#which is a proportion of the population that shrinks and shrinks as the ages roll on. by the third age she's middle tirion's craft granny | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

feanorianethicsdepartment · 3 years

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Do you have any personal headcanons about Celebrimbor's mother and her relationship with Curufin? I always thought that it's weird we don't have even the barest information about that considering Celebrimbor's unique position as the only next gen Feanorian. (Sorry if you already talked about this somewhere!)

thanks for the ask! i have, but i'm not going to pass up an opportunity to blather on about my ocs for several paragraphs

curufin's wife (she lacks a name because i hate giving characters names and will delay it until i absolutely have to) is noldorin, she lives in valinor in the years of the trees. i haven't thought much about her family, but i suspect they're middling nobility at the highest the did-valinor-have-social-classes debate is a whole different rabbit hole. she's a metalworker like her husband (she probably specialises in a slightly different subcategory but idk enough to say what) and is a member of the same tirion artisan guild. it's in that context that they meet and begin their Intense Crafting Rivalry

you know that trope where a pair of rivals are so obsessively devoted to one-upping each other it's blindingly obvious that what they actually want is to kiss? that's them, that's their relationship. their specialties are just similar enough they do a lot of the same stuff but just different enough their approaches tend to be radically divergent. what starts as the two of them trying to prove the superiority of their own artistic circle or whatever evolves into them trying to show up him/her specifically, s/he's wrong about x and i know i can do better, why does my family keep asking if we're dating yet????? their competition gets absolutely ridiculous in ways only a pre-scarcity society can get, like building an entire fountain out of solid silicon specifically because he said she couldn't do it (he actually said shouldn't but screw him (not literally cousin oh my valar))

but yeah. their relationship grows an undercurrent of the-only-one-allowed-to-push-around-my-archnemesis-is-me, and they find themselves fighting back to back (occasionally literally) when tirion guild politics takes a turn for the tirion guild politics. they just slowly come to trust each other, more than anyone else, and soon there comes an appropriately dramatic moment for them to suddenly kiss. they're still always trying to out-craftself each other, celebrimbor grows up in a house that's about 70% forge to the background noise of his parents insulting each other's work, but they're comfortable with each other in a way neither of them could have imagined in the early days, and when things get rough they always have each other's backs

things do, in fact, get rough. maglor won't meet his wife until beleriand, caranthir's relationship with his spouse slowly falls apart along with the political situation in tirion, but curufin's wife is loudly team fëanor. she suffers from an acute case of finwean spouse disease, she thinks going to middle-earth to build their own world is an awesome idea, she's deeply embedded in the tirion artisan scene with an entire social circle as think the same way, and when the inevitable civil war flares up she'll probably be even more eager to fight the fingolfinians than her husband. she goes with him and their-still-pretty young son to formenos, and when the trees get eaten and fëanor does the speech she prepares for the adventure of a lifetime

then, alqualondë. i stand by my conviction that nobody on the noldorin side walked in planning to steal the boats, let alone murder the teleri, but it was dark and the world was ending and everybody had sharp things. like everybody else involved in the first kinslaying, curufin and wife got caught up in the battle because somebody shouted 'they're attacking us!' in the distance. she is at first more trying to stop them from stabbing her, obsidian fishing spears glancing off ornamental steel, but then she lashes out and she hits someone in the chest and -

there was this recurring trope in her and her husband’s endless mutual critique. she’d create something beautiful, artfully devised and elegantly constructed, showing off a whole ton of design principles and doing things with the material no one had ever done. he would look at it skeptically and go ‘okay, but what use is it? what is it for?’

red liquid running down the fuller of the exquisite sword she forged herself, light guttering out of another elf’s eyes as he coughs up blood, she knows, sure as once were the light of the trees, what the piece of metal in her hands is for

the next few moments are a blur. she threw the sword into the water, she knows that. somehow she wound up running out of alqualondë, tears streaming down her face, as buildings burned and people screamed behind her. she found a concealed spot by the road, tore off her armour, peeked outside, and watched. when the fires were dying down and the boats were clearly gone, she mustered her courage and went to save her family

in the centuries to come, very few people believe celebrimbor when he tells them his mother tried to get his father to come back by, among other things, appealing to his better nature. nobody believes that it almost worked. but curufin was still only starting out on the road to hellbeastery, and his wife was his eternal partner-in-crime. right there at the beginning, staring out over a burning city, she saw where the road the noldor were walking would eventually lead them, no matter how much they tried to deny it. no dreams could be worth that, she told him. no ideals. and she was always the idealist, wasn’t she?

she was. maybe that’s why he, who had so very few ideals to mark his path, refused to abandon this one. their discussion rapidly devolved into a screaming argument half the camp could hear, much like curufin’s last argument with celebrimbor, centuries later. soon enough, though, it became clear that he wouldn’t turn back, and she refused to go on, and neither of them could change the other’s minds. the only thing left between them was celebrimbor

celebrimbor was eight (-ish in elf years), and completely freaked out, and eight, and knew almost nothing about what was going on, and eight, and had grown up listening to his grandfather’s dreams, and eight, and was surrounded by adults who very loudly thought going to middle-earth would solve all their problems, and eight, and couldn’t tell why his mother was abandoning them. panicking, on the spot, he buried his face in curufin’s smock to wipe away his tears. when he looked up, she was gone

so yeah, curufin’s wife went back with finarfin, that’s why she didn’t go to middle-earth. she initially stayed with nerdanel because almost everyone else on both sides of her extended family remained by (and later burned) the boats, i’m only just realising the horrible curufin argument probably wasn’t even the only one she went through that night, jeez. also she really needed a hug. the sun rose, alqualondë started rebuilding, and she ended up head of her and her husband’s former mutual craft guild, mostly because nobody else with the skills to do it was left. decades turn to centuries, news slowly filters back from beleriand, and her worst nightmares are proven so awfully right

probably the biggest emotion she feels towards curufin in the aftermath is betrayal. they were partners, in every sense of the word, they took on the world and they did it together, using their constant competition to drive each other to ever greater heights. they listened to each other, they trusted each other’s judgement, and she knows he understood the point she was making. him continuing on anyway, and diving face-first into the void - the elf she thought she knew would never have done that. as time passes by, the grief and the loneliness get subsumed by a deep abiding rage. if she ever sees the thing her husband let himself become again, she’ll throw a welding torch in his face

but that anger, that heartbreak, none of that applies to her son. when the hosts of valinor began gearing up for war - she’s the leader of tirion’s most prominent metalworking guild, she can’t not go. while they’re unloading supplies and siege equipment and stuff onto the isle of balar, she happens to pass by this relatively short dusky-skinned noldo hauling some smithing equipment about. as soon as he gets a proper look at her, he gasps. she looks back in confusion, and then she meets his eyes

later, she’ll hear his tales of his adventures in the hither lands, all of the hardships, yes, but also all of the brilliance. later, she’ll learn about the person he’s grown into, someone she can be unreservedly proud of in his choices and works. later, they’ll talk about the future, about his ambitions of making his grandfather’s dream come true, but with open hands and a light to be shared with all the peoples of middle-earth. for now, though, she wraps celebrimbor in a massive hug, and lets the tears flow down her face, because no matter how much they’ve lost, no matter how deep the darkness around them, right here and now, her son is alive

#my terrible ocs #ask #minkasartyplace #curufin #celebrimbor #assorted textual ghosts #noldor #look with all the shit that's gonna happen to tyelpe the least he deserves is a hug from his mum #i was gonna write that he ~never saw her again but then i realised there's no way she wouldn't join up with the war of wrath army #she was aware of the possibility that the nargothrond thing was a front and he'd been as corrupted as his father #she was studiously ignoring that possibility until if and when it became relevant #which it didn't #i feel like seeing the person celebrimbor became softens her opinion on the exiles #probably makes up with some members of her own family #anyone who's involved in the later kinslayings is still bad people though #she glosses 'feanorian minions' as 'target practice'#she's a reasonably prominent leader of the noldor what stayed behind #specially the ones who would have been feanorians if they'd gone #which is a proportion of the population that shrinks and shrinks as the ages roll on. by the third age she's middle tirion's craft granny #in the kidnap-dads-all-the-way-down au she's perfectly happy to mother celebrimbor's sisters #sometimes i think about making her part-telerin but i feel that undermines her choice after alqualonde #half wanna write an au where baby tyelpe stays with her now #jk i do not have the time #but i had a lot more to say about her than i expected. thanks for asking!

