“Civilization can die, because it has already died once.” - Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff Discussion regarding the potential collapse of global civilization: a social and technological upheaval that results in a far more simplified society in terms of social order, technology, economy, and interdependencies, with an inability to rebuild within centuries or millennia. Overindulging in this sub may be detrimental to your mental health. ![]() Anxiety and depression are common reactions to collapse-related news, so if you are feeling overwhelmed, please be conscious of your mental health and the effect this may have on you. As ever, if you are considering suicide, please seek professional help. Are only a call away. Posts and comments must follow the rules: 1. Posts must be relevant to societal collapse 2. No prepper or survivalist posts 3. No product reviews or recommendations 4. No conspiracy theories or false material 5. No duplicate posts 6. No discriminatory material 7. 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A daily output is 75 watts, or joules per second, a watt is a joule per second. Now, if we convert that time, 3,600 seconds in an hour, we can get rid of that time in the bottom. And then, an average workday of eight hours, you can figure out the average daily output of a human, which is 2.16 megajoules were. Well, for example, take a look at this picture here. There's a young lady carrying water in her village. That's a current picture, that's modern photography. So one of the things we'll look at is not only the past, but the fact is that many people around the world, over a billion still live on human power today, or simple machines. 2 Before we get started, there's some things we have to figure out. This is a science based course, so we have to figure out what a unit of power, energy, what are these things that we, we deal with all the time and never stop to think about? But a watt is a unit of power, or energy per unit time. The unit of energy is a joule. You know, like scientists do, they always figure out something to name after themselves. Actually, they didn't, it's the people who follow on after them, they thought so much of the people, Watt, Joule, that they named units of power and energy after them. So a watt, when you look at it, is energy per unit time or a joule per second. So it's instantaneous rate, how much can somebody do at a particular point in time. Now if you look at an average human, If you work all day, an average human can work at a rate of 75 watts, or power output. Now that's an average human. That's not an athlete that's really in training and can jump and leap tall buildings in a single bound, or things like that, that's an average human. So let's break this down in units. A daily output is 75 watts, or joules per second, a watt is a joule per second. Now, if we convert that time, 3,600 seconds in an hour, we can get rid of that time in the bottom. And then, an average workday of eight hours, you can figure out the average daily output of a human, which is 2.16 megajoules were the M stands for mega or million. So 2.16 million joules per working day is an average human being. 3 Now another way to look at that is something that some of us might be more familiar with is that the energy use if I save for instance a light bulb. So look at a 100 watt incandescent light bulb. Now this is before we get into the next module, so it's not an energy efficient light bulb yet. Let's look at the old fashioned incandescent light bulb, the 100 watt. Now how much energy would we use in a 10 hour period? Well 100 watts times 10 hours is equal to a 1000 watt hours. Now watch the units very carefully. This is where a lot of people get tripped up. It is not watts per hour, it's watt hours. It's on the same line. So if you look at the units, a watt as a joule per second. If we multiply this by ten hours with a suitable conversion, 3600 seconds per hour, the time cancels out so we're left with joules or energy. So when you buy a kilowatt hour from your utility, you're in effect buying a block of energy. That's all we're doing there, is buying a block of energy. So on a human scale, an output of seventy-five watts for eight hours, yield six hundred watts per day of 0.06 kilowatt-hours per day. 4 So we worked this way for many, many years, just human power. And you know, I can imagine the first person looking over there after a long day at work and getting kind of tired and thinking to himself, man if I could just get this cow to work for me things would be a lot better. So that's what they did, they harnessed a cow, an oxen, a farm animal. Even before they had the farms they thought about domesticating and harnessing an animal to help human beings out. The problem is that early on, these early harnesses did not effectively transfer the power from the animal to whatever's being pulled. So the early harnesses made a cow or oxen worth about four humans. And at four humans, it wasn't worth the prevailing practice of just enforcing labor so what we did was that didn't change practices for many, many years. We still worked on that. 5 So what happened next is that we come up with a better harness where the cow was worth about six human beings. At that point, domesticated animals really took off and we started harnessing simple machines. These, a picture right here is two donkeys, looks like from the ears, there pulling a disc harrow with the farmer sitting on a seat right there. So we tried to harness our animals to help us out. So let's take this further and make a, an example that kind of leaps forward in class a little bit. But just look at the US, for example; we spend and use about 18 and a half million barrels of oil a day in this country. Okay, and a barrel's 42 gallons. You find out that a gallon of crude oil's worth about 141,000 BTUs, or British Thermal Units. You can do that in mega joules also. But you break that down, do the proper conversions, and find out that, that oil consumption is worth about 2.43 gallons per day per person in the country. And if you look at that, I gotta look down at my notes here 'because I couldn't remember all these things at once stuck in my head. But that allocation of oil to each person in this country is equivalent to about 166 humans, output of 166 humans per day. So that would be like harnessing 166 laborers to do what you need to do, to have done during the day regardless of how you wanted it done, whether it was going to the store in your car, or air conditioning your house. But, in terms of comparison, that is, concentrated energy. 