Viking Supporters Co-operative
Viking Chat => Off Topic => Topic started by: Viking Don on March 12, 2011, 11:41:03 pm
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So where are all the jokes? Do they have some kind of diplomatic immunity? Is it too soon? Am I too sick? Do I really need to ask that question?
Sorry for the people, but hope their industry is f**ked.
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They look like they're going to be struggling for the next 10 years don't they? The cost of refurbishing is going to have a bloody enormous impact on national finances. That'll be good news for some and downright bad news for others - most of us included I suspect.
Can't think of any jokes just yet though Don. Sorry.
BobG
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Don't know about ten years Bob, as always we don't get to know until ages after. I can remember sitting in the park hotel before a game on Boxing day a few years ago when the news was that 200 had been killed by an earthquake in Indonesia. Look how that turned out.
I don't think that finance comes into it, other than the fact that anyone who just bought Japanese goods will be sitting on a fortune.
Nuclear power stations all over there, they're not going to let on that this may be the end of the world in that area. Remember Chenobyl, no information whatsoever came out until years after, still hasn't probably. Half-life of these materials is far longer than we'll ever live.
As REM would say...
It's the End of the World, as we know it!
Ah well. it's only a holographic universe anyway, so don't worry! It's only an illusion.
EDIT: I use the word 'only' with discretion, probably easier to miss it out altogether.
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I just can't wait until these jokes start flooding in. But I think it's great how the Japanese aren't allowing their country to fall apart.
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The Japanese 2012 Wind Surfing squad must be keen, they've just arrived in f**king Dover!
I hope everyone's ok in Japan, the last time I had 9 aftershocks, I couldn't find my house either!
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The Japanese 2012 Wind Surfing squad must be keen, they've just arrived in f**king Dover!
I hope everyone's ok in Japan, the last time I had 9 aftershocks, I couldn't find my house either!
:laugh: :laugh: quality!
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The sydney bondi surf classsic has had it's results declared null and void after it was unexpectedly won by a Japanese man on a wardrobe......
Just turned the telly on, this is the best episode of tageshi's castle i have ever seen....
and probably the baddest i have been sent yet....
Rescuers in japan have called elton John, George Michael and Grahame Norton to help search through the rubble for injured victims
their work could prove invaluable as they are experts at finding Japs eyes covered in shit......
##################################
Poor ,poor people, watching the reports on tv made me feel physically sick for them. we really don't realise how lucky we are to live here where the most we have to worry about is a little bit of snow do we?
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Got to admire the Japanese fortitude.
I phoned a busines colleague of mine over there on Friday to see how they were coping. Apparently he was out partying. He kept shouting down the phone, \"Massive rave. Massive rave.\"
But seriously folks, being in the structural engineering business, it was very impressive to see how the Japanese infrastructure survived the earthquake itself. If the seismic engineering hadn't been at such a high quality, you might be looking at 1 million dead now. What you do to protect against a tsunami though is anyone's guess.
Interesting point on the effect on Japan's economy. They'll have it hard for a few months, but past experience suggests that many countries (at least, already developed ones) actually bounce back much stronger economically after a disaster like this. For example, there'll not be a single out of work builder, railway engineer, telecoms engineer or even simple shot shoveller in Japan for the next 5 years. That will give a massive boost to an economy which has been stubbornly bumping along the bottom for 20 years since the daft t**ts in 1990 implemented exactly the same policies that Gideon, Dave and Nick are now putting into place. They'll now have no choice but to expand public investment to get the place back on its feet.
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Billy, following on you post on a serious theme, the Japanese will be fine and will no doubt re-build in a manner designed to combat any increased threats to their structures. The vast majority of their economy recovery following the second world war can be attributed to a gentleman called William Edwards Deming. He was sent to Japan by Eissenhower at the end of the war, and he told them that if they would embrace the principles that he taught them, they would have the rest of the developed world screaming for protection within 5 years. The rest as they say is history, no one takes the piss out of Japanese quality now as they did when me and thee were kids eh? Being in the industry that you are, can I recommend a book for your reading list. If you can get a copy of \"Out of the Crisis\" by William Edwards Deming Cambridge Press 1986 it will change your thought processes no doubt, it certainly did do mine!!!!
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A Japanese friend of mine told me that he fled down into the sewers to find safety during the quake.
There he met a girl who had done the same thing. He said they fell in love but ha hasn't seen her for a few days.
He now wonders if it was real love, or just a case of two nips that passed through the shite.
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I won't be donating to the appeal fund, i've just seen a man getting interviewed on Sky News and he's got 2 massive boats on his drive ! the greedy B@st@rd.
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Our lass is Japanese and the bitch has dumped me as she comes to terms with the tragedies in her homeland. Oh well, plenty more in the sea to choose from, as they say.
I ran the bath for the kids earlier today and 3 Japs dropped out of the tap
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The Japanese version of Total Wipeout's a bit extreme...
I was talking to my mate on MSN earlier, and he was telling me about how he lost all his family and how his building was on fire. Shat himself every time I sent a nudge.
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Ellen MacArthur's solo round the world record as just been beaten by a Jap in a Deckchair.:woohoo:
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If you want to feel a bit less sympathetic I'd suggest watching a film called 'The Cove'.
At least Taiji will have been hit by the wave and hopefully wiped out the bas**rds that made their living there, they had it coming!
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:laugh: as sick as it may be I'm in stitches reading this thread.
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Christ, and I got stick for posting a picture of a dead cat? Real people with real families here folk, have some respect.
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Ellen MacArthur's solo round the world record as just been beaten by a Jap in a Deckchair.:woohoo:
Brilliant. :laugh:
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How do you spot a Japanese prostitute?
She's the one in the fishnets!
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There is going to be a charity conert for the Japanese Tsunami appeal
up to now Katrina and the waves, Beach Boys and Wet wet wet have agreed to perform
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There is going to be a charity conert for the Japanese Tsunami appeal
up to now Katrina and the waves, Beach Boys and Wet wet wet have agreed to perform
Apparently it's gonna be a cover of \"The Tide is High\" :thumbsup:
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I have been thinking about a comment by RedJ that as sick as these jokes are they make him laugh, and also Keyser's very valid point about having respect.... It isn't perhaps seemly to be finding humour in the face of such tragedy, but then, perhaps that is what keeps us from going under as we struggle to comprehend the unimaginable horrors these poor people are suffering right now.
They truly must feel the end of the world has arrived, three reactors critically damaged, an erupting volcano and now the threat of another massive earthquake and tsunami....I think perhaps God help them, that those who perished first could well be the unlucky, lucky ones.
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I have been thinking about a comment by RedJ that as sick as these jokes are they make him laugh, and also Keyser's very valid point about having respect.... It isn't perhaps seemly to be finding humour in the face of such tragedy, but then, perhaps that is what keeps us from going under as we struggle to comprehend the unimaginable horrors these poor people are suffering right now.
They truly must feel the end of the world has arrived, three reactors critically damaged, an erupting volcano and now the threat of another massive earthquake and tsunami....I think perhaps God help them, that those who perished first could well be the unlucky, lucky ones.
That's the way a guy I knew at school years ago explained the reason we made jokes about Chernobyl - we just couldn't imagine what it would've been like, or want to, for that matter, and we'd rather be positive (albeit in a rather dark way) about the situation than anything else.
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If you want to feel a bit less sympathetic I'd suggest watching a film called 'The Cove'.
At least Taiji will have been hit by the wave and hopefully wiped out the bas**rds that made their living there, they had it coming!
Brilliant film, pretty depressing though. Everytime i see pictures of people swimming with captive dolphins I think how traumatised they must be. Also amazing to know that dolphins can commit suicide.
Heres a picture to make you feel less sorry some of the people who have been killed:
(http://www.adventure-journal.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/dolphin_slaughter_taiji_japan_the_cove_brooke_mcdonald_19.jpg)
And the film: http://www.megavideo.com/?v=BD9DT9KL
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sorry bout the deppresing post on this thread :(
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If you want to feel a bit less sympathetic I'd suggest watching a film called 'The Cove'.
At least Taiji will have been hit by the wave and hopefully wiped out the bas**rds that made their living there, they had it coming!
Brilliant film, pretty depressing though. Everytime i see pictures of people swimming with captive dolphins I think how traumatised they must be. Also amazing to know that dolphins can commit suicide.
Heres a picture to make you feel less sorry some of the people who have been killed:
(http://www.adventure-journal.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/dolphin_slaughter_taiji_japan_the_cove_brooke_mcdonald_19.jpg)
And the film: http://www.megavideo.com/?v=BD9DT9KL
Yeah, all them kids what have been washed away deserved it, karma eh?
If only tsunami's could distinguish between people and dolphin murderers.