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pwitness · 7 years

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Dickens as economist

Mr. Sentiment vs. Mr. Scrooge

It was the worst of times.

When Charles Dickens returned from his triumphant American reading tour in June 1842, the specter of hunger was stalking England. The price of bread had doubled after a string of bad harvests. The cities were mobbed by impoverished rural migrants looking for work or, failing that, charity. The cotton industry was in the fourth year of a deep slump, and unemployed factory hands were forced to rely on public relief or private soup kitchens. Thomas Carlyle, the conservative social critic, warned grimly, "With the millions no longer able to live...it is too clear that the Nation itself is on the way to suicidal death."

A firm believer in education, civil and religious liberty, and voting rights, Dickens was appalled by the upsurge in class hatred. In August a walkout at a cotton mill turned violent. Within days the dispute had escalated into a nationwide general strike for universal male suffrage, called by leaders of a mass movement for a "People's Charter." The Chartists had taken up the principal cause of middle-class Radicals in Parliament--one man, one vote--into the streets. The Tory government of Prime Minister Robert Peel promptly dispatched red-coated marines to round up the agitators. Rank-and-file strikers began drifting back to their factories, but Carlyle, whose history of the French revolution Dickens read and reread, warned darkly that "revolt, sullen, revengeful humor of revolt against the upper classes...is more and more the universal spirit of the lower classes."

In the glittering London drawing rooms where lords and ladies lionized him, Dickens's republican sympathies were as hard to overlook as his garish ties. After running into the thirty-year-old literary sensation for the first time, Carlyle described him patronizingly as "a small compact figure, *very* small," adding cattily that he was "dressed as a la D'Orsay rather than well"--which is to say as flash as the notorious *French* count. Carlyle's best friend, the Radical philosopher John Stuart Mill, was reminded of Carlyle's description of a Jacobin revolutionary with "a face of dingy blackguardism radiated by genius." At fashionable midnight suppers the Chartist "uprising" provoked bitter arguments. Carlyle backed the Prime Minister who insisted that harsh measures were necessary to keep radicals from exploiting the situation and that the truly needy were already getting help. Dickens, who swore that he "would go farther at all times to see Carlyle than any man alive," nonetheless maintained that prudence and justice both demanded that the government grant relief to the able-bodied unemployed and their families.

The Hungry Forties revived a debate that had raged during the famine years, 1799 to 1815, of the Napoleon Wars. At issue was the controversial law of population propounded by the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus. A contemporary of Jane Austen and England's first professor of political economy, Malthus was a shy, softhearted Church of England clergyman with a harelip and a hard-edged mathematical mind. While still a curate, he had been tormented by the hunger in his rural parish. The Bible blamed the innate sinfulness of the poor. Fashionable French philosophers like his father's friend the Marquis de Condorcet blamed the selfishness of the rich. Malthus found neither explanation compelling and felt bound to search for a better one. *An Essay on the Principle of Population*, published first in 1798 and five more times before his death in 1834, inspired Charles Darwin and the other founders of evolutionary theory and prompted Carlyle to dismiss economics as "the dismal science".

The fact that Malthus sought to explain was that, in all societies and all epochs including his own, "nine parts in ten of the whole race of mankind" were condemned to lives of abject poverty and grinding toil. When not actually starving, the typical inhabitant of the planet lived in chronic fear of death by hunger. There were prosperous years and lean ones, richer and poorer regions, yet the standard of life never departed for long from subsistence.

In attempting to answer the age-old question "Why?" the mild-mannered minister anticipated not only Darwin but Freud. Sex, he argued, was to blame. Whether from observing the wretched lives of his parishoners, the influence of natural scientists who were beginning to regard man as an animal, or the arrival of his seventh child, Malthus had concluded that the drive to reproduce trumped all the other human instincts and abilities, including rationality, ingenuity, creativity, even religious belief.

From this single provocative premise, Malthus deduced the principle that human populations tended always and everywhere to grow faster than the food supply. His reasoning was deceptively simple: Picture a situation in which the supply of food is adequate to sustain a given population. That happy balance can't last any more than could Adam and Eve's tenure in paradise. Animal passion drives men and women to marry sooner and have bigger families. The food supply, meanwhile, is more or less fixed in all but the very long run. Result: the amount of grain and other staples that had just sufficed to keep everyone alive would no longer be enough. Inevitably, Malthus concluded, "the poor consequently must live much worse."

In any economy where businesses compete for customers and workers for jobs, an expanding population meant more households contending for the food supply, and more workers competing for jobs. Competition would drive down wages while simultaneously pushing food prices higher. The average standard of living--the amount of food and other necessities available for each person--would fall.

At some point, grain would become so expensive and labor so cheap that the dynamic would reverse itself. As living standards declined, men and women would once again be forced to postpone marriage and have fewer children. A shrinking population would mean falling food prices as fewer households competed for the available food. Wages would rise as fewer workers competed for jobs. Eventually, as the food supply and population moved back into balance, living standards would creep back to their old level. That is, unless Nature's "great army of destruction"--war, disease, and famine--intervened to hurry the process, as happened, for example, in the fourteenth century, when the Black Plague wiped out millions, leaving behind a smaller population relative to the output of food.

Tragically, the new balance would prove no more durable than the original one. "No sooner is the laboring class comfortable again," Malthus wrote sadly, "than the same retrograde and progressive movements with respect to happiness are repeated." Trying to raise the average standard of living is like Sissyphus trying to roll his rock to the top of the hill. The faster Sissyphus gets almost there, the sooner he triggers the reaction that sends the boulder tumbling down the slope again.

Attempts to flout the law of population were doomed. Workers who held out for above-market wages wouldn't find jobs. Employers who paid their workers more than their competitors did would lose their customers as higher labor costs forced them to raise prices.

For Victorians, the most objectionable implication of Malthus's law was that charity might actually increase the suffering it was intended to ease--a direct challenge to Christ's injunction to "love thy neighbor as thyself." In fact, Malthus was extremely critical of the traditional English welfare system, which provided relief with few strings attached, for rewarding the idle at the expense of the industrious. Relief was proportional to family size, in effect encouraging early marriage and large families. Conservative and liberal taxpayers alike found Malthus's arguments so persuasive that Parliament passed, virtually without opposition, a new Poor Law in 1834 that effectively restricted public relief to those who agreed to become inmates of parish workhouses.

"Please, sir, I want some more." As Oliver Twist discovers after making his famous plea, workhouses were essentially prisons where men and women were segregated, put to work at unpleasant tasks, and subjected to harsh discipline--all in return for a place to sleep and "three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a week, and half a roll on Sundays." The fare in most workhouses probably wasn't as meager as the starvation diet Dickens described in his novel, but there is no doubt that these institutions topped the list of working-class grievances. Like most reform-minded middle-class liberals, Dickens considered the new Poor Law morally repulsive and politically suicide and the theory on which it was based a relic of a barbaric past. He had recently returned from America with its "thousands of millions of acres of land yet unsettled and uncleared" and where the inhabitants were in "the custom of hastily swallowing large quantities of animal food, three times a-day," and found the notion that abolishing the workhouse would cause the poor to run out of food absurd.

Bent on striking a blow for the poor, Dickens began early in 1843 to write a tale about a rich miser's change of heart, a tale that he liked to think of as a sledgehammer capable of "twenty times the force--twenty thousand times the force" of a political pamphlet.

