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The express lines are a known problem and Beijing is starting to build them (the first two will be line 17 and 19). The difference is in NYC the express lines and the regular lines run side by side, while the future express lines in Beijing will be individually build and won't necessarily run parallel to any existing lines.

The reason of the difference I think is the method of building tunnels. The NYC subway system is build long time ago, when cut and cover is acceptable. The width of the tunnel thus can be very wide, especially considering cost. Make the tunnel twice as wide may only cost less than 50% more (I'm guessing the number). Modern tunnels are mostly built using TBM, in which case the cost of making the tunnel twice wider may cost more than 100% because of the affects of multiple TBM working side by side may be hard to predict and hard to coordinate. So in this case it may be better to just build a regular line first, and than build a express line in a different route.

I'm not a civil engineer, so my reasoning may be completely wrong.

I think the parent means something else. You can find people predicting all kinds of disasters for the next 5 years and maybe some of them are right. But it's very hard for governments to know which one are right. Especially considering some are of the form "there's more than 50% possibility something bad will happen". In this case even if the bad thing doesn't happen in 5 years, you are still not sure if you should disregard the warning.

As someone involved in this I feel obligated to explain some basic mechanics in Chinese IPO. 1. Unlike in US. The underwriter/issuer doesn't decide who get the allocation. Instead it's a 2 tier lottery which is purely based on how much you put in and the RNG. This is mainly to stop the perceived "corruption" they think exists in US where a nice relationship with the broker can get you a good allocation in a hot IPO, AND the fact that you can just announce the amount you want to buy without posting any money for that. 2. Because of 1, individual investors treat this as a lottery instead of a popularity contest as in US, so everyone wants in. As a result, to protect the individual investors, the equivalent of SEC of china has an unspoken rule that the IPO company must have a PE ratio below 23(don't ask why 23). With current avg PE in 70s range, it looked like a sure win for whoever get the lucky allocation. 3. SO! Whoever get any movable money will be paticipating in this IPO, because you are looking at a risk free 10% -20% annualized return. Point to me one guy who think that's not awesome and I'll buy him a skii trip in the Alps.

So, just imagine Apple went IPO today, and priced at 1/3 of PE as MSFT, AND everybody has the same chance of getting the shares at the IPO price as long as you have the money to backup your order. How much do you think will be in this lottery.

It's not capital control in this case, it's the different shares. The shares you bought in HK can not be sold in SH, and vice versa. When the company does an IPO, it will assign a percentage of the shares to SH and the other to HK. It will be fixed in that way. You'd better treat them as two separate holding companies listed on SH and HK, each owning a piece of the actual company.

you obviously didn't read the article. They are using embryoes to be diacarded with defects that would never be able to develop into human beings.

I would recommend you to follow Michael Pettis[1]. He used to focus on China but recently also wrote about Europe. I find his explanation convincing but by no means is his view the consensus amount economists.

I think much of your question can be answered by this piece: http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/07/no-the-spanish-cant-be-m...

[1]:http://blog.mpettis.com/

In short, prolonged trade imbalances are mostly because of policy reasons, in this case suppressed German wages, and individual preference or things like "hardworking culture" are most likely results instead of causes.

Location is the key. The places listed in the article are all "new districts" of growing major cities, so they will be filled as planed. But not all major cities are actually growing, or growing as fast as planners hoped. And no official will admit their city is not growing, so as new districts are being build, some of them are going to be ghost ones.

However, the real ghost cities are mostly not going to be the ones you see in the media, for the reason of not shiny enough. If a project is on the failing trail, both the government and the developer will try to back off, to cut loses. So if you see the buildings are properly finished and streets well maintained, just lacking people, then it means the government and developers have not lost hope, and usually they have some good reasons.

So bundling should be one of the options instead of the only option. With bundling they are locking up the tech stack for the manufactures.

This is how a lot of Chinese and Korean streaming services operate. And integrated donation system can allow for more interactive options between streamer and audiences, or even between audiences. (Like streamer present the audiences with two options, and the option that getting more donations will be chosen by the streamer.)

Can I use other applications besides WhatsApp? No, WhatSim works only with WhatsApp.

If this is the trend, then those quad-sim crappy phones I got from China will finally be useful! One for WhatsApp, one for netflix, one for phone, one for internet.

Honestly I don't know who will ever use this..

Also, when I first read the title, I thought: cool, they implemented the WhatsApp protocol on a sim card, so feature phones can chat on WhatsApp! How disappointed I am.

It's boring because it's not a "pure" color, as it must be a mix of different wavelengths that is weighted similar to what get to the surface of earth from sun. So it's boring in the same sense a white noise is boring -- it has little information. On the other hand, a more pure color means there must be something that is changing the sun's light as it reflects it, or it's emitting light of some specific wavelength, which has more information.

Or put it simply, it's the color of dirt, and dirt is boring.

I think this is relevant. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8114547

As opposed to some other commentator, I don't think the shut-ins are actually content with being isolated. It's more like a trap that you fell into and don't know how to climb out of. If society don't try to help them, (some of) them may fell down even further, to the point of suicide.

You have to realize even if your "natural" food is free of toxins, the traditional cooking methods are likely to produce them, especially in grilling, frying and baking. And the worse part is the chemistry there is complex and may differ depend on source material and actual cooking method. On the other hand, the plastics are simpler and easier to analysis of possible transfers(or changes) in given temperatures. For the types approved for microwave uses there are more research done than say the interaction between beef and your pan. So I wouldn't worry too much about it.

