Fat Git wrote:dookus wrote:
This doesn't make any sense. The fact that buying coal from abroad was a cheaper option didn't make our mines unprofitable in and of itself (less profitable and unprofitable are not the same thing). It was rather the fact that at one point the industry was losing £1.2 million quid a day and the National Coal Board ended up getting a grant of £875 million quid which meant that...their operations weren't profitable! You know, losing more money than you make. Which is what happens when the country switches over time to a different energy source, the cost of production goes way up, and you lose enormous amounts of working time to strikes.
They were not unprofitable, they were in comparison to coal from abroad, ie: the profit margins
were smaller therefore - they were unprofitable. Of course the government were paying grants to
the coal board because the effing owned it! We needed (and still need) coal, we still have it
under the ground even today but the profit margin wasn't as wide as it was if you imported it
from Poland and Colombia.
Nobody has a problem subsidising the famers and the banks. That's OK. Just as well they are
and not being able to fall on their sword based on a profit margin because we would have no
big business left!
They were getting massive grants - £1.2 billion a year at one point - because the value of the coal that was sold by them was not enough to cover the costs of operating the mines. That is called being unprofitable. I do not see how you cannot understand this very simple idea. The fact that the government owned the mines makes absolutely no difference to what you call 'profitable' - if a company owns another company which is losing money and gives it a grant to keep it in business, the smaller company doesn't magically become 'profitable'.
We have already discussed banks. The banks are subsidised (i.e. state-owned) because the stupid fuckers ran up far more in liabilities than they could possibly afford; however, letting them collapse would have fucked the entire financial system and the entire economy would have been unable to operate. Sadly, the banks have worked themselves into a position where they have to be propped up.
dookus wrote:I didn't address the Hukuo point. The idea that the Chinese stick all their factories in areas that were already heavily populated (and so do not have 'factory towns' in the way the UK, US, Germany, Japan, and the ex-USSR do) doesn't seem to be true. In fact, here's a whole book on Chinese factory towns:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Factory-Towns-S ... 9888083694 -perhaps you'd like to go tell them too that they're talking 'complete nonsense'.
Fat Git wrote:
It is true.
You have probably never heard of 'The Great Leap Forward' and 'The Cultural Revolution' if you want to argue this with me, read up on it so you least have an idea that you seem to know what you are talking about.
I guess getting to middle age hasn't taught you any manners. Of course I've read about them. However, they're entirely irrelevant to this discussion. Your original statement was:
Fat Git wrote:The UK is one of the few countries in the world where industry and communities are linked. For example, the reason Burnley exists is because of the cotton industry. Now there is no cotton mills - Burnley is dying as we speak."
After we established that in fact there are examples of this all over the world, from the US to Germany to South Africa to the USSR, you backpedalled to:
Fat Git wrote:Complete nonsense, the Chinese government specifically built factories in designated areas of high population density so people didn't have to migrate to these cities...most people have jobs in their local area that was brought to them by the government. In the UK - it was the other way round.
I then showed you an entire book dedicated to examples of how this is untrue. In classic Fat Git style, you change your argument again to:
Fat Git wrote:Yes, there are 'factory towns' in China - of course there are.
But apparently this is totally different, because:
Fat Git wrote:...the factories were built after the population stabilized in the areas where they built them and there was the workforce already there to fill the factories. The Chinese 'Industrial Revolution' happened very recently. So it wasn't like Britain where factories were built in specific parts of the country and the population (and factories) grew over a timeframe - sometimes growing 400 times over their original population. Before the 1970's China was still mostly a peasant, agricultural economy. Their path to industrialisation was nothing like the UK.
So what? If you take the factories away from these factory towns, the populace are left with nothing. They are not going to go back to what they were doing before, because the towns exist on the back of the factories. Like Burnley, in your example. Your spiel about the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward and the pace of industrialisation are pretty much irrelevant because in the event of the factories closing down, the end result is pretty much the same thing. Unless you think they'll all just go back to farming in their millions.
Fat Git wrote:Now, if this needs to be exaplained more simply - let me know, and I will try.
You need to explain these things more simply to yourself. Every time you get caught talking shít, you either backpedal, make things up, or throw childish insults, and frankly there are smarter, classier people on this forum to debate with.