*A Christmas Carol*, argues the economic historian James Henderson, is an attack on Malthus The novel is bursting with delicious smells and tastes. Instead of a rocky, barren, overpopulated island where food is scarce, the England of Dickens's story is a vast Fortnum & Mason where the shelves are overflowing, the bins are bottomless, and the barrels never run dry. The Ghost of Christmas Present appears to Scrooge perched on a "kind of throne," with heaps of "turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam." "Radiant" grocers, poulterers, and fruit and vegetable dealers invite Londoners into their shops to inspect luscious "pageants" of food and drink.

In an England characterized by New World abundance rather than Old World scarcity, the bony, barren, anorexic Ebenezer Scrooge is an anachronism. As Henderson observes, the businessman is "as oblivious to the new spirit of human sympathy as he is to the bounty with which he is surrounded." He is a diehard supporter of the treadmill and workhouse literally and figuratively. "They cost enough," he insists, "and those who are badly off must go there." When the Ghost of Christmas Present objects that "many can't go there; and many would rather die," Scrooge says coldly, "If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."

Happily, Scrooge's flinty nature turns out to be no more set in stone than the world's food supply is fixed. When Scrooge learns that Tiny Tim is one of the "surplus" population, he recoils in horror at the implications of his old-fashioned Malthusian religion. "No, no," he cries, begging the Spirit to spare the little boy. "What then?" the Spirit replies mockingly. "If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population." Scrooge repents, resolves to give his long-suffering clerk, Bob Cratchit, a raise, and sends him a prize turkey for Christmas. By accepting the more hopeful, less fatalistic view of Dickens's generation in time to alter the course of future events, Scrooge refutes the grim Malthusian premise that "the blind and brutal past" is destined to keep repeating itself.

The Cratchits' joyous Christmas dinner is Dickens's direct riposte to Malthus, who uses a parable about "Nature's mighty feast" to warn of the unintended consequences of well-meaning charity. A man with no means of support asks the guests to make room for him at the table. In the past, the diners would have turned him away. Beguiled by utopian French theories, they decide to ignore the fact that there is only enough food for the invited guests. They fail to foresee when they let the newcomer join them that more gatecrashers will arrive, the food will run out before everyone has been served, and the invited guests' enjoyment of the meal will be "destroyed by the spectacle of misery and dependence."

The Cratchits' groaning board, wreathed with the family's beaming faces, is the antithesis of Malthus' tense, tightly rationed meal. In contrast to Nature's grudging portions, there is Mrs. Cratchit's pudding--"like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half-a-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedecked with Christmas holly stuck in the top"--not large enough for seconds perhaps, but ample for her family. "Mrs. Cratchit said that now the weight was off her mind, she would confess she had had her doubts about the quantity of flour. Everybody had something to say about it, but nobody said or thought it was at all a small pudding for a large family. It would have been flat heresy to do so. Any Cratchit would have blushed to hint at such a thing."

The Christmas spirit was catching. By the story's end, Scrooge had even stopped starving himself. Instead of slurping his customary bowl of gruel in solitude, the new Scrooge surprises his nephew by showing up unannounced for Christmas dinner. Needless to say, his heir hastens to set a place for him at the table.

Dickens's hope that *A Christmas Carol* would strike the public like a sledgehammer was fulfilled. Six thousand copies of the novel were sold between the publication date of December 19 and Christmas Eve, and the tale would stay in print for the rest of Dickens's life--and ever since. Dickens's description of the poor earned him satirical labels such as "Mr. Sentiment," but the novelist never wavered in his conviction that there was a way to improve the lot of the poor without overturning existing society.

Dickens was too much a man of business to imagine that schemes for bettering social conditions could succeed unless they could be paid for. He was a "pure modernist" and "believer in Progress" rather than an opponent of the Industrial Revolution. Wildly successful while still in his twenties, he had gone too far on his own talent to doubt that human ingenuity was climbing into the driver's seat. Having escaped poverty by making his way in the new mass-media industry, Dickens was impatient with conservatives such as Carlyle and socialists such as Mill who refused to admit that, as a society, "we have risen slowly, painfully, and with many a hard struggle out of all this social degradation and ignorance" and who "look back to all this blind and brutal past with an admiration they will not grant to the present."

Dickens's sense that English society was waking up, as if from a long nightmare, proved prescient. Within a year of the Chartist "uprising," a new mood of tolerance and optimism was palpable. The Tory prime minister admitted privately that many of the Chartists' grievances were justified. Labor leaders rejected calls for class warfare and backed employers' campaign to repeal import duties on grain and other foodstuffs. Liberal politicians responded to parliamentary commissions on child labor, industrial accidents, and other evils by introducing the Factory Acts of 1844, legislation regulating the hours of women and children.

Dickens never imagined that the world could get along without the calculating science of economics. Instead, he hoped to convert political economists such as the Ghost of Christmas Future had converted Scrooge. He wanted them to stop treating poverty as a natural phenomenon, assuming that ideas and intentions were of no importance, or taking for granted that the interests of different classes were diametrically opposed. Dickens was especially eager for political economists to practice "mutual explanation, forbearance and consideration; something...not exactly stateable in figures." When he launched his popular weekly, *Household Words*, he did so with a plea to economists to humanize their discipline. As he wrote in his inaugural essay, "Political economy is a mere skeleton unless it has a little human covering, and filling out, a little human bloom upon it, and a little human warmth in it."

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brajeshupadhyay · 4 years

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England’s coronavirus outbreak shrinks by HALF in a week

England’s coronavirus outbreak appears to have shrunk by half in the past week, according to a government-run surveillance testing scheme.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) predicts that there were only 53,000 people in England who had Covid-19 between May 24 and May 30 – 0.1 per cent of the population.

This estimate – based on swab tests of nearly 20,000 people picked at random to give ministers a clearer picture as to the true scale of the crisis in Britain – is a massive drop on the 133,000 people (0.24 per cent) thought to the have the illness in the same data last week.

And the ONS says that around 39,000 people per week are catching the infection – 5,500 per day, which is a drop from 54,000 per week between May 16 and May 23. This means that only around one in every 1,000 people are actually carrying the virus, down from one in 400 at the latest estimate.

The ONS report said: ‘As the proportion of those testing positive in England is decreasing over time, it is likely that the incidence rate is also decreasing. However, because of the low number of new positive cases, we cannot currently measure a reduction.’

Different data from blood antibody tests, published yesterday by Public Health England, suggested that around 8.5 per cent of the country has had the virus already – some 4.76million people.

In a separate report published today the ONS confirmed that more than a quarter of the 46,380 ‘excess’ deaths that happened between March 7 and May 1 were not directly linked to Covid-19.

That data showed that the number of people dying in care homes of any cause rose by a staggering 60 per cent in March and April, while it rose 43 per cent in private homes. Hospitals, meanwhile, saw 21 per cent fewer deaths than usual.

As well as a lack of testing, possible explanations for more people dying without even catching the virus were down to them avoiding medical care out of fear, that increased stress caused by the pandemic was killing people, and that hospitals had less capacity to help people.

Data from the Office for National Statistics shows a downward trend in the number of people testing positive for the coronavirus over the course of May

ONE IN 12 BRITS VISITING FRIENDS AND FAMILY AT HOME AS LOCKDOWN EASES

Britain is beginning to flout coronavirus lockdown rules, according to government data that was published today.

Nearly one in twelve Brits (7.7 per cent) polled met up with family or friends in one of their homes between May 29 and 31.

This is 63 per cent higher than the rate recorded by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) the week before (4.7 per cent).

Boris Johnson last week gave the green light to the first socialising since lockdown, allowing up to six people to meet outdoors and in private gardens for BBQs.

But spending time inside another household is still not permitted, as health bosses desperately try to prevent a second wave of Covid-19 cases.

The ONS data, published today, did not reveal whether or not the visits counted as going inside someone’s home or just in their garden.

Separate data from the poll – carried out on 1,224 adults – showed Britain’s anxiety rates have dropped to the lowest since lockdown was imposed on March 23.

Results showed the average anxiety rating was 3.7 between May 28-31, down from a high of 5.2 at the start of the crisis.

