I have been lurking for a couple years, rarely post but read several hours a day...
I am working on a community-preparedness-score web application. Think "walk score" but for post peak survival.
Here are some of my underlying thoughts / assumptions
1) While I enjoy reading Kunstler, I disagree with his premise, "the suburbs will be abandoned". While I appreciate that generally speaking the suburbs currently have serious problems, I don't think giving up on them entirely is an option. Most of the suburbs will have to be salvaged.
2) Personal preparation is of limited use, community preparation should be the goal.
For example, growing my own food isn't going to be very useful if my neighbors are stealing it faster than I can grow it. If at least some of my neighbors aren't on-board, I am going to have serious problems.
3) Specialization is a better way to live than self sufficiency - I don't want to grow my own food AND make my own clothes AND build my own shelter. I would rather specialize in a few skills and trade with my neighbors. I don't want to be a frontiersman
So back to the web application...
Imagine you go to the site (maybe it could be on the oildrum?) and take a survey.
First - the survey asks is what your zip code is. This will be important for later
Second - questions about basic survival: Do you have a well, do you have a way to clean water, do you have top soil to grow a little food, can you raise rabbits etc...
Third - questions about what skills you have to offer, what tools you would be willing to share, how do you like to be paid for services? etc...
Fourth - ??
Fifth - ??
After you have answered the survey, you will get a personal score and be prompt to create an account
If you create an account, you will then be given a community score and will have access to a community inventory of skills, assets etc.
So for example, once you went through the process, you might know who within X miles of your home can make shoes, who has well water, who knows how to kill/prepare a chicken, who has a large stew pot etc...
The challenge is knowing what questions to ask, how to score the results and know where to draw the line on being too invasive.
I think this sort of application is what we really need to kickstart preparations.
If you have any thoughts, feel free to share them... I am specifically interested in knowing what criteria you think I should collect and how items should be weighted.
There is a big difference between what we want to do, and what we can do. In some circles, I am considered an optimist regarding Alan Drake's proposal. From my August, 2006 "Net Exports Revisited" article:
I believe that vast expanses of American Suburbia are going to become virtually abandoned in the years ahead. Alan Drake has noted that a good deal of suburbia was so poorly constructed that a lot of it is biodegradable. Alan has outlined how we can go back to what we used to have: electric trolley cars connected to electric light rail lines.
CBS Sunday Morning, on 8/20/06, had a segment on "tiny houses." They profiled a home designer and builder who specialized in building very small functional homes of about 100 square feet. You can find more information on his website.
What this builder has realized, and what millions of Americans are just beginning to also realize, is that anything over 100 square feet or so per person is not a necessity; it is optional consumption, a want, instead of a need.
The US is not Switzerland, but Alan Drake has described how Swiss per capita oil consumption in the Second World War was about 0.25% of current US per capita oil consumption. They did it primarily by electrifying their transportation system.
I propose a sort of triage operation: "tiny" homes and multifamily housing along electric mass transit lines. In my opinion, it is the only way that we can preserve some semblance of a civilized society. The suburbs are, by and large, a lost cause.
I caught the latter part of ‘Planet in Peril” on CNN last night. I thought of Alan as the show ended with a commercial. It was well done. If you didn’t see it…a group of animated gas cans are walking around looking woefully at traffic on the highway and seem to have no where to go as they wonder around, eventually they stumble upon a railroad track, just then a train passes by as the cans are lined up near the track. The wind from the train causes the spouts to flow in the direction of the wind and the cans lean with the wind. Then the caption “The future of transportation” or something like that…
From an energy efficiency point of view, it would help if there were shared walls with the neighbors - i.e. something like an apartment building instead of little houses on individual little lots.
100 sq ft/person - when I was in grad school I had a bedroom about that size. In order to squeeze into something that tight, you would almost want shared bathrooms on each floor - much like a dormitory.
When I moved in with my girlfriend, we had to reduce the amount of stuff that we had by quite a bit. The hardest stuff for me to get rid of were books and papers - the rest of it, not so hard.
Ahh...books and papers. My basement stills holds mine, 20 years later. Y'a never know when you might need some notes on group theory (of the symmetry kind, not the social sciences).
I built my own loghouse of roughly 4500 sq ft (under roof). I had also helped some spec. builders in the past and helped others make additons(garages,etc) to their houses. I finished basements in my own homes.
I did plumbing,dirwork,poured foundations,did all the electrical work,and so on and on....
So when my son purchased a rather new 2 story McMansion after helping him look at newer homes for a very long time...I was very dismayed over the absolutely shoddy building practices and the materials used.
Houses built in the years prior to the mid 80s were usually of pretty decent construction...Today there is no plywood used in the framing and little used elsewhere...its all chipboard(OSB by name). With this flimsy sheating a layer of Tyvex housewrap is thrown on and and rest of the walls are incredibly cheap and junky 2x4s. Everything is built and then 'hidden' behind a facade. Many of the crawl spaces have drainage problems and contain large amounts of moisture. The duct work is abysmal as is the shoddeniness of everything else. Roof included.
