Two employees of a fertilizer company in Riga, Michigan, were assigned to install a new float valve in an old 35-foot deep cistern for a new 300-foot well. This cistern was covered with a concrete slab with entry through a covered manhole. The first worker entered the cistern and as he reached a plank platform six feet below the opening, he was instantly overcome and fell unconscious into the water below. The man on the surface immediately ran to the nearby plant for help. Several workmen responded and two of them entered the cistern to render aid. They met the fate of the first worker. A passerby who had been drawn to the scene by the crowd which had gathered was told by an excited bystander that several men in the cistern were drowning. Upon hearing this, he shouted, "I can swim, I can swim" and pulled away from a company employee who was trying to restrain him. Now there were four bodies in the well.
Shortly afterward the fire department arrived at the scene with proper rescue equipment. The fire chief entered the cistern wearing a self-contained breathing apparatus. After reaching the plank platform, he removed his face mask to shout instructions to those on the surface and he, too, was instantly overcome. All five persons died in the cistern.
Tests of the cistern atmosphere revealed that H2S in a concentration of about 1000 parts per million was present when the five deaths occurred. The water pumped up from the deep well contained dissolved hydrogen sulfide which was released in the unventilated cistern.
The friends I play Urb-X with are hyper aware that it's the heavier-than-air gasses that pool and that kill you. I find it amazing and depressing they didn't have any sort of safety gear or air monitoring. In the UK, I'm sure this would have breached both working at height and enclosed spaces working regulations.
Even if we're exploring something as pathetic as an old ROC bunker only _one_ of us (usually me) goes down first and is attached to the end of a rope. If I stop talking then the person topside can do what they like to try and get me out, but under no circumstances do they come down behind me. We've also usually got a third person sat in the van (so just off site) communicating with us via radio and with GPS coordinates and road directions written down ready to give to the emergency services should it all go entirely to hell...
Sorry for the ramble; It's a horrible tragedy, but as what I've stated above is the level I expect for an unplanned slightly drunken Sunday-afternoon explore, I _really_ expect people in a commercial setting to know better. Probably more to the point, whoever ordered them to go in there deserves to be strung over the coals....
tldr: it's _really_ easy to go from 1 person slightly injured to multiple people dead :(
Absolutely. This is also well known in the amateur caving community too, who follow similar practices to those outlined by yourself. I too find this crazy.
As they say in the diving industry about water and confined spaces: a deceptively easy way to die.
I've just realised that the word document linked to actually seems to be dated 1974 (google makes it seem possible that the incident was 1971). It doesn't excuse anything but I like to think we've gotten a bit better since then. I get the impression in caving circles at least, "bad air" is much better understood these days.
(irrelevant, but for the record, cave diving scares the pants off've me =) )
I've looked into it in the past and keep looking at atleast a £500 cost -usually more if you want O2, CO, CO2, H25 (I think those were the ones I decided I was interested in).... and _then_ there's the certification cost, so I really can't justify it (though I'd love to).
My friends dad used to be a safety inspector duwnt' pit in the 70's and he's been trying to convince me to get an old Davy Lamp and to just pay attention to what the flame is doing, but I've yet to find a nice one (or inherit his). I have been known to ignite my cigarette lighter on every other rung when going down a ladder but in hindsight, that has the potential to end extremely badly.
Enough so that you can actually run an automobile engine on CO.
Here in Finland, during second World War when petrol/gasoline was in very short supply, even army vehicles would run on CO gas. Petrol was only used for starting the engine.
Starting a truck involved first chopping little pieces of wood to a reactor attached to the car or lorry, lighting them and creating a fire with suitable under-supply of oxygen so that the reactor emits CO. When the gas is at right concentration to burn, start then engine with petrol and then switch to CO gas.
This is El Kamina, a modern hack made by the current Prime Minister in the country:
Yeah, that's a very good point. It was suggested by an acquaintance that I just throw a lit sparkler down the hole before entering, which _almost_ made sense -though if I ever do manage to find a pocket of CO then it's going to make one heck of a mess.... Davy Lamp time it is then -big flame == big trouble and time to leave.
I might have to start taking a household CO detector with me (the cheap ones now even have a PPM reading [1]) though I'm still wary of it giving a false sense of security and me then missing something else just as hazardous. Once again, Davy Lamp might be the solution to this -apparently the flame goes out when there's 17% oxygen or less, which is still life supporting.
You know, if you're doing work, or going into enclosed spaces, you really should just get the best gas detector you can get your hands on. It's a lot better than dying.
I worked for a short time at an installation that refurbished small oil rigs. It's about the worst kind of modern work environment: lots of poisonous substances (eg. heavy oil/crude leftovers), welding in closed spaces, tight crawlspaces and the whole thing is a basically a set of Faraday cages, so both VHF and cell reception is pretty bad.
Basically when you opened up a tank, you'd first have someone lower down a high precession meter to sample it over 12 hours. If that looked good, you have at least two gas meters per team, and the team is in constant contact with someone outside (either by said crappy VHF, and/or supplemented with a rope - pull the rope every minute - sound the alarm if the signalling stops, and send in a rescue team. If you figure an excellent 5 minutes from alarm to the team is inside, that's 6 minutes without air).
Worst accident we had was due to faulty documentation: a rig had stopped over and done an undocumented paint job. A team was repainting that section, on the inside of an enclosed space (a shaft) while another team was doing hot work (welding and/or cutting) on the outside. The old paint on the inside had cadmium in it - the result was 5-7 people airlifted to the hospital with cyanide poisoning.
Brilliant anecdotes; thank you. I didn't realise quite how seriously it was taken (multiple samples over extended periods, etc) in industry. Cyanide poisoning sounds horrific.