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if only
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It has always sickend me to see how the dolphins are killed, it is wrong and so very cruel..
But also totally incomparable to this terrlble catastrophe. No way should a babaric way of fishing mean so many innocents should perish in such a terrible way.. that isn't khama.
One small bright light innamongst such horror, a four month old baby girl found alive...Bless her little heart.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1366155/Japan-earthquake-survivor-reunited-baby-daughter--tsunami-warning-sounds.html
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Joking aside, the damage is almost beyond comprehension. Imagine this happening all the way from Skeggy to Dover.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/03/13/world/asia/satellite-photos-japan-before-and-after-tsunami.html
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In my ignorance before this I always thought that where I lived I would be safe, we are about half to three quaters a mile from the beach, and in the '58 floods even tho the water could be seen from my parents house it didn't actually come that far, plus I'm on a bit of a hill...
Cut to the reports of this tsunami and the terrifying fact that it travelled at least 10 km inland, and the sobering thought that within seconds of a wave like that hitting my beach, we would be gone.
When you think to yourself, 10 km from my house takes me to................. THAT is when you finally realise just how huge this wave really was.
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In my ignorance before this I always thought that where I lived I would be safe, we are about half to three quaters a mile from the beach, and in the '58 floods even tho the water could be seen from my parents house it didn't actually come that far, plus I'm on a bit of a hill...
Cut to the reports of this tsunami and the terrifying fact that it travelled at least 10 km inland, and the sobering thought that within seconds of a wave like that hitting my beach, we would be gone.
When you think to yourself, 10 km from my house takes me to................. THAT is when you finally realise just how huge this wave really was.
You want to hope that you don`t get a repeat of this then
Britains Biggest Earthquake (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1931_Dogger_Bank_earthquake)
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It makes you appreciate how lucky we are to be virtually in the middle of a plate.
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There is going to be a charity conert for the Japanese Tsunami appeal
up to now Katrina and the waves, Beach Boys and Wet wet wet have agreed to perform
SINGING \"THE TIDE IS HIGH\" NO DOUBT!
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In my ignorance before this I always thought that where I lived I would be safe, we are about half to three quaters a mile from the beach, and in the '58 floods even tho the water could be seen from my parents house it didn't actually come that far, plus I'm on a bit of a hill...
Cut to the reports of this tsunami and the terrifying fact that it travelled at least 10 km inland, and the sobering thought that within seconds of a wave like that hitting my beach, we would be gone.
When you think to yourself, 10 km from my house takes me to................. THAT is when you finally realise just how huge this wave really was.
You want to hope that you don`t get a repeat of this then
Britains Biggest Earthquake (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1931_Dogger_Bank_earthquake)
Bugger that.
THIS is what yon Norfolk Yokels want to be having sleepless night over.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storegga
Me, I'm glad I moved to halfway up one of them hill in Sheffield.
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Billy, following on you post on a serious theme, the Japanese will be fine and will no doubt re-build in a manner designed to combat any increased threats to their structures. The vast majority of their economy recovery following the second world war can be attributed to a gentleman called William Edwards Deming. He was sent to Japan by Eissenhower at the end of the war, and he told them that if they would embrace the principles that he taught them, they would have the rest of the developed world screaming for protection within 5 years. The rest as they say is history, no one takes the piss out of Japanese quality now as they did when me and thee were kids eh? Being in the industry that you are, can I recommend a book for your reading list. If you can get a copy of \"Out of the Crisis\" by William Edwards Deming Cambridge Press 1986 it will change your thought processes no doubt, it certainly did do mine!!!!
Never heard of that Savvy, but I'll definitely dig it out. Ta for the head-ups.
I find Japan fascinating. How a country can go from being more bestial than Nazi Germany (at Nakning in 1937, in three weeks of carnage they massacred Chinese civillians at 30 times the rate that the Nazis killed Jews at Auschwitz, and without the efficiency), to being flattened by American fire-bombs, to being a peace-loving, uber-efficient global manufacturing machine, to becoming a stagnant economic disaster-zone in the space of one lifetime is amazing. They must have a real culture of \"Yes sir - we do what you say.\" Fantastic when it is put to positive use - bloody awful or terrifying when it isn't.
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In my ignorance before this I always thought that where I lived I would be safe, we are about half to three quaters a mile from the beach, and in the '58 floods even tho the water could be seen from my parents house it didn't actually come that far, plus I'm on a bit of a hill...
Cut to the reports of this tsunami and the terrifying fact that it travelled at least 10 km inland, and the sobering thought that within seconds of a wave like that hitting my beach, we would be gone.
When you think to yourself, 10 km from my house takes me to................. THAT is when you finally realise just how huge this wave really was.
You want to hope that you don`t get a repeat of this then
Britains Biggest Earthquake (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1931_Dogger_Bank_earthquake)
from wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1931_Dogger_Bank_earthquake): \"in London the head of the waxwork of Dr Crippen at Madame Tussauds fell off.\"
God forbid we have an earthquake that strong again - imagine the chaos if David Beckhams head fell off! :blink:
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If you want to feel a bit less sympathetic I'd suggest watching a film called 'The Cove'.
At least Taiji will have been hit by the wave and hopefully wiped out the bas**rds that made their living there, they had it coming!
Brilliant film, pretty depressing though. Everytime i see pictures of people swimming with captive dolphins I think how traumatised they must be. Also amazing to know that dolphins can commit suicide.
Heres a picture to make you feel less sorry some of the people who have been killed:
(http://www.adventure-journal.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/dolphin_slaughter_taiji_japan_the_cove_brooke_mcdonald_19.jpg)
And the film: http://www.megavideo.com/?v=BD9DT9KL
Yeah, all them kids what have been washed away deserved it, karma eh?
If only tsunami's could distinguish between people and dolphin murderers.
Who mentioned the kids or any other innocent victims like? I said the 'bas**rds that made their living there'. Those bas**rds were even poisoning their own kids along with the rest of the population. Yep, that's karma. A crumb of comfort.
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'kin 'ell. If there's Karma like that going round, I'll make sure that none of my neighbours eat Bernard Matthews turkey rolls. There'll be a big chuffing asteroid on its way...
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LMAO! Dolphin murderers?? What about the evil Cod murderers? or Chicken killers? You've been listening to that green wellied brigade who'd have you believe dolphins are as inteligent as us. People deserved to die because they killed a fish? (I know) Next you'll be saying animal rights activists are right trying to murder scientists who use animals for research in an attempt to save humans.
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I'm not a fan of what I would consider to be barbaric hunting methods but I can't really relate Minimata, Nanking or Taiji to the effects that we are seeing in North East Japan, otherwise we start looking at Ukraine in 1932/3 or what used to be Yugoslavia, or Pol Pot or Rwanda.
Man has always been cruel - perhaps it is mankind that needs bumping off to enable the planet to survive and an earthquake anywhere would just be part of the natural scheme of things.
The people in that area of Japan appear to be showing incredible strength, and the economy of Japan will no doubt thrive on the full employment of the construction/utilities industry, but just for the moment I can smile at the dark humour as I sympathise with the people who for the time being have no homes and no belongings and missing families.
Meanwhile I'm seeing Ed Byrne tonight - I'll see if he comes up with something.
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Gallows humour is what the British are famous for.
When my grandad died I took the day off for his service, he was cremated. The next day I went back to work still upset and in the canteen, one of the lads says to me \"Have a nice barbeque yesterday?\" and about fifteen others pissed themselves with laughing. I laughed myself, even though it hurt. My mate who said it though came up and gave me a big cuddle, and the rest of the boys made a fuss and took me under their wing as I was a young lad then. This banter and support got me through a very tough time.
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LMAO! Dolphin murderers?? What about the evil Cod murderers? or Chicken killers? You've been listening to that green wellied brigade who'd have you believe dolphins are as inteligent as us. People deserved to die because they killed a fish? (I know) Next you'll be saying animal rights activists are right trying to murder scientists who use animals for research in an attempt to save humans.
Personally i am against killing animals. And these guys kill 25,000 dolphins a year, and sell most of them for $150 as meat. This meat is filled with dangerous levels of Murcury and other contaminants. This was being fed to children at schools as a way of keeping there dolphin meat selling. I accept that you dont care about dolphins being killed, but im pretty sure if kids new about how the dolphins in dolphinariums had been captured, they would feel different. So yes, i do think these few people deserved to die, but obviously not along with thousands and thousands of innocent people.
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Dear Japan
Bit of a bas**rd when something sneaks up on you without any warning eh ?
Love all the lads from
Pearl Harbour.
