big on love, tolerance, and the human potential
We too often believe our crashed economy was ‘sparked by unbridled binging on cheap money by a very large part of the American population’.
No, everybody was not doing it. Only enough people more than a few, and from there the whole thing was whipped up by the media and encouraged by the credit industry and Greenspan himself. Otherwise most people wouldn’t even know you can do such a thing, never mind get the idea of doing it themselves.
Charlie Petit:
What’s lacking is the obvious.
Which is that if BP and the oil industry and the Minerals Management Service has been acting like grownups for the last 20 years or so, there would have been developed a blow out preventer with a fitting for a backup on top, without customized on-the-fly engineering, that could be added to finish the job.
Think about it. All a B.O.P. does is to act like a faucet.
That means there is no reason to think good engineering would not have found more than one way to replace the tap should it go bad. Or entirely different strings of valves, some at depth, to turn off a runaway well. The deep kill drill mud method may be the one that shuts it off forever and forget it.
This good news is, in reality, the scandal. It underscores the laxity of imagination and penny pinching that got BP and the gulf coast into this mess in the first place.
That’s the story: it is not fundamentally difficult to turn off an oil well. One has only to invest time and money up front in the way to do it.
There is much talk about failure of the press to get the ultimate reason for the disaster right, our “addiction” to oil and other energy that is cheap to produce. That’s a fine, philosophical position. But just as important is to report why the technology failed and whether it had to be that way.
I’d say the press and gov’t regulators alike must demand immediate development of smart, 21st century hardware that gives oil drillers a whole set of proven, robust hardware for rebuilding the top of an oil well, complete with shut-off systems and backup shut-off systems, to start deploying the day a major leak begins.
These guys practically started from scratch. If they came up with this in a few months of near-panic conditions, think what could have been done over the last few decades had there been proper leadership and oversight.
Eric Garland:
There’s a whole ton that economists don’t do:
- SOCIAL TRENDS like Boomer retirements, a culture of hiring and firing people every four minutes,
- TECH TRENDS such as ubiquitous wireless communication flattening hierarchies and enabling global collaboration,
- ECOLOGICAL TRENDS such as water shortage and the end of cheap energy,
- POLITICAL TRENDS such as the removal of primacy of states and even European nations in favor of central bank currency manipulation and fiat economic activity.
Uh, sort of everything except their incredibly narrow abstraction of the universe.
I’m going to just say it – neoclassical economics is basically worthless. Its ludicrous curves and CIGS, its absurd Keynesian Katfight, its outmoded and ignorant concept of “gross domestic product” – their intellectual output simply is useless in the real world. Their performance in response to the last two years make the moniker “The Dismal Science” an incredibly optimistic assessment.
Does anybody need economists? We need top-down analysis of economic activity in our complex world. We are not receiving it from those who claim to provide it. What shall we do?
An oil supply crunch looms large. This is both unstoppable and taking place at an unprecedented pace. A lack of oil by 2013 could force the price of crude above $200 a barrel.
One of the world’s most respected institutions warns that business is facing catastrophic consequences by not preparing for oil scarcity.
Supply security and climate change is forcing a wave of initiatives that will revolutionize the way that we manage and use energy.
The insurance market has a major interest in preparedness. Lloyd’s calls on manufacturers, retailers and the wider business community to reassess global supply chains and their just-in time models because the “current system is increasingly vulnerable to disruption.”
Whether the spill is capped in July, August or September, about 20% of the oil particles will ooze beyond Florida and into the open Atlantic.
Though diluted, the east coast could see oil by October. In one year, garbage in the Atlantic gyre will be shined and nearly the entire Gulf is sheened.
The full Univ. of Hawaii animation is here.
There’s nothing safe out there. You should have seen that coming. People don’t think about what could go wrong.
Space shuttles shatter. Bridges buckle. Hotel walkways collapse. Levees fail. An offshore oil rig explodes, creating the biggest offshore oil spill in U.S. history.
The common thread is technological arrogance and hubris.
With a career studying more than 600 disasters, Robert Bea said, “I’m an engineer – I’m in the prevention business. But you can’t prevent what you don’t understand. Look at the oil spill problem. Everyone thinks it’s a technological problem. It’s not. It’s a management problem.”
“It’s just the arrogant presumption that you have got the thing under control, whatever the thing is. In this case, it’s drilling beyond your depth.”
