Financial topics

[aedens]

http://www.offthegridnews.com/current-e ... eschooled/
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-05-0 ... -lifestyle

Look what we have now with the stated 1963 goals on "higher social values"
As we noted they are attacking charter schools again so the cycle repeats. To be blunt as my young adults state they
are released brain dead with a 500 word vocabulary and they have the back bone to state they want money to fix it.

http://gdxforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php ... ish#p16569

[Higgenbotham]

Now let's say at some point in the future there's a water system in Detroit or some other major city in a state of disrepair and the water comes on for a few hours per day. The water system engineers find a way to get the water pumped the required 20 miles and someone out in the far reaches of the system in a suburb of Detroit can open their tap for a few hours per day and get some water. Problem solved, right? No, not in this case. The reason is that all the piping is underground. The underground piping is going to have leaks in it. At present there are water systems that are losing substantial amounts of water to leaks in the system piping. That occurs in the midst of drought conditions. Getting back to the point of this, a water system that has pipe leaks must be pressurized all the time. That is because the underground pipe has pressure acting against it and if the pipes aren't pressurized from the inside all the time you will be basically drinking the runoff that ends up in the soil around those pipes. Most of which is probably contaminated with chemicals and pathogens around the distribution system of any large city. So while it's OK for your lights to flicker on and off a few hours per day, it's not OK for your water system to operate in that manner.

Water pressure is an important factor to consider when planning a distribution system. As a rule of thumb, the water pressure throughout the distribution system should be no less than 17 PSI. In many high value districts, distribution lines are designed for a normal pressure of between 60 and 70 PSI.

Low pressure in the mains can be a health hazard since the pressure in the pipes keeps contaminated water from entering the mains. If the pressure in a pipe is too low or is negative, contaminants from nearby ditches, cross-connections, and poor quality house plumbing can be drawn into the water system.

Investigations have proven that most water-borne disease outbreaks are the result of contamination of water after it is pumped into the distribution system. To prevent contamination, an adequate chlorine residual must be maintained and the residual pressure should never be allowed to fall below 20 PSI. The Virginia Department of Health issues an advisory for extra-precautionary measures during periods of low pressure or vacuum.

http://water.me.vccs.edu/concepts/pressuredistr.html

If the system has elevated storage nearby and enough water can be pumped to elevated storage while power is on to hold pressure in the system the rest of the day, then those people will be OK.

It's surprising how difficult is was to find a reference which describes this in layman's terms. These concepts are very basic to the operation of the infrastructure of a civilization and it seems this knowledge has almost been lost. This reference came from a web site called Virginia Community Colleges.

[Higgenbotham]

This is very interesting. Looks like a complex system to me.

Water distribution system
The distribution system of Dallas Water Utilities (DWU) is one of the largest in the United States. As of June 2003, DWU provided retail water service to just over 1.2 million people within the Dallas city limits. The major distribution system facilities include 28 pump stations (including the high service pump stations at the three water treatment plants), 11 ground storage reservoirs, 9 elevated tanks, and 78 vault structures separate from the major facilities, in addition to over 4,600 miles (7,400 km) of distribution and transmission main. The distribution system is divided into 17 pressure zones to maintain adequate water pressures throughout the system. There are four major pressure zones (Central Low, North High, East High, and South High), and five smaller secondary pressure zones (Meandering Way High, Red Bird High, Trinity Heights, Pleasant Grove, and Cedardale) which comprise most of the Dallas service area. Each of the nine major and secondary pressure zones are supplied by one or more pump stations and have elevated or ground storage facilities that establish the static hydraulic gradient for each zone. The remaining eight pressure zones are supplied from an adjacent pressure zone via pressure reducing valve, or single, small booster pump station. These pressure zones do not have storage facilities that establish their static hydraulic gradient.

There are 35 pressure monitoring points throughout the distribution system that are not located at a major facility. These points are connected to the SCADA system, and are used to monitor hydraulic conditions within the distribution system.

