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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: carranza2 who wrote (10358)	10/21/2006 11:14:54 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 217931

C2, I'm [originally] a civil engineer. So I quite like things like dams and the like. While I agree that man-made things can defy natural processes all over the place, some things are in what one could call "unstable equilibrium". Such as, the Twin Towers, houses below sea level, on volcanoes, on top of cliffs, on flood plains, re-entry of space shuttles, Chernobyl's reactors, and lots more besides. I just love it when humans do death-defying things and twist the four forces of the apocalypse to our purposes. But I am somewhat in awe of them and would be very nervous about attaching my name to the design of them. A two storey building would be my height limit. It's a pretty easy thing to build an earth dam/levee and from what I know of the Katrina situation, it should easily have held in place. It seems to have been like the Ruahihi canal - an entirely predictable design/construction blunder. But people mess up the simplest things - usually because of lack of care and attention [they use "human error" as an excuse for their indifference and laziness]. Nevertheless, even if the levees were perfect, they are still holding the line against relentless forces and you have no doubt read that I live 80 metres above sea level, and well protected behind islands and high coastlines, so that when, [not if], a huge tsunami comes ashore, the probability of me being close to sea level is much lower than if I lived with a sea-level view of the waves, or, in the case of New Orleans, below sea-level view of the waves. When there's not much cost, I prefer things to be in stable equilibrium. So, I like low level buildings with not far to fall. I like above sea level. Away from volcanoes [I'm on a volcanic field now, but far enough away from potential phreatic volcanoes that I should be clear unless visiting Mission Bay or something]. Away from a cliff edge. Not on a flood plain. Rare events are common - because there are so many different rare events that can happen that one of them is going to happen for sure, any minute now. Combine a 1:100 [year] flood, 1:100 earthquake, 1:100 electricity collapse, 1:100 terrorist attack, 1:100 aircraft crash, 1:100 war, 1:100 pandemic, 1:100 volcano, 1:100 bolide, 1:100 financial collapse, 1:100 insurrection, 1:100 famine, 1:100 etc.... Means you are definitely going to get one of them pretty soon. Be prepared, zing a zing, bom bom. One way to be prepared is to separate oneself from their planned attack. Being away from sea level is a good start. It's even cheaper than being at sea level, so that's an easy one. It's a simple matter to pop down to the beach if one wants. Theoretically, if the professionals do their job right, one could live in a 100 storey building, next to a nuclear reactor, on the sea shore, adjacent to the San Andreas fault, commuting to work by aircraft, with a dormant volcano nearby and leveraged on derivatives with a mortgage to the gunwales and be fine. I've never been to New Orleans. One of these days I will go there. Mqurice