Across Weirdish Wild Space

OK, admittedly, as much as I really loathed the “Wassup” commercials when they were on television (and think Bud is a terrible beer), this parody is absolutely fantastic :

If you are unfamiliar with them, the original is here too :

(via BoingBoing.)

OK, as more than casual readers know, I’m a huge fan of Warren Buffet. Not only do I try and invest like him, but I think he’s very sharp beyond being just an astute and wiley investor. Great, but very long interview with him here on the Warren Buffett CNBC Interview:

”... you only find out who’s
been swimming naked when the tide goes out. Well, we found out that Wall Street has been kind of a nudist beach.”

(via clusterstock.)

Meant to post this a while back from an email that went round at work.

Love the idea. Simply… Offer to bring in a whack of business for one day to one business if they’ll pay for environmental improvements to their business with the proceeds.

Seems like the first run went well (and you have to love the Lil Wayne video spoof). Have to see whether it’s sustainable, but it is an interesting idea in crowdsourcing.

(thanks to Anu K. for the link)

Silicon Valley VC firm Sequoia Capital has a fabulous presentation to scare the bejesus out of their startups on what the current financial crisis means for their fledglings.

While I don’t agree with all of it, it’s got some excellent economic analysis in it of the real reasons there is a very real and serious problem at the moment and why it’s going to be hard for new companies to borrow and in general why we’ve all had perverse economic incentives to take on debt rather than save (I notice it missed deregulation in there, but hey, no one’s perfect).

It’s good and explains some very complex issues reasonably simply (hey, you didn’t want someone with an economics background like me presenting it, trust me) and if it doesn’t make some startups batten down the hatches, start cutting expenses and try to eek it out for a while, I don’t know what will.

Their bottom line : It’s not a normal downturn and recovery will take quite a while. I love the slide, Get Real or Go Home as a conclusion.

I’m not sure I really believe Sequoia really thinks things are this bad, but having the presentation out there probably has put the fear of God into some startups whose burn rates have been something like it was in the 90’s.

Interestingly, the most inadvertent reaction came from VC watcher TechCrunch who had the Post line “Profit Maximization V. Survival Maximization.” While the article was focusing on the role and blame a lot of VCs have (I believe) incorrectly pinned on VCs for the downturn, I thought the headline was a more basic question that I thought a lot of companies should have been asking themselves a while back. Sure, you need a balance of both, especially if the question of shareholders enters the picture, but the fact is a lot of companies have been, for a while now, confusing profit maximization with survival maximization and a lot of them are probably going to be treated unkindly by the increasingly likely recession coming on.

Long term view, stick with the three rules of why you should be starting a company :

1. You can do something no one else can do
2. You can do something better than anyone else can do (and defend your ability and advantage to do so)
3. You have a particular insight into consumers or businesses you can capitalize on better than anyone else

You’ll notice that these are all based on survival maximization rather than profitability.

Money As Debt is a fantastic 45 min or so animated feature on the fundamental changed nature of money, loans and the banking system that disabuses people of the notion that money and especially loans are still tired to underlying value (like, say for instance gold).

The first half on the actual idea of money is debt gives a real insight into how we’re in the middle of our current financial crisis, though the second half goes off into some interesting talk of more sustainable money systems and then sadly goes somewhat into the realm of the weird talking about conspiracy theories and pins things on the idea of a cabal rather than a systemic problem and breakdown.

Basically, though it underlines the idea that banks can create as much money as people can borrow and the entire system of money creation and legal tender is based on the promise of the borrower to pay.

If too many people are unable to pay their promises, the fundamental debt repayment that all this money was created upon and the only real value to money that banks have multiplicatively lent out is cut from under them, which is why the crisis is so scary.

[Actually, I did this last Saturday, it’s just taken me this long to get to write about it.]

While I’m not really plugged into what an iconic (happy, CG ?) part of life a flutter on the dogs was for the regular punters in the East End of London, it would be difficult to pass up the historic (and somewhat sad) occasion of the last greyhound races at the fabled Walthamstow Stadium before it closed its doors for good and made way for (yet more) boring and architecturally bankrupt London residential development.

