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China's War Against Wires
hodet writes "On sections of Beijing Road, you can barely see the sky. On Tibet Road, they dangle in garden-hose rolls and knots intricate enough to confound a Boy Scout. Over on Hefei Street, one enterprising apartment dweller even used them to hang-dry selected cuts of meat.
Tech-happy Shanghai, the most wired city in China, has a problem: wires. Telephone wires. Fiber-optic wires. Electrical wires. Wires no one can seem to identify. Black wires. Blue wires. Magenta wires. They're everywhere, and they're gumming up the works."
Those words are from Ted Anthony, not hodet.
> Hint. You can see the sky anyway, wires or no wires.
hint. radiation. I sure want as less of that as I can get.
Most power in the UK is delivered to homes via underground cables (although the 132,000 V national grid stuff is nearly all on pylons). The problem with running local cables overhead, besides appearance, is that storms tend to bring down trees, which pull down any nearby cables. The big pylons are well out of the way of trees.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
For people who has not been to Japan, rent "Serial Experiment Lain" to get an idea of what overhanging wires in japan looks like. luckily people are sane enough (or at lease shy enough, anyway) to not dry their meat on the lines; but one of my commuting routes passes a road that above it is nothing but juxopositions sy shards of visible sky, cut into pieces by wires going every which way.
but when you dont have the chance to burry things, i guess it's inevitable. (side note, after earthquakes japan tends to use the rebuild phase as a chance to organize some of this stuff, which is neat)
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Huge problem in Kyoto, Japan's ancient capital. It used to be a pristine, elegant, small city. Its streets are now a tangle of cables.
This is a problem for societies such as China (now) and Japan (opst-war) which expand too quickly. In the pace of progress, it seems too difficult, too regressive, to take the time for really clever use of technologies, such as building cables underground, digging out walls and restoring the surface again, and, nowadays, wireless where possible.
If you look at well-preserved places, they still have modern conveniences like aircon, alarms, etc. But they are willing to spend more, often a lot more, to get the best of both worlds.
These are typical of any area undergoing modernization. It is kind of elitest for anyone to say that they lacked planning. (even though they are) Just look at the United States when it was undergoing its telecommunications boom in the early 1900s; (wired one not the wireless kind) countless phone, telegraph, power and who knows what else lines were strung all over the place.
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This is just what happens, planners can't always be expected to accomodate for the booms of a volatile industry, the private sector is pretty resilient, it will work to help itself in the quickest most efficient (not necessarily pretty) way possible. Once the government has had time to catch up and realize the ensuing chaos, then they can work to make everything nice and orderly again without disrupting the oh so important rapid expansionary growth shown in these industries.
http://www.albionmich.com/history/histor_notebo
Big government sucks!
Nuclear war would really set back cable. - Ted Turner
The wires are such a mess that they would be considered a clear safety hazard by most peoples standards. I was in Shanghai (one of the most advanced cities in china) and I took some photos of both how low the wires were (as low at 4 feet off the ground!) and the over head rats nest . There was worse, I just didn't have my camera at the time.
I'll show you how to distribute AC over IP
I think this internet thing sounds like a good idea
Many communication lines are run along railroad right-of-ways because the railroad is mostly straight, runs between urban centers and is uninterrupted. Remember a couple of years ago when a tank car caught fire in a train tunnel and took out Internet connectivity for half the Eastern US? Sprint, one of the big US carriers, started life as part of the Southern Pacific railway. Here in Tokyo a lot of fibre got laid in the subway tunnels.
At least some of them are there for the control, signaling and communication needs of the railroads.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
At least in Rural Texas, where you see short (10 feet high) poles strung with wires, half rotted or fallen over, they were telegraph cables. The rails are still used, but the cables aren't.
Communication to/from the train is done by radio and communication between rail stations is done by regular telephone.
There are a few different kinds of underground lines.
HPFF are the most common in the US, and SCFF are the least common, mainly because they don't do well in extreme weather. The fluids are dielectric, 200 psi oil, and saturates the kraft paper insulator of the wires. The fluid is static, and removes heat from the wires by conduction. HPGF uses compressed nitrogen to accomplish basically the same thing.
HPFF requires a pressurizing source, usually a station at one end of the line, with an oil/gas resorvoir. HPGF requires a regulator and a nitrogen cylinder. The HPGF lines also require manual maintenance, as you can't just leave nitrogen gas cylinder's laying around.
Couple all of that with usual line maintenance, and you've got one expensive system, all in the name of keeping the sky unobstructed.
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.