You are currently browsing the daily archive for November 7th, 2007.
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Sometimes I just open Pandora to find out the name of a song or artist I heard and want to buy from iTunes (or whatever). But then it automatically starts playing and it’s a really cool song and so I have to wait for the song to finish (since there’s no guarantee I’ll hear it again anytime soon). Then another good song comes on. And another. Soon enough, I forgot why I visited. Yeah, it’s a hard life.
Currently loving: Slumber Party: “Detroit femme doom rock with a late-night vibe.” I personally love the combination of 50’s rock harmonies, electronica and beautiful female vocals.
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Wired has taken notice of peak oil, so hopefully the word will start to spread and more and more people will realize we have a massive problem on our hands.
I’ve talked about peak oil before, but to recap it is the notion that at some point, the maximum amount of oil the world has to offer versus our consumption of it, will peak. Supply compared to demand was at its highest level last year, and never again will it be as high. From here on out, it’s a downward journey until there is no oil left. This is in part due to an increase in demand for oil throughout the world. As countries like China and India with massive populations continue to grow and add more cars to their streets, the demand for oil steadily increases. However, oil is a non-renewable resource so once we have exhausted all of it in the world, game over. So real supply is always decreasing (even though available supply may increase at times due to more refineries or pumps — this is temporary).
So you might at first think the road down to oil exhaustion will take a while, since it was practically a century climbing to the top of the hill. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Demand is ever-increasing, which means we will use the supplies up faster and faster. Also, intermittent outages will occur as supplies begin to fail. These shortages will mirror the OPEC oil embargo of the 1970’s. These crises will not just be a couple weeks of long lines, but will have a massive impact on the world economy. A few such crises and countries being cut off altogether will be catastrophic.
Every last thing we have in the west is based on oil. Farming. Plastics. Clothing. The blagoblag. Power production. Solar panels. Wind turbines. Nothing we have could be made without oil as it stands right now. When supplies begin to fail, we’ll see widespread repurcussions. It won’t be pretty.
I’ve been following the progress of Wonkosphere and talking about it for a while now [here, here, and here]. If you’re not familiar with Wonkosphere, it’s a website that tracks the buzz generated by candidates on political blogs. It reports buzz as a percentage of the total buzz by conservative, liberal, and independent bloggers. It also reports the tone of the posts, so you get more than just who is being talked about. So it appears that the buzz share is a predicter of national polling results According to Kevin Dooley of Wonkosphere, it’s not the total percentage of buzz share that is predictive of polling results, but the change in buzz share that predicts where national numbers are going. So are blogs affecting politics (as many have suggested) or are they just reflecting social trends?
Kucinich is doing fairly well today with buzz share, coming in at #3 among Democrats. He spiked a few days ago when his UFO comments incited a conservative love fest of crazy-elf-hippy remarks. Democracy for America held the 2008 Pulse Poll to gather data about people’s choice for who should be the 2008 Democratic contender. The results put Kucinich at a fairly decisive #1, beating out the phantom Al Gore (aka Newest Nobel Turd) and John Edwards. DFA consists primarily of Progressive Democrats, though, so you can’t generalize it to the population at large. However, these people tend to be rather vocal and active politically, so they may start to rub off. It’s a daunting task, though, counteracting the media brick-brain effect (i.e. making your brain into a gray brick).
