The Economy
America Love It Or Fix It 2008
If we’re addicted to oil, our twelve-step program should begin with admitting that we have a problem. As the price of oil creeps higher, finding new energy sources is more important than ever. But the search for alternatives, combined with environmental disruptions, is putting new pressures on other essentials like food. There are some things that are going well in the world. Right now, the economy is not one of them.
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always a coincidence...
i just watched the movie thing and a pal of mine happened to be pierin over my shoulder at the same time. No longer than thirty minutes before that we watched the new batman movie. he says in response to the oil/corn thing, "where's our batman."
Posted on July 30, 2008 — by foss
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Whatch'a gonna do?
This is the situation that's drawn me to economics as a major. The hockey stick is going to be the symbol of our times, with exponential growth in so many areas equating exponential depletion in so many others. One of the fascinating things is how, despite everything, hunger is a political problem. Distribution most directly, but political most ultimately. Encroaching "resource peaks" are a consumption efficiency problem most directly, but a political problem ultimately. They are also technology challenges and since we've solved so many other challenges with technology we're tempted to rely on it. The analogy I like most is of a guy who was fat in high school but worked out a lot in order to make it on the football team so later he thinks can always do it again if he really needs to, even though he's becoming morbidly obese and a half-donut away from triple-bypass surgery. We got to the moon within a time-frame we set for ourselves and we win world wars and we built a country from nothing, so we can handle anything, right? So debt spirals out of control, numbers used to measure economic health and growth are changed in increasingly sneaky and dangerous ways (look up "hedonics" and you'll feel like the financial news show you watch totally cheated you), and we're at the wrong end of a housing market and credit bubble. Even GOLD could be overvalued right now. Smart financial policy, a major scaleback of the military industrial complex and a major increase in infrastructure investment and other domestic projects could save us. Bold technology investment would be part of that. Think Extra Bold, like mining asteroids. A lot of materials are difficult to mine because we have to dig so deep, but there's mountains of all kinds of inorganic, usually lighter metals. Sounds crazy, but communication satellites were laughable sci-fi 30 years before Sputnik. Just need the political <strike>will</strike> leadership.
Posted on August 7, 2008 — by ConsumerX
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