Category: economy

“We have become great because of the lavish use of our resources and we have just reason to be proud of our growth. But the time has come to inquire seriously what will happen when our forests are gone, when the coal, the iron, the oil, and the gas are exhausted, when the soils shall have still further impoverished and washed into the streams, polluting the rivers, denuding the fields, and obstructing navigation…the minerals do not renew themselves. Therefore in dealing with the coal, the oil, the iron, metals generally, all that we can do is try to see that they are wisely used. The exhaustion is certain to come in time.”—Theodore Roosevelt

Next Big Future:

There is persistent demand for characters. Entertainment is based on characters. The success of Avatar and Pixar for computer generated characters.

The total virtual character market is greater than $35 billion annually and growing 18% per year.

What made Max Headroom a major media icon? Because people innately respond to human-like form.

Robot developer David Hanson asserts, “People are deeply discerning of social intelligence in the human form….

The human mind is hardwired for social cognition and face-to-face interactions. We must witness the machines learn and grow, fill with wonder and hope, and strive towards goals, see them struggle and overcome.

“This explains people’s powerful attraction to fictional characters in entertainment and literature, and why characters inspire such strong emotions in people, even love.

“Machines must form deep, caring relationships with people, and attain true love and wisdom. As protagonist machines obtain these capabilities, they will grow more desirable to consumers.”

A Global Graveyard for Dead Computers in Ghana

NYTimes Magazine – 16 images

Don’t even talk to me about IT and Interwebs and Apple and Intel and China and Taiwan and Best Buy and Walmart and Waste Management and… just shut up.

Unfortunately for Google, there’s a wonderful search engine called Google, which can be used to dig up things …

Mike Masnick on net neutrality and pipes to our brain:

Google is going to do what it believes is best for Google. There’s nothing wrong with that — it’s just that, in the past, Google tended to realize that what was best for consumers was also best for Google. Now… it doesn’t seem quite as sure of that. I think this is generally a mistake that Google may come to regret.

How much unemployment can we blame on Obama?

At first, 671,000 jobs were lost as the stimulus and other moves kicked in. Within  six months, 630,000 jobs returned.

The tally:  Obama can be held accountable for a net loss of 41,000 jobs.

7,796,000 jobs were lost by Republicans and G.W. Bush.

A. Very close to 55 percent of the beef sold to the American consumer is ground beef. In the next 10-15 years, 65-70 percent will be ground beef.

B. As body weight increases, blood pressure rises. Excess salt increases blood pressure. Fast foods and processed foods contain particularly high amounts of fats and sodium.

C. Life and health insurance companies invest billions of dollars into fast food restaurants.

D. Pharmaceutical firms want some of the action?

Free statins with fast food could neutralize heart risk

“Taking a statin is a rational way of lowering some of the risks of eating a fatty meal.” – Dr Darrel Francis, American Journal of Cardiology.

The reduction in cardiovascular risk offered by a statin is enough to offset the increase in heart attack risk from eating a cheeseburger and a milkshake.

All Fixed Now.

Asian governments generally grapple with an informal or hidden economy reaching levels of 30%, while China’s shadow economy was set at about 15%.

But Bloomberg is reporting new numbers which reveal about 30% of China’s economy is also illegal or quasi-illegal. Households are hiding as much as $1.4 trillion, 80% accrued by the top 20% politicians, managers and plant contractors.

Next Big Future has broken out a laundry list of China’s hidden money!

China’s measure of official GDP is centrally derived, based on its ‘flow of funds’ and not easily comparable to OECD figures. The USA and OECD countries have estimated 16% shadow economies. Worldwide, criminal financial activity hides another 15% from tally and tax. 2006 study of shadow economies for 145 countries, Brookings Institute [ pdf ]

A Global Study of the Emerging Middle Class, OECD [ pdf ]

By 2036, the world economy grows to $200 trillion, up from $70 trillion now.
Asia will be over half the world economy. North America will drop to 12% from its current 26%.

Stuart Staniford’s Shares of Global GDP.

Bill Gates: Forget university, the web is the future for education.

He said, “Five years from now on the web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world. It will be better than any single university.”

Using online courses and textbooks , he believes a $50,000 per year university education would total just $2,000.

Boys with boilers are entrenched opportunists. Steam power is old machinery, whether nuclear, coal, gas, wood pellets or garbage. Weakening nuclear power by trumping old numbers, new power is making great strides after a half-century ignoring it.

Solve Climate blog: Solar power is branded as clean but expensive, incapable of competing with nuclear, but a ‘historic crossover‘ significantly strengthens the case for renewable energy.

Commercial-scale solar developers in North Carolina are already offering utilities electricity at 14 cents or less per kilowatt hour.

