One Stop Thought Shop

There’s nothing safe out there. You should have seen that coming. People don’t think about what could go wrong.

Space shuttles shatter. Bridges buckle. Hotel walkways collapse. Levees fail. An offshore oil rig explodes, creating the biggest offshore oil spill in U.S. history.

The common thread is technological arrogance and hubris.

With a career studying more than 600 disasters, Robert Bea said, “I’m an engineer – I’m in the prevention business. But you can’t prevent what you don’t understand. Look at the oil spill problem. Everyone thinks it’s a technological problem. It’s not. It’s a management problem.”

“It’s just the arrogant presumption that you have got the thing under control, whatever the thing is. In this case, it’s drilling beyond your depth.”

Most of the global food supply is just 12 crops and 14 animals, an alarmingly shallow gene pool.

What doesn’t bend, breaks.  That’s the worry of too few.

Three-quarters of the world’s critically important food-crop varieties have disappeared during the 20th century, and hundreds of locally adapted livestock breeds are on the verge of doing so.

Diversity is an alternative to catastrophe. The more variety in a system, the more resilient it is.

Another damaging shift:  Suburban poor increased 25% over the Bush years; five times more than in cities.

A third of the very poor now live in the suburbs, the largest and fastest-growing poverty demographic area in the country. Suburban governments are not prepared.

Wow.

5 billion of our 6.9 billion people now have a mobile phone.

In the year 2000, about 720 million people had a cellphone. That’s 2 million new contracts per day.

The House Energy Committee called BP’s pipeline chief to Washington. After the second hearing in a month, Kevin Hostler has decided to quit.

The 800-mile Trans-Alaska Pipeline System transports 700,000 barrels of oil per day, about 15 percent of US crude oil production. BP’s severe policies has cut the 2010 budget to $1 billion, compared with $1.1 billion in 2009 and $1.3 billion in 2008.

Based on hundreds of pages of internal documents and interviews with more than a dozen senior employees on the safety and integrity of the pipeline, the ‘Business Practices, Employee Concerns Program and Compliance and Ethics Group’ will develop a plan for enhancing the open work environment to deal with issues of intimidation and fear.

“There is a risk ranking exercise that is used and the concern that the risk ranking is being used primarily for budget reductions and although work is shown as lower risk it still should be done to protect the environment.”

Alaskans are celebrating. The pipeline’s owners issued an executive obit:

“This is consistent with the recent employee survey that demonstrated there has been a reduction in employee comfort in reporting concerns to senior management.”

Stealing credit from her predecessor, Sarah Palin boasts on radio and TV, : “I had to set up our Petroleum Systems Integrity Office so that we could be there on the front lines making sure what the oil companies were telling us was legit when they were dealing with their corroded pipes that we find out and other lax maintenance issues….“

More than 100 recorded incidents of corroded pipes and “other lax maintenance issues” between 2001 and 2007 reveals Palin’s pipeline oversight was bogus

“More than one American in five thinks that buying lottery tickets constitutes a sound retirement plan.

“What a lottery sells is a dream. That dream is of great personal wealth, even if the lottery is the only game in the world in which your chances of winning are not greatly increased by playing.

From The Economist, here’s a firm and revealing ‘Special Report On Gambling’:

• Shuffle up and deal
• The risk instinct
• At war with luck
• Bet on the bot
• Log on, ante up
• Lengthening odds
• Cutting off the arms
• When the chips are down
• The dragon’s gambling den
• Come, all ye gullible
• Sure thing

“The most popular forms of gambling—slots, lotteries and casino games—are simply bad bets which players are likely to lose.”

Before you sob, laugh out loud. The rich are tops in walking away from mortgages. “The rich are different: they are more ruthless.”

NYTimes:

Whether it is their residence, a second home or a house bought as an investment, the rich have stopped paying the mortgage at a rate that greatly exceeds the rest of the population.

More than one in seven homeowners with loans in excess of a million dollars are seriously delinquent. One in 12 mortgages below the million-dollar mark is delinquent.

There’s nothing more to know about Reagan Republicans.

How long it will take to fix the post-80s frenzy of finance?

Ponder these charts of our total debt in the credit market. The green line is government debt; red line is private debt.

Austerity policies after the crash of 1929 triggered massive unemployment and misery for 13 years. Obviously shrinking spending and budgets by 10% of GDP/year was much too rapid.

How many years do we pay down the massive accumulated debt and interest of the free market fiasco?

Japan we can see. Tackling debt since 1998 at about 6%/year, less painful than outright depression, their debt load has been reduced by half.

Stuart Staniford calculates the overall process will spin out to 2025, adding that we don’t know the appropriate speed to offload debt. And this time it’s global.

Perhaps one of a few in 100 years, a professor is asking:

We need big innovative American businesses that can scale, export and employ millions of workers, many without a college degree. How are we going to get there?

We consume the equivalent of 1.4 Earths, but a small percentage of us are responsible for the vast majority of consumption, pollution, land and water degradation, and biodiversity loss.

Nearly 25 percent of California’s children have never seen a dentist.

OECD countries need to create 80 million jobs.

Diabetes is exploding  in Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Cambodia and Laos. Why? Fast food is everywhere.

To deliver only a third of America’s fuel, the oil and gas industries use 143,000 square miles of our land. Additionally, the BP spill has closed 80,000 square miles.

“We’re not addicted to oil. We are addicted to driving.”

Americans drive around 3 trillion miles per year. If we drove exactly the same number of miles we do today, how much solar power would we need for electric vehicles?

Tony Seba:

I did the numbers and the answer will surprise you.

Land needed to use solar power for an all-electric USA car fleet is merely 1,000 square miles.

An area the size of King Ranch in Texas with its 1,289 square miles could generate all of America’s electric vehicle power with 30% extra electricity to spare. Ted Turner’s 244 square mile ranch in New Mexico alone could generate enough electricity to power 25% of all cars in America.