Originally published at: Tofu Dreg: China's poorly constructed residential towers | Boing Boing
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Man on hill, not on level.
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I’m increasingly convinced that if you combine the absolute worst of Gilded Age capitalism and the absolute worst of Stalinist communism, today’s China is exactly what you get.
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“Shaky Building”!
That’s not very creative.
Chabuduo!
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Holy crap, that’s terrifying. When the building in the thumbnail shears off what appears to be an entire wing, the debris falling around it looks like dirt. Not rebar, not pulverized concrete, freaking dirt. There’s one shot in which they clearly poured concrete into the base of a horizontal beam, filled it with dirt and then capped with concrete to disguise it.
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steel has to be tempered
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I remember a few years back some conservative relatives were passing around some meme of a collapsed Chinese building with some sarcastic text about “Chinese engineering,” which I found incredibly ironic. Because the engineering was most likely totally fine - it’s the construction that’s a problem, and that’s only a problem because of a lack of enforced building codes and regulation of materials, due to government apathy and/or corruption. In other words, the problem was a lack of government oversight and regulation, the very things those relatives were spending the rest of their time railing against.
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Tofu Dreg sounds like a not-very-scary street gang.
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Fucking hell.
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I wonder how much of that steel ended up in the West due to China’s dumping of steel into European and North American markets? And how much of it was spotted as being substandard before it went into construction over here?
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What is needed are incorruptible regulators. Where may China find them?
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China and the GOP: Regulations? Who needs regulations.
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Or how you make natto.
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Steel is overrated. For one thing, it’s more expensive than the alternatives.
Crash exposes parapet built of weeds— 5 Jan 2012 Shenzhen Daily
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In China there is counterfeit everything - clothes, beer, baby formula, steel, cement. Corruption is endemic- at every level of society. Grand construction projects will last how long? Remember those glass scenic trestle bridges? Use them at your own risk. Defective. OTOH they can send successful missions to the moon and cannot afford to lose face, so it’s a mixed bag. You takes your chances.
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“Dirt” is a terribly pejorative description. That’s clearly a deinforced concrete structural core.
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I hereby nominate the Trump as a term for a measure of corruption, incompetence, & greed.
How to define those parameters is left to those wiser than me, which is most people on this planet.
ETA:
This might to be calibrated in something like MilliTrumps [or MicroMilliTrumps} for the normal ongoings of life its Ownself…
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It should be a logarithmic scale like the Richter Scale, measuring the size and scope of the fuckup divided by the relative simplicity of the task so fucked up.
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