The Pacific Institute, in a 2010 report issued for Global Water Day, reports that every day, 2 million tons of sewage and industrial and agricultural waste are discharged into the world’s water — the equivalent of the weight of the entire human population of 6.8 billion people.1
The UN estimates that the amount of wastewater produced annually is about 1,500 km, six times more water than exists in all the rivers of the world. (UN WWAP, 2003) .1 In fact, more people die from unsafe water annually than from all forms of violence, including war (WHO, 2002).2 This Gallup World News report provides a summary of water problems worldwide:
Some think that safe drinking water is easy to find in nations where supermarkets are packed with bottled water – a multibillion-dollar-per-year industry. Yet if you want to drink water that does not have harmful contaminants, the challenge of finding it remains great.
In fact, the CR Way, an international movement, whose members strive to extend their lives through low-calorie, optimal nutrition, issued a warning when one of our members found that the expensive, seductively packaged bottled water brand she was drinking had radioactive radium among its components. Another member found that his bottled water source contained minerals in concentration high enough to contribute to kidney-stone formation. So it became clear that finding pure, safe drinking water is essential for our anyone who strives for optimal health.
This motivated me to take a close look at the three sources people turn to for water: municipal, bottled, and well water. Fortunately, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) – a Washington-based environmental activist organization that works to protect kids from toxic chemicals in food, water, air and the products people use – has done extensive research on this subject:
Municipal Water in the U.S.
The EWG did a three-year study of water quality in U.S. municipalities of 250,000 or more. They gathered data from tests conducted by 47,667 utilities.
EWG found more than 300 contaminants, ranging from microorganisms capable of causing disease to radioactive substances – even rocket fuel known to be toxic to the thyroid gland. And only approximately one-third of the contaminants found are even regulated by the EPA.3
Then there is the addition of chlorine, the virtually ubiquitous anti-contaminant, as well as fluorine, which is added to 80% of the municipal drinking water in the U.S. LivingTheCRWay Blog has reported on the danger of high amounts of fluorine ingestion since it is linked in some studies to brain damage, Bromine and Fluorine—Thyroid Disruption , Living The CRWay Blog, Paul McGlothin, Meredith Averill, 2012
Bottled water isn’t better.
Bottled water manufacturers are not required to release results of analysis of their water. In a 2008 EWG study of 10 bottled water brands – disinfection byproducts, fertilizer residue, and pain medication were detected – 38 pollutants in all.
The EWG also evaluated 163 brands of bottled water, finding no bottled water brand that merited their “A” ranking. Op. cit., EWG3
Well water has its own set of problems.
Well water is unregulated, so homeowners must take it upon themselves to test it. Most do not test beyond the minimum requirements to get a certificate of occupancy. Yet naturally occurring contaminants, like arsenic and radioactive radon or radium, are not uncommon in well water. Nor are coliform bacteria, which cause gastrointestinal illness.
Assembling content that informs LivingTheCRWay members and the public of the problems with drinking water and how to solve them has taken several months. These resources provide more information:
Bromine and Fluorine—Thyroid Disruption . Living The CRWay Blog. Paul McGlothin, Meredith Averill, 2012
As a board member of the Lifeboat Foundation, I thought it important to write this blog post since the water on which our lifeboat floats needs protection desperately.
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1. UN World Water Assessment Programme, 2003, IN: World Water Quality Facts and Statistics. The Pacific Institute World Water Day 2010. Available at
http://www.pacinst.org/reports/water_quality/water_quality_facts_and_stats.pdf
2. World Health Organization research, 2002, IN: World Water Quality Facts and Statistics. The Pacific Institute World Water Day 2010. Available at http://www.pacinst.org/reports/water_quality/water_quality_facts_and_stats.pdf
3. Environmental Working Group (EWG), Health/Toxics: Our Water, 2012. Available at http://www.ewg.org/ourwater
]]>The detailed G&M safety report naturally considers both of these, and considers hypothetical stable MBH capture rates based on a weak CR background flux. It actually overlooks better examples of white dwarfs which are part of a binary pair such as Sirius B, the little companion to one of our closest and brightest stars, Sirius A.
One could argue that white dwarfs are not greatly understood — but the relevant factors to the safety debate are quite understood — density, mass, escape velocity, and approximate age of such observed phenomenon. Only magnetic field effects are up for debate.
If Sirius B captured even one such MBH due to CR bombardment from its companion star in the first say 20 million years of its existence — and it would be difficult to argue that it would not — then that MBH would be accreting for the last 100 million years, through far denser material, and most likely at a much higher velocity, than any MBH captured in the Earth due to LHC collisions. Therefore, given the continued existence of Sirius B, accretion rates would therefore have to be incredibly slow and there would be no significant threat to Earth from what would be a much slower MBH accretion rate here.
