Latvia's center-right government fell today. It is the second to fall after Iceland.
All posts by James O'Keefe
Making sense of energy and materials
The price of oil and other materials went through several years of rapid growth as the economy grew and several months of an even more rapid fall once the economy started to crash. Over at The Oil Drum, Phil Hart gave a pretty simple micro economics explanation of what happened and what might happen going forward.
His thesis relies on the idea that we have reached either a peak or the peak of oil production. However, given what we know of crude oil production in the last few years, the idea isn't far fetched.
As Phil points out, we could see more booms and busts. The busts prompt oil producers to rein in plans to expand oil production, leading to reduced production and higher prices. The higher prices then reduce output from the rest of the economy, causing the bust.
We may see this cycle in other commodities. Food production, under threat of increased desertification due to global warming, already happening in Australia and elsewhere (see Burning Questions), may exhibit a similar behavior. Dire conditions potentially.
ACTA – Narn vs. Shadow game
Two of us met and gamed a Narn-Shadow meeting engagement.
Pictures up on flickr or you can view them as a slide show turn by turn.
Here is the description:
Setup
The Shadows on the right had:
2 young cruisers
2 scouts
2 scouts
The Narn on the left had:
1 Bin'Tak Dreadnought
1 G'Lan cruiser
2 T'Loth Assault Cruisers
1 Dag'Kar Missile Frigate
1 Ka'Toc Battle Destroyer
1 Sho'Kar Light Scout Cruiser
1 G'Lan cruiser
2 T'Loth Assault Cruisers
1 Dag'Kar Missile Frigate
1 Ka'Toc Battle Destroyer
1 Sho'Kar Light Scout Cruiser
Shadows won initiative and the Narns started setting up first.
Turn 1
The Shadows won initiative and had the Narns move first.
The G'Lan cruiser, Dag'Kar Missile Frigate, Ka'Toc Battle Destroyer held back while the T'Loths, Bin'Tak and the scout advanced.
The Shadows advanced at max on all fronts. However, the two scouts were
out of range and saw no action this turn. One Shadow cruiser
concentrated its fire on the vanguard T'Loth, while the other attacked
the Bin'Tak. Both Narn ships took significant damage. The Bin'Tak
remained in the battle, but the T'Loth was immobilized and one crew
point shy of having a skeleton crew.
The vanguard T'Loth attacked the closest Shadow scout, but wasn't able
to destroy the scout. The Bin'Tak and Dag'Kar loosed the energy mines
and other long range armament, but aside from damaging the scout
closest to the vanguard T'Loth, the Shadows took little damage.
The Narn scout reduced the stealth on a scout, but didn't much damage.
Turn 2
The Narn won initiative and had the Shadows move first.
One Shadow cruiser attempted to move into a flanking position on the
Bin'Tak, while the other moved to engage the undamaged T'Loth and
G'Lan. The damaged scout flanked the immobile T'Loth. The other scout
played chicken with the Narn scout and ended up getting hit in the
rear, but no damage result owing to the Shadow scout's shields.
The G'Lan cruiser, and the mobile T'Loth moved up next to the ailing
T'Loth as did the Ka'Toc Battle Destroyer. The Dag'Kar Missile Frigate
held back while the Bin'Tak rotated in place to engage the Shadow
cruiser. Both traded blows with one another, with the Shadow cruiser
received scratches while the Bin'Tak took it on the chin, but still
focused it fire.
The damaged Shadow scout finally dispatched the immobile T'Loth while
the other Shadow cruiser concentrated on the G'Lan and gave it quite a
bruising including critical hits that left it immobilized.
The Dag'Kar and Ka'Toc attacked the Shadow scouts, but did not take either down.
The Narn fighters did engage the Shadow fighters, but with the local
advantage in numbers, the Shadows prevailed in the two dogfights.
Amazingly, a Shadow scout was able to avoid significant damage from a
cloud of Narn fighters.
Turn 3
The Shadows won initiative and had the Narns move first.
One Shadow cruiser continued its attempt to flank the Bin'Tak, and
positioned itself just to the side of the Bin'Tak and out of range. The
other Shadow cruiser continued to engage the G'Lan.
The Shadow damaged scout turned its attention on the Ka'Toc and was
able to reduce it to a skeleton crew in the first shot. The other scout
focused its attentions on the G'Lan.
The Dag'Kar Missile Frigate, its energy mines fully loaded, attacked
the Shadow scout attacking the G'Lan. The Narn scout sailed behind the
Shadow ships. The remaining T'Loth contemplated opening a jump gate
next turn.
Over all, while the scenario was balanced points wise, the Shadows were
able to out maneuver the Narns and were well on their way to winning
the day. Both players felt that the Narns needed more ships to balance
the game out better.
My so called tweet
I probably put to much time into reading the status messages, notes or what not that friends post on Facebook, Twitter, or their blogs (RSS feeds are your friends).
Part of my motivation is that several of my friends from bygones past died before I got back in touch. Indeed, in one case, I googled a friend to find that her only reference was her obituary from a few months before. While I know that it is just life, using these tools helps me, as Glen Daniels pointed out, to keep a finger in the lives of my friends whether we met 20 years ago or 2 months ago.