Meanwhile, two power companies – Duke Energy and Progress Energy – are pushing ahead with plans for local nuclear plants that will generate electricity at the higher rate of 14 to 18 cents per kilowatt-hour.

We are stifled by pilfering.

Crony capitalism obtains a disproportionate amount of society’s goods.

Every day, things happen in this world that can never be explained by any known law. Every day, what gets said gets forgotten, and the same mystery that brings the words, carries them away, wrapping them up into a secret of the forgotten. The law of the inexplicable is always forgotten. – Fernando Pessoa

Crony capitalism is the inevitable consequence of stability.

Established cronies will adopt stability as their primary objective.

And the longer the period of stability, the worse the ultimate collapse.

A crony capitalist economic system that protects incumbent firms hampers the ability of the system to innovate and adapt to novelty.

via Ashwin Parameswaran, an ex-banker.

Does the United States even have the capacity—emotionally or politically—to make the massive changes necessary for us to compete in the 21^st century global economy?

Finance capitalism has become a network of exponentially growing interest-bearing claims wrapped around the production economy. – Michel Hudson

Michel Hudson:

Finance capitalism has become a network of exponentially growing interest-bearing claims wrapped around the production economy.

A lot of people will be ready to say the story is over, but that’s like saying that you put the bottle of poison down after drinking only a pint of it.

Writing her diary during days out on the sea, Rebecca Solnit asserts ‘oil spill’ is the wrong term. ‘Blowout’ is a better word for this oil that didn’t pour down but welled up like magma from the bowels of the earth.

The blowout was not only the biggest oil spill in American history by far: it’s a story that touches on everything else – taints everything, like the black glop on sandy beaches, on pelicans, terns, boats, sea turtles, marshlands and dolphins.

It’s about climate change, peak oil, the energy future, the American presidency, about corporate power and the corrosive effect of Big Oil on global politics.

It’s also about technology, geology, biology, oceanography, ornithology, the rich, deeply entrenched cultures of the Gulf, about human health and risk management, about domestic violence, despair, drinking, unemployment, bankruptcy, about British pension funds, the wake-up call to shareholders and the class action suit brought by the New Orleans chef Susan Spicer of the restaurant Bayona because contamination, scarcity or outright loss of the primary ingredients in the region’s cuisine – shrimp, crab, fish and crayfish – is one current and probably continuing outcome of the blowout.

‘Blowout’ is a better word.

The whole region had become something like the Western Front, a place where you might run into pockets of poison gas, except that this wasn’t a battlefront: it’s home, for pregnant women, for children, for old people who’ve spent their entire lives here, for people who love the place passionately, for people who don’t know any place else on earth and don’t want to go anywhere, and for people who can’t, at least economically. And for countless birds, fish, crustaceans, cetaceans and other ocean life.

The blowout is about global capital, and about policy, and about the Bush-era corruption that turned the Minerals Management Service into a crony-ridden camp that didn’t do its job, and about Big Oil, and about a host of other things. But it is also about the destruction we’ve all seen in the images, which are horrible in a deep and primordial way.

If you have minutes to browse good journalism and superb news writing, here’s something Katie Couric and too many others neglect to mention.

An excellent 5-part series:

The biggest whistle blower in history has successfully crippled Swiss banking secrecy, reigned in fraud and shenanigans worldwide, exposed secret accounts of many hundreds of tax evaders to the IRS, most of whom are offered amnesty including 222 billionaires… for which he is thrown in jail and is suing the U.S. government for billions in reward money.

Not fiction.

A tidbit for bellyaching at the bar. Turns out the price of a gallon of gas at the pump is just a down payment. The rest is hidden in taxes. And patriot dead.

How much is spent by the Pentagon to secure oil brought to the USA?

The US military spends trillions of dollars to secure oil supplies, patrolling sea-lanes and fighting wars, while denying oil as the motive.

Peter Maass at Foreign Policy combed through the Defense Department’s data:

…which is not easy to do because the Pentagon does not disaggregate its expenditures by region or mission — and came up with a total, over three decades, of $7.3 trillion. Yes, trillion.

And that’s just a partial accounting of peacetime spending.

It’s far trickier to figure out the extent to which America’s wars are linked to oil and then put a price tag on it.

There has also never been an accounting of costs accrued through Congress, federal agencies and state or local government which would include land grants, capital subsidies or tax incentives, as well as, er, effect of pollution on health… numerous spills and clean-up  …or, of course, the astounding fee of a too hot planet.

How would US policy change if the true cost of oil was acknowledged?

The carbon in a barrel of oil is about 0.43 metric tons,
thus there’s 2,150,000 tons of carbon in BP’s total oil spill.

We ::: spew::: that much carbon into our air every 2 hours 41 minutes;
almost 9 times a day; 61 times a week; more than 3,000 times a year.