Survey data from the Office for Statistics showed that six out of 10 people now feel comfortable meeting up with people who don’t live in their household

As part of a nationwide swab testing scheme to find out what proportion of people would currently test positive for the disease, 19,723 people were tested between May 17 and May 30.

Those people came from 9,094 households. A total of 21 of them, from 15 different households, tested positive during that time – 0.1 per cent.

The test data covers a two-week period meaning last week’s and this week’s share one of the same weeks, but the ONS’s estimate based on its data has dropped significantly.

The promising signal from the ONS ties in with testing data from the Department of Health which shows officials are finding it harder to track down positive cases.

Numbers of people getting diagnosed with Covid-19 through the official testing programme has fallen significantly this week despite more tests being carried out.

In the seven days up to yesterday, June 4, 13,335 people tested positive across the UK, compared to 18,219 in the seven days before that – a 36 per cent drop.

Professor Keith Neal, an epidemiologist at the University of Nottingham, said: ‘The rate of infection continues to decline and is half what it was two weeks ago. Changes over a longer period are now statistically significant.

‘This is highly compatible with the fall in diagnosed cases. The contact tracing service has more than enough staff to cope with the current level of infection.

‘The main problem is people not getting tested for COVID-19 when they have symptoms.’

He added: ‘The main limitation of the study is the small numbers testing positive gives wide confidence intervals.

‘No study is perfect but by following the same group of people it is a very powerful tool to identify the trend.’

A separate report published today by the ONS aimed to try and explain why there have been so many ‘excess’ deaths during the coronavirus crisis in England and Wales.

It calculated that, between March 7 and May 1, 46,380 more people died than average. Some 12,900 of them (27.8 per cent) were not direct victims of Covid-19.

That period, when NHS hospitals were urged to turf out as many patients as they could who didn’t need urgent treatment, saw a 21 per cent drop in hospital deaths, the report said.

But the number of people dying in care homes soared by a massive 60 per cent, and in private homes it rose by 43 per cent.

The report said the largest increase in deaths was seen in people with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

Nick Stripe, the head of health analysis at the ONS, said in a tweet: ‘Dementia increases are so sharp it’s implausible that they are unrelated to Covid-19.

HOW TESTING WILL TRACK THE VIRUS’S R VALUE AND MONITOR COVID-19

REGULAR SWAB TESTS FOR 25,000

At least 25,000 people will be enrolled into a scheme in which they will take swab tests each month to see if they are infected at the time.

The mass sampling study will continue for the next year and will be scaled up to include 300,000 people if it is found to be useful.

The surveillance scheme is being co-led by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The first official results are expected imminently.

REGULAR ANTIBODY TESTING

Further antibody testing will be rolled out to 1,000 households across the country, to work out how much of the population has already been infected.

Trained nurses will take blood samples from the volunteers and send them to a lab where they are analysed to see if they have developed any immunity.

The scheme is also being run by the ONS and Oxford University, which will analyse the anonymised blood tests in one of their laboratories.

100,000 RANDOM TESTS

Imperial College London will oversee a two-part REACT programme (Real-time Assessment of Community Transmission).

The first part of this will be the 100,000 tests of random people in 315 different areas of the UK, to see how many of them are currently infected.

RANDOM ANTIBODY HOME TESTS

Part two will be a roll-out of at-home antibody tests, which can tell whether people have already had the disease and recovered. These will be given to 300 people for an initial trial and then rolled out to 10,000 people and then to 100,000 if it is successful.

The antibody tests will create a picture of how many people have had the virus already and may have immunity to it, meaning they won’t catch it again, at least in the short-term.

‘They generally affect the very old, they would tend to impact women to a greater extent than men simply due to pop[ulation] structure. Especially once care home epidemics took hold with [limited] testing.’

The ONS said that, although many of the deaths among elderly people were not attributed to Covid-19, large numbers of undiagnosed cases of the disease were a ‘likely explanation’.

Dementia and Alzheimer’s disease and other symptoms linked to old age accounted for two thirds of the total number of non-Covid-19 excess deaths in England and Wales from March 7 to May 1, the ONS said.

There were 5,404 more deaths than expected among dementia and Alzheimer’s disease patients – a rise of 52 per cent compared to average.

And 1,567 excess deaths occurred due to ‘symptoms signs and ill-defined conditions’ – a 77.8% rise from the five-year average.

Undiagnosed Covid-19 could ‘help explain the rise’ in the deaths of frail elderly people with underlying conditions, particularly women and those in care homes, the ONS added.

It said: ‘The absence of large rises in deaths due to this cause that mention conditions that could exhibit similar symptoms to Covid-19 suggests that if Covid-19 is involved in the increase in deaths due to dementia and Alzheimer disease, the usual symptoms of Covid-19 were not apparent.

‘This could fit with recent clinical observations, where atypical hypoxia [low blood oxygen] has been observed in some Covid-19 patients.

‘In someone with advanced dementia and Alzheimer disease, the symptoms of Covid-19 might be difficult to distinguish from their underlying illness, especially with the possibility of communication difficulties.

‘Care home residents have experienced changes to their usual routine as a result of measures to tackle the coronavirus pandemic. Adverse effects of such changes cannot be discounted as another possible explanation of the increase in the number of deaths in care homes.’

Friday’s release is the first detailed analysis from the ONS looking at the increased number of deaths during the pandemic where coronavirus was not mentioned on the death certificate.

The highest number of excess non-Covid-19 deaths have taken place in care homes, with a weekly maximum of 2,975 of these deaths being registered in the seven days to April 17.

Non-Covid-19 deaths in private homes saw a separate peak in the week ending April 24, when 1,760 were registered.

The ONS said that if patients have been discharged from hospital sooner than they may have been typically, because of pressure on the NHS’s resources, this ‘could have resulted in some deaths occurring in care homes or private homes that would have otherwise occurred in hospital’.

It added that the reported lower rates of testing in all settings outside hospitals ‘could lead to some deaths in other locations involving Covid-19 not having Covid-19 listed on the death certificate as a contributory factor, leading to apparently higher non-Covid-19 excess deaths’.

Up to 5.6million people in England – 10% of the country – may have already had the coronavirus, government antibody sampling scheme reveals

Up to 5.6million people in England could have already had the coronavirus, according to results of a government-run surveillance scheme.

Blood samples taken from almost 8,000 people suggest up to 10 per cent of the country have antibodies specific to Covid-19, showing they have had the disease in the past.

Public Health England’s best estimate is that 8.5 per cent of people in England have already had the coronavirus – 4.76million people. But this, it admitted, could be as high as 10 per cent (5.6m) or as low as 6.9 per cent (3.864m).

Regional variations show that the rate of infection has been considerably higher in London, with 15.6 per cent of the city’s population already affected. And it has been lowest in the South West, where only 2.6 per cent of people are thought to have had the virus.

The national prevalence of antibodies suggests that, with around 43,000 deaths from a population of 56million people, the true death rate of Covid-19 is 0.9 per cent – nine times deadlier than the flu.

This suggests it kills one in every 111 people who catch the disease will die with it. The death rate was again lower in London, where it appeared to be 0.57 per cent.

PHE’s data was based on blood tests taken from 7,694 people across England in May, of which around 654 tested positive. It chimes with other estimates which suggest similar numbers.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) put the national level of past infection at 6.78 per cent – around 4.5million people in the UK – while Health Secretary Matt Hancock had previously announced early PHE results suggesting it was only five per cent nationwide.

Data from Public Health England showed that London has the largest proportion of its population already infected with the coronavirus, while the fewest people were infected in the South West of England

The death rate calculations are based on a total 43,353 deaths in England, which is composed of the 42,210 recorded by May 22 by the Office for National Statistics, plus a further 1,143 announced by NHS England since then.

Government data records mean non-hospital deaths specifically for England cannot yet be counted between May 22 and June 4.

And the estimate for London’s death rate follows the same formula – the ONS announced 8,034 by May 22 and 78 have died in hospitals since then: a total 8,112.