So, I went down the dogs… to watch them burst from the traps for the last time.

And it was pretty great, despite the fact that, unlike the (ok, the one time) I went to the track and bet on the geegees and made a killing, I couldn’t pick a winning greyhound for the life of me despite using my time tested horsey method of picking by the stats in the racing form. Also, I kept thinking how much fun it would be to have other breeds race as well. Imagine a dachshund steeples for instance !

But the closing of Walthamstow was a bit sad, even for me, who it isn’t really a part of life for (and who hopes his grandparents, who would be quite disappointed, don’t find out about. Dog racing in general has been in decline for quite a while in England exacerbated by off-track high street betting (in every major street in London) and internet bookmaking. The Chandler family who runs the concern, and who originally opened it 75 years ago in 1933, claimed a loss last year of £500k which was unsustainable from a business perspective.

Still, it is always sad to see a piece of history go. Winston Churchill famously did his first address after the end of World War II from the stadium and it graces the cover of Blur’s Parklife album cover, was the set for films, TV, commercials and generally a stalwart part of the East End for its run.

After the last race, people burst out and starting running (the wrong way mind you) round the track and were joined by probably a third of the entire stadium before they started saying they were going to turn out the lights and lads and ladettes starting ripping pieces of the Stadium and tracks in order to have some memorabilia from this little piece of history (some of which I imagine are up on eBay already).

It was a very fun evening out and even with the losses, still worth it being there (but damn I wish we’d booked ahead for dinner and box seats). Pretty cool all round and even if you’re upset you missed it and want to contribute a bit to history and the memory of the place, there is a retirement fund for the those greyhounds that will be retired (rather than moved to the few other remaining tracks in the country) so that good, peaceful homes can be found for the speedy little puppies.

Another interesting side note is that the famous Walthamstow neon sign pictured here is apparently considered historic and therefore untouchable, so the new residential development, even in this downturn market of housing starts, will apparently be incorporated into the new design of the residential complex.

Great little mini-documentary ? Teaser ? that needs a bigger documentary added to it even though the student who did it calls it a small graphic novel.

Reminds me of the book about the actual journey a tshirt takes from where it is manufactured to the time it gets to your back (someone please tell me the name of the book since a search on amazon for journey and tshirt brought up way too much old concert memorabilia… =< ).

(via scaryideas).

This is article, I have to say, is extremely interesting :

Free and Flush, Russians Eager to Roam Abroad – NYTimes.com: ””

One of the thing it was impossible not to notice on my recent trip to Turkey, particularly near Antalya, where the hotel this article talks about is, was the incredible numbers of Russians and Germans on the south coast (and increasingly, Bulgarians as well).

I was trying to explain to a Russian newly-made friend there about how strange it seemed, since when I was growing up, Russia was an identifiable enemy in the Cold War and trying to illustrate it with a trip to Seattle I had taken where a Russian attack submarine was on display as more of a curiosity and amusement rather than this nuclear weapon of terror during the 80s.

Anyhow, it’s quite fascinating, how the growth of some of the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) are totally changing the face of tourism and influencing their own home countries. To be honest, other than the carbon footprint (I shudder at), I can’t really view it as anything other than a good thing.

Though, it does also change the destination countries they end up going to I find. The fact that trying to learn to speak Turkish did nothing but seem to amuse Turks while I was in the country (though did get me free into some places just for trying) and the fact that every Turk seemed to be working on learning German or Russian (in fact, in Kas German was hear dmuch more than even English).

Definitely interesting, though this Las-Vegas-ification/Disneyfication of countries for the benefits of package tourist guests is always worrying.

Between threadless, woot and snorg, I think I need to start banning myself from buying tshirts. It’s getting way out of hand… :-(

I just bought one called : Mister Bobo, Masonic Dyna-Monkey.

Man, I really have to start dressing like a grown-up.

