Gyroscopic Investing

MediumTex wrote:Nuclear power plants will also be fun for people of the future to try to understand.  Failing to grasp what we were trying to accomplish with them, people of the future might come to refer to them as "atomic death centers", or maybe "landscape habitability destruction facilities."

Good point. I assume you're talking about the fact that once the power goes out, all of those hundreds of nuclear power plants and the tons of nuclear waste in those cooling pools will melt down, eradicate the ecosystem, and turn the surface of the planet into a wasteland.

I wonder what future archeologists will think of our propensity to hoard gold in vaults — rather than using it more widely for its advanced elemental conductive properties. As much as I hate to call gold a barbarous relic for its now obsolete role as a monetary buffer-stock policy, I can't help but wonder if it's actually possible for an advanced civilization to build a highly successful (and expensive) manned space program while under the limitations of a gold standard.

Gumby,

Does our high gold price really hamper our abilities?  Aren't their other conductors almost as capable?

moda0306 wrote:Does our high gold price really hamper our abilities?  Aren't their other conductors almost as capable?

I think it does. Certainly gold is needed for certain high-conductive low-corrosion applications — many of them haven't been invented yet, or won't be with the price being so high.

For instance — and this is just one example — gold is an ideal element for fuel cells, but it's high cost makes it less practical.

Silver and copper are more conductive per volume, but unlike gold, they oxidize and corrode — effectively destroying their application over time.

Remember the gold record we put into the Voyager spacecraft? It was gold-plated copper so that it would actually survive a multi-millennial trip somewhere.

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

Funny story about that... according to Wikipedia, the artists recorded on the golden record signed agreements which only permitted the replay of their music outside of the solar system (no joke).

Gumby wrote:

MediumTex wrote:Nuclear power plants will also be fun for people of the future to try to understand.  Failing to grasp what we were trying to accomplish with them, people of the future might come to refer to them as "atomic death centers", or maybe "landscape habitability destruction facilities."

Good point. I assume you're talking about the fact that once the power goes out, all of those hundreds of nuclear power plants and the tons of nuclear waste in those cooling pools will melt down, eradicate the ecosystem, and turn the surface of the planet into a wasteland.

Yes, and more broadly the idea that nuclear power plants are built based upon the premise that the curent civilization that created it will last far longer than any civilization in history has ever lasted.

Imagine how silly it would seem to us if the ancient Romans had built power facilities that required a significant resource commitment, highly trained engineers and constant monitoring for hundreds of years after the power facility was no longer producing any power. 

If you look through history, civilizations routinely have assumptions about their durability into perpetuity built into their belief systems, but normally this bit of hubris doesn't have any REALLY bad consequences, and we can read about them in the history books and smile at their lack of understanding that they, too, were just temporary organizations of human society. 

What we have done with nuclear power plants is basically risked the human habitability of a certain portion of the earth's surface on the idea that civilization in its current form will be around for hundreds or thousands of years to take care of these complex waste problems, even though there is simply no precedent for anything like this working out very well to date in human history.

Don't they say that the "rainbow serpent" Australian culture stayed pretty much the same for over 30,000 and perhaps as long as 60,000 years. Possibly the  Hadza people in central Tanzania have a system that has lasted without needing to change for 100,000 years. I guess they don't rely on models based around 8% investment returns for perpetuity .

You guys know that a meltdown happens when a reactor runs out of control, so can't happen after it's shut off, right?

KevinW wrote: You guys know that a meltdown happens when a reactor runs out of control, so can't happen after it's shut off, right?

Not exactly.

If there were ever an electromagnetic pulse that stopped the flow of electricity on the planet, none of the reactors on the planet would be shut down properly. We'd all be dead as every core that wasn't shut down (and kept off) melted down simultaneously. Remember, keeping a reactor off requires electricity to be running at all times to keep the fuel submerged.

Also, the bigger problem is likely all of the spent fuel pools that need to have power maintained to them at all times, lest the water boils away and exposes them. It's a major problem.