Scientists say that the reason for a lower death rate in London is that the city has a younger average age than other regions.

Covid-19 is known to be worse for elderly people, who are more likely to die if they catch the virus. It has killed one in every 57 over-90s in the country already.

Professor Keith Neal, an epidemiologist at the University of Nottingham, said: ‘I would consider the average of Londoners to be younger than outside.

‘If people in London were seven years younger then there would be a 50 per cent lower death rate just from this measure alone. Also land is expensive in London so probably fewer care homes than outside per head of population.’

London’s rate may also be lower because it has had far more infections, meaning more will have been among healthier people in the community. In areas with fewer coronavirus cases, there is a chance a greater proportion of the cases were caught in hospitals or care homes by people who were more likely to die – this would artificially increase the death rate.

Antibody testing is a method of sampling people’s blood to look for antibodies, which are made by the body so it can remember how to fight off certain diseases.

Only someone who has already had Covid-19 will have antibodies in the blood.

EVERY RECOVERED COVID-19 PATIENTS DEVELOPS ANTIBODIES – BUT THEY MAY NOT BLOCK THE INFECTION AGAIN

Most people who recover from the novel coronavirus generate at least some antibodies capable of neutralizing SARS-CoV-2, the first round of results from a new study suggest.

While many antibodies grab hold of the virus, only a few counteract the pathogen and prevent it from entering our cells.

Researchers from Rockefeller University in New York City looked at 149 recovered patients and determined that the majority had a weak antibody response.

However, they found that every patient’s immune system seemed to be capable of generating the types of antibodies that neutralize the virus, just not particularly enough of them.

‘This suggests just about everybody can do this, which is very good news for vaccines,’ Dr Michel C Nussenzweig, head of the Laboratory of Molecular Immunology at Rockefeller, said in a statement.

‘It means if you were able to create a vaccine that elicits these particular antibodies, then the vaccine is likely to be effective and work for a lot of people.’

For the study, published on pre-peer review site bioRxiv.org, the team looked at 149 people who donated plasma at The Rockefeller Hospital in New York City over the course of five weeks.

Convalescent plasma is the liquid portion of blood is taken from a recovered coronavirus patient, which contains antibodies and immune B-cells.

Participants had symptoms of the virus for about 12 days while infected, and their first symptoms occurred about 39 days before they donated plasma.

Researchers then mixed the plasma with a pseudo coronavirus and measured if or how well the virus would infect human cells in a petri dish.

Most samples did not do very well at neutralizing the virus.

In fact, the neutralizing effect was undetectable in 33 per cent of donors. The investigators say this may be because their immune systems cleared the infection before antibodies could be produced.

They found that the effect was very high among one percent of patients, so-called ‘elite donors.’

The team identified 40 antibodies that neutralized the virus, and focused on three that did so even at low levels.

These antibodies bound to at least three sites on the spike protein found on the surface of the coronavirus that it uses to enter our cells.

Researchers now plan to clone these antibodies in hopes it will help patients with severe or life-threatening cases of the virus.

‘We now know what an effective antibody looks like and we have found similar ones in more than one person,’ Robbiani said.

By running blood samples through a machine which contains a part of the virus, scientists can monitor whether the blood reacts in a way that shows it knows how to fight the virus – this indicates they have had the illness in the past and recovered.

PHE’s data gives regional breakdowns of the levels of antibodies it has found in blood samples so far.

The numbers are still based on relatively small samples so must be treated with caution.

These were the approximate regional proportions of people who have had the virus already:

England 8.5 per cent

London: 15.6 per cent

North West: 10 per cent

East of England: 8 per cent

North East: 6.1 per cent

Midlands: 5 per cent

South East: 4 per cent

South West: 2.6 per cent

Data from the antibody tests should be taken with a pinch of salt because the tests can produce large margins of error, even if they are highly specific, and studies have suggested that some people produce barely-detectable levels of antibodies.

PHE’s figures show that men are more likely to have had the virus than women – 9.4 per cent of men tested positive for antibodies compared with 7.6 per cent of women.

And they were also more likely to be found in younger people.

People aged between 17 and 29 were most likely to have had the disease anywhere in England, with an estimated infection rate of 10.2 per cent.

The lowest rate of past infection was in the oldest age group included in the data – the 60 to 69-year-olds, of whom 6.3 per cent had antibodies.

Prevalence became gradually higher as the age groups got younger, with a rate of 7.8 per cent among people in their 50s, 7.9 per cent in people in their 40 and 9.3 per cent in people in their 30s.

Officials said that the effect of lockdown meant the antibody data did not appear to have changed much. Only massively bigger sample sizes might changes this.

The report said: ‘Adjusted prevalence estimates vary across the country and over time.

‘Given that antibody response takes at least two weeks to become detectable, those displaying a positive result in week 18 [April 27 to May 3] are likely to have become infected before mid-April.

‘The plateauing observed between weeks 18-21 demonstrates the impact of lock down measures on new infections.’

Today’s report comes after the Office for National Statistics estimated last week that around seven per cent of the country had had the virus already.

That data, which had not been published before, was based on 885 blood tests to look for signs of coronavirus-specific antibodies in members of the public.

The tests were analysed by researchers at the University of Oxford and the University of Manchester from people who have provided blood samples since April 26.

Their finding that 6.78 per cent of the sample had the antibodies suggest the same rate of infection has been experienced across England, at least. It is reasonable to scale that to the entire of the UK, suggesting around 4.5million people have been infected.

On how this could affect the death rate of the virus in Britain, Cambridge University statistician Professor David Spiegelhalter said: ‘As a back-of-envelope calculation, the latest ONS survey suggests around 6.8 per cent of 56million people in England have been infected, which is around four million, and there’s been around 40,000 deaths in England linked to COVID.

‘So this suggests that infection has carried around a 1 per cent average mortality rate. Which is impressively close to the much-disputed estimate of 0.9 per cent made by the Imperial College team back in March.’

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genotype-environment · 6 years

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Dallas-Fort Worth leads the country in share of new high-end apartments

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Last year, almost 100 percent of the apartments built in Dallas-Fort Worth had something in common: They were all high-end rental units.

With developers in the biggest apartment-building market in the country aiming for the same slice of the rental pie, North Texas now ranks high among markets with the largest share of pricey, luxury apartment building.

D-FW has more high-end apartment building than any other metro area in the country, according to a study by Yardi Systems, just as in 2017. Nationwide, 8 out of 10 apartment communities that opened last year targeted high-end renters.

"Encumbered by high construction costs and encouraged by a surge in demand for rentals, developers have bet big on high-end apartments," Yardi analysts say. "Back in 2012, high-end properties represented about half of all new completed construction, but now these projects occupy the lion’s share of the multifamily industry.

"Nationally, about 87 percent of all large-scale apartment buildings completed in the first half of 2018 are high-end."

The surge in construction of deluxe rental units comes at a time when demand for affordable apartments in major U.S. markets is at an all-time high.

"Almost all of the new dwelling units being delivered are Class A — they are higher-end product," said John Sebree, national director with commercial property firm Marcus & Millichap. "The number of new high-end households being created is a much smaller percentage.

"A large percentage of those new households are B and C apartment tenants, and we are not creating any more B and C product."

What’s worse, thousands of older B and C apartments around North Texas are being knocked down for pricier rental communities.

(The share of high-end apartments being built nationwide has almost doubled./Yardi Systems)

Because of the shrinking pool of older apartments, rents in those units are rising at a higher percentage than new luxury apartments that are flooding some markets.

High-end apartment rents are up less than 1 percent this year in D-FW, and neighborhoods with older units are seeing rents rise more than 3 percent.

"The strongest rent growth has been in the neighborhoods where we are not building much in this cycle," said Greg Willett, chief economist with Richardson-based RealPage. "We have really filled up the neighborhoods where you see Class C units.

"Historically, you have had chronic vacancies there. Those areas are now jam-packed full."