6 But, if we look around the world, today, we still have many places in the world that use human powered activity and animal power activity for the vast majority of what they do in a day. Here's two oxen here pulling a plow on the left hand picture. On the right hand picture are two farm carts. You can see some of the modern technology, the rubber tires, axles, metal, but still, it's a farm animal pulling a farm to market type of cart. 7 We progress in our history of energy, we started using wind power for things. This is a, a scene probably in the low countries in Holland where you use wind to pump water and to drain the land so you could farm it. And in the front you have a cart pulled by, it looks like a dog. So we harnessed, harnessed very many different animals to do our work for us over time. And now we move on to physical attributes of the planet we live on, like wind. 8 The picture on the left is a, Jacobs Aeromotor the Great American Desert is what we called that originally when we explored that region in the United States of America, but we found out that desert actually had very, very good soils, and underneath the desert was a large aquifer. So we put these early wind powered pumps in there, to pump water out to provide water for our earlier farms and farm house uses. Now, an early version of that if you look on the right is a Persian wind mill. Now that Persian wind mill's probably 1500 years old, it's a vertical axis, different from the others and wind can only approach from one direction. That's in an area where you might have tradewinds that are very predictable, always coming from one direction. 9 Water power was the next thing to be harnessed, where we have examples of water wheels being in use. There's an overshot, and I think the one the top picture there might be stream flow, where it's actually just the flow of the stream that causes the water wheel to work. And that can be used to saw wood, to grind grain, to provide power for many different uses. 10 Time marches on. We can start putting these outputs in comparison to what we talk about in early human output. Early windmill mechanical outputs, about 1.5 to 10.5 kilowatts, early water wheel mechanical output is 1.5 to 3.8 kilowatts. Again, many, many times more than a single human could do during a day. Now, the wind power strange looking thing right next to my elbow, is a, guy by the name of Brush invented a windmill to produce electric, not wind mill, but a ind powered generator to produce electricity in 1888. The output was 12 kW, massive improvement, but still nowhere near what we do today. 11 Now, use wind power, use water power, now somebody comes up with an engine, an actual mechanical engine. The first engine in production use was a Newcomen steam, steam engine in 1712. Newcomen developed a very simple steam engine that basically used an up and down motion to pump water out of coal mines. Didn't care about the efficiency, which was about 1%, because it's a coal mine. All you did was dig more coal out of the coalface and shove it into this pump to pump water out of the mine. Well, along comes Watt, again we named that unit of power after that, the watt. Along comes Watt, and his partner Bolton, who somehow in the tides of history have been forgotten, but it's the Watt/Bolton steam engine. Massive improvements in terms of separating the condensing and the heating part, so you have a cool part and a hot part. And they separated the two, so you could do them more efficiently and more quickly. Also, replace the up and down motion with a rotary crankshaft to give us rotary motion. Now rotary motion is important because the next thing you do with rotary motion, is start making things that can move. 12 So, early power summary, we've got a working laborer, 0.075 kilowatts, an Ox, 0.45 Kilowatts, early wind power one 1.5 to 10.5, early water power is 1.5 to 3.8 kilowatts, Newcomen steam engine is 15 kilowatts, Watt/Bolton steam engine now 25 kilowatts. But the next thing on our ticket is a diesel engine, that's 10 kilowatts. So we're starting to move on to magnify human power. 13 So let's see what these numbers mean in comparison to working laborers. So an ox is equal to 0.45 kilowatts, human being was 0.075. Simple division, back to our onversion. Six workers equaled about one ox. The largest early wind power devices represent the output of 140 laborers, 10.5 kilowatts to 0.075 kilowatts. The output of a Watt/Bolton stream engine was equivalent to about 333 laborers. Now, flash forward ahead to us, an automobile with about 134 horsepower engine, I picked that because that's equal to about 100 kilowatts, is equivalent to the output of about 1300 individual laborers. So remember that the next time you have to go back and get that gallon of milk that you forgot at the store. It's like harnessing 1300 individual laborers just to get you out to get that gallon of milk, that you forgot. In finance, a foreign exchange option (commonly shortened to just FX option or currency option) is a derivative financial instrument that gives the right but not the obligation to exchange money denominated in one currency into another currency at a pre-agreed exchange rate on a specified date.