The distribution system consists of over 4,600 miles (7,400 km) of pipe with diameters ranging from less than 4 inches (100 mm) to 96 inches (2,400 mm) in diameter. The majority of the total pipe length is sized 8 inches (200 mm) in diameter. About 88 percent of the distribution system is pipes sized 16 inches (410 mm) or smaller in diameter. The DWU distribution system is made of several different pipe materials. Small diameter pipe materials include copper, galvanized iron, PVC, and cast iron. Larger diameter transmission mains are made of steel and various reinforced and prestressed concrete. Approximately 51 percent of the distribution system consists of grey cast iron pipe (CIP). The next most prevalent material types are ductile iron pipe (DIP) and PVC.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas_Water_Utilities

http://dallascityhall.com/departments/w ... ct2012.pdf

What would be relevant in terms of analyzing the water system to determine if your supply is robust is whether the elevated storage on your particular pressure zone is sufficient to maintain pressure at the far reaches of the pressure zone or whether additional pumping is used from a ground storage reservoir. I don't think all major systems use elevated storage; I picked this one at random to see what kind of information can be accessed.

From the second reference:

Pressure and Flow:
i. The height of the tank must be such so as to provide a minimal operating
pressure of 35 pounds per square inch (psi) throughout its service area.
ii. The engineer must evaluate the topography of the pressure zone for which
the tank is being designed so as to locate the tank where it can provide the
best operating pressure.

The last consideration I can think of, and they don't say, is whether the tank is of sufficient volume to accommodate, say, 18 hours of usage if the power system were to be shut off most of the day. They can't shut the water off in the distribution system because it must hold pressure. I read where the average Dallas resident uses 233 gallons of water per day and the tank would have to be large enough to accomodate that usage for the pressure zone on which it operates. I would doubt that it is in all cases.

But overall this particular system looks quite robust to me.

[Higgenbotham]

Beyond the above issue of storage and distribution, the next question would be whether the treatment plant has enough capacity to move one days worth of usage through it during a situation where the power grid is only operating several hours each day. My guess is the answer is no under current demands. However, my guess is also that as the grid begins to flicker off that enough customers will be cut off from the water supply due to lack of payment that a city like Dallas would still be able to pump enough water into the elevated tanks to accommodate those still on the water system and hold pressure as necessary. The problem would therefore be due to the customers who no longer have running water due to lack of affordability rather than overall system failure, at least for those systems that use elevated storage.

This has interesting implications because it means that people who depend on larger systems that have enough scale to use elevated storage may be better off than those who depend on small systems that only use the small pressure tanks and must have power running to them all day in order to operate properly (or have generator backup which may also not have a reliable source of fuel).

[Higgenbotham]

From earlier today:

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2015/ ... t-off.html

The Archdruid puts some larger context on the water shutoffs in Detroit and Baltimore.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/ ... valve.html

The Archdruid's conclusion to the above linked essay seems to be the path the water shutoffs will take for now in that systems will be able to operate for those who can afford to pay.

I suspect, for what it’s worth, that the shutoff notices being mailed to tens of thousands of poor families in those two cities are a good working model for the way that industrial civilization itself will wind down. It won’t be sudden; for decades to come, there will still be people who have access to what Americans today consider the ordinary necessities and comforts of everyday life; there will just be fewer of them each year. Outside that narrowing circle, the number of economic nonpersons will grow steadily, one shutoff notice at a time.

As I’ve pointed out in previous posts, the line of fracture between the senile elite and what Arnold Toynbee called the internal proletariat—the people who live within a failing civilization’s borders but receive essentially none of its benefits—eventually opens into a chasm that swallows what’s left of the civilization. Sometimes the tectonic processes that pull the chasm open are hard to miss, but there are times when they’re a good deal more difficult to sense in action, and this is one of these latter times. Listen to the whisper of the shutoff valve, and you’ll hear tens of thousands of Americans being cut off from basic services the rest of us, for the time being, still take for granted.

--From the Archdruid Report "The Whisper of the Shutoff Valve", 2015

In round numbers, the descent might last somewhere between fifty and two hundred years. It is unlikely to be sooner, it could well be later, but the dark age is most likely to arrive within this time bracket. The collapse itself will be brief, taking a decade at most and possibly much less. Past instances of collapse have seemed to happen almost overnight. Once confidence goes out of the system it unravels very quickly. When perceptions return to reality, they do so abruptly.

--From the Phoenix Principle and the Coming Dark Age by Marc Widdowson, 2001

The underlined passages seem to be saying the same thing. This is the factor that these analyses omit:

But I think it also applies to the entire world as a complex system.
Everything in the world is so interlocked these days, that the failure
of any large component, or even some small components, could
disastrously affect the entire world.

