china, China, CHINA

[omaniphil]

(and afaik Oman hasn't exactly been doing much for Yemeni refugees)

Yemeni support for the Dhofar insurgents in the early 70s didn't do a lot for good relations between the countries. The border is fairly militarized - I remember when I was a kid, we drove down to southern Oman in the late 80s, and we were turned back by a military patrol about 30 miles from the border.

[iamsmu]

[Culican]

In all fairness to China, they aren't the only ones that have miscalculated when operating big dams. Most people don't realize that Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River came close to being being over topped and possibly lost in 1983 due to flooding. Only a last minute decision to put plywood sheets in the spillways to raise the lake level a few more feet saved the day. The inflows stopped before the plywood was topped.

The spillways were being eroded and the worry was that possibly the water would make its way into the original diversion tunnels used when the dam was built allowing all 30million acre-feet to drain. Everything downstream, numerous small towns, three interstate highways, a bunch of dams*, and gas and oil pipelines would have been wiped out.

*One article I can't locate said the Hoover Dam may have survived it as the "Bureau's art deco dam was massively over engineered" and only been overtopped.
---
For a while in 1983, sheets of plywood were all that kept the mighty Glen Canyon Dam from overflowing

"As more and more debris broke loose from the cavitation, it had accumulated in the horizontal portion of the left spillway, creating a condition known in fluid dynamics as a hydraulic jump. The phenomenon occurs when fast-flowing water, in this case the water traveling down the steeply angled portion of the spillway at more than 100 mph, either hits a blockage or is routed into a channel that’s too small to accommodate it.

That caused the water to back up in the upper portion of the spillway. Instead of a steady flow of white water into the river, the discharge came in pulsating spurts of water and air, sending shockwaves into the already damaged structure.

That created a new "what if": Could the shockwaves be enough to compromise the sandstone around the 150-foot concrete plugs that sealed off the upstream portions of the diversion tunnels? If either of the plugs failed, there wouldbe nothing to stop the 8 trillion gallon reservoir — 180 miles long, 25 miles wide and nearly 600 feet deep — from draining."
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/lo ... 662234001/

The plywood that saved the day. When a reservoir stretches back hundreds of miles even a couple of feet more height is a lot of storage.

[zappey1]

Comrade Elon!
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/china ... eid=yhoof2

SpoilerShow

“I see in the United States increasingly much more complacency and entitlement especially in places like the Bay Area, and L.A. and New York,” Musk said, pointing to two states that have helped boost Tesla’s business through tax breaks and other incentives. In fact, the Los Angeles Times put the total amount of government help for Tesla at more than $4.9 billion.

What a POS!

[mbasic]

In all fairness to China, they aren't the only ones that have miscalculated when operating big dams. ... [cool Glen Canyon story]

Yeah, hopefully their dam will hold.
If it doesn't, it would be the greatest engineering disaster of all time.....ever.

Glen Canyon was designed and built in 1950's....on the relatively small Colorado River watershed.
The China damn was modern day. Better modeling, computers, build techniques, known failures, etc.
The Yangtze River System is fucking hyuuuoooooge.

I wonder how much they considered global warming?
.... like warming of the earth could put more moisture in the atomsphere and lead to more storms heavier and more unpredictable rainstorms/rainy seasons. You are talking about something that would have to have a 100 lifespan.

[hector]

Comrade Elon!
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/china ... eid=yhoof2

SpoilerShow

“I see in the United States increasingly much more complacency and entitlement especially in places like the Bay Area, and L.A. and New York,” Musk said, pointing to two states that have helped boost Tesla’s business through tax breaks and other incentives. In fact, the Los Angeles Times put the total amount of government help for Tesla at more than $4.9 billion.

What a POS!

This is outweighed by him smoking weed on podcasts and building space ships.

[aurelius]

I wonder how much they considered global warming?
.... like warming of the earth could put more moisture in the atomsphere and lead to more storms heavier and more unpredictable rainstorms/rainy seasons. You are talking about something that would have to have a 100 lifespan.

Short answer: they didn't.

[mbasic]

Comrade Elon!
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/china ... eid=yhoof2

SpoilerShow

“I see in the United States increasingly much more complacency and entitlement especially in places like the Bay Area, and L.A. and New York,” Musk said, pointing to two states that have helped boost Tesla’s business through tax breaks and other incentives. In fact, the Los Angeles Times put the total amount of government help for Tesla at more than $4.9 billion.

What a POS!

This is outweighed by him smoking weed on podcasts and building space ships.