Being a classically trained economist, I’ve always recognized that one of the biggest problems with the old adage with “you can manage only what you measure” is the corollary that it is “what you measure, matters.”

For decades, nations have measured their progress through the horrible proxy yardstick that is the GDP or GNP, currently the Gross Domestic Product. I’m a huge fan of alternative measurement systems that include other measurements to get a true grasp of a nation’s progress and strength. Mostly because of a famous speech by Robert Kennedy which just passed its 40th anniversary this past week.

The Glaser Progress Foundation presented the video below but the in tandem with this, Senator Dorgan in the US has also been holding congressional committees about forcing the Commerce Department to adopt “satellite accounts” in addition to GDP that were recommended by the National Academy of Sciences (that, unsurprisingly, were stopped from being adopted by the Bush administration). Anyhow, inspirational video. Check it out.

Transcripted and removing the specifically about the US stuff :

For too long we seem to have surrendered personal excellence and community value in the mere accumulation of material things.

Our gross national product now is over 800 billion dollars a year, but that… gross national product counts air pollution, and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic squall.

It counts napalm, and it counts nuclear warheads, and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our city. It counts Whitman’s rifles and Speck’s knifes and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

Yet, the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play.

It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.

It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country.

It measures everything in short, except that which makes life worth while.

Seriously, does anyone have a defence for still measuring national progress exclusively under GDP anymore other than the typical hand-wringing and arguing over how it should be augmented or replaced ? Would it even matter to try a couple of different measurement systems simultaneously to see what could be accomplished or makes sense ?

(via WorldChanging)

Your moment of Internet Zen for Tuesday…

via TechCrunch

And I’m living in it… :-(

Mercer has released its 2007 ranking of the world’s most expensive cities to live in.

While I don’t get how Moscow could beat out London (London shot up from number 5 to number 2 this year), it does definitely explain why my charity paycheque makes me feel like I’ve gone back to living like an undergrad compared to my nice beachfront place in Vancouver (did I mention my apartment ceiling was actually leaking water the last two weeks ?). US cities fell because of the failing American peso, now at 2:1 to the sound British pound. I should also point out that no Canadian city appears in the top 20. In fact, no Canadian city appears in the top 50, so think about that all you fellow Canucks dwelling in cheap global cities ! Looking at the list, Paris is looking better day by day.

Anyhow, here’s the top 20 in case you were wondering :

1. Moscow
2. London
3. Seoul
4. Tokyo
5. Hong Kong
6. Copenhagen
7. Geneva
8. Osaka
9. Zurich
10. Oslo
11. Milan
12. St. Petersburg
13. Paris
14. Singapore
15. New York
16. Dublin
17. Tel Aviv
18. Rome
19. Vienna
20. Beijing

The genius of the Roman Empire was not its Legions, but its public works and the trade networks which allowed it to maintain an empire where others lost what they had conquered.

Almost identically, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (VPL, Amazon) is Perkins autobiography of how he was hired as an Economic Hit Man (EHM) for the US through the NSA to make wildly optimistic economic forecasts to countries to encourage them to take on massive debt for huge infrastructure projects that, because of his estimates, they believed they would be able to pay back out of the growth these projects achieved, often through natural resource revenues such as timber, water and especially oil. The end goal to make them beholden to their financiers.

Fueled by the World Bank and the IMF, it is a tale of a triangle trade in expanding American Empire, by indebting poorer nations and extracting concessions, shackling them in debt while at the same time generating huge transfers of cash from the World Bank back to the very American engineering firms that fueled the need for the loans.

At first Perkins believed his own press, but then began to see the very real human cost of what he was creating. Nations, tied down by debt, where more and more of the nations wealth went to servicing a crushing usurious debt while its peoples slipped below the poverty line and desperately needed money for health, education and the alleviation of harsh conditions ended up back in the pockets of the US.

More effective than military might, less tyrannical but amazingly more effective, the EHMs moved in wherever American interests needed to be served. And when they failed, Perkins always said the jackals, the wet work men, waited in the wings with thinly veiled assassinations, political unrest and paid for rebellion.

