> The following item "Is the World facing fundamental changes?" will
> be of interest.
>
> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14583201
What's interesting about that is that every bit of it is about
finance. Bonds, banking, currencies, sovereign debt, the Fed,
interest rates.... So finance is the world's fundament? The world's
bedrock? Basic to everything, similar to the way in which, say,
chemical bonds are basic to the structure of stuff?
Nothing about the physical location of machine tools, availability of
food and shelter, guns and ammo, availability of medical expertise or
other matters of survivability. Agreed that, should the financial
superstructure utterly implode, urban supplies of food, energy and
other necessities would fall apart. But if global finance, presently
in the hands of a cohort of over-achievers most of whom apparently
enjoy one or more of the several malignant "personality disorders"
characterized in DSM-IV -- if global finance in those hands is
globally critical for all those real-world things (machine tools, food)
then......What?
Then When It All Changes may come when the guys with a firm but sweaty
grip on the levers of financial power discover that those levers are
no longer connected to anything (or anticipate that such a moment is
immanent) and go for some kind of financial Sampson Option.
What's the angle of subcidence [1] for a towering pyramid of jumbled
greed-heads?
My first ripe tomato appeared yesterday.
- Mike
[1] Maybe I have the wrong engineering term here. But you know from
experience that granular stuff -- sand, crushed stone, bolts of
fire wood, heaps of 4' cordwood at a paper mill or the sawdust at
a saw mill -- can be piled up by dumping more and more in the same
spot. But at some point, the newly added stuff starts to slide
down the side of the heap, eventuating in a cone- or
pyramid-shaped pile. If the particles are small and smooth --
grain or beach sand -- that happens often and on a small
scale. But if the bits are lumpy, rough, irregular, jagged, -- if
there are interactions between the individual bits -- the pile
will get quite tall and then subside in a sudden catastrophic
cascade.
What's the correct engineering term for the angle, characteristic
of a given medium, at which this occurs and/or at which the heap
stabilizes?
And when does the pyramid of power reach such a height?
--
Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
/V\
[email protected] /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^
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