[1] See Foreign exchange derivative. The foreign exchange options market is the deepest, largest and most liquid market for options of any kind. Most trading is over the counter (OTC) and is lightly regulated, but a fraction is traded on exchanges like the International Securities Exchange, Philadelphia Stock Exchange, or the Chicago Mercantile Exchange for options on futures contracts. The global market for exchange-traded currency options was notionally valued by the Bank for International Settlements at $158.3 trillion in 2005 For example, a GBPUSD contract could give the owner the right to sell?1,000,000 and buy $2,000,000 on December 31. In this case the pre-agreed exchange rate, or strike price, is 2.0000 USD per GBP (or GBP/USD 2.00 as it is typically quoted) and the notional amounts (notionals) are?1,000,000 and $2,000,000. This type of contract is both a call on dollars and a put on sterling, and is typically called a GBPUSD put, as it is a put on the exchange rate; although it could equally be called a USDGBP call. If the rate is lower than 2.0000 on December 31 (say 1.9000), meaning that the dollar is stronger and the pound is weaker, then the option is exercised, allowing the owner to sell GBP at 2.0000 and immediately buy it back in the spot market at 1.9000, making a profit of (2.0000 GBPUSD? 1.9000 GBPUSD)? 1,000,000 GBP = 100,000 USD in the process. If instead they take the profit in GBP (by selling the USD on the spot market) this amounts to 100,000 / 1.9000 = 52,632 GBP. Although FX options are more widely used today than ever before, few multinationals act as if they truly understand when and why these instruments can add to shareholder value. To the contrary, much of the time corporates seem to use FX options to paper over accounting problems, or to disguise the true cost of speculative positioning, or sometimes to solve internal control problems. The standard clich? About currency options affirms without elaboration their power to provide a company with upside potential while limiting the downside risk. Options are typically portrayed as a form of financial insurance, no less useful than property and casualty insurance. This glossy rationale masks the reality: if it is insurance then a currency option is akin to buying theft insurance to protect against flood risk. The truth is that the range of truly non-speculative uses for currency options, arising from the normal operations of a company, is quite small. In reality currency options do provide excellent vehicles for corporates' speculative positioning in the guise of hedging. Corporates would go better if they didn't believe the disguise was real. Let's start with six of the most common myths about the benefits of FX options to the international corporation -- myths that damage shareholder values. Historically, the currency derivative pricing literature and the macroeconomics literature on FX determination have progressed separately. In this Chapter I argue the joint study of these two strands of literature and give an overview of FX option pricing concepts and terminology crucial for this interdisciplinary study. I also explain the three sources of information about market expectations and perception of risk that can be extracted from FX option prices and review empirical methods for extracting option-implied densities of future exchange rates. As an illustration, I conclude the Chapter by investigating time series dynamics of option-implied measures of FX risk vis-a-vis market events and US government policy actions during the period January 2007 to December 2008. Chapter 2: This Chapter proposes using foreign exchange (FX) options with different strike prices and maturities to capture both FX expectations and risks. We show that exchange rate movements, which are notoriously difficult to model empirically, are well-explained by the term structures of forward premia and options-based measures of FX expectations and risk. Although this finding is to be expected, expectations and risk have been largely ignored in empirical exchange rate modeling. Using daily options data for six major currency pairs, we first show that the cross section options-implied standard deviation, skewness and kurtosis consistently explain not only the conditional mean but also the entire conditional distribution of subsequent currency excess returns for horizons ranging from one week to twelve months. At June 30 and September 30, the value of the portfolio was?1,050,000. Note, however, that the notional amount of Ridgeway's hedging instrument was only?1,000,000. Therefore, subsequent to the increase in the value of the pound (which is assumed to have occurred on June 30), a portion of Ridgeway's foreign currency exchange risk was not hedged. For the three-month period ending September 30, exchange rates caused the value of the portfolio to decline by $52,500. Of that amount, only $50,000 was offset by changes in the value of the currency put option. The difference between those amounts ($2,500) represents the exchange rate loss on the unhedged portion of the portfolio (i.e., the 'additional'?50,000 of fair value that arose through increased share prices after entering into the currency hedge). At June 30, the additional?50,000 of stock value had a U.S. Dollar fair value of $45,000. At September 30, using the spot rate of 0.85:1, the fair value of this additional portion of the portfolio declined to $42,500. Ridge way will exclude from its assessment of hedge effectiveness the portion of the fair value of the put option attributable to time value. That is, Ridgeway will recognize changes in that portion of the put option's fair value in earnings but will not consider those changes to represent ineffectiveness. Aitan Goelman, the CFTC’s Director of Enforcement, stated: “The setting of a benchmark rate is not simply another opportunity for banks to earn a profit. Countless individuals and companies around the world rely on these rates to settle financial contracts, and this reliance is premised on faith in the fundamental integrity of these benchmarks. The market only works if people have confidence that the process of setting these benchmarks is fair, not corrupted by manipulation by some of the biggest banks in the world.” The Commission finalized rules to implement the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act regarding Regulation of Off-Exchange Retail Foreign Exchange Transactions and Intermediaries. The Commission also finalized Conforming Changes to existing Retail Foreign Exchange Regulations in response to the Dodd-Frank Act. Additional information regarding these final rules is provided below, including rules, factsheets, and details of meetings held between CFTC Staff and outside parties.
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