For the record I sit at a desk all day poking at computers -it's just occasionally I and some friends have the urge to go exploring WW2 structures or old railway tunnels. If I were doing anything commercially or even if I were doing it more often then proper air monitoring would be essential. At the moment we're more than happy to eyeball something (or stand at the entrance and check for a breeze) and just decide "nope -not worth the risk".
I'm also hyper aware that actually, we don't really know what the heck we're doing (even though I spend a lot of time reading up on how similar has gone wrong for other people); so discretion has to be the better part of valour. If anyone reading this happens to be based middle of the UK, has a better idea what they're doing than I do and wouldn't mind me tagging along to learn some new things, then please please please, PM me :)
It so much more important to take this stuff seriously if you only do it occasionally and for fun/recreation! Suffocation is the least of your worries, both H2S and CO are poisonous. And you don't have a team standing by with with air tanks. So response time is likely to be closer to an hour, on the off chance that there's even anyone to call for help. Think about the kind of brain damage you're liable to suffer if you do survive such an ordeal.
A couple of gas meters (the reason to have two, in case it's no obvious, is to try and make sure at least one sounds an alarm in case of faulty equipment etc) - and an "active" monitor to someone outside (aka: a rope) is generally as good as you'll get. And a lot better than what most people do.
Don't become the next anecdote at a search and rescue seminar.
I... umm... yeah. Those are all extremely good points. The idea of surviving with major brain damage is almost more scary than thinking I wouldn't come out at all. It also goes towards explaining why when I ask my friends for advice who do have industry experience, they're not willing to do more than tell me I'm an idiot and that if I want to do it safely then I just shouldn't do it.
I feel I should point out that I do try to be mindful not to become a statistic or anecdote. Apart from the obvious reasons, in 2015 it's hard enough to get away with having unsupervised, unstructured and unlitigated fun. If I do myself in through stupidity whilst exploring, climbing or gliding etc, then apart from anything else it's going to make it that much more difficult for anyone who comes after me. Imposing more restrictions or difficulty on a hobby I love is the last thing I want to be remembered for.
H2S, CO and O2 seem like the obvious gases to be mindful of; is there anything else you'd suggest looking for in an air monitor pr being especially wary of? Massive thanks for your time and knowledge :)
I suppose there are other hydrocarbons to worry about (both naturally occurring from compost, and from leaking gas pipes/old tanks). Not so much because of suffocation (that's why you have the O2 gauge) but from the not blow up/be burned alive part. I suppose it depends a bit where you go exploring - AFAIK old coal mines can be dangerous wrt fires/explosions. It's a good reason to avoid open flame/non ex certified electronics, if you have reason to suspect an explosive atmosphere. Fires can be dangerous just by binding oxygen - in addition to the more obvious danger.
I think the main thing is to realize that enclosed spaces can be really dangerous. Farmers die in grain/grass silos every year. And people die from CO poisoning from using coal as heat-sources indoors, or just from theoretically sound, but flawed fire based heating solutions (eg: paraffin/diesel/oil heaters).
Though I'm somewhat wary about buying potentially life critical systems from AliExpress -especially when I have no idea how I'd go about testing, never-mind certifying it :)
I once took an H2S safety training class. The first rule of working in an area with known H2S is if you see one of your colleagues suddenly drop to the floor for no apparent reason get the hell out of the area and whatever you do, don't stop to render aid to the fallen. After you have reached a safe well ventilated place, you should put on your safety gear and then head back to rescue the incapacitated.
There are too many stories like this where a whole bunch of people die trying to rescue the first victim so it makes total sense but it is kind of weird working in an environment where you know your colleagues will not help you (at least at first) if something goes wrong.
Btw: H2S doesn't really dull your sense of smell because of prolonged exposure. It only becomes odorless at deadly concentrations. So it turns out you don't know if you cannot smell it because it isn't present or it is just about to kill you.
Shit kills. I guess this happens everywhere in the world, but over here (Finland), there are the occasional deaths at farms where H2S released from remains of cow manure, stored in a tank, kills people.
A farm-owner suffocated inside a manure tank which was lacking oxygen and contained toxic gases. Also his brother, who went in to help, died.
A tank of liquid-form manure was almost empty. A pipe at the bottom of the tank was blocked. The farm owner decided to enter the tank and finalize emptying the tank. However, he lost consciousness and fell to the bottom.
His brother, who was close by, saw what happened and went in to save the unconscious man, but he was also overcome in a moment. Four hours later a family member discovered the victims. Fire service was called to help, and with pressure air breathing equipment, they retrieved both men. They were both found to be dead. Cause of death was a poisoning by methane and hydrogen sulfide."
"The lagoons themselves are so viscous and venomous that if someone falls in it is foolish to try to save him. A few years ago, a truck driver in Oklahoma was transferring pig shit to a lagoon when he and his truck went over the side. It took almost three weeks to recover his body. In 1992, when a worker making repairs to a lagoon in Minnesota began to choke to death on the fumes, another worker dived in after him, and they died the same death. In another instance, a worker who was repairing a lagoon in Michigan was overcome by the fumes and fell in. His fifteen-year-old nephew dived in to save him but was overcome, the worker's cousin went in to save the teenager but was overcome, the worker's older brother dived in to save them but was overcome, and then the worker's father dived in. They all died in pig shit."
I worked one summer for my uncle helping to construct new farrowing barns for pigs. One of the clearest lessons I got was to never, EVER, get down near the manure pits of the barns in use and that if anyone did have problems, to not go in after them.
After that, was lessons about watching for risks of fire and knowing where to GTFO.
I don't remember any at-the-time recent issues with asphyxiation and there were well known cases of barn fires every 5-8 years (we were replacing one that burnt down the year before). Still, the bigger warning I remember was about safety near manure.
Here this happens with decaying green algae on the Brittany coast. It kills wild animals and every so often the people who clean up beaches and oyster farmers.
I once took a university course called "Chemical Equilibrium" which required some lab time. The labs were about examining solutions with unknown ions and figuring out what they were. A common tool in doing so is by bubbling hydrogen sulfide gas through the solution, which will cause the precipation of certain cations.
