high speed train in china is fuck planes, not fuck cars.
imagine what happens when a plane ticket is half or a third of the price, and you land down town at subway station...
now the subway... that's fuck cars.
if you think that the high speed rail in china is a net negative, i have a ghost city to sell you.
Fun salad fingers story. When it first came out it was a hit in our circle of friends. It was also hosted on a website called fat-pie.com
One girl wanted to show her friend and her friends mum at their place, so she just googled "fat pie" on front of everyone.
Salad fingers was not above the fold in the search results. It was especially bad because her friend was a bit tubby.
There's like a 15% tariff on imported cars (from memory), they're definitely over priced there and always have been. There's foreign brands thar aren't imported, ie produced locally. For a while GM Shanghai was making a fuck load of cars there but its slowly been tapering off. My CN Telsa was bit cheaper than the same one in the US. But I couldn't tell you that it's apples for apples, sometimes the local model of something is cheaper because it's made of cheaper stuff.
The bigger issue for big city china when buying a car is the plates. If its an ICE the cost of getting plates can be 100x that of a EV. Regardless of where it's made.
As for stuffing products in a friendly customer or by some kind of stupid regulation is not common but happens. There is a complex web of incestuous company ownership and an equally complex web of influence and indirect ownership by the government. If someone needs to hit their numbers real bad it's possible they'll ask / insist / regulate that another company buys up to help make it happen. There are a few laws that are supposed to prevent it, but if nobody complains then probably nobody investigates.
I've seen this happen a few times with stuff much cheaper than diggers.
China was briefly an observer state to Warsaw Pact and then pretty quickly completely withdrew.
After sino-sovet split in the early 60s Sino-soviet relations did not really normalize until Gorbachev.
Boom, headshot.
I know what happens. I put on a bunch of weight, the automatic immigration gate wouldn't let me through and I got sent to the desk with a person. they told me it was because my face has changed too much grin they made a new picture and I was fine after that.
I lost a bunch of weight recently and while the machines let me in they wouldn't let me out without going to the big desk again for a new photo.
The real estate market doesn't account for 30% of the economy. Though I suppose there's a bunch of way to measure "the economy".
There is pent up demand for housing yet property marketing is dropping. Actually it may have bottomed out but who knows. Beijing wants to correct it and that's what's been happening.
I have property in tier 1 and tier 2, it dropped to pre covid levels. I wasn't doing property for quick flips but I definitely noticed it.
The scars of covid are everywhere in China just like most countries. its going to take a while for it to recover. just like everywhere else.
China collapse remains a click bait dream for the time being if you ask me.
There's a bit more to it than that. But yes EVs are subsidized in China.
I worked in a business where we had one product that was useful for automakers but especially useful for EVs. About 8 years ago the EVs in China were mostly cheap shitty BYDs.
Seemingly out of nowhere, the government changed a bunch of rules and regulations for new cars. Within a month design teams were being established at every major automaker in China focusing on EVs. It was a great year for us.
Key EV components, especially the materials to make batteries, started to come down in price.
Then the green plates started turning up. Every city has its own rules for car registration, some places like Shanghai, would auction new number plates each month resulting in a low supply and high demand. It was possible to buy a car cheaper than the number plate. Then if you register an EV you can get a green plate for almost nothing.
About 3 years ago the cities started requiring new taxis and busses to be EV. Places like shenzhen just converted everything to EV. Released licenses for training and testing self driving.
Charge stations started popping up everywhere. There's no way a shopping mall or new residential development could avoid having at least a large section for charging. My own home, converted an entire floor to charging parking stations in the underground car park.
Finally tesla set up Shanghai giga factory. I have no idea how they managed to make that deal but not long after they started shipping model 3s domestically they slashed the prices down to cheaper than a niceish BYD.
If you go to Shenzhen today about a third of cars are EV and you will see a dozen brands you've never heard of before (some are terrible cars, but most are reasonable quality and a handful are bullshit luxury)
As in tradition in China, the government will now let them go into a price war to push the manufacturers to find cheaper ways to make them. Many will go bust or give up.
I have to assume that openAI also paid for the books. if yes then i consider it the same as me reciting passages from memory or coming up with derivative text.
if no, then by all means, go after them and any model trainer for the cost of one book.
Asking an LLM to recite an entire novel isn't even vaguely a thing yet.
I didnt like friendlyjordies brand of humor. not one bit.
when he started going after that dog cunt broz I couldn't help myself. I had to watch.
by now I love him, he's become a hero of what free speech (such that it) is in Australia. served with a massive dose of sarcasm and ridicule.
I'll keeping giving him money and watching his shit while he keeps going there and calling out all the bullshit that goes on in australian government.
doesn't Chinese have pronouns though?
她 she 他 he 它 it
or am I missing something ?
This feels more like he has contractual obligations to be on stage for a certain number of minutes.
it's one of those pop idol malicious compliance tantrums. "so I have stand on stage for the full 90 minutes?"
"ill show them...."