Food safety scandal rocks China as report claims cooking oil carried in same trucks as fuel

Yes... Unfortunately, yes.

It was fooken one of yss

Except Chin's dictator is grown up.

U.S. has been complete shit for the last 8 years, but somehow we haven't collapsed and life goes on as usual. So I'm usually pretty skeptical of specific predictions (though the trends are worth paying attention to).

The single most accurate predictor of a country's future is their demographic structure, and China's is one of the worst, not just in the world, but in history. It's pretty normal for nations to go into cycle of prosperity and despair where they expand and shrink, however, what China is going through is unique. China's population is predicted to shrink down from 1.4 billion people to just 587 million by 2100. That is insane. It's scale, speed, intensity is something we've never seen before. China's demographic collapse is going to be worse than Europe during the black plague or China during the Great Chinese Famine or Germany after WWII. China is about to go into uncharted territory. We don't know what things will be like on the other side because we've never seen it before and we have no model or system to deal with it. One thing is for certain though, China as we know it today under the CCP is going to go away.

As for the US, if it were to continue on it's current demographic trends, it'll reach China's current demographic situation at some point in the second half of this century, that's a lot of time to figure things out. At that point, other countries such as Russia, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Italy, Spain, as well as China would have been decades into their demographic collapses. That's a lot valuable time to learn from what these countries went through and proceed with more knowledge captiously based on what minimized the damage and what didn't.

Demographic collapses don't happen overnight, they take decades to unfold. Demographers were able to predict China's demographic collapse since they started seeing the demographic shifts that happened due to the implantation of the one child policy back in 1979. That's why you've been hearing about it for so long and why you'll continue to hear about it for years to come. As time marches on, those demographic collapse went from being predictions to becoming reality, and as time continues to pass, the current trends will continue to get worse and worse. The damage these demographic trends will inflect on the system will incrementally increase year by year until the system can't support itself any longer.

The thing is that they can't reverse the demographic situation. Even if China started forcing people to have kids or opened their borders to allow for millions of immigrants, it won't mean anything. It's already too late, the demographic collapse is going to happen no matter what the CCP does. Keep in mind, Japan is in the same position and they will face the same fate regardless. The only difference is that Japan is a wealthy country with a highly developed economy, so it can at least slow down the inevitable and buy itself some time. China unfortunately doesn't have this luxury.

For the record, I don't want China to collapse like this because the effects are going to be devastating. However, the numbers don't lie and every metric is showing us that they are heading towards a collapse at full speed. The CCP can't handle this, no government can in their position. There's really nothing like what China is going through in history. The scale and speed at which this collapse is happening is unprecedented. It'll most likely go down as the most defining event of the 21st century.

While that is true, I think it is important to note that as bad as our problems are, and some of them are pretty bad, that there are countries that have it way worse than us. China is one of those countries. Some of their problems are genuinely mind boggling. Imagine going through our current problems right now but with an irreversible demographic collapse. It's nuts to think about.

Unfortunately Upvotes aren't linked to the objective truthfulness of a statement. If they were, fake news wouldn't be a thing.

Also, what is wrong about having an opinion based on a collection of shared articles. Sure they might be biased and some might even report more details than they have sources for but given enough randomly encountered articles some common truths can emerge.

Satire

China isn't exactly the place to look towards when it comes to public transit, there's way better countries to be envious of when it comes to public transport. Their highspeed rail system by itself is around $900 BILLION in debt. It is so overly built that the maintenance costs and insufficient demand is coming to bite them in the ass. To put things in perspective, this figure is around 5% of China's entire GDP and it is expected to grow as the years pass by. It's generally normal for public transportation system to not be profitable and for the government to cover the gaps, but this? This is absolutely insane.

There's stuff that we could learn from them as a country and vice versa, but this is definitely not one of those things.

I think China's history is the best predictor of where China will go after this collapse. China's history from the very beginning has been defined by cycles that alternate between a bunch of small warring states that constantly fight each other and giant tyrannical empires that unites them all. You could say the current China under the CCP is another iteration of those giant empires and that after the collapse, China will go back to it's historical mean of being divided by a bunch of smaller states that fight amongst each other.

From which size is a country too big to operate as a single country? I think cultural identity is much more important than size, and the Chinese government has put a tremendous effort in culturally unifying the land with great success (and great cost; see Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, the relationship with Taiwan, loss of local languages and culture). I don't see that disappearing anytime soon.

A civil war with a stalemate is of course possible (in fact it's already the reality), but an USSR style collapse in many different countries is just not something I can see happen.

Things are going to get a lot more interesting from here on out. It'll be a long time since the world is going to feel stable and boring. So buckle up, we're in for a weird ride.

Perhaps the lesson that will come from all these demographic collapses will be that economic growth should be slow and steady. Countries that try to rush rising up the ranks of standards of living by doing whatever they can to generate economic growth regardless of consequences will end up trading their long term future for short term prosperity.

Actually Europe's demographics are pretty bad too. They're often overshadowed by China's, but they're still devastating in their own right. Most of Europe is already going through a demographic collapse right now, but they're less dramatic in scale and speed than China's. They'll be more like Japan's collapse, but with immigration... at least that's the case for Western Europe. Eastern Europe (including Russia) is going through a Chinese-esque demographic collapse as we speak. Interestingly, the US has the healthiest demography out of the 3. It's not great, but it's still better than either Europe or China by quiet a bit. The most realistic scenario is that the US will remain the world's leader in future, maybe to even greater degree than now. At least until other countries like India catch up.

Depends if it's light distillate, or, like, coal tar.

Butane -> cooking oil without washing would be fine, by the standard of if I'd still use the oil. I'd be more worried about leaching from the metal or plastic of the tank.