Experts Issue 2018 Warning: Earth "Had It Easy This Year" With Only 6 Severe Earthquakes

Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

Scientists are warning that 2018 won’t be as “easy” on us as 2017 was when it comes to the number of severe earthquakes they predict.

In 2018, Earth, and one billion of its inhabitants could face 20 severe earthquakes due to the slowing rotation of the planet.

Tiny changes in the speed of our planet’s rotation will trigger huge seismic activity by releasing vast amounts of underground energy causing severe earthquakes, experts claim. Although their research has been rejected by some scientists, they are intent on sounding the alarm. The slowing of Earth’s rotation could disrupt the crust of the Earth making it possible to see 20 severe earthquakes next year.

According to the Daily Mail, the planet’s rotation is slowing down because of tidal forces between Earth and the moon. The side of Earth closest to the moon feels its pull the strongest, while the side farthest from the moon feels its gravity less. That difference in gravitational pull stretches the Earth, which causes tidal bulges. These bulges pull the moon closer or farther away from Earth by around 4cm per year. The moon exerts the opposite force on them, pulling them back toward it, creating friction and slowing down the planet’s rotation. The time the Earth takes to make a complete rotation on its axis varies by about a millionth of a second per day. While the rotational rate hasn’t declined evenly,  the average day has grown longer by between 15 millionths and 25 millionths of a second every year.

Researchers found five periods in the past century when there were more earthquakes than other times. On these five occasions, there was a 25 to 30 percent increase in the number of earthquakes with a magnitude of 7 or above. These all coincided with a slowing in the rotation of the Earth. Scientists from the University of Colorado in Boulder and the University of Montana say that even fluctuations of a millisecond could increase seismic activity.

The minuscule variations in Earth’s rotation cause a shift in the shape of the Earth’s iron and nickel “inner core.” This, in turn, changes the liquid outer core on which the Earth’s tectonic plates rest. “The mechanism we’ve come up with is that as the Earth slows down it’s like a skater spinning on ice. As the Earth slows down its equatorial diameter reduces,” Dr. Rger Bilham of the University of Colorado told BBC Inside Science. “Its (the Earth’s) waistline gets smaller, but its clothes, the tectonic plates on Earth, remain the same size, which means they get rumpled up. These tiny changes to the overall shape of the Earth are enough, if there are faults that are already ready to go … to kind of kick them over into failure,” he said.

“The correlation between Earth’s rotation and earthquake activity is strong and suggests there is going to be an increase in numbers of intense earthquakes next year,” Dr. Bilham said.

This research comes just after a 7.3-magnitude earthquake struck Iran, leaving at least 400 people killed and more than 6,000 injured. The quake hit 19 miles southwest of Halabja in Iraqi Kurdistan at around 9.20pm on Sunday, when many people would have been at home. More than 100 aftershocks followed.

What's Killing The Middle Class? (Part 1)

Authored by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

The rising asymmetry of rewards within our economy has many drivers.

We all know the middle class that actually owns capital and wields political influence is shrinking. As I noted last week in Redefining the Middle Class: It Isn"t What You Earn and Owe, It"s What You Own That Generates Income, defining the middle class by household income alone is a misleading metric, as it leaves out the critical factors of debt and ownership of productive assets.

A household may have an income of $150,000 and appear well-off by that metric, but if they are mired in debt and own virtually no productive assets or wealth that can be passed on to future generations, they aren"t middle class--they"re well-paid proletariats.

So what"s killing the middle class? If you read the dozens of articles on the decline of the middle class in the mainstream (corporate) media, you soon discover there"s a short list of the usual suspects:

1. Globalization / outsourcing

2. Technological changes / automation

3. "Winner take all" asymmetry in rewards for specialized skills

Clearly, each of these has squeezed the incomes of all those between the jobless poor and the wealthy reaping the lion"s share of the rewards from globalization and technological change.

A worker at a steel mill who earned $28/hour plus benefits could, with frugality and long-term planning, eventually own a home free and clear and acquire a nest-egg of assets.

When that worker"s job was outsourced, and his next job paid $9.25/hour, the opportunities to amass capital fell precipitously.

A middle-skill worker replaced by automation had the same life-changing experience if he didn"t acquire much higher level skills and move to a stronger job market--both difficult tasks with highly uncertain outcomes. (No wonder secure government jobs from which jobholders can"t be fired are so sought after.)

As economist Michael Spence explained, a key dynamic in globalization"s asymmetric rewards in pay and career stability is the tradability / non-tradability of output and labor: a bushel of grapes can be grown in another country, but you can"t outsource a haircut.

Grapes, computer chips, tech support, etc., can be grown, made or done elsewhere (outsourced) as they are tradable; hair cuts, most government services, being served a beer at a brewpub, etc. are non-tradable.

The rising asymmetry of rewards within our economy has many drivers. Studies by physicists suggest that the highly networked complexity of our economy generates wealth / income inequality by its very nature: Physics can predict wealth inequality:

Bejan"s Constructal Law addresses the fundamental principle of physics that underlies the evolution of flow systems as they change in design over time to increase flow access. It reveals that "branching tree-shaped" flow patterns govern the structure of the entire universe--most clearly evident within rivers, neural networks, lightning bolts, electrical circuitry and trees.

"The Constructal Law extends the power of physics over all of the phenomena of evolutionary design and organization, from geophysics to biology, technology, and social organization," Bejan said.

"This unites economics and physics. The equivalence between wealth and movement is correct in the broadest sense: outliers exist and undoubtedly the equivalence is evolutionary because wealth and fuel use are increasing over time."

What did they discover in terms of wealth inequality? Bejan and Errera show that nonuniform distribution of movement (wealth) becomes more accentuated as an economy becomes more developed--its flow architecture becomes more complex for the purpose of covering smaller and smaller interstices of the overall territory. "Relatively modest complexity is required for the nonuniformity in the distribution of movement (wealth) to be evident," Bejan said.

In other words, only specific types of specialization garner most of the rewards. Specialization itself doesn"t necessarily lead to outsized gains; what matters is the tradability of the specialization and the supply and demand for that specialized set of skills.

As I repeatedly point out, just issuing 500,000 more graduate degrees in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) doesn"t automatically create 500,000 new jobs; there has to be demand for those skills.

Skills that are non-tradable and scarce will command high compensation. Skills /credentials that are tradable and abundant are a dime a dozen--there is no pricing power to labor that"s abundant, tradable and interchangeable (i.e. a commodity).

In effect, outsourcing and automation are eating the soft center between the low/moderate-skilled workforce that can"t be outsourced (dog walkers, waiters, nannies, etc.) and the high-skilled technocrat class employed by the government, finance and corporations.

As software improves, automation can move higher up the employment food chain, turning non-tradable (i.e. can"t be outsourced) employment into commodity labor that can be augmented (partly replaced) by software/automation tools.

Self-driving vehicles are an example of this dynamic.

This displaces middle-skilled workers who find there is an abundance of other middle-skilled workers seeking high-paying jobs. This over-supply of middle-skilled workers creates a glut that pushes wages down. It"s just supply and demand.

All these factors are consequential, but they conveniently leave out the politically explosive dynamics that are enriching the political and financial elites (the few) at the expense of the middle class (the many). All these factors are politically neutral abstractions--they have been stripped of exploitive, parasitic, predatory political and financial dynamics.

For example, consider how we"ve substituted debt for income. Savings have crashed while consumer debt has soared. This is the core dynamic of debt-serfdom.

Was this substitution the result of automation and outsourcing? In Part 2, we"ll look at the politically explosive dynamics that are killing the middle class.