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

Say a deadly virus occurs and kills everyone on the planet, Contagion (the movie) style, whose going to keep all the nuclear fuel submerged? Nobody. They will eventually boil their water tanks away and bed exposed to the environment. And this will happen all across the globe.

Is there any phenomenon which could create such a pulse (other than an alien race powerful enough to destroy the planet in many different ways)?

KevinW wrote: Is there any phenomenon which could create such a pulse (other than an alien race powerful enough to destroy the planet in many different ways)?

The sun discharges EMPs all the time. If one were large enough, or the Earth's magnetic shields were compromised (say during a magnetic pole flip), it could theoretically cause an EMP effect that stops the flow of electricity for awhile. Nuclear explosions have also been known to cause an EMP effect. According to Wikipedia, citing 1997 Congressional testimony, a large nuclear device detonated at 400–500 km (250 to 312 miles) over Kansas would cause an EMP all of the continental U.S.

Anyway, here's another scenario... Say a deadly virus occurs and kills everyone on the planet, Contagion (the movie) style, whose going to keep all the nuclear fuel submerged? Nobody. They will eventually boil their water tanks away and be exposed to the environment. And this will happen all across the globe.

Don't forget, the reactors need to be kept off — and that requires electricity and skilled management.

KevinW wrote: Is there any phenomenon which could create such a pulse (other than an alien race powerful enough to destroy the planet in many different ways)?

It happens in the form of certain kinds of solar storms that appear to occur at about 500 year intervals. 

The last such event (and the only one actually recorded in history) was in 1859.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859

Telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed, in some cases even shocking telegraph operators. Telegraph pylons threw sparks and telegraph paper spontaneously caught fire.  Some telegraph systems appeared to continue to send and receive messages despite having been disconnected from their power supplies.

It would probably instantly fry almost every circuit board in the world.  It's hard to imagine all of the trouble that would cause.

Hold hard cash and physical gold.

For the umpteenth time.

Gumby wrote: Anyway, here's another scenario... Say a deadly virus occurs and kills everyone on the planet, Contagion (the movie) style, whose going to keep all the nuclear fuel submerged? Nobody. They will eventually boil their water tanks away and be exposed to the environment. And this will happen all across the globe.

Don't forget, the reactors need to be kept off — and that requires electricity and skilled management.

The key, I think, is to understand that it only takes a relatively short period of no one at the controls for things to seriously begin to malfunction across the whole system.

I watched with interest last spring when Egypt experienced a mostly peaceful revolution, and yet there was still some looting and destruction of antiquities in Egyptian museums.  I thought to myself: "those items remained safely buried in tombs for thousands of years, and barely 100 years after we dig them up we are already seeing a mob snatch them and destroy them."  Even though we know that human society periodically experiences upheavals there was still no allowance made for that in Egypt, which holds relics of prior civilizations the safety of which surely ought to transcend some passing political turmoil.

What happens is that periodically things just break down for a while.  It can be because of a natural disaster, an epidemic, a war or just a really bad political situation.  When you build systems that require constant monitoring and maintenance you're just asking for trouble.

Imagine 1,000 years from now humans are studying the prior 1,000 years and they point out how the world basically fell into chaos for about 18 months in the year 2137 following the bizarre convergence of a solar EMP event and a global flu pandemic (such convergences are not unprecedented--World War I and the Spanish Flu pandemic overlapped in 1918).  During this 18 month period a dramatic amount of electronically stored knowledge was simply lost, there were hundreds of nuclear power plant meltdowns, a significant percentage of the human population died and many systems dependent upon global supply chains simply stopped functioning.

One of the things about complex systems that people often seem not to grasp is that the more efficient a system is the less resilient it is.  When our overall economic system drives everyone relentlessly toward greater efficiency, it also unwittingly often drives us toward less resiliency.

MediumTex wrote:One of the things about complex systems that people often seem not to grasp is that the more efficient a system is the less resilient it is.  When our overall economic system drives everyone relentlessly toward greater efficiency, it also unwittingly often drives us toward less resiliency.

[Mind explosion] That's deep. And very true. You should really get all of these ideas into a(nother) book sometime. You could really give the Malcom Gladwell types a run for their money.