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Don't you think nuking them was payback enough? :laugh:
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LMAO! Dolphin murderers?? What about the evil Cod murderers? or Chicken killers? You've been listening to that green wellied brigade who'd have you believe dolphins are as inteligent as us. People deserved to die because they killed a fish? (I know) Next you'll be saying animal rights activists are right trying to murder scientists who use animals for research in an attempt to save humans.
Yes, cos Cod are well known for being conscious, self-aware beings aren't they...along with turkey's etc...always in front of the mirror doing their hair :laugh:
I'd look stuff up before making ignorant comments, it's nothing to do with being an animal rights activist (I'll happily eat anything that doesn't recognise itself in a mirror), why not read the evidence? And no, I won't be saying whatever other rubbish you may assume I'll say next...Jeez.
Start here:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090914172644.htm
You also seem to have overlooked the 'poisoning their own children' part as well, in your Denis Leary type rant. Like I said in the first place, I recommend actually watching 'The Cove', not reading a shitty review and forming an opinion based on that. Then ask if people deserved to die because they killed a fish (I know too!). :) BTW, my answer is an unequivocal 'YES'. Had they found you in their town trying to uncover what they were actually doing, they'd have slit your throat, no qualms. If you doubt that then you've been listening to the blue or red wellied brigade who try and make you think everyone is like us. Naive to say to least.
EDIT: BTW talking of Grandads, mine spent 3 years in a POW camp run by....correct. I know for sure that had he been around today he'd have been leaping around for joy, the silly old bugger would never forgive them, even after they stopped worshiping their emperor as a God. Still, his legacy lives on in that I've never bought a Jap car.
Ian H, good post, what did Ed come up with?
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Do we need nuclear/oil power?
Solar panels covering deserts, wind, tidal forces etc. would power the world, no problem.
We need nuclear/oil power because:
Individuals need to make lots of money. It'd be unheard of to have FREE energy, even though it's there for the taking anyway.
Not surprisingly, it's those individuals that try to 'educate' people.
Who's winning?
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There were, at the very least, half a dozen viable ways that alternative and substantial power sources could have been developeed in the 70's and 80's. Geothermal inclines in the oceans, burning (and using as fertiliser the more compost like stuff) all our rubbish to creat heat to drive turbines, nuclear fusion (the funds allocated to that were and are plain shameful), satellite generators using the suns rays and beaming power down to Earth (that one's relatively easy I understand), one about using the sea as a source of some special atom thing and then doing summat dead clever with it, there's plenty more. But mankind and more particularly, his vested interests, killed every single one. So now we have no choice but to use fission - which is downright scary stuff.
We failed to face up to the challenge. Have you ever thought, the last 3 to 4 decades could easily have seen the peak of human development and achievement? With resources dwindling, humanity procreating, poisions slowly accumulating, vegetation (and therefore oxygen) plainly disappearing at a staggering rate, sea levels rising, weather becoming ever more crop unfriendly, the tundra already melting and so letting off more methane than even we could ever produce - and now cannot stop even if we tried. The pressure is mounting. It's an easy argument to make that humanity is about to pass beyond its best years of achieving anything.
BobG
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There were, at the very least, half a dozen viable ways that alternative and substantial power sources could have been developeed in the 70's and 80's. Geothermal inclines in the oceans, burning (and using as fertiliser the more compost like stuff) all our rubbish to creat heat to drive turbines, nuclear fusion (the funds allocated to that were and are plain shameful), satellite generators using the suns rays and beaming power down to Earth (that one's relatively easy I understand), one about using the sea as a source of some special atom thing and then doing summat dead clever with it, there's plenty more. But mankind and more particularly, his vested interests, killed every single one. So now we have no choice but to use fission - which is downright scary stuff.
We failed to face up to the challenge. Have you ever thought, the last 3 to 4 decades could easily have seen the peak of human development and achievement? With resources dwindling, humanity procreating, poisions slowly accumulating, vegetation (and therefore oxygen) plainly disappearing at a staggering rate, sea levels rising, weather becoming ever more crop unfriendly, the tundra already melting and so letting off more methane than even we could ever produce - and now cannot stop even if we tried. The pressure is mounting. It's an easy argument to make that humanity is about to pass beyond its best years of achieving anything.
BobG
I've got a book for you Bob.
Why the West Rules (For Now...) By Ian Morris. He's a Brit, from Stoke, who's now a prof of Archaeology and History at Stanford.
The book is breathtakingly ambitious, thoroughly researched but also, very. very readable. He set himself the target of figuring out why it is that the West (Europe/America) is currently more developed and powerful than the East (Japan and China). Which it is, unquestionably.
He goes back 20,000 years and follows the ebbs and flows of civilizations on both sides of the planet, developing a scoring system for how powerful and advanced they were.
For someone like me, who has a naive belief that everything will get better in the long run, it's both exhilliarating and terrifying. He describes dozens of advanced civilizations that rose and fell like waves over centuries and millenia. He shows how, after the fall of Rome, Europe didn't reach the same fell of development until the 1720. In the meantime, China had developed a civilization as powerful as Rome by 1000AD (I'd never heard of it!) which itself then collapsed and led to their own Dark Ages.
But the key thing is that it gives you a feeling for just how exponential the development in the last 250 years has been. Time and agains, civilizations got to the level that we were are by the mid 1700s, then collapsed. THIS time, the West broke through, had the Industrial Revolution and as a result we came to dominate the planet. This is utterly unprecedented in human history.
Morris reckons that the Romans' development (by his score) was about 40 in 100AD. We then dropped to about 20 for the next 1600 years before getting back to 40 in 1720. Now, he scores us at about 900!
Think about how rapidly technological development is now. It took well over 100 years for trains to go from 10mph to 100mph. In the last 50 years, we've gone from 100mph to 250-300mph. 30 years ago, a ZX Spectrum with 16k RAM and a 3.5MHz processor was the height of accessible computing. Today, for similar money you can buy a machine with 1000 times the processor speed and 200,000 times the RAM. Think about how rapidly the internet has revolutionised communication. It took 100 years from the telephone being invented, to International Direct Dialling being common. It's only taken 15 years for mobile phones and the internet to eclipse that type of communication 1000 fold.
So technology is developing capability at a rate that gets faster all the time. Think about what the technological world will look like by 2050. 2100. Never mind 2200.
Think about bringing a foot soldier from Wellington's army to the present day. Try explaining to him that you could call someone on the other side of the world using a tiny machine in you hand. That you could go onto a computer (explain waht a computer is) and use a rectangle of plastic (explain to him what plastic is) to take money from your bank account (explain what a bank account is) to buy a plane ticket (explain what a plane is) to fly within 24 hours to New Zealand (explain what New Zealand is). Now think about how utterly incomprehensible the technological world of 2200 would be to US!
Morris also admits that we have grave problems to get through over the next half century. But if we DO, technological development will take us to levels where today's worries are as trifling as we consider the worries of 1800 to be. Today, virtually no-one dies of smallpox, TB. Virtually no-one has leprosy, rickets, scurvy. In 100 years time, people will say the same about cancer, coronary heart disease etc. Over the next 100 years, the traditionally grindingly poor billions of China and India will attain lifestyles like ours.
And technological development will sort out the problems that come with that. Global warming will be sorted. Food production will be sorted. New fuels will be sorted. All by technology. As long as we don't go all Flat Earth and start going anti-technology. That's the reaction of comfortable westerners who can afford to complain from their centrally heated homes with their well-stocked cupboards.
Here endeth the rant.
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There were, at the very least, half a dozen viable ways that alternative and substantial power sources could have been developeed in the 70's and 80's. Geothermal inclines in the oceans, burning (and using as fertiliser the more compost like stuff) all our rubbish to creat heat to drive turbines, nuclear fusion (the funds allocated to that were and are plain shameful), satellite generators using the suns rays and beaming power down to Earth (that one's relatively easy I understand), one about using the sea as a source of some special atom thing and then doing summat dead clever with it, there's plenty more. But mankind and more particularly, his vested interests, killed every single one. So now we have no choice but to use fission - which is downright scary stuff.
We failed to face up to the challenge. Have you ever thought, the last 3 to 4 decades could easily have seen the peak of human development and achievement? With resources dwindling, humanity procreating, poisions slowly accumulating, vegetation (and therefore oxygen) plainly disappearing at a staggering rate, sea levels rising, weather becoming ever more crop unfriendly, the tundra already melting and so letting off more methane than even we could ever produce - and now cannot stop even if we tried. The pressure is mounting. It's an easy argument to make that humanity is about to pass beyond its best years of achieving anything.
BobG
I've got a book for you Bob.
Why the West Rules (For Now...) By Ian Morris. He's a Brit, from Stoke, who's now a prof of Archaeology and History at Stanford.