It’s a frightening confirmation of just about every political conspiracy story you’ve ever read and more frightening for the fact that it is not a work of fiction by Perkins, but the autobiography of his own life.

Perkins’ conscience eventually got the best of him and he managed to get out while accepting sell-out positions where his silence was valued, but as unrest in the rest of the world started to come to a boil, and the US has come to be seen more as a monster than a saviour, and especially in the light of the World Trade Centre bombings, Perkins felt compelled to finally dust off the manuscript that he had been threatened and cajoled not to write and put it into print.

A deeply disturbing, provocative and savagely eye opening look into the non-military nature of the expansion of the American Empire.

I just hope they keep the Skype to Skype service free and leave the SkypeIn and voicemail services at reasonable levels (like where they are now for instance).

Is it just me or is everybody with serious market capitalization trying to be the everyman internet to everyone all of a sudden ? What do google or eBay need VoIP or instant messaging for ? Most analysts are questioning both the price tag and the need on this acquisition.

The BBC and the NYT have great summaries.

(backposted to the 6th of July from the 23rd since delayed writing up the post)
While I’ve always been a computer geek, it was not until after my undergrad that it actually occurred to me (last week, for instance) that it might be the foundation for a career. And in fact, throughout University I trained in classical Economics at what is arguably the best school in Canada for the slippery science.

So, largely, the stuff in Freakonomics(VPL, Amazon) I found less than, well.. freaky. It did remind me though that what attracted me to Econ in the first place was more that it was a serious of techniques and tools for thinking about problems and marked by suites of tools and methods for teasing meaning out of large incoherent datasets (so yeah, probably no accident I find myself heading up a BI group).

Levitt is unusual in the economist community in that most economists have one idea they develop the entire course of their careers and which they are known for. Levitt simply finds interesting problems and applies his considerable intellect to them. Unconventional and widely considered brilliant (at least at Harvard) he’s looks at some tricky, unusual questions and is most popularly known (and vilified in some circles) for linking the legalization of abortion to the inexplicable and contrary-to-all-expert-opinion drop in the crime rate during the 90s which had been predicted to be a bloodbath after the 80s.

There are a lot of things to like about Levitt, mostly because he lacks the fuzzy thinking you find from other economists who confuse their models with reality and have a tendency to fail to make distinctions between things that are correlated (move together or opposite to each other in some way) and the actual causative factors which could be used as levers for changing those things correlated. A good example from Levitt is whether books make kids smart. The counter-intutive answer (and I’m not saying I agree with it) is that looking at his data, the presence of books in a household does not cause intelligence but rather is indicative of other factors which represent the governing factors on a child’s eventual intelligence. The presence of books is correlated to a child’s intelligence but is not caused by it. (It should be noted I grossly disagree with Levitt here because of a flaw in the way he did this correlation. He correlates the presence of books to children’s test scores in school which, if my schools have been any indication, are a very poor indicator of intelligence IMHO. Nevertheless, the example is interesting because it is illustrative).

Another thing I found interesting is how Levitt defines economics as the science of incentives. This was a nuance that had never really struck me, as basically, economics had always been defined to me in Uni as the science of the allocation of scarce resources, possibly owing to the grossly macroeconomic focus of Western. More than anything though, he is correct. The practical upshot of economics is designing systems that will cause desired behaviours which is done fundamentally through positive or negative incentives.

Levitt also illustrates the concept of information assymmetry (one of the conditions against competition theory working, but which is the reality we all face) which is basically, what experts know and you don’t, which causes inequality in markets competition and how that it is generally used against you as a consumer in economic terms of inculcate fear and force buying decisions through imagined incentives that may or may not exist (a fascinating followup to this psychologically is Robert Cialdini’s Influence BTW). The description of the incentives facing real estate agents, doctors, and for that matter a number of “experts” that people rely upon (and interestingly how they’ve become more disintermediated through the internet) is one of the best descriptions I’ve ever heard of the problem (and fodder for my father, who feels all real estate agents are rip-off artists… :-) ).

