The Iron Yuppie

Who's Gaming Oil?

Ran across this blog and immediately subscribed. I'm not sure who's running it or what their motivation might be, but it appears to be a fairly good roll up of recent stories on the oil price rise. More fundamental than even proliferation, I believe that oil will be the most dangerous and destabilizing factor in the world in the next decade. I suppose it's possible that it already has been. Though I talked briefly about this before, it feels like one of two things are happening right now: one, we're having trouble finding enough oil to meet our needs and this will be only exacerabated when India and China get fully up to speed; or, two, somebody is making some change through speculation and artificial shortages a la the energy market in 2001. Whether or not it is artificial, we are sitting on a finite amount of energy in the form of oil, and we had better get on a horse and start looking to diversify either now or in the near future. I don't care how much drilling you do in the Gulf or in Alaska, you can only get so much oil!

FLICKA via AdLand

It's in a foreign language (Swedish?), so just click through and let the page finish loading (the LADDAR will keep flashing on and off until it's done). Then click on the orange splash. Check out how amazingly easy it is to take a standard photo and morph it into the image of beauty. And people wonder why we have a distorted sense of self-image. Or maybe people don't wonder. The problem is that with the market so tuned to giving us what we want if you had the above picture next on the cover of a magazine next to the touched up one, the touched up one would fly off the shelves. I'm not sure WHAT the way out of this mess is, but I don't think the magazine editors are going to be leading the charge on this one. It's going to take something from outside like the "Save the Dolphins" campaign around Tuna. Maybe "Save the Mental Health of the 15 year old"?

Carly's Gone. HP Celebrates.

Wow, this is pretty sad. To paraphrase an invidiual on Slashdot, "You know you're doing something wrong if the employees pop Champagne when you leave." Yikes!

Neocons May Get the Last Laugh

A Republican friend of mine sent me this article and I have to say it certainly looks to be correct. Democracy, or the appearance of democracy anyway, does appear to be spreading. Bill Mahr had a really good point the other day on Fresh Air... if you are a politician, you basically have no opportunity to change your mind or else you're labeled a flip-flopper and inconsistent. I was against the war in the way it was executed and I did not think it was beneficial for us to go into Iraq for any of the stated reasons (WMD, democracy, etc). However, let me take this opportunity to illustrate why I will never hold public office by saying I was wrong. There is no doubt that the war in Iraq has made it clear that if you appear that you are even remotely against the democracy of your people (and your name does not end in "hina") your days are numbered. I question how much of this is window dressing and lucky timing... Syria still has not pulled out; we do not know _what_ kind of democracy will be installed in Iraq (is a theocracy which is against the U.S. better than Saddam?); Arafat died opening up the opportunity for new leadership (unless the CIA is into giving people cancer); and so on. Even with the caveats, the world is taking notice. An open question is how much of a “crazy hobo” strategy is this? By that I mean if you're interested in getting everyone to walk on the other side of the street, one option is to ask every one nicely to move over and politely wait. Another option is to defecate on yourself and scream profanities at the top of your lungs. Are these folks moving over there because you've made a convincing argument or because there's so wigged out by what you're doing they are just staying as far out of your range as possible. My gut tells me the latter is the case, and this does not lend itself to self sustaining stability for the long term. The only way to get people to walk on the other side of the street and keep them there is to provide a more compelling reason for why that is a good thing. Of course my gut has shown bad predictive ability in recent months/years; maybe I should stop listening to it.

Query Letters I Love

Everything creative has already been done. Until now! The concept is the author of this blog posts actual query letters about screenplay ideas. I subscribed to this so fast I sprained my mouse clicking finger.

Yahoo! News - Suicide Bomb Kills 125 Near Iraq Marketplace

I was actually looking on some of my favorite blogging sites for coverage of this brutal bombing today, but I could hardly find anything. I must admit I'm surprised, especially from a lot of the bloggers who I read with daily coverage of the activities over there (before you send me an avalanche of postings, just assume for a second that I looked through my blog roll (on the right) and did not see the coverage).

