Asleep at the Pump
Filed Under Economy, Energy, Environment, Technology | Leave a Comment
After a visit to the laundromat this morning, I put another $20 worth of gas in the old, problem-plagued Jeep, wincing (both the Jeep and I) at a pump price of $3.99 a gallon for regular — up more than a dime since the last time.
And apparently based on the so-called favorable employment report released Friday, U.S. sweet crude increased by $1.48 to end the week at $97.84 per barrel, while Brent picked up $2.51 to finish at $114.58 per barrel.
Gas-pump prices appear erratic, depending where ye be: Statewide average in California is $3.73 a gallon for regular, up 3.7 cents in a week, but meanwhile, a good friend of mine residing less than two hours south of me recently paid $4.19 a gallon — Sup with that?
(Illustration found here).
Maybe we should take the plunge already and go Eurozone — $10-a-gallon gas would force stiff-necked US peoples to alter lifestyles and move on before the whole thing becomes reality.
New fuel for old vehicles — there’s about 240.5 million cars and light trucks cruising US highways and the average age of those vehicles rose to 10.8 years last year from 10.4 in the year before, due mainly to bad times in Detroit and the economy.
Apparently from indications beyond a recession, US peoples have been easing off the private vehicle for awhile now.
Via AlterNet two years ago:
Among the trends that are keeping sales well below the annual figure of 15-17 million that prevailed from 1994 through 2007 are market saturation, ongoing urbanization, economic uncertainty, oil insecurity, rising gasoline prices, frustration with traffic congestion, mounting concerns about climate change, and a declining interest in cars among young people.
Market saturation may be the dominant contributor to the peaking of the U.S. fleet.
The United States now has 246 million registered motor vehicles and 209 million licensed drivers — nearly 5 vehicles for every 4 drivers.
Kids and cars:
Perhaps the most fundamental social trend affecting the future of the automobile is the declining interest in cars among young people.
For those who grew up a half-century ago in a country that was still heavily rural, getting a driver’s license and a car or a pickup was a rite of passage.
Getting other teenagers into a car and driving around was a popular pastime.
In contrast, many of today’s young people living in a more urban society learn to live without cars.
They socialize on the Internet and on smart phones, not in cars.
Many do not even bother to get a driver’s license.
This helps explain why, despite the largest U.S. teenage population ever, the number of teenagers with licenses, which peaked at 12 million in 1978, is now under 10 million.
If this trend continues, the number of potential young car-buyers will continue to decline.
Plus these kids now are also faced with an incredible financial burden, not only with a humongous student-loan debt, but a bleak employment picture (despite Friday’s numbers) — unless one is an oil/gas person (corporations are people).
Maybe a bit of inequality right there: Exxon’s $41.1 billion in 2011 profit translates into nearly $5 million in profit every hour, or more than $1,300 every second. The annual profit comes near the record revenues of $46.23 billion in 2008…Between 2008-2010, Exxon Mobil registered an average 17.6 percent federal effective corporate tax rate, while the average American paid a higher rate of 20.4 percent.
Maybe venture into the ugly-oddness of fuel:
Gasoline prices are higher at the beginning of 2012 than at the beginning of any previous year ever — even at the beginning of 2008, a year when the national average for a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline reached a record $4.114 on July 7.
In its Daily Fuel Gauge Report, AAA Texas noted Friday a national average of $3.467 for a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline — up from $3.455 a day ago, $3.389 a week ago, $3.288 a month ago and $3.116 a year ago.
“We’re seeing the highest gasoline prices that we’ve seen,” Sarah Schimmer of AAA Texas said Friday.
“2011 was a record year, and in 2012 we’re definitely seeing higher prices.”
And all this for mobility, not only just for driving my Jeep around town, but oil/gas framed within the way-big picture of how the existence of an entire civilization depends on the black, bubbly shit — no way yesteryear can continue into the nowadays.
In reality, peak oil is actually the end of easy oil, low prices at the pump and so forth, and this peak supposedly occurred worldwide in about 2005 — so we’re already on the downside.