Most of the global food supply is just 12 crops and 14 animals, an alarmingly shallow gene pool.
What doesn’t bend, breaks. That’s the worry of too few.
Three-quarters of the world’s critically important food-crop varieties have disappeared during the 20th century, and hundreds of locally adapted livestock breeds are on the verge of doing so.
Diversity is an alternative to catastrophe. The more variety in a system, the more resilient it is.
Another damaging shift: Suburban poor increased 25% over the Bush years; five times more than in cities.
A third of the very poor now live in the suburbs, the largest and fastest-growing poverty demographic area in the country. Suburban governments are not prepared.
Wow.
5 billion of our 6.9 billion people now have a mobile phone.
In the year 2000, about 720 million people had a cellphone. That’s 2 million new contracts per day.
The House Energy Committee called BP’s pipeline chief to Washington. After the second hearing in a month, Kevin Hostler has decided to quit.
The 800-mile Trans-Alaska Pipeline System transports 700,000 barrels of oil per day, about 15 percent of US crude oil production. BP’s severe policies has cut the 2010 budget to $1 billion, compared with $1.1 billion in 2009 and $1.3 billion in 2008.
Based on hundreds of pages of internal documents and interviews with more than a dozen senior employees on the safety and integrity of the pipeline, the ‘Business Practices, Employee Concerns Program and Compliance and Ethics Group’ will develop a plan for enhancing the open work environment to deal with issues of intimidation and fear.
“There is a risk ranking exercise that is used and the concern that the risk ranking is being used primarily for budget reductions and although work is shown as lower risk it still should be done to protect the environment.”
Alaskans are celebrating. The pipeline’s owners issued an executive obit:
“This is consistent with the recent employee survey that demonstrated there has been a reduction in employee comfort in reporting concerns to senior management.”
Stealing credit from her predecessor, Sarah Palin boasts on radio and TV, : “I had to set up our Petroleum Systems Integrity Office so that we could be there on the front lines making sure what the oil companies were telling us was legit when they were dealing with their corroded pipes that we find out and other lax maintenance issues….“
More than 100 recorded incidents of corroded pipes and “other lax maintenance issues” between 2001 and 2007 reveals Palin’s pipeline oversight was bogus
“More than one American in five thinks that buying lottery tickets constitutes a sound retirement plan.
“What a lottery sells is a dream. That dream is of great personal wealth, even if the lottery is the only game in the world in which your chances of winning are not greatly increased by playing.
From The Economist, here’s a firm and revealing ‘Special Report On Gambling’:
“The most popular forms of gambling—slots, lotteries and casino games—are simply bad bets which players are likely to lose.”
Before you sob, laugh out loud. The rich are tops in walking away from mortgages. “The rich are different: they are more ruthless.”
Whether it is their residence, a second home or a house bought as an investment, the rich have stopped paying the mortgage at a rate that greatly exceeds the rest of the population.
More than one in seven homeowners with loans in excess of a million dollars are seriously delinquent. One in 12 mortgages below the million-dollar mark is delinquent.
How long it will take to fix the post-80s frenzy of finance?
Ponder these charts of our total debt in the credit market. The green line is government debt; red line is private debt.
Austerity policies after the crash of 1929 triggered massive unemployment and misery for 13 years. Obviously shrinking spending and budgets by 10% of GDP/year was much too rapid.
How many years do we pay down the massive accumulated debt and interest of the free market fiasco?
Japan we can see. Tackling debt since 1998 at about 6%/year, less painful than outright depression, their debt load has been reduced by half.
Stuart Staniford calculates the overall process will spin out to 2025, adding that we don’t know the appropriate speed to offload debt. And this time it’s global.
Perhaps one of a few in 100 years, a professor is asking:
We need big innovative American businesses that can scale, export and employ millions of workers, many without a college degree. How are we going to get there?
We consume the equivalent of 1.4 Earths, but a small percentage of us are responsible for the vast majority of consumption, pollution, land and water degradation, and biodiversity loss.
Nearly 25 percent of California’s children have never seen a dentist.
OECD countries need to create 80 million jobs.
Diabetes is exploding in Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Cambodia and Laos. Why? Fast food is everywhere.
To deliver only a third of America’s fuel, the oil and gas industries use 143,000 square miles of our land. Additionally, the BP spill has closed 80,000 square miles.
“We’re not addicted to oil. We are addicted to driving.”