Needless to say, we were warned about the dangers of H2S, and told that if it ever escaped the fume hood we would know immediately by the smell and should evacuate the premises before we succumbed to olfactory fatigue and poisoned ourselves. Another fun gas used in the same course was HCN. All in all, A very solid lesson in not fooling around outside the fume hood, and from the anecdote above a possibly life saving lesson which can't be said for most university courses...
For those who do not know, H2S is also a key part of the vile smell in flatulence, so strictly speaking it's a rather common substance in nature albeit in "safe" concentrations.
>"For those who do not know, H2S is also a key part of the vile smell in flatulence, so strictly speaking it's a rather common substance in nature albeit in "safe" concentrations."
Funny story and probably TMI.
I used to work in aviation maintenance on large military aircraft. We regularly had to enter into "confined spaces" (fuel tanks, wings, ect) and were required to take a hand-held "air sniffer" with us that would alarm if any of about 5 or so monitored gases got too high.
I would always fart into the thing to see what would happen and it would always read 0 on all monitored gases. However on one day, I had perhaps the worst smelling "flatulence" ever and while inside the center fuel tank of a P3, I let one rip right into the sniffer. H2S went from 0 to 1ppm, but strangely carbon monoxide (CO) went from 0 to 7ppm. I always expected the H2S, but I don't know what the heck CO was doing in my bowels..
The short version is more likely CO2, not CO, and the detector was probably fooled by methane. In more detail:
I was motivated to google, and much like radioactivity or electric current its possible to measure "scary" things to low levels that don't usually matter, and according to a 1982 gastroenterology paper that I found, aerobic fecal fermentation will produce an irrelevent yet measurable extremely low CO output while the anerobic fecal bacteria find CO to be a yummy fuel and will rapidly consume it. Unfortunately they cannot consume CO fast enough to scavenge your blood clean if you're suffering from CO poisoning, which is too bad. Carbon monoxide being known as that thing that gives you massive gas would be far preferable to being known as that poison that kills people, but thats how it goes, can't win em all, so despite our helpful fecal bacteria CO does kill people. The paper theorized the anerobes protect the host by eating the extremely small level of CO that normal aerobic gut flora output.
From fooling around with chemical sensors in my youth, quite a few work by heating up an oxidation catalyst and measuring its temp very closely given the carefully measured outside air temp and electricity fed into them. So feed it a fuel like carbon monoxide and it gets microscopically, yet measurably, hotter. You can play molecular weight games to get a catalyst that preferentially responds to light stuff like methane or CO, or heavy stuff like vaporized wax. My semi-educated guess is the aviation CO sensor got fooled by methane in the guy's gas. Methane isn't a serious threat in an airplane fuel tank so its unlike bowel gas analysis was a high priority in the specs. This is in the class of proving things by ruling them out, and you can't rule out a heated oxidation catalyst sensor getting fooled by low molecular weight methane, its a believable scenario.
Quite possibly, but I also wouldn't be surprised if it was actually CO. The western-fatty diet, a.k.a the stereotypical US diet, winds up promoting CO output by not only your gut commensals, but by your epithelial cells themselves.
Not really on topic but human microbiota papers from before the late 90's/early 2000's aren't the best -- especially when dealing with metabolic processes and outputs. Available technologies and techniques at the time made studying many commensal anaerobes very difficult.
That one actually has, at least what sounds like, a built in aquarium pump that actually draws air into the unit.
The other style we used seemed to be completely digital. It made no noise and the main unit was big and bulky. The sensor plugged into it with long wires and the sensor it self was just a big heavy plastic cube. On one side it had a screen and behind the screen was just what looked like metal. As if it could sense gases through metal or something, dunno.
And I don't know which model I was using at the time of my "experiment"
I was motivated to bottom up research vs your top down and apparently technology has advanced and the cool kids these days are using obscure semiconductors that drop in resistance as reductive (as opposed to oxidative) gases adsorb on the surface, then periodically they heat up and cook off the adsorbed stuff (otherwise they'd be permanent total dosage sensors).
It ends up being the same argument on a high level that for both operational and practical reasons the sensors usually respond to anything that burns / reduces in the presence of oxygen regardless of specific chemistry and design.
It occurs in deep wells that cave divers swim into as well. They often have to swim through an H2S layer, which can numb their lips and any exposed skin. It's generally a race to get through this layer and into the caves below as fast as possible.
And for those interested, H2Se has an LC50 about an order of magnitude lower than H2S. Fortunately S/Se in crude oil is likely to be >10000. It smells like garlic.
I just wanted to add an evolutionary perspective on why H2S might smell so bad for us. Sure it's dangerous, but so are many gases that don't smell. However:
Unrelated, but reading this reminded me of the story. One of my chemistry teachers in high school made a lab where we had to identify various substances by smell. H2S was one of those substances, and we were told it had a distinctive sulfuric smell.
I remember trying to smell the substance by wafting[0] (as previous teachers had instructed us) and thinking 'hm, I thought I smelled that a second ago, but now I can't'. My teacher's response was 'oh, you're just not smelling it hard enough. You really need to take a big sniff' and stuck his nose over the petri dish to demonstrate.
Fortunately I was skeptical enough of him by this point in the semester that I ignored him. Only later did I look it up and discover that H2S is not actually odorless - it smell like rotten eggs. But it also dulls your sense of smell at the same time[1].
This is only one of several times when he almost killed us with labs in that class (my favorite was when he came just a second away from lighting a classmate on fire with Thermite[2]).
Well, I made H2S on a few occasions in high school, and I always thought it has a powerful odor of rotten eggs. I have no doubt about it. You make a little H2S in a test tube, you will know, along with everyone else in the room and perhaps in adjacent rooms too.