In this context, any argument promoting the oft rubbished T-L-M-Ch theorem actually provides us with a safe assurance, in the knowledge that accretion rates must be negligible, that there is also no risk of any heating/micro-explosive effect due to Hawking Radiation, as Telemach refutes HR. In this context it is quite a paradox that Prof O.E. Rossler who derived Telemach has championed it as a safety concern…
In the volatile world we live in today it is unfortunate that other issues are over-dominated by the debate on the safety of one particular industry here that may be no threat whatsoever. It was with pleasure I read The Chaos Point — The World at the Crossroads by Ervin Laszlo recently. As far as I recall, our particle colliders hardly got a mention at all.
And finally to share a very low-key ‘Earth Day’ gig in my local town last weekend I was happy to attend ‘(a) choose or create a pledge (b) once committed you must try and stick to your pledge to the end and © try to start an eco revolution’: It’s a wonderful world.
]]>Some on this site think there is something unique about the Black Hole controversy. It does affect the whole planet. But most people don’t consider humancide worse than genocide, and humancide not as bad as destroying all life. Americans and Canadians might suffer in an almost total way if Old Faithful geyser and Yellowstone National Park becomes a newly active volcano. http://www.phillyimc.org/en/bee-colony-collapse-and-dealing-disaster
]]>One: most of America’s worst economic crises have been a result of financial obscurity. The first major crash in my lifetime was in the tech bubble of the early 2000s, where Wall Street traders were overrating the quality of Internet stocks. Once the broader market realized this, the values of many tech companies were obliterated. Millions of investors exposed to this sector lost their entire investments because they were unaware of these misrepresentations. In the most last recession, where lenders were underrating the riskiness of homeowners and financial institutions were securitizing riskier-than-advertised mortgages, millions of investors lost their entire investments yet again because they were unaware of further misrepresentations.
Two: economic history repeats itself, even if as a society, we might be aware of this pattern. Taking these two market crises as an example of this bleak fact about our species, it seems that we’ll always have the shortest of memories. In this case, history repeated rather quickly – twice in the span of a decade. Is it possible that people are cognizant of a recurring mistake before it happens, even if it’s happened before in their lifetimes? Most likely not, if the last recession is any example. A significant number of real estate professionals, banking gurus, and regulators were responsible for inflating a price bubble in the housing market, even though some fraction should have been economically conscious enough to understand the problems that would eventually arise.
The question then remains: is there a way to solve both of these problems, assuming the best of all possible worlds? Yes. Imagine a place where peoples’ understandings of basic economics and financial practices was commonplace, where a homeowner and a lender had an equal comprehension of a mortgage, where a hard-working breadwinner knew the dangers of payday loans, and where a child could sit side-by-side with his or her parents while overseeing family finances. All of these possibilities – and more – can come into fruition if we as individuals place a greater emphasis on financial awareness. Note: I don’t say “financial learning” because all of these concepts are innate to us, though hidden by verbiage and stigma. Whether we like it or not, if our career is in finance or not, we must come to terms with the economic world that surrounds us.
If we are lucky, a societal “financial flowering” may just reduce the severity of future crises, and will definitely place more dollars in the pockets of our grandchildren. Just think, if we are able to teach future generations about the dangers of debt, or the linkages between well-being and sound investing practices, our world will be a better place. For lack of a better cliché, this is not rocket-science, which is why it is actually possible. I work for WealthLift, a company that teaches novice investors how to evaluate and trade stocks, while providing them with educational lessons about topics such as hedge funds, the Federal Reserve, and retirement planning. I hope that more people will try to make a difference in the realm of financial clarity, because it is an issue that affects us all.
At the end of the day, our lives are a factor of the number of Greenbacks we hold, whether we like it or not. I want to raise my children in a culture that has a better grasp on these issues, not for wealth or power, but for peace.
]]>Let’s start with a model of risk so simplified as to be completely unrealistic, yet will still retain a key feature. Suppose that we managed to translate every risk into some single normalized unit of “cost of expected harm”. Let us also suppose that we could bring together all of the payments that could be made to avoid risks. A mitigation policy given these simplifications must be pretty easy: just buy each of the “biggest for your dollar” risks.
Not so fast.
The problem with this is that many risk mitigation measures are discrete. Either you buy the air filter or you don’t. Either your town filters its water a certain way or it doesn’t. Either we have the infrastructure to divert the asteroid or we don’t. When risk mitigation measures become discrete, then allocating the costs becomes trickier. Given a budget of 80 “harms” to reduce, and risks of 50, 40, and 35, then buying the 50 leaves 15 “harms” that you were willing to pay to avoid left on the table.