On the whole an interesting read even for someone trained in economics, so I think it may be fascinating for those who are interested in learning about incentives and market inequality in really well written and understandable terms.

I think the only sad thing about the book is it’s a bit self-aggrandizing and really should have stuck to a few more illustrative and interesting examples rather than merely following a promotional vein for Levitt’s theories. His narrative power and simplicity are really what set this book apart rather than his concentration on particular problems that I think are meant to show him as some cool-ass economist shaking the foundations of the economic institution.

One of the annoying things about looking at your end of year accounts is that you get to see how much you spent in totally absurd categories over the course of the year. One of the things that ticks me off is the egregious amounts I’ve paid for phone services over 2004. Moving out here, I chose what I thought was a completely reasonable cell phone plan, which would cover my minimal daytime usage and unlimited weekends and nights.

My plan was to have my phone consist of approximately $50 per month. I can tell you now, it was a lost cause. Unlike Europe, in Canada you also pay “minutes” for incoming calls, not just outgoing, so any call I received also started ticking off against my call plan. Additionally, free services like a voicemail box and call display were not included in my plan which “nickel and dimed” me another $10 bucks every month. And there is some absurd “network access fee” (how precisely am I supposed to use a mobile phone network without accessing it ??? This is why oligopolies are evil) of $15 per month that you must also agree to to use the plan.

All this meant that my minimum cell phone plan was $50 per month, and then long distance fees started which, are also quite egregious. So, despite best efforts, even changing the call plan to minimize monthly fees, and with the absurdly low number of calls I would get every month (quite seriously 1 or 2 long calls and the rest would be text messages), my bills were running into the high $100+ every month. Which is absurd, because I really don’t use the mobile that much.

So, this is my plan to get my monthly phone expenses down to a sane $50 per month (in my opinion, my cell phone should not cost more than my commercial web hosting or broadband internet access) :

1. Use Skype More
   
   I can’t recommend this program highly enough. I use it all the time and the call quality is consistent calling Vancouver or Cyprus. They just released a new beta for the Mac this morning (it works on Win, Lin and Mac) which even allows conference calling between parties. And the sound quality is amazing.

   The SkypeOut service allows calling phones directly. Also, for international calls the costs are much, much lower per minute than either cell phones or traditional land lines. You can call anyone in Western Europe, North America, Australia or New Zealand for €0.017 (yes, 1.7 cents) per minute (calling mobiles is a higher rate by country but land line calls are dead cheap). Sad thing right now is that it can’t receive calls though (voice mail and a fixed Skype number would be sooooo great).

   I have to pay for broadband internet access anyway, I might as well take advantage of subsidized VoIP calls. I put €10 on Skype in October, have used it extensively, and still have €1.18 left (part of why I’m so incensed at the cell phone costs)

   There is a great article on using Skype on the Mac article if you’re interested (part 1, part 2). And if you do have Mac OSX, there is a great little Applescript for dialing directly from your addressbook contacts which is very handy.

   Skype also has instant messaging and file transfer capabilities though I find I prefer my other IM client, AdiumX for that.

2. Get a pay-as-you-go cell phone
   
   Weirdly, these are still expensive out where I am. When I mentioned the fact that another provider in Toronto had charged me half as much I got a sniffy customer service rep who stated that it was more expensive because we were so remote (cough). Anyhow, at a price of $0.33 per minute and $0.58 long distance (in Canada) and no international outgoing calls, it is more expensive per minute than a subscription phone but not too bad. Looking at my calling patterns it seems most calls I get are during hours when the company gets to charge me extra for those minutes.Furthermore, voice mail is included free and call display which is added to a normal bill and costs $10 currently. Remove the network access fee of $15 monthly as well and I’m already $25 a month better off. $50 to activate the SIM card (twice as much as it cost in Toronto or Europe and no minutes added on), but I figure that will pay itself back in 2 months just from the network access and voice mail/call display features.
   