I don't doubt that it deadens the sense of smell, I'm just saying it's nowhere near odorless on first contact.
Of course, I never made an amount large enough, nor did I stuck around long enough, for the sense impairment to occur.
If you knew approximately where the dangerous gas was, could you take a deep breath and run in with your breath held? If you prepare for it, you can probably hold your breath for a good minute and some.
His article on chlorine trifluoride was an absolute classic as well, and some of his articles make me very glad I don't live anywhere near Dr. Klapötke's lab.
The FOOF article pointed out one other nasty problem, namely, how easy it is to game search systems:
"But I do note that if you run the structure through SciFinder, it comes out with a most unexpected icon that indicates a commercial supplier. That would be the Hangzhou Sage Chemical Company. They offer it in 100g, 500g, and 1 kilo amounts, which is interesting, because I don’t think a kilo of dioxygen difluoride has ever existed. Someone should call them on this – ask for the free shipping, and if they object, tell them Amazon offers it on this item. Serves ’em right. Morons."
Given how often I come across spammy search results in Google, I guess I shouldn't be too surprised.
Yeah, the (usually Chinese) spammy chemical suppliers have an interesting selection. I've seen several offering to sell you 99% pure isopropane, which is a bit like offering a RESTful service that keeps track of state on the server.
Given that a number of tests listed beforehand are with compounds that have their own "won't work with" articles, yeah one do wonder about the sanity of the chemist behind the paper.
Holy shit! Even the concept of how it's produced is nuts. The extra links are even better, including the better-than-oxygen oxidizer that burns sand. The whole collection of anything involving flourine is like "let's see just how many people we can kill and things we can destroy without actually doing it." Whole blog is great along with high quality comments.
Thanks for the link and thanks to others for updated links! I'm in process of spamming all kinds of people with them haha. Hmm: need to get a hold of some FOOF that will go poof next 4th of July. :)
> The fire chief entered the cistern wearing a self-contained breathing apparatus. After reaching the plank platform, he removed his face mask to shout instructions to those on the surface and he, too, was instantly overcome.
Now that one is probably deserving a Darwin Award...
Says the guy arm-chairing the situation on HN. In contrast to anyone that's actually done such a thing, reads this and thinks, "yeah, but for the grace of $DEITY go I, because a single lapse in judgement is all it takes, and in a stressful situation single lapses in judgement come in boxes of a dozen."
If you have the training, been apprised of the situation, are wearing the right breathing equipment, and you have 4 bodies lying on the ground in front of you, then you have had all the warnings you could possibly expect to get. Disregarding safety in the face of so much evidence about the danger is either perverse or stupid. I can agree with your excuse for the other people (to some degree) but the fire chief doesn't get a pass on this one.
Bravery on its own just isn't enough. This complete fool forgets all his confined space training, endangering not only himself but also his men, who now have one more victim to extricate. The rest of the rescue crew are people, too. Submariners have the word "oxygen thief" for this magnitude of idiot.
Well, the accident in question happened nearly 50 years ago. Who knows what kind of training was in place at the time or even how well understood this sort of problem was.
"Little House on the Prairie" has a scene where the father digs a well and tests the air downhole with a candle. That's awareness of the danger in a literary work more than 100 years ago. Farmers and well-diggers have been aware of the phenomenon for centuries, it's inconceivable that a fireman of the mid-20th century didn't know how to defend himself against the danger.
it's inconceivable that a fireman of the mid-20th century didn't know how to defend himself against the danger
Not as much as you might think. Firefighters routinely fought fires without SCBA up until at least the 70's, and probably into the 80's in rural areas. And if they weren't using SCBA for structure fires, they probably weren't using them for rescue calls in most cases. It was a cultural thing... for a long time, firefighters just didn't understand/appreciate the importance of SCBA. In hindsight that seems hard to believe, but it's been a slow process to get to a place where every firefighter is rigorous about making sure they use SCBA at all required times. (To some extent, that could be said about other protective gear as well, including turnout gear and PASS alarms).
Also consider that many (probably most) fire departments don't receive a lot of specific training on confined space rescue. Of course, you might ask, "why not?" and the simple answer is "time". Especially with volunteer firefighters, you can only get folks out for so much training a week. And fire calls are many times more common than confined space calls, so most training time is spent on the routine firefighting stuff.
Similar thing with hazardous materials training... it's a relatively recent thing for the majority of fire departments to receive specific haz-mat training, and even then, unless the department runs a specialized haz-mat team, their personnel probably only train to the "awareness" level.
I don't mean to excuse the fire chief, as I don't know the details of that specific story. But for something like that to happen, especially that many years ago, isn't a complete surprise.
Source: I was a firefighter and certified firefighting instructor throughout most of the 90s / early 2000's. My dad was also a volunteer firefighter and I've had a lifelong interest in the fire service.
The problem is understanding just how fast it affects you, and how little you need in your system. I imagine his line of thinking was "Well, if I just shout and don't breathe in, it'll be fine".
The problem is that at high enough concentrations, a single breath is all it takes. Did you remember to purge your mask before taking a breath when you put it back on?
The thing about H2S is, it's every bit as dangerous as HCN, but it has a better PR agent. If you wouldn't take off your SCBA mask in a room full of HCN, "even for just a sec," then you shouldn't do it in a room suspected of being full of H2S either.
The fire chief would have known that H2S is hazardous, but his training unfortunately (and obviously) didn't communicate just how hazardous it is.
I worked for someone who was a variation on the 'Brad' theme for a while, absolutely infallible.
One day I walked through the workshop where he was making a positive from which a mold would be made for a piece of machinery. There was an obvious error in it (it really isn't all that hard to make a mistake, moldmaking is intricate) and I tried to interrupt him to ask how he planned to solve this and told me to stick to my job (programming, not mechanical engineering).