Companies will be required to prove safety prior to using or releasing a chemical.

well… er… Duh.

In the news today: “Reform of the [1976] Toxic Substances Control Act is long-overdue,” said Chairman Henry A. Waxman.

While we too slowly learn to deal with exponential demands and few answers, we must try to reduce agony for millions of us that are neither slackers nor lazy but under-served by society itself.

Stan Sorscher – Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace:

Investment creates jobs. GE invests billions in China. Microsoft invests billions in India. Boeing invests billions in Russia. General Motors builds more cars in China than in America.

We are making millions of new jobs — just not in America.

It is no surprise that our economy is hollowing out.

Look at the huge global oversupply of cheap labor, combined with mobility of capital, rapid transfer of technology out of the country, and trade policies that encourage investment offshore.

We’ve known about oversupply of labor for decades. We’ve known it’s an American problem too. It’s easy for us to say that the supply of jobs may never be sufficient worldwide, but are we ready to concede that America may never again fully employ a willing work force?

I think no one stumping for office and few if any corporate or union leaders offers an adequate reply to 250,000 people born each day.

We’re looking at decades of hard, hard change. Let’s begin.

We need more jobs than we can create.
There are more workers than we can employ.

Recent analysis shows there are 6 applicants for every job opening. Clamoring for training, relocation to stimulus driven projects, not even economic recovery will greatly alter this ratio.

Imagine employing everyone residing in your county or voting district. Do you think you can succeed? Let’s multiply that success across your state, across our nation. Ignoring offshore issues for a moment, the challenge is enormous.

Industrial policy, trade protectionism, and as we’ve seen, not the magical ‘game theory’ of deregulated competitive markets are a fix for our nation. Tweaking errors, repairing budgets and slowing pirates is plainly overdue. Assuring a robust supply of cash is circulating is helpful. But today’s hot policies remain far from adequate and perhaps never potent.

Whether we retreat behind our borders or not, accommodating each of us by monetizing each of us into what we call jobs is outside the reach of organizations as we know them. Relying solely upon market incentives to create vast numbers of enterprise with a job for us all is less a failure than it is insufficient.

Many are reviving proposals for a base annual income to assure individuals and communities remain afloat. A different approach to spending, different than infamous welfare or safety net services, an adequate monthly income would keep communities workable and prevent most people from falling into state or local services.

To create sufficient employment, if that is ever likely again, to assure we are building a solvent society, I’d prefer wit and wisdom in every neighborhood, in every apartment block of every city, in every factory, office and store to search for solutions at least as well as the best thinkers of Capitol Hill or Wall Street. A baseline livable income, analysts say no more costly than our current system, might prevent many social ills. It’s a suggestion that’s too complex and fiery for me to recommend, or refuse to consider.

A government taking responsibility for its citizens, which many see as socialism, is merely formulating a society that works. We must respond to a permanent oversupply of labor in a way that’s more sensible than today’s disintegration into costly risks of desperation, volatility and what will brew from permanent anger.

Follow up links:

We have already entered a ‘Long Emergency’ as James Kunstler pounds. The Financial Times recently surveyed the Crisis in Middle Class America. The very busy Economic Populist blog is keeping up on the latest outrage du jour.

Hybrid Air Vehicles, among others, is updating the blimp for heavy lift transportation.

Add a passenger cabin.

Tethered for power, we could noiselessly float to work above congested traffic.

Like Beijing’s upcoming freeway-straddling bus or building a monorail over existing roads, a signal of the imagination we’ll need to improve commuting and the future of travel.

Straddling over the lane while traffic continues beneath, construction of Beijing’s 115 mile, 300 passenger bus line begins this year. That’s an idea! Use rights of way over existing roads.

James K. Galbraith

In fact, the right response to the crisis is to expand, not cut, both Social Security and Medicare.

The reality is, we are never going to make up good new jobs for everyone who has been hit.

Care for the elderly, energy, climate change, the Gulf of Mexico catastrophe, our decayed infrastructure, public health—these are real issues. Let’s deal with them.

The ‘long-term budget deficit’ is a phony problem, ginned up by politicians, some economists, and the historic enemies of Social Security and Medicare on Wall Street.

For God’s sake, let’s not sacrifice our most successful social programs to the hysteria we’re hearing from them.

The only concern about government deficit spending should be a whether it generates inflation….

An Executive Director of the World Bank, Mr. Per Kurowski explains our crisis:

… no gigantic financial crisis has ever resulted from excessive lending to those who are perceived as risky

…they have always resulted from excessive lending to those who are perceived as not risky.

:::koff::: subprime :::koff:::
:::koff::: meks me laff

Debt?!

More than one generation went lookin’ for a loan. The debt of all generations put us here.

And no one does debt better than business.

Wait for it. There’s more