Political chemistry of oil spills

TED Talks latest podcast, The political chemistry of oil spills: Lisa Margonelli, is a quick paced lesson through a little chemistry and a lot of politics around oil and the eventual spills.  While the discussion of politics and economics towards the end is very US centric; it probably applies to us in Australia and many other countries.  The video is embedded at bottom of this post.  The video is interesting as their are a several incredible slides, including the attempt to burn spills and charts on the petroleum consumption in the US economy.

One of the aspects of the talk that stuck with me is that in the US citizens are subsidising petrol (gas) through taxation.  The military activities and 3rd world development projects funded by through taxation allows for the price at the pump to stay low.  This was described as a shell game in hiding the true cost of the petrol at the pump.

The morality of the oil industry and theatre that results from senate committees criticising oil company CEOs appear to have gotten in the way changing the laws that could enable change in how petroleum is consumed in the US economy.

There's a lot more, but I can't do it justice.  Take the 17 minutes 34 seconds to watch the video below.

$6k on $100k

The use of measuring government debt against the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) makes sense to me.  While not an economist, so there are bound to be other benefits that I don't find obvious, to me it provides for benchmarking against other countries and gives an indicator for how easily or difficult it is to pay off.  But the whole GDP is not available to pay off the government debt.  When Prime Minister Gillard gave the analogy over the weekend that the current net debt is like someone on $100k pa having a loan of $6k, it gave the impression that the whole GDP was available.

Using the current debt, taxation and GDP figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics I'd like to complete the analogy started by Ms Gillard.

This person on $100k runs a business, works with charities / social programs and a has a family to provide for.  The $100k is the total revenue(???) from the business.

Without intending to accumulated debt for charities / social programs he/she has made investments in the names of these social programs.  This is important work so this person has been willing to carry some debt for the social work.  Currently the debt is $6k more than the investments.

The business this person runs can be debt intensive.  The current debt held by the business in excess of any investments in the business's name is HOLD.

This person also needs to provide shelter for their family.  The mortgage on the family home is currently HOLD.

So the hypothetical GDP person has debt HOLD times their income.  Probably not as stretched as the typical Aussie with a mortgage at the moment.  But still not able to wipe the net government debt out by living cheaply for a month as implied by PM Gillard over the weekend.      

NBN you have when you don't have an NBN

Waiting not so patiently for...

Landscape 500... a photo competition being run by Christian Fletcher.  I've got the sunset at freo and two photos of a similar theme ready to go.

Focus

This American Life podcast's current episode, 408: Island Time, covers the importance of focus in getting a job done.  In this case covering how focus has failed in the Non Government Agencies from improving the economic success of Haiti in 50 years.  At least this is the point of act 1.  The remaining acts deal with other trials and tribulations in Haiti.

FaceBook, What FaceBook?

I've started the deletion process.  Just in case I wake up screaming as if from a bad dream, FaceBook is protecting me from myself.  I have to wait for a fortnight, that's 14 days for those not part of the Commonwealth, for the deletion to take effect.

I was getting concerned with the changing privacy settings late last year.  This concern was heightened after the April 2010 change, after which some photos that I was convinced were only accessible to a group of friends could be found via a web search.  I think someone in the group sent the images on to others within FaceBook and effectively opened up the photos to others and are now available to the whole world.

Matt McKeon has posted a graphical representation of the changing access to information from the default privacy settings from 2005 to April 2010.  This highlights the importance of the default settings and being aware.

Add to the above FaceBooks recent changes which extends it's presence through the web, with 'like button' and 'Instant Personalization' and sharing with docs.com, yelp.com, etc.  The privacy settings for these are back in FaceBook and it appears you need to play whack-a-mole with the settings.  Each time a new service is integrated you need to actively go and adjust the settings.  There doesn't appear to be a global setting for these personalization and sharing options.

I've decided it is too much effort to try and get this working properly and it was time to opt out.  As opting in is to play the games as per FaceBooks evolving rules.  This is FaceBook's view on the issue, via Elliot Schrage (vice president for public policy at Facebook), presented on New York Times' Bits Blog:

Why not simply set everything up for opt-in rather than opt-out? Facebook seems to assume that users generally want all the details of their private lives made public. – abycats, New York

Everything is opt-in on Facebook. Participating in the service is a choice. We want people to continue to choose Facebook every day. Adding information — uploading photos or posting status updates or “like” a Page — are also all opt-in. Please don’t share if you’re not comfortable. That said, we certainly will continue to work to improve the ease and access of controls to make more people more comfortable. Your assumption about our assumption is simply incorrect. We don’t believe that. We’re happy to make the record on that clear.

Leo Laporte deleted his account recently, video evidence below.

Tea

 

Tea art over at The Evil Genius in Residence. I'm off to get a cuppa now.