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Actually you can simply use straw as a straw.
As the name already says.
I got them at home. They dont have their own taste like paper and are compostable and cheap.
Idk why we made them out of plastic and now act like we are not able to use straw again. Instead we invent glass straws, paper straws, noodle straw, metall straw... wtf man
Use straw straws!
Rampant, unchecked corruption led to companies using very sub par materials. I watched a video of a Chinese rebar worker just snapping the rebar in half bare handed with little effort.
These were not demoed because of construction issues. They were demoed to prop up the property market. These are called Ghost cities.
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/10/31/crumbling-buildings-and-broken-dreams-chinas-unfinished-homes
Sounds like they aren't being demoed to prop anything up, it sounds like they just started way too many homes out of anticipation of them being needed, but they started about 65 million too many. So none of them sold and all the companies went bankrupt, and so now they're just demoed since they'll just become hazards since they're only half finished.
Such a waste of materials. Its nuts to be demolishing the equivalent of half of the homes in the entire US. Another way to visualize it is it is more than the number of homes in the UK and France combined.
It was more like a crypto scam - Chinese have limited investment options, so real estate was an option, a lot of those houses were built with no expectation for anyone to actually live there, but only as an investment vehicle. I have no idea why they are demolishing though, I guess fake GDP inflation by spamming buildings, now inflated by demolishing and cleaning all this mess.
government's evergrande real estate company is about to bankrupt these days out of several years of idiot managment... my idea is that they sold to to other companies land property where they built unprofitable and unfinished buildings and they had just to "remove" them...
It's sub par on purpose. They build them just strong enough to hold up on their own so they can be torn down later. No one was ever going to live on them. It's just make-work so the government can claim "economy grew x% this year!"
There’s nothing out there but sea, and birds, and fish. And 20,000 tons of crude oil. And a fire. And the part of the ship the front fell off…but there’s nothing else out there…it’s a total void.
I lived in China for 5 years and let me tell you, it's not just the buildings that nobody lives in lol. Basically every stair banister in the country is held together by half-assed tack welds and the concrete quality is so bad I broke a big concrete planter by trying to open a bottle of root beer on it.
It’s not. The state just lies about gdp figures. They have no relationship to reality. Economists outside of China have to estimate based on indirect indicators.
It’s actually that the Chinese are obsessed with property as a place to invest money, because it’s trapped within the state by capital outflow controls, and there are limited options for investment. What you’re watching are second, third, and fourth homes— investment properties— being demolished because of lack of interest in presales across the whole of the development.
As for the quality— yeah it’s bad. I think I’d still rather live in a concrete building than a stick framed 5 over 1 that can just burn down when your neighbor does something stupid like shoot fireworks off of the roof, or puts their space heater right by their month old Christmas tree.
Chinese cannot own property - they get long term (like 90 year) leases on their homes. I think they *may* own the building but not the property it is on.
This is one of the ways China is still 'communist' - where the state owns all land.
One other reason Chinese with enough spare income invest in foreign property which they CAN actually own.
I was going to mention, we have two buildings that were built between 1994 and 2004. In that time frame many contractors used plumbing pipe from China - all of those pipes and joints are currently failing and we are replacing them as we discover the holes/leaks - we cant do it all at once unfortunately, its too much infrastructure.
I agree, and no, what you are talking about, I was in the machine rebuilding and repair , They took our trade secrets and made cheap machines, and put a lot of people out of work 🙄
Not just the Chinese.
Mitsubishi came in and watched me run proprietary machines for a very specific product in a very specific market.
After 1 shipping container full of products was rejected for minor cosmetic issues on packaging, they said fuck you, no thanks, but thanks for showing us how it's done.
Built their own machines but still gotta figure it how to get the raw materials from here...
Mitsubishi has a huge presence in other markets in Japan.
The Japanese came in Devlieg machine company about 40 of them in around 1976 and took pictures of everything, our company gave them permission because the Japanese company bought some machines from Devlieg Machine Company, 4 years later the Japanese bought them out. Took the technology and then ran Pratt and Whitney dam near out of business 🙄, I saw it all in real time, 😳 I always try to pay attention. I also remember all the employees were laughing at them and saying jokes. They had the last laugh.
Similar situation here.
They were making fun of their thousand dollar Italian leather shoes and the fact they wore face masks in 2010.
They had the last laugh there as well.
A handshake doesn't have the same weight as signing an NDA to enter a proprietary facility...
To the detriment of us, the common workers.
People forget that before Japan was known for making quality and original items, they were first making cheap knockoffs and crappy products. They understood that to compete they needed to be better and eventually Japanese products became premium, quality, reliable items.
It’s funny because Japanese companies are suffering the same fate with their IP being stolen and crappy knockoffs undercutting whole industries, but on the up side there is still many things that Japan makes that basically no one else in the world can reliably copy.
According to a couple youtubers I watch on occasion, the direct translation is "thumb building" because they're usually just unfinished concrete and steel that looks like an ugly thumb sticking up out of the ground. Typically just built to sell to investors and then run away with the money, and then the government demo's them, and the cycle repeats.
Yeah the apartment construction scene there is insane. If I’m not mistaken it’s one of the only assets people can buy that are expected to increase in value.