The book is breathtakingly ambitious, thoroughly researched but also, very. very readable. He set himself the target of figuring out why it is that the West (Europe/America) is currently more developed and powerful than the East (Japan and China). Which it is, unquestionably.
He goes back 20,000 years and follows the ebbs and flows of civilizations on both sides of the planet, developing a scoring system for how powerful and advanced they were.
For someone like me, who has a naive belief that everything will get better in the long run, it's both exhilliarating and terrifying. He describes dozens of advanced civilizations that rose and fell like waves over centuries and millenia. He shows how, after the fall of Rome, Europe didn't reach the same fell of development until the 1720. In the meantime, China had developed a civilization as powerful as Rome by 1000AD (I'd never heard of it!) which itself then collapsed and led to their own Dark Ages.
But the key thing is that it gives you a feeling for just how exponential the development in the last 250 years has been. Time and agains, civilizations got to the level that we were are by the mid 1700s, then collapsed. THIS time, the West broke through, had the Industrial Revolution and as a result we came to dominate the planet. This is utterly unprecedented in human history.
Morris reckons that the Romans' development (by his score) was about 40 in 100AD. We then dropped to about 20 for the next 1600 years before getting back to 40 in 1720. Now, he scores us at about 900!
Think about how rapidly technological development is now. It took well over 100 years for trains to go from 10mph to 100mph. In the last 50 years, we've gone from 100mph to 250-300mph. 30 years ago, a ZX Spectrum with 16k RAM and a 3.5MHz processor was the height of accessible computing. Today, for similar money you can buy a machine with 1000 times the processor speed and 200,000 times the RAM. Think about how rapidly the internet has revolutionised communication. It took 100 years from the telephone being invented, to International Direct Dialling being common. It's only taken 15 years for mobile phones and the internet to eclipse that type of communication 1000 fold.
So technology is developing capability at a rate that gets faster all the time. Think about what the technological world will look like by 2050. 2100. Never mind 2200.
Think about bringing a foot soldier from Wellington's army to the present day. Try explaining to him that you could call someone on the other side of the world using a tiny machine in you hand. That you could go onto a computer (explain waht a computer is) and use a rectangle of plastic (explain to him what plastic is) to take money from your bank account (explain what a bank account is) to buy a plane ticket (explain what a plane is) to fly within 24 hours to New Zealand (explain what New Zealand is). Now think about how utterly incomprehensible the technological world of 2200 would be to US!
Morris also admits that we have grave problems to get through over the next half century. But if we DO, technological development will take us to levels where today's worries are as trifling as we consider the worries of 1800 to be. Today, virtually no-one dies of smallpox, TB. Virtually no-one has leprosy, rickets, scurvy. In 100 years time, people will say the same about cancer, coronary heart disease etc. Over the next 100 years, the traditionally grindingly poor billions of China and India will attain lifestyles like ours.
And technological development will sort out the problems that come with that. Global warming will be sorted. Food production will be sorted. New fuels will be sorted. All by technology. As long as we don't go all Flat Earth and start going anti-technology. That's the reaction of comfortable westerners who can afford to complain from their centrally heated homes with their well-stocked cupboards.
Here endeth the rant.
Haha BST. Eventually we'll all live forever and get on with each other forever. You know that is NOT going to happen, second law of thermodynamics init? Why would humanity be excepted, explain. You've heard of entropy. Philosophy loses over Physics.
As much as I'd like to say it's all going to be OK on the night, it isn't. It's all going to end, even every trace of what you are now. Humanity seeks order, and order leads to disorder. May as well don the black outfits now, as it's inevitable.
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Viking Don:
Either Ed hadn't heard any or decided that the couple of hundred folks from Grimsby area that bothered to turn out were too close to being a town on an East Coast to risk upsetting them.
My Dad was a POW in Burma in WW2 and he never talked about it - and he/we never bought electrical goods or cars labelled as made in Japan. Strangely he bought a Nissan late in his life and his reasoning was that it was assembled in Sunderland so that was OK ..... I think he'd have been OK with me having a VW though!
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Viking Don:
Either Ed hadn't heard any or decided that the couple of hundred folks from Grimsby area that bothered to turn out were too close to being a town on an East Coast to risk upsetting them.
My Dad was a POW in Burma in WW2 and he never talked about it - and he/we never bought electrical goods or cars labelled as made in Japan. Strangely he bought a Nissan late in his life and his reasoning was that it was assembled in Sunderland so that was OK ..... I think he'd have been OK with me having a VW though!
Like you Ian, my family circumstances were the same in that my Grandad also spent a long time in a Japanese POW camp in Burma. He too never discussed what had happened to him save........it was horrific and I don't want you ever to know son.
However he never (as far as I know) hated the Japanese nation per se. but he did look at lables on electrical items and cars and never knowingly bought anything Japanese. I am told his whole demeanour (as well as health) changed him for the worse for the rest of his life.
Do I hate the Japs............of course not but currently pity the weak and defenceless amongst them. They are a strong nation with a strong sense of national pride who will rebuild their lives and country bigger and better for the 2nd. time in the last 60+ years.
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He did let us buy http://www.capitalgardens.co.uk/nippon-ant-killer-powder-p-6373.html tho' ...... Sorry, the thread was about our black sense of humour allowing us to cope - we've got to be able to laugh - too many tears!
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Billy - agree entirely that technological development could cure many, many ills. But I had two points which you've not addressed:
1) technological development is going to be forced to focus on immediate things like providing food, managing wars, managing water and managing the climate. With more and more demands being placed upon it, and less and less resources with which to meet all the varied demands we all seem to blindly believe technology will meet
2) Humankind shied away from many of the big, big challenges. I gave some examples above. You can call it what you like, you can attribute it to what you like, but the bottom line is - we did. Personally, I put a lot of it down to vested interests and politcal manoeuvering - but that's just an opinion.
Put the two together and you have a case for humanity having reached the peak of its ability to deliver solutions. Who the fcuk, for example, cares about a bloody I-Phone when water is running out, and not much is being done about it, in a third of the world? Who the fcuk cares about HD TV when we're reducing the bio diversity of this planet by raping it to feed these stupid marketing gimmicks, and, permanently damaging our own well being by such a large rate each year that I'm frightened to give the figures?
We are in dnager of losing the capacity to deliver the solutions we're going to need. Electricty? Just where is it all going to come from eh? Nuclear? Unlikely we'll commit to enough. Oil? For a while, yes. But how much longer? Coal? Could be - but each megawatt of coal fired electricity chucks out something like 1000 times the pollution of a megawatt of nuclear. And it kills people. And it uses vast tonnages of oil moving it around and clearing up the waste. Wind? Some, yes. But not base load. It could give around 2% of world demand. Hydro? Likewise. Burning waste? If we ever decide to do it, that too will only provide about 2%. Space generators? They would solve the problem entirely. But who's doing owt about it eh? We've failed the challenge I tell thee!
BobG
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Bob.
That attitude has been put forward in every generation since Malthus. And every generation makes the same mistake - assuming that TODAY's technology us all that we'll have to solve tomorrow's problems.
You're right that those are big challenges. But they will be addressed by improvements in technology that we can't even begin to
Imagine yet.
Go back to Malthus, who \"proved\" in The early 1800s that population growth was bound to end in mass starvation. \"The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.\" His conclusion was that the poor should be allowed to rot. Just like his philosophical descendant Teddy Goldsmith who started The Ecologist with similar underpinning thoughts. (And his nephew is now Cameron's environment guru - God f**king help us...)
Every one of them is steeped in a flat earth philosophy that sees technology as an enemy, when it is actually the drive that has taken billions of us out if grinding poverty, illness and early death. And over the next century, it will solve ALL the problems that you flag up.
Optimism! In 200 years time, your worries will look as foolish and short sighted as Malthus's do today.
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It's a fair point Billy. History is full of Cassandra's crying 'woe is me'. Where I get hung up is on the notion that physical resources are not infinite, that the demands upon those diminishing resources are increasing exponentially and that missed opportunities don't often come around again. It might be years and years away yet - who can tell? - but at some point there has to be a peak - and a subsequent drop.
Bob
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Sure Bob, but what are \"resources\"?
In 1800, who cared about crude oil? In 1600, who cared about coal?
In 2200, who knows what resources will be considered vital?
Ian Morris has a theory that technological developments occur when scared, lazy or greedy people work out ways to do things better, easier or more profitably, to make themselves stronger, more secure and wealthier. If the last 200 years, since the Industrial Revolution, tells you anything, it's that mankind has a phenomenal ability to work out solutions to problems that seemed impossible to previous generations. We're worried now about the Japanese reactors, but imagine going back 200 years and telling Napoleon that by 2011, 50% of France's energy would come not from muscle, horses, burning wood, windmills or burning coal, but by splitting atoms. If you'd have told Napoleon that France's very existence would have depended on a resource called Uranium, he'd have said, \"But that is worthless today. A few nutcases use it as a paint pigment.\"
Now extrapolate that 200 years forward and you see immediately that there will be technological developments and use of other resources that we cannot possibly imagine today.