Yes they will fall apart rapidly. The concrete buckles. The lawn is subsoil. The fasteners are air driven and do not perform well. You see no screw fasteners in these houses.
The wifes seem to be the ones deciding on what to buy and all they see is vistages of drywall and cheap cookie cutter finish products. No real quality but with the laminate flooring , which is really a picture of wood or stone printed on a very small substrate of plastic..they think they have captured the essence of real quality. They are completely wrong and no nothing of construction.
Its just 'uuuuooooooo don't those cabinets look good? and that metal prefab fireplace?' ..which can't and couldn't burn real wood..they are only appropiate for propane fed phony gas logs.
Agreed. My wife tells me the quickest way to gauge the quality of a house is to look at the amount of overhang on the eaves. Builders wishing to cut corners invariably build eaves with the most modest amount of overhang.
You, my good man, need to sit and watch TLC's Flip This House so you get up to speed on how its supposed to be done :-) I don't do TV but mom watches this show religiously. It doesn't strike her as the least bit ironic to sit in a WWI vintage brick prairie foursquare that might sell for 10% of the price of one of the "flipped" homes and watch that show, but it makes me smile every time I hear the announcer's prattle when I pass by the sewing room.
A period staying with my parents recently got me hooked on this show - it is a train wreck...
the first few episodes were improbably successful... but recently more and more are just shocking - watching these idiots lose their shirts on flips that will NEVER HAPPEN...
--
All these memories will be lost in time
like tears in rain
How right you are! My father would have loved your loghouse. A really well-built loghouse can last for centuries. You've made a wise choice.
I too have done a lot of the building stuff you mentioned. I've now got the tools and ability to build a house if I had too.
Most new houses seem to sell because the kitchen and the bathroom look nice. This apparently appeals to women. One is often given the advice to bake some fresh bread when a potential buyer is coming to look the place over, or install a large, flat-screen television, or a very fancy refridgerator in the kitchen, that people would 'aspire' to own. Selling property is often about selling a perception or an idea.
It's a shame we don't produce and value quality as much as we used to. Of course this would slow things down too much, but maybe we need to slow things down a bit?
I bought a second-hand McIntosh 275 valve amplifier which is almost thirty years old. It's really, really, heavy. It's American quality and engineering. The circuit design is fifty years old at least and the sound is absolutely fabulous. Most people are simply awstruck when they hear the music it makes. It blows most modern amps away.
So maybe we haven't really been 'progressing' as much as we thought. Maybe we've been buying quantity and not quality and wasting vast ammounts of energy and other resources in the process.
Amplifiers Schmamplifiers ..... I have some personal-life sorting out to do, but one thing I may end up doing is making bits and pieces for, maybe even the whole things, involving musical instruments. Strictly acoustic.
Amplification is very very young, and according to the Olduvai Theory won't be a part of our lives for much longer. In fact guitars and violins etc may well be back to gut strings not all that far in the future.
It is not just houses or hi-fi equipment -- EVERYTHING is cheap junk these days. "Value Engineering", it's called.
One really has to look hard to find well-made stuff. It does exist, but it takes a lot of effort to find it. Good starting tip: skip Sprawl-Mart.
It isn't just your McIntosh amp or old houses - for lots of things, well-maintained used goods will often be the better buy compared to brand-new value engineered crap.
One thing I admire greatly about traditional (pre-industrial) Japanese culture, or the Shakers for that matter, is the antithesis of our "clutter-junk" culture. Have just a few, supurbly crafted things, and keep them out of the way when not in use.
I always regretted getting rid of my old SAE amp. While not a tube amp, it was stone reliable and American made. Its' replacement, a Sanyo freon cooled unit, died after five years.
I'm sure some EE guys will jump on and explain all the ways why ICs are so much of an improvement on the old vacuum tubes. I have absolutely no doubt that they are a great improvement for the manufacturers.
The thing is, though, is that you could actually REPAIR the old vacuum tube equipment. If you were handy with a soldering gun and knew a little bit about basic electronics, you could even order a kit and build it yourself (which even I have done). Anything you build yourself you should be able to repair yourself (which even I have done), and keep running for as long as spare parts are available (a lifetime, if you stockpile them).
Now, if an electronic device goes on the blink, it usually goes in the trash and a replacement is bought. It is getting increasingly difficult to find anyone that can repair anything anymore -- especially for less than the cost of buying a brand new replacement.
Nothing to repairing electronic stuff designed to be repaired. Much of the consumer stuff is specifically designed with encapsulated components so that it can not be repaired and whole modules have to be replaced, and this leads to total replacement.
so in other words, what we are doing is taking concentrated resources and dispersing them. mostly in the landfill. not unrelated to the discussion about phosphate on here a few days ago.
