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Hurricane Sandy Discussion Thread
Renegade:
The MRE thing reminds me of MRUs, but also of a serious problem with how society is currently structured...
In the 1980's, we had all kinds of bothersome business intellectuals blathering on about "just in time" manufacturing and warehousing and all kinds of stuff. Great. Now we have a situation where if there is any kind of a hiccup in the system, everything shuts down. No reserves. No stockpiles. Not enough to last more than a few hours/days. Brilliant. Well done. We've thrown out the idea that the little squirrel was probably pretty smart when he stockpiled food for the winter, and decided that the squirrel is wasting valuable storage space that could be rented out for paper money that's worth less than what it is printed on. It's a systemic problem. My description there is of a symptom of the problem - it is not the problem itself - so I'm not interested in debating warehousing and logistics strategies - just a quick note there so that the problem doesn't get derailed because of the symptom. (I've not outlined the problem yet - and won't -- it's too time consuming at the moment.)
Then, we have people crammed into tiny subsections of tall boxes. There's zero chance of any of these people being able to feed themselves - they are reliant on a system that continues to show its cracks - they are reliant on that cracked system to feed and clothe them. Even if they are capable otherwise, they don't have access to the resources to do so, i.e. land/space/water/etc. (I just know someone is going to freak out about this... BTW - that was a fallacy > +1 point if you can identify and name it.)
Then, we have government telling us that if you have enough food in your house to last more than 1 week, you're a terrorist.
http://feralgenius.blogspot.com.au/2011/12/only-terrorists-have-seven-days-worth.html
Lots more references out there for that. I picked 2 at random.
Everything is stacked against people.
That is, unless you want to look into "prepping" or "preppers".
So, we have a society that is geared towards ensuring that people cannot be prepared for a natural disaster, and we have the economy geared towards ensuring that business cannot be prepared for a natural disaster...
And now we're left to rely on the "state"?
Am I alone in seeing this as completely insane?
Or have I not been detailed enough? (I'm being pretty lazy there - hoping people can fill in the blanks intelligently (another fallacy there > +1 more if you can identify and name it) on their own.)
IainB:
@40hz: Sorry. I just edited my last comment with the addition of [/sarc] ("sarc off").
40hz:
@40hz: Sorry. I just edited my last comment with the addition of [/sarc] ("sarc off").
-IainB (November 06, 2012, 02:30 PM)
--- End quote ---
@IainB: No offense taken previously. No apology needed now. :)
My responses were more to clarify the way things actually work around here to someone who might not know. None of that was said to take issue with your comment.
I think we all know you better than that. :Thmbsup:
skwire:
"In contrast to Hazel, however, Sandy was not as strong a hurricane."-tomos (November 01, 2012, 06:53 AM)
--- End quote ---
Technically, to be proper English, it's missing an "of": "In contrast to Hazel, however, Sandy was not as strong of a hurricane."
IainB:
@Renegade: I think your comments point to things that, when looked at impartially, though they may seem to be part of a kind of societal madness, are arguably more likely to have their roots set firmly in what appears to have been socially acceptable practice.
To explain, I have taken the liberty of chopping your comments into what seemed to me like relevant sections, so that I could state my ten penn'orth:
1. Stock in hand: In the 1980's, we had all kinds of bothersome business intellectuals blathering on about "just in time" manufacturing and warehousing and all kinds of stuff. Great. Now we have a situation where if there is any kind of a hiccup in the system, everything shuts down. No reserves. No stockpiles.
2. Urbanisation: Then, we have people crammed into tiny subsections of tall boxes.
3. Silliness: Then, we have government telling us that if you have enough food in your house to last more than 1 week, you're a terrorist.
Everything is stacked against people.
That is, unless you want to look into "prepping" or "preppers".
4. Economic externality: So, we have a society that is geared towards ensuring that people cannot be prepared for a natural disaster, and we have the economy geared towards ensuring that business cannot be prepared for a natural disaster...
And now we're left to rely on the "state"?
-Renegade (November 06, 2012, 07:07 AM)
--- End quote ---
My explanation:
1. Stock in hand: In accounting for manufacturing, when you hold a stock of something (e.g., stocks of nuts and bolts to be used in an assembly line), it is accounted for in the books of account as an Asset. Stocks are unproductive assets - locked up financial value - waiting to be put to productive use. Cost-efficiency (and profitability) dictates that you maintain stock levels as efficiently as possible, so you must avoid over-stocking, as this could directly affect financial liquidity and actual interest or notional use-of-money costs. The foreman's experience and queuing theory would generally help to determine what stock levels you need to maintain to be able to meet production deadlines/throughput, without having production delays - e.g., if you run empty of the stock and have to stop production whilst you wait for new stocks to be ordered and delivered. So you must not under-stock either, as this will adversely and directly affect revenue/profitability.