While D-FW’s employment base and population are growing, incomes are not rising fast enough to keep up with apartment rents, which have grown almost 40 percent in North Texas since the recession.

"A bigger share of the population can only afford those Class C units," Willett said. "They have been priced out of the middle market and upper-tier properties."

Developers say rising land, construction and financing costs make it almost impossible to build workforce apartments in many urban areas.

"We have chosen to play in the upper end," said Tom Bakewell, one of the founders of Dallas-based apartment builder StreetLights Residential. "We are going to go even higher-end."

StreetLight’s newest Dallas rental high-rise on the edge of Highland Park has average rents of $5,000 — almost five times the D-FW average. Tenants’ average age in the McKenzie building is in the 50s, and they lease units for as long as two years.

"We are going to try and roll these out in more cities," Bakewell said. "We will only do a few of them in most markets."

Dallas and Fort Worth have one of the country’s largest shares of new high-end apartments.

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filiplig · 6 years

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Osnos, Evan - Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

page 4 | location 54-58 | Added on Thursday, 14 May 2015 15:50:31

Above all, it is a time of plenty—the crest of a transformation one hundred times the scale, and ten times the speed, of the first Industrial Revolution, which created modern Britain. The Chinese people no longer want for food—the average citizen eats six times as much meat as in 1976—but this is a ravenous era of a different kind, a period when people have awoken with a hunger for new sensations, ideas, and respect. China is the world’s largest consumer of energy, movies, beer, and platinum; it is building more high-speed railroads and airports than the rest of the world combined.

page 6 | location 85-88 | Added on Thursday, 14 May 2015 15:54:42

China today is riven by contradictions. It is the world’s largest buyer of Louis Vuitton, second only to the United States in its purchases of Rolls-Royces and Lamborghinis, yet ruled by a Marxist-Leninist party that seeks to ban the word luxury from billboards. The difference in life expectancy and income between China’s wealthiest cities and its poorest provinces is the difference between New York and Ghana.

page 8 | location 115-117 | Added on Thursday, 14 May 2015 15:58:25

The longer I lived in China, the more I sensed that the Chinese people have outpaced the political system that nurtured their rise. The Party has unleashed the greatest expansion of human potential in world history—and spawned, perhaps, the greatest threat to its own survival.

page 39 | location 591-594 | Added on Friday, 15 May 2015 17:03:15

“To survive in China you must reveal nothing to others. Or it could be used against you … That’s why I’ve come to think the deepest part of the self is best left unclear. Like mist and clouds in a Chinese landscape painting, hide the private part behind your social persona. Let your public self be like rice in a dinner: bland and inconspicuous, taking on the flavors of its surroundings while giving off no flavor of its own.”

page 69 | location 1050-1052 | Added on Saturday, 16 May 2015 17:49:28

The size of China’s population made college admissions so brutally competitive that people compared it to “ten thousand horses crossing a river on a single log.” To create more opportunities, the government doubled the number of colleges and universities, in just ten years, to 2,409. Even so, only one in every four aspiring college students was able to earn a place.

page 98 | location 1496-1498 | Added on Tuesday, 19 May 2015 16:58:22

By 2007, when Siu Yun-Ping hit his streak in Macau, the China scholar Minxin Pei noted that nearly half of all Chinese provinces had sent their chief of transportation to jail. Pei calculated that corruption of one kind or another was costing China 3 percent of its gross domestic product—more than the national budget for education.

page 104 | location 1595-1596 | Added on Tuesday, 19 May 2015 17:11:09

“Chinese have never looked at foreigners as human beings,” Lu Xun wrote. “We either look up to them as gods or down on them as wild animals.”

page 106 | location 1617-1619 | Added on Tuesday, 19 May 2015 17:13:31

When the Chinese travel industry surveyed the public on its dream destinations, no place scored higher than Europe. Asked what they liked about it, the Chinese put “culture” at the top of the list. (On the negative side, respondents complained of “arrogance” and “poor-quality Chinese food.”)

page 120 | location 1837-1839 | Added on Tuesday, 19 May 2015 17:37:45

“Analysts overseas can never understand why the Chinese economy has grown so fast,” he said. “Yes, it’s a one-party state, but the administrators are selected from among the elites, and elites picked from one-point-three billion people might as well be called super-elites.”

page 157 | location 2393-2395 | Added on Saturday, 23 May 2015 17:58:20

“Chinese people have begun to think, ‘One part is the good life, another part is democracy,’” Liu went on. “If democracy can really give you the good life, that’s good. But without democracy, if we can still have the good life, why should we choose democracy?”

page 186 | location 2849-2851 | Added on Sunday, 24 May 2015 18:10:53

“I don’t believe anyone who truly loves literature can also love Mao Zedong,” he told me. “These two things are incompatible. Even putting aside his political performance, or how many bad things he did, or how many people starved to death because of him, or how many people he killed, there is one thing for sure: Mao Zedong was the enemy of writers.”

page 210 | location 3211-3213 | Added on Monday, 25 May 2015 16:55:20

His contacts overseas and his embrace of the Internet merged two of the Party’s most neuralgic issues: the threat of a foreign-backed “color revolution” and the organizing potential of the Web. The previous year, President Hu Jintao told the Politburo, “Whether we can cope with the Internet” will determine “the stability of the state.”

page 221 | location 3387-3392 | Added on Monday, 25 May 2015 17:13:40

Two days after Liu won the prize, his wife, Liu Xia, visited him at Jinzhou Prison in the province of Liaoning. “This is for the lost souls of June Fourth,” he told her. Returning to Beijing, she was placed under house arrest. The government barred her, and anyone else, from going to Oslo to pick up the award; the only previous time this had happened was in 1935, when Hitler prevented relatives from going on behalf of Carl von Ossietzky, the German writer and pacifist, who was in a guarded hospital bed after having been in a concentration camp. Liu Xia’s telephone and Internet connections were severed, and she was barred from contact with anyone but her mother—the beginning of a campaign of isolation that would last for years.

page 222 | location 3399-3404 | Added on Monday, 25 May 2015 17:15:37

Decades ago, the black screen had been a fair reflection of China’s blinkered view of the world, its backwardness and seclusion. But now the instinct to shield the public from unflattering facts was absurdly at odds with the openness and sophistication in other parts of Chinese life, and it seemed to cheapen what ordinary Chinese people had worked so hard to achieve. China was not Hitler’s Germany, but Chinese leaders were willing to let themselves be lumped beside the Nazis in the history of the Nobel Prize. Either the strongest forces in the Chinese government were not wise enough to realize the cost, or the wisest forces were not strong enough to persuade the others.

page 245 | location 3748-3753 | Added on Tuesday, 26 May 2015 18:04:36

The truth was that I struggled with the question of how much to write about Ai Weiwei—or, for that matter, the blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng or the Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo. How much did their ordeals really tell us about China? If the average news consumer in the West read (or watched or heard) no more than one China story a week, should it be about people with dramatic lives or typical lives? The hardest part about writing from China was not navigating the authoritarian bureaucracy or the occasional stint in a police station. It was the problem of proportions: How much of the drama was light and how much was dark? How much was about opportunity and how much was about repression? From far away it was difficult for outsiders to judge, but I found that up close it wasn’t much easier, because it depended on where you were looking.

page 264 | location 4047-4049 | Added on Wednesday, 27 May 2015 17:44:23

In 2011 the central bank posted to the Web an internal report estimating that, since 1990, eighteen thousand corrupt officials had fled the country, having stolen $120 billion—a sum large enough to buy Disney or Amazon. (The report was promptly removed.)

page 293 | location 4484-4486 | Added on Thursday, 28 May 2015 18:05:26

The longer I lived in China, the more it seemed that people had come to see the economic boom as a train with a limited number of seats. For those who found a seat—because they arrived early, they had the right family, they paid the right bribe—progress was beyond their imagination. Everyone else could run as far and fast as their legs would carry them, but they would only be able to watch the caboose shrink into the distance.

