SOUTH AMERICA - A Time-Lapse Adventure

SOUTH AMERICA - A Time-Lapse Adventure from Morten Rustad on Vimeo.

Eye of India

Eye of India from Benn Berkeley on Vimeo.

Mass Layoffs in Chinese Coal Fields

Marketplace:

Behind the doors of this gritty coal town, nobody answers the repeated knocks. When they hear there's a foreign journalist on the other side, most keep their doors shut. But then, a woman opens hers, shoos the visitor inside, and explains why. "We don’t dare talk about what’s happened," she said. "You talk, and they’ll retaliate."
She's referring to local government officials and the managers at the Eastern Wind coal mine across the street. The mine is run by Longmay, the largest state-owned coal mining company in China’s northeast. It’s one of several here in the city of Qitaihe that will empty when Longmay lays off 100,000 workers later this autumn....
Mining makes up nearly a quarter of Qitaihe’s economy. Most of the city’s 800,000 people work to support the city’s coal mines. Longmay runs twelve mines here. Several will be shut down as the company lays off 40 percent of its workforce. “This is all related to corruption," Song said, yelling. "The whole Communist Party is corrupt; the entire system. They do whatever they want. We could all die on the street and it’s no business of theirs!”
Four years ago, Longmay made more than $100 million in profit. But now this region has the slowest economic growth in China, and lower coal prices have plunged the company into hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of debt.
Corruption also played a part. A few years ago, a company vice president was charged with accepting $50 million worth in bribes, money he used to buy dozens of sports cars and 58 houses, several of which he had never even visited...."Longmay’s situation is in fact rather universal in China in recent years," Deng said "Datong Coal Mine Group in Shanxi, China National Coal Group, Yankuang Group in Shandong, Shandong Energy Group — all these old coal companies have similar predicaments. They all have heavy personnel burdens, and they all have big local social responsibilities."
Combined, these companies have 600,000 employees whose jobs could soon be on the chopping block, too. “This situation is precisely what the government fears the most," Deng said. "A lot of idle men in their prime working age, without jobs. It threatens to cause social unrest.”

100,000 employees laid off?  Potentially more layoffs than that in the industry?  What gives?  Is coal from Australia cheaper, or has demand decreased that much?  I wouldn't think demand would be going down with all the power plants that have come on-line in the last few years.  I can imagine that many unemployed coal miners could lead to social unrest.  From here, China appears very opaque.  I have to wonder what in the hell is really going on over there.

Red Areas vs. Blue Areas

A little population density example:

Only 5% of the world’s population lives in the entire blue region. For comparison, the same number of people live in the small red region.  Believe it or not, it’s true. There are just as many people living in the small red area as there are living in all the blue areas combined.

For the geographically challenged, that is Bangladesh and part of India in red.

America: Hub of Innovation - Coal Mining Edition

Bloomberg:

A 30-year-old mining technique is becoming all that’s keeping a group of U.S. coal producers from joining their competitors in bankruptcy.
Coal, already locked in a battle with cheap natural gas, now faces federal environmental rules that threaten to reduce its share of power generation to the lowest in 66 years. Companies from Illinois to Northern Appalachia are responding by leaning more heavily than ever on longwall-mining, a technology that’ll be used to produce a quarter of America’s coal this year, up from 19 percent in 2013....
“People ask me all the time, ‘What’s the new mining technology that saves coal?’” Jim Stevenson, director of North American coal for consultant IHS Inc. in Houston, said by phone July 31. “It’s the longwall. It’s the proliferation of this 30-year-old technology that’s keeping coal coming out of these basins.”

30-year-old technology, huh?  Well, not exactly:

The technology, which evolved in Europe in the 1960s and was improved in the 1980s, is emerging as a bright spot for an industry battered by sliding prices, environmental regulations and increasing competition from natural gas.

I'd love to know the number of "new technologies" that originated in Europe years and years ago.  It seemed like every article I read in Engineering News-Record that talked about a project using a new construction method mentioned how it had originated in Europe thirty years before.  For as arrogant as we are about how our unfettered capitalism unleashes amazing innovations, I just don't see it in civil engineering.  This is another example of that.

PATAGONIA 8K

PATAGONIA 8K from Martin Heck | Timestorm Films on Vimeo.

The Fallen of World War II

Everest - A Tribute to the Fallen

Everest - A Tribute to the Fallen from Elia Saikaly on Vimeo.

