I was propitious final week to spend a few days in Istanbul. The place has altered quick given we was final there in 2007. It’s still a bustling, colourful place with a beat of trade and production coursing by a veins – we can scarcely hear a production heart beating. But lavishness appears everywhere – bigger cars, coloured windows, trade jams, high heels and engineer bags, full restaurants. The unconstrained ships, crawl to unrelenting 24/7, ploughing from a Black Sea into a Sea of Marmara and a Aegean and onto a Mediterranean. Still a overpass between continents yet no longer a ‘cheap’ city, we would contend only as expensive, if not more, as London.
My initial revisit was in 1962 and we clearly remember a Roman subterraneous Cistern with a aged city built over a top. When we went behind in 1999 we beheld that a Romans had mastered Tier 3 with point upkeep (about 2000 years before a data-centre industry!) – a Cistern was fed around a aqueduct from a plateau and had dual tanks, any containing some-more than 8,000m³ of uninformed water. When a H2O flowed quick in a open from snow-melt a additional was used to feed a wells, pressurise a fountains and flush a streets. When a H2O slowed in a prohibited summers a tanks done adult a shortfall. But a crafty tools were a ‘transfer-switches’ during any end. Gates authorised one tank during a time to be emptied for cleaning, point with a other tank feeding a city above. Great accessibility engineering.
However on this revisit my courtesy was drawn to dual critical news equipment that done an engaging contrariety to a UK. (Obviously not as critical as a artillery exchanges conflicting their eastern limit yet we would not brave to make any comments about that we know little).
The initial was a quote from a Turkish Minister of Culture. They seem to have had a PR debate regulating about ‘Made in Turkey’ and a Minister was doubt a success. My singular knowledge of Turkish production covers UPS and we know of during slightest one bureau that constructed tip of a operation units adult to about 20kVA, even yet it was located as it was in a city centre building of several floors of workshops. Their outrageous advantage behind afterwards was their low cost base, quite labour. Everywhere we demeanour in Istanbul we see workshops creation all sorts, engineered products included. However a Minister was extolling a change to ‘Designed in Turkey’ and mentioned that this would not be so receptive to low-cost foe from a Far East. Well my recommendation is formed on my early days of offered motors and expostulate systems to production industries in a Midlands and South Wales during a late 70s. Nearly all now defunct, gone, exported and transposed by selling malls, coffee shops with giveaway Wi-Fi, gift shops, housing estates and unemployment. It’s simple; ‘manufacturing’ creates practice while ‘design’ generally does not. Our best instance is substantially Dyson – one of a best-ever product designers that now manufactures all those spiral cleaners and ball-barrows in low-cost countries yet retains a few hundred jobs in a UK instead of formulating thousands. We used to make soaking machines and colour TVs in Wales, cars bikes in a Midlands, trains in Swindon (OK, removing a bit Victorian now!). Now we even import line-up from China instead of regulating a genuine Welsh stuff. So my recommendation to a Turkish Minister is ‘hang onto a thought of ‘Made in Turkey’ for as prolonged as we can’. And when it comes to cruise Turkey’s delayed advent to a EU … best ask someone else!
The second object was only as fascinating. Turkey is building a new chief appetite hire but, during a same time, opening new spark mines. Yes, spark mines. The UK supervision might wish to anticipate why? The proclivity for Turkey is that they are 50% contingent on gas imports (mainly from Russia and North Africa) and they don’t consider that this gives them confidence of supply. The devise is to boost a purpose of spark (is that a conflicting of a ‘dash for gas’?) to aloft than 30% in a grid. Sounds strange? Maybe, yet here we are in a UK contingent on a same Russian gas, shutting coal-fired stations that bake Polish spark and a aged nuclear-fission stations while sitting on an island built on deep-coal seams with over 300 years of reserves. OK, if we try to forget Mrs Thatcher and Arthur Scargill for a impulse and start blazing a possess spark it won’t final 300 years, yet maybe it will overpass a appetite opening we are confronting but boring gas conflicting some potentially antipathetic landscape?
I should revisit Turkey some-more mostly – it taught to me to consider better.
Article source: http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/blogs/ian-bitterlin/constantinople-still-major-trading-link-between-europe-asia&u=4892