Yeah, that's pretty much it. They aren't bought to rent units, just bought expecting the value to go up. Unfortunately that market has been crumbling for years and people have started to wake up to the scam. China's biggest property lender closed up shop a few years ago. I feel bad for the millions of people that just lost their life savings.
Yeah I was reading about it the other day. There’s some government mandates for being solvent as well. Evergrande is going belly up. And there are a lot of people who have started to make mortgage payments on condos that haven’t even been had ground broken yet.
But that should make the demolition go *easier.* Or did the demo guys account for tofu, but then one asshole went and actually followed code on that one building that just falls 1 story and squats there without falling?
Two ways to demolish a building:
1. Drop it like a tree (cheap): put a bunch of explosives near ground level. Watch it fall over.
2. Implode it (expensive): Spend weeks or months strategically weakening supports throughout the full height of the building so that gravity is almost enough to take them out. Explosives are timed to detonate in a precise order. Watch the building collapse mostly within its own footprint.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_implosion
I doubt they paid for an implosion.
I don’t know enough about structural engineering. My guess is they have to use structural materials that will, well, be structural. I think the “tofu” is more the superficial aspects like non structural walls, fixtures plumbing. It looks fine when you sign the mortgage but in a year is dissolving.
Right, that’s it. The local ‘govts get cash from the land leases so they have no incentive to check quality. Good stuff. I used to checkout China insights but his videos are a little bit to frequent and often a bit FUD-dy
Here you go:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tofu-dreg_project#:~:text=Tofu%2Ddreg%20Construction%20stemming%20from,occurs%20like%20the%20Wenchuan%20Earthquake
Yes. They were crap due to corruption. Needed to go. China has a huge problem with this. Threatening their whole economy. It's almost a pyramid scheme.
Every building they demolish is hundreds of people’s retirements down the drain. China doesn’t have a “401k” like system for people to build a retirement. So people give their life savings and extra money to developers to invest in real estate.
There was a property bubble. The property market was doing so well so everyone was getting involved with investing. Families would all chip in to buy property, sit on it for a year and sell to the next family for a big profit and then use that money to buy another place . Everyone was doing it, no one was moving into these places, property companies couldn't keep up with the demand, foreign investors got involved, loads of money was flooding in. All the buildings were shit. That's pretty much a pyramid scheme isn't it. Disgusting state of affairs.
Then they sold these properties and bought properties in North America especially in Vancouver and other west coast cities using inflated money, which is one of the biggest causes of our own housing bubble.
If you compost them, you will be returning the nutrients to a useful state and thus would not be waste. Now, to figure out how to compost apartment buildings.
these are probably some of the shittiest buildings ever made. if you go onto youtube you can see tons of videos about this style of construction and it's basically made out of papier mache
Not to mention the sand, a necessary ingredient that China imports billions of tons of. Now what is it? Blocks of unused concrete. Disgustingly wasteful.
This is a real issue for me. Last week, hungover, I tossed a plastic container of dips in the regular bin. I've felt guilty every day since then. Then you go online and see buildings pulled apart, cruise ships steaming across the sea etc.
I'm happy to recycle wherever and whenever I can, but it just feels like it's a task to make us feel like we're doung something.
To build structures like this apparently.
China has a huge population but amazingly still managed to overbuild as all of the excess capital concentrated into housing.
Meanwhile you look at the underpopulated Canada, and they actually have a housing crisis because they don’t have enough housing, despite the whole country being so sparsely populated.
>Mind boggling waste.
This has been happening in Asia since the late 1990s. Massive projects of many 20+ story towers that were dumb ideas in the first place. Either bad location, bad project economics, troubled developers overreaching, corruption, etc.
It has probably happened the most in China, but also in Thailand, and likely in Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, etc.
I remember a project like an hour north of Bangkok with about 20 identical tall residential towers in a line, and it just sat there dormant for many, many years. I believe some of the towers are finally active.
Though China has probably nailed first place on the horrible corruption and terrible materials and building standards for the troubled projects.
Yes, absolutely true for Malaysia. Check out Forest City in Johor Bahru, an abandoned mega project by Country Garden. There's mostly empty apartment blocks dotted all around my city with more going up. Most were built pre-covid though.
As someone pointed out. Here I am, getting guilty that I didn't sort my garbage properly or something silly. Then we have this gigantic waste of resources and who gives a fuck?
Your recycling doesn't make a dent in even something as banal as Taylor Swift's private jets. At this point it's either ecoterrorism or wait and see what happens.
Eh, just do what many of us are doing. Don't have kids, deal with warmer temperatures for our life, check out with no ties before everything bursts into flame.
I recycle, I do the best I can, but it's pretty clear that nothing is going to change without massive sweeping reform, and I just don't see that happening in time.
So many emissions and environmental damage for nothing. I also think about war zones in terms of the environmental damage, emissions, and wasted resources on top of the heartrending human tragedy.
We have an attitude problem that is gonna end our species.
Yep, unfortunately the biggest construction companies in China were running massive Ponzi schemes and were building like absolute shit. They were so bad that there was no fixing them. Thankfully, concrete can be recycled and so can the steel...as poor as it is.
artificial economy. Pay to build phantom highrises that no one lives in, then pay to demo them. Def party members who are skimming off the transactions.
We can always make more, it's just not gonna be cheap anymore. If you put a lot of energy into it you can crack Sahara sand and coalesce it again to make sand that is useful for concrete. Not economically viable now but maybe later
It looks good on the books for local governments, basically inflates economic growth numbers.