One interesting look at future possibilities comes from “Fleeing Vesuvius: Overcoming the Risks of Economic and Environmental Collapse,” a collection of essays from economists, environmental scientists, a couple of architects and even a corporate lawyer on the premise of how close we are to being totally f*cked.
From a review by Stuart Jeanne Bramhall of Fleeing Vesuvius and posted Friday at DissidentVoice:
The title refers to the volcano that destroyed Pompeii in 79 AD, specifically the large number of residents who failed to save themselves, despite weeks of earthquakes, gaseous clouds and other obvious signs that an eruption was imminent.
For more than a decade, a growing body of evidence suggests that the planet is on the verge of economic and ecological collapse.
Yet the vast majority of us do absolutely nothing to prepare for the stark conditions ahead.
…
All (the essay writers) are in basic agreement around the book’s central premise: the industrialized world needs to urgently downsize its energy use, both to stave off catastrophic climate change and to conserve dwindling fossil fuels.
In his Introduction, “Where We Went Wrong,” the late Irish economist Richard Douthwaite points out that one barrel of oil provides the equivalent labor of a man working forty hours a week for twelve years.
He goes on to stress that before the advent of cheap fossil fuels, capitalism was impossible — an economy relying on human labor and animal power is too inefficient to support it.
By definition capitalism depends on capital accumulation, the production of an economic surplus that can be reinvested in new capital (property and machines) to expand production even further.
Producing a surplus of this size only became possible because of the vast amount of cheap (practically free) work performed by fossil fuel energy.
And Ms Bramhall also reveals a brightness from the essays, not all doom-n-gloom: The last five sections of the book focus on solutions, with inspiring examples of new approaches to land use, agriculture and industrial design from individuals, groups and communities who have begun the transition to a less energy-intensive lifestyle.
Inspiration needs to have already been popped — too much pie-in-the-sky without actual political reality.
One updated sample chapter of Fleeing Vesuvius can be found at The Oil Drum.
And another review of the essay collection can be found here.
A major snag in the optimism — the above-mentioned political reality.
So says Kumi Naidoo, head of the environmental group Greenpeace, who spoke Friday at the big-wig, pow-wow Munich Security Conference, and chimed a loud alarm.
Via Raw Story:
“The moment of history we are in can be described as a boiling point or a perfect storm,” he told the assembled gathering of world leaders, ministers, top brass and defence policy experts at the annual Munich gathering.
“We are seeing a convergence of multiple crises happening at the same time. A food crisis, climate crisis, poverty crisis … and then of course the financial crisis and a demographic crisis and a global governance democratic crisis,” he added.
“The bottom line is that too many of our leaders … are sleepwalking us into a crisis of epic proportion,” he claimed.
One of those doing the sleepwalking is US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who’s also in Munich, Germany, this weekend for the conference, but her schedule has no room for end-of-life-as-we-know-it antics fostered by environmental activists — Clinton will most-likely reminisce about “…what a key partner Europe is in the global security, economic, democracy promotion agenda that we have.”
Just wake ‘em later.
BlackOut — SOPA’s Choice
Filed Under Bullshit, Orwellian, Technology | 1 Comment
(Illustration found here).
Today is a kind of watershed moment when the Internets respond to attempts to censor shit by banging down the back door, but a load of ‘Net peoples have chosen instead to go black.
Daily Kos has an action line to protest the twin online-control orbs SOPA ‘Stop Online Piracy Act,’ (US House) and PIPA ‘Protect Intellectual Property Act” (US Senate), which reportedly are designed to shut down access to overseas websites that traffic in stolen content or counterfeit goods, but like a lot of other surveillance-state-of-affairs, there’s more than just bullshit flying.
Copyright law can be a step away from censorship: “Like many other tech companies, we believe that there are smart, targeted ways to shut down foreign rogue websites without asking U.S. companies to censor the Internet,” a Google spokeswoman told Reuters on Monday.
