Infrastructure Tales
The Ancient City That Mastered Water
youtu.be
How Japan ignored climate critics and built a global natural gas empire
🇯🇵❤️🚢
Every six hours, somewhere in the world, an LNG shipment controlled by a Japanese company leaves a port. However, these tankers are only the tip of the iceberg
A thread 🧵
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So beautiful
Open this picture. It illustrates the EXTENT of Japan's dominance in the LNG supply chain
👉 A Japanese company produces the shale gas
👉 Gas is sent to an LNG plant partially owned by a Japanese company
👉 LNG is loaded on a ship built and owned by a Japanese company
👉 The ship is controlled by a Japanese company, which sends it to Thailand
👉 T... See more
In higher resolution
The industry’s biggest recruiting challenge, however, is the industry’s invisibility. It’s a truism that people don’t think about infrastructure until it breaks, but they tend not to think about the fixing of it, either. In his 2014 essay, “Rethinking Repair,” professor of information science Steven Jackson argued that contemporary thinking about technology romanticizes moments of invention over the ongoing work of maintenance, though it is equally important to the deployment of functional technology in the world. There are few better examples than the subsea cable industry, which, for over a century, has been so effective at quickly fixing faults that the public has rarely had a chance to notice. Or as one industry veteran put it, “We are one of the best-kept secrets in the world, because things just work.”
Good.
For wind, as with water
Japan's Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism wants to build an "automated logistics road" that uses automated freight pods between Osaka and Tokyo, later extended to Fukuoka and Sendai. This is in response to the truck driver shortage. It's wild that Japan... https://t.co/aFD6VvCDQs
Seems similar to the power loop Waymo was working on