I don't think the descent has to run to the same level as previous examples before the catastrophic failure can occur. The catastrophic failure can occur from a higher level of functioning comparatively speaking.

The Archdruid and Widdowson are both attributing the inflection point of the collapse to it being a psychological phenomenon. It doesn't have to be that. In this case it won't be. It will occur first due to a technical failure that occurs in the same manner as the technical failure of a software system. The conditions for technical failure weren't present in previous collapses.

[Higgenbotham]

We've all described examples of technical failure:

--Another Carrington Event wipes out the power grid
--A flash crash wipes out the stock and bond market, letters of credit can't get issued, and worldwide trade comes to an abrupt halt
--Hackers lock up the worldwide electronic money system and it can't get restarted
--Tokyo gets hit by a devastating earthquake, Japan collapses, and that causes a cascading failure of the worldwide system
--Beijing's missile defense system issues a false alert and party leadership orders a full scale nuclear attack on the United States
--Noth Korea figures out how to detonate a nuke over the Central US, which is effective in wiping out the power grid
--A Frankenfood GMO gets released from a Monsanto lab and spreads like wildfire, destroying the world's food supply in 19 months
--A strain of H5N1 is released from a lab in Europe and spreads quickly, aided greatly by international travel, killing 4 billion people

[Higgenbotham]

Some passers by may read this and wonder what I know about Monsanto and the capability of genetic engineering to induce a worldwide technical failure. I worked in their biotech unit. That would be a good start. I still have the list of jobs he sent and the official job offer letter on company stationery.

The next year, 1983, I got a call from a recruiter at Monsanto. He said they were going to fill some jobs in their new biotech area. He said if you'd be interested I'll send you a list of jobs we want to fill and you can pick out the one you want and call me back. So he did and I picked one out and called him back, then headed out to St Louis for the Summer.

[aedens]

The said study involved 30 pregnant women and 39 non-pregnant women who came to the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Sherbrooke (CHUS) in Quebec for a tubectomy. It is also worth noting that none of the subjects worked or lived with a spouse who was working in direct contact with pesticides. All of them were considered to follow a typical Canadian diet which included eating GM foods such as corn, potatoes and soybeans. Blood samples from the women were taken before delivery for pregnant women and during tubal ligation for the non-pregnant ones. Umbilical blood sampling was also done after birth.
During analysis of the blood samples, the Cry1Ab toxin was detected in 93 percent of the pregnant women and 80 percent from the fetal blood samples. And also, 69 percent of the blood samples of non-pregnant women were found to have the said toxin. There were earlier studies showing that trace amounts of the Cry1Ab toxin was found in the gastrointestinal contents of livestock that has been given GM corn as feed. This have given initial fears that the said toxin may not be always broken down effectively in the gut as what most biotech companies and GM Food proponents imply.

[aedens]

http://touch.latimes.com/#section/-1/ar ... -83499402/

[gerald]

We've all described examples of technical failure:

--Another Carrington Event wipes out the power grid
--A flash crash wipes out the stock and bond market, letters of credit can't get issued, and worldwide trade comes to an abrupt halt
--Hackers lock up the worldwide electronic money system and it can't get restarted
--Tokyo gets hit by a devastating earthquake, Japan collapses, and that causes a cascading failure of the worldwide system
--Beijing's missile defense system issues a false alert and party leadership orders a full scale nuclear attack on the United States
--Noth Korea figures out how to detonate a nuke over the Central US, which is effective in wiping out the power grid
--A Frankenfood GMO gets released from a Monsanto lab and spreads like wildfire, destroying the world's food supply in 19 months
--A strain of H5N1 is released from a lab in Europe and spreads quickly, aided greatly by international travel, killing 4 billion people

I would add "little" natural things like -- http://enenews.com/sinkhole-develops-da ... ontinuousl

"Sinkhole develops under dam in US — 7 nuclear reactors downstream — Water now seeping out — Gov’t notified of ‘stability issues’, plants begin evaluating potential flood impacts — Official: An ‘uncommon’ occurrence, we’re monitoring it continuously and working around clock — Structure same height as Niagra Falls"