So fine. I went about my programming ways. A while later a bunch of expensive aluminum trial casts arrived from an even more expensive custom made mold (mold are very expensive) and after some very silent moments in the workshop there was a lot of cursing and yelling.
I walked downstairs and asked what they planned to do about the two shafts running through each others center and was asked if I had known all along why didn't I say something...
>Notice anything off about that XML? If you said, “value should be 0 instead of False”, then give yourself a pat on the back.
Because text values can be valid XML for Boolean values. According to the XML Schema specification:
3.2.2.1 Lexical representation
An instance of a datatype that is defined as ·boolean· can have the
following legal literals {true, false, 1, 0}.
3.2.2.2 Canonical representation
The canonical representation for boolean is the set of
literals {true, false}.
I was hoping for a lot better. The story's entirely made up and the XML parsing bit is especially painful.
There's absolutely no reason that "false" will necessarily be represented as "0" for a particular API.
Not to mention that it actually wouldn't be that hard to unload the coal. Yes, it would be annoying and cumbersome, but certainly not on the order of losing 80%.
Really? I'd imagine the potential pool for buyers in the market for 28K tons of coal is pretty limited (read: power stations), and they have their supplies sorted out years in advance.
I'd say almost everything they post has at least a kernel of truth. Likely, some commodities broker did get a delivery of coal once, whether it was on this scale or not is really the question.
Planet Money had a recent podcast titled "The Onion King", where someone took physical control of onion futures, and why that is the one type of future outlawed by congress.
"and why that is the one type of future outlawed by congress"
I was intrigued enough to follow this up, although I didn't listen to the podcast. From wikipedia:
During the hearings, the Commodity Exchange Authority stated that it was the perishable nature of onion which made them vulnerable to price swings. Then-congressman Gerald Ford of Michigan sponsored a bill, known as the Onion Futures Act, which banned futures trading on onions. The bill was unpopular among traders, some of whom argued that onion shortages were not a crucial issue since they were used as a condiment rather than a staple food. The president of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, E.B. Harris, lobbied hard against the bill. Harris described it as "Burning down the barn to find a suspected rat". The measure was passed, however, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the bill in August 1958. [1]
The only other outlawed future is motion picture box office receipts:
"7 U.S. Code § 13–1 - Violations, prohibition against dealings in motion picture box office receipts or onion futures; punishment
(a) No contract for the sale of motion picture box office receipts (or any index, measure, value, or data related to such receipts) or onions for future delivery shall be made on or subject to the rules of any board of trade in the United States. The terms used in this section shall have the same meaning as when used in this chapter.
(b) Any person who shall violate the provisions of this section shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor and upon conviction thereof be fined not more than $5,000."
There is an awesome book "Reminiscence of a stock operator" by Edwin Lefevre, the story is about one guy and he does that with coffee in the US, not one, but 2 times. The government actually had to come in and take it from him...
The book is a mixture of fiction and real life and it's just great! One of my favorites
It is an awesome book and its an extremely thinly disguised biography of Jesse Livermore.
Its interesting to read up on why its thinly disguised. Its widely believed the author both got, and planted, stock tips for Livermore, but the author wanted no written legal document connecting them in case things went wrong and he ended up in court discussing his documented long financial relationship w/ Mr Livermore. Legally on paper he can say he has never had anything to do with the guy, etc. Everyone knew exactly what was going on, of course.
Fred Schwed's "where are the customers yachts?" is another investment classic.
Another classic comedy was Ben Graham's Security Analysis; its a comedy in the sense that market prices currently have no relationship to fundamentals from a Graham perspective. When I was young and dumb I thought I'd spend my life making wise investment decisions based on fundamentals using Mr Graham's techniques. Instead, my entire adult life has been spend in central bank bubbles. In that sense the book is useless today. But in your grandpa's day, or great grandpa's day, this is how investment decisions were calculated, and its kinda interesting historically.
It would be amusing some slow day to have a HN article along the lines of "books recognized as cool, that have nothing to do with computers". I think we've had them in the distant past, years ago.
> It would be amusing some slow day to have a HN article along the lines of "books recognized as cool, that have nothing to do with computers". I think we've had them in the distant past, years ago.
That would be very cool, I love reading how the world works outside computers but there is so much of everything and it's hard to filter in fields I know nothing about, have you considered suggesting it to dang, it would fit in well still I think.
> its a comedy in the sense that market prices currently have no relationship to fundamentals from a Graham perspective
You missed the whole point of Security Analysis and Intelligent Investor(another Graham book). The market is irrational from time to time, so you patiently wait on the side when prices are overvalued and invest in fundamentally good companies when prices are undervalued.
Not missed on a large enough scale. Prices used to fluctuate and occasionally be below the fundamental value. That never happens anymore, supply and demand issues. Given that fundamental value never exceeds price, if I were investing instead of speculating/gambling I'd never buy in. And if you're speculating/gambling, the fundamental value of a company is irrelevant. Or rephrased the above is the comedy I'm referring to.
I worked at a small quant fund and we once had a bug that caused our roll forward trade to fail on a rather large position of front month WTI contracts. We technically were going to have to take delivery since we were long the contracts at expiry, but our brokerage was nice enough to fix the situation for us.
This is a recurring nightmare of mine: forgetting to close out a commodity futures contract, then suddenly having 20,000 bushels wheat (or whatever it was) show up on my doorstep one morning. Brrrr.
One of the better ones I've heard is that John Maynard Keynes took delivery of a grain contract while running the Chest Fund of King's College Cambridge. Not having any better place to store the grain, he filled up the college's chapel with it, leading a reverend to remark "Mr. Keynes must believe that God is some sort of enormous chicken."
This is more common than you think, however any larger broker (GS,ML,MS,DB) will gladly take your position for a large fee. You will pay handsomely for their service.
