OT: Crane Collapse at One57 NYC

Hansen is a hack.

--
Les Cargill

...

000,000.00

laughable to think of certain SED regulars who brag about how much money th ey make.

That's not what the US census figures showed. Everybody except the top quintile of the income distribution was getting less in 2011 than they were in 2010. This isn't inconsistent with the bottom 5% or the bottom

1% getting more, but there's no evidence that they did.

In all the other advanced industrial countries, we've got universal health care, so we get access to doctors when we need them. This shows up in whole population public health statistics.

But that's exactly what's going on at the moment. Your slow economic growth is squeezing lower and middle class wages, and the economic growth that you are seeing is ending up in the pockets of the top 5% of the income distribution.

Perhaps. But that's not what's going on right now. And US income inequality is a lot higher than in most other advanced industrial countries.

The US Gini index at 40.8% is worse than Russia's at 40.1%. Australia is pretty bad at 35.2%, and France isn't much better at 32.7%. Germany

- at 28.3% - is probably the target you ought to be be aiming at. Sweden - at 25% - may have gone too far, but their social indicators are all enviably good.

Sadly, it's not. The US isn't spending enough on education or on health care for the poor to get the most out of it's work force, and it's not spending enough on automating it's industry because it's cheaper to outsource the work to cheaper manual labour in other countries. The other countries are spending lots of money to educate their workers and automate their production, paid for by what they get for doing production work for US companies, so this isn't going to last and it's eroding your competitive edge while it goes on.

It's been demonstrated repeatedly. The last section of the wikipedia article references published academic work on the subject.

I don't think you've actually looked at the evidence.

Since you clearly haven't looked at the evidence, your excuse seems to be along the lines of "it can't be true so I won't look at it".

Wrong. It's that rich parents live in rich suburbs which can afford to pay for good schools. Having rich parents thus gets you a better education, and a better chance to get into a good university where parental support makes it easier for you to stick around for graduate education.

There are other advantages of growing up in a good neighbourhood and going to a good university - you get to meet people who will be useful acquaintances when you do move into full-time employment.

In the US the poorest kids don't have access to good health care or good education, which makes things worse.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

This Hansen ?

What are you credentials on the subject of weather science ?

And does anyone give a flying f*** what Slowman "thinks"? ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 
              
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

There's no reason to blame AGW for the latest storm, any more than you can blame anything for anything else in a wildly chaotic system. They had a big storm in 1938, too.

--

John Larkin                  Highland Technology Inc 
www.highlandtechnology.com   jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com    

Precision electronic instrumentation 
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Custom timing and laser controllers 
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e.

There's certainly no way of associating the latest storm with AGW, but such storms are happening more frequently than they did, and it's reasonable to assume that evaporating more sea-water in the tropics provides extra energy that can turn into a storm that pummells New York.

John Larkin can't follow the logic involved, but that doesn't happen to invalidate the connection.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

When did he start thinking? Should we call Ripley's?

The worst hurricane in US history was the great Galveston storm of September, 1900.

Hurricanes are observed more frequently because we have airplanes and satellites now to count them better.

--

John Larkin                  Highland Technology Inc 
www.highlandtechnology.com   jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com    

Precision electronic instrumentation 
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators 
Custom timing and laser controllers 
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links 
VME  analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer 
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators

n s

here.

for

is

It seems to have killed more Americans any other. There are other criteria for "worst". Which one did you have in mind?

That's your opinion. Hansen is probably a more reliable judge of the evidence, and he sees it a little differently.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Bill Sloman schrieb:

Hello,

real levee's are useful if they are built like these used in the Netherlands. But in New Orleans they used concrete walls instead which were simply tilted by the flood because of the weak ground of mud and sand. In the Netherlands the levee's are built on the same type of weak ground but as a old fashioned levee's of the time when there was no concrete available.

Bye

Agreed. But after a few more direct hits of record sized and strength storms even the most fervent AGW denialist will have to admit defeat.

A single event cannot be anything other than bad weather, but a change in the overall frequency and severity over the longer term is climate.

I reckon it will take two or three more hits like this before Americans will take AGW seriously as a long term threat to major coastal cities.

--
Regards, 
Martin Brown

My home town's (Huntington, WV) levees are concrete walls that go deep into the ground plus have grassed dirt berms on both sides. ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 
              
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

Bull pucky. "The entire human race in 2011 used about a third of the energy present in an average hurricane." ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 
              
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

Jim Thompson schrieb:

Hello,

the concrete walls used in New Orleans also went into the ground but not deep enough. You need a relatively broad strip of ground to build a good levee. I think there is not enogh space left in New York to build such broad and solid levee's.