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There were, at the very least, half a dozen viable ways that alternative and substantial power sources could have been developeed in the 70's and 80's. Geothermal inclines in the oceans, burning (and using as fertiliser the more compost like stuff) all our rubbish to creat heat to drive turbines, nuclear fusion (the funds allocated to that were and are plain shameful), satellite generators using the suns rays and beaming power down to Earth (that one's relatively easy I understand), one about using the sea as a source of some special atom thing and then doing summat dead clever with it, there's plenty more. But mankind and more particularly, his vested interests, killed every single one. So now we have no choice but to use fission - which is downright scary stuff.
We failed to face up to the challenge. Have you ever thought, the last 3 to 4 decades could easily have seen the peak of human development and achievement? With resources dwindling, humanity procreating, poisions slowly accumulating, vegetation (and therefore oxygen) plainly disappearing at a staggering rate, sea levels rising, weather becoming ever more crop unfriendly, the tundra already melting and so letting off more methane than even we could ever produce - and now cannot stop even if we tried. The pressure is mounting. It's an easy argument to make that humanity is about to pass beyond its best years of achieving anything.
BobG
I've got a book for you Bob.
Why the West Rules (For Now...) By Ian Morris. He's a Brit, from Stoke, who's now a prof of Archaeology and History at Stanford.
The book is breathtakingly ambitious, thoroughly researched but also, very. very readable. He set himself the target of figuring out why it is that the West (Europe/America) is currently more developed and powerful than the East (Japan and China). Which it is, unquestionably.
He goes back 20,000 years and follows the ebbs and flows of civilizations on both sides of the planet, developing a scoring system for how powerful and advanced they were.
For someone like me, who has a naive belief that everything will get better in the long run, it's both exhilliarating and terrifying. He describes dozens of advanced civilizations that rose and fell like waves over centuries and millenia. He shows how, after the fall of Rome, Europe didn't reach the same fell of development until the 1720. In the meantime, China had developed a civilization as powerful as Rome by 1000AD (I'd never heard of it!) which itself then collapsed and led to their own Dark Ages.
But the key thing is that it gives you a feeling for just how exponential the development in the last 250 years has been. Time and agains, civilizations got to the level that we were are by the mid 1700s, then collapsed. THIS time, the West broke through, had the Industrial Revolution and as a result we came to dominate the planet. This is utterly unprecedented in human history.
Morris reckons that the Romans' development (by his score) was about 40 in 100AD. We then dropped to about 20 for the next 1600 years before getting back to 40 in 1720. Now, he scores us at about 900!
Think about how rapidly technological development is now. It took well over 100 years for trains to go from 10mph to 100mph. In the last 50 years, we've gone from 100mph to 250-300mph. 30 years ago, a ZX Spectrum with 16k RAM and a 3.5MHz processor was the height of accessible computing. Today, for similar money you can buy a machine with 1000 times the processor speed and 200,000 times the RAM. Think about how rapidly the internet has revolutionised communication. It took 100 years from the telephone being invented, to International Direct Dialling being common. It's only taken 15 years for mobile phones and the internet to eclipse that type of communication 1000 fold.
So technology is developing capability at a rate that gets faster all the time. Think about what the technological world will look like by 2050. 2100. Never mind 2200.
Think about bringing a foot soldier from Wellington's army to the present day. Try explaining to him that you could call someone on the other side of the world using a tiny machine in you hand. That you could go onto a computer (explain waht a computer is) and use a rectangle of plastic (explain to him what plastic is) to take money from your bank account (explain what a bank account is) to buy a plane ticket (explain what a plane is) to fly within 24 hours to New Zealand (explain what New Zealand is). Now think about how utterly incomprehensible the technological world of 2200 would be to US!
Morris also admits that we have grave problems to get through over the next half century. But if we DO, technological development will take us to levels where today's worries are as trifling as we consider the worries of 1800 to be. Today, virtually no-one dies of smallpox, TB. Virtually no-one has leprosy, rickets, scurvy. In 100 years time, people will say the same about cancer, coronary heart disease etc. Over the next 100 years, the traditionally grindingly poor billions of China and India will attain lifestyles like ours.
And technological development will sort out the problems that come with that. Global warming will be sorted. Food production will be sorted. New fuels will be sorted. All by technology. As long as we don't go all Flat Earth and start going anti-technology. That's the reaction of comfortable westerners who can afford to complain from their centrally heated homes with their well-stocked cupboards.
Here endeth the rant.
What utter rubbish!
Sinclair Spectrums had either 16kb or 48kb of RAM. You are clearly thinking of the ZX81, which had 3.5kb of RAM (and an optional 16kb external RAM pack), or the original VIC-20 which had the same base RAM.
Tsk, shoddy work, BST. Not up to your usual standard!
;-)
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There were, at the very least, half a dozen viable ways that alternative and substantial power sources could have been developeed in the 70's and 80's. Geothermal inclines in the oceans, burning (and using as fertiliser the more compost like stuff) all our rubbish to creat heat to drive turbines, nuclear fusion (the funds allocated to that were and are plain shameful), satellite generators using the suns rays and beaming power down to Earth (that one's relatively easy I understand), one about using the sea as a source of some special atom thing and then doing summat dead clever with it, there's plenty more. But mankind and more particularly, his vested interests, killed every single one. So now we have no choice but to use fission - which is downright scary stuff.
We failed to face up to the challenge. Have you ever thought, the last 3 to 4 decades could easily have seen the peak of human development and achievement? With resources dwindling, humanity procreating, poisions slowly accumulating, vegetation (and therefore oxygen) plainly disappearing at a staggering rate, sea levels rising, weather becoming ever more crop unfriendly, the tundra already melting and so letting off more methane than even we could ever produce - and now cannot stop even if we tried. The pressure is mounting. It's an easy argument to make that humanity is about to pass beyond its best years of achieving anything.
BobG
I've got a book for you Bob.
Why the West Rules (For Now...) By Ian Morris. He's a Brit, from Stoke, who's now a prof of Archaeology and History at Stanford.
The book is breathtakingly ambitious, thoroughly researched but also, very. very readable. He set himself the target of figuring out why it is that the West (Europe/America) is currently more developed and powerful than the East (Japan and China). Which it is, unquestionably.
He goes back 20,000 years and follows the ebbs and flows of civilizations on both sides of the planet, developing a scoring system for how powerful and advanced they were.
For someone like me, who has a naive belief that everything will get better in the long run, it's both exhilliarating and terrifying. He describes dozens of advanced civilizations that rose and fell like waves over centuries and millenia. He shows how, after the fall of Rome, Europe didn't reach the same fell of development until the 1720. In the meantime, China had developed a civilization as powerful as Rome by 1000AD (I'd never heard of it!) which itself then collapsed and led to their own Dark Ages.
But the key thing is that it gives you a feeling for just how exponential the development in the last 250 years has been. Time and agains, civilizations got to the level that we were are by the mid 1700s, then collapsed. THIS time, the West broke through, had the Industrial Revolution and as a result we came to dominate the planet. This is utterly unprecedented in human history.
Morris reckons that the Romans' development (by his score) was about 40 in 100AD. We then dropped to about 20 for the next 1600 years before getting back to 40 in 1720. Now, he scores us at about 900!
Think about how rapidly technological development is now. It took well over 100 years for trains to go from 10mph to 100mph. In the last 50 years, we've gone from 100mph to 250-300mph. 30 years ago, a ZX Spectrum with 16k RAM and a 3.5MHz processor was the height of accessible computing. Today, for similar money you can buy a machine with 1000 times the processor speed and 200,000 times the RAM. Think about how rapidly the internet has revolutionised communication. It took 100 years from the telephone being invented, to International Direct Dialling being common. It's only taken 15 years for mobile phones and the internet to eclipse that type of communication 1000 fold.
So technology is developing capability at a rate that gets faster all the time. Think about what the technological world will look like by 2050. 2100. Never mind 2200.
Think about bringing a foot soldier from Wellington's army to the present day. Try explaining to him that you could call someone on the other side of the world using a tiny machine in you hand. That you could go onto a computer (explain waht a computer is) and use a rectangle of plastic (explain to him what plastic is) to take money from your bank account (explain what a bank account is) to buy a plane ticket (explain what a plane is) to fly within 24 hours to New Zealand (explain what New Zealand is). Now think about how utterly incomprehensible the technological world of 2200 would be to US!