Stock control software thus relies on the sophisticated application of good stochastic method and even LP (linear programming) to solve the complex problem of optimising stocks for dual objectives - cost-effectiveness and production effectiveness. Tricky.
As I recall it, JIT or "Just In Time" manufacturing was somehow going to magically fix this. It came out of a theoretically ideal concept of automated manufacturing "cells", which modular concept I first came across in 1980 whilst working at CDC on CAD/CAM and NC software developments. The idea of these "cells" was that if you decomposed your production processes to the state where you had production/process cells that did just one or two things, each having an input end (manufacturing materials input) and an output end (manufactured materials produced), then by arranging them appropriately you could get a series of them to produce (say) sausages, and then by rearranging them differently you might have them producing (say) aircraft.
The concept relied on inputs arriving just at the appropriate time they were required for inclusion in the manufacturing process in each cell, thereby eliminating the need for stocking the materials (this was a theoretical ideal, remember).
The concept worked fine in practice in the case of the automation of the flow/control of electrons - as in transistorised circuitry components - e.g., a very useful cell was/is the 555 timer that is to be found in practically any electronic circuit that you come across.
However, the concept did not seem to work terribly well in other cases, and no-one quite knew why. Even if they didn't (couldn't) understand what it really meant, the term "JIT" became a shibboleth that management had to use in every 5th sentence they spoke or wrote, just so that their colleagues would recognise that they were on "their" team. If you didn't use the term, you must be on the "others' " side - not one of "the management team", anyway. It became a necessary term for protective colouration and survival in management. It thus became a management cliché (BS, buzzword), similar to "going forward", "whitespace", "synergistic", "level playing field", "go-to", "vision", "mission", "engagement", etc. Use of such terms in management is mandated for self-survival.
It was about this time (early '80s) that the US seemed to be belatedly recognising their own prophet W.E. Deming, having studiously ignored him for some 20 years previously whilst at the same time praising and marvelling at Japanese manufacturing's prodigious productive efficiency and marketing success (which, hilariously the Japanese manufacturers and engineers have always publicly ascribed to Deming's teachings!). The exemplary dogmatism and intellectual deafness of US business management schools and their inability to learn new things was - and still seems to be - egregious, with Harvard Business School arguably being there steadfastly leading the way back into darkness, most of the time.
Deming's process management approach (which was based on W.A. Shewhart's earlier work on statistical control methods) was quite coincidentally topped-off by a timely bit of what initially seemed to be unrelated theory - Humphrey's Capability Maturity Model (CMM) (click link to view .PDF file about this). The CMM was described in the book Managing the Software Process (1989). The CMM was conceived by Watts Humphrey, who based it on the earlier work of Phil Crosby. Active development of the model by the SEI (US Dept. of Defence Software Engineering Institute) began in 1986. What the CMM gave was a general model for process capability maturity, and it dovetails beautifully with Deming's work (e.g., Deming's process control chart, the PDSA cycle, and his 14-point philosophy).
So, where you say:
In the 1980's, we had all kinds of bothersome business intellectuals blathering on about "just in time" manufacturing and warehousing and all kinds of stuff. Great. Now we have a situation where if there is any kind of a hiccup in the system, everything shuts down. No reserves. No stockpiles.
--- End quote ---
- you are describing the reality of institutionalised ignorance of the worst kind - self-inflicted ignorance. That is, we have the full knowledge of how to set up and run all and any of our processes for optimum results, but that knowledge has not been passed on (or taught) to members of society. There are apparently some philosophical and not-invented-here reasons for this, but that could be another discussion in itself.
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2. Urbanisation:
Then, we have people crammed into tiny subsections of tall boxes.
--- End quote ---
Yes we do, and I gather that censuses show that the urbanised population on the planet numbers larger than the rural population. It used to be the opposite, but that all started to change when the migration from rural areas commenced during the British Industrial Revolution. Now it seems to be largely unavoidable, planetwide. We'll have to adapt to living like this, and I think the evidence is that we have done/are doing quite well in that regard. In the UK and the US they have demonstrated some egregious mistakes/lessons in city planning since the '60s at least, though the UK arguably learned from those lessons and leapfrogged those problems when the plan for the new city of Milton Keynes was drawn up, with council/State housing even embodying the Parker Morris 1961 minimum space standards (per the 1961 government report titled Homes for Today and Tomorrow and more commonly known as the Parker Morris standards).
