Tanada wrote:frankthetank wrote:I think the signs are everywhere. I just have no idea how long we can keep riding this plateau..could be days, could be years, could be decades... it isn't going to take much for it all to crumble.
My spouse and I were discussing the future over dinner tonight. As a history nut I just finished watching a video about a team who built a family scale Roman bathhouse of the type built around 200 AD. The team used traditional materials as much as they could, right down to the point of roasting limestone to convert it into lime, then soaking it in water to make hydrated lime to add to the sand to make the mortar to assemble the brickwork.
In any case I pointed out that 100 or even 75 years ago in America many masons knew how to roast limestone into lime and make mortar that way because the process had been relatively unchanged for close to 3000 years. Now every mason I have ever met on a building site (four different ones from different companies I can think of off the top of my head) get their mortar as a pre-mix bag of sand and hydrated lime, just add water, of on one occasion buckets of lime and a truckload of sand that they mixed in the correct proportions. The manufacturing of lime in large kilns is today a nearly universal mystery to even the people whose very jobs depend on this 3000 year old technology. Sure getting your mortar pre mixed is very convenient and because of economies of scale very inexpensive. But there is something to be said for at least knowing how to make it from raw materials if you need too. Trowing some lumps of limestone gravel into a pot and heating it up to red hot and keeping it there all day is not exactly a highly technical task. Traditionally the lowest level apprentices would have the job of doing it on any large construction site, roast the limestone all day today, let the pot cool overnight, hydrate the lumps of lime in a separate container the next morning while you reload the pot with more lumps and get it back on the fire all day. You can make the same argument about carpentry as you make about masons, the whole purpose of the apprentice/journeyman/master system was to ensure everyone learned every step of the type of job from the start to finish. Greek carpenters could build you a whole house with not a single nail in it, and so could every carpenter right up until the Steel making crucible invented by Henry Bessemer made iron cheaper than dirt. As we were having dinner the conversation turned to food preservation via canning, salting or smoking. Outside of our own extended family we only could name two families that can their own food.
Take away the grocery store and the big box construction supply chains and we are in a world of pain. Say Uncle Sam manages to just barely maintain the food supply. The farm equipment and delivery equipment are kept working by hook or by crook. How long until the masons run out of bricks and mortar? How long until the carpenters run out of pre cut lumbar and nails? It takes a heck of a lot more than food and water to maintain a working society, but our culture has disassociated itself from the fundamental skills to do very much of anything. All of the things like nails and lime that are end used by the home consumer or the commercial builder have been widely separated from up into some factory, likely on the other side of the ocean from us.
This is not the formula for long term success.
onlooker wrote:He can only come up with a couple instances in all of history where a society managed to avoid it.
Well isn't that the surprising thing how common this trajectory yet how unavoidable. Striking is the mention of how the elites and leadership group are the last to notice given their vaunted positions and the most reluctant to implement great changes precisely because of their favorable position within the status quo. Any way the pancake talk is also intriguing
KaiserJeep wrote:Tanada, nobody uses lime mortar anymore, it was replaced by Portland Cement mortars in the early 20th Century. The new mortars are much harder and cure faster, allowing you to lay brick at a furious rate, and by the time you have completed one course the first brick you laid is ready to support the second course.
Portland Cement mortars are also harder and far more weather and freeze resistant than lime mortars, but absolutely cannot be used to point up the mortar joints of older buildings. Lime mortar is only used in small quantities in the restoration of pre-20th century structures - such as the US Capital building - but they cheated and put latex in that mix, it is as soft as regular lime mortar but far more weather resistant, particularly to acid rains caused by coal burning.
I take your point about the loss of vintage tech - but your example is the first I ever heard of where lime mortar was used in a new structure. Even the 200-year-old full log structures built by the American Pioneers are being restored in the 21st Century using log chinking that is based around closed-cell urethane foams (a petrochemical), skimmed over with weather-resistant latex caulks (that remain flexible and shed water, unlike straw and clay-based "wattle" chinking). Synthetic latex (toluene diisocyanate (TDI) or methylene diphenyl diisocyanate(MDI) and polyester polyols) is yet another combination of petrochemicals.
