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The most frustrating thing about these pylons and cables pictured in the article is they come ridiculously close to the buildings beside them. At one point I w

The most frustrating thing about these pylons and cables pictured in the article is they come ridiculously close to the buildings beside them. At one point I was looking at renting an apartment in a building right beside them (Hoola), ultimately didn’t, in part because of the power lines. Turns out there is no/little regulation in how far away these lines must be from other buildings.

toss1 4y ago
And those power lines can have very real effects. When I had a computer network/support business, a somewhat competing business (they were mostly Mac, we were mostly Windows) with strong marketing and weak tech decided to move to a new location. The new location was on an upper floor of a converted old mill building near the river, railroad tracks, and high-voltage power transmission lines, which were just outside the windows on that floor (like only a few meters away). Several months later, they were out of business. The rumor around town was that they'd frequently lost large amounts of data and/or customer's entire drives (floppy and hard). I'm not sure if this was because they were all marketing and weak technologists and it just caught up with them in higher error rates with more biz, or if it was just one big error of being ignorant of the EM fields from the power lines outside windows (which I did hear second-hand that they'd started having random data loss in the new location, took too long to understand it, and were doomed by the time they figured it out). I'd also read about when the Tennessee Valley Authority started installing some of the first high-voltage transmission lines in the US, a clever adjacent homeowner buried a long wire in a set of coils under the lines and ran it to his house to supply power. He was eventually caught and argued that he wasn't stealing electricity because he was only collecting ambient power. He lost, as although the device was not mechanically contacting the lines, it was still of course electromagnetically coupled — the phenomena of which he was taking advantage.

toss1 4y ago

And those power lines can have very real effects. When I had a computer network/support business, a somewhat competing business (they were mostly Mac, we were mostly Windows) with strong marketing and weak tech decided to move to a new location. The new location was on an upper floor of a converted old mill building near the river, railroad tracks, and high-voltage power transmission lines, which were just outside the windows on that floor (like only a few meters away). Several months later, they were out of business. The rumor around town was that they'd frequently lost large amounts of data and/or customer's entire drives (floppy and hard). I'm not sure if this was because they were all marketing and weak technologists and it just caught up with them in higher error rates with more biz, or if it was just one big error of being ignorant of the EM fields from the power lines outside windows (which I did hear second-hand that they'd started having random data loss in the new location, took too long to understand it, and were doomed by the time they figured it out). I'd also read about when the Tennessee Valley Authority started installing some of the first high-voltage transmission lines in the US, a clever adjacent homeowner buried a long wire in a set of coils under the lines and ran it to his house to supply power. He was eventually caught and argued that he wasn't stealing electricity because he was only collecting ambient power. He lost, as although the device was not mechanically contacting the lines, it was still of course electromagnetically coupled — the phenomena of which he was taking advantage.