I bought a second-hand McIntosh 275 valve amplifier which is almost thirty years old. It's really, really, heavy
Amp Archecture.
The heavyness is the amp. The Mac passed the signal thru the amp ONCE to get it's power, modern (TEAC and since) pump the signal thru multiple times to get the same power out of it. Feedback . Macs Were WAY better. Does it have tubes?
Tubes I have read seem to produce more fidelity..which was once what everyone was looking for.
I also heard or read that vinyl records produce more authentic fidelity than CDs or mag tape or whatever else(Ipods?)..and I have a huge number of Bluegrass records and well ..all that I ever brought thru the years..and do have several turntables.
Its supposed to reproduce the various instruments frequencies better.
So perhaps the past was better in many products and cheap dumbed down manufactured products are not that good.
I used to work on a lot of discrete board products. Yet I do like the ability to have a complete morse code keyer on a chip..and just build the rest myself, like I did. A Curtis chip it was.
I do also like the huge number of functions on my Kenwood hf rig..vs the old Yaseu FT101 I used to have way back where you had to manually load the finals then resonate the load to the output..so on.
Yet the Kenwood weighs a ton..and its of very good quality..yet its mhhh maybe 10 to 15 years since they came out with this model.
I'm sorry, but Vacuum Tube amplifiers simply do not produce better 'fidelity' than modern amplifiers. In fact, the accuracy and range of a tube amplifier is significantly less than a comparable modern, transistor amplifier.
The only advantage that tube amplifiers have over modern amplifiers is that when they are overdriven they produce distortion that is 'warm' and 'pleasant'. The distortion produced by modern amplifiers is quite unpleasant by comparison.
All distortion is bad however. Distortion represents a failure of the system to accurately reproduce the sound that was recorded. The solution is not to switch to a different type of amp, but to get an amp that has enough power to create the desired volume without distorting.
Of course, few people seem to notice distortion anyway, so your mileage may vary, but I like my sound systems to produce sounds as close to the source material as possible, that way, if a particular CD sounds terrible, I can blame it on the band or on their sound engineer and not on an antiquated amplifier.
Also, regarding the weight of amplifiers, I have noticed that the weight of a given amplifier is not so much a function of the actual amplifiers contained within, or even of the heat-sinks attached to those amplifiers, but of the power supply (mainly the transformer) for the amp. If the power supply is on the left side of the case, the left side will weigh twice as much as the right.
However, Although the quality of the sound produced by the modern amplifier may be substantially better than the tube amplifier, I expect the tube amplifier would last a lot longer than its modern brother. The modern consumer equipment just isn't built with a long service life in mind.
I have gone though quite enough electronics to learn this lesson very well: The word consume isn't in the phrase 'consumer electronics' by accident.
Which explains that digital sampling leaves out some of the original while the grooves in vinyl contain all the original...granted that dust , etc may have a spoiling effect..note MAY....
As to vacumn tubes...I haven't tried to back up my claim but I suppose that some googles would be informative.
I am an acoustic instrument player,an electronics technician and a ham radio operator. Have been all these for mhhh...about 40 years. Not that this means much but I have seen and experienced the complete span,from vinyl to 8 trks to cds to dvds and so forth. Of course for the best in fidelity one must listen to real instruments played live.
However for me the next best is vinyl with a set of good speakers. Surely Ipods with tinny tiny speakers on headphones must be about as bad as it can get. Given that very expensive headphones might be better but you won't find them on Ipods nor much else today.
Realistically, this is an issue that has been absolutely beaten to death, although it usually receives poor coverage/understanding.
The link you provided was an excellent example. The author of that piece focused on a single issue and ignored the big contrasting points. Although vinyl records have better accuracy because they don't have to deal with Analog to Digital back to Analog conversion, this is an issue that has been largely fixed because the modern Digital to Analog converters are so good. Also, in order to hear the difference, you would need to have an obscenely expensive sound system to begin with, so this is an issue that is encountered by very few.
The point that the author ignored, is that Compact Discs have a much greater dynamic range than vinyl. This is the difference between the intensity of the greatest possible signal and total silence. For a vinyl record to have a similar range, it would probably need to be about a full inch thick.
The counterpoint to this however, is that modern sound engineers usually give up most of this range to make their albums sound 'louder'. They crank up the volume of the quiet parts so that their album will sound louder than others owned by the listener. This means that when the band wants to get louder, they don't have anywhere to go.
(Roger Waters used this to great effect on "The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking": one has to keep the volume quite high to hear his whispered lyrics, so that when he starts shouting, it really blows your ears off. I don't believe that could be done with vinyl.)
This isn't really related to energy though, so we should take this discussion to email if you want to continue.
As for my background, as I am in my early twenties, so I have no background compared to you, but I did live sound reinforcement for concerts and theatre at a community theater operated by my high school, and have been studying Civil Engineering since then, now on the path to med. school.
