jawfish

Big Forging Presses
john posted in technologies on May 18th, 2012

Iron Giant – Magazine – The Atlantic.

Approaching Alcoa’s 50,000-ton forging press feels a bit like approaching an alp: it starts out incomprehensibly huge and keeps getting incomprehensibly huger. From a distance, the thing dominates the horizon of the hangar-like Cleveland Works facility; as you get nearer, catching glimpses through forests of girders and around cliffs of firebrick, it begins to dominate the air above. But even as you stand at its foot, being told that the eight steel bolts anchoring it are 40 inches thick, calculating in your head that that makes them 10 feet around—even then it’s still a bit out of reach. Only when you climb it, peer down from its sixth-floor summit, and realize that the puny machine next to it is, in fact, its 35,000-ton brother—well, then you finally appreciate the size of the thing. It’s big.

A fun article in the Atlantic. Additional note: the Chinese have built a far larger one:

Chinese 160MN press

Chinese forging press

American forging press dating from 1955:

Library of Congress

The Atlantic continues:

The Fifty, as it’s known in company shorthand, broke down three years ago, and there was talk of retiring it for good. Instead, it was overhauled and is scheduled to resume service early this year. One of the great machines of American industry has been reborn.

A forging press is—begging the forgiveness of the engineering gods—essentially a waffle iron for metal. An ingot, usually heated to increase its malleability, is placed on the lower of a pair of dies. The upper die is then gradually forced down against the ingot, and the metal flows to fill both dies and form the intended shape. In this way, extremely complex structures can be created quickly and with minimal waste.

What sets the Fifty apart is its extraordinary scale. Its 14 major structural components, cast in ductile iron, weigh as much as 250 tons each; those yard-thick steel bolts are also 78 feet long; all told, the machine weighs 16 million pounds, and when activated its eight main hydraulic cylinders deliver up to 50,000 tons of compressive force. If the logistics could somehow be worked out, the Fifty could bench-press the battleship Iowa, with 860 tons to spare.

read the whole article:

Iron Giant – Magazine – The Atlantic.

The Future is Coming, the Future is Coming, You May Feel Discomfort
john posted in Fin de siècle, politics & culture, repost on May 17th, 2012

Welcome to the Future Nauseous.  by Venkat on May 9, 2012   ribbonfarm blog

A long essay on futurism. It rambles a bit, and has the wavy-gravy out-of-focus quality of futurism, but I think he makes some interesting points. Seen from the POV of marketing technical products like cellphones, it offers some insight into why some products fail ( because they are too new ).

Both science fiction and futurism seem to miss an important piece of how the future actually turns into the present. They fail to capture the way we don’t seem to notice when the future actually arrives.

Sure, we can all see the small clues all around us: cellphones, laptops, Facebook, Prius cars on the street. Yet, somehow, the future always seems like something that is going to happen rather than something that is happening, present-continuous rather than future perfect. Even the nearest of near-term science fiction seems to evolve at some fixed receding-horizon distance from the present.

There is an unexplained cognitive dissonance between changing-reality-as-experienced and change as imagined, and I don’t mean specifics of failed and successful predictions.

My new explanation is this: we live in a continuous state of manufactured normalcy. There are mechanisms that operate — a mix of natural, emergent and designed — that work to prevent us from realizing that the future is actually happening as we speak. To really understand the world and how it is evolving, you need to break through this manufactured normalcy field. Unfortunately, that leads, as we will see, to a kind of existential nausea….

Some quips:

…How, as a species, are we able to prepare for, create, and deal with, the future, while managing to effectively deny that it is happening at all?

Futurists, artists and edge-culturists like to take credit for this. They like to pretend that they are the lonely, brave guardians of the species who deal with the “real” future and pre-digest it for the rest of us.

But this explanation falls apart with just a little poking. It turns out that the cultural edge is just as frozen in time as the mainstream. It is just frozen in a different part of the time theater, populated by people who seek more stimulation than the mainstream, and draw on imagined futures to feed their cravings rather than inform actual future-manufacturing.

The two beaten-to-death ways of understanding this phenomenon are due to McLuhan (“We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”) and William Gibson (“The future is already here; it is just unevenly distributed.”)

Both framing perspectives have serious limitations that I will get to. What is missing in both needs a name, so I’ll call the “familiar sense of a static, continuous present” a Manufactured Normalcy Field….

…So what about elements of the future that arrive relatively successfully for everybody, like cellphones? Here, the idea I called the Milo Criterion kicks in: successful products are precisely those that do not attempt to move user experiences significantly, even if the underlying technology has shifted radically. In fact the whole point of user experience design is to manufacture the necessary normalcy for a product to succeed and get integrated into the Field. In this sense user experience design is reductive with respect to technological potential….