And today (Wednesday) Google has a black band over its name on its search site, and Wikipedia leads to a Gothic-looking spot which proclaims “Imagine A World Without Free Knowledge,” in protest of the upcoming Congressional bills.
Along with Wiki, Reddit and Boing Boing, among others were also going black for awhile to protest.
Even HuffPost had a huge, black box at the top of his home page (where a photo/headline usually appears) early Wednesday, and supplies a factoid page here.
All authority hates freedom — one wonders how the popular uprisings in the Middle East, even the Occupy movement here in the US would fare under these laws, and how would freedom really be effected because as it is now, the real freedom is in the ability to get the truth out there.
Even in the most totalitarian regimes on earth, a little iPhone camera can change the outlook of the whole, entire world — in a real sense, currently there can’t be a total news black out and we need to keep it that way.
An understanding via the LA Times:
Sascha Meinrath, director of the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative, said the bills set “a horrendous precedent globally” and that much of the content users put online — such as open publishing, crowd-sourced information gathering or comments sections — could all become “incredibly dangerous” if the bills passed.
“We would end up in a situation where we’re trying to do needlepoint with harpoons,” he said.
“You can’t target only pirated information, content or media without getting tons of collateral damage that removes entirely legal content.”
As a screenwriter, East Hollywood resident Steven Darancette, 40, uses Wikipedia often for background information. But he isn’t too concerned about the website going dark Wednesday, saying he supports the protest.
“If I need to get research, I’ll just Google,” he said.
“There are also these things called books.”
The way-big problem, though, is once that door is opened, then locked back again by SOPA/PIPA there’s no going back, the freedom of pure communication will be lost in an Orwellian influenced society, and that ain’t good at all.
Enigma Ball
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Musings, Technology | Leave a Comment
Mystery seems to part of the nowadays.
In wars and rumors of wars, earthquakes and pestilence, understanding of the great scheme of things seems to be drowned in an unknown pool of mystery — unless one considers the GOP presidential race, where there’s absolutely nothing but puzzlement, but no mystery — and the wave of unprecedented problems appears to have come from nowhere, but actually have been here all along.
We live in a most-interesting age.
(Illustration found here).
And in the recent death of Kim Jong il is another mystery — how did he live as long as he did?
The answer: By being an international village-idiot man of mystery, who was fairly smart.
From Time magazine this past Wednesday:
Soon after U.S. President George W. Bush branded North Korea a member of the “axis of evil” in 2002, Kim travelled to Russia to meet with then President Vladimir Putin, and he asked Pulikovsky to do him a peculiar favor.
“He told me, ‘Konstantin, when the official meeting [with Putin] is over, I want to sit down with him in private for ten minutes, with no one in the room, not even interpreters. I need to tell him something.”
That evening, the private meeting was arranged, and as Pulikovsky escorted Kim back toward the border afterward, his curiosity got to him.
“I asked him, ‘Comrade Kim, if it’s no secret, why did you need these ten minutes?’” Pulikovsky says.
“And he smiled at me and said, ‘What’s the difference? The point is for Bush to wonder what we were talking about.’
For me that was classic Kim.
He always found some way to get snagged in your thoughts, to make himself into a mystery.”
And he did indeed drive George Jr. even more crazed than he already is and helped foster the fright of a North Korea.
This week a natural mystery — a metallic ball fell out of the sky onto the plains of Africa’s Namibia, although the object has been called “man made,” what it is and exactly where it came from is…
From Australia’s ABC News:
The hollow ball with a circumference of 1.1 metres was found near a village in the north of the country some 750 kilometres from the capital Windhoek, according to police forensics director Paul Ludik.
Locals had heard several small explosions a few days beforehand, he said.
With a diameter of 35 centimetres, the ball has a rough surface and appears to consist of “two halves welded together”.
It was made of a “metal alloy known to man” and weighed six kilograms, Mr Ludik said.
The ball was found 18 metres from its landing spot, a hole 33 centimetres deep and 3.8 metres wide.