The Tallest Skyscraper Built Every Year

The Economist:

Canada Loves Poop

So says The Atlantic (Ralph Waldo Emerson would be proud of the publication he co-founded):

The French love the heart emoji.
Canadians prefer pizza—and the pile of poo.
And Americans? The land that gave the world the iPhone, the Declaration of Independence, and the Kinsey Report prefers emoji that depict technology, royalty, and… eggplants. 
These preferences were revealed in a new report from SwiftKey, a software company that makes keyboards for iOS and Android phones. The report describes global trends in emoji usage and breaks them out by country and by language. Like nations themselves, it seems, emoji usage is also shaped by culture, climate, and geography.

Yes, this post is useless, but I really wanted to publish that headline.

China Used More Cement in 3 Years than the U.S. did in 100

There is a lot of crazy data here:

So how did China use so much cement? First, the country is urbanizing at a historic rate, much faster than the U.S. did in the 20^th Century. More than 20 million Chinese relocate to cities each year, which is more people than live in downtown New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago combined. This massive change has taken place in less than 50 years. In 1978, less than a fifth of China’s population lived in cities. By 2020, that proportion will be 60 percent....
More stunning than Shanghai's transformation is the growth of the Pearl River Delta, a megalopolis on the Chinese mainland across from Hong Kong. The manufacturing hub had 42 million inhabitants in 2010, according to the World Bank. If considered a single urban area – which makes sense, since the cities there all run together -- the Pearl River Delta would be the world’s largest city by both area and population.
What’s almost more impressive than China’s biggest cities is the incredible number of “small” cities that no one has ever heard of. In 2009, China had 221 cities with more than a million people in them, compared with only 35 in Europe. Even relatively minor cities like Zhengzhou and Jinan are more populous than Los Angeles or Chicago.
Beyond China's incredible urbanization, there are a few more facts that make the cement stat even more believable. As Goldman Sachs pointed out in a note, China’s population today is only about four times as large as the U.S., but it is 15 times as large as the U.S. was in the early 20th Century, and nine times the size of the U.S. in 1950.
The world also experienced a shift in building materials over the 20th Century. In 1950, the world manufactured roughly as much steel as cement; by 2010, steel production had grown by a factor of eight, but cement had gone up by a factor of 25. And where many houses in the U.S. are made of wood, China suffers from a relative lack of lumber. Unlike in the U.S., many people in China live in high- or low-rise buildings made out of cement.

The scale of everything in China is just mind-boggling to me.  I'm pretty sure China's steel industry is as large as the rest of the world's combined.  The overproduction in every industry there is astounding.

Dubai Flow Motion

Dubai Flow Motion from Rob Whitworth on Vimeo.

Happy Mardi Gras

I hope you are enjoying the last day before Lent.  The Atlantic has a rundown of photos of Carnival celebrations around the world.  Nothing can top the spectacle of Rio:

Dancers from the Vila Isabel samba school participate in the annual carnival parade in Rio de Janeiro's Sambadrome on February 16. #

Ricardo Moraes/Reuters

Like I said, spectacle.

A Closer Look at the Smithfield Deal

The Center for Investigative Reporting takes a look at the Chinese purchase of Smithfield Foods, and investigates whether the company that bought Smithfield is controlled by the Chinese Government.  I find that focus to be misguided, but there are some very interesting numbers in the article:

The Virginia-based pork company derived its ham from a curing process Native Americans taught settlers five centuries ago. It owned part of Main Street in the bucolic town of Smithfield – including a restaurant, a historic Southern hotel and the company’s nearby headquarters.
C. Larry Pope, its president and CEO, had a fireplace in his sprawling executive office, which looked more like a hunting lodge than the command center for what had become America’s largest pork business.
But in 2013, a Chinese firm bought this quintessential slice of Americana – Main Street and all. The takeover, valued at $7.1 billion, remains the largest-ever Chinese acquisition of an American company...
With the Smithfield purchase, a Chinese company now owns 1 in 4 pigs raised in the U.S....
Pope had moved into the role of chief executive at Smithfield Foods seven years prior, taking the reins from the grandson of the company’s founder. He oversaw the company’s operations, including 46,000 worldwide employees, a research lab that had genetically engineered the leanest pigs on earth and nine slaughterhouses, including the world’s largest in North Carolina.
The company processed 32 million pigs a year. On average, one pig moved through a Smithfield Foods processing plant every second to be slaughtered, butchered, packaged and shipped for consumption. Bacon, ribs and other pork cuts made Smithfield a multibillion-dollar company.
Smithfield supplied restaurant chains such as McDonald’s and Denny’s and many grocery stores in the United States. It represented the height of America’s industrialized farming, owning everything from hog farms in Iowa to slaughterhouses outside Chicago and warehouses and distribution trucks that crisscrossed the United States, Canada and Europe....
In 2011, the year the five-year plan was announced, Chinese nationals owned $81 million worth of U.S. farmland.
By the end of 2012, the Chinese owned $900 million in U.S. farmland – a 1,000 percent increase – making them the largest buyers that year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The Smithfield deal included another $480 million in U.S. farmland, which would push the Chinese stake to nearly $1.4 billion in less than two years....
Pope explained that the deal would create jobs in the U.S., not destroy them. Shuanghui’s plan to import more American pork would ramp up production at Smithfield’s 460 hog farms, creating more money for farmers and more jobs at the slaughterhouses.