Bye

NYC is mostly slums, so there's lots of space. As for the flooding tunnels, only in NYC do they not know about doors and sandbags. ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 
              
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

No, the levees in New Orleans are mostly big, wide mounds of dirt, sometimes with a concrete facing on the water side to reduce erosion. We used to ride our bicycles and motorcycles on the levees... they were fun to jump at high speed. I got arrested one night about 2 AM riding my motorcycle on the levee way up in Jefferson Parish.

The big problem is New Orleans was undercuting. Water pressure would open a channel in the soft soil deep under a levee, sometimes emerging as a sand boil blocks away. That water passage would enlarge until the whole levee collapsed without much warning.

The other problem was the canals, like the 17th St Canal, that were cut from the lake or whatever deep into the city. They had the smallest and weakest levees, and no locks to cut them off at high water. Incredibly stupid. Everybody knew that the ideal storm would sooner or later flood the city; the answer was to drink up while you can.

The levees were (and are) maintained by the Corps of Engineers of the US Army, a notoriously blundering bunch of guys. Read this:

A really fascinating book.

--

John Larkin                  Highland Technology Inc 
www.highlandtechnology.com   jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com    

Precision electronic instrumentation 
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators 
Custom timing and laser controllers 
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links 
VME  analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer 
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators

There is no statistically valid, definitive trend in hurricane frequency or intensity. The worst hurricane in US history was in 1900.

If there is any trend, it seems to be higher frequency and lower intensity, but the statistics are weak. We've only had aircraft spotting offshore storms since around 1935 and satellites since the

1960s. Before that, offshore hurricanes were often missed. Hurricanes do more economic damage now because coastal regions are so built up, thanks to Federal flood insurance.

The big ones always happen late in the season. Galveston was hit on September 1. The big 1938 storm hit the east cost on September 21.

Let's blame earthquakes on AGW too. People have.

--

John Larkin                  Highland Technology Inc 
www.highlandtechnology.com   jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com    

Precision electronic instrumentation 
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators 
Custom timing and laser controllers 
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links 
VME  analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer 
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators

There is now.

$90,000,000.00

laughable to think of certain SED regulars who brag about how much money they make.

Still... year by year, there are fewer and fewer terribly poor people, across all populations. That has almost nothing to do with income statistics. "Terribly poor people" are outside the system being measured...

So Yurp has elected to go broke in service of a medical fetish in a different manner than the US. "Population health statistics" are extremely political and not very trustworthy.

Slow growth, at this writing, cannot be shown to be caused by income inequality. That's the problem. This is Yet Another Narrative with a core assumption that has no empirical support.

Slow growth is probably caused by "money as a medium of account" during a span of time when demand for liquidity is very high, for aggregated psychological and demographic reasons.

That list doesn't tell us anything, really. Again... there's no real support for income inequality as a cause of poverty, outside of outright kleptocracies.

Germany is a giant Potemkin Village, based on policies of nearly predatory exports. It's not quite Mercantilist, but it's getting there.

Really, look at what underlies the EU problem.

That's ludicrous. We blow billions trying to educate the ineducable. See the University of Phoenix for an example. Health care can *also* not be shown as a constraint on productivity.

I won't say Yurp isn't more effective at training, not education per se, but that's also in context of a Bismarckian cradle to grave system. For path dependency reasons, that Bismarckian cradle to grave system will not work in the US absent a major disruption. A major disruption in the US would create a demand deficit large enough that any new equilibrium after will probably blow all the models out.

Still, the US could cherry-pick policies from Switzerland and Sweden. We won't.

Today. That's changing. Rapidly. China's probably past the knee of the curve now.

But these things will not improve income distribution. We don't have a system constrained by productive capacity; we have a system in which monetary velocity stubbornly refuses to improve and stay improved.

That means nothing. There are no empirically defensible works of any color which show that income inequality causes anything other than a triggering of feelings of tribal resentment in humans.

But I have.

The evidence shows that there's nothing like cause and effect, only the odd, transient correlation.

This is *PRECISELY* what is meant by "behaving in a manner consistent with meritocracy." The resulting functionaries don't know how to run anything. They're ticket punchers.

Most of that is agitprop from the real estate "cabal" ( don't think it exists? look at ad spending ) and the Educational Industrial Complex.

We've sown the wind ( subsidized real estate, health care and education ) and are reaping the whirlwind. When you subsidize things, you get more of it, it costs more and the quality declines.

The periods of greatest growth in the US were by people who had access to very little of either.

--
Les Cargill