Month: April 2004

Real time serendipity

Dave Winer:

What a small world. Gregor Rothfuss is in Zurich, 10 minutes away from the Internet cafe I’m in. He’s coming over. Gregor is the OSCOM guy and was a semi-regular at Berkman Thursdays when he was living in the Boston area last year.

That was fun. All happened within a few minutes. We talked about lots of things, and I told Dave Bloggercon Europe should be in Eastern Europe. Dave seems to like Poland, so I’ll see whether I can make some introductions to the people at the Open Society Institute.

The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity

A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
We can recollect cases in which a fellow took an action by which both parties gained: he was intelligent. Such cases do indeed occur. But upon thoughtful reflection you must admit that these are not the events which punctuate most frequently our daily life. Our daily life is mostly, made of cases in which we lose money and/or time and/or energy and/or appetite, cheerfulness and good health because of the improbable action of some preposterous creature who has nothing to gain and indeed gains nothing from causing us embarrassment, difficulties or harm. Nobody knows, understands or can possibly explain why that preposterous creature does what he does. In fact there is no explanation – or better there is only one explanation: the person in question is stupid.

Peak Oil

When first assuming office in early 2001, President George W. Bush’s top foreign policy priority was not to prevent terrorism or to curb the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Rather, it was to increase the flow of petroleum from suppliers abroad to US markets. In the months before he became president, the United States had experienced severe oil and natural gas shortages in many parts of the country, along with periodic electrical power blackouts in California. In addition, oil imports rose to more than 50% of total consumption for the first time in history, provoking great anxiety about the security of the country’s long-term energy supply. Bush asserted that addressing the nation’s “energy crisis” was his most important task as president.

interesting analysis that links hubberts peak with the carter doctrine.
2007-03-08: Exxon on Peak Oil. Evasive. hmm

Bartiromo … asked Tillerson how Exxon could be expected to keep growing its reserves of oil and gas when $20B a year in capital spending through the rest of this decade will only result in an extra 1M barrels a day in production volume, according to Exxon’s estimates. Tillerson didn’t really answer the question, merely repeating his assertion that Exxon’s volumes will keep growing through the end of the decade. In a later exchange, he added that the world’s oil would not run out in his lifetime.

2018-10-16: OPEC accelerating peak oil? That would be a great way to accelerate the move towards a post-oil society. And of course, make domestic oil even more competitive. Checkmate

While analysts doubt Riyadh would go as far as an energy embargo now, the government has used oil resources to exert political pressure before. During the 19 70s, a Saudi-led coalition slashed oil exports to the US in protest of Washington’s support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War. “We cannot entirely rule out that the leadership would dust off the 1973 playbook if the bilateral relationship with Washington deteriorates sharply from here

2020-12-01: Peak oil now

Most analysts had only predicted declining demand for oil in improbably green scenarios that could only be achieved with far stronger global climate policies. What made BP’s 2020 forecast unique is that peak oil now snuck into its business-as-usual baseline. If technologies and pollution rules improve, the dropoff in demand would be even more swift.

Well-researched Article about how the oil majors are being forced to change.

Energy intensity

Worldchanging on a Moore’s law of efficiency. I wonder how much this is due to improvements in processes and how much due to shifts in value generation from the physical to the virtual.

From 1845 to the present, the amount of energy required to produce the same amount of gross national product has steadily decreased at the rate of 1% / year. 1% / year yields a factor of 2.7 when compounded over 100 years.

2006-10-24: Rosenfeld’s Law

the energy required to produce 1$ of GDP has decreased by ~1% per year since 1845.

2008-02-19: Really puzzling how people can make dumb investments in “real estate” when energy efficiency has an IRR that beats most sectors.

McKinsey Global has an energy productivity plan. An additional $170b per year invested in energy efficiency can provide 17% internal rate of return and cut projected energy demand growth by 50% by 2020. We could use existing technologies to pay for themselves. It would provide up to 50% of the global greenhouse gas avoidance to get to a long term 550 ppm level of GHG in the atmosphere. This would reduce the energy demand in 2020 by 135 quadrillion BTU or the equivalent of 64m barrels of oil per day. Instead of needing 613 quadrillion btu in 2020, there would be a need for 478 quadrillion btu. (In 2003, the world used 422 quadrillion btu).

2008-05-10: Energy intensity

America’s energy intensity was falling by a 0.4% until the oil shock of 1973. It is now falling by 2% a year.

2019-10-04: Andrew McAfee is offering to take a number of bets centered around predictions and implication from his new book More From Less.

In 2029, the US will consume less total energy than it did in 2019. In 2029, the US will produce less total CO2 emissions than it did in 2019, even after taking offshoring into account. Over the 5 years leading up to 2029, the US will use less paper in total than it did over the 5 years leading up to 2019.

2020-04-24: Building energy efficiency

in the past 5 years, the efficiency of the best new and retrofit buildings improved by 2-10x, with terrific economic returns, simply because we became smarter about how to choose and combine the technologies. That can be done in vehicles and industry too: for example, 2x or 3x car efficiency at comparable cost.

Monorom tribute

I could go insane with the web page behind the discussion board. First I could make it 110% xhtml 1.1 + CSS. Heck, why not xhtml 2.0 just to be extra addictive-personality-disordered. Then I could neatly format all the html code so it’s perfectly indented. But the html is generated by a script, and the script has to be indented correctly so that it’s perfect too, and a correctly indented ASP script does not, by definition, produce correctly indented HTML. So I could write a filter that takes the output of the ASP script and reindents it so that if anybody does a View Source they would see neatly indented HTML and think I have great attention to detail. Then I would start to obsess about all the wasted bandwidth caused by meaningless whitespace in the HTML file, and I’d go back and forth in circles between compressed HTML and nicely laid out HTML, pausing only to shave.

monorom, if i ever give you pain about xml:space and other esoteric issues again. consider the above 🙂

Munchhausen

We are the ants building an ant hill. We are neurons building a mind. We are unwittingly constructing something that we can’t even see or understand because we see it too zoomed in. Our descendants are reaching back from the future and pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. Their influence can be felt even now, but will only get stronger.