My email address is listed on my user page.
In my opinion such a radical realignment of expectations can't be made in a single generation. This might be an eventual outcome due to intractable realities, but it won't come about through any sort of reasoned large-scale planning. My 2¢ anyway. Societal adaptation seems reactionary to me and not a planned process. Forward looking individuals may be able to put themselves at the front of the parade by planning for such an eventuality but society as a whole will be slow to adapt and will fight tooth and nail to maintain old expected ways of life. It will take a lot of pain to force people to move in such a direction and there isn't anywhere near enough yet.
I like the way you think! Will be back with comments after I've had my coffee. Would you mind giving out an email address in case the threads get unwieldy?
1) In general you've highlighted and recognised a number of the important system effects that many miss, well done!
2) You're jumping from 'post peak' to 'skinning rabbits'. There are many stages to survive between the two and many of the capabilities and positioning elements are not what you are thinking of. Those stages will see out the lifespans of many here.
3) There is a tendency to assume that a post peak world is simply a reversing of the clock. That's unrealistic. The knowledge we have, plus more, will be available. In particular there is no reason to expect the telecoms/Internet will not still be in force, and even to grow. Don't get seduced by the 'living in the past' wrong turn.
Think more about what people will give up and what they won't. There are a variety of reasons why people moved from the countryside to the towns during the industrial revolution. It certainly wasn't because it was a lovely place to live, or because they could be self sufficient in towns - but they did it anyway.
As a pointer, the first thing to go is long distance transport - think what that means for commuting and holidays and what it means for survival scenarios.
As a pointer, the first thing to go is long distance transport
Most likely not.
Only recreational long distance transport, tourism and e.g. foreign mineral water.
From many previous posts at TOD it has been shown that the energy cost of transport is mostly incurred in local distribution not in the long distance bulk transport of reasonably valuable goods.
However long distance transport does depend on safety of travel which may disappear in some areas.
There is much talk about changing transportation but it always seems centered around business as usual, only scale it all back. If we treat the effects of PO+AGW like a life and death struggle like WW II what we will see is ...
The blue one on the right broken up for scrap:
While this blue one gets any remaining diesel:
All uses of FF are not equal. Current wealth and power will not dictate how this resource is used once the masses become aware of what has happened. I would point to South Africa as a model for the social dynamics that come with a wealthy person driving a nice vehicle past someone who can't make it no matter how hard they work.
Matt;
I appreciate the invitation to do some creative/structural thinking this morning.
My main response to the data-gathering is to shift the focus of the web's advantages a little bit. I am very appreciative of the ability of networked computers to share vital information, but it is also potentially hazardous, and I don't want to create channels for the dark side, if I can avoid it. The two aspects already used in the web that I think give us some powerful tools in the way you are describing are things like Craig's List or Freecycle, and also for broad-based education, for basics, for specialty skills and for communicating successful projects/initiatives from one region to another, so that they can be quickly shared, checked and adopted far afield. This is already happening, of course. I regularly download websites from all around the globe of peoples' attempts at windpower, solarpower, converting cars and tractors and scooters to electric, biogas, gardening, etc..
My reaction to a database of 'I've got water', 'I've got a toolshop' , 'my garden is full of tomatoes' etc.. got me a little anxious about this data being skewed towards the ability to conveniently map resources by those who would, ahem, take them.. I'm not usually big on the 'band of roving brigands' Murals of our prospective future, but piracy is even common today, while the colorful costumes may have been exchanged for t-shirts or Business suits.
The more protectionist angle does, however point to another benefit of networked communications, as they can also be a way to rally defenses, and they can be a way to stay connected with out-of-sight neighbors, in order to PREEMPT the souring of relations that could lead to rivaries and resource conflicts. As with many things, the poison can also be used as a cure.
Finally, the specialization you mention strikes me as the ultimate balancing act. There will be a lot more necessary skills people will benefit from learning, even in the current stages of energy-depletion, like cooking, storing foods without refrigeration, gardening, etc.. so I think there will be pressure to learn many more DIY skills.. but those will serve a person/family as a reduction in 'Imports'.. or paying some other Specialist to do such things for you, while we will also benefit from HAVING a Specialty which we know that other will come to us as our valued EXport(s). Increase earnings, reduce expenditures..
Hello...
I have been lurking for a couple years, rarely post but read several hours a day...
I am working on a community-preparedness-score web application. Think "walk score" but for post peak survival.
Here are some of my underlying thoughts / assumptions
1) While I enjoy reading Kunstler, I disagree with his premise, "the suburbs will be abandoned". While I appreciate that generally speaking the suburbs currently have serious problems, I don't think giving up on them entirely is an option. Most of the suburbs will have to be salvaged.
2) Personal preparation is of limited use, community preparation should be the goal.