Lolz

[mbasic]

I wonder how much they considered global warming?
.... like warming of the earth could put more moisture in the atomsphere and lead to more storms heavier and more unpredictable rainstorms/rainy seasons. You are talking about something that would have to have a 100 lifespan.

Short answer: they didn't.

Yeah. If it's not this time, it's next time. It's 10 years from now when they have their 3rd 500-year storm in a row.

Another thing I read about was the massive pressure all that water puts on the tetonic plates or whatever. Essentially, all that weight hitting at once from the perspective of geology's clock....then comes the sudden unloading.

[aurelius]

Yeah. If it's not this time, it's next time. It's 10 years from now when they have their 3rd 500-year storm in a row.

Dams generally have a design life of 50-years. Which should scare people in the US as 85% of the dams in the USACE inventory are older than 50 years. A LOT of our infrastructure was built in the 1930's under the WPA. Last year I had to do an emergency stabilization on a stream because a dam failed.

The X-year storm designation was always bad terminology. Take the Front Range (Denver metro area). It has ~75 runoff causing rainfall events per year. The 1% storm event (100-year storm) is a storm event that exceeds in terms of inches of rainfall 99% of all storms over a set time time interval (in the case of Front Range the 2-hour storm event was used. Texas uses the 24-hour storm event). Given 75 runoff storm events occur annually, you would expect at least 1 100-year event every 2 years. You also have to consider the design storm events hydrograph or shape is an abstraction. So there are many ways actual storm events can exceed the abstract storm events we use for design but not exceed total rainfall or duration.

No one really know why the X-year event nomenclature was ever used. We just need to stop because it leads to a sense of security that should not be there. It also leads to bad engineering. The 'emergency' spillway isn't something that will be used once a decade. It can see water several times a year.

I can tell you that consideration of the weight on Teutonic plates does not go into the design.

[Rasmusb]

I can tell you that consideration of the weight on Teutonic plates does not go into the design.

The tableware of Teutonic knights is underappreciated!

I couldn't help it....

[mbasic]

China real estate collapse ?

https://news.yahoo.com/china-nightmare- ... 00957.html

[aurelius]

China real estate collapse ?

Probably not. China will trample on a bunch of perceived Western property rights (as in simply tell foreign investors and debt holders to fuck off) to prevent it. And fuck Western investors looking to make a quick buck in China. China has a long history of not playing by the Western capitalist rulebook. The world needs to stop pretending China is a good faith actor and invest elsewhere.

[mbasic]

Probably not. China will trample on a bunch of perceived Western property rights (as in simply tell foreign investors and debt holders to fuck off) to prevent it.

seems like if this happened, "go fuck off foreign investors", would be dumping gas on the aforementioned real-estate-bubble-burst fire ...
Not big vote of confidence going forward wouldn't you say?

And fuck Western investors looking to make a quick buck in China.

From what I'm reading, the USA itself doesn't have that much exposure here .... maybe other 'Western' entities.

China has a long history of not playing by the Western capitalist rulebook. The world needs to stop pretending China is a good faith actor and invest elsewhere.

Possibility of a shit storm for the get-rich-quick-gang and speculative investors, sure ....
... maybe a sign China's growth isn't going to (or has not been) fuel the world growth/economy fire ..... which would be a slow decay trickling into the US economy at some point.

we will see

[aurelius]

we will see

I read this, "they predict regulators will engineer a restructuring of Evergrande’s $300 billion pile of liabilities that keeps systemic risk to a minimum." as fuck creditors and investors to stabilize Evergrande. Which is generally what happens when companies restructure debt through bankruptcy. Add to that China has a history of simply taking over troubled companies. And as recently as 2019 Chinese state-owned companies simply defaulted on debt and hid behind the Communist Party.
Could be wrong though.

[quikky]

Damn: https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/04/china/xi ... index.html

[mbasic]

Damn: https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/04/china/xi ... index.html

In the 2000's they built a massive organ harvesting center hospital out here right in uighur-land,

and right next to that they built a place to burn the left over unused parts a crematorium for patents that succumbed to their natural

illnesses and couldn't afford proper funerals.

[mbasic]

Prediction: ( )

Say if the Russian invasion of Ukraine"fails" with regards to the Russian people and the lower gov't tolerating Putin long term .... in the way of protests, calls for reform, domestic anti-Putin sentiment, etc....

....watch China just turn into a full-blown-North-Korean-dystopian-police state.

That is all.

[aurelius]

....watch China just turn into a full-blown-North-Korean-dystopian-police state.

It is already. China just gilded the cage.

[neandrewthal]

stuff

How do you even assess the integrity of a structure that is underwater and how do you repair it if you have to?