You don't need to. I remember when I was a child, our family have this tradition of walking around the park after dinner. My parents would talk about work and ask about my day. And sometimes my father would throw questions like "why do you think there are 60 minutes in an hour instead of say 57" "why is 1/3 = 0.33333... is there a possibility there's a digit of 4 down the road?". I'm not sure if he come up with these question randomly or he has a system, but I still remembers a lot of them today.

I like this one. Normalized data, with all changes timestamped, realtime pushed directly to my own server where I can use along with my own internal datasets. It'll be very labor intensive though.

What's wrong with 14th century then?

Here's Matt Levine's take: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-11-20/the-goldman...

I partially agree with him. It's a bizarre situation and created distortion in the market, but it doesn't seem to be a GS conspiracy.

I'm not sure either. My understanding is that they let you compile (part of) your program to a middle layer, a more abstract version of X86/64 instructions. And the binary then can be generated based on the actual machine using the instruction set that machine supports. So if some of the computation you do prefers a certain instruction, but you still what it to run without it, and you don't what the user to recompile from the source, then you can use this.

Before Abe, Japan is in a trap:

1. It has 200% debt-to GDP ratio

2. It has near zero interest rate and negative to zero inflation

3. It has near zero growth rate.

It's important to understand how this trap works: Japan simply can't have meaningful growth. If there's real growth, that will force the interest up, otherwise there will be mass misallocation and high inflation. But given a 200% debt to GDP, the government just can't afford a higher interest rate, as the debt servicing cost will eat up most of the budget. So, assuming growth rate and interest rate is about the same (big if, i know), for just maintaining the status quo (regarding debt burden), for every x% the economy grows, the government has to raise 2x the amount to cover the interest expense. That's how scary it is.

That's why there's this sales tax hike and the consequent gdp dip. While other country with lower debt to gdp ratio can keep stimulating for a long time and only deal with the debt problem after recovery, Japan can't. It has to increase the government revenue relatively early, because it has a much smaller buffer to begin with.

I'm not a historian, but the bottom class seems toke a lot of debt. That's a common way for a free man to become a slave. Also, debt relieve (or the lack of) was always a big reason for mass movements or riots. As for peasants, I'm not sure about Europe, but in China they are one of the biggest client group. They would take out loans in planting season and pay it back in harvest. The standardization of these loans' terms and making it a government monopoly is a big part of Wang Anshi's[1] reform.

[1]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Anshi

The problem is we (actually you, since I'm not a US citizen) elect one set of people to vote on our behaves for everything. If we can delegate to different people on different issues, then it'll be very different. The whole notion of party politics may even break down.

These argument must be taken with a grain of salt. The truth is you don't know how many independent random investing they actually make. The classic argument is that given more than 1000 people there will be someone with a perfect score in 10 coin toss. But the reality is that some investor only tossed 5 times(big bet, long term investment), while some others tossed 100 times(short term, lots of smaller trading). It's much easier to say to a PE fund which only makes a deal every 2 years that its success is pure luck, than say the same thing to a high frequency trading firm who trades every second.

Causation vs. Correlation doesn't matter that much in most cases, if your goal is a investment strategy. Most of the research is like "if the ROE in the quarterly report is like this, then the return of the stock will be like that in the next month". Maybe the ROE is the reason for the stock performance, or maybe something else is affecting both the ROE and the future stock performance, (but certainly future stock performance can't just go back in time to affect current reported ROE, in normal cases). Either way, you don't care. What you care is to establish a pattern between a current event and a future event, and whether that hold true in all kinds of scenarios, especially in the near future. Although a direct causation is more robust but if it's a hidden variable you'll have to settle for less.

This. Most of my current favorite show aren't new, some goes back to pre-2006 era. For me the game changer is the Podcast Addict[1] app, but it mostly just allows me to have a bunch of "listen sometimes" shows. For the good ones, I won't care if I have to download to PC and sync with my phone, like I didn't complain much when I have to go to a physical store to buy CD back when it's still a thing.

[1]:https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bambuna.po...

The reason sounds interesting... But there is a startup culture in China.

Over the years I've read a lot of arguments from both sides: China's growth will continue for a quite long time vs. it'll end soon. Both have some valid and interesting points and I'm still not convinced either way.

But there's a more general theme I find interesting. If you are to predict how long something is going to last, given it already lasted longer than its peers, there are always two kinds of thinking: a) it's already stretching itself so it'll end soon, or b) the fact it already lasted this long means our references are not correct, and this could last a lot longer than we thought possible.

Like lkrubner already points out, the cause and effect is probably the opposite of what a lot of people think. We may think apprenticeship means business is treating its worker well, "investing" in them. But what did the workers really get? Here's a graph: http://www.businessinsider.com/core-unit-labor-costs-in-germ... Seems being a German worker is not that great?

I'll let Michael Pettis explain it: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/05/07/no_the_span...

The evil of collective farming is the "collective" part, not the large scale part. Optimal scale of operation changes along with the price of labor and other inputs, as well as technology. But collective "ownership" where the incentive system is distorted is never good.

It's not about contradicting my world view, or even the mainstream view. It's because this is one of the latest tricks played by a long time con artist and it's not good to be drawn to it time and time again. Given the track record I think the bar should be much higher for this.

Also, I don't know how you linked downvoting to witch hunting. I thought downvoting is a vital part of how HN works, I would downvote it myself if i can do it. Is it something that you can do but can never recommend others to do?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Catalyzer Somebody with the power should downvote this. Maybe it's worth talking 20 years ago, but after so many years of dubious results there should be a much high threshold for it to be worth noting.