Monday, November 30, 2009

The crisis is Energy

The climate change debate has been set on edge by the revelation that records were "homogenised" and the original data lost by the East Anglia researchers. The conservative columnists seem to be convinced that disproving human created pollution is affecting our environment is their duty, even if it is. The risk to cities and low lands over the next 90 years or so, notwithstanding.

It is as though the threat to business, if the oil taps are turned off one day, is simply untenable. It is as though the status quo was a holy relic to be preserved for ever and a day.

The answer is not limiting productivity; it is finding better and less expensive ways to use energy. The oil industry is not really that different to the cancer causing tobacco giants - oil is however intimately tied with the economic model of industry. Industry can change direction, replace oil use by creating opportunities and find ways to produce energy without risk or damage to the environment.

As it is possible to achieve this, and failure to do so results in no conservation of the world as it was, the progress of clean technology remains an important priority for research and development.

Thursday, November 26, 2009

Sovereign Debt - UPDATE

Dubai has asked that it may suspend payment on it's extraordinary property development schemes including Palm Island, projects that are owned by a holding company, 100% owned by the Dubai government. It is therefore "Sovereign Debt".

What is disturbing is that loaning governments may respond to Dubai effectively giving the Dubai economy a bail out. There really is no reason to, as the holding company is limited in liability therefore creditors may sit it out and not seek it's downfall, as they have too much invested and the incomplete project has less value than a completed one.

The actual risk involved (apart from the unnecessary environmental intrusion) if Dubai borrowed more to cover payments and keep building, seem minimal. If the company cannot borrow more, then creditors may tolerate late payment.

The news of Dubai's possible default had a large impact on world financial markets


December 1st, 2009
UPDATE: Dubai government will not support the debt as it is a problem for negotiation with creditors BBC

Views of Dubai - "you can go to prison for a bounced cheque" "I am trapped here"

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Loan Traps

Organisations that feed off poverty by lending with ridiculous rates are coming under a bit of a spotlight of protest in the UK. As they should. Anyone who loans money to another person is entering a business transaction. If the APR is over 15% per annum, and the borrower has to pay more than 15% of their income in loan repayments, it is bound to fail. With APRs as high as hundreds of percent per annum, and incomes being uncertain, it does not take much fancy maths to see that it is a trap that the poor will never see the end of.

However, the same could be said of credit cards, sub-prime mortgages in general and much business debt. It simply has a future of not being repaid.

What does that mean? It means suffering, stress and the undoing of the potential of real lives for the sake of enriching a person or organisation that is essentially criminal in their intent. To profit from the suffering of others.

A new economic model is required. The current one may have suited a smaller world but the majority of humanity is being used by a small rich minority in an intergenerational scam that enslaves the lives of the many.

One solution is revolution. Economic revolution.

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

US Debt Tsunami

The US debt emergency is coming, and it is a man made Tsunami – after the erasure of an accumulation of massive fictional wealth – the complex debt structures borrowed with leverage against assumptions that have resulted in systemic deficiencies and bailouts – and may result in the collapse of one set of rules in favour of a new set.

More

Monday, November 23, 2009

Head of IMF says keep stimulus

When the head of the IMF speaks, the bankers sit up and listen. But is his advice going to be any more accurate than anyone else's?

It is hard to continue to mount up the debts investing in stability when jobs replacing all those that have vanished from the economy seem to fail to appear again anywhere else.

Governments may not recognise it is not just stability of the institutions that exchange and invest funds but the intergenerational pause that may work out far more costly.

There is a tendency to inherit old political stances and watch polls, instead of knowing what you are doing and hanging on for dear life as your popularity finally rises toward the end of your term.

More... Change is necessary

Grisly Cosmetics

A Peruivan gang made a "wrinkle cream" from human fat collected from scores of murdered peasants.

"The gang have been nicknamed the Pishtacos after the ruthless assassins of indigenous Quechua legend who ambushed solitary victims and drained their fat as an offering to gods to make the land fertile. Another version depicts them as cannibal bandits who ate the skin and sold the fat. The stories date back to before the European conquest."

Friday, November 20, 2009

One answer

Intellectual Ventures - a group of scientists who are coming up with viable scientific ideas that can help quell the effects of arctic ice loss due to global warming but imitation of volcanic spewing of sulphur dixoide into the stratosphere at about 60 degrees north, should cool the atmosphere.

Scientists love to isolate a problem and think outside the box. Intellectual Ventures has some innovative solutions.

Monday, November 16, 2009

The Problem with Global Warming

Reduction targets as a goal seem ignore a fundamental problem. We are overheating the world by increasing our activity levels year on year. It is politically unsound to rail against productivity growth.

More on NZ being the worst climate offender - and what is wrong with our approach to global warming.

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Making Peace - Summary

Full article: Automatic Removed Warriors here, ends with this summary:

Military action always brings chaos.

Imagined political change is not sufficient reason to justify violence.

In 40 years nobody has tried peace as a solution.

Sharing the wealth with education and respectively putting up with the strange rituals of the other as something private is progressive as successful pluralities emerge.