Kind of like all the "efficient" paper contracts that were supposed to protect people against default and reduce market risk?

How about 3 inefficient branches of government when one would do?

Gumby wrote:

MediumTex wrote:One of the things about complex systems that people often seem not to grasp is that the more efficient a system is the less resilient it is.  When our overall economic system drives everyone relentlessly toward greater efficiency, it also unwittingly often drives us toward less resiliency.

[Mind explosion] That's deep. And very true. You should really get all of these ideas into a(nother) book sometime. You could really give the Malcom Gladwell types a run for their money.

I can't take credit for that one.  It's an idea that's been out there for a long time, but I'm glad I could serve it up here.

On a related note, Joseph Tainter wrote a book called "The Collapse of Complex Societies" in which he made a pretty simple and intuitive argument that each increment of complexity in society has some return in terms of benefits to the society relative to its costs.  At some point along the continuum of complexity a society begins to see declining marginal utility to extra units of social complexity until a society finds itself no longer experiencing any improvements in social organization through the introduction of additional complexity.  One of the underlying drivers of this dynamic is the increase in energy costs that typically accompany additional levels of social complexity.

Obviously, a more complex system is going to be more prone to breakdowns that simpler and more resilient systems would be able to handle.  Thus, one way we find out that we have created a system that is too complex is when it suddenly collapses as the lack of resilience embedded in the accumulated levels of complexity are suddenly exposed by some external shock to the system.  As we all know, such shocks happen more often than most people like to think.

If Roy Scheider's character from "Jaws" saw this principle swimming in the ocean he might say: "We're going to need a simpler boat."

I guess I file these disaster movie scenarios under "risks that are too remote to devote energy to."  Taking a look at death rate statistics can be illuminating.  There are about 10 times more deaths due to cardiovascular disease than violence, and that's something like 10-1000 times again more deaths than those caused by nuclear power accidents. (The figures vary quite a bit depending on who you ask.)  I allocate my "worry energy" accordingly.

MediumTex wrote: One of the things about complex systems that people often seem not to grasp is that the more efficient a system is the less resilient it is.  When our overall economic system drives everyone relentlessly toward greater efficiency, it also unwittingly often drives us toward less resiliency.

This is an old saw in systems engineering.  There are many opportunities to add a buffer or slack, which almost always makes the system more robust but less efficient.

For example: how many bathrooms do you want in your home?  With a spare bathroom, your "housing system" can handle all sorts of bumps in the road: a large party, shutting down one bathroom for repairs, hosting a boarder, etc.  But the efficiency and price of your "housing system" are worse than if you only had the bare minimum number of rooms.

These kind of tradeoffs exist at many levels: real estate space, manufacturing parts stockpiles ("lean"), electricity and water production capacity, number of links in the distribution supply chain (drop-shipping vs. three-tier), road throughput, network bandwidth, willingness of consumers to do without, buffers in online video streaming, automobile offroad capability, etc...  Specialization of labor, information technology, social interconnectedness, financial leverage, and globalization all push toward more efficiency but less slack.

Consequently things are cheaper now than they used to be in absolute terms, but part of that's because you don't get nearly the slack "baked in" that you used to.  Luckily you can compensate by adding slack back in at the household level, and I think this is sensible.  Live below your means, have a well stocked pantry, spare parts, ability to live for a few days without grid electricity, tools on hand, favors to call on, and so on.

KevinW wrote: I guess I file these disaster movie scenarios under "risks that are too remote to devote energy to."  Taking a look at death rate statistics can be illuminating.  There are about 10 times more deaths due to cardiovascular disease than violence, and that's something like 10-1000 times again more deaths than those caused by nuclear power accidents. (The figures vary quite a bit depending on who you ask.)  I allocate my "worry energy" accordingly.

Nobody's saying that we need to sit around worrying about this every day. The point is simply that our planet will eventually turn into a radioactive wasteland after our civilization has ended. And if a few Mad Max characters are still standing after society collapses, they'll likely be wiped out by the resulting radiation.