For example, growing my own food isn't going to be very useful if my neighbors are stealing it faster than I can grow it. If at least some of my neighbors aren't on-board, I am going to have serious problems.
3) Specialization is a better way to live than self sufficiency - I don't want to grow my own food AND make my own clothes AND build my own shelter. I would rather specialize in a few skills and trade with my neighbors. I don't want to be a frontiersman
So back to the web application...
Imagine you go to the site (maybe it could be on the oildrum?) and take a survey.
First - the survey asks is what your zip code is. This will be important for later
Second - questions about basic survival: Do you have a well, do you have a way to clean water, do you have top soil to grow a little food, can you raise rabbits etc...
Third - questions about what skills you have to offer, what tools you would be willing to share, how do you like to be paid for services? etc...
Fourth - ??
Fifth - ??
After you have answered the survey, you will get a personal score and be prompt to create an account
If you create an account, you will then be given a community score and will have access to a community inventory of skills, assets etc.
So for example, once you went through the process, you might know who within X miles of your home can make shoes, who has well water, who knows how to kill/prepare a chicken, who has a large stew pot etc...
The challenge is knowing what questions to ask, how to score the results and know where to draw the line on being too invasive.
I think this sort of application is what we really need to kickstart preparations.
If you have any thoughts, feel free to share them... I am specifically interested in knowing what criteria you think I should collect and how items should be weighted.
thanks...
There is a big difference between what we want to do, and what we can do. In some circles, I am considered an optimist regarding Alan Drake's proposal. From my August, 2006 "Net Exports Revisited" article:
http://www.energybulletin.net/19420.html
I caught the latter part of ‘Planet in Peril” on CNN last night. I thought of Alan as the show ended with a commercial. It was well done. If you didn’t see it…a group of animated gas cans are walking around looking woefully at traffic on the highway and seem to have no where to go as they wonder around, eventually they stumble upon a railroad track, just then a train passes by as the cans are lined up near the track. The wind from the train causes the spouts to flow in the direction of the wind and the cans lean with the wind. Then the caption “The future of transportation” or something like that…
Maybe you need to read TOD daily to get it…:-)
That's a Norfolk Southern ad. It's been running a lot.
You can watch it online here.
From an energy efficiency point of view, it would help if there were shared walls with the neighbors - i.e. something like an apartment building instead of little houses on individual little lots.
100 sq ft/person - when I was in grad school I had a bedroom about that size. In order to squeeze into something that tight, you would almost want shared bathrooms on each floor - much like a dormitory.
When I moved in with my girlfriend, we had to reduce the amount of stuff that we had by quite a bit. The hardest stuff for me to get rid of were books and papers - the rest of it, not so hard.
Ahh...books and papers. My basement stills holds mine, 20 years later. Y'a never know when you might need some notes on group theory (of the symmetry kind, not the social sciences).
As long as all building feedstock comes from salvage.
I still think the engine of the train must have multiple
on train energy sources.
Say-steam to make electricity.
Arkansaw of Samuel L Clemens
I still think the engine of the train must have multiple
on train energy sources.
Why? Such a demand would add weight.
As to the frailty of todays housing.
I built my own loghouse of roughly 4500 sq ft (under roof). I had also helped some spec. builders in the past and helped others make additons(garages,etc) to their houses. I finished basements in my own homes.
I did plumbing,dirwork,poured foundations,did all the electrical work,and so on and on....
So when my son purchased a rather new 2 story McMansion after helping him look at newer homes for a very long time...I was very dismayed over the absolutely shoddy building practices and the materials used.
Houses built in the years prior to the mid 80s were usually of pretty decent construction...Today there is no plywood used in the framing and little used elsewhere...its all chipboard(OSB by name). With this flimsy sheating a layer of Tyvex housewrap is thrown on and and rest of the walls are incredibly cheap and junky 2x4s. Everything is built and then 'hidden' behind a facade. Many of the crawl spaces have drainage problems and contain large amounts of moisture. The duct work is abysmal as is the shoddeniness of everything else. Roof included.
Yes they will fall apart rapidly. The concrete buckles. The lawn is subsoil. The fasteners are air driven and do not perform well. You see no screw fasteners in these houses.
The wifes seem to be the ones deciding on what to buy and all they see is vistages of drywall and cheap cookie cutter finish products. No real quality but with the laminate flooring , which is really a picture of wood or stone printed on a very small substrate of plastic..they think they have captured the essence of real quality. They are completely wrong and no nothing of construction.
Its just 'uuuuooooooo don't those cabinets look good? and that metal prefab fireplace?' ..which can't and couldn't burn real wood..they are only appropiate for propane fed phony gas logs.
Yes it will disappear fast. And it deserves to.
airdale
Agreed. My wife tells me the quickest way to gauge the quality of a house is to look at the amount of overhang on the eaves. Builders wishing to cut corners invariably build eaves with the most modest amount of overhang.
