
Where the Real Skyscrapers Are (Hint: North Dakota) - tzs
https://medium.com/re-form/where-the-real-skyscrapers-are-hint-north-dakota-76b33694c99e
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stevesearer
Here's a video of a tower worker climbing a 1700' tower that really gives me
sweaty palms:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDYK0zaQuZs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDYK0zaQuZs)

I've also been impressed with the amount of high quality content on Medium
over the last several months. It seemed like a glorified blogging platform at
first, but there have been a number of really interesting stories like this
one and the one about the inventor of the Aeropress.

[https://medium.com/backchannel/first-alan-adler-invented-
the...](https://medium.com/backchannel/first-alan-adler-invented-the-aerobie-
now-he-s-created-the-perfect-cup-of-coffee-c5e94ccc538e)

~~~
peterwwillis
At first I thought, "oh, i'm sure there's a line you can attach to your
harness to keep you from falling..." but then he gets outside the tower, free-
climbs 140 feet, finally positioning himself on the very top of a 1,700 foot
tower, with zero support and a tiny piece of foothold, all the while carrying
30lbs dead weight [to say nothing of wind], whereupon he finally clips in his
harness.

Jesus fucking christ.

~~~
toothbrush
Yeah, i was kind of gripping the table almost unable to contain shouts of
"attach yourself already" :/ The worst is the final 20 seconds when he dawdles
and fumbles the clip with two hands, simply standing at the top looking down
:/ But i guess from his point of view that's easiest, he's not climbing any
more...

~~~
falcolas
I've heard those videos caused a lot of flack for the workers, due to the lack
of safety equipment use.

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forrestthewoods
"After a tower project gets FCC approval, it takes about a year to complete.
While the KVLY tower cost $50,000 to build in 1963, a typical 2,000-foot tower
today costs about $3 million."

I'd love to see the full breakdown as to why exactly. That seems grossly
unnecessary.

Wolfram says $50,000 in 1963 dollars is $393,000 in 2015 dollars. So there's
an almost 10x increase on top of inflation.
[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%2450000+in+1963+dollar...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%2450000+in+1963+dollars)

~~~
meric
The price of technological goods such as TVs and computers have been going
down constantly, and this means inflation of non-technological goods will be
higher than the official inflation rate.

The price of gold is around $1150 in 2015, and $35 in 1960, a 32 times
increase.

The price of a KVLY tower increased 60 fold from $50,000 to $3m.

Compared this way, 60x vs 32x is much less extreme.

~~~
forrestthewoods
I like your line of thinking, but gold seems like a really poor point of
comparison. I tried to find inflation adjusted prices over time for things
such as energy and steel and had difficulty. There's lots of easy data on oil
but anything else is tricky. Hrm..

~~~
meric
You can compare other goods like college education, property, medical care
besides precious metals. Things that take a lot of skill and labor, and where
technology have little to no downwards pressure on the price.

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BIair
North Dakotan checking in. I've seen this tower many times, from the road and
up close, it's pretty uninspiring. Hard to get a sense of scale when it's so
thin and transparent. Also, you can't see the view from the top (legally).
What fun would the Space Needle, Empire State or Burj Khalifa be if you
couldn't see what the view is like from the top?

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juliangregorian
Empire State _Building_. Empire State is New York State.

~~~
Houshalter
I think from the context it's fairly obvious what he's referring to.

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ericboggs
The tower in Dallas, NC (on the map) is less than a mile from my childhood
home. It sits in the middle of a cow pasture -- I grew up catching bluegill
and catfish in a cow pond a few hundred yards from the tower. Never realized
that it would be the 4th tallest building in the world if it were a
skyscraper. Thanks for sharing.

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f15h
One thing the OP missed is the fact that Tokyo Skytree is also a broadcast
tower. Just a bit better on the aesthetics than the American ones.

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rmason
Here's the tallest structures in the USA of which many are towers:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_structures_in_t...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_structures_in_the_United_States)

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stretchwithme
Interesting, especially since the replacement for the WTC claims its height
using a similar structure mounted on top.

The experts decided its the tallest building in the US based on that non-
building "architectural element", which could later be extended to re-capture
the "title", for whatever that's worth.

[http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/11/12/world-t...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/11/12/world-
trade-center-tower-willis-tower-largest-us-building/3504515/)

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jrs235
Can you imagine witnessing one of those towers when they fell down?