Morris also admits that we have grave problems to get through over the next half century. But if we DO, technological development will take us to levels where today's worries are as trifling as we consider the worries of 1800 to be. Today, virtually no-one dies of smallpox, TB. Virtually no-one has leprosy, rickets, scurvy. In 100 years time, people will say the same about cancer, coronary heart disease etc. Over the next 100 years, the traditionally grindingly poor billions of China and India will attain lifestyles like ours.
And technological development will sort out the problems that come with that. Global warming will be sorted. Food production will be sorted. New fuels will be sorted. All by technology. As long as we don't go all Flat Earth and start going anti-technology. That's the reaction of comfortable westerners who can afford to complain from their centrally heated homes with their well-stocked cupboards.
Here endeth the rant.
It is worth remembering that all that Human development has largely been driven by simply burning things. Releasing a natural source of solar power stored over hundreds and thousands of years. The discovery of fire made the difference for early man. The ancient empires burned wood, the industrial revolution really got underway when we discovered we could burn coal. Then someone this liquid black stuff coming out of the ground burned and that pushed development on again.
I find it sobering when you think that for all our ingenuity and our technology most of it is still driven by burning things and in that respect, things haven't really moved as far forward as we like to think. For me, solving the energy problem remains our greatest challenge.
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Does anybody think the day will come when man can harness Trouser Gas?
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If we insist on eating Cows (and I do), then we should definitely burn theirs. Just a case of getting trousers that fit.
Billy: People ARE still starving today. Maybe not in Denaby, but balby...
And France is 75% nuclear. Thankfully they're not on a fault.
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I was thinking a pair of Farrah's just to add a bit of class to the cultured Bovine that has the ability to refrain from discharging a bucket of shit, at will. That said I suspect the Farrah's would be too tight to hold the pre-shit gas. I think scientifically, we'd need to be looking at ladies pregnancy pants (obviously stylish ones in a denim effect to give the Bovine some dignity).
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Elasticated waist isnt a good look though, Cussy. Given the state the world is in, the last thing any of us need right now is a bovine uprising, demanding River Island pants rather than Mothercare.
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Farrah's are real Knacker Crackers, they were just fine when you were 15 and all you had in your pocket was a front door key and a dinner ticket... Try a pair now with a wallet and a phone, Christ it's enough to make yer eyes water.:cry:
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Does anybody think the day will come when man can harness Trouser Gas?
In a way, already being done up and down the country, where sewage works are using methanegas from sewage waste to power the works themselves. The Salt End Sewage Treatmnent works in Hull being a case in point.
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That explains where Hull is then, I thought it was a place called 'isthatyou-youdirtybas**rd'
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Gallows humour is what the British are famous for.
When my grandad died I took the day off for his service, he was cremated. The next day I went back to work still upset and in the canteen, one of the lads says to me \"Have a nice barbeque yesterday?\" and about fifteen others pissed themselves with laughing. I laughed myself, even though it hurt. My mate who said it though came up and gave me a big cuddle, and the rest of the boys made a fuss and took me under their wing as I was a young lad then. This banter and support got me through a very tough time.
Its what has made the Railways a great place to work over the years Chris! The inate ability to not take each other too seriously and have the crack, is what makes the place tolerable! who else would turn out at silly o'clock in all kinds of weather if you couldn't have a laugh with each other! long may it continue! I spent sometime pissing about moving boxes about in a Warehouse and realised leaving the rail industry was probably not the best career move I made!
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Billy, following on you post on a serious theme, the Japanese will be fine and will no doubt re-build in a manner designed to combat any increased threats to their structures. The vast majority of their economy recovery following the second world war can be attributed to a gentleman called William Edwards Deming. He was sent to Japan by Eissenhower at the end of the war, and he told them that if they would embrace the principles that he taught them, they would have the rest of the developed world screaming for protection within 5 years. The rest as they say is history, no one takes the piss out of Japanese quality now as they did when me and thee were kids eh? Being in the industry that you are, can I recommend a book for your reading list. If you can get a copy of \"Out of the Crisis\" by William Edwards Deming Cambridge Press 1986 it will change your thought processes no doubt, it certainly did do mine!!!!
Never heard of that Savvy, but I'll definitely dig it out. Ta for the head-ups.
I find Japan fascinating. How a country can go from being more bestial than Nazi Germany (at Nakning in 1937, in three weeks of carnage they massacred Chinese civillians at 30 times the rate that the Nazis killed Jews at Auschwitz, and without the efficiency), to being flattened by American fire-bombs, to being a peace-loving, uber-efficient global manufacturing machine, to becoming a stagnant economic disaster-zone in the space of one lifetime is amazing. They must have a real culture of \"Yes sir - we do what you say.\" Fantastic when it is put to positive use - bloody awful or terrifying when it isn't.
Me and you both Bill, you'll find that the majority of what they do is not rocket science, its basic common sense combined with the ability to listen as well as talk.
Whilst at Sunderland University I had the opportunity to visit the Public works department at Washington. The example being made was how a public sector company could work in the private sector. The bill of goods was the public works being able to quote you for a set of double glazed windows ratber than Safe style UK or Everest et al, and the public works would undercut and fit said windows! At the factory, the final product involved a ten stage process which included as the last stage, you've got it, \"inspection\".
Now the Japanese have a process called \"poka yoka\" which is basically a mistake proofing system. The basic tenaments are that as a process you accept no defects, you create no defects, and you pass on no defects, if all of this is achieved at each stage of the process, final inspection becomes obsolete, unfortunely in this country, we've not managed to get on that paradigm yet!!!
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Another example was quoted by an American management guru called Tom Peters. He gave the example of a contract between an American firm and a japanese manufacturing company. The contract was for tens of thousands of a specific component that had to be manufactured to a very tight specification but allowed a small % (1% I think) to be outside the tolerance. When the shipment was delivered, the Amercians found a package that contained the 1% that were out of tolerance, and were clearly labelled as such!
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Billy, following on you post on a serious theme, the Japanese will be fine and will no doubt re-build in a manner designed to combat any increased threats to their structures. The vast majority of their economy recovery following the second world war can be attributed to a gentleman called William Edwards Deming. He was sent to Japan by Eissenhower at the end of the war, and he told them that if they would embrace the principles that he taught them, they would have the rest of the developed world screaming for protection within 5 years. The rest as they say is history, no one takes the piss out of Japanese quality now as they did when me and thee were kids eh? Being in the industry that you are, can I recommend a book for your reading list. If you can get a copy of \"Out of the Crisis\" by William Edwards Deming Cambridge Press 1986 it will change your thought processes no doubt, it certainly did do mine!!!!
Never heard of that Savvy, but I'll definitely dig it out. Ta for the head-ups.
I find Japan fascinating. How a country can go from being more bestial than Nazi Germany (at Nakning in 1937, in three weeks of carnage they massacred Chinese civillians at 30 times the rate that the Nazis killed Jews at Auschwitz, and without the efficiency), to being flattened by American fire-bombs, to being a peace-loving, uber-efficient global manufacturing machine, to becoming a stagnant economic disaster-zone in the space of one lifetime is amazing. They must have a real culture of \"Yes sir - we do what you say.\" Fantastic when it is put to positive use - bloody awful or terrifying when it isn't.
Me and you both Bill, you'll find that the majority of what they do is not rocket science, its basic common sense combined with the ability to listen as well as talk.
Whilst at Sunderland University I had the opportunity to visit the Public works department at Washington. The example being made was how a public sector company could work in the private sector. The bill of goods was the public works being able to quote you for a set of double glazed windows ratber than Safe style UK or Everest et al, and the public works would undercut and fit said windows! At the factory, the final product involved a ten stage process which included as the last stage, you've got it, \"inspection\".
Now the Japanese have a process called \"poka yoka\" which is basically a mistake proofing system. The basic tenaments are that as a process you accept no defects, you create no defects, and you pass on no defects, if all of this is achieved at each stage of the process, final inspection becomes obsolete, unfortunely in this country, we've not managed to get on that paradigm yet!!!
Not sure there's such a thing as a mistake-proof system. Certainly not in Japan anyway, as recent events highlight. Probably the stupidest place on the planet to build so many nuclear power stations, given the geology.
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Billy, following on you post on a serious theme, the Japanese will be fine and will no doubt re-build in a manner designed to combat any increased threats to their structures. The vast majority of their economy recovery following the second world war can be attributed to a gentleman called William Edwards Deming. He was sent to Japan by Eissenhower at the end of the war, and he told them that if they would embrace the principles that he taught them, they would have the rest of the developed world screaming for protection within 5 years. The rest as they say is history, no one takes the piss out of Japanese quality now as they did when me and thee were kids eh? Being in the industry that you are, can I recommend a book for your reading list. If you can get a copy of \"Out of the Crisis\" by William Edwards Deming Cambridge Press 1986 it will change your thought processes no doubt, it certainly did do mine!!!!