page 335 | location 5133-5134 | Added on Friday, 5 June 2015 16:32:37

“Of the various countries I’ve visited,” Sandel told me the next day, “the free-market assumptions and convictions are more present in China among young people than anywhere, with the possible exception of the United States.”

page 366 | location 5607-5608 | Added on Sunday, 7 June 2015 16:57:40

It was impossible to know what “most Chinese” believed because the state media and the political system were designed not to amplify public opinion but to impose a shape upon it.

page 397 | location 6079-6085 | Added on Monday, 8 June 2015 17:38:54

Chinese leaders were facing a choice: to continue growing, they could adopt a more democratic form of government, as South Korea did in the 1980s, or they could recommit themselves to authoritarianism. Historically, the latter approach was risky. Over the long term, authoritarian states do not grow as reliably as democracies; they are fragile, and they tend to thrive only in the hands of visionary individual leaders. “For every Lee Kuan Yew, of Singapore, there are many like Mobutu Sese Seko, of the Congo,” according to the Harvard economist Dani Rodrik. In the short term, the Party could succeed at silencing its critics, but in the long term, that was less clear, especially if segments within the Party recalculated their own risks and rewards for loyalty and decided that they had more to gain by siding with the people.

page 398 | location 6092-6096 | Added on Monday, 8 June 2015 17:40:55

In many countries, a more educated and entrepreneurial middle class has demanded greater control over its affairs. China had already passed the threshold into what political scientists call the “zone of democratic transition”—when a country’s per capita income exceeds four thousand dollars, and the correlation with regime change rises sharply. By 2013, China was at a level of eight thousand five hundred dollars. The China scholar Minxin Pei examined the twenty-five autocracies with higher levels of income and a resistance to democratization. He found that twenty-one of them were oil states. China was not.

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pretty-prima-blog · 7 years

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General Trend of Home Building Materials 8 Conjecture

New Post has been published on https://app2chart.com/general-trend-of-home-building-materials-8-conjecture/

General Trend of Home Building Materials 8 Conjecture

China the future of home building materials industry trend of what is it? Who to accurately feel the pulse of the future trend of it? Among the many trends which, the author Sudden Impact, to tease out some possible trend for you readers to reference:

The first major trend is that China may be M type society

The so called M type society is the Japanese strategy expert Kenichi Ohmae first discovered and made. More simply, social class is only two of the poor and the rich, while the middle of a large number of shrinking middle class, like the letter M, like going from the middle of collapse, capitalist society proud of the middle class no longer exists, only the two classes rich and poor. China’s social reform and development of the three decades later, looming shadow of the M based society. Along with corruption, the right to rent seeking interests of the solidification, princelings, rich, and the emergence of second generation such as disk knot, the bottom level to the society fewer and fewer opportunities for mobility.

China’s social scene of terrible “class compaction” phenomenon. To put it bluntly, that is, a poor kid in today’s society, through their own hard work, the success of the rich squeezed into the ranks of fewer and fewer opportunities than before. Only two categories of people in society: the poor and the rich. M based society, the impact on the real estate market is faced with the poor, the rich small family and face the “luxury” will be hot. Of home building materials industry of the enterprises, located at two ends: the low end and high end brands and enterprises will live more moisture. Without an awkward position of “the end” corporate and brand will live the worst, there might even be closed collapse.

The second major trend is that China would see a great “Silver” Market

The so called silver market is the elderly market. China’s demographic dividend has been to enjoy the golden moment, China has entered the aging society, the elderly population as much as the total number of 160 million. The Pearl River Delta frequent “labor shortage” in China has sounded the alarm for an aging society. If companies can take this trend as early as possible make proper preparations, developing products suitable for the elderly, but also a valuable opportunity to seize the silver market. If cabinets enterprises to research and development to counter the bottom of the shorting (for example, can be inserted into the old wheelchair), Container handling into a central cabinet (those old people who get something), table row (easy to move older items) cabinets. Research on the toilet next to the bathroom enterprises should be able to install handrails, bathroom, etc. allow wheelchair turning in circles.

The third major trend is the hardcover in the proportion of residential housing will be greatly enhanced rough housing will become history Blank room like China, like the previous hottest VCD is not read by foreigners can not understand, and with Chinese characteristics product. Rough housing is the least environmentally friendly, the most uneconomical housing, with the tensions and promote low carbon global energy economy, the arrival of a number of countries have introduced policies to promote the hardcover room, rough housing will gradually fade into the wilderness. Due to its vast many people, the situation is different, this process may be more lengthy, but it is an irreversible trend.

The fourth major trend is the traditional home improvement companies may disappear, replaced by the manufacturing sector into the home improvement industry, to conduct large scale industrial production, to replace the current decoration companies in the hands of workshop.

With the advance of fine decorated homes, “parts production factory, on site construction and equipment of” will gradually become the mainstream of home decoration, most of the renovation work can be done internally in the factory, on site standardization, rapid oriented assembly. No longer see the number of migrant workers rolled up bedding roll to eat, sleep in the same situation the owners home. Traditional, non standardized, serious waste of resources, inefficient, and hand workshop style home improvement companies will be replaced gradually phased out.

Trend is the fifth largest home building materials industry, the brand concentration of highly concentrated, like the mature IT industry and home appliance industries, only some of the public familiar with well known brand presence, and some predators a full range of international brands to enter and penetrate into China Market China’s current home building materials market is flourishing, quite a mixed bag, each segment has a myriad of businesses squeeze inside, brand concentration is very low. This situation will exist some time, but sooner or later come shuffling of time, the industry’s only a few large brands, large group, accounting for the vast majority of market share. China’s current domestic building materials industry, in addition to sanitary industry, almost no international brands competing against. This situation will be with China’s home building materials market norms, industry concentration degree of the increase, foreign brands predators will choose an overall cut into home building materials market in China, with Chinese enterprises with the segmentation of the market cake.

Trend is the sixth largest home building materials distribution industry, local channels will appear predators, commercial capital, industrial capital of the channel over hegemony in the domestic building materials industry to re staged China’s home appliance industry was now “the Soviet Union (Gome and Suning) hegemony,” Gome, Suning the two channels of giant, dominating the flow of household appliances industry, other channels basically no right to speak. The current expansion of ????? crazy and relatively stable actually home, home building materials distribution industry, the position of hegemony has been out of the horizon, commercial capital over industrial capital has been almost no suspense, just waiting for some time.

Trend is the seventh largest home building materials industry appear giant pan home group and professional brands competing against a scene.

The future, as consumers increase brand loyalty and a package of one stop home solutions for the love and favor, across multiple categories (business may be across the furniture, flooring, ceramic bathroom, wardrobe cabinets, kitchen appliances, wood Doors and many other categories) and Pan home group will grow as a company within the industry giant, with a strong brand pull and overall strength, occupy a major share of the market. Some focus on market segments and segmentation category of the professional company will rely on its own differentiated products, professional services, personalized brands are market segments of consumer trust and loyalty of large enterprise groups with competing against the legislation was undefeated.

Eighth largest non store sales trend will become a new growth point in the industry

With the Internet and technology development, home construction material enterprises to open up more online sales channels, more and more enterprises to develop business B TO C to carry out non entities in the online direct marketing shop. Achieve the online virtual experiences, video shop, the customer according to their own preferences, personal DIY products, online orders, online payment and other functions. All of the buying process, the transaction can be done through the network. Non store sales as a strong complement physical stores, and in the future occupy a certain market share.

See the future and trends, and sometimes is not very difficult. The key is the trend can become a reality, fully prepared and able to persevere in our employees. Ma’s words still apply: Today is very cruel, very cruel tomorrow, the day after tomorrow is very good. In this process, many people are down tomorrow night, can not see the sun the day after tomorrow. Dedication to stick to the day after the arrival of a major trend, there will be “left” is king!

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thereaderscafenetwork-blog · 7 years

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General Trend of Home Building Materials 8 Conjecture

New Post has been published on https://app2chart.com/general-trend-of-home-building-materials-8-conjecture/

General Trend of Home Building Materials 8 Conjecture

The first major trend is that China may be M type society

The second major trend is that China would see a great “Silver” Market

Trend is the seventh largest home building materials industry appear giant pan home group and professional brands competing against a scene.