Several such balls have dropped in southern Africa, Australia and Latin America in the past 20 years.
Life is getting real peculiar when big, metal balls start falling from the sky — Chicken Little don’t know shit.
Watchers/Listeners
Filed Under Bullshit, Orwellian, Technology, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
“Even the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards.
Part of the reason for this was that in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance.
The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further.
With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end.”
– George Orwell, 1984 (quote found here)
(Illustration found here).
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange spoke Monday during a panel discussion at London’s Bureau of Investigative Journalism — he was announcing another WikiLeaks dump, this time the files concern private surveillance companies who have worked with various world governments to track whoever via monitoring software integrated into electronic devices.
“Who here has a BlackBerry?
Who here uses Gmail?
Well you are all screwed!” Assange exclaimed.
“The reality is intelligence contractors are selling right to countries around the world mass surveillance systems for all of those products.”
Meanwhile, just yesterday, Sen. Al Franken demanded an explanation on how the so-called ‘Carrier IQ,’ installed all new Android smartphones, really works — this hidden software is supposedly meant to help mobile carriers monitor and diagnose problems with their devices, but in reality may transmit personal information.
In a letter to Carrier IQ President and CEO Larry Lenhart, Franken wanted more information on the capabilities of the device.
Via Raw Story:
“I am very concerned by recent reports that your company’s software—pre-installed on smartphones used by millions of Americans—is logging and may be transmitting extraordinarily sensitive information from consumers’ phones…
“I understand the need to provide usage and diagnostic information to carriers,” he continued.
“I also understand that carriers can modify Carrier IQ’s software.
But it appears that Carrier IQ’s software captures a broad swath of extremely sensitive information from users that would appear to have nothing to do with diagnostics—including who they are calling, the contents of the texts they are receiving, the contents of their searches, and the websites they visit.”
“These actions may violate federal privacy laws, including the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act,” Franken warned.
“This is potentially a very serious matter.”
Serious indeed.
Franken was responding to a claim from Trevor Eckhart, a 25-year-old electronics expert, that the Carrier IQ operation can be used in nefarious ways.
On Eckhart’s blog he explains how this works, and despite a lot of geek shit (non-sensible to me), he concludes:
The fact that it’s embedded into the shipped device raises very serious security and privacy concerns.
…
The CIQ application is embedded so deeply in the device that it can’t be fully removed without rebuilding the phone from source code.
This is only possible for a user with advanced skills and a FULLY unlocked device.
…
If a bad actor discovered a vulnerability or used malware, he could potentially exploit that opportunity to become a “CIQ operator,” leaving many users helpless against the extensive collection and misuse of their own information and no way to stop it.
With so much moving code across the operating system, I would say the chances of malware looking here isn’t that far-fetched.
Of course, Carrier IQ got pissed at Eckhart, fired off a cease-and-desist letter and demanded he issue an apology for calling its software a”rootkit,” but back-tracked when Electronic Frontier Foundation became involved.
The EFF is an US-based non-profit digital rights advocacy and legal organization.
From CNET News:
Just days later, Carrier IQ did an about face after the Electronic Frontier Foundation responded to its cease-and-desist letter, saying that Eckhart’s comments and research are protected under the Copyright Act’s fair use provision.
“Our action was misguided and we are deeply sorry for any concern or trouble that our letter may have caused Mr. Eckhart,” the company said in response to the EFF’s letter.
“We sincerely appreciate and respect EFF’s work on his behalf, and share their commitment to protecting free speech in a rapidly changing technological world.”
In dumping the surveillance logs, termed “The Spy Files,” WikiLeaks on its Web site explains:
International surveillance companies are based in the more technologically sophisticated countries, and they sell their technology on to every country of the world.
This industry is, in practice, unregulated.
Intelligence agencies, military forces and police authorities are able to silently, and on mass, and secretly intercept calls and take over computers without the help or knowledge of the telecommunication providers.