Never heard of that Savvy, but I'll definitely dig it out. Ta for the head-ups.
I find Japan fascinating. How a country can go from being more bestial than Nazi Germany (at Nakning in 1937, in three weeks of carnage they massacred Chinese civillians at 30 times the rate that the Nazis killed Jews at Auschwitz, and without the efficiency), to being flattened by American fire-bombs, to being a peace-loving, uber-efficient global manufacturing machine, to becoming a stagnant economic disaster-zone in the space of one lifetime is amazing. They must have a real culture of \"Yes sir - we do what you say.\" Fantastic when it is put to positive use - bloody awful or terrifying when it isn't.
Me and you both Bill, you'll find that the majority of what they do is not rocket science, its basic common sense combined with the ability to listen as well as talk.
Whilst at Sunderland University I had the opportunity to visit the Public works department at Washington. The example being made was how a public sector company could work in the private sector. The bill of goods was the public works being able to quote you for a set of double glazed windows ratber than Safe style UK or Everest et al, and the public works would undercut and fit said windows! At the factory, the final product involved a ten stage process which included as the last stage, you've got it, \"inspection\".
Now the Japanese have a process called \"poka yoka\" which is basically a mistake proofing system. The basic tenaments are that as a process you accept no defects, you create no defects, and you pass on no defects, if all of this is achieved at each stage of the process, final inspection becomes obsolete, unfortunely in this country, we've not managed to get on that paradigm yet!!!
Not sure there's such a thing as a mistake-proof system. Certainly not in Japan anyway, as recent events highlight. Probably the stupidest place on the planet to build so many nuclear power stations, given the geology.
Wrong.
Japan has no coal.
They have no oil.
They have 150million people and one of the world's most powerful economies.
How are they supposed to provide energy for it? Once the WWII plan of enslaving 500million Chinese and Koreans and making them run on treadmills linked to dynamos went tits, they didn't really have much choice but to go nuclear.
It's always a risk. But even now, after the worst quake to hit Japan for 1000 years, the odds are that they will contain this problem. It's not going to be remotely like Chernobyl
They might have a contamination problem for a decade. They might have a few thousand people with health problems. That's the gamble.
Now compare and contrast that against what would have happened to their economy, their standard of living, their life expectancy and their technological ability to withstand earthquakes if they HADN'T gone for nuclear power. If they hadn't been technologically advanced enough and economically rich enough to pay for seismic-resistant houses, and to manage a rescue system, you wouldn't be looking at 15-20,000 dead in the quake, you'd have had 1-2 million dead from their houses falling in on them.
It f**king well terrifies me that there's going to be a naive, ignorant green backlash against nuclear power, by comfortable middle class bleeding-heart Westerners.
Do you know what one of the biggest killers in the developing world is? Lung disease caused by constant breathing in of smoke from wood and dung fires that are used for heating and cooking. Do you think the 2 million people a year who die those agonising early deaths after years of being debilitated by the illness would prefer for their grandkids to carry on living like that to satisfy some green conscience in England? Or would they rather their country end up with electricity coming from nuclear power stations, and accept the fact that every few decades, a few thousand people might die in an accident.
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Japan isn't the only country in the world that has no coal or oil. So does that mean that that the African nations should follow their lead? Sorry Billy, but they're not gambling with just their own nation's well-being.
As an advocate of nuclear-power I don't really go down the green line, if it can be done safely then it's another short term answer. Where does the fuel come from? You know that supply is also limited. In this country we don't have to worry about geology as such, but we have other issues to concern us. Terrorist attacks being among them.
I find it quite frustrating that having a view against nuclear power in geologically unstable areas necessarily puts you into the green welly brigade in the minds of some people. Nuclear power at the moment is an expensive option when we could be ploughing that money into real long-term solutions.
I've heard the argument that the wind doesn't always blow, the sun doesn't always shine etc. It's bullshit. The wind does always blow, and the Sun does always shine. The tides are unstoppable and geothermic energy is there for the rest of humankinds existence. It's just a case of forming a worldwide energy policy. Unfortunately it's secular politics that get in the way, so in the meantime let's just be happy to gamble on our future eh? For what exactly? An even smaller MP3 player or phone that will wake you up with a shag followed by a cup of tea and a cancer-free fag?
And really, being the one of the biggest economies in the world, they could have just paid for some oil/coal, like we do.
And it won't be a problem for just a decade. These materials have half-lifes of thousands of years. If it goes up, that area will be uninhabitable pretty much forever, in a human time-scale.
I do share your optimism that it's not going to be as bad as Chenobyl, but my crystal-ball obviously isn't as high grade as yours.
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I wasn't suggesting that you were a naive green type - I just lose my rag on this issue because it energy is THE most important problem facing us over the next century. Get it wrong and we f**k up our own economy at best. At worst, we cause global tensions that could tip us into major conflict. And that's before you look at the moral case of how we support the poor t**ts in sub-Saharan Africa or the worst places in central Asia in developing a humanely decent standard of living.
Energy policy is horrifically difficult. It's all very well saying, go for wind/wave/geothermal power, but it has NEVER been shown to work on a scale that could supply major economies. So any country that chucked all its eggs in that basket would be taking a massive risk that they would end up screwing their entire economy.
On the same theme, it's not as simple as \"they could have paid for oil or gas like we do.\" Look at what I said before. If Japan had gone for a far more expensive option, their economy would have been weaker for decades and they would have ended up not having the resources or the technolocgical sophistication to make them able to protect their citizens against the (inevitable) earthquakes.
If Japan had bumbled along with shit GDP growth like us since WWII, and as a result had skimped and saved on its seismic design because their equivalent of Gideon told them that they couldn't afford it, how many people do you think would have died last Friday? And in the big scheme of things, is that better or worse than a nuclear power stattion problem that looks like being contained despite the best efforts of our 24/7 media to suggest that it's the biggest disaster in world history.
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Well I just think we are far too busy putting economy before humanity. f**k the economy, f**k everyone's economy. When someone gains invariably someone else loses. If we as a species continue to focus on 'our economy' then there's really no hope for us as a species. We'll wipe each other out.
Idealist I am I know, it ain't gonna happen. But if we ever are to understand that the world is just one place then there's hope that natural resources can be shared throughout the world.
Imagine there's no countries etc.
No matter how many MP3 players are produced we still have the same amount of food available. We can't eat fission chips.
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I used to think like that.
Go and have a look at the figures for life expectancy vs GDP per capita.
If you don't revise your opinions after looking at those numbers, you're (not you personally - \"one is not\") fit to be called properly human.
Basically, the richer (for which, read: more economically and technologically advanced) a country is, the longer-lived and healthier its people are.
So your contrsst between \"economy\" and \"people\" is a false one.
It is economic growth that has given us better, healthier, longer lives. And given more of us the chance to become educated and not have to spend every day doing back-breaking manual work to earn a crust.
Me, I'll take the glitches that come with economic and technological growth, if that growth keeps on making life better for billions of people. If a few hundred thousand die along the way, that's peanuts compared to the billion who would have died early deaths if technology hadn't improved their lives and their economies.
PS: That idea that \"some winning = someone else losing\" was proved wrong about 250 years ago by Adam Smith. There are many, many ways in which all sides can win. THAT is why technological and economic development is not evil inherently.
What do you think will get a billion people in Africa out of grinding poverty? Charity? People in the West waking up one morning and thinking \"I'll sell the car and give the money to Mozambique peasant farmers?\"
It'll be econimic development. It'll be when they have a chance to produce stuff that the rest of the world wants to buy and enoug money to buy what the rest of the world produces.
It WILL come. And it'll come even quicker if we don't listen to bleeding heart Westerners drawing wrong-headed conclusions from isolated cases like Fukushima.
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Not sure what you mean now. I'm not suggesting we go back to the dark ages and start living in caves, we have Science, which is really what has led to the longer life expectancies you refer to.
So just how rich do we have to become before we live forever? Is that the aim?
We in the the west have already achieved a standard of living that I for one am perfectly happy with, I really don't need any more. The world was and still is a beautiful place. It's not going to look any better from the back seat of a Bentley sipping champagne and snorting Coke. I've been educated to a standard that has made it possible to earn a living without doing much more than I'm doing now, in fact, it's more difficult for my poor brain having this lovely discussion with you now than it has ever been been to earn enough money to be happy and healthy. :) (I know you hate them things!).