Americans drive around 3 trillion miles per year. If we drove exactly the same number of miles we do today, how much solar power would we need for electric vehicles?
Tony Seba:
I did the numbers and the answer will surprise you.
Land needed to use solar power for an all-electric USA car fleet is merely 1,000 square miles.
An area the size of King Ranch in Texas with its 1,289 square miles could generate all of America’s electric vehicle power with 30% extra electricity to spare. Ted Turner’s 244 square mile ranch in New Mexico alone could generate enough electricity to power 25% of all cars in America.
Michael Pettis:
With all of the major economies facing banking crises, they must clean up the banks by forcing the household sector to pay the bill. This will put downward pressure on household disposable income and wealth for many years.
But we are all betting on the consumer – and inexplicably enough (to me, anyway) many of us are betting most heavily on the hapless Chinese consumer – to come surging back and bring us the growth that we so desperately need. I am pretty skeptical that this will happen.
There is an awful lot of banking mess that households are going to need to deal with first, and only after the mess is cleaned up will consumption come roaring back.
Debt. Debt. Debt. Debt. The Republican inspired expansion since 1980 becomes the borrowed American Dream.
I wonder if this is the ‘premier’ chart of our times? Folks bellyache about government spending because that’s where blame is, but the old saw about credit where credit is due has become something more modern: debt wherever it’s offered.
We’re just not smart. All of us. There’s no one at blame here. All of us bargained. Global conditions are similar. The distinctions among nations are moot.
Fixing this is new history, not so much rule changing or switching players, but a fundamental shock to what we call success.
Here’s something BP can never be. Not GE, not GM, not even IBM.
“I have to describe a bit what the Mozilla universe looks like“, says Mozilla Director of Community Asa Dotzler.
The biggest circle is our users, nearly 400 million strong today.
These people decided that the default browser that came with their computer was insufficient and took steps to download and install a new browser.
Some of those users took the added step of becoming beta testers, about 4 million of them. This circle of people try updates about once a month and give us high level feedback.
Inside that circle are the group I call “advocates”. This is probably about 400 thousand people and includes the 100 thousand Spread Firefox members that have put up Get Firefox buttons at their sites, the fans that are regularly spreading the word on Facebook and Twitter, and people helping other Firefox users with support issues.
The next circle in is our daily testers and Test Pilots. These people, about 40 thousand strong, test and report feedback on the changes that are happening to Firefox every single day as well as offer structured feedback on particular features or design changes through our Test Pilot program.
Inside that circle are the 4,000 or so dedicated contributors who are doing everything from writing patches to helping to translate Firefox and Mozilla websites to participating in user engagement campaigns, to submitting feedback on Design Challenges, etc.
A stand-out group is nearly 80 localizations developed by an army of volunteers across more than 100 countries with a small handful of full-time staff coordinating.
Finally, there are about 1,000 people at the core who are either full-time contributors or critical volunteers we depend on every day to lead the project forward.
We are able and willing to engage the smartest and most passionate people from all over the world.
When I was young and naïve, I believed that important people took positions based on careful consideration of the options. Now I know better. Much of what Serious People believe rests on prejudices, not analysis. And these prejudices are subject to fads and fashions. — Paul Krugman
Andy Grove: How To Make An American Job
Today, manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry is about 166,000 — lower than it was before the first personal computer, the MITS Altair 2800, was assembled in 1975.
Meanwhile, a very effective computer-manufacturing industry has emerged in Asia, employing about 1.5 million workers — factory employees, engineers and managers.
The largest of these companies is Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., also known as Foxconn. The company has grown at an astounding rate, first in Taiwan and later in China. Its revenue last year was $62 billion, larger than Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp., Dell Inc. or Intel.
Foxconn employs more than 800,000 people, more than the combined worldwide head count of Apple, Dell, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard Co., Intel and Sony Corp.
10-to-1 Ratio
What should the strategy in the area be after we withdraw from Afghanistan? Three things:
- Play the role of the spoiler. Ally ourselves with any group that opposes the Taliban, in much the same way we “took” Afghanistan back in 2001.
- Maintain a special operations and drone presence in the area to prevent Al Qaeda from reforming in Afghanistan.
- Take advantage of the opportunity to finally realize the dividend afforded by the end of the Cold War. Cut the US defense budget, currently more than the rest of the world combined, by half.