Alright, so how hard can this be to sort this out? After all, just because going big isn’t always the best for your budget, doesn’t mean it isn’t easy to figure out. Unfortunately, this problem is also known as the “0–1 knapsack problem”, which computer scientists know to be NP-complete. This means that there isn’t any known process to find exact solutions that are polynomial in the size of the input, thus requiring looking through a good portion of the potential solution combinations, taking an exponential amount of time.
What does this tell us? First of all, it means that it isn’t appropriate to expect all individuals, organizations, or governments to make accurate comparative risk assessments for themselves, but neither should we discount the work that they have done. Accurate risk comparisons are hard won and many time-honed cautions are embedded in our insurance policies and laws.
However, as a result of this difficulty, we should expect that certain short-cuts are made, particularly cognitive short-cuts: sharp losses are felt more sharply, and have more clearly identifiable culprits, than slow shifts that erode our capacities. We therefore expect our laws and insurance policies to be biased towards sudden unusual losses, such as car accidents and burglaries, as opposed to a gradual increase in surrounding pollutants or a gradual decrease in salary as a profession becomes obsolete. Rare events may also not be included through processes of legal and financial adaptation. We should also expect them to pay more attention to issues we have no “control” over, even if the activities we do control are actually more dangerous. We should therefore be particularly careful of extreme risks that move slowly and depend upon our own activities, as we are naturally biased to ignore them compared to more flashy and sudden events. For this reason, models, games, and simulations are very important tools for risk policy. For one thing, they make these shifts perceivable by compressing them. Further, as they can move longer-term events into the short-term view of our emotional responses. However, these tools are only as good as the information they include, so we also need design methodologies that aim to broadly discover information to help avoid these biases.
The discrete, “all or nothing” character of some mitigation measures has another implication. It also tells us that we wouldn’t be able to make implicit assessments of how much individuals of different income levels value their lives by the amount they are willing to pay to avoid risks. Suppose that we have some number of relatively rare risks, each having a prevention stage, in which the risks have not manifested in any way, and a treatment stage, in which they have started to manifest. Even if the expected value favors prevention over treatment in all cases, if one cannot pay for all such prevention, then the best course in some cases is to pay for very few of them, leaving a pool of available resources to treat what does manifest, which we do not know ahead of time.
The implication for existential and other extreme risks is we should be very careful to clearly articulate what the warning signs for each of them are, for when it is appropriate to shift from acts of prevention to acts of treatment. In particular, we should sharply proceed with mitigating the cases where the best available theories suggest there will be no further warning signs. With existential risks, the boundary between remaining flexible and needing to commit requires sharply different responses, but with unknown tipping points, the location of the boundary is fuzzy. As a lack of knowledge knows no prevention and will always manifest, only treatment is feasible, so acting sharply to build our theories is vital.
We can draw another conclusion by expanding on how the model given at the beginning is unrealistic. There is no such thing as a completely normalized harm, as there are tradeoffs between irreconcilable criteria, the evaluation of which changes with experience across and within individuals. Even temporarily limiting an analysis to standard physical criteria (say lives), rare events pose a problem for actuarial assessment, with few occurrences giving poor bounds on likelihood. Existential risks provide no direct frequencies, nor opportunity for an update in Bayesian belief, so we are left to an inductive assessment of the risk’s potential pathways.
However, there is also no single pool for mitigation measures. People will form and dissolve different pools of resources for different purposes as they are persuaded and dissuaded. Therefore, those who take it upon themselves to investigate the theory leading to rare and one-pass harms, for whatever reason, provide a mitigation effort we might not rationally take for ourselves. It is my particular bias to think that information systems for aggregating these efforts and interrogating these findings, and methods for asking about further phenomena still, are worth the expenditure, and thus the loss in overall flexibility. This combination of our biases leads to a randomized strategy for investigating unknown risks.
In my view, the Lifeboat Foundation works from a similar strategy as an umbrella organization: one doesn’t have to yet agree that any particular risk, mitigation approach, or desired future is the one right thing to pursue, which of course can’t be known. It is merely the bet that pooling those pursuits will serve us. I have some hope this pooling will lead to efforts inductively combining the assessments of disparate risks and potential mitigation approaches.
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What’s to worry? RMS Titanic departs Southampton.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Titanic disaster in 1912. What better time to think about lifeboats?
