Purpose:
To give America's future
a better chance to succeed
than our forefathers
gave our parents
and our parents gave us.
|
Branson warns that oil crunch: Energy crisis threatens to be more serious than credit crunch
Sir Richard Branson and fellow leading businessmen will warn ministers this week that the world is running out of oil and faces an oil crunch within five years.
…Other British executives who will support the warning include Ian Marchant, chief executive of Scottish and Southern Energy group, and Brian Souter, chief executive of transport operator Stagecoach.
Their call for urgent government action comes amid a wider debate on the issue and follows allegations by insiders at the International Energy Agency that the organization had deliberately underplayed the threat of so-called “peak oil” to avoid panic on the stock markets.
…The issue came up at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos where Thierry Desmarest, chief executive of the Total oil company in France, also broke ranks. The world could struggle to produce more than 95m barrels of oil a day in future, he said – 10% above present levels. “The problem of peak oil remains.”
Chris Skrebowski, an independent oil consultant who prepared parts of the peak oil report for Branson and others, said that only recession is holding back a crisis…Skrebowski believes that Britain is particularly vulnerable because it has gone from being a net exporter of oil, gas and coal to being an importer, and is becoming increasingly exposed to competition for supplies.
The question of peak oil came to centre stage last November when a whistleblower told the Guardian the figures provided by the IEA – and used by the UK and US governments for much of their planning scenarios – were inaccurate.
“The IEA in 2005 was predicting that oil supplies could rise as high as 120m barrels a day by 2030, although it was forced to reduce this gradually to 116m and then 105m last year,” said the IEA source. “The 120m figure always was nonsense but even today’s number is much higher than can be justified and the IEA knows this.”
Terry Macalister
guardian.co.uk
 Print This Post
Govs feel the weight of wielding budget ax
…Since taking office last year, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) has criticized accounting gimmicks and borrowing that, she has said, led to the Grand Canyon State’s current budget “crisis.”
But now Brewer is defending a compromise she struck with state legislators that relies on the same type of budget tricks and borrowing…
…the state would borrow $750 million and delay making $450 million worth of payments into the next fiscal year…
In neighboring Nevada, Gov. Jim Gibbons (R) plans to call legislators back to the capitol by the end of the month to deal with an $880 million gap in the current two-year budget…
…the $880 million shortfall would require a 20 percent cut of state government operations…as The Associated Press explains it: “Nevada’s budget is so far out of balance that by one account the state could lay off every worker paid from the general fund and still be $300 million in the red. The economic downturn has hit so hard that prisons may be closed, entire colleges shuttered and thousands left without jobs.”
…Gibbons’ plans would result in the layoffs of 234 state employees. But the layoffs won’t save the state as much as many people think, because the state still must pay for unemployment benefits…
…school superintendents maintain that to make the 20 percent reduction, without pay cuts, they will have to resort to massive layoffs, larger class sizes and maybe even a shorter school year.
Stateline.org
All warfare is based on deception,
…when able to attack we must seem unable,
when using our forces we must seem inactive,
when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far…,
when far away, we must make him believe we are near.
Sun Tzu
China’s hawks demand cold war on the US
…almost 55% of those questioned for Global Times, a state-run [Chinese] newspaper, agree that “a cold war will break out between the US and China”.
An independent survey of Chinese-language media … has found army and navy officers predicting a military showdown and political leaders calling for China to sell more arms to America’s foes. The trigger for their fury was Obama’s decision to sell $6.4 billion (£4 billion) worth of weapons to Taiwan, the thriving democratic island that has ruled itself since 1949.
“We should retaliate with an eye for an eye and sell arms to Iran, North Korea, Syria, Cuba and Venezuela,” declared Liu Menxiong, a member of the Chinese people’s political consultative conference.
He added: “We have nothing to be afraid of. The North Koreans have stood up to America and has anything happened to them? No. Iran stands up to America and does disaster befall it? No.”
…“This time China must punish the US,” said Major-General Yang Yi, a naval officer. “We must make them hurt.” A major-general in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), Luo Yuan, told a television audience that more missiles would be deployed against Taiwan. And a PLA strategist, Colonel Meng Xianging, said China would “qualitatively upgrade” its military over the next 10 years to force a showdown “when we’re strong enough for a hand-to-hand fight with the US”.
Chinese indignation was compounded when the White House said Obama would meet the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet, in the next few weeks.
“When someone spits on you, you have to get back,” said Huang Xiangyang, a commentator in the China Daily newspaper, usually seen as a showcase for moderate opinion.
An internal publication at the elite Qinghua University last week predicted the strains would get worse because “core interests” were at risk. It said battles over exports, technology transfer, copyright piracy and the value of China’s currency, the yuan, would be fierce.
…American officials seem baffled by what has gone wrong and how fast it has happened.
…Diplomats say they have been told that there was “frigid” personal chemistry between Obama and the Chinese president, with none of the superficial friendship struck up by previous leaders of the two nations.
…Americans were also livid at what they saw as deliberate Chinese attempts to humiliate the president by sending lower-level officials to deal with him.