You, my good man, need to sit and watch TLC's Flip This House so you get up to speed on how its supposed to be done :-) I don't do TV but mom watches this show religiously. It doesn't strike her as the least bit ironic to sit in a WWI vintage brick prairie foursquare that might sell for 10% of the price of one of the "flipped" homes and watch that show, but it makes me smile every time I hear the announcer's prattle when I pass by the sewing room.
A period staying with my parents recently got me hooked on this show - it is a train wreck...
the first few episodes were improbably successful... but recently more and more are just shocking - watching these idiots lose their shirts on flips that will NEVER HAPPEN...
--
All these memories will be lost in time
like tears in rain
Dear Airdale,
How right you are! My father would have loved your loghouse. A really well-built loghouse can last for centuries. You've made a wise choice.
I too have done a lot of the building stuff you mentioned. I've now got the tools and ability to build a house if I had too.
Most new houses seem to sell because the kitchen and the bathroom look nice. This apparently appeals to women. One is often given the advice to bake some fresh bread when a potential buyer is coming to look the place over, or install a large, flat-screen television, or a very fancy refridgerator in the kitchen, that people would 'aspire' to own. Selling property is often about selling a perception or an idea.
It's a shame we don't produce and value quality as much as we used to. Of course this would slow things down too much, but maybe we need to slow things down a bit?
I bought a second-hand McIntosh 275 valve amplifier which is almost thirty years old. It's really, really, heavy. It's American quality and engineering. The circuit design is fifty years old at least and the sound is absolutely fabulous. Most people are simply awstruck when they hear the music it makes. It blows most modern amps away.
So maybe we haven't really been 'progressing' as much as we thought. Maybe we've been buying quantity and not quality and wasting vast ammounts of energy and other resources in the process.
Peak amplifier?
Amplifiers that would turn up to eleven, obviously. I saw a made for T.V. movie about this particular resource some years ago :-)
What you're remembering is the movie This is Spinal Tap.
Here's a feed of the famous clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d54UU-fPIsY
Amplifiers Schmamplifiers ..... I have some personal-life sorting out to do, but one thing I may end up doing is making bits and pieces for, maybe even the whole things, involving musical instruments. Strictly acoustic.
Amplification is very very young, and according to the Olduvai Theory won't be a part of our lives for much longer. In fact guitars and violins etc may well be back to gut strings not all that far in the future.
As a professional musician(classical guitarist)
my mind wanders to this thought occasionaly.
So I always have at least a couple years worth of
modern nylon strings at hand.
It is not just houses or hi-fi equipment -- EVERYTHING is cheap junk these days. "Value Engineering", it's called.
One really has to look hard to find well-made stuff. It does exist, but it takes a lot of effort to find it. Good starting tip: skip Sprawl-Mart.
It isn't just your McIntosh amp or old houses - for lots of things, well-maintained used goods will often be the better buy compared to brand-new value engineered crap.
One thing I admire greatly about traditional (pre-industrial) Japanese culture, or the Shakers for that matter, is the antithesis of our "clutter-junk" culture. Have just a few, supurbly crafted things, and keep them out of the way when not in use.
I always regretted getting rid of my old SAE amp. While not a tube amp, it was stone reliable and American made. Its' replacement, a Sanyo freon cooled unit, died after five years.
I'm sure some EE guys will jump on and explain all the ways why ICs are so much of an improvement on the old vacuum tubes. I have absolutely no doubt that they are a great improvement for the manufacturers.
The thing is, though, is that you could actually REPAIR the old vacuum tube equipment. If you were handy with a soldering gun and knew a little bit about basic electronics, you could even order a kit and build it yourself (which even I have done). Anything you build yourself you should be able to repair yourself (which even I have done), and keep running for as long as spare parts are available (a lifetime, if you stockpile them).
Now, if an electronic device goes on the blink, it usually goes in the trash and a replacement is bought. It is getting increasingly difficult to find anyone that can repair anything anymore -- especially for less than the cost of buying a brand new replacement.
"Progress"
Nothing to repairing electronic stuff designed to be repaired. Much of the consumer stuff is specifically designed with encapsulated components so that it can not be repaired and whole modules have to be replaced, and this leads to total replacement.
so in other words, what we are doing is taking concentrated resources and dispersing them. mostly in the landfill. not unrelated to the discussion about phosphate on here a few days ago.
I bought a second-hand McIntosh 275 valve amplifier which is almost thirty years old. It's really, really, heavy
Amp Archecture.
The heavyness is the amp. The Mac passed the signal thru the amp ONCE to get it's power, modern (TEAC and since) pump the signal thru multiple times to get the same power out of it. Feedback . Macs Were WAY better. Does it have tubes?
The british refer to vacumn tubes as valves.
Tubes I have read seem to produce more fidelity..which was once what everyone was looking for.
