China Opens World's Highest Bridge, Breaking Its Own Record (nbcnews.com) 55
The world's highest bridge opened in China on Sunday, taking the crown from another bridge in the same province. From a report: The Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge soars about 2,050 feet above a river and gorge in the southern Chinese province of Guizhou. It is more than twice as high as the Royal Gorge Bridge, which is suspended 956 feet above the Arkansas River in Colorado and is the highest in the United States.
According to Chinese state media, the new Guizhou bridge also sets a record as the world's longest bridge in a mountainous region, spanning 4,600 feet across. Hailed as China's latest "infrastructure miracle," the bridge is designed to spur tourism and economic growth in one of the country's least developed regions.
According to Chinese state media, the new Guizhou bridge also sets a record as the world's longest bridge in a mountainous region, spanning 4,600 feet across. Hailed as China's latest "infrastructure miracle," the bridge is designed to spur tourism and economic growth in one of the country's least developed regions.
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Yeah, and check out the list of tallest bridges: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F... [wikipedia.org]
Most of them are in China. There's a bit more competition for the longest bridges: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F... [wikipedia.org]
More underground rail than the rest of the world combined, built in less than two decades. More high speed rail than the rest of the world combined, similar timescale. They do not mess around when it comes to infrastructure.
It's not just them though. If you look at some of the Nordic countries and the tunnels the
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Something has clearly gone badly wrong.
Politics being the thing. HS2 was a classic case of a political football. Because it was about points scoring rather than infrastructure, it changed every 5 minutes, with each change leading to ever escalating costs. And of course making it very political bleeds honesty and transparency from the project because politicians don't like playing second fiddle to reality.
It was always going to be expensive, since the UK is quite compact it's not like there's cheap empty lan
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I never asked about the numbers, which I had read in the summary. I was complaining about the lack of perspective - it could be 2050 feet high for a span of 50 feet, and the remaining bridge span only 100 feet high. How narrow the gorge is and the surrounding terrain makes a huge difference, especially when the shit cinematography that never really shows a perspective that you can see the height of the bridge
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I'm curious, but not curious enough to bother googling it (there should be a word for this)
There should be a word for it. Germans would just invent one on the spot. Something like Nachguckfauligkeit.
Maybe... Googulazy ?
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Sometimes you just have to be there and see it in person
Ah, like a sunset, or a crazy person fighting a traffic cone in the middle of the street.
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Or, you know, take one shot from the side where you can actually see it. Most of the shots are top down or just of the top of the span. It's not difficult to take a picture from far away enough to show the bridge's height.
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They included a video so I could use my imagination? It's just terrible camera work.
'There should be a bridge here' (Score:4, Insightful)
let's build it.
Capitalism:
I want to help, where's my money.
I also want to help where's my money?
That needs a permit, here's the fee.
That can be seen from my backyard - pay me to go away.
We need to do a study, it'll be ready next decade. My fee is monthly.
My buddy needs business, let's include him in the contract - he makes toilet seats.
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Re:'There should be a bridge here' (Score:5, Informative)
Bureaucracy isn't capitalism, what is wrong with you. You literally inverted the definition.
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Crony capitalism.
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Capitalism is littered with bureaucracy through and through. Are you interfacing with a manager? HR? The C-class? That is all bureaucracy same as the government.
Bureaucracy like capitalism is neutral, the goodness or badness of it are specific to specific actions and somewhat subjective. Someone checking that money is being spent correctly is doing bureaucracy same as someone stopping a project for environmental review is bureaucracy. We shouldn't demonize the word itself.
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Capitalism isn't neutral. I know what you're saying but it's sort of not the right approach to the discussion. Capitalism and Bureaucracy are inherently bad as everything good about it exists in an unstable form. Capitalism is stable in a single monopoly. Bureaucracy is stable when so many checks are done that nothing happens. What we do is make them good by applying non-capitalistic principles to capitalism, such as regulations, and cutting red tape out of bureaucracy by defining limits to its impact.
That'
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Bureaucracy isn't capitalism, what is wrong with you. You literally inverted the definition.
No, he didn't. Bureaucracy is orthogonal to capitalism, it's not an opposite. Capitalism means only one thing, capital controls the means of production. Anything else is specific to some specific form of capitalism (or some other ism) and not relevant to whether it is capitalism or not.
Capitalism tends to produce bureaucracies in order to track capital, so the two generally go hand in hand.
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I think what you're seeing is just part of a cycle where regulations are tightened and loosened over time. Free societies are riddled with pendular swings.