…In Beijing, some diplomats even claim to detect a condescending attitude towards Obama, noting that Yang Jiechi, the foreign minister, prides himself on knowing the Bush dynasty and others among America’s traditional white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant elite.
Michael Sheridan
Times Online
February 8th, 2010 | Tags: Science Ethics 1. Beginning with none of the oxygen that we breath, it is estimated that life on Earth has been around for about 3.9 billion years.
Somewhere in the first billion years or so, some life forms started excreting oxygen, which poisoned and killed all of the other life forms on the planet at the time.
It took about 2 billion years to get to the level of oxygen we have now.
2. Out of the estimated 100 million asteroids that that intersect with the Earth’s orbit around the sun, there are about 2,000 big enough to cause a major extinction. Mass extinctions of life on Earth occurred 440, 251 (asteroid), 210 and 65 (asteroid) million years ago. About 74,000 years ago, a volcano caused the last widespread extinction.
If the average species on Earth lasted about four million years, chances are that 99.99% of the approximately thirty billion species of everything that has ever lived on Earth is extinct.
The more complex life was, the faster it may have disappeared.
3. If life on Earth were one day, a big meteor would have hit it about every 3 minutes. Plants on land showed up around 10 P. M., or about 450 million years ago. Insects showed up around 10:30 P.M. and dinosaurs about 11 P.M.
No one knew about dinosaurs until 1855.
Some scientists figure Homo Sapiens have been around somewhere between 150,000 to 1,800,000 years, or about 20 seconds before midnight, or .04% or less of the approximate age of the planet. Modern human beings have existed for about 10,000 years, or 0.0001% of Earth’s age.
.
Don’t worry, be happy
-Bobby Mcferrin
February 7th, 2010 | Tags: Accounting Ethics, CPA Continuing Education, Debt, Generational Ethics, Great Depression, Journalism Ethics, Political Ethics, Social Security, Statistics, Unemployment If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it,
people will eventually come to believe it.
The lie can be maintained only for such time
as the State can shield the people
from the political, economic and/or military consequences.
Joseph Goebbels
Statistics mask real economic pain
The jobless rate improved this week. It’s now 9.7 percent.
So it sounds as if Henry Paulson…can join Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers in self-congratulation over their roles in preventing a second Great Depression.
They can all cite today’s jobless rate and contrast it favorably to 1933, when it was about 25 percent.
…But the fact is that private-sector employment actually looks worse than during the Great Depression. If you compare the numbers with 1933, more than a third of U.S. workers are jobless today.
…In 1933, 25% of the working population meant 12.8 million people were out of work in a workforce of about 51 million. That included senior citizens, because only about 10% of older people had pensions in those years before Social Security.
Now, the federal government says we have an estimated 14.8 million unemployed, out of a work force of about 154 million. But that number is artificially lower than in the Great Depression because 33 million senior citizens are on Social Security — and not seeking jobs as they were then. An additional 7.4 million adults receive disability payments under Social Security, and some would also have been seeking work in 1933.
But that’s not all. We have a far larger standing military than in 1933 — about 1 percent of the work force, or 1.4 million men and women.
Another 1.6 million people are in jails and prisons, a near-record amount, and again a larger percentage of able-bodied U.S. residents than in 1933. They are excluded from the statistics today.
In other words, 43.4 million people are paid for government employment in the military, or supported through government programs. If added to the jobless numbers, it equals about 58 million people.
…The big difference now is that despair is masked. Social Security and the expansions of unemployment insurance mean that people are able to keep the wolf from the door. The bread lines of the 1930s are food banks.
…Maybe that’s one reason why the American people are so angry at their leaders. They know that many of the government statistics are often just statistical sleight-of-hand.
Kirstin Downey
Politico.com
February 7th, 2010 | Tags: Science Ethics 1. Earth revolves around and receives light and energy from the Sun, whose core is estimated to be 27,000,000° F. The Sun’s interior could hold 1.3 million Earths.
The Sun appears to have been active for 4.6 billion years and may have enough fuel to go on for another five billion years or so.
Earth is about 4.55 billion years old.
About 50,000,000 years after Earth was formed, an asteroid and/or another planet about the size of Mars crashed into it, creating the moon.
3. Earth is one of nine known planets in our solar system.
Earth orbits the sun at 66,000 miles per hour and is spinning at 1,041 miles per hour at the equator.
3. The surface of Earth is made up of big slowly moving plates, the center is about 3,959 miles away, and is probably hot in the middle.
4. When comparing Earth to the rest of the universe, it is very, very, very small.
So is the Sun, the solar system and the Milky Way.
Council Committee Recommends Cuts To Police, Fire Departments
…the Los Angeles City Council’s Budget and Finance Committee on Monday recommended that cuts be made to the police and fire department…
The city is operating $208.5 million in the red and must make drastic cuts to make its fiscal budget by July. City Administrative Officer Miguel Santana is recommending 1,500 city-worker layoffs as well as the elimination of the Human Relations Commission, Commission on the Status of Women, the Children, Youth and Families Commission, the departments of Disability and Environmental Affairs, the Fire Department’s next recruit class, and the Department of Cultural Affairs grants program.
