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Comment by trhway | Hacker News Reader

it is hard to imagine where do you evacuate so many people to - temp housing? relatives?

China is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to China.

Butchering of Douglas Adams' work aside, it's true, having taken a train a few times across bits of mainland China - it just. does. not. stop. and you can witness constant construction too.

> China is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.

China is almost exactly the same size as the United States.

There's probably more than a few of us on HN from smaller countries who would also find the size of the US mind-boggling.

Especially us from higher latitudes whose worldview is influenced by the Mercator projection.

A useful link that helps with that problem:

https://thetruesize.com/#?borders=1~!MTYxNDU5OTQ.MzgwMzc5Mg*...

Great site.

Never realized Greenland fits inside the USA. Dragging a country to/from the poles really establishes how ridiculous the projection is.

> Dragging a country to/from the poles really establishes how ridiculous the projection is.

I mean, the pole is an infinitesimal point that _any_ rectangular projection must expand to the size of the equator.

I don't think it's fair to say it is ridiculous - it has pros and cons - with the distortion of areas towards the poles definitely being one of the latter

https://connectusfund.org/13-major-pros-and-cons-of-mercator...

I was not just referring to China's acreage. China is also very big vertically - and this vertical building is not just limited to a handful of cities.

Being originally from Scotland, almost every large country or city is mind-blowingly big as far as I'm concerned :)

Being in Scotland I see that as a feature not a bug ;-)

It is quite eye opening when you hear of name of some "smaller" Chinese city you have never heard of and then go look the population only to find it to be in millions.

And there are 113 cities with more than a million inhabitants in China: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/chinas-113-cities-one-milli...

A friend of mine in college was an international student from China. He was from a city I had never heard of and it boasted a population of 7 million people.

Undoubtedly, the United States is huge. But a large chunk of the US (Alaska) is separated from the contiguous landmass. It dilutes the perception of size relative to China.

The melting permafrost of Alaska, Canada, and Russia, are about to become prime real estate in the next few centuries.

I hear this a lot. Is there any reason why people are not scooping up Canadian wilderness properties right now?

Well, it’s not going to become valuable for probably another 6 generations. You’ll be long dead by then, but your great great great great ancestors might benefit from it.

A lot of it is the Canadian Shield - which probably isn't the most desirable property (thankfully):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Shield

Because climate change isn't going to make the Canadian Shield, and muskeg, any more valuable than it is now.

To put another way, if muskeg were worth using, it would have been used a century ago.

Well, they're going to become vast, mosquito-infested swamps. Whether you regard that as "prime real estate" probably depends if you're an estate agent or not.

China has 60 million empty apartments... The government should think about that.

Isn't China's urbanization rate quiet low at the moment. Better to build some reserve if you need to move people from rural to urban areas. So if you have to move hundreds of millions of people into urban areas its probably a good thing to have some housing reserves build up to facilitate those migrations.

China has been doing that for 3 decades. The target is a 60% urbanization rate. That's why there are so many "empty apartments". Because they are build and it takes a year or two to fill them up, so it looks like they are "empty". I lived in two such developments during the years that I lived in China. It's interesting to see the policies used to fill them. And to come back to the place a year later, when it is crowded.

Most developed nations have like a urbanization rate of at least 80+%. To reach developed nations urbanization rate china would need to move like 300 million people into urban areas, doing some quick maths.

Ghost cities...

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