Norilsk: Otherworldly Photos of an Arctic City
bbc.com
bbc.com
Also at the massive cost to the surrounding environment.
I guess Inuits live in the extreme cold as well, but their entire world population is smaller than the city of Norilsk.
Assuming you didn't mean global warming here, there was never much of environment there humans could damage.
There’s a lot of ways humans can ruin the environment even without global warming.
People have lived in such places for millennia, before "burning copious amounts of hydrocarbons" was a thing...
And why would we know how you "interpreted it" if it wasn't spelt out? And what would be the limits to accept other places as being "like Norilsk"?
Cold cities only (e.g. not a cold village)? Cold places in Russia? Cold industrial cities only? Cities that get dark in the artic for months? Would similarly cold places elsewhere count? Does it have to get to -40 celcius or a city that gets to -20 will do?
The "most reasonable interpretation of a comment" of what we were already discussing in this thread is that we weren't talking about Norilsk lookalikes, but about whether people could live in such adverse settlements before or are "only able to live there while burning copious amounts of hydrocarbons to stay warm and/or generate electricity".
That was literally the claim that started the subthread.
>Assuming I've never heard of the Inuit or whatever is offensively patronizing and violates the HN recommendation to respond to the most reasonable interpretation of a comment.
It's not that difficult to not have heard of the Inuit, or to have heard of them but believe they lived if other conditions, or whatever.
The "outrage" is rude, and probably violates the same HN recommendation it invokes (if not others too). The parent replied very calmly to a question.
HN is global and has people of all places and all ages, including people who know little or nothing about Alaska and the Inuit. And people don't know all kind of basic things if they're not in their interests. Heck, many people can't place basic countries on the map, much less know about the Inuit. Just because someone is a programmer, and reads HN, is no guarantee.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit
Not to mention the whole of human population passing through an ice age:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power...
I think Norilsk is undeniably artistic, in both the idea of the city, and in its unique aesthetics.
So, I think you picked a bad example.
Edit: the above may not be reliable - a different source puts the Philippines at the top. But anyway.
It is not just nickel. Rather it is the entire mine->produce chain for most of the minerals has largely been "outsourced" to countries that we think are incredibly polluted.
[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg15120490-300-rich-pic...
Like in... why do people stay?! Russia's a huge country and with free movement you'd imagine such places would get depopulated quickly...
Well... they get "milk coupons" though (to literally get a couple liters of free milk per month), as a "sorry" for the exposure to the dangerous environments and toxins at work. It's more a legacy inherited from USSR where it was largely believed that milk reduces the danger of hard work envs, removes toxins:
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9C%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%BA...
And that is true about milk thing in USSR, people actually still believe that milk removes toxins.
Why did people stay in Detroit when it was down? Moving is not as easy as it seems. Only very few have courage to leave their nest. But that's a whole different story.
In Russia, besides the fact that movement is not "free" because of propiska ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propiska_in_the_Soviet_Union ), general conservative propaganda highly encourages pin-pointed "nationalism". You leave your city - you are a traitor, how could you leave your friends and family.
About "traitor" thing - well, usually everybody understand that there are better places to live than small city in Siberia. People move very often. For example, after school 20% of my classmates moved outside of Siberia and almost everybody left my small city and moved to a bigger one. I were born in Siberia and moved to Saint-Petersburg a year ago -- no one called me a traitor. They even come as guests, stay in my apartment and sometimes think about moving too.
I've met a couple of people from Norilsk - they are glad they moved out, but proud of the place of their origin. Which I consider pretty healthy position.
2) Momentum and roots. Norilsk was founded in 1935, which means at this point you have multiple generations of families for whom it's their home.
3) Work and money. Norilsk exists because of mining. It continues to employ mostly people in mining, and pays them reasonably well for the harsh environment.
So it's an industrial city.
The area is extremely rich in resources. Looking at the way people live they definitely deserve a bigger share of those resources. The company that produces those metals and spoils the environment is owned by billionaires Vladimir Potanin, Oleg Deripaska and others, closely associated with Putin.
Unfortunately some see socialism as a candy, a glorious oasis we should all paddle towards without realization that it's a giant trap. A pure hell with great marketing for ordinary people.
Like, for starters: what is actually going on? Don't leave us in suspense. Spit it out, lad.
Deregulation is fine with me as long as capitalism is producing the desired outcome.
Meanwhile unfettered socialism leads to absolute hell holes like Denmark.