All of the numbers describing Smithfield's operations amaze me.  460 farms.  32 million pigs a year. $480 million in farmland.  But probably most amazing is that the Chinese bought 1/4 of the entire U.S. pork industry for $7.1 billion, which was 30% above the market value of the company at the time.  Even at the 30% premium, that would indicate that all the hog raising facilities and all the hog processing facilities, along with all the hogs in the United States are worth less than $30 billion.  That's less than a third of what is spent on highways annually, and the transportation network is grossly underfunded.  $30 billion is pocket change in the U.S. economy.  That seems like a pretty low number to me. 

A Bad Harvest

The orange crop in Florida was really bad:

Some growers have just given up and abandoned their groves without pulling up the trees, which can worsen citrus greening, since the psyllid will feast on trees that don’t have pesticide, and then fly to nearby groves and infect those trees. There were 126,000 acres of abandoned groves in Florida in 2014, and 7,300 acres of forested areas that have abandoned citrus in their canopies, according to the USDA.
There are some measures that arrest or slow the spread of the disease, but they’re costly. Growers are now treating their trees eight times a year or more to reduce the number of psyllids on them, they’re also adding fertilizer and other nutrients to the trees' roots to help them fight the disease. A citrus grower now spends $2,250 an acre to grow trees—prior to greening, he would spend $850 an acre, according to Florida Citrus Mutual, an industry association.
“The smaller growers seem to be really thinking about the economics, a lot of them are deciding to throw in the towel and are selling their groves,” said Dean Saunders, a real-estate broker who served in the state House of Representatives and comes from an agricultural family.
As many growers give up, the infrastructure to support citrus is shrinking, too. United Indian River Packers, Inc., one of Florida’s oldest packinghouses, announced last year they were auctioning off their properties in order to focus on other businesses. A Naples store where customers could buy fresh produce before it was shipped elsewhere closed in May, the land sold to a builder.
“You kind of scratch your head and wonder—is there even going to be an industry?” Saunders said. “I don’t believe that but I understand why people would ask the question.”

That's just ugly.  I was surprised when reading a story about a Brazilian orange juice baron when I saw this statement:

 Brazil was more prepared than Florida for greening, an insect-borne bacterial disease discovered in the state’s orange groves in 2005, because it had put systems in place after outbreaks of a bacteria known as canker, said Juliano Ayres, director of Cutrale-funded Fundecitrus in Araraquara, which releases alerts as diseases spread.

I don't know.  That sounds a little sketchy to me.  But I would recommend reading the whole article at Bloomberg, because it is interesting.

Is This The Year For a China Meltdown?

Bank of America thinks it might be:

China is at mounting risk of a financial crisis this year as growth sputters and deflationary pressures trigger a wave of defaults, Bank of America has warned.

The US lender told clients that a confluence of forces are coming together that threaten to chill the speculative mania on the Shanghai stock exchange and to expose the underlying fragility of China’s $26 trillion edifice of debt.

“A credit crunch is highly probable,” said the bank in a report entitled “Deflation, Devaluation, and Default”, written by David Cui and Tracy Tian.

They said the country’s highly-leveraged companies cannot safely withstand President Xi Jinping’s drive to stamp out moral hazard and wean the country off excess credit, warning that the mix of slower growth and excess debt “could prove lethal for the financial system”.

The report warned that it is rare for countries to escape either a financial crisis, or major bank failures, a currency upset, a sovereign crisis – or a mix of these – after letting credit grow at such vertiginous rates.
“The most likely scenario is a bad debt surge as growth slows, followed by a credit crunch in the shadow banking system, followed by a major recapitalisation of the banks,” said Mr Cui.
The report said China spent 15pc of GDP to rescue lenders in the late 1990s but the scale of the problem is much greater today, and this time the government cannot resort to fresh stimulus so easily.
Loans have jumped by roughly 100pc of GDP in the past five years under most estimates. This is twice the pace of growth in Japan over a comparable period before the Nikkei bubble burst in 1990, or in the US before the Lehman crisis in 2008. 
Standard Chartered said total credit has surpassed 250pc of GDP once shadow banking and offshore lending are included, an extremely high level for an emerging economy without mature markets or layers of accumulated wealth.
Mr Cui said the explosive rise on the Shanghai stock market - up 50pc in barely three months - is being driven by “blue-sky talk” and $180bn of margin lending from brokers. It is happening at a time of deteriorating earnings. “When the sell-off happens, we suspect that it will not be orderly,” he said. The Shanghai composite index may fall back from 3,300 to 2,400 before it settles in a trading range.
He advised investors to stick to defence stocks or equities linked to the nuclear industry given that both are shielded from Mr Xi’s efforts to shake out excessive capacity in Chinese industry.
Bank or America said China has been in factory gate deflation for 33 months and the downward slide appears to be deepening.

