dirtyid
Joined 10 years ago
Joined 10 years ago
IMO people buy cheap generic Chinese brands for the same reason they buy cheap dollar store products. They're gambling they can pay 30% the price for 90% of the function. Amazon reseller premium = they're paying slightly more for returns in case things break. They can save more buying from Ali resellers. Even more while temu subsidizing orders. The only people looking for quality are people who order from resalers of established PRC brands, i.e. Xiaomi. In the days before Amazon cracked down, you had brands like MPOW decide better marketting strategy was to give people gift cards for reviews and give no question asked replacements well outside of warranty period. Pretty win-win for consumers.
The TLDR is PRC urbanization strategies isn't targetted at tier1 cities, it's targetted at tier 2/3/4 cities. They don't want tier1 cities getting denser, they want density to spread, especially to increasingly developing interior provinces and where most of the new industry hubs are being situated. Incidentally, a lot of the extra shit potential speculative RE is happening in this area. There's plenty of rural people from these regions that PRC is trying urbanize but being priced out due to richer tier speculators driving up prices.
The current problem isn't excess housing stock, 50m is wasteful but not excessively so buffer. The problem was presales was tying up too much investment in RE, driving up housing prices and affordibility. Central gov wants people to invest in SMIC not Evergrande, so 3RL crackdown which is going to take a few years to unwind as central gov forces developers to finish or return deposits while they're being slowly dismantled - priority is to make buyers whole. In the mean time there's some capital stuck in the system, which is bad but not end of world. Medium long term, PRC's initial shitty housing stock is approaching 50+ years end of life, and demand for new replacement square meter is going to kick in.
TLDR is the inefficiency is not primarily the surplus, it's the bubble, and the bubble sapping investments away from other sectors.
The entire EV graveyard narrative is extra retardedly overblown by western media (like bike graveyards). There's a few car share fleet graveyard and subsidy scams amounting to a few 100s of thousands of heavily used urban fleet cars or useless scam chasis. This is out of growing 2-3m total car share fleet and projected 100s of millions of future EV sales. Now both sectors have or is active being consolidated to drive out bad players. Bluntly, it's fucking nothing, a few billion in waste vs 100s of billions gained per year in building new sector. Hurricanes destroy significantly more cars than that every few years in the US. Like everytime PRC decides to go HAM on pursuing an sector, there's some initial overcapacity and waste but things even out when sector matures. Ask any auto export power if they would waste a few billion dollars and few hundred thousand scraped hulls to be where PRC EV is now, and they'd say yes to a trade 10x that.
By this measure, US would be saturated in Huawei phones like PRC is in iPhones. And US streets would be clogged with Chinese cars the same way western cars on PRC streets. Hell Ericsson and Nokia are still winning token 5G contracts in China. "Exact same thing" would be PRC/CCP allowing western brands to sell in PRC except in niche security circumstances. Question is whether US is more of a security state than PRC, or benefits more from protectionism of incumbant industries.
My meal prep uses lots of stackable take out containers, in different sizes that nest into each other, with interchangable lids, that take up a fraction of the space. Really optimizes fridge space as well since frequently you can use the best size containers.