Every single reactor and fuel rod on the planet needs to be actively cooled for the next few thousand years to prevent the planet from being eradicated by radiation. If nobody's around to do that, the Earth will become a radioactive wasteland.

There's nothing we can do about it at this point, so there's no sense in worrying about it. It's just interesting to imagine what kind of story future archeologists may try to tell to explain what happened.

KevinW wrote: I guess I file these disaster movie scenarios under "risks that are too remote to devote energy to."  Taking a look at death rate statistics can be illuminating.  There are about 10 times more deaths due to cardiovascular disease than violence, and that's something like 10-1000 times again more deaths than those caused by nuclear power accidents. (The figures vary quite a bit depending on who you ask.)  I allocate my "worry energy" accordingly.

But it is SO much more stimulating to imagine the terrible things that would flow from a 1 in 400,000,000 event with effects one million times worse than those that would flow from a 1 in 400 event.

We're humans.  We like novelty and are intrigued by the unknown.

I'm not sure that complexity in itself always makes a system fragile. I think the danger comes when the whole of a complex system is totaly dependent on any single part. Something like an ecosystem is both complex and resilient because you can cut out any 50% of it and the remainder will survive. In human society the danger comes when we force everyone and all nations etc to all be the same. I think it is not too much of an exageration to say that the integrationist mindset is humanity's greatest threat. If we all just have google, KFC, and the federal reserve; then total global collapse is a very real possibility.

It's the combination of complexity and a relentless drive to efficiency.  In a stable environment redundancy and slack are inefficient and the market moves to eliminate them.  Which creates single points of failure that show up when the assumption of stability turns out to be false.  E.g. a flood in Thailand means the world runs out of hard drives which impacts every industry that uses computers which is practically everything ( http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/ ... rough_2013 ).

Another hypothesis for the Ark being an energy source is the Manna Machine.  From Wikkipedia:

"The Manna Machine is an ancient astronaut book by George Sassoon and Rodney Dale which concludes that a machine device was given to the Israelites, when they went on their 40 year journey in the Sinai Desert. The device was said to create manna, a type of algae. It explains how the Israelites survived their 40 year wandering in the Sinai Desert. It is said by Sassoon and Dale that a nuclear reactor used to power the manna machine was stored in the Ark of the Covenant. The Ark was supposed to have powered the machine to run continuously, producing manna for six days. On the 7th day it would be taken apart for cleaning so it could run the following week. This is where Sabbath is thought to come from."

The best evidence for the location of the Ark seems to be in Ethiopia.  But, the "guardian" who is imprisoned with it and who "protects" it 24/7 doesn't exactly look like he's suffering exposure to radiation sickness akin to the symptoms described in the Bible.

There's also interesting evidence linking the Knights Templar (who originally protected/transported the Ark) to the Treasure Pit of Oak Island in Nova Scotia.  No one has been able to successfully excavate it over hundreds of years.

MG

Lone Wolf wrote: Wow, I think the guy just claimed that the Ark of the Covenant (!!) acted as the conductor in the power plant here.

MachineGhost wrote: There's also interesting evidence linking the Knights Templar (who originally protected/transported the Ark) to the Treasure Pit of Oak Island in Nova Scotia.  No one has been able to successfully excavate it over hundreds of years.

Ha! I love this forum. For those who have never heard of it, the Oak Island Money Pit is actually a pretty interesting mystery. Check out the following video about it (9 minutes):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hw-lCOHbya8

Tortoise wrote:

MachineGhost wrote: There's also interesting evidence linking the Knights Templar (who originally protected/transported the Ark) to the Treasure Pit of Oak Island in Nova Scotia.  No one has been able to successfully excavate it over hundreds of years.

Ha! I love this forum. For those who have never heard of it, the Oak Island Money Pit is actually a pretty interesting mystery. Check out the following video about it (9 minutes):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hw-lCOHbya8

That's a pretty good video.

Calling any of that "evidence" that the Knights Templar buried the Ark of the Covenant on Oak Island is a bit of a stretch, though.