![A Towering Inferno: Chinese Skyscraper Burns Like a 40-Story Torch [Shocking Video]](https://billwhittle2.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/092022W-THUMBNAIL-e1663842438977.jpg)
Like a 40-story torch, a Chinese building burns. We’re told that the Chinese Communist regime is building the cities of the future, but time and again, we see shoddy, substandard and dangerous construction practices that endanger lives…and we’ve got the shocking video. What did they do with all the money from the explosion of technology and exports?
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30 replies on “A Towering Inferno: Chinese Skyscraper Burns Like a 40-Story Torch [Shocking Video]”
Hey Guys, and Bill in the early 90’s, I believe, United Airlines had at least 2 major crashes, because of maintenance issues. I’m an ex-machinist for Continental Airlines back when Stapleton Airport was still in use. We, because of us being in bankruptcy, did everything right because we were being watched so corners were not cut. United Airlines at the time was the biggest and most profitable, and after the plane crashes, some of the mechanics I know, were very embarrassed and would try to not make eye contact, and later they told me, that management saying was, it’s not making money while it’s sitting on the ground, and said corners were being cut to get them done faster. I got plenty more stories about how, in the government, with it’s large budget, wasn’t doing it’s job properly either.
As a retired Engineer, yes it scares the hell out of me. Not only that, I know the central problem is “honor” and integrity which is dedication to truth. A lack of dedication to the truth–facts of reality–is what is being robbed from our children by the most evil system in America, the “Educational System”. I agree with Bill, it is not the ‘teachers’ it is the System, shot full of corruption and self interest. Besides that, as an engineered system, American Education is designed to produce unimaginative, factory workers with no understanding of their abilities or having any ambition. . .or respect for the true facts of reality.
OKOK, this pushes my button. BUT I see catastrophe coming and feel so helpless to prevent the deaths it will bring to our children, and grand children.
We need a whole new Educational System in America…and we need it now.
I imagine part of the reason for China’s poor engineering is that the people injured or their families can’t sue the government for faulty construction. I don’t know if this is true, but the CCP has so much control over the people that it’s probably unthinkable to do so. I don’t believe too many companies here in the US would risk losing their license and/or business due to flawed construction.
Here in the good ol’ USof A our education system of no one ever fails and everyone is always a winner has us rapidly emerging into the Third World ….. Oh, wait a minute …. we’re already there!!!
Gentlemen, are you monitoring the comments over on YouTube?
An interesting tangent is developing there: How come this tower, burning through its entire length, did not collapse into its own footprint in an hour or two like WTC’s 1,2, and 7? Is Chinese steel better than American? Or are we who are calling this out (they, not me) on to something in our conspiracy theories?
I am only relating what I see there. My own bias is largely in sync with Bill’s. I admit it is a bias and am willing to watch the back-and-forth of opposing positions in the debate and go to where the truth is, if I am not there already.
It’s fascinating, the way people can look at the same thing and come to differing conclusions. Also – my observation – most people shoot the arrow first, then paint a bullseye around it.
The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were nearly 100 stories. This building is 40 stories. The World Trade Center towers were over twice as big in height and probably considerably larger in girth too.
The World Trade Center towers were full of extremely hot burning jet fuel and the elevator, equipment and utility shafts acted like 100 story tall chimneys for draft purposes. It wasn’t just burning, it was a blast furnace in there.
A massive difference in size, weight, stresses and temperatures. So …
Apples and oranges.
I’m glad you didn’t fall for it. Things are rarely as simple as they seem to people who don’t have any real knowledge of a given situation and/or would like to think they know more than they really do. That is how conspiracy theories get started and reinforced.
Along with ACTS’s reply, I would suspect burning something on the outside, where the heat can vent in two directions, is different from burning on the inside where the heat is in direct contact with meltable structural members.
Correct on both counts. Take a dry tree stump and drill some hole through axially. This will burn better than just burning the bark.
But if you burn all the bark, and just the bark, and are standing on the top of the stump it is still hot enough to kill you along with the smoke inhalation.
I wasn’t thinking about death by heat or smoke, just the temperature of the steel or whatever building material they used, per the original comment. People wondering why the twin towers fell and this building did not are looking at apples and oranges, I think.
No, I got what you were saying. Just adding for others that a raging fire at 500 degrees with lots of black smoke is still deadly even if not hot enough to damage steel.
The CCP must have reached across the internet to defocus Bill’s laptop just after he made disparaging remarks about them. But then they gave up?
Or their substandard electronics malfunctioned.
The reason Communist China has a huge inferiority complex is because they actually are inferior. They seem to think that there’s a shortcut to ending that inferiority because, after all, “communism is a superior form of government that must therefore automatically yield superior results”.