Anyhow, that is the current plan. I’ll be disconnecting my regular cell phone service shortly and I’ll keep people posted in terms of how I’m tracking financially compared to last year as well as any user issues in terms of convenience compared to having a subscription service.

And other extreme tech note. I was reading the other day about the rapidly dropping cost of implementing all the VoIP, PBX and other systems required to become your own teleco as many business probably need to do when setting up or trying to reduce costs for their telecommunications. It’s unreal how cheaply open source software is dropping the costs of comms in this area, especially with regard to VoIP. There is a nice blog posting on Asterisk, the open source PBX and VoIP system. Basically, install a complete telecomms system for less than $6000 USD. Beats the hell out of the 75,000 € I saw a small company pay in France to get a small PBX system.

And while on the subject, been doing a lot of fiddling with OpenVPN as well, an SSL VPN system which is amazingly flexible for road warriors versus IPSEC, CIPE or PPTP based alternatives. Very interesting. At an organization I used to be at, an influential sysadmin managed to push through a hardware based CIPE (moving to IPSEC) solution (500+ € per connection ie. office or homeworker/road warrior that IMHO was not very scalable or ruinously costly to provide remote access to mobile activists on the road (though fine for offices). Why go for hardwarer when you can do it in software though ? An SSL based VPN would have been the way to go in my opinion. OpenVPN is quite promising.

Followup on Powered by sunshine and water

Further debates in the energy discussions. There is an excellent article in Science from a British economist (we’re all joykillers, really) on the potential difficulties of powering cars via large scale hydrogen conversion in the US (ie. H₂, rather than the car conversion idea).

I think this is largely true actually. It would take enormous amounts of power to not only generate H₂ but move the entire petroleum infrastructure over to it and, as pointed out, impact greehouse gas emissions. Interesting stat I was unaware of (though not topical to my points) :

The duo considered the United Kingdom and the United States. Transport accounts for about one third of each country’s energy consumption.

Still, the assumption here is that we would be using commercial large scale generation as the main source of fulfilling demand.

Personally, I’m beginning to wonder whether micro-generation, where say each car or house uses their own power generation (as alluded to in the car article above), rather than a centralized grid being a superior approach to this problem. For instance, if you had an efficient enough setup at your home or with your car, while it is parked unused during the day, or while you’re at work, your home or car could actually feed generating capacity (electrical, once its H₂ needs are taken care of back to the local grid. So, creating a system of micro-generation which involves positive net generation.

Kinda like open source or grassroots power generation. Hmmm… Just pondering but it’s an interesting idea I’ve been toying with since we started working on the next house design, though not sure if the BC grid is required to buy excess power from our next house if we can create it.

Anyone know if anyone is working on this microgeneration idea ? Can’t find a lot on it though have been checking out HomePower magazine a lot more as I think of ways to make both the house and the next boat completely self-sustaining if not positive net producers.

playing : Get The Cool Shoe Shine by Gorillaz

Yesterday, crude oil broke $51 USD a barrel, a historical first even indexed for inflation. While most attribute this to supply speculation due to reduced extraction from Gulf production getting whacked with 4 hurricanes, there is an interesting and more subtle trend behind the scenes.

There is a quiet but influential economic and geological theory called the Hubbert peak. Basically, it states we’re never going to “run out of oil”, but what is almost a certainty is that we will, at some point, run out of cheap oil. And that is cause for concern. Extracting and refining oil is all about net energy benefit, the idea that you get more energy out of the oil than you put into getting it out of the ground. As you extract oil, however, that net energy benefit drops over time.

When oil production first began at the largest oil fields 50 barrels of oil were recovered for every barrel of oil used in the extraction, transportion and refining processes. This ratio becomes increasingly inefficient over time, currently 1-5 barrels of oil are recovered for every barrel used in the various recovery processes. When this ratio reaches the point where it takes 1 barrel to recover 1 barrel then oil becomes useless as energy.