I did this recently as well (though for a different purpose, chemical testing). it's even more difficult than the journalist describes. No refinery wants to stop processing or halt flow in their pipelines, and so getting WTI or Bakken oil is immensely difficult when you're not at the source. There are small mom & pop ~2-3bbl/day producers who are willing to sell their oil at a premium, however.
Ventilation is a huge problem - H2S emits a very foul smell. Quickly open and close a small bottle of crude in a room, and the scent lingers for a few minutes or more.
At work we have recently been working with an oil company. Even on a project fully funded by this oil company it took us months to convince them to send us a few bottles containing about 100mL each. Getting rock samples from their oilfield, which is what they really want us to do tests on, was much harder.
Those minimum orders are astronomical it's almost funny. Does anybody actually purchase manufacturing-level quantities of goods on alibaba? Genuinely asking.
Yes. It isn't like an eBay type transaction though, it's not 'just swipe your credit card'.
I never did oil, but I did do other commodities. It goes something like (in my experience, a typical Alibaba experience):
1. See a supplier with OK terms. Instantly distrust them.
2. Seek some kind of sample if this is first-time contact. Smell out how close they are to actual origination (usually far, far away, most easily detected by response time for sample, if so, avoid).
3. Experience pain waiting for sample then joy getting a sample and seeing it is consistent with claims.
4. Write contact with the correct incoterms based on sample above, which hopefully has been tested by an independent 3rd party that specialise in these things (this article is about oil, how about the same scale, but sun-dried tomatoes? Specialists exist, but are costly). Always use letter of credit for anything big, as the bank will bear responsibility, unless you really trust the other party and choose not to pay a fee state of mind. Make sure the contact is aligned to the letter of credit and you interests so the bank doesn't pass the buck to you if you didn't bother to write a decent contract. The bank will not hesitate to point out that the reason the coal was soaked as it was loaded at the incorrect point, or the required seal on the jars of the tomatoes didn't have a seal to stop them from from spoiling. There are limits to this, but the contract is enforced from terms and measures deemed 'reasonable' between corresponding banks, and for those that work in LC or trade in banking, 'reasonable' is a practical, not an academic, concept.
5. Profit (or bust, depending on how the above were done).
Alibaba doesn't make money on the cut (well some, not in the above, its too politically hot to handle), it makes it from both sides as an introduction fee. Due diligence is your business, not Alibaba's, and they explicitly make no promise for this.
How do people handle QC issues with Alibaba orders? I dipped my toe in when ordering a crate of allegedly "CE marked" chargers that turned out to be obviously unsafe, and haven't been back.
You receive samples first and check them. Another option is having an agent in find on your behalf perform QC before you pay the balance on your initial deposit. That's what I do..
Relatedly(?) When I had a diesel car, I bought and stored a small barrel of biodiesel in the basement of our apartment (saving like $0.05 a gallon!). I was told that diesel doesn't burn except under extreme pressure, and that you could throw a match into an open cup of diesel and it would just go out.
You can throw a match into an open cup of cold diesel and it'll go out.
But if the cup gets hot, diesel vapour will start coming off the top, which will ignite. If you're unlucky it'll produce enough heat to vapourise more diesel, etc.
Also, if you let the cold diesel touch cloth, it'll get wicked up, and the diesel-soaked cloth will ignite really easily. That will in turn generate enough heat to etc.
The same applies to paraffin (although to a rather lesser extent). It's a great fuel for camping and sailing, because it's nearly inert... but only nearly so. A puddle of paraffin in the bottom of your boat isn't a problem. A puddle of paraffin spilt on your cabin upholstery is a serious fire risk.
Ah, fond memories of playing with candles. Make enough "wick" of thin metal wire, and at some point the flame will boil off gases from the candle/pool of melting paraffin wax. At this point, cheap glassware will likely crack from the heat -- spilling hot wax over the table, likely igniting it - best advice is to quench the flame before it gets to that. Or so I've heard.
Fun fact: standard cheapo tea lights make great fire lighters, because they burn reliably and provide a static heat source for a long period of time. Put one under a piece of wood and it'll most likely catch fire eventually.
A short time later the wax in the tea light melts. Than it boils. Then you get (briefly) a pillar of flame...
Great video, thanks. There's an interesting fact in there about them putting dye in heating oil to stop people putting it in their cars and avoiding diesel tax.
You can throw a match into an open cup of gasoline and it will go out (yes, I've tried it). That doesn't mean I don't treat it as the highly flammable fluid that it is. That includes not storing it in the basement where the gas furnace and it's pilot light live.
Crude still has all the fractions in it, including those prone to evaporating and producing a flammable fuel/air mixture. The toxic H2S discussed is also flammable, just to add to your problems.
I bought a tiny bottle of crude oil from Drake's Well near Titusville, Pennsylvania as a grade school kid. We used it as furniture polish and for various things around the house. (Drake's Well was the original oil well.)
Not in petrochemicals, but neither is this is this reporter. I get it, it's supposed to be a joke, but it's such a poorly executed one fraught with so many major components glossed over that it detracts from any humor the article could have had. When the Onion writes something, it's humor is wonderful because not only the wit is there but there are few if any inconsistencies even for pedants who dissect things such as I.
1000ppm of hydrogen sulfide surely can kill you. The work-around this is to take delivery of a barrel of "sweet" rather than "sour" crude. Even in the "sour form", you get "up to" 1000ppm. However, barrels 1) are sealed properly by institutions with safety regulatory agencies just like any other industry, and 2) to get H2S exposure at that rate, you'd have to effectively stick your head into a barrel and inhale directly. To calculate actual PPM you'd likely be exposed to, you'd have to evaluate the aromatic distribution of H2S. (see: Gas-Phase Reactions: Kinetics and Mechanisms, Chapter 2).
The journalist is right about the insurance policies.
She later even mentions she has sweet crude. :facepalm:
>> My boss insists that I must factor in the cost of lost productivity for the many minutes spent on the phone with FedEx in an attempt to trace the package as it zigzagged across Manhattan. On that basis, I’m probably already in the red.