…The Web arrived via the document metaphor. Despite the rise of the stream metaphor for conceptualizing the Web architecturally, the user-experience metaphor is still descended from the document….

…The smartphone could have developed via metaphoric descent from the hand-held calculator; “Oh, I can now talk to people on my calculator” would have been a fairly natural way to understand it. …

…This also explains why so few futurists make any money. They are attracted to exactly those parts of the future that are worth very little. They find visions of changed human behavior stimulating. Technological change serves as a basis for constructing aspirational visions of changed humanity. Unfortunately, technological change actually arrives in ways that leave human behavior minimally altered.

Engineering is about finding excitement by figuring out how human behavior could change. Marketing is about finding money by making sure it doesn’t. The future arrives along a least-cognitive-effort path.

This actually suggests a different, subtler reading of Gibson’s unevenly-distributed line.

It isn’t that what is patchily distributed today will become widespread tomorrow. The mainstream never ends up looking like the edge of today. Not even close. The mainstream seeks placidity while the edge seeks stimulation.

Instead, what is unevenly distributed are isolated windows into the un-normalized future that exist as weak spots in the Field. When the windows start to become larger and more common, economics kicks in and the Field maintenance industry quickly moves to create specialists, codified knowledge and normalcy-preserving design patterns….

…The future is a stream of bug reports in the normalcy-maintenance software that keeps getting patched, maintaining a hackstable present Field….

Read the whole thing: Welcome to the Future Nauseous. by Venkat on May 9, 2012

Countdown to Greek Exit – The Cost?
john posted in repost, The Emperor is Naked on May 16th, 2012

Quantifying The Plan Z Dry Powder – This Is The Greek ELA Borrowing Capacity | ZeroHedge.

Posting the whole article due to short length.

We already posted a full run down from JPM on what the immediate costs from a Greek EMU exit would be (starting at €400 billion and going higher), but one point that bears repeating is just how much borrowing capacity Greece has under the ELA in the aftermath of today’s news that the ECB is leaving Greek banks to fend for themselves until such time as the Greek recapitalization payment is wired over to Greece, which the ECB has defined simply as “soon.” The answer: woefully inadequate, and certainly not enough to backstop the remaining Greek deposits of €170 billion as of the end of March (likely far less now), at €65 billion. And that’s an upside estimate: as JPM says “The true maximum amount that Greek banks can borrow via ELA is likely though to be significantly smaller because not all loans are accepted as collateral via ELA.” Remember: this is all just one giant game of chicken – Greece’s Syriza has bet the farm that the cost from a Greek fallout is just too big to Europe and the terms of the hated “Memorandum” will be adjusted, while to Europe, on the other hand, the outcome to Greece, at least according to Europe and the IIF’s Dallara will be “between catastrophic and armageddon.” So… Who blinks first?

From JPM:

Greek banks have run out of ECB eligible collateral already and can only access Bank of Greece’s ELA, but even with ELA, the collateral,typically loans, is not unlimited. They have already borrowed €60bn via ELA which, assuming 50% haircut corresponds to around €120bn of loan collateral. Outstanding loans are €250bn, so Greek banks have a maximum of €130bn of remaining loan collateral which allows for a maximum of €65bn of additional borrowing from Bank of Greece’s ELA. This corresponds to around 40% of Greek bank deposits which stood at €170bn as of the end of March. The true maximum amount that Greek banks can borrow via ELA is likely though to be significantly smaller because not all loans are accepted as collateral via ELA. The alternative is for Greek banks to be allowed to issue more government guaranteed paper but the ECB can, with a 2/3rd majority, block a steep and unsustainable increase in Bank of Greece’s ELA. This would effectively cut Bank of Greece off from TARGET2.

Once TARGET2 starts unwinding, with a massive €644 billion claim on the Eurosystem by the Bundesbank, and the realization that an imploding heretofore “contingent” and suddenly all too real liability amounting to 25% of German GDP means an in-kind collapse in living standards, then the simmering German anger will go truly parabolic.

One thing is certain: at least JPM is “hedged.”

Countdown to Greek Exit
john posted in repost, The Emperor is Naked on May 16th, 2012

Get Ready: We’re About To Have Another 2008-Style Crisis – Blogs at Chris Martenson.

I just quoted the start of the article. He makes many points about runs on the bank, what happens after they leave the Euro and so on. Read the whole thing, I suggest.