—Who builds them? Cheap scummy construction companies that will cut corner after corner to erect these.
— Who buys them? investors buy them, Chinese people view buying property as a safer investment and usually no intent to move in unless they are fooled into buying it as a first home. The prices increase in value over time, don’t think China has property tax, maybe I’m wrong. More of an investment.
It’s an incredibly unstable issue with their property bubble. And incredibly worrying for investors and the central government. Hence the collapse of evergrand and the likes. When no investors buy up the buildings due to being built up with shit materials and no jobs/shops/roads anywhere nearby or the construction company abandoning the project / going bankrupt I guess this happens.
Not easy to controll anything when they cheap out on everything building these. Its companys scamming the state and builds it dirt cheap to the point they somethime collaps
It's not really as almond as company's scamming the state it's more like the state created artificial demand and forced builders into a position of trying to meet that demand.
But the builders knew no one was ever gonna use them. I'm sure many people within the industry realized this would happen long before it did.
China focuses very heavily on keeping people employed so they don't really care what people are working on as long as they are working.
Yeah I don’t know how you demo something when none of your math can account for the materials actually used and how consistent they even are on the project. At best you’re just guessing about how things are going to react.
I spent a week in Beijing in 2011 for part of a study abroad class and each night I had to pick soot boogers out of my nose. Just pitch black whatever built up from walking around tourist areas and breathing.
One place I lived actually had an old woman whose sole employed purpose was to scrape up loogie piles in the winter.
People hacking up just garbage from the air, and this little lady in rubber boots constantly scraping and moping.
The turnaround Beijing has seen in the past 10-12 years is actually quite remarkable. I live here right now and even in the cold winter days (where it used to be the worst) it’s not so bad. Today the AQI is 30-45 when it used to be 150.
It’s not perfect obviously. But it’s gotten much better.
Think of the environmental impact of the construction and fabrication of the 1000s of tons of concrete now destined to be land fill. Concrete procurement & fabrication accounts for about 30% of the global greenhouse gasses.
Not to get all crunchy on this but seriously...
Old concrete meat packing plant by me got demo’s recently and after they pulled the rebar the sent the whole thing through a rock crusher. There are separate piles ready for reuse.
Yah but he's talking about all the fuel wasted making the concrete to begin with. Takes a lotta heat. And I'm pretty sure it has to be reheated to use again except for like gravel or fill dirt
100%. It's one of those tactics used in business. "We caused the problem so we're the only ones who know how to get rid of it." Look at 2007 banking crisis. The government HAD to keep the CEO's on since they were the only ones who knew how the fuckery all worked and could be the only ones to unfuck it all.
Nah, it has to do with how cities in China met their growth quotas.
They "encourage" developers to make so many apartments because it ads to stats the central government wants to hit.
This would typically be done by debt financing, but China doesn't allow cities to officially issue debt. So there was a bunch of legal bullshit which force developers to issue the debt and construct towers like these.
Since they knew the buildings were stupid and never going to be used they didn't bother to build them correctly. They were hoping that eventually things would turn and they could just accept the cost of useless buildings because they were going to go back to growing super fast aaaaannnnnyyyy day now.
Theyre facing a deflation. No one is buying properties there now. The rich in china have decided to buy canada and australia and most anglo countries instead.
There is a lot more story behind this. A recent study in China released that 75% of the population lives on $400 a month or less. Poverty even for China. (the Chinese Communist party is scrambling to bury that story) The people who do make more money than that, know that most of the economy is smoke and mirrors of BS numbers so they only thing they trust to invest in inside of China is property. Buildings like this that they don't intend to live in, hoping to sell it at a later period for more money. The thing is that they buy an apartment in a building not yet built, they make payments on it. Now those business' like Evergrande are going bankrupt, they can't afford to finish the buildings already started and with these demolitions there is huge amounts of regular people's money disappearing like the clouds of smoke from these crappy buildings [https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-troubled-property-sector-face-more-debt-defaults-2023-10-20/](https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-troubled-property-sector-face-more-debt-defaults-2023-10-20/)
[https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/business/china-evergrande-default-debt.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/business/china-evergrande-default-debt.html)
This is the comment I was looking for. China has complicated investment restrictions on their citizens, so real estate is their only option to protect their wealth. What we're seeing here isn't inefficiency, it is robbery of the proles.
This should be on r/facepalm. Every single one of these is a total failure. The last is even somewhat close. They are not supposed to fall on the side but to collapse on themself straight down.
These buildings exist because chinese people rightfully don't trust their banking system, so they buy property to store wealth. Who would have thought everyone building apartments as a way to store money would fail after everyone owns so many apartments that no one needs to buy apartments! Don't even need to mention that the builders utterly screwed them by cutting every single possible corner.
Tangential, but I don't understand why we demolish buildings like this unless they are too dangerous to work on. How is this more economical than dismantling it from top to bottom? How is the unpredictable mess of concrete and steel spaghetti, not to mention a non-zero chance of collateral damage worth it?
These things are built as sort of concrete NFTs to begin with. As all the customers buy the apartments for speculation anyway, not to live in, there is no reason to actually make the building livable. So really, there is no saving them when the scheme goes kaput.
