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Comment by aequitas | Hacker News Reader

For anyone in Europe I can recommend a visit to Völklingen Hütte (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%B6lklingen_Ironworks). I went there last year on holiday in Germany.

It's an old iron factory built into a museum. Most parts are open to public and are left in a 'frozen' state since it was closed in '86 (although maintained and sometimes still fully functional). It's a really nice travel in time and insight into an industry of this scale. I remember how parts of the complex seen organised and architected and other parts are just a big mess of pipes and parts that have been added and shoved in over the decades that this factory ran (24/7, all season, without a roof, I might add).

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I raise you a Russian city of Cherepovets, the photos don't do it justice, where you see green, yellow, violet snow wherever it isn't just black and the pipes, columns and other stuff of the steel and associated chemical plants go for kilometers along the road and you feel like you're descending to hell. Those moving trains of railroad cars filled with tens of tons of actively burning coals which awash everything around with that red glow...

https://gizmodo.com/5680577/the-chimneys-of-hell-are-in-russ...

Wow. That looks worse than the Ruhr area before they started scrubbing.

Mommy why are the clouds orange?

I think those particular clouds are orange because the sun is setting behind them. It seems unlikely that grey smoke rises up from the chimneys and then suddenly turns orange a bit below the cloud layer.

Being 63 years old and a resident of new england, I have amnesiac longing for the old manufacturing of my youth. It really was a much dirtier environment. I can remember my Dad parking the new Chevy near a factory for a few hours and it was covered with some type of soot. There are still remnents of the old days. Mill comlplexes largley empty and river bottoms with "heavy metal" that is best left undisturbed. 20 years ago, I couldn't conceive the area surviving as a service economy. We have survived and I hope we continue without dirty manufacturing.

It's really pretty nuts - 25 years ago, New England still was studded with shoe shops and textiles and other consumer manufacturing that has since all been outsourced to Bangalesh or Vietnam or wherever. Likewise, there used to be so many paper mills on the major rivers, like the Androscoggin in Maine, that you wouldn't be surprised if you pulled out fish looking like the one on The Simpsons... Or on the Merrimac river, where they are still pulling old cars off the bottom with mafiosos in the trunk.

Now most of those old 19th century mill buildings are transitioning into dorm-like hipster studio apartments.

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