Users’ physical location can be tracked if they are carrying a mobile phone, even if it is only on stand by.
…
When citizens overthrew the dictatorships in Egypt and Libya this year, they uncovered listening rooms where devices from Gamma corporation of the UK, Amesys of France, VASTech of South Africa and ZTE Corp of China monitored their every move online and on the phone.
…
The CIA officials have bought software that allows them to match phone signals and voice prints instantly and pinpoint the specific identity and location of individuals.
Intelligence Integration Systems, Inc., based in Massachusetts — sells a “location-based analytics” software called Geospatial Toolkit for this purpose.
Another Massachusetts company named Netezza, which bought a copy of the software, allegedly reverse engineered the code and sold a hacked version to the Central Intelligence Agency for use in remotely piloted drone aircraft.
And this is beyond just the old ‘looking over you shoulder‘ routine — be aware and be watchful, they are.
Venal Brains Cooking
Filed Under Bullshit, Politics, Technology | Leave a Comment
Most scientists identify as Democrats (55 percent), while 32 percent identify as independents and just 6 percent say they are Republicans.
– Pew Research, July 2009
Reality conception doesn’t require the brains of a rocket scientist, but one does need some kind of brain, and maybe a brain that’s not so flat.
Take Mitt Romney (please!), who carries an impressive foreign policy brain trust, but still lacks walking-around sense.
“Romney’s team is almost too broad, it’s soulless,” worried one GOP foreign policy expert who has informally advised the Romney campaign.
“You don’t know what direction he would go and some conservatives are worried it could be analysis paralysis.”
Before any paralysis, there’s gotta be some emotional feelings.
(Illustration found here).
A couple of weeks ago, Herman Cain blew off an interview with the Manchester (New Hampshire) Union Leader due to the fact the talk would also be on video — a real bad piece of equipment for Cain after the Libya incident — and his campaign had installed a new rule: No video cameras in newspaper interviews.
And why? Because “videos are typically used for television, and it’s a newspaper.”
The Union Leader responded in a blistering editorial, the final graph the kicker:
Videos these days are used by everyone, even random people on the street who record candidates with their cell phones.
The difference between television and newspaper interviews is not that cameras are present, but that newspaper interviews tend to be longer and more in depth.
The Cain campaign knows this.
It seems that Cain is fine with everyone seeing him give short, prepared answers, but not with everyone seeing him try to answer questions in which he has more than 30 or 60 seconds to respond.
He would do well to rethink that decision, for it gives the impression that he’s got something to hide.
No shit, sherlock.
Herman has a major, and disgusting, problem with women.
However, the much, way-much-bigger problem is that US politics sucks through a small straw.
Nearly 70 percent of US peoples consider the current Congressional operation the worse in 60 years — a “do-nothing Congress,” as scripted by Harry Truman in 1948 (via CNN).
The failure of the so-called “Super Committee” is a case in point — a do nothing due to the (t)he nastiness of the proposed cuts and the huge, huge ass-holeness of the GOP.
A most-excellent post yesterday at The Bonddad Blog reported the US could get going again if a lot of shit is put aside, with an emphasis on putting people back to work, pointedly on this country’s embarassing infrastructure.
The problem? Too much bullshit:
So what’s the problem?
Why is our system so fundamentally stuck?
Partly it’s a colossal, bipartisan lack of the political courage required to tell people what they sort of know but don’t want to hear.
Partly it’s a Republican Party that, for its own cynical reasons, wants no deal with this president. Partly it’s moneyed, focused lobbies that swarm in defense of specific advantages written into the law; there is no comparable lobby for compromise, let alone sacrifice.
…
The point to the above two paragraphs is simple: our political system is beyond broken and dysfunctional. I’m not quite sure where that is, but I do know it’s really bad place to be.
And that is why watching the train-wreck that is the daily news is so frustrating: solving the problem is easy, but our political system has become so dysfunctional as to prevent that from happening.
Brains infested with dry rot won’t work — the US is in a world of hurt.