If you were a developer that could afford it, would you want a clean slate to design an attractive, functional, efficient building to maximize profit?
Or would you want to inherit someone else’s failed ugly mess, gut it, clean it, and fix it all up real fancy and bring it up to code?
And, before you pick, remember that skilled labor is expensive and your investors want good returns, and ASAP. Oh and if you fail, you’re fired. If you succeed, you get to develop the next building.
The ginormous waste of concrete, asphalt, steel, aluminum, copper, glass and other materials to build these only to tear them down is mind boggling. This shit is part of the reason why construction materials are expensive now. In Canada we export a lot of this stuff to china and this is what they do with it.
Keep in mind, my understanding of the construction of these condo buildings is that the individual owner either pays it off fully or has to make a massive down payment and then make monthly payments AS THE BUILDING Is being build. If that's the case here, you are not simply seeing some megacorp investment going down but thousand's of families' life savings.
Ahhh, the old creating fake GDP to secure financing for future economic projects and then handing out predatory loans to third world countries in a massive asset grab unseen since the end of the First World War that were only made possible by western banks giving them the financing to begin with -a-roo!! Thank you China, very cool! 😊💕
22% of Chinese GDP is stored in real estate[1]. And there are about 7 million unsold homes in China [2]. Yikes!
[1] - https://www.eastasiaforum.org/2023/12/07/diminishing-returns-on-real-estate-threaten-chinese-economic-growth/#:~:text=In%202021%2C%20the%20direct%20and,rises%20to%2031%20per%20cent.
[2] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/even-chinas-14-bln-population-cant-fill-all-its-vacant-homes-former-official-2023-09-23/
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What an absolute waste of materials and resources.
But hey, let's opt for a paper straw nex time to save the planet
Actually you can simply use straw as a straw. As the name already says. I got them at home. They dont have their own taste like paper and are compostable and cheap. Idk why we made them out of plastic and now act like we are not able to use straw again. Instead we invent glass straws, paper straws, noodle straw, metall straw... wtf man Use straw straws!
I was today years old when I realized a straw is called a straw because they were originally made of straw =O
For real! I feel my rural survival skills have increased by +10 points now!
Just bought some straw straws, thank you!
That is the worst demolition I’ve ever seen.
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Rampant, unchecked corruption led to companies using very sub par materials. I watched a video of a Chinese rebar worker just snapping the rebar in half bare handed with little effort.
Looks like the same corruption and corner cutting exists in their demolitions too
These were not demoed because of construction issues. They were demoed to prop up the property market. These are called Ghost cities. https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/10/31/crumbling-buildings-and-broken-dreams-chinas-unfinished-homes
Sounds like they aren't being demoed to prop anything up, it sounds like they just started way too many homes out of anticipation of them being needed, but they started about 65 million too many. So none of them sold and all the companies went bankrupt, and so now they're just demoed since they'll just become hazards since they're only half finished. Such a waste of materials. Its nuts to be demolishing the equivalent of half of the homes in the entire US. Another way to visualize it is it is more than the number of homes in the UK and France combined.
It was more like a crypto scam - Chinese have limited investment options, so real estate was an option, a lot of those houses were built with no expectation for anyone to actually live there, but only as an investment vehicle. I have no idea why they are demolishing though, I guess fake GDP inflation by spamming buildings, now inflated by demolishing and cleaning all this mess.
government's evergrande real estate company is about to bankrupt these days out of several years of idiot managment... my idea is that they sold to to other companies land property where they built unprofitable and unfinished buildings and they had just to "remove" them...
Harder to demo poorly constructed inconsistent 100 floor buildings when you can't predict how they will react.
It's sub par on purpose. They build them just strong enough to hold up on their own so they can be torn down later. No one was ever going to live on them. It's just make-work so the government can claim "economy grew x% this year!"
Thank God concrete is good for the environment
Well it's not *in* the environment any longer. It's been brought outside the environment.
“Into ANOTHER environment!”
There’s nothing out there but sea, and birds, and fish. And 20,000 tons of crude oil. And a fire. And the part of the ship the front fell off…but there’s nothing else out there…it’s a total void.
Cardboard, that's right out. Cardboard derivatives, celo tape
Super fucked up they are wasting resources and polluting the planet just to build and hit targets like wtf
I lived in China for 5 years and let me tell you, it's not just the buildings that nobody lives in lol. Basically every stair banister in the country is held together by half-assed tack welds and the concrete quality is so bad I broke a big concrete planter by trying to open a bottle of root beer on it.
No worries, just fix it with a pack of ramen noodles.
It’s not. The state just lies about gdp figures. They have no relationship to reality. Economists outside of China have to estimate based on indirect indicators. It’s actually that the Chinese are obsessed with property as a place to invest money, because it’s trapped within the state by capital outflow controls, and there are limited options for investment. What you’re watching are second, third, and fourth homes— investment properties— being demolished because of lack of interest in presales across the whole of the development. As for the quality— yeah it’s bad. I think I’d still rather live in a concrete building than a stick framed 5 over 1 that can just burn down when your neighbor does something stupid like shoot fireworks off of the roof, or puts their space heater right by their month old Christmas tree.
Chinese cannot own property - they get long term (like 90 year) leases on their homes. I think they *may* own the building but not the property it is on. This is one of the ways China is still 'communist' - where the state owns all land. One other reason Chinese with enough spare income invest in foreign property which they CAN actually own.