Thus they spend time, blood and treasure trying to outsmart their own inferiority. Rather than just strive to not be inferior.
Taiwan on the other hand does not have this problem. When I buy something from Taiwan, be it microchips or fountain pens or anything in between, I am very, very rarely disappointed. The failure rate and quality control standards of Taiwan are on a par with any top tier industrialized Western nation.
Last week Taiwan was hit with a 6.9 magnitude earthquake and a bunch of strong aftershocks. Most of you probably don’t even know it happened. I wouldn’t know it happened except that I subscribe to USGS bulletins on earthquakes and tsunamis. (A holdover for me from living in Southern Kalifornia for a decade and a half.)
Why wasn’t a quake of that magnitude all over the news? Because there were no mass casualties would be my guess.
The damage from the quake was not wholly inconsequential but it was no worse than you’d expect from something similar occurring in California. Mostly older buildings and not a lot of them, some roadway and bridge damage and a very minimal loss of life. I can only find information on one man being killed from a ceiling collapse. Heck, a moving train was derailed and none of the passengers were even hurt.
Imagine if that magnitude quake hit the buildings in mainland Communist China featured in this video. If it will sway from whatever harmonics on stable ground in still air, it’s going to fall when the ground itself is moving.
The problem is cultural not genetic or racial. The problem is a communist government which has abandoned traditional knowledge and practices that have evolved over centuries of human experience. Because they’re “too smart” to bother with all that old stuff. According to them they have a new and better way of doing things.
Our own now radicalized Democrat Party has exactly the same problem in this country. When the ‘better’ choice for a Transportation Secretary is to spend his time posing for photos with his male lover in a hospital pretending to have delivered the baby they just bought and then go on months long ‘maternity leave’ when nothing maternal is involved at all — instead of addressing a supply chain crisis … That sort of thing is the exact same thing as the problems China has. Different frame of reference, same underlying cause.
Do you think the small town mayor would be able to bring anything useful to the supply chain solution?
I am glad he wasn’t all that active. If he had competent staff people, he could at least grandstand, get face time on camera and present their solutions, but we don’t have anyone like that in most of the cabinet offices, it seems.
Of course not. He was never intended to do so.
( South Bend isn’t really a small town though. It’s a medium sized city. It’s not Los Angeles, New York or Miami, more like St.Cloud MN, Fargo ND, or Billings MT.)
It wouldn’t matter however how large or small any city might be that Lil’ Petie Buttgrudge mayored for. He wasn’t appointed for his skills and experience. He was appointed because he’s a cutsie-pie gay man.
This is the real issue. People being appointed to government positions to run our nation not because they have skills and experience but because they check various intersectional ideological boxes. In Soviet Russia it didn’t matter how good you were at something, it mattered how good a Party Member you were.
Because the Left thinks that this is a better way to govern. This is the link between what they’re doing and what the Chinese do. They both think they’ve come up with a new, better way to do things and don’t need the evolved knowledge and experience of millennia of human existence. Millennia which brought mankind to a pinnacle which has never, ever been achieved in all human history.
No, no, they’re way too smart to tap into something like that. They’re so smart they have come up with a better way. A better way that promises to be inferior across the spectrum and make things worse. A fact they refuse to admit because …
For them and only them specifically it IS a better way. It allows them to harvest power and wealth from this magnificent system that brought us to the peak of human endeavor and has maximized the human condition beyond all the hopes and dreams of our ancestors.
They don’t care if buildings crash to the ground, or people starve because energy becomes too expensive, or runaway inflation strips their less powerful and less wealthy brothers and sisters of the hard earned fruits of responsible labor. There’s so much wealth and power to be had that it’s not going to matter for a long, long time to them what happens to those they see as beneath them.
To people like Xi Jinping, Nancy Pelosi, AOC, Joe Biden (and his family and the unelected committee that pulls his puppet strings because I doubt anything much matters to Potato Joe anymore) people like you and I only exist to be herded, controlled and culled like cattle in order to increase their own wealth and power.
What’s bad for us is good for them. Ideally they would have us all wholly dependent on their whims, living on their largess and producing for them. Like human livestock in barns eating dole hay (or bugs). Owning nothing and liking it because after a generation or two we’d know nothing better.
The hard part about all this is that their way is the normal human state. We’ve shrugged off that sort of life but it’s always there waiting to take over again. The normal human state is to accept serfdom and thralldom if it means security as vassals. With lickspittles and toadies elevated slightly over the rest to keep everyone in line and keep rebellion from rearing its head.
For us, worst of all, technology now makes creating an unbreakable universal yolk possible.