We'll have plenty of these materials - as long as we pump oil. Then without petrochemicals most of the modern brick residences we have can't be restored unless you use real Portland Cement mortars (transportation fuel costs and manufactured with natural gas or propane), because they don't have enough eave overhang to protect lime mortar. Wattle chinking requires straw and clay. Common asphalt shingles - or the higher tech fiberglas shingles - are also petrochemicals.
Sorry to run on, but I have been reading up on modern building materials as part of planning to build a timber-framed home, covered with SIPs (structural insulated panels, urethane foam sandwiched between layers of OSB) designed to be as maintenance-free as possible. As a general rule, we are going to be in a world of hurt without petrochemicals, as we can't even maintain the residences built over the last few decades without access to the same or similar high tech building materials.
It is possible to select materials (metal roofing and gypsum wallboards and ICF (insulated concrete form) foundations that (as long as they are installed properly) will last the better part of a century - but should you fall prey to a crooked contractor and shoddy workmanship, your new residence might last no longer than common contractor built homes. Frankly, in our price-is-everything world, most modern homes are built to standards that will probably result in less than 50 years of life.
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
History is cyclical because human nature remains the same now as it was in ancient Sumerian, or pre historic China or wherever you want to point to an early agricultural society.
onlooker wrote:Any talk of societal collapse I think would be incomplete without the book by Joseph Tainter "The Collapse of Complex Societies" One of the main premises of the book is that as societies become more complex they incur more expenses and costs derived from that complexity and that complexity begets more complexity creating a feedback loop that produces diminishing returns as costs more and more outpace any benefits from increased complexity
Tanada wrote:-snip- Point being you can build as super duper of a house as your heart desires, but if it actually lasts 50 years and is occupied the whole time it will be getting updates over those years no matter how carefully you plan it now.
Newfie wrote:I thought this article relevant to this topic.
http://gcaptain.com/globalization-world ... hits-wall/
KaiserJeep wrote:Newfie wrote:I thought this article relevant to this topic.
http://gcaptain.com/globalization-world ... hits-wall/
Sounds like (finally) globalization is topping out, and I expect international shipping to decline further over time. Automation is now idling Chinese workers in droves, as robots (also manufactured in China) are now distinctly cheaper than even Chinese laborers. It is predictable that organized labor will now occur in China - what an irony in a nominally Marxist country!
The facts are that most jobs lost to automation are never coming back. CNC machinery is being used in timber framing, and even conventional homes are no longer "stick built", they are assembled as flat panel modules in a factory with CNC machinery, then stacked/trucked to the homesite and assembled via crane and forklift. Better home quality, higher insulation value, lower cost, faster construction, less materials wasted, and far less labor.
I felt empowered yesterday after a portable air conditioner repair. The unit was a useful 14,000 BTU size, was about 5 years old and made in China. Still, it was the only A/C I had and it had failed in 96-degree F weather. I could not find any service information whatsoever online, and considered replacing it, which would have cost $400-$500 (HOA rules forbid cheaper window-mounted units when visible from the street). But I thought WTH, I might as well try. Two hours of my time (mostly removing and replacing the shroud), a new $0.07 crimped-on electrical connector, and about 12" of double-sided tape, and it came to life again.
OK, so it really was not a challenge for an experienced EE. But I saved money, landfill space, and the raw materials that a new unit would have consumed. The world is what you make of it. If we can't afford to replace technology, we can darned sure practice our tinkering skills.
There is no way that high ceiling-ed living room with a working fireplace is energy efficient.KaiserJeep wrote:Tanada wrote:-snip- Point being you can build as super duper of a house as your heart desires, but if it actually lasts 50 years and is occupied the whole time it will be getting updates over those years no matter how carefully you plan it now.
Yes, but one can address the basic structure itself and make that strong, weather-resistant, fireproof, low maintenance, and rot-resistant. There are timber-framed homes on Nantucket, some built from timbers salvaged from shipwrecks, that have been around since the late 1600's, with periodic (every 30-50 years) replacement of the cedar shingles on roof and exterior walls. Nantucket's oldest house, a timber frame saltbox, dates from 1685:
There is a corn grist windmill that was built in 1646, also from salvaged ship's timbers:
Newfie wrote:VT,
Sure you can find a few, but not as old slow growth with fine growth rings. You can't find enough to build a fleet of sailing ships or enough to house any significant number of people.
Timber shortage has driven politics since before the Venitians.
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