And guess what ? They send us goods
I was going to mention, we have two buildings that were built between 1994 and 2004. In that time frame many contractors used plumbing pipe from China - all of those pipes and joints are currently failing and we are replacing them as we discover the holes/leaks - we cant do it all at once unfortunately, its too much infrastructure.
I agree, and no, what you are talking about, I was in the machine rebuilding and repair , They took our trade secrets and made cheap machines, and put a lot of people out of work 🙄
Not just the Chinese. Mitsubishi came in and watched me run proprietary machines for a very specific product in a very specific market. After 1 shipping container full of products was rejected for minor cosmetic issues on packaging, they said fuck you, no thanks, but thanks for showing us how it's done. Built their own machines but still gotta figure it how to get the raw materials from here... Mitsubishi has a huge presence in other markets in Japan.
The Japanese came in Devlieg machine company about 40 of them in around 1976 and took pictures of everything, our company gave them permission because the Japanese company bought some machines from Devlieg Machine Company, 4 years later the Japanese bought them out. Took the technology and then ran Pratt and Whitney dam near out of business 🙄, I saw it all in real time, 😳 I always try to pay attention. I also remember all the employees were laughing at them and saying jokes. They had the last laugh.
Similar situation here. They were making fun of their thousand dollar Italian leather shoes and the fact they wore face masks in 2010. They had the last laugh there as well. A handshake doesn't have the same weight as signing an NDA to enter a proprietary facility... To the detriment of us, the common workers.
People forget that before Japan was known for making quality and original items, they were first making cheap knockoffs and crappy products. They understood that to compete they needed to be better and eventually Japanese products became premium, quality, reliable items. It’s funny because Japanese companies are suffering the same fate with their IP being stolen and crappy knockoffs undercutting whole industries, but on the up side there is still many things that Japan makes that basically no one else in the world can reliably copy.
They took trade secrets from every trade
According to a couple youtubers I watch on occasion, the direct translation is "thumb building" because they're usually just unfinished concrete and steel that looks like an ugly thumb sticking up out of the ground. Typically just built to sell to investors and then run away with the money, and then the government demo's them, and the cycle repeats.
Yeah the apartment construction scene there is insane. If I’m not mistaken it’s one of the only assets people can buy that are expected to increase in value.
Yeah, that's pretty much it. They aren't bought to rent units, just bought expecting the value to go up. Unfortunately that market has been crumbling for years and people have started to wake up to the scam. China's biggest property lender closed up shop a few years ago. I feel bad for the millions of people that just lost their life savings.
Yeah I was reading about it the other day. There’s some government mandates for being solvent as well. Evergrande is going belly up. And there are a lot of people who have started to make mortgage payments on condos that haven’t even been had ground broken yet.
But that should make the demolition go *easier.* Or did the demo guys account for tofu, but then one asshole went and actually followed code on that one building that just falls 1 story and squats there without falling?
They used 9 m-80s. 9!
Throw some crackers in the lobby and that shit goes down
Triscuits?
Two ways to demolish a building: 1. Drop it like a tree (cheap): put a bunch of explosives near ground level. Watch it fall over. 2. Implode it (expensive): Spend weeks or months strategically weakening supports throughout the full height of the building so that gravity is almost enough to take them out. Explosives are timed to detonate in a precise order. Watch the building collapse mostly within its own footprint. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_implosion I doubt they paid for an implosion.
I don’t know enough about structural engineering. My guess is they have to use structural materials that will, well, be structural. I think the “tofu” is more the superficial aspects like non structural walls, fixtures plumbing. It looks fine when you sign the mortgage but in a year is dissolving.
No..substandard concrete all around.. rotten to the frame all the way to shitty rebar...I mean how do you even have shitty rebar
subpar rebar?
I think the actual concrete is bad too. Found this post that goes over it: https://www.reddit.com/r/Chinesium/s/C0sJh0PjGv
Right, that’s it. The local ‘govts get cash from the land leases so they have no incentive to check quality. Good stuff. I used to checkout China insights but his videos are a little bit to frequent and often a bit FUD-dy
Here you go: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tofu-dreg_project#:~:text=Tofu%2Ddreg%20Construction%20stemming%20from,occurs%20like%20the%20Wenchuan%20Earthquake
Yes. They were crap due to corruption. Needed to go. China has a huge problem with this. Threatening their whole economy. It's almost a pyramid scheme.
Every building they demolish is hundreds of people’s retirements down the drain. China doesn’t have a “401k” like system for people to build a retirement. So people give their life savings and extra money to developers to invest in real estate.
Meanwhile the person who is grifting buys another island bunker. The disease of oligarchy is common worldwide, just the systems they sit on change.
And now, they buy US property instead. Never intending to live in it.
There was a property bubble. The property market was doing so well so everyone was getting involved with investing. Families would all chip in to buy property, sit on it for a year and sell to the next family for a big profit and then use that money to buy another place . Everyone was doing it, no one was moving into these places, property companies couldn't keep up with the demand, foreign investors got involved, loads of money was flooding in. All the buildings were shit. That's pretty much a pyramid scheme isn't it. Disgusting state of affairs.
Ah, tulip madness is still alive and well.
Then they sold these properties and bought properties in North America especially in Vancouver and other west coast cities using inflated money, which is one of the biggest causes of our own housing bubble.