Well, my hat is off to the global central planners for averting the next stage of the unfolding financial crisis for as long as they have. I guess there’s some solace in having had a nice break between the events of 2008/09 and today, which afforded us all the opportunity to attend to our various preparations and enjoy our lives.

Alas, all good things come to an end, and a crisis rooted in ‘too much debt’ with a nice undercurrent of ‘persistently high and rising energy costs’ was never going to be solved by providing cheap liquidity to the largest and most reckless financial institutions. And it has not.

Forestalled is Not Foregone

The same sorts of signals that we had in 2008 are once again traipsing across my market monitors. Not precisely the same, of course, but with enough similarities that they rhyme loudly. Whereas in 2008 we saw breakdowns in the credit spreads of major financial institutions, this time we are seeing the same dynamic in the sovereign debt of the weaker European nation states.

Greece, as expected and predicted here, is a right proper mess and will have to leave the euro monetary system if it is to have any chance at recovery going forward. Yes, all those endless meetings and rumors and final agreements painfully hammered out by eurocrats over the past year are almost certainly going to be tossed, and additional losses are going to be foisted upon the hapless holders of Greek debt. My prediction is that within a year Greece will be back on the drachma, perhaps by the end of this year (2012)….

 

Get Ready: We’re About To Have Another 2008-Style Crisis – Blogs at Chris Martenson.

Resources vs Capital
john posted in Peak Bling, repost on May 14th, 2012

What Is the Limiting Factor? « Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy Herman Daly

Limits to growth are resource-bound. All macro economists should have to hoe turnips and dig gold for a while.

When the American Revolution was starting, Washington, who surveyed west of the Alleghenies, and Jefferson, who built his famous house at the ridge of the Shenandoahs, were looking West for the demographic and economic future of the Colonies. Why? Because the economy was based on a slash-and-burn sort of plantation agriculture that ruined land, and on artificial restriction of sea trade imposed by the home country in order for a monopoly on raw materials and finished goods. In part the Revolution was about access to resources, which were denied by the British. This pattern of exhausting resources has continued on through American history – wrest what you can from what you have and move West for better resources. Politically the West has a long history of tension between its natural resources, timber, mining, agriculture and ranching, and the financial powers back East. So it’s probably expected that the great myth of growth includes application of Eastern capital to rural resources. In fact this is what the British empire did as well. But no man can have been ignorant of the state of a given natural resource – abundant – common -in decline- gone when fisheries, trapping, mining, ranching, and land itself were constantly tied up in boom-and-bust cycles.

So it can’t be sheer ignorance of the fragility of resources that allowed the myth of unending growth to build. Maybe it was good old-fashioned American hucksterism, the kind that built Florida and Los Angeles. Maybe it was encouraged as an blow-off valve for popular discontent. Never mind that JP Morgan can buy your town, it’s a promise that you can have two suits and a piano in the parlor one day yourself.

Here’s Daly:

In yesteryear’s empty world capital was the limiting factor in economic growth. But we now live in a full world.

Consider: What limits the annual fish catch — fishing boats (capital) or remaining fish in the sea (natural resources)? Clearly the latter. What limits barrels of crude oil extracted — drilling rigs and pumps (capital), or remaining accessible deposits of petroleum — or capacity of the atmosphere to absorb the CO2 from burning petroleum (both natural resources)? What limits production of cut timber — number of chain saws and lumber mills, or standing forests and their rate of growth? What limits irrigated agriculture — pumps and sprinklers, or aquifer recharge rates and river flow volumes? That should be enough to at least suggest that we live in a natural resource-constrained world, not a capital-constrained world.

Economic logic says to invest in and economize on the limiting factor. Economic logic has not changed; what has changed is the limiting factor. It is now natural resources, not capital, that we must economize on and invest in. Economists have not recognized this fundamental shift in the pattern of scarcity.
….
The claim that capital is a near perfect substitute for natural resources is absurd. For one thing substitution is reversible. If capital is a near perfect substitute for resources, then resources are a near perfect substitute for capital — so why then did we ever bother to accumulate capital in the first place if nature already endowed us with a near perfect substitute?

It is not for nothing that our system is called “capitalism” rather than “natural resource-ism.” It is ideologically inconvenient for capitalism if capital is no longer the limiting factor. But that inconvenience has been met by claiming that capital is a good substitute for natural resources. Ever true to its basic animus of denying any fundamental dependence on nature, neoclassical economics saw only two alternatives — either nature is not scarce and capital is limiting, or nature’s scarcity doesn’t matter because manmade capital is a near perfect substitute for natural resources. In either case man is in control of nature, thanks to capital, and that is the main thing. Never mind that manmade capital is itself made from natural resources….

 

Read more: What Is the Limiting Factor?