I also heard or read that vinyl records produce more authentic fidelity than CDs or mag tape or whatever else(Ipods?)..and I have a huge number of Bluegrass records and well ..all that I ever brought thru the years..and do have several turntables.
Its supposed to reproduce the various instruments frequencies better.
So perhaps the past was better in many products and cheap dumbed down manufactured products are not that good.
I used to work on a lot of discrete board products. Yet I do like the ability to have a complete morse code keyer on a chip..and just build the rest myself, like I did. A Curtis chip it was.
I do also like the huge number of functions on my Kenwood hf rig..vs the old Yaseu FT101 I used to have way back where you had to manually load the finals then resonate the load to the output..so on.
Yet the Kenwood weighs a ton..and its of very good quality..yet its mhhh maybe 10 to 15 years since they came out with this model.
airdale
Ahh the good ole analog vs digital debate....
The problem with early CD's was the filtering and converters.
Plus records/tapes have that high fidelity...
hisssssssssssssssssssssss........and crackle/pop.
:)
I'm sorry, but Vacuum Tube amplifiers simply do not produce better 'fidelity' than modern amplifiers. In fact, the accuracy and range of a tube amplifier is significantly less than a comparable modern, transistor amplifier.
The only advantage that tube amplifiers have over modern amplifiers is that when they are overdriven they produce distortion that is 'warm' and 'pleasant'. The distortion produced by modern amplifiers is quite unpleasant by comparison.
All distortion is bad however. Distortion represents a failure of the system to accurately reproduce the sound that was recorded. The solution is not to switch to a different type of amp, but to get an amp that has enough power to create the desired volume without distorting.
Of course, few people seem to notice distortion anyway, so your mileage may vary, but I like my sound systems to produce sounds as close to the source material as possible, that way, if a particular CD sounds terrible, I can blame it on the band or on their sound engineer and not on an antiquated amplifier.
Also, regarding the weight of amplifiers, I have noticed that the weight of a given amplifier is not so much a function of the actual amplifiers contained within, or even of the heat-sinks attached to those amplifiers, but of the power supply (mainly the transformer) for the amp. If the power supply is on the left side of the case, the left side will weigh twice as much as the right.
However, Although the quality of the sound produced by the modern amplifier may be substantially better than the tube amplifier, I expect the tube amplifier would last a lot longer than its modern brother. The modern consumer equipment just isn't built with a long service life in mind.
I have gone though quite enough electronics to learn this lesson very well: The word consume isn't in the phrase 'consumer electronics' by accident.
Pickyreader said:
"but I like my sound systems to produce sounds as close to the source material as possible,"...plus a lot more..
BUT my contention as to the quality of vinyl holds some water as you can read by this link:
http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/question487.htm
Which explains that digital sampling leaves out some of the original while the grooves in vinyl contain all the original...granted that dust , etc may have a spoiling effect..note MAY....
As to vacumn tubes...I haven't tried to back up my claim but I suppose that some googles would be informative.
I am an acoustic instrument player,an electronics technician and a ham radio operator. Have been all these for mhhh...about 40 years. Not that this means much but I have seen and experienced the complete span,from vinyl to 8 trks to cds to dvds and so forth. Of course for the best in fidelity one must listen to real instruments played live.
However for me the next best is vinyl with a set of good speakers. Surely Ipods with tinny tiny speakers on headphones must be about as bad as it can get. Given that very expensive headphones might be better but you won't find them on Ipods nor much else today.
What is your background , if I may ask?
airdale-yes vacumn tubes are surely dead but ...
Realistically, this is an issue that has been absolutely beaten to death, although it usually receives poor coverage/understanding.
The link you provided was an excellent example. The author of that piece focused on a single issue and ignored the big contrasting points. Although vinyl records have better accuracy because they don't have to deal with Analog to Digital back to Analog conversion, this is an issue that has been largely fixed because the modern Digital to Analog converters are so good. Also, in order to hear the difference, you would need to have an obscenely expensive sound system to begin with, so this is an issue that is encountered by very few.
The point that the author ignored, is that Compact Discs have a much greater dynamic range than vinyl. This is the difference between the intensity of the greatest possible signal and total silence. For a vinyl record to have a similar range, it would probably need to be about a full inch thick.
The counterpoint to this however, is that modern sound engineers usually give up most of this range to make their albums sound 'louder'. They crank up the volume of the quiet parts so that their album will sound louder than others owned by the listener. This means that when the band wants to get louder, they don't have anywhere to go.
(Roger Waters used this to great effect on "The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking": one has to keep the volume quite high to hear his whispered lyrics, so that when he starts shouting, it really blows your ears off. I don't believe that could be done with vinyl.)
This isn't really related to energy though, so we should take this discussion to email if you want to continue.
As for my background, as I am in my early twenties, so I have no background compared to you, but I did live sound reinforcement for concerts and theatre at a community theater operated by my high school, and have been studying Civil Engineering since then, now on the path to med. school.
My email address is listed on my user page.