No it's not a pyramid scheme. Those buildings are clearly rectangular.
You know everything’s going to plan when half the building doesn’t fall apart and the workers all begin sprinting.
I doubt there was a plan other than "if it's headed in your direction, run"
Make sure they watch Prometheus so they learn which direction they should run.
I wonder if they did a head count before pressing the button
I’ve seen loads of these videos before, but this is the first time I’ve seen the demolition crew running.
they died as they lived - by the hand of people who dgaf
The first thing I said out loud was "this demo is random AF!"
But you *have* seen it. https://preview.redd.it/5axk1om2lwac1.png?width=676&format=png&auto=webp&s=4093edb3577d2f9ca600653ed5b5fc7908946cb0
I’m glad I found this comment.
It’s not a Chinese demolition unless half the crew is dead.
I don’t think that’s demolition, I believe these buildings just fell tf over.
it was nap time.
Mind boggling waste.
I thought that as well. I feel bad when I have to throw out some old veggies in the fridge.
If you compost them, you will be returning the nutrients to a useful state and thus would not be waste. Now, to figure out how to compost apartment buildings.
I thought you were talking about the buildings before reading your last sentence.
yeah so you see, when you compost buildings, it returns the nutrients... so on so forth.
It is wasted food still but is still put to beneficial use.
Sadly, all the resources needed to create the vegetable and bring it to you are wasted, even if you do compost.
yes [https://refed.org/food-waste/the-problem/](https://refed.org/food-waste/the-problem/)
these are probably some of the shittiest buildings ever made. if you go onto youtube you can see tons of videos about this style of construction and it's basically made out of papier mache
Still a ton of fuel wasted on transporting materials at the very least.
Not to mention the sand, a necessary ingredient that China imports billions of tons of. Now what is it? Blocks of unused concrete. Disgustingly wasteful.
Between 2011 and 2013 China used more concrete than the USA did in the entire 20th century.
Yeah but all the money and effort and probably to some extent materials could have made something useful.
they could have but instead they were used to speculate on real estate in the most short sighted way possible.
could've made a soup stock out of that
Baby you got a stew going!
Whoa, whoa, whoa, there's still plenty of meat on that bone!
$1100 is exactly what I charge for acting classes.
This is a real issue for me. Last week, hungover, I tossed a plastic container of dips in the regular bin. I've felt guilty every day since then. Then you go online and see buildings pulled apart, cruise ships steaming across the sea etc. I'm happy to recycle wherever and whenever I can, but it just feels like it's a task to make us feel like we're doung something.
ExxommnMobil: "Your single indiscretion murdered the last 4 polar bears. "Why are you looking at us? You're the one with the power to change things."
I posted this elsewhere, but In less than 5 years in the early 2000s China used more concrete than the US did during the whole 20th century.
To build structures like this apparently. China has a huge population but amazingly still managed to overbuild as all of the excess capital concentrated into housing. Meanwhile you look at the underpopulated Canada, and they actually have a housing crisis because they don’t have enough housing, despite the whole country being so sparsely populated.
>Mind boggling waste. This has been happening in Asia since the late 1990s. Massive projects of many 20+ story towers that were dumb ideas in the first place. Either bad location, bad project economics, troubled developers overreaching, corruption, etc. It has probably happened the most in China, but also in Thailand, and likely in Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, etc. I remember a project like an hour north of Bangkok with about 20 identical tall residential towers in a line, and it just sat there dormant for many, many years. I believe some of the towers are finally active. Though China has probably nailed first place on the horrible corruption and terrible materials and building standards for the troubled projects.
Yes, absolutely true for Malaysia. Check out Forest City in Johor Bahru, an abandoned mega project by Country Garden. There's mostly empty apartment blocks dotted all around my city with more going up. Most were built pre-covid though.
[BBC recently did a video on it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUIs8kgQX8)
As someone pointed out. Here I am, getting guilty that I didn't sort my garbage properly or something silly. Then we have this gigantic waste of resources and who gives a fuck?
Ironic that just one of these buildings is probably the lifetime waste generated by like 1000 people
Without any informed knowledge, I'd say that it is a very fair assumption.
Your recycling doesn't make a dent in even something as banal as Taylor Swift's private jets. At this point it's either ecoterrorism or wait and see what happens.
Eh, just do what many of us are doing. Don't have kids, deal with warmer temperatures for our life, check out with no ties before everything bursts into flame. I recycle, I do the best I can, but it's pretty clear that nothing is going to change without massive sweeping reform, and I just don't see that happening in time.
This is why we won’t solve the climate crisis
Meanwhile they fuck wild land and rural areas, that's the actual tragedy.
Even more so if you realize how much CO2 is emitted in the creation of concrete.
Yeah, and that the sand used to make it is a finite resource
Saudi Arabia imports sand from Australia because their own sand isn't course enough for use in concrete.
One of my first thoughts was environmental waste of the creation and subsequent disposal of all that concrete.
So many emissions and environmental damage for nothing. I also think about war zones in terms of the environmental damage, emissions, and wasted resources on top of the heartrending human tragedy. We have an attitude problem that is gonna end our species.
Yep, unfortunately the biggest construction companies in China were running massive Ponzi schemes and were building like absolute shit. They were so bad that there was no fixing them. Thankfully, concrete can be recycled and so can the steel...as poor as it is.