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I personally like to contrast it with "mid-stage Marxism" where the centrally planned economy fails and everyone starts starving. The later stages are indistinguishable from the early stages of
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I've often wondered if Marx really intended for Socialism or Communism to be put into action, or if he was trying to create a dialectic tension that would collapse in a particular way. People talk about Marx "turning Hegel on his head", but could it be that instead of thinking he could certainly predict the outcome of a Hegelian dialectic, he was actually hoping to
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Late stage capitalism is where the capitalists have subverted the controls needed to make capitalism work properly.
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Capitalism is not some linear path running from Mercantilism to Marxism. There are business and political cycles. Market power waxes and wanes. Problems arise and are corrected. Like Dem
Re: 'There should be a bridge here' (Score:2)
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We're near end stage capitalism
predictions about the future are difficult, and capitalism is a bit like the english language, adopting things as it goes.
suppose we'll see.
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You're telling me they also have a national healthcare plan?
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Huh? What you described was literally not capitalism. Capitalism isn't about putting bureaucratic barriers, that's literally the opposite of capitalism. WTF are they teaching nowadays? China is enabling capitalism, while we've gotten into a fascistic bureaucracy.
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Bureaucratic barriers? There was specifically one single thing listed which would fall under that heading, the permit. The rest is just crony capitalism, which runs this country to a far greater extent than the government has for years.
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If I am forced to pay useless people, that's not capitalism that's literally fascism or communism. Capitalism in the strictest sense is that if you have the money (capital) you should be allowed to build whatever you like.
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That's an interesting planet you live on, very different from Earth, but I'm not putting it on my Trip list.
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The upside is that it also appears to be cyclical.
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Capitalism is all about the bureaucratic barriers because capitalists long ago figured out that they help maintain monopolies and allow them to charge even higher rates for work. Regulatory capture is just one of many examples.
Re:'There should be a bridge here' (Score:4, Informative)
This is a choice we make by who we elect and what we expect them to do with the power of our government.
The Hoover Dam was built in 5 years because we said as a nation (via Congress) we wanted to build it and we passed an act to do so and it got done.
Boulder Canyon Project Act (1928) [archives.gov]
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At this point that is almost every elected official at the federal level. But sure you got to choose from the limited choices all propped up by the same corporations. You think you had a choice, but it is a choice between puppets.
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Sure and campaign finance reform is something that has been discussed my entire life with very little movement.
Also both parties have primaries and they get like 30% voter participation so we the electorate play a part in that as well.
AOC beat Joe Crowley who was a committee chair and a quite "corporate" incumbent. Bernie Sanders almost won the Dem nod despite really everythsing pushing against him.
Lots of Trump endorsed candidates beat "establishment" Republicans in many districts in 2016-2024 so while m
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Ok sure, the Apollo project then. I thought this was America. How soon does it need to be to make the point that our liberal democracy is as capable of doing large projects as a state-capitalist-single-party-authoritarian state?
I swear 20 years ago if you told me i'd be sympathizing with the Neo-conservatives over the current Republican party over patriotism in America...
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Ok sure, the Apollo project then. I thought this was America. How soon does it need to be to make the point that our liberal democracy is as capable of doing large projects as a state-capitalist-single-party-authoritarian state?
I swear 20 years ago if you told me i'd be sympathizing with the Neo-conservatives over the current Republican party over patriotism in America...
Whether it be China or last century America, very large projects tend to be government projects.
And on top of that they require a level of national unity to get off the ground.
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This is a choice we make by who we elect and what we expect them to do with the power of our government.
What is this 'we' shit? 'We' didn't elect anyone. Those who have control of money elected people. Money talks, not individuals.
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You forgot a key step on China's side:
China: Let's build it.
Get rid of everyone and everything in its way.
Big deal (Score:2)
Washinton State is home to some of the lowest [wikimedia.org] bridges. Where's our gold star?
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No chance, Greece has the Washington State bridge beat hands down [amusingplanet.com], that article says there are two of those bridges, I've only seen the southernmost (SE, Isthmia) one. Crossing the canal on that bridge is really fraught when it is wet (which is most of the time), you are walking on a smooth wooden surface and it is like walking on sheet ice.
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Yeah, but one of our floating bridges sank, can Greece beat that? (Contractors were doing in an inspection inside the concrete pontoons when a storm came up, and were in such a hurry to get out that they forgot to close the manhole covers.)
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Alexa, add Huajiang Bridge to my trip list. (Score:2)
That's incredibly cool. There's a pedestrian walkway across it and an observation deck on top of one of the towers, I definitely want to go. Looking at the zigzag road that it replaced I can see why it used to take 2 1/2 hours to cross. The terrain resembles the Apurimac River valley near Pacarictambo in Peru, there are (IIRC) 21 hairpins going down one side of the valley, a small steel bridge, and 17 going up the other side.
Here is a clip with different perspectives (Score:2)