Bloomberg - I love your reporting for what it is. Tom crushes it in the morning. Alyx Steel makes poignant remarks. BBC doesn't try to be The Daily Show. Stick at what you're good at & don't try to be VICE. Especially for someone who reports on finance, she's overlooking so many things. Insurance she mentioned earlier but didn't bother to mention factor that capex. Storage is an opex (she mentions consignment venues (tech analogy: co-locating your servers) but those are fees she didn't factor in). In real life, if she's arbitraging US oil, the journo needs to be a CME member. For a March maturity date, a ~3 mo membership lease is $1k as an opex.
* Further reading:
"Petroleum and Gas Field Processing", et al. Chapter 7: Crude Oil Stabilization and Sweetening
"Gas-Phase Reactions: Kinetics and Mechanisms" V.N. Kondratie, et al. Chapter 2 (or there abouts).
Edit: To anyone who's downvoting me, by all means please respond (with some cordiality if you would), as to why! I tried to cite my sources properly, but if any professionals who deal with futures (especially crude oil, and even more so those who have taken delivery or performed the arbitrage she "simulated") see anything factually incorrect, I'm really happy to be corrected.
Edit 2: I responded as to why I found this article so aggravating below. Please read it before you down-vote me. It's comparable to how frustrated my tech friends and I get when television shows cross the threshold of comical technical inaccuracy and progress into a zone of visceral opposition. HN traditionally had a "Don't downvote people solely because you disagree with them" policy. My remarks are relevant to the article and (to my knowledge) factually correct.
To reply with the response such posts usually get: You must be really fun at parties!
This post was entertaining to most of us because we are not in the industry, knew little about the presence of hydrogen sulfide, and did not realize that the industry was so reluctant to sell to random interested buyers. Yes they could have written "This reporter tried to buy a barrel of oil, but sellers were reluctant, and it was calculated that individuals buying crude oil is not a profitable venture. She was also cautioned that Hydrogen sulfide is toxic, and is released by crude oil". They chose not to do that because, well -- that's not fun to read.
You are being downvoted because you are essentially telling us: 'you idiots, this is not funny, this is not news, this is stupid, there are smarter people there doing serious work, why waste your time on this' in extended form.
One might be well suggested to, as they say, 'cheer up'.
One of the thing I like of HN I that you can have a serious technical discussion about any subject. Some users know more about chemistry, some users know more about computers, some users know more about rockets, ... Many press articles have a lot of hype and exaggerations, and it's nice to have comments with more technical balance and details.
About the downvotes: It's common to get a few downvotes, even with very good comment. Just ignore them. (But if you get 10 downvotes, try to read your comment again.)
Bloomberg is a really targeted news institution on which people rely for not comedy but financial information. It's reflected in the fees you pay to get access to their terminals, it's reflected in their promos, and even the corporations who select to advertise with them know they're trying to hit a target reader. Usually, that reader is not someone looking for a comic laugh.
Imagine pulling up a Linux news site and seeing something that's funny to someone who is in marketing because of some wacky antics. You went there to see what sort of critical patches need to be administered, but instead you saw "What happened when I tried to install Linux on my leather shoes!".
I'm upset because context is important. Especially for news outlets which are called the fourth estate for a reason. When I turn on PBS Newshour I don't want 50 minutes of Paris Hilton. If they re-oriented an entire episode to cover Paris Hilton just to get more viewers (equivalent of click-bait), I'd be equally upset. I'm not calling anyone here stupid, but this clearly is not news.
"This post was entertaining" -- that's my whole problem. Bloomberg is a news outlet. Jon Stewart went on the O'Reilly factor and eloquently articulated the problem with select subsets of media (oversimplified to "to fill 24 hours of content, some outlets have resorted to silly antics to increase/retain viewership rather, rather than do what they're supposed to -- report the news). This article was under "News" not "Op/ed".
RE: parties, again, context. I don't engage in pedantry there, because one can generally categorize that form of interaction as "social" rather than "news/informative". At which point, I politely engage in small talk until I find something they like which I find interesting (whether its model aircrafts or modern farming, I can find something interesting to talk about with anyone generally).
Just a FYI but Bloomberg has significantly changed their editorial direction recently. Think some senior editor left or something. I really don't mind because it does not seem that their standard news coverage has suffered as a result and I can easily avoid things but yeah.
It's a fine line. Newspapers were always partly entertainment; their goal is to get read so they can sell advertisement. You wouldn't have crosswords and comics and the NYT style section otherwise. A bit of infotainment is okay, when done in an ethical manner, as I think is the case here; Voltaire and Karl Kraus were doing something similar.
Now, when it verges on disinformation, like Geraldo or the NYT style section and their silly trend articles...
What you're saying is true, but it could have been much better if they'd paid attention to the details.
One of the things I love about HN is that not only will interesting and funny articles like this come up, but also that I can hit the comment section afterward for the real story. Your parent's comment was more interesting than yours.
In a world where journalism ethics and standards take a back seat to laughs or more clicks, I keep coming back to hn because you can find knowledgeable comments to help you understand what's going on.
Sure, people could communicate more effectively. Would we be more forgiving of the comment were the article a (slightly) ignorant joke about a topic hackers are passionate about?
> HN traditionally had a "Don't downvote people solely because you disagree with them" policy.
You are confusing HN with Reddit. HN never had such a policy, nor any, for that matter.
pg specifically said before handing over the site that he didn't mind downvoting to disagree. I have seen no movement from new leadership on this; in fact, new leadership have doubled down on some of pg's worse calls. With the graying out of comments added in to the downvote encouragement, effectively that situation encourages you to only offer uncontroversial opinion lest your thoughts become invisible and silenced. It's not a heavy thought exercise to see where allegations of groupthink come from.