I just want your standard of health and happiness for the entire world, so what do you imagine is holding the educated wealthy world from applying this standard? I'm not arguing about our standard of living, but at the same time I'd rather see what we call the 'developing' world being given a little more help to reach our standards than have our economy spend a few billion so I can live a couple of years longer.
I'm really not bothered about living for a few years longer in a shitty care home in a country where the government steal whatever I've earmarked for my kids, just to keep me barely alive and dribbling for a few more miserable years so they can point to the longer life misnomer. That's just bullshit also.
As for non-fossil fuels NEVER having been shown to work - can you think of any occasion where it has been tried? Is there any reason WHY it has never been tried? Probably nothing to do with the people who make lots and lots and even more lots of money from Oil, is it? Heard of the guy who invented the diesel engine? Killed, as it was designed to run on peanut oil. Can't have that can we?
Talking of Oil, Libya?
It's the years in between dribbling that are important. Not sure it really matters how long that is for. We have a life expectancy so try and live it.
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Another example was quoted by an American management guru called Tom Peters. He gave the example of a contract between an American firm and a japanese manufacturing company. The contract was for tens of thousands of a specific component that had to be manufactured to a very tight specification but allowed a small % (1% I think) to be outside the tolerance. When the shipment was delivered, the Amercians found a package that contained the 1% that were out of tolerance, and were clearly labelled as such!
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I also heard of an american company that actually sent a consignment of extra parts along with each shipment to make up for any defects found in the main order. The fact that this costs them money and that defects don't come for free must have never occurred to them! Conversely, who the fcuk would do business with a company that would do this?
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Billy, following on you post on a serious theme, the Japanese will be fine and will no doubt re-build in a manner designed to combat any increased threats to their structures. The vast majority of their economy recovery following the second world war can be attributed to a gentleman called William Edwards Deming. He was sent to Japan by Eissenhower at the end of the war, and he told them that if they would embrace the principles that he taught them, they would have the rest of the developed world screaming for protection within 5 years. The rest as they say is history, no one takes the piss out of Japanese quality now as they did when me and thee were kids eh? Being in the industry that you are, can I recommend a book for your reading list. If you can get a copy of \"Out of the Crisis\" by William Edwards Deming Cambridge Press 1986 it will change your thought processes no doubt, it certainly did do mine!!!!
Never heard of that Savvy, but I'll definitely dig it out. Ta for the head-ups.
I find Japan fascinating. How a country can go from being more bestial than Nazi Germany (at Nakning in 1937, in three weeks of carnage they massacred Chinese civillians at 30 times the rate that the Nazis killed Jews at Auschwitz, and without the efficiency), to being flattened by American fire-bombs, to being a peace-loving, uber-efficient global manufacturing machine, to becoming a stagnant economic disaster-zone in the space of one lifetime is amazing. They must have a real culture of \"Yes sir - we do what you say.\" Fantastic when it is put to positive use - bloody awful or terrifying when it isn't.
Me and you both Bill, you'll find that the majority of what they do is not rocket science, its basic common sense combined with the ability to listen as well as talk.
Whilst at Sunderland University I had the opportunity to visit the Public works department at Washington. The example being made was how a public sector company could work in the private sector. The bill of goods was the public works being able to quote you for a set of double glazed windows ratber than Safe style UK or Everest et al, and the public works would undercut and fit said windows! At the factory, the final product involved a ten stage process which included as the last stage, you've got it, \"inspection\".
Now the Japanese have a process called \"poka yoka\" which is basically a mistake proofing system. The basic tenaments are that as a process you accept no defects, you create no defects, and you pass on no defects, if all of this is achieved at each stage of the process, final inspection becomes obsolete, unfortunely in this country, we've not managed to get on that paradigm yet!!!
Not sure there's such a thing as a mistake-proof system. Certainly not in Japan anyway, as recent events highlight. Probably the stupidest place on the planet to build so many nuclear power stations, given the geology.
You may have got my comments out of context Don, I was talking manufacturing.
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Billy, Don
I've been reading a book published in the mid 70's By Jerry Pournelle if you're interested. an intelligent Yank with an interest in the (then) future. Although some of his data is obsolete now - and so it should be - he does point to the worrying facts that of all the various 'alternative' energy sources thatwere technically feassible or 'developable' in the 70's, not one was then being pursued. Indeed, funding for every single one of them was being cut by Pres. Carter.
Now, Pournelle doesn't say that any one, or all, of these would have been a panacea. But taken together, they could have made a major diference. He felt, back then, that the need for oil could have been removed entirely by the year 2000 if we had done the research into fusion. He also pointed out that imported oil was costing the US $50 Billion a year even then! even spending 150Bn on fusion research would be a drop in the ocean when the savaings would have so vast. Like you, Don, I'm afraid I have come to the conclusion that pork barrel politics, vested interests and electoral neccesity all act to kill new things that threaten old. And that's why, as I hope I made clear earlier, I do not have Billy's faith in the future. We could do as you suggest Billy, but the pressures continue to grow. At what point will we take seriously the neccesary research and development? When it's too late? When the resources are too thin and the immediate pressures (water, food, climate to name but three) are too big to allow us to divert enough into 'research and development'?
We don't think far enough ahead. We don't think globally. If that continues we're f**ked in the long term. And this is one of the 2 reasons I remain in favour of the EC. It's a step on the road to a world policy setting forum.
BobG
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Eyup Bob, yes I'll have a look into the author you mention. One of the books that helped me form an opinion about this issue is called 'Fission, Fusion and he Energy Crisis' by Stanley Hunt, part of the Physics degree course when I was at Warwick way back in the 80's. A lot of the information in that is now obsolete as we've supposed to have run out of oil by now! But the strange thing is we don't seem to be any closer to solving the problem 30 years later!
To me the greatest technological advances in this area are ones that will solve the problem long-term, and from the little we know now, that just has to be renewable sources and/or fusion. Of course if we crack the fusion problem then we're made, as there's an awful lot of the raw material in the sea! It will take an awful lot to crack, but I'm sure that one day it will be possible. In the meantime we already have the necessary technology to harness renewables and that could even make the need for fusion superfluous. It is the small-village mentality that stops us making serious efforts. Should we ever become a global economy then we'll be fine, but it doesn't look likely when countries continue to think in terms of their own interests and economy.
Sorry Savvy, yes you're right, and anyway the reactors are Russian-designed so I can't blame the nips. The actual components were probably fine, had they been sited in the relatively geographically stable areas of Russia.
My last post on the subject as I know I'm starting to sound like an old hippy. Which is probably my closest political alliance! Cheers fellas, interesting subject for a few more years I feel.
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I can see both sides of this issue, and imho there is merit on both sides. I'm part of the optimistic lot as the advances in technology in just my lifetime are mind blowing. I remember when cell phones were big and clunky, tv's were huge cubes sitting back a foot from the wall. Now I don't have a flat screen tv, but its just to show how everything changes for the better. That said, it's true that this type of technology vastly outpaced other types, and why is that? Imo because we have people like Steve Jobs' techy ingenuity as well as marketing savvy to market it and make money. Again, money making is most likely the determining factor, and nuclear technology etc. costs a lot in research and development, and it's not on the top of the governments lists in terms of priorities, but it should be. So while being optimistic about the future, it's plain to see where we as human beings are falling down on the job - the power of special interests, presidents being friends with oil producing countries etc. I for one don't know the answer but we should be putting more pressure on the all leaders to look at the entirety of the world to share the problem and come up with long term solutions as Japan has done owing to their lack of resources, -- while trying to make small advances along the way, The G-8 summit or maybe now it's the G8+5 summit is a good start, but where is everyone else? Also, I believe it lacks the personnel, and resources to follow through on any plan they identify as a group to undertake.
As an aside, my daughter works for GE, who apparently had supplied some of the parts for the nuclear reactors in Japan, and happily they have donated $5 million to the effort, but as another but bizarre aside, a lot of her colleagues sit on large athletic balls instead of chairs at their desks to strengthen their cores and backs. Now I'm not saying this has anything to do with moving ahead with technology, but maybe they will work faster trying to come up with new technologies as I imagine they tire quickly having to sit up straight all day an all...;-)
Fascinating discussion though fellas.
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Hi Don
ISBN 0 352 30906 7 'A Step Farther Out' Jerry Pournelle. Paperback.W H Allen & Co 1980
Pournelle made his name as a writer of sc-fi. But he was/is a scientist too. Quite heavily involved in the Moon programme for example.
Did I know u went to Warwick? I can't remember. Rootes Hall eh.....?! And pissed up in the SU. I left in 1977. So I remember it as a building site :) But I was in the Arts Centre sit in in 74 just as it opened. And I saw the trillions of cops that came one dawn to overpower anybody and everybody. Nasty that was.
Cheers
Bob