?  Hell, where I was at the time I paid $1.60 a gallon at the low point, mostly because the state had relatively low fuel taxes.
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Aug 5, 2015 19:40
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Crashrat posted:Thanks for the on-topic reply that didn't just begin and end with an insult. The thing is that what you're talking about simply doesn't work out well. It's a decent rule of thumb for estimating things in the rough, but it tends to fall apart in the actual data. And the price is already, well, not staying "here".
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Aug 5, 2015 20:02
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Vladimir Putin posted:I think this is a good idea though. It's the reason why startup incubators are built. Startup incubators have a pretty lousy track record.
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Aug 13, 2015 03:33
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