One way to start a discussion is with some vintage entertainment. On the centenary weekend of the wreck of the mega-liner, our local movie palace near the Hudson River waterfront ran a triple bill of classic films about maritime disasters: A Night to Remember, Lifeboat, and The Poseidon Adventure. Each one highlights an aspect of the lifeboat problem. They’re useful analogies for thinking about the existential risks of booking a passage on spaceship Earth.
Can’t happen…
A Night to Remember frames the basic social priorities: Should we have lifeboats and who are they for? Just anybody?? When William McQuitty produced his famous 1958 docudrama of the Titanic’s last hours, the answers were blindingly obvious – of course we need lifeboats! They’re for everyone and there should be enough! Where is that moral certainty these days? And whatever happened to the universal technological optimism of 1912? For example, certain Seasteaders guarantee your rights – and presumably a lifeboat seat – only as long as your dues are paid. Libertarians privatize public goods, run them into the ground, squeeze out every dime, move the money offshore, and then dictate budget priorities in their own interest. Malthusians handle the menu planning. And the ship’s captain just might be the neo-feudal Prince Philip, plotting our course back to his Deep Green Eleventh Century.
Think Mink and Don’t Sink: Talulah Bankhead in Hitchcock’s Lifeboat.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat deals with the problems of being in one. For a very long time – unlike the lucky stiffs on the Titanic, who were picked up in 2 hours. Specifically, it’s about a motley group of passengers thrown together in an open boat with short provisions, no compass, and no certain course. And, oh yes, the skipper is their mortal enemy: The lifeboat is helmed by the U-boat commander who torpedoed their ship. He overawes them with seafaring expertise and boundless energy (thanks to the speed pills in his secret stash) and then lulls them by singing sentimental German lieder. At night, the captain solves his problems of supply and authority by culling the injured passengers while everyone’s asleep. He tells the survivors they’re going to Bermuda. They’re actually headed for a rendezvous with his supply ship – and from there the slow boat to Buchenwald. The point of Lifeboat is simple: What can you do in your life and environment so you never, ever end up in one?
What’s wrong with this picture?
Risk avoidance is the moral of The Poseidon Adventure. A glorious old ocean liner, the Poseidon, is acquired by new owners who plan to scrap it. But these clever operators maximize shareholder value by billing the ship’s final voyage as a New Year’s cruise to Greece. They take on every paying passenger they can find, barter with a band to get free entertainment, and drive the underloaded ship hard and fast into the stormy winter Mediterranean over the protests of the captain and seasick travelers. At this point an undersea earthquake triggers a 90-foot tsunami, and despite ample warnings this monster wave broadsides the top-heavy liner at midnight, during the New Year’s party. First the ball drops. Then the other shoe drops. The result is the ultimate “Bottoms Up!”
And the takeaway of The Poseidon Adventure applies to all of the films and to life in general, not to mention the next few generations on the planet. As David McCollough’s famously concluded in The Johnstown Flood, it can be a fatal assumption ‘that the people who were responsible for your safety will act responsibly.’
You can have a ripping good time watching these old movies. And as futurists, sociologists, planners, catastrophists, humanists or transhumanists, you can conjure with them, too. Icebergs and U-boats have ceased to menace – of cruise ships, I say nothing.
But the same principles of egalitarianism, legitimacy, non-beligerence and prudential planning apply to Earth-crossing asteroids, CERN’s operations and program, Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno manipulations, monetary policy and international finance, and NATO deployments present and future.
Or do they? And if they do, who says so?
Ship beautiful — the Aquitania on her way.
CC BY-NC-ND Clark Matthews and The Lifeboat Foundation
Earth’s Titanic Challenges by Clark Matthews is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at https://lifeboat.com.
It is not the first time that CERN announces record energies and news around April 1 – apparently hoping that some critique and concerns about the risks could be misinterpreted as an April joke. Additionally CERN regularly starts up the LHC at Easter celebrations and just before week ends, when news offices are empty and people prefer to have peaceful days with their friends and families.
CERN has just announced new records in collision energies at the LHC. And instead of conducting a neutral risk assessment, the nuclear research centre plans costly upgrades of its Big Bang machine. Facing an LHC upgrade in 2013 for up to CHF 1 Billion and the perspective of a Mega-LHC in 2022: How long will it take until risk researchers are finally integrated in a neutral safety assessment?
There are countless evidences for the necessity of an external and multidisciplinary safety assessment of the LHC. According to a pre-study in risk research, CERN fits less than a fifth of the criteria for a modern risk assessment (see the press release below). It is not acceptable that the clueless member states point at the operator CERN itself, while this regards its self-set security measures as sufficient, in spite of critique from risk researchers, continuous debates and the publication of further papers pointing at concrete dangers and even existential risks (black holes, strangelets) eventually arising from the experiments sooner or later. Presently science has to admit that the risk is disputed and basically unknown.