Dennis Romero
LA Weekly
TrimTabs: Here’s Why The Real Jobs Loss Number Was 5x Worse Than What The BLS Reported
TrimTabs employment analysis, which uses real-time daily income tax deposits from all U.S. taxpayers to compute employment growth, estimated that the U.S. economy shed 104,000 jobs in January. Meanwhile, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported the U.S. economy lost 20,000 jobs.
…The BLS has seriously underreported job losses for the past two years due to their flawed methodology. TrimTabs has identified the following four problems:
1. The BLS employment estimate is based on a survey, and not on an actual count of employees…TrimTabs believes that rapid changes in an employment cycle cannot be captured by surveys.
2. Several times a year, the BLS applies enormous seasonal adjustments to their survey results to account for seasonal fluctuations in the job market. For example, this January, the BLS added 1.92 million jobs to their survey results to report a job loss of 20,000 to account for the layoff of retail holiday workers. In our opinion, the sheer magnitude of the seasonal adjustment which dwarfs the monthly result renders this month’s job loss estimate meaningless.
3. At the time of the first release, only 40% to 60% of the BLS survey is complete and is subject to large revisions over the next two months.
4. The BLS applies a mysterious “birth/death” adjustment to their survey results to account for business openings and closings. While the payroll data was adjusted substantially, the “birth/death” adjustments were left unchanged. In 2008 and 2009, the BLS’ “birth/death” adjustment added 904,000 and 882,000 jobs, respectively, for a total of 1.79 million. By way of comparison, in 2006 and 2007, the BLS’ “birth/death” adjustment added 964,000 and 1.13 million jobs, respectively. We find it highly unlikely that in 2008 and 2009, during the worst recession since the 1930’s, more businesses opened than closed netting 1.79 million jobs.
In our opinion, flawed BLS survey results, month-after-month, do the public a huge disservice. While its results point to a slowly recovering economy, TrimTabs’ results point to a dangerously weak economy.
TrimTabs via The Business Insider
…the level of employment today, at 129.5 million, is the exact same level it was in 1999. And, during this 11-year span of Japanese-like labour market stagnation, the working-age population has risen 29 million. Contemplate that for a moment; fully 29 million people competing for the same number of jobs that existed more than a decade ago.
David Rosenberg
via Mauldin via The Business Insider
Candidates and current Greensboro City Council members and Guilford County Commissioners should be prohibited from entering into for-profit enterprises dependent upon public support.
Candidates and current Greensboro City Council members and Guilford County Commissioners should be prohibited from making campaign contributions to entities who publicly endorse political candidates.
Candidates and current Greensboro City Council members and Guilford County Commissioners should be prohibited from accepting campaign contributions from those with conflicts of interests, including leading members of organizations receiving taxpayer money, and/or developers, contractors or their lawyers or agents, for 12 months before and after doing business with Greensboro and Guilford County’s governments.
Suggestions or Objections?
|
Disclaimers
What you may think I'm thinking
isn't necessarily what I'm thinking.
Format originally conceived
to conform
to compliance guidelines
for strategic, economic planning
and financial ethics courses,
for CPAs, attorneys and investors.
If anything can be refined,
don't be surprized
if some posts read differently
later.
Efficacy
through understanding
could be exponential,
as long as most don't know
what they could.
Writing style
is kind of like poetry
only different,
with as little punctuation
possible.
It's not supposed to be easy.
Many opinions expressed
are those of the author
as of the date of the post
and are subject to change
without notice.
Some views
do not necessarily represent
author opinions
or anyone elses.
Information
has been obtained from sources
believed to be reliable,
but accuracy is not guaranteed.
The material has been prepared
solely for information purposes.
The site’s content is provided
as general information only
and should not be taken
as investment or tax advice.
Fine print can take
what big print gives.
All site content
including advertisements
shall not be construed
as a recommendation
to buy or sell any security
or financial instrument,
or to participate in any trading
or investment strategy.
Any action taken
as a result of information, analysis
or advertisement on this site,
is ultimately reader responsibility.
Consult
investment or tax advisers
before investment decisions.
Past perfromance
is no guarantee of future results.
If you were
who you think you were,
and you are
what you think you are,
and some of what will
can, can’t or won’t change,
you may not be
who you think you’ll be.
Some of what was
may not have happened
the way you think.
The only two certainties,
are that you
and everything that’s not you
exists.
Without written exemptions,
sometimes multiple restrictions
may not apply,
unless they do.
Most information
is hypothetical.
What you don’t know
you don’t know
is more than you think.
If what others
think was, is and may
might not be what you do,
weigh author and self bias.
Author is not liable
if observation
alters the observed.
Think for yourself
and act accordingly.
The actual existence
of some information
can neither be confirmed
nor denied.
Author is not responsible
if some hypothetical questions
may not be,
under alternative interpretations.
Charles Darwin
may have been adopted.
Reality may or may not be
more than you think.
Time may exist independently
of human consciousness.
You may be a robot
and not know.
Nothing doesn’t change.
You can’t start over.
|
Recent Comments