Eighth largest non store sales trend will become a new growth point in the industry

app marketing

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zuranimukherjeenudexn · 7 years

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General Trend of Home Building Materials 8 Conjecture

New Post has been published on https://app2chart.com/general-trend-of-home-building-materials-8-conjecture/

General Trend of Home Building Materials 8 Conjecture

The first major trend is that China may be M type society

The second major trend is that China would see a great “Silver” Market

Trend is the seventh largest home building materials industry appear giant pan home group and professional brands competing against a scene.

Eighth largest non store sales trend will become a new growth point in the industry

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lightningwolf66 · 7 years

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General Trend of Home Building Materials 8 Conjecture

New Post has been published on https://app2chart.com/general-trend-of-home-building-materials-8-conjecture/

General Trend of Home Building Materials 8 Conjecture

The first major trend is that China may be M type society

The second major trend is that China would see a great “Silver” Market

Trend is the seventh largest home building materials industry appear giant pan home group and professional brands competing against a scene.

Eighth largest non store sales trend will become a new growth point in the industry

app marketing

buy app reviews

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silviajburke · 7 years

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The Chinese Credit Bubble

This post The Chinese Credit Bubble appeared first on Daily Reckoning.

The confrontations between the U.S. and China on trade, currencies and geopolitics will begin immediately at a rhetorical level, but may take a year or two to play out at a policy level. Supply chains, long-term contracts, and reserve positions don’t turn on a dime even when new administrations are sworn in.

Yet, one issue that will not wait and is a ticking time bomb is the Chinese credit bubble. That bubble is primed to explode with or without new policies from Trump. When it happens and how it happens will have profound implications for your portfolio.

The dimensions of the problem are vast. China’s growth has become captive to what economists call Goodhart’s Law. This law says that when an economic metric becomes the goal of policy, it loses meaning as a metric. Goodhart’s Law applies in the case of Chinese GDP.

Once the Chinese government decided to “target” GDP growth of 8 percent, or 7 percent, or 6.5 percent more recently, GDP growth lost its meaning as a reliable guide to Chinese economic performance. Instead the Chinese hit the economic target by non-economic means merely to say they hit the target.

For instance, my trip from Shanghai to Nanjing was on one of the new high-speed rail lines being built under direction from the central government in Beijing.

The train is the best in the world. It travels at 200 mph and is almost silent as it speeds down specially welded high-speed rails. I had a business class seat that was nicer than most airline business-class seats. The train stations in both cities are spacious, clean, and efficient and put American train stations to shame. In fact, they’re even nicer than some of the newest major airports around the world.

Best of all the ticket was cheap! Just ¥429.50 (about $62.00) round-trip. A comparable trip on Amtrak’s Acela would have cost $400 and the service would have been far inferior (not to mention having to endure the cramped confines of New York’s Pennsylvania Station).

While I enjoyed the ride, a thought crossed my mind: How do you pay for billion-dollar train stations, and billion-dollar railroads by charging $62.00 for a 350-mile round-trip?

The answer is, you can’t. The entire enterprise in being financed with unpayable debt. The state-run China Railway Corporation is losing over $1 billion per year and various other state owned enterprises (SOEs) are losing billions more in construction and equipment manufacturing.

If you have a 6.5 percent GDP growth target, it is easy to achieve just by building infrastructure, which counts in the “investment” category of a standard GDP definition. Billion dollar train stations and rail lines count as investment and therefore GDP whether the railroads ever make money or not. The same is true for highways, pipelines, even entire cities.

On various visits to China I’ve seen so-called “ghost cities” stretching to the horizon entirely empty of residents and businesses. Yet the construction costs are added to GDP even though there are few or no paying tenants. (I’ve spoken with some business owners who do occupy offices in ghost cities. They pay no rent and are there just to make the buildings look partially occupied and help the sales office attract others).

The problem is that the rail transportation infrastructure I found so impressive, and most of the other infrastructure in China, was built with debt. The debt was financed by the mega-Chinese banks on government orders.

Since the ghost city buildings don’t have tenants and the train tickets are heavily subsidized, there’s no way that debt can be repaid. Instead new loans are made to pay interest on the old, or the debt is refinanced or rolled-over in a never-ending stream of zombie lending.

The banks finance their lending with customer deposits or sales of wealth management products (WMPs, something like the CDOs that brought down Lehman Brothers). WMP’s have been described by the former Chairman of the Bank of China as the greatest Ponzi scheme in history. Banks rely on sales of new WMPs to redeem the old ones at maturity. The projects financed by the original WMPs cannot repay them.

How big is this mountain of debt? Total Chinese debt at all levels (household, corporate, bank and government) is now more than 250% of GDP as shown in the chart below:

However, this 250% figure understates the problem. It does not include the WMPs, which are technically investments kept off the balance sheets of the book. It also does not include provincial obligations that take the form of guarantees. Those will have to be bailed out by Beijing.

The real debt-to-GDP figure is easily 500%. It’s like owing $100,000 on a MasterCard when your salary is $20,000 per year. That’s a sure recipe for bankruptcy.

You can see from the graph that most of the debt is coming from the corporate sector. But, these are not normal corporations as understood in the U.S. These are mostly SOEs, controlled by the government. That means they may have to be bailed-out by the government when the system finally crumbles.

Much of this debt is denominated in U.S. dollars so the situation is made even worse by the strong dollar and the global dollar shortage. Both of those factors make dollar-denominated debt much harder to repay.

The debt system is propped up — for now — by more debt and dishonest accounting. If the banks were forced to write-down bad loans, the system would have collapsed a long time ago.

But one dysfunction that cannot be finessed is cash-flow. As every entrepreneur and small businessperson knows, cash never lies. You either have it or you don’t. Because of excessive debt and inability to pay, cash flow problems are now reaching epidemic proportions in China.

China observer Valentin Schmid, writing in the Epoch Times in late 2016, reports:

“If firms can’t borrow more or squeeze their suppliers, they will go bankrupt. According to research by Goldman Sachs surveying companies in China, four have defaulted on $3 billion worth of bonds since the middle of November. These defaults are a break with the record in the previous five months from June to October, when only three of the companies surveyed didn’t meet their payments.

Given that China’s companies are drowning in debt, this squeeze on cash flow does not bode well for stability in 2017.”

Of course, China could try to grow its way out of the debt problem. This is like the person in the above example suddenly getting a $50,000 raise so he can manage the payments on his $100,000 in MasterCard debt.

This is where the Trump administration seems set to throw a monkey-wrench in China’s already dubious growth plans. Trump’s plans for tariffs, taxes, and a strong yuan will slow China’s growth at exactly the moment it needs to grow faster. Geopolitical analysts at Stratfor summarize the situation as follows:

“Clearly there are no easy answers to China’s debt problem, which is looking grimmer by the day. The only painless escape would be on a wave of economic growth, but at this point that seems unlikely. Achieving growth rates of more than 10 percent is much more difficult for an economy that is already the second-largest in the world, and the global economic environment is not half as favorable to China as it was 15 years ago because the developed world is struggling to manage debt problems of its own.

At home, Chinese wages are considerably higher than they were in 1991, and the economy is less competitive. Because China’s working-age population will soon begin shrinking, ending the productivity gains from the decades long “demographic dividend,” these wage hikes will make it harder for the country to achieve prodigious growth.”

China is faced with a mountain of unpayable debt, weaker growth, and a stronger dollar that will make the debt even harder to repay. The Chinese credit bubble has only one feasible solution, China must use its hard currency reserves to bail-out the entire banking and SOE sector and try to start over with a relatively clean balance sheet.

The problem is that the reserves needed for a bail-out are evaporating and liquid reserves may hit zero by the end of 2017.

Kind regards,

Jim Rickards for The Daily Reckoning

The post The Chinese Credit Bubble appeared first on Daily Reckoning.

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