US oil production has already hit the Hubbert peak almost precisely when Hubbert predicted it would (this after the industry ruined Hubbert’s career for proposing the theory).

However, the implications of the Hubbert peak for world oil production are much greater and the consequences far reaching. And it is this peak that is of geopolitical concern. Hubbert predicted this peak would hit in the next 5-8 years or so. If this is true, we could be facing the end of cheap energy.

“So what ?”, I hear you say. Well.. basically the entire industrial boom of the 20th century, all the growth and conspicuous consumption we currently enjoy, is based on one major resource we take for granted : cheap energy. Where has that energy come from ? Oil. Dead dinosaur juice. Basically, the most significant portion of the modern world economy and industrial growth are founded on cheap petroleum.

The end of cheap energy has profound implications for how life is lived in North America, from the way we organize towns and suburbs (see the The End of Suburbia for an interesting documentary on this idea) to our entire concepts of growth and progress. Conservation might get us there, but not under our current Hummer worshipping worldview. And it’s not like we can simply switch to other energy sources; capacity is simply not there. Electricity needs to be generated somehow (even electric cars need electricity from someplace) and virtually all the capacity in North America is in petroleum based oil or natural gas generation. Nuclear, biomass, ethanol and even renewable sources such as sun, wind and water currently are either dangerous and costly, not net energy creators or simply do not have a significant capacity yet to alter current energy consumption patterns.

It is possible that as energy becomes more expensive, chances are real economic growth will stall as energy becomes a more significant portion of cost. The main resource input in any modern industrial process is energy.

What the effects of this will be is hard to predict (radical social change ? better efficiency ? conservation ? geopolitical resource conflict ? ) but it would seem that new popular and political will needs to be put into the idea of sustainability, conservation and renewable energy sources if we are to avoid more dire consequences than global warming.

What can you do ? Well, in addition to becoming politically active about these issues the mantra of reduce, reuse and recycle is extremely applicable here. Anything that you don’t have to have made or anything you can reduce cuts total energy requirements for the economy. For those things that you do need to purchase, looks at smaller energy efficient products (so, um, no hummers). Patronize companies with real corporate responsibility programs and buy from firms who are serious about environmental commitments rather than just greenwashing their actions to avoid boycotts.

playing : Nota Bossa by The Funky Lowlives

Just was talking with the NASA contracted unixgirl (yes, I hate her right now… =p) when we segued into a discussion of the US election and voter turnout this time round.

I meant to blog last week that the 18th September – 24th September edition of the Economist has a brilliant and insightful feature on fixing what many perceive as what is broken in American Democracy (No Way to Run a Democracy pg. 13 – sadly pay for play content on their site) as well as excellent insights into the latest congressional elections, character assassination politics (especially topical after finishing Franken’s Lies book) and electronic voting. As a synopsis, the Economist focuses on gerrymandering, campaign-finance reform, voter registration (and role scrubbing) and the voting machinery and electoral college problem (many people are not aware that Gore won more of the popular vote than Bush even if Bush was awarded the election by the winner takes all electoral college votes. Don’t get me started…).

Also inside is also one of the most intelligent articles I’ve read to date on normal Muslims being caught between the extremist and foreign powers hijacking their faith for their own causes (The War for Islam’s Heart. pg. 51.). Something I’ve really struggled with articulating myself when trying to convey to people that the people they see on TV are not like anyone I’ve ever met in all my travels in Muslim lands.

Oh, and the article on why the EU must say yes to allowing Turkey to enter the EU despite reservations (pay for play) is fascinating and interesting and probably one of the most important yet under-reported issues that will effect the next 25 years.

And there is a great Technology Special Section though sadly it’s a soft touch for those of us who normally keep up with tech stuff in the blogosphere.

Sorry for bordering on gushing, but I had abandoned the Economist several years ago post university when their coverage became unbelievably biased to the Right, so I am pleasantly surprised to see objectivity back in the magazine and some really intelligent thought applied to some very thorny issues.

Oh, and remember most libraries have copies available if the price tag of a subscription is too steep.