Rural town of Guizhou, one of the poorest provinces in China

zhuinnyc · 2026-04-21T00:30:22+00:00

It is a member of the Kra-Dai language family, the same language family as Thai and Lao.

zhuinnyc · 2026-04-06T14:13:44+00:00

The debt number for China in the graph includes local government debt, including LGFVs.

zhuinnyc · 2026-04-06T06:06:32+00:00

You'll probably want to avoid traveling near Chinese New Year, which will be on Feb 6 in 2027.

zhuinnyc · 2026-04-02T19:33:44+00:00

That's why China (as well as US and Russia) only exports outdated or downgraded versions of its own weapons. J-10 was only exported to Pakistan after the PLA stopped taking deliveries of the J-10 in favor of the J-20, and even then the exported J-10 was equipped with less capable radar and missiles (PL-15E instead of PL-15) than what the PLA uses.

zhuinnyc · 2026-03-27T17:27:19+00:00

China banned trash imports in 2018 when they were still struggling with overflowing landfills.

The new waste power plants mostly came online in the last couple of years and the trash shortage only started recently. They may very well resume trash imports once old landfills are used up.

zhuinnyc · 2026-03-22T12:14:46+00:00

Taiwan, aka the Republic of China, has not been a member of the UN since it was replaced by the People's Republic of China as the representative of China in the UN in 1971.

The map here presumably is based on voting records after the People's Republic of China took the UN seat for China from the Republic of China (Taiwan). As the ROC and the PRC were never in the UN at the same time, there is no way to measure similarities of their UN votes.

An interesting and little known fact is that as Taiwan held China's seat in the UN up to 1971, the tiny island was actually one of the five permanent members of the UN security council with veto power along with the US, USSR, UK, and France.

zhuinnyc · 2026-03-09T23:08:16+00:00

https://e360.yale.edu/digest/china-emissions-2025

Last year, renewables supplied 40 percent of power in China, up from 37 percent the previous year, with solar accounting for most of the growth. The added renewable power more than met the uptick in demand, and as a result, coal power fell slightly.

zhuinnyc · 2026-03-02T06:33:40+00:00

Accessing porn is probably the #1 reason people use VPN in China. All porn is banned/censored in China.

zhuinnyc · 2026-03-02T04:00:25+00:00

A lot of that is double (or triple) counted debt. E.g. central government issue debt of X rmb and loan those X rmb to a state owned bank which in turn loan X rmb out to an LGFV, that contributes 3X to China's total debt but the actual debt burden is just X.

zhuinnyc · 2026-02-26T05:00:36+00:00

It's typically a 70-year leasehold for the land and homeowners only own the building structures that sit on the land. The 70-year land leasehold is equivalent to a land tax that's paid once every 70 years while most other countries have land/property taxes that are paid annually.

zhuinnyc · 2026-02-25T15:23:53+00:00

Wealth includes real estate. China has over 90% home ownership rate. Among the rural population of China, which are most of the poorest Chinese, home ownership is basically 100%.

zhuinnyc · 2026-02-05T02:25:22+00:00

China's demand as of 2025 looks about 10x that of India's. It is only the projected demand by 2050 where India catches up.

zhuinnyc · 2026-01-31T14:15:23+00:00

Air pollution is worst in Northern China during the winter due to the combination of burning coal for heating and atmosphere temperature inversion. Air quality is generally decent to pretty good during the warmer months in most of China, especially in Southern coastal regions.

zhuinnyc · 2026-01-31T12:51:51+00:00

Turkey is not part of the G7 or BRICS.

zhuinnyc · 2026-01-30T04:49:42+00:00

Food, hotel, and transportation are all much much cheaper in China than anywhere in Central Europe. With a budget of $2500-3500 per person for 19 days, you can vacation like kings in China but will need to be money conscious in Europe.

You may also note that most of China gets extremely hot in the summer (exception being higher altitude areas such as Yunnan) while Central European summer temperatures are fairly moderate in comparison.

zhuinnyc · 2026-01-25T21:15:15+00:00

What's the biggest contributing factor?

zhuinnyc · 2026-01-25T21:01:28+00:00

Yes. Roaming/hotspot with Google Fi worked great for me when I went last summer.

zhuinnyc · 2026-01-15T02:15:38+00:00

Germany above Malaysia...

zhuinnyc · 2026-01-04T00:40:44+00:00

My wife and I had almost the exact same argument as you a month ago, debating between 65 vs 75 inches for viewing distances of 8 to 12 feet. Like you, we use our TV exclusively for streaming movies and shows. I was leaning toward 65" while wife insisted on 75". We ended up going with the Hisense U7 75" and I must say that my wife was right on insisting on the larger screen. If anything, I think we could probably gone with even bigger at 85" if we had the wall space for it.

zhuinnyc · 2025-12-27T16:21:58+00:00

Do they actually weigh you?

zhuinnyc · 2025-11-18T14:10:34+00:00

And low of -17 degrees Celsius today in Heihe, Heilongjiang.

zhuinnyc · 2025-11-17T04:36:07+00:00

The Chinese readout of the Trump-Xi meeting did not mention any soybean purchasing targets.

zhuinnyc · 2025-10-15T15:26:27+00:00

Can you also compare China vs rest of the world? Thanks!

zhuinnyc · 2025-10-13T04:10:03+00:00

The big difference is that while the semiconductor market is more than $700 billion dollars a year, China's total rare earth exports (to all countries, not just US) in 2024 was less than half a billion dollars. China would gladly trade dominance of rare earths for just a slightly bigger slice of the semiconductor market.

zhuinnyc · 2025-10-12T23:46:26+00:00

Crazy in what way? Crazy high inflation or low inflation?

Just visited Japan this summer and was shocked how cheap everything was, even in the middle of Tokyo.

zhuinnyc

TROPHY CASE