Wednesday, October 27, 2021

The worst place on earth

A quick tour of the steel mill in the BaoGang Steel and Rare Earth Complex in Baotou, Inner Mongolia. Looks like a delightful place to work.

 

2 comments:

Unknown said...

That was the US not too long ago...
A teacher I once had said on the first day of class, "If you learn nothing else in this class, there are two things you must know. There is no such thing as a free lunch. And every engine has an exhaust pipe. These two things govern the entire universe."
An awful lot is packed in that code.

ambisinistral said...

Yea... watching that clip I thought of what Gary Indiana used to be like. However, my memories of Gary are from decades ago, this video is current.

If you look at modern pictures of smoke stacks meant to evoke pollution, you'll notice the smoke is all white since it has been ran through scrubbers and has been heavily filtered. In the video the smoke out of the plant's stacks was brown -- it is unfiltered smoke from the coal fires.

That filtering is one of the reason why U.S. air quality has improved so much since the days of my Gary memories. Yes, there is no such thing as a free lunch, but there are such things as scrubbers and filters. The plant in the video is obviously not using them. Apparently, half-assery is alive and well and governs in its own way.