~~~
Spearchucker
Or climbing that ladder all the way to the top?

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elihu
What's the limit on structures of this type? It seems unlikely that the radio
towers we have now are the best we can do; it sounds like they just stopped
making them bigger because there wasn't anyone that wanted a bigger one badly
enough to justify the cost.

~~~
quesera
Legally (in the U.S.), the FAA restricts the height of towers to about 2000',
with rare variances granted.

Technically, we don't need supergiant towers, now even less than ever before.
High frequency broadcasters (TV) need line of sight to their customers, but --
economically -- TV transmission also has huge energy costs (wide bandwidth),
and you're fighting the inverse square law the whole time. So in the low-
populated areas where you might reach more people at the margins, it just
doesn't make economic sense. In denser markets, the next city will be better
served by a local station.

Also economically, the general rule of thumb is that the cost of a tower
increases as the square of its height.

But I think you were asking about the physical limit. These masts are
typically made of galvanized steel tubes. Pipe OD size and wall thickness (and
therefore compressive strength) will vary, but that is the ultimate limiting
parameter.

The galvanized steel guy lines are in tension, but it's easy to add more of
these as height and footprint increase.

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clarky07
Just the first part is key. The FAA won't let you. The article mentions that
there are many towers close to the 2000 limit placed by the FAA.

~~~
elihu
Other countries besides the US could build one, if they had a compelling use
case. I was mostly just wondering what the physical limits are on this kind of
thing.

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protomyth
Calling what happened in 1997 "a freak ice storm" is a bit of an
understatement. Most of a state without power and only one of these amazing
towers still transmitting. I do wonder if there is video of the aftermath of
the fall.

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kahirsch
On December 10, 1989, two of these 2,000 towers collapsed near Raleigh, NC. It
was as the ice was melting after a really bad ice storm.

Pictures of the aftermath:
[http://www.oldradio.com/archives/warstories/WRAL.htm](http://www.oldradio.com/archives/warstories/WRAL.htm)

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kazinator
These towers are usually "disqualified" from height records by using the
weasel words "free-standing structure" or "self-supporting" or similar.

In the photo, you can clearly see the numerous guy wires holding it up.

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mortenlarsen
I may be old school, but a 3MB (mostly images) web page seems a bit over the
top.

~~~
ghshephard
For a large display (iMac), it's glorious, but agreed, on a MacBook Air (let
alone an iPhone), it's overkill.

There should be a way to determine the resolution of a target device, and just
send the appropriately sized images.

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skuhn
I think that people are starting to realize that a one-size-fits-all approach
to images isn't really feasible anymore. If you serve gigantor images that
look good on retina or 4K screens to low res devices, you just wasted a lot of
bandwidth and tanked your page load time for no reason. The opposite is also
true: 640x480 images don't look super great on 4K screens.

You can resize your images to a few key sizes, but it can quickly get out of
hand to support all the various permutations of size and format for every
potential user (and who knows if most of these objects will ever even be
served).

There are some solutions to the problem out there, such as the one from my
employer: [http://www.imgix.com/imgix-js](http://www.imgix.com/imgix-js)

Basically though, to do responsive design with image heavy content, you need
to make the images responsive as well.

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ghshephard
"You can resize your images to a few key sizes, but it can quickly get out of
hand " \- This shouldn't be a problem. Just resize dynamically as needed and
cache. Resizing on the server is a pretty fast operation, and you only need to
do it once for any given form factor.

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Scarbutt
Is there a resource somewhere to see how do they build a tower so tall?

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exabrial
I was wondering the same thing... If you've ever seen a construction crane go
up, it's the same process apparently. Check out this older video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KvjwdXA89w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KvjwdXA89w)