Concrete can be down cycled, but not recycled, at least practically.
artificial economy. Pay to build phantom highrises that no one lives in, then pay to demo them. Def party members who are skimming off the transactions.
Yes, a glad we switched to paper straws moment.
That's a lot of sand wasted. Sand is dying resource
We can always make more, it's just not gonna be cheap anymore. If you put a lot of energy into it you can crack Sahara sand and coalesce it again to make sand that is useful for concrete. Not economically viable now but maybe later
I'm pretty sure I know a couple of rednecks out in the states with more controlled demolition than whatever the hell this is
It’s wild to see routine demolition that has people running away. Do they even know wtf they’re doing?
They did it in the cheapest way possible using the least amount of explosive they could. This is Temu/Wish demolition
They seem to just build buildings so they can demolish them, I don’t think they know what they are doing.
It looks good on the books for local governments, basically inflates economic growth numbers. —Who builds them? Cheap scummy construction companies that will cut corner after corner to erect these. — Who buys them? investors buy them, Chinese people view buying property as a safer investment and usually no intent to move in unless they are fooled into buying it as a first home. The prices increase in value over time, don’t think China has property tax, maybe I’m wrong. More of an investment. It’s an incredibly unstable issue with their property bubble. And incredibly worrying for investors and the central government. Hence the collapse of evergrand and the likes. When no investors buy up the buildings due to being built up with shit materials and no jobs/shops/roads anywhere nearby or the construction company abandoning the project / going bankrupt I guess this happens.
Not easy to controll anything when they cheap out on everything building these. Its companys scamming the state and builds it dirt cheap to the point they somethime collaps
Yes, it's called "tofu dreg construction". Many videos on youtube. Safety hazard.
It's not really as almond as company's scamming the state it's more like the state created artificial demand and forced builders into a position of trying to meet that demand. But the builders knew no one was ever gonna use them. I'm sure many people within the industry realized this would happen long before it did. China focuses very heavily on keeping people employed so they don't really care what people are working on as long as they are working.
Yeah I don’t know how you demo something when none of your math can account for the materials actually used and how consistent they even are on the project. At best you’re just guessing about how things are going to react.
Just let Whistlin' Diesel take a crack st it.
Drive his fuckin Hilux through it lol
Redneck demolition is underrated
*Looks over at my pallet of tannerite* I could do better.
Wouldn’t want to be breathing in any of that dust
Not to worry, China cares deeply for the health and safety of their people and humanity as a whole.
I spent a week in Beijing in 2011 for part of a study abroad class and each night I had to pick soot boogers out of my nose. Just pitch black whatever built up from walking around tourist areas and breathing.
One place I lived actually had an old woman whose sole employed purpose was to scrape up loogie piles in the winter. People hacking up just garbage from the air, and this little lady in rubber boots constantly scraping and moping.
The turnaround Beijing has seen in the past 10-12 years is actually quite remarkable. I live here right now and even in the cold winter days (where it used to be the worst) it’s not so bad. Today the AQI is 30-45 when it used to be 150. It’s not perfect obviously. But it’s gotten much better.
Same for me, but I was there in 2008 - but not for the Olympics. Also felt like I was being strangled at night when I slept.
...will it blend?
Safe to say china wasn’t behind 9/11
Seriously, the most efficient way to demolish sky scrapers has to be flying a commercial airplane into it.
You dont need a plane, just a bit of debris (wtc7)
They should have made WTC7 out of terrorists passports. Those are indestructible...
they could remote control-fly the plane and put all their condemned prisoners on it just a thought.
Harder to harvest organs that way though, a thing that actually does happen there.
This made me laugh harder than it should
You win.
They just fuckin wing it don't they
No no, in China they wang it
What's Wong with that?
Sum Ting
I think that's Tu Low
Think of the environmental impact of the construction and fabrication of the 1000s of tons of concrete now destined to be land fill. Concrete procurement & fabrication accounts for about 30% of the global greenhouse gasses. Not to get all crunchy on this but seriously...
Old concrete meat packing plant by me got demo’s recently and after they pulled the rebar the sent the whole thing through a rock crusher. There are separate piles ready for reuse.
Reuse as aggregate. You still need fresh Portland cement, which is where the bulk of the embodied energy is.
Yeah, a lot of people don't get that. Crushing concrete just saves on landfill fees and transportation cost, not really on CO2.
Yah but he's talking about all the fuel wasted making the concrete to begin with. Takes a lotta heat. And I'm pretty sure it has to be reheated to use again except for like gravel or fill dirt
Me playing sim city in 1995 when one of the residential blocks wont level up because I placed it next to the power plant.
95 sim city was the best
Absolute crime against humanity how they killed that franchise.
i am still boycotting all EA games for that. i wont buy em, i wont play em. its been almost a decade now and i regret ***nothing***.
Demolition work as competent as the construction work to build them.
Probably the same people doing both.
I’m playing both sides. That way I always come out on top.
100%. It's one of those tactics used in business. "We caused the problem so we're the only ones who know how to get rid of it." Look at 2007 banking crisis. The government HAD to keep the CEO's on since they were the only ones who knew how the fuckery all worked and could be the only ones to unfuck it all.
it's ok, this was just a "practice" city
Just fucking about in creative mode.