In someways I think I know more about some friends now than I did years ago. It is weird, fun and somewhat reassuring all in one
How we aren’t Japan
Paul Krugman writes:
So far the Obama administration’s response to the economic crisis is
all too reminiscent of Japan in the 1990s: a fiscal expansion large
enough to avert the worst, but not enough to kick-start recovery;
support for the banking system, but a reluctance to force banks to face
up to their losses. It’s early days yet, but we’re falling behind the
curve.
all too reminiscent of Japan in the 1990s: a fiscal expansion large
enough to avert the worst, but not enough to kick-start recovery;
support for the banking system, but a reluctance to force banks to face
up to their losses. It’s early days yet, but we’re falling behind the
curve.
He has likened our government's response to that of Japan during its "lost decade" in the 1990s after the crash of its property bubble and resulting financial crisis.
In a number of ways I agree. However, there are three things are very different between Japan then and the US now: two economic:
- US corporations, and likely foreign corporations operating US factories and offices, will not hold back on laying off workers.
- The US savings rate is abysmal.
and one political:
- The US is not dominated by one political party.
This later point is the most important one.
While I have long maintained that the Democrats and Republicans are, in regards to the economy and capitalism, very similar, there are differences. After all, 36 of 41 Republican Senators supported the DeMint amendment to the stimulus bill which would have reduced federal government revenues by over $3 trillion and further enriched corporations and the wealthy at the expense of the rest of us.
If Obama cannot clean up the mess GW left us by 2010, or at least show enough progress, things could get very difficult for the congressional Democrats on election day.
And in Iceland
Common Dreams has a great article
by Rebecca Solnit on the situation on Iceland (from TomDispatch). She
goes into more depth than other articles I have seen and provides some
useful analysis and history. I liked the characterization of Iceland
as a hedge fund and a country rolled into one.
There is now a Socialist & Left-Green coalition running the
government. Everyone seems to be blaise about the fact that the new PM
is an out lesbian, which is most gratifying. It also looks like the
Left-Green Party *may* come out on top in the April elections, though
we shall see. Back in October, Doug Henwood interviewed Ögmundur Jónasson, head of the Left Green delegation in the Icelandic parliament on his radio show. If you don't, you should subscribe to his newsletter, or at least read his blog.
Interesting Economic Tidbits
Dollars & Sense posted some interesting links (many from the Financial Times, it would appear) on their blog including:
- The double digit annualized GDP falls in Japan and Latvia. Other parts of Asia don't look very healthy either.
- The health and economic cost of the increasing obesity epidemic in Mexico (MY NOTE: spurred by all of our subsidies to corn production.)
- Several analyses of the new financial stabilization plan announced yesterday. D&S summarized with:
This is simply unbelievable: assets worth virtually nothing because
they consisted of much less than their hyper-excessive leverage
multiples are to be peddled to the very same sort of investors who have
just been burned by these things, simply because the leverage is now to
be put up by uncomplaining (not to mention increasingly skint)
taxpayers and foreign investors, and not the banks. And this in an
attempt to make a transition to a less-leveraged system! It's no
surprise that nobody seems to be buying it.
they consisted of much less than their hyper-excessive leverage
multiples are to be peddled to the very same sort of investors who have
just been burned by these things, simply because the leverage is now to
be put up by uncomplaining (not to mention increasingly skint)
taxpayers and foreign investors, and not the banks. And this in an
attempt to make a transition to a less-leveraged system! It's no
surprise that nobody seems to be buying it.
All together, the
proposals put forward today could amount to nearly $3 trillion. And
everyone except the administration seems to believe that won't be
nearly enough.
You should read the article yourself.
A little on the economic stimulus bill
My brief review of the economic stimulus bill is that it will be too little to buoy a US economy that is dropping off of a cliff and is directed at the wrong areas. There are too many tax cuts, which will end up being saved rather than spent, and too little government spending, especially to state and local governments who will end up cutting tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of jobs, further increasing unemployment.
If you doubt that the US economy is dropping off of a cliff, then check out these graphs. First, from The Big Picture, personal consumption expenditures is falling at a rate not seen in over forty years:
And second this graphic on the change in industrial production now, versus the average of all post war recessions as well as the best case and worst case [from Brad Setser’s Follow the Money Blog]. If this were a “normal” recession, we would be starting to bounce back. This is not a normal recession.
Project Sweet Tooth Progress – January 2009
I found that my previous Project Sweet Tooth incentives proved to be unworkable, because if I did use them I would end up frittering away all my time reading things on the web. So I changed the incentives back to how I had originally envisioned them:
- 1/2 hour for each day without sweets or soda
- 1/2 hour for each night of eight hours of sleep
During January, I avoided sweets for 23 of 31 days and got at least eight hours of sleep for 5 of 31 nights. This brings me to 14 hours towards my hobbies (aka me time). Of this time, I used about five hours, and carried over nine hours into February.
Quote: People try non-violence for a week …
People try non-violence for a week, and when it 'does not work' they go back to violence which hasn't worked for centuries.
Theodore Roszak
Quoted in Thinking Green! Essays on Environmentalism, Feminism, and Nonviolence by Petra K. Kelly, Parallax Press, Berkeley, California, 1994
Quoted in Thinking Green! Essays on Environmentalism, Feminism, and Nonviolence by Petra K. Kelly, Parallax Press, Berkeley, California, 1994