That is terrible news for commodities.  Just a guess, but I doubt a Communist government will be able to weather a capitalist meltdown very effectively. But, then again, capitalist countries suck at handling deflation, too.

NCAA Championship Pregame Weekend Links

My employer is allowing workers to come in late on Tuesday so they can watch Ohio State Monday night.  In the lead-up to the game, here are some stories to read:

How the Redskins Got Their Name - SB Nation.  A review of a children's book promoted by the Washington Redskins propaganda arm.

St. Louis Strikes Back: NFL Proposal for Riverfront Stadium Unveiled - nextSTL.  1. Don't call it Riverfront Stadium. 2. 'It is fucking stupid to spend $860-985 million on a football stadium. 

Marshawn Lynch's Unstoppable Drive - The New Yorker

Brazil Water Supply, Crops Still at Risk a Year after Epic Drought - Scientific American.  That would indicate how epic our bumper crop was, that markets still went in the toilet.

Indiana Senate weighs blocking local limits on factory farms - CNBC.  Big Ag versus home rule.  Money talks, local government walks.  Republicans are only in favor of local government when it allows them to screw poor people and minorities or benefit rich folks and businesses.

The Cheesemaking Monk of Manitoba - Modern Farmer.  As you know by now, I'm a sucker for agricultural stories featuring Catholic religious.

Against Hoppy Beer - Slate.  I'm not a fan.  I like my malty bocks, marzens, schwartzbiers, etc.

Hard Cider Is Having A Moment - Fivethirtyeight.  It sure has paid off for Boston Beer.  Check the stock price for the release date for Angry Orchard, April 2012, versus now ($107 vs. $284)

Antibiotics: US discovery labelled 'game-changer' for medicine - BBC.  How they grew the bacteria is pretty cool.  Also, see Teixobactin - The Big Picture

Diaper Material Brings Nanoscale Resolution to Ordinary Microscopes - Scientific American

Mainline Street - GQ.  How heroin took hold in Laramie, Wyoming.

Oil-Price Drop Takes Shine Off Steel Town - Wall Street Journal.  As if Lorain and Youngstown need another kick in the nuts.

Why the Republican Congress's First Act Was To Declare War on Math - New York Magazine. Because tax cuts. Also, see Kansas Is Totally Screwed - Mother Jones.  That's why Republicans hate math.

The Politics of Drinking Water - The Atlantic.  On the anniversary of the Freedom Industries fuckup in West Virginia.

 Aerial Photos Expose the American Prison System's Staggering Scale - Wired

Where America's Social Security benefits go, in four maps - Wonkblog.  Bible Belt or Disability Belt?

Kumbh Mela: The Greatest Gathering of People Ever on Planet Earth

30 Years After Bhopal

The Atlantic features a photo series reminding us of the largest industrial disaster ever:

Thirty years ago, on the night of December 2, 1984, an accident at the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, released at least 30 tons of a highly toxic gas called methyl isocyanate, as well as a number of other poisonous gases. The pesticide plant was surrounded by shanty towns, leading to more than 600,000 people being exposed to the deadly gas cloud that night. The gases stayed low to the ground, causing victims throats and eyes to burn, inducing nausea, and many deaths. Estimates of the death toll vary from as few as 3,800 to as many as 16,000, but government figures now refer to an estimate of 15,000 killed over the years. Toxic material remains, and 30 years later, many of those who were exposed to the gas have given birth to physically and mentally disabled children. For decades, survivors have been fighting to have the site cleaned up, but they say the efforts were slowed when Michigan-based Dow Chemical took over Union Carbide in 2001. Human rights groups say that thousands of tons of hazardous waste remain buried underground, and the government has conceded the area is contaminated. There has, however, been no long-term epidemiological research which conclusively proves that birth defects are directly related to the drinking of the contaminated water.

 A worker cleans dust as he displays a panel of photographs of some of the thousands of people who died in the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster at the forensic department of Gandhi Medical college in Bhopal on June 8, 2010. (AP Photo/Prakash Hatvalne) #

To me, the pictures of the children born with birth defects are the most troubling, and that applies even if the birth defects can't be tied to the disaster.

Astronaut: A journey to space

Astronaut - A journey to space from Guillaume JUIN on Vimeo.