The message here is that we have long held the knowledge to plan and design for pleasant human habitation. Whether we do so plan is another matter.
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3. Silliness:
Then, we have government telling us that if you have enough food in your house to last more than 1 week, you're a terrorist.
Everything is stacked against people.
That is, unless you want to look into "prepping" or "preppers".
--- End quote ---
If we treat it as given (from the foregoing) that commercial processes are generally likely to be relatively efficient because of the necessary commercial focus on cost-efficiency + production efficiency, then this silliness would seem to be the product of variously inefficient or broken processes operated by the State - i.e., including State and commercial processes that are governed/mandated by statutory/regulatory dictates that are subject to the law of unintended consequences. For example, if you have a government policy of "green energy" that subsidises investement in and building of wind-farm power generation, then you are going to kill an awful lot of fauna (birds and insects), reduce the average cost-efficiency of national power generation, and increase the national/local cost/price of electricity (QED). Oops. We might say that we wouldn't want/expect that all to happen, but it is so obvious and predictable an outcome (and environmentalists and others had been telling us these things all along) that you might think that only an imbecile would go ahead with it. Oh, but wait...
I would suggest that it's not deliberately "stacked against the people" for it's own sake, so much as the people are the natural and only host to society's parasites - people in government and commercial. It's an economic reality. The fast buck has to be made by someone and extracted from someone else, and it is the consumer/taxpayer who ultimately pays for anything and everything - i.e., the good things and the cockups. Who else could pay? Just as human ignorance/stupidity/greed is the norm, State ignorance/stupidity/greed and corruption is rife and exists in a self-perpetuating cycle, and thus is - and has to be - funded by the consumer/taxpayer.
Presumably, the "preppers" are people who want to extricate themselves from dependency/reliance on the cycle of silliness and ripoff, so that they can peacefully survive the corrupt idiots and their idiotic plans, regardless. But prepping behaviour doesn't necessarily help to fund/perpetuate the lucrative cycle and may even put it at risk, so neither the State nor commercial interests would really want that to happen. Best make it illegal, but if you do, then make it look like it could have been a silly administrative error - but incredibly difficult to reverse now - just in case there's any blowback from their sheeple hosts. The latter will go back to sleep eventually and adapt to it as the new status quo.
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4. Economic externalities:
So, we have a society that is geared towards ensuring that people cannot be prepared for a natural disaster, and we have the economy geared towards ensuring that business cannot be prepared for a natural disaster...
And now we're left to rely on the "state"?
--- End quote ---
If a disaster is man-made by a commercial organisation - e.g., environmental pollution - then that is usually regarded as an "externality" by the commercial organisation, and very often the costs for clearing the mess up are regarded as society's costs, the commercial operation not accepting responsibility. The taxpayer pays.
The State has no such opportunity to pass on its responsibility for some man-made disaster or aggravation of a disaster that it may have caused. Nevertheless, the outcome is the same - the costs for clearing the mess up are to society's cost. The taxpayer pays.
Regardless, any commercial processes will generally tend to be relatively cost-effective and efficient (as above), but the State-run/managed processes not so much so. If there was profit to be made from being "prepared for a natural disaster", then there would be commercial processes that did that, but civil preparedness - for aggression or defence (war), or for man-made or natural disaster - is traditionally the domain of the State. If the State started to privatise some of these functions/processes, then it might be abrogating the absolute control that it currently wields. So it's not likely to happen.
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On the latter point, I was very impressed with the political astuteness and adroitness demonstrated by the mayor of NY (Bloomberg) when he scored a double-whammy out of the political opportunity presented by Hurricane Sandy. Any responsibility for failure to mitigate the damage or failure to address the humanitarian issues or clear up properly was successfully externalised. You see, the hurricane was an unprecedented event which could thus not have been planned for, and was attributable to CAGW, which Obama had shown he was the Man for sorting out, having promised to push back sea-levels, or something.
This was nothing short of politically brilliant IMHO - albeit cynical and despite crawling with logical fallacy/irrationality:
* (a) Absolutely no blame could be attributable to NY or other civil defence measures or apparent deficiency thereof.
* (b) What it necessitated was Guvvermint attention (he passed the buck!), and Obama was the Man - he would address this dreadful and pressing CAGW issue but only if he were voted back into office for another term.
* (c) Panders to the imagination and/or ideology of the CAGW proponents (all voters).
* (d) Detracts from the stance of Obama's contenders (whose disappointed supporters could be potential votes for Obama).
I'm a Bloomberg fan now. I reckon he's even Teflon-coated! :Thmbsup:
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