Anyhow, I've been thinking about these events for a long time. My conclusion is that the lawfulness of our society basically depends on the ability of people not to be able to do math supported by a moral system. I know that many many people have stated opinions like this before (Hobbes would be one of the most well known), but the only reason that people are not out committing crime all the time is that people are generally afraid of getting caught. I do not believe beneath our chewy exterior we are all sociopaths just waiting to murder at the earliest opportunity, but minor, and even major, non-violent crime seems only to be deterred by the thin blue line of police enforcement. If just 2% of the population decided to commit a crime, there is no way the police could prevent it, let alone catch a significant amount. In Iraq, where there is effectively no enforcement, some vanishingly small percent (less than 2%) actually are out there committing crimes. Most are not the type of this terrible suicide bombing... most are stealing wire or taking bribes or other corruption. And, as a result, a lawless culture is born. I believe that this lawless culture then engenders the acceptability of more severe crimes like the one from today. Unless you turn EVERYONE into police officers or create wide spread vigilantism, crime will continue to be wide spread until the population begins to police itself through social norms. I'd like to think that creating this sort of self-enforcing culture would have been far more important than elections and certainly would have been possible sooner had we done a bit more sensible planning up front.

OXO International

NOBODY makes products like these guys. NOBODY. My favorite is this:

Oxo Measuring Cup Look at it! You can see what's being measured from the top so you don't have to bend over as you're pouring your liquid in! It's so smart.

I wish they made more; I'd be willing to buy it all. Oxo umbrella. Oxo 1040 form. Oxo car. Oxo relationship. Oxo baby. Sign me up!

Soros sees oil tie to dollar slide

As a very recent visitor to our neighbor to the north, I miss the days of getting a 50% sale on everything I bought up there. Thanks to the weak dollar, it’s practically the same as spending American coin up there (and getting a huge price hike)! According to George Soros, a man who knows a little bit about currency speculation, the fact that the central banks in oil exporting countries have moved from dollars to euros as a currency of exchange is the reason I’m paying so much more for a crepe, a Cuban cigar and a pair of Aldo boots. Is it possible that those countries are afraid of some form of punitive action by the US administration and are trying to limit the U.S.’s ability to get funding in a pre-emptive attempt to stop said action? Or could it be that they just do not trust that we will not fall into a spiraling deficit? Anyone who knows more about this than many (READ: anyone), please feel free to enlighten me.

FCC Censorship via /.

How can anyone in the FCC justify this? The point is that it is less harmful (according to the government) to dump toxic waste than it is to show half a boob during the super bowl. I may be expressing the full measure of blue state perception here, but I cannot imagine anyone on Earth making a case that the disparity between those two fines makes sense.

The Kerry Spot on National Review Online

I disagree with Mr. Geraghty on two points:

1) "So many American news consumers" may be a bit of an exaggeration. First, the NYT and WaPo still get more readership than most other daily papers put together. Further, reading news is not exclusive... it is possible to read more than one news source in a given news cycle. With online aggregators, either through blogs, web sites and the like, I would argue that it is more likely than ever that people get multiple view points on a given story.

2) The coverage at the Belmont Club as well as the Captain's Quarters appears to be just as biased in the opposite direction. Except for the one comment from Hilary Clinton about the success of the Insurgency (is that capitalized or what?), they are all positive stories, including the non-story about Canada sending 30 soldiers to train Iraqis. Surely there must be SOMETHING negative happening in Iraq that can be covered.

Perhaps the problem here is not the publication of the stories, but the perception of unbiasedness of any outlet. I've read the NYT for a long time, and I've thought it to be fairly unbiased, so I may be a bad test for this, but what we really need is not for outlets to change their reporting style, but to have an unambigous way of understanding exactly what a news outlet's biases really are. Accurate ways of measuring and reporting this are yet to be determined.