March 2008
26 posts
Hour without Power
The World Wildlife Fund sponsored Earth Hour 2008 is tonight from 8 to 9 local time. It started last year when 2.2 million people in Sydney turned off their lights for an hour, causing a drop in energy consumption of 10.2% in the city (equivalent to taking 48,000 cars off the road). It appears Chicago, Atlanta, Phoenix, and San Francisco as well as a number of others are on the list of...
stalking just got so much easier →
“Tibet is not free! Tibet is not free!”
– Monks at the Jokhang Temple in Tibet who risked life imprisonment by decrying the calamity and “cultural genocide” by China against Tibetans. This was the first visit by foreign journalists since the riots began in Lhasa in March, and was organized by Chinese hosts to demonstrate the...
clean tech boom.. maybe
We are at an impasse all too similar to that of the 1970s. The Yom Kippur War in October of 1973 led to the Arab Oil Embargo on all nations supporting Israel, which sent oil prices soaring. Today we are still at the mercy of the Middle East, with OPEC controlling the production of oil, thus facilitating skyrocketing prices. In 1973 President Nixon created Project Independence, with the goal of...
QQ: Is the current boom in clean energy...
I’m writing a paper on this now. Feel free to share your insight via reblog/email.
“We will never be able to anticipate all discontinuities in financial markets....”
– —Alan Greenspan in this FT article. A lot went down while I was gone.
DJIA Part Deux
The Editor & Executive Director of the Dow Jones Indexes took issue with my opinions and assertions (& my incorrect index creation date..) in my recent post about the Dow Jones Industrial Average. They’ve asked that I share their point of view… In reference to your blog on the Dow Jones Industrial Average, we’d like to correct a couple of things and comment on others. The DJIA was...
"No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while... →
What do ethanol and the subprime mortgage meltdown have in common? Each is a good reminder of that most powerful of unwritten decrees, the Law of Unintended Consequences - and of the all-too-frequent tendency of solutions imposed by the state to exacerbate the harms they were meant to solve. The linked op-ed discusses how the subprime crisis stems from the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 under...
DST today? Who knew?
This is the second year the US has moved daylight savings forward from the first Sunday in April, which was the norm for 20 years, to the first Sunday in March. In 2005 Congress passed an energy mandating this change – anticipating a decrease in energy consumption. But is it so? Benjamin Franklin provided one of the earliest suggestions for daylight savings during his envoy in Paris. He proposed...
Jailhouse Rock →
A new report shows that more than 1 in every 100 US adults is incarcerated. More than 1%!
A Penny Saved..
Did you know that the penny costs more than it’s worth? In fact, it costs 1.2 cents to produce one penny. At its worst, back in 2006, it cost the US Mint 1.75 cents to manufacture each penny. So here’s a hot debate – do we obliterate the penny from our currency? The AP recently had an article about the potential elimination. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson thinks the penny is...
the price of a slice: going up →
foodlation at its worst..Subway fares just increased in NYC, and according to the article linked above, you can expect to dig for some extra quarters the next time you hit up your local pizza place. This seems pretty much in line with the Pizza Connection, which posits that the price of a pizza slice kind of parallels the price of a subway ride. Will we be shelling out $3 for a plain slice by the...
Subprime Primer →
Here’s a neat little nugget about that whole subprime mess. They do a better job at explaining than I did.
“We’ve got to get off oil.”
– President Bush at the Irony Conference. (the International Renewable Energy Conference today in DC)
"Quizno's model - with a twist"
On September 10, 2001, al-Qaeda was a name that was hardly recognized. Though the group was founded in 1988 by Osama Bin Laden and this timeline tells of earlier attacks linked to the group, the name was just not largely recognized. After September 11, however, the world knew al-Qaeda. By the end of the month it became a household name. How is al-Qaeda a brand? Well, to analyze a brand’s...