That, along with the fact that my account was marked as an instantly-penalized troublemaker at some point and I only found out by emailing many months later even though my email was in my profile all along, is one of the reasons I no longer contribute here. That was a startling discovery, that individuals get marked as troublemakers based upon the opinion of a moderator and, in my case, a single comment. Think about that for a second, and think about all the comments you've ever made, and the fact that HN usernames are part of the YC application process. A lot clicked for me once I stepped back and thought about it.
As I said, don't confuse HN with Reddit. The leadership of Hacker News has a large amount of zeal and actively steers conversation toward arbitrary positivity and civility, including moderation decisions you would find questionable anywhere else. Before appealing to decency and policy when a comment gets downvotes as you have, just remember that. The irony is that HN loves to mock Reddit, but in many ways it is three times the community HN is.
And please don't complain about downvotes. That is specifically discussed here.
Fun fact: I find downvoting to be a completely worthless feature of this site for all of the reasons you've listed and more!
I find it useless to be in possession of the capacity to downvote, as well as the recipient of downvotes from others. This has provoked me to adopt enhanced counter strategies with the full awareness that my behavior is both unorthodox, and contrarian to the culture and preferred/espoused norms/mores of this site as a whole.
In particular, I've noticed that one contrarian comment, which directly contradicts a parent, and indeed violates the typical cultural views of the site as a whole, while remaining on-topic, maintaining valid points, and supporting evidence, receives way more attentive mileage, than any downvote. This is usually because those with vested interests in expressing a typical norm struggle deeply to contradict sound evidence and factual observations.
So, I've stopped maintaining normal accounts, stopped using accounts that have the ability to downvote, stopped downvoting, and instead downvote with words that actually explain my motivations for what would be a downvote, if I were the sort of person to actually resort to petty downvoting.
Instead of pining for the "privilege" of downvoting my peers, I simply unspool evermore single-use accounts and tell people exactly why I disagree with them, point-blank, and never look back, or care about the superficial shade of text coloring my comment, nor the meaningless negative number in a point system on an account that will never be used again.
Downvoters are really only silencing themselves, by refusing to go out on a limb and risk downvotes themselves, rather than express disagreement.
Another key point: My contrarian remarks aren't made in such ways that would result in getting flagged to death or hellbanned. My goal is discussion, not shock value or being incendiary for the sake of receiving negative attention. Some things need to be said, and I'll be happy to oblige if no one else will.
> It's comparable to how frustrated my tech friends and I get when television shows cross the threshold of comical technical inaccuracy and progress into a zone of visceral opposition
I don't mind it when comedy bits are inaccurate about the things I'm a subject matter expert on, because it's not meant to be taken seriously.
Now correct me if I'm wrong, but about the profit angle. This is her job, right? Doing research on stuff and writing an article about it. Given the other arguments in the article, I think it would be fair to say the pay for the article should also factor into the profit/less equation :)
BTW, thanks for putting me on track to notice one interesting aspect about H2S:
"In 2015, hydrogen sulfide under extremely high pressure (around 150 gigapascals) was found to undergo superconducting transition near 203K (-70 °C), the highest temperature superconductor known to date."
Its not a contact poison but a breathed in poison, so given even the lightest breeze you're probably OK. In a sealed tank, of course, you're dead.
Also there is no such thing as the crude molecule or atom. Its like dirt, and I assure you not all dirt is equal. And some crude has so much sulfur you'd think it should be yellow like paint. Some has about none.
If you've ever heard economic discussion about "sour crude" now you know what they're talking about. If you build a refinery to process oil you don't waste money on a hydrotreater to eat the sulfur if you don't have to, then if the market floods with cheap worthless sour crude you can't process it without buying/building a hydrotreater cycle process. And they aren't cheap or built in a day, either.
> All was not lost, however. If a barrel of crude oil would kill me, a small amount would certainly make me stronger, I suggested (inanely) to the broker. It was at this point, I believe, that the broker gave up.
Noob question: say I have $1000 that I want to invest in oil (not in an oil company, but in the commodity itself). How do I go about it? Judging by the article, buying actual oil isn't the way to go.
If you had more money, you could trade futures, which are mentioned in the article. If you sell the future before the date of delivery, then you never have to deal with the physical aspect of the commodity. There are lots of online brokerages you can use for this, for example, E*Trade and TradeStation. But they have higher minimums than $1000.
With $1000, you could trade ETFs, for example USO [0]. The account minimums for ETFs are lower. If you look at what's inside USO [1], it's basically a wrapper for a future (NYMEX WTI Crude Oil CL).
Doubtful. More likely just part of the running joke the oil's source could not be verified -- they did not want to be tied a potential purchase of ISIS-controlled oil.
--
Two employees of a fertilizer company in Riga, Michigan, were assigned to install a new float valve in an old 35-foot deep cistern for a new 300-foot well. This cistern was covered with a concrete slab with entry through a covered manhole. The first worker entered the cistern and as he reached a plank platform six feet below the opening, he was instantly overcome and fell unconscious into the water below. The man on the surface immediately ran to the nearby plant for help. Several workmen responded and two of them entered the cistern to render aid. They met the fate of the first worker. A passerby who had been drawn to the scene by the crowd which had gathered was told by an excited bystander that several men in the cistern were drowning. Upon hearing this, he shouted, "I can swim, I can swim" and pulled away from a company employee who was trying to restrain him. Now there were four bodies in the well.
Shortly afterward the fire department arrived at the scene with proper rescue equipment. The fire chief entered the cistern wearing a self-contained breathing apparatus. After reaching the plank platform, he removed his face mask to shout instructions to those on the surface and he, too, was instantly overcome. All five persons died in the cistern.
Tests of the cistern atmosphere revealed that H2S in a concentration of about 1000 parts per million was present when the five deaths occurred. The water pumped up from the deep well contained dissolved hydrogen sulfide which was released in the unventilated cistern.