Hardtimes Roundup

Worst Decade Ever for U.S. Jobs:

Empty Chinese Skyscrapers



Abandoned Detroit Skyscrapers



CNN Money:
Can farming save Detroit? -- Yes, a farm. A large-scale, for-profit agricultural enterprise, wholly contained within the city limits of Detroit...

This is possibly not as crazy as it sounds. Granted, the notion of devoting valuable city land to agriculture would be unfathomable in New York, London, or Tokyo. But Detroit is a special case...

The massive Renaissance Center office and retail complex, built in the 1970s, mostly served to suck tenants out of other downtown buildings. (Today 48 of those buildings stand empty.)...

Virginia Pilot:
FBI deluged by fraud cases from real estate bubble -- The criminal cases against Brian W. King and Ronnie E. Brodie are typical of what the FBI is seeing as a result of the rise and fall of the real estate market.

King, 42, of Virginia Beach, pleaded guilty this month to falsifying mortgage applications, obtaining more than $700,000 in loans he never should have qualified for by inflating his income.

Brodie, in an unrelated case, will be arraigned Wednesday on similar charges of lying on her mortgage papers. Like King, the 36-year-old from Virginia Beach is accused of inflating her income.

Cases such as King's and Brodie's have become commonplace in U.S. District Court in Norfolk, as the FBI and other federal agencies begin seeing the fruits of mortgage fraud investigations that started three years ago just as the real estate market began deteriorating...

James Howard Kunstler / CF Nation:
Forecast 2010 -- The Long Emergency is officially underway. Reality is telling us very clearly to prepare for a new way of life in the USA. We're in desperate need of decomplexifying, re-localizing, downscaling, and re-humanizing American life. It doesn't mean that we will be a lesser people or that we will not recognize our own culture. In some respects, I think it means we must return to some traditional American life-ways that we abandoned for the cheap oil life of convenience, comfort, obesity, and social atomization...

Kevin Depew / Minyanville:
Five Themes for 2009: The Final Reckoning --

• Unemployment Rate: 10%
• Number of Metropolitan Areas where unemployment is higher than a year ago: 372
• Number of Metropolitan Areas tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics: 372
• Total consumer bankruptcy filings through November 2009: 1,300,000
• Total consumer bankruptcy filings in 2008: 1,095,344
• Homes currently in foreclosure: more than 1,000,000
[...]
• Finance industry lobbyists per member of Congress: 5
• Federal government share of GDP 2009: 26%
• Federal government share of GDP 2000: 18.4%

China Launches World's Fastest Train

China Daily:
'Fastest in the world' -- The Wuhan-Guangzhou high-speed railway, arguably the world's fastest train journey at a speed of 350 km/h (217 mph), started operation on Saturday...

China will build 42 high-speed passenger rail lines with a total length of 13,000 km in the next three years, covering more than 90 percent of the population.

By 2012, trips from Beijing to most provincial capitals would only take between one and eight hours, said Wang Yongping, the Railway Ministry spokesman.

High-speed rail services from Beijing to Hong Kong are expected to open in three years, cutting the journey from 23 hours to eight. The one-way trip from Shanghai to Hong Kong will be shortened to six hours from the current 18, he said.

High-speed trains not only shorten the distance between cities but also change the speed of China's economic growth, said Wang Xiaoguang, a professor with the Chinese Academy of Governance.

China, a vast country that is often worried about the wide income gap between its highly developed coastal areas and the lagging interior, is looking to the railways to help spread the wealth, he said...

A kid enjoys the ride on the new high-speed Wuhan-Guangzhou rial line on Saturday.

Wikipedia:
Wuhan–Guangzhou High-Speed Railway -- a 968-kilometre (601 mi) high-speed rail line, operated by China Railway High-speed (CRH), connecting Wuhan (Hubei) and Guangzhou (Guangdong), in the People's Republic of China. It is the world's fastest nuclear powered train service...

The first commercial trains left Wuhan and Guangzhou North at 9:00 am on December 26, 2009, and reached their destinations in three hours, compared with ten and a half hours for the previous service...

...during test runs, a train achieved a top speed of 394.2 kilometres per hour (244.9 mph)...