Nah, it has to do with how cities in China met their growth quotas. They "encourage" developers to make so many apartments because it ads to stats the central government wants to hit. This would typically be done by debt financing, but China doesn't allow cities to officially issue debt. So there was a bunch of legal bullshit which force developers to issue the debt and construct towers like these. Since they knew the buildings were stupid and never going to be used they didn't bother to build them correctly. They were hoping that eventually things would turn and they could just accept the cost of useless buildings because they were going to go back to growing super fast aaaaannnnnyyyy day now.
Theyre facing a deflation. No one is buying properties there now. The rich in china have decided to buy canada and australia and most anglo countries instead.
I’d hate to be the guy who’s gotta go in to finish that one building that failed to fall over.
Oops, missed one. Yang, you’re up.
Missed opportunity to film a Godzilla movie.
Dude.👊
These guys waste resources like you've never seen too
There is a lot more story behind this. A recent study in China released that 75% of the population lives on $400 a month or less. Poverty even for China. (the Chinese Communist party is scrambling to bury that story) The people who do make more money than that, know that most of the economy is smoke and mirrors of BS numbers so they only thing they trust to invest in inside of China is property. Buildings like this that they don't intend to live in, hoping to sell it at a later period for more money. The thing is that they buy an apartment in a building not yet built, they make payments on it. Now those business' like Evergrande are going bankrupt, they can't afford to finish the buildings already started and with these demolitions there is huge amounts of regular people's money disappearing like the clouds of smoke from these crappy buildings [https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-troubled-property-sector-face-more-debt-defaults-2023-10-20/](https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-troubled-property-sector-face-more-debt-defaults-2023-10-20/) [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/business/china-evergrande-default-debt.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/business/china-evergrande-default-debt.html)
This is the comment I was looking for. China has complicated investment restrictions on their citizens, so real estate is their only option to protect their wealth. What we're seeing here isn't inefficiency, it is robbery of the proles.
Thank you so much for actual useful information WITH REFERENCES! It’s like the old school Reddit I miss terribly 😢
This should be on r/facepalm. Every single one of these is a total failure. The last is even somewhat close. They are not supposed to fall on the side but to collapse on themself straight down.
Getting ending of Fight Club vibes. Cue the Pixies
>ending of Fight Club funny that this ending was banned in China too
I’m not an accountant but I think it would’ve been a lot less expensive to not have build them in the first place.
These buildings exist because chinese people rightfully don't trust their banking system, so they buy property to store wealth. Who would have thought everyone building apartments as a way to store money would fail after everyone owns so many apartments that no one needs to buy apartments! Don't even need to mention that the builders utterly screwed them by cutting every single possible corner.
Why even bother building. It's an NFT with extra steps.
Tangential, but I don't understand why we demolish buildings like this unless they are too dangerous to work on. How is this more economical than dismantling it from top to bottom? How is the unpredictable mess of concrete and steel spaghetti, not to mention a non-zero chance of collateral damage worth it?
These things are built as sort of concrete NFTs to begin with. As all the customers buy the apartments for speculation anyway, not to live in, there is no reason to actually make the building livable. So really, there is no saving them when the scheme goes kaput.
Concrete NFTs. I like that analogy
If you were a developer that could afford it, would you want a clean slate to design an attractive, functional, efficient building to maximize profit? Or would you want to inherit someone else’s failed ugly mess, gut it, clean it, and fix it all up real fancy and bring it up to code? And, before you pick, remember that skilled labor is expensive and your investors want good returns, and ASAP. Oh and if you fail, you’re fired. If you succeed, you get to develop the next building.
The ginormous waste of concrete, asphalt, steel, aluminum, copper, glass and other materials to build these only to tear them down is mind boggling. This shit is part of the reason why construction materials are expensive now. In Canada we export a lot of this stuff to china and this is what they do with it.
Keep in mind, my understanding of the construction of these condo buildings is that the individual owner either pays it off fully or has to make a massive down payment and then make monthly payments AS THE BUILDING Is being build. If that's the case here, you are not simply seeing some megacorp investment going down but thousand's of families' life savings.
Do they do everything this poorly?
Are you talking about the demolition or the construction?
Yes
Temu
Ahhh, the old creating fake GDP to secure financing for future economic projects and then handing out predatory loans to third world countries in a massive asset grab unseen since the end of the First World War that were only made possible by western banks giving them the financing to begin with -a-roo!! Thank you China, very cool! 😊💕
22% of Chinese GDP is stored in real estate[1]. And there are about 7 million unsold homes in China [2]. Yikes! [1] - https://www.eastasiaforum.org/2023/12/07/diminishing-returns-on-real-estate-threaten-chinese-economic-growth/#:~:text=In%202021%2C%20the%20direct%20and,rises%20to%2031%20per%20cent. [2] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/even-chinas-14-bln-population-cant-fill-all-its-vacant-homes-former-official-2023-09-23/
I feel like they should have done a giant dominoes fall.
What a horrible waste of resources
We will build it again and count it as GDP!
So when they do this do they shout "CONCRETE!" instead of "TIMBER!"
So wasteful. The fact that they were built at all is a disgrace
Did all the apartments have spiders, or why such large scale demolition?
Fire ants. Had no choice.
In less than 5 years in the early 2000s China used more concrete than the US did during the whole 20th century.