The Left cannot do this to us unless we let them, but there will come a day when what we allow or not really won’t matter. To hasten that day you need people like Lil’ Petie in positions of power.
If he’s ever done anything useful, I’ve seen no evidence of it. What I have experienced though, are unnecessary delays from short staffing. This being a result of the enemy paying lumpers and mechanics not to work. Also as a result of the “pandemic” or rules intended to help unions and lawyers, very often I’m not allowed to just unload my truck myself.
I have a problem with government inspections. Because they don’t inspect.
Some time ago my family was selling eggs to a small local grocery store. One day the store owner called us to let us know the county health department made them take the eggs off the shelf because we did not have a license from the health department to sell eggs.
So my dad begins to process of obtaining a license and by the time it was all said and done it cost us $300 and nobody from any department whatsoever came to look at our chickens our farm or anything. We could have been injecting our eggs with arsenic and nobody would have ever known.
And so that peek behind the curtain for this 13 year old boy was the beginning of my path to libertarianism.
That is a valid observation, as well as whether the inspector that does show up is a nit picking jerk or a reasonable accommodator when circumstances warrant it. Plus the criteria do change over time and not all owners, designers, builders, or tradesmen manage to keep up with the latest versions and changes. There is usually a good reason for a particular spec or requirement, although sometimes it seems to just be because someone had to justify their role in an industry council or a new product came out by an influential vendor.
But another point of view is that provided by my friend designing and building/ contracting his own house. He viewed a failed inspection as an opportunity for consulting an expert, the county inspector, for a modest fee (around $25 back then; maybe $50 now), compared to if a real engineering consultant had been required ($200 to $300, perhaps). Clearly single family homes vs. large scale commercial buildings have different scales of concern and criteria, but he had a point for his circumstance.
Several years ago, my family had a food processing business in Detroit. Naturally, the city health inspectors would periodically “inspect”.
One time, the inspector arrived with a trainee and he had the trainee down on his knees, scraping whatever he could find in the corners and threatening that he could easily close us down with these scrapings.
Since the trainee was about my age, my dad wanted me to talk to the trainee.
He (the trainee), told me that he would really like a date with a nice looking black girl (the trainee was white) and that such a date would probably make him forget about all those scrapings.
It turns out that the senior inspector knew my dad from years before, when my dad owned a topless bar on Michigan Avenue. My dad explained to me that he used to fix the senior inspector up with girls in exchange for a clean health inspection. Now, the senior guy was training the new guy for the same thing.
Apparently, this type of shake down by city inspectors is not uncommon and it is just another reason why we call it “The Swamp”.
Steve with the Spider-Man mug. He is just a big kid
LOL, says the guy with the Bender B. Rodriguez avatar. I miss that show.
“Shut up baby I know it”
The reason we update building codes and other safety-related laws is because we value life, (well, at least for now, anyway). When you believe that we came from the goo-to-the zoo-to-you, then your life has no more value than a rodent or a bush. This is why religion is banned in communist countries. If they do allow religion, it’s only the one the government mandates. That then allows them to focus on the flashy stuff to impress others. After all, in a country with the population of China, what do a few lives matter if they can impress other countries with their trinkets?
In the scuba diving community the pinnacle is D.I.R (Do It Right). In the dangerous activity of cave diving their practices and mindset have resulted in an almost perfect safety record – not because of government mandates, but because of a sense of pride.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doing_It_Right_(scuba_diving)
Also, for those interested in how tall buildings are prevented from swaying in the wind, here is an interesting video from Smithsonian’s YT channel.
It was just the first one I found in my search there are others and older ones.
I find them quite interesting. But then, as I have said, I am a geek engineer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q58trnpxBN4
Geek engineers unite! I, for one, belong to that great fellowship that goes: “Oh wow! How cool!” when others just yawn. You poor non engineers don’t know what you are missing.
Reposting to this episode my comment from BackStage as it is more appropriate here.
In 2017 the Grenfell Tower in London had this as one of its contributory causes.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-40272168
My father was a WWII navy pilot turned nuclear engineer. He would test and retest, work through problems until he knew the answers. He built real models, not computer simulations, to make sure his theories would work in practice.
How is this not Trump’s fault? Or climate change? Capitalism?
… Or runaway inflation? Or the recession? Or the Ukraine war? Or the border crisis? Or the supply chain breakdown? Or every single COVID death?
I’m pretty sure Trump is at fault for excessively fast growing grass on my lawn forcing me to mow more often too. I’m not sure if he sneaked in and put some sort of growth agent on the lawn or it’s just a secondary effect of Trump’s Global Warming (TGW). I think he had something to do with the recent oil pressure sender failing on my Jeep too.
😉