The other night the World News cited a Moody’s Economy.com study that showed where the surge in the price of a barrel of oil actually comes from. Moody’s projects that if prices were based solely on supply and demand, a barrel of oil would cost only $75.
$30 is tacked on due to speculators, that is oil futures traders. They’re long oil, buying futures contracts with speculations that prices will continue to rise.
An additional $20 is caused by the weak dollar. Since crude oil is priced in dollars, as the dollar depreciates, higher prices are necessary to maintain a supply and demand balance. Since the dollar has depreciated about 10% in the last year, it buys about 10% less oil than it did a year ago.
The final $10 is attributed to what is called a risk premium — that is the apprehension in the marketplace that deliveries of oil supplies may be disrupted. This happens for a number of geopolitical reasons such as strikes in Nigeria or deterioration in Iraq. Sellers, therefore, demand a premium on current deliveries or hoard oil for future sales.
And there you have $135 barrels of oil. I thought it was interesting, though rather speculative itself.
I want a an infinite whiteboard that can be shared through the net.
It shall be infinite, not only in the x-y dimensions, but in the wrinkles that can be unfolded within, when you need more space.
It shall record its changes through time and be able to play them back at will.
We shall be able to draw, capture, record, clip, type, sing and paste straight into it. Also e-mail something to fall somewhere near an anchor.
We need anchors in this huge space. I want to reference a region or a point and link it from another point inside the board or from the outside; a gateway in time and space.
Once I can find my way I need to organize de space, so I shall need tags, for regions, for objects or for points.
I want to have it in my phone as well.
…
mmm… maybe I can use tumblr as the database, it has tags, it has anchors, it has multimedia.
¿Shall we move less?
I bet that if we build less cars and planes, the blue bar will go down as well.
(liquids refer to liquid fuels)
Just some fragments of this interesting post about Pseudo-modernism:
Postmodernism, like modernism and romanticism before it, fetishised [ie placed supreme importance on] the author, even when the author chose to indict or pretended to abolish him or herself. But the culture we have now fetishises the recipient of the text to the degree that they become a partial or whole author of it. Optimists may see this as the democratisation of culture; pessimists will point to the excruciating banality and vacuity of the cultural products thereby generated (at least so far).
…
Non-reproducible and evanescent, pseudo-modernism is thus also amnesiac: these are cultural actions in the present moment with no sense of either past or future.
…
But a shift has occurred, in that what was a marginal pastime of the fan has become the dominant and definitive way of consuming music [downloading and mix-and-matching of individual tracks on to an iPod], rendering the idea of the album as a coherent work of art, a body of integrated meaning, obsolete.
…
The activity of pseudo-modernism has its own specificity: it is electronic, and textual, but ephemeral.
…
Pseudo-modernism is of course consumerist and conformist, a matter of moving around the world as it is given or sold.
…
In place of the neurosis of modernism and the narcissism of postmodernism, pseudo-modernism takes the world away, by creating a new weightless nowhere of silent autism.