It will not be possible to keep up this ostrich policy much longer. Especially facing the planned upgrades of the LHC, CERN will be confronted with increasing critique from scientific and civil side that the most powerful particle collider has yet not been challenged in a neutral and multidisciplinary safety assessment. CERN has yet not answered to pragmatic proposals for such a process that also should constructively involve critics and CERN. Also further legal steps from different sides are possible.
The member states that are financing the CERN budget, the UN or private funds are addressed to provide resources to finally initiate a neutral and multidisciplinary risk assessment.
German version of this article published in Oekonews: http://www.oekonews.at/index.php?mdoc_id=1069458
Related LHC-Critique press release and open letter to CERN:
https://lifeboat.com/blog/2012/02/lhc-critique-press-release…hc-upgrade
Typical physicist’s April joke on stable black holes at the LHC (April 1 2012, German): http://www.scienceblogs.de/hier-wohnen-drachen/2012/04/stabi…rzeugt.php
Latest publications of studies demonstrating risks arising from the LHC experiment:
Prof Otto E. Rössler: http://www.academicjournals.org/AJMCSR/PDF/pdf2012/Feb/9%20Feb/Rossler.pdf
Thomas Kerwick B.Tech. M.Eng. Ph.D.: http://www.vixra.org/abs/1203.0055
Brief summary of the basic problem by LHC-Kritik (still valid since Sep. 2008): http://lhc-concern.info/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/lhc-kriti…ry-908.pdf
Detailed summary of the scientific LHC risk discussion by LHC-Kritik and ConCERNed International: http://lhc-concern.info/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/critical-…ed-int.pdf
We wish you happy Easter and hope for your support of our pragmatic proposals to urgently increase safety in these new fields of nuclear physics.
LHC Critique / LHC Kritik — Network for Safety at nuclear and sub-nuclear high energy Experiments.
Tel.: +43 650 629 627 5
New Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/groups/LHC.Critique/
]]>We will soon be able to use technology to make ourselves more intelligent, feel happier or change what motivates us. When the use of such technologies is banned, the nations or individuals who manage to cheat will soon lord it over their more obedient but unfortunately much dimmer fellows. When these technologies are made freely available, a few terrorists and psychopaths will use them to cause major disasters. Societies will have to find ways to spread these mind enhancement treatments quickly among the majority of their citizens, while keeping them from the few who are likely to cause harm. After a few enhancement cycles, the most capable members of such societies will all be “trustworthy” and use their skills to stabilise the system (see “All In The Mind”).
But how can we manage the transition period, the time in which these technologies are powerful enough to be abused but no social structures are yet in place to handle them? It might help to use these technologies for entertainment purposes, so that many people learn about their risks and societies can adapt (see “Should we build a trustworthiness tester for fun”). But ideally, a large, critical and well-connected group of technology users should be part of the development from the start and remain involved in every step.
To do that, these users would have to spend large amounts of money and dedicate considerable manpower. Fortunately, the basic spending and working patterns are in place: People already use a considerable part of their income to buy consumer devices such as mobile phones, tablet computers and PCs and increasingly also accessories such as blood glucose meters, EEG recorders and many others; they also spend a considerable part of their time to get familiar with these devices. Manufacturers and software developers are keen to turn any promising technology into a product and over time this will surely include most mind measuring and mind enhancement technologies. But for some critical technologies this time might be too long. GadgetBridge is there to shorten it as follows:
- GadgetBridge spreads its philosophy — that mind-enhancing technologies are only dangerous when they are allowed to develop in isolation — that spreading these technologies makes a freer world more likely — and that playing with innovative consumer gadgets is therefore not just fun but also serves a good cause.
- Contributors make suggestions for new consumer devices based on the latest brain research and their personal experiences. Many people have innovative ideas but few are in a position to exploit them. Contributors rather donate their ideas that see them wither away or claimed by somebody else.
- All ideas are immediately published and offered free of charge to anyone who wants to use them. Companies select and implement the best options. Users buy their products and gain hands-on experience with the latest mind measurement and mind enhancement technologies. When risks become obvious, concerned users and governments look for ways to cope with them before they get out of hand.
- Once GadgetBridge produces results, it might attract funding from the companies that have benefited or hope to benefit from its services. GadgetBridge might then organise competitions, commission feasibility studies or develop a structure that provides modest rewards to successful contributors.
Your feedback is needed! Please be honest rather than polite: Could GadgetBridge make a difference?
]]>Tom — Web Admin.
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