In my opinion such a radical realignment of expectations can't be made in a single generation. This might be an eventual outcome due to intractable realities, but it won't come about through any sort of reasoned large-scale planning. My 2¢ anyway. Societal adaptation seems reactionary to me and not a planned process. Forward looking individuals may be able to put themselves at the front of the parade by planning for such an eventuality but society as a whole will be slow to adapt and will fight tooth and nail to maintain old expected ways of life. It will take a lot of pain to force people to move in such a direction and there isn't anywhere near enough yet.
I like the way you think! Will be back with comments after I've had my coffee. Would you mind giving out an email address in case the threads get unwieldy?
Sure....
My name is Matt Baker, my email is
mbaker at kohesion daught net
Three things:
1) In general you've highlighted and recognised a number of the important system effects that many miss, well done!
2) You're jumping from 'post peak' to 'skinning rabbits'. There are many stages to survive between the two and many of the capabilities and positioning elements are not what you are thinking of. Those stages will see out the lifespans of many here.
3) There is a tendency to assume that a post peak world is simply a reversing of the clock. That's unrealistic. The knowledge we have, plus more, will be available. In particular there is no reason to expect the telecoms/Internet will not still be in force, and even to grow. Don't get seduced by the 'living in the past' wrong turn.
Thanks...
The goal should be to prepare for a variety of scenarios. Perhaps I gave away my personal bias a little to strongly.
Think of it this way...
The survey could start with the essentials: water, food, shelter, heat.
Once staying alive is out of the way, later steps of the survey could focus on things like transportation, tools, books , community organization etc..
Think more about what people will give up and what they won't. There are a variety of reasons why people moved from the countryside to the towns during the industrial revolution. It certainly wasn't because it was a lovely place to live, or because they could be self sufficient in towns - but they did it anyway.
As a pointer, the first thing to go is long distance transport - think what that means for commuting and holidays and what it means for survival scenarios.
As a pointer, the first thing to go is long distance transport
Most likely not.
Only recreational long distance transport, tourism and e.g. foreign mineral water.
From many previous posts at TOD it has been shown that the energy cost of transport is mostly incurred in local distribution not in the long distance bulk transport of reasonably valuable goods.
However long distance transport does depend on safety of travel which may disappear in some areas.
I was talking mainly about the 100 mile daily commutes, the regular trips to family, the regular overseas flights, holidays, breaks, etc.
The cut that takes the average US mileage and slices double digit percentages off it at the same time as making flights a 'once a year' events.
There is much talk about changing transportation but it always seems centered around business as usual, only scale it all back. If we treat the effects of PO+AGW like a life and death struggle like WW II what we will see is ...
The blue one on the right broken up for scrap:
While this blue one gets any remaining diesel:
All uses of FF are not equal. Current wealth and power will not dictate how this resource is used once the masses become aware of what has happened. I would point to South Africa as a model for the social dynamics that come with a wealthy person driving a nice vehicle past someone who can't make it no matter how hard they work.
Matt;
I appreciate the invitation to do some creative/structural thinking this morning.
My main response to the data-gathering is to shift the focus of the web's advantages a little bit. I am very appreciative of the ability of networked computers to share vital information, but it is also potentially hazardous, and I don't want to create channels for the dark side, if I can avoid it. The two aspects already used in the web that I think give us some powerful tools in the way you are describing are things like Craig's List or Freecycle, and also for broad-based education, for basics, for specialty skills and for communicating successful projects/initiatives from one region to another, so that they can be quickly shared, checked and adopted far afield. This is already happening, of course. I regularly download websites from all around the globe of peoples' attempts at windpower, solarpower, converting cars and tractors and scooters to electric, biogas, gardening, etc..
My reaction to a database of 'I've got water', 'I've got a toolshop' , 'my garden is full of tomatoes' etc.. got me a little anxious about this data being skewed towards the ability to conveniently map resources by those who would, ahem, take them.. I'm not usually big on the 'band of roving brigands' Murals of our prospective future, but piracy is even common today, while the colorful costumes may have been exchanged for t-shirts or Business suits.
The more protectionist angle does, however point to another benefit of networked communications, as they can also be a way to rally defenses, and they can be a way to stay connected with out-of-sight neighbors, in order to PREEMPT the souring of relations that could lead to rivaries and resource conflicts. As with many things, the poison can also be used as a cure.
Finally, the specialization you mention strikes me as the ultimate balancing act. There will be a lot more necessary skills people will benefit from learning, even in the current stages of energy-depletion, like cooking, storing foods without refrigeration, gardening, etc.. so I think there will be pressure to learn many more DIY skills.. but those will serve a person/family as a reduction in 'Imports'.. or paying some other Specialist to do such things for you, while we will also benefit from HAVING a Specialty which we know that other will come to us as our valued EXport(s). Increase earnings, reduce expenditures..
Best,
Bob Fiske