saw this on a post comparing shanghai in 1987 to now.

  • amemorablename
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    2 months ago

    I was genuinely wondering on that part, if exposed wiring would be an actual hazard or not. I don’t know much about types of wiring and types of them, so didn’t want to jump to conclusions one way or the other. Like my computer cables at home aren’t exactly hidden and years back, there was one point where we had a cable running throughout our apartment (and IIRC, we used the wall and ceiling for part of it to get it from one room to the other). But that’s probably(?) a different story in terms of safety than, say, electrical wiring for a place.

    So where my mind was going is like, if it’s not an unsafe kind of cables, they are literally just caring about appearances over quality from their alleged visit, which is what they claimed the communists are doing. If it’s truly a true story and unsafe wiring, I see that as a legitimate concern for safety reasons; but the claim it has to do with caring about appearances over quality still doesn’t make sense even granting them all of that, as you’d think if that were the case, they’d make dangerous infrastructure and hide the danger, not leave it out in the open for a visiting foreigner to say “China bad.” They can’t seem to get their reasoning straight on why exactly this means “communism bad.” The more I think on it, the more it looks like they started from their conclusion and worked backwards. Also, I’ve been in hotels before in the US where the first room we got had problems and we told them and they set us up in another room. The information I acquired there was that one room had problems and another did not. I did not acquire a whole picture of the hotel, much less every hotel in the entire country.

    • Addfwyn
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      2 months ago

      Unless it is exposed electrical wiring or something without insulation, it shouldn’t be a functional safety issue. All the cable I work with has already been insulated when you are running it, the hiding part is just for appearances/so people don’t trip on anything (which presumably they would not do on the ceiling). Now I have no idea if they are talking about electrical cable, ethernet, fiber, etc. There are a lot of cables that typically run through a hotel.

      If it is electrical, maybe an issue. If it’s an exposed fiber line the biggest risk is just the guest breaking it.