Demand, Prices Up DATA: The Big Picture, one of my new favorite blogs, has an interesting post showing the price of Oil and Copper in relation to increased Chinese demand. (I read this as a causation relationship, but it may just be correlation.)



In any case, the era of cheap energy spurting from the ground will be drawing to a close very soon. I hope we're prepared.  ¶ 10:49 AM 2 Comments

  Paper Haters DATA: An interesting article by the C. S. Monitor suggests that young people wouldn't subscribe to a newspaper even if it was free. Ouch.

According to the Washington City Paper, an alternative weekly, a recent internal Washington Post study found that many young people would refuse free subscriptions because they don't want bulky newspapers cluttering up their homes.

Younger people are used to news content on the Internet, which allows them to pick from lists of headlines instead of flipping through pages to find stories that interest them, says Adam Penenberg, assistant professor in the business and economic reporting program at New York University. "They customize their news-gathering experience in a way a single paper publication could never do," Mr. Penenberg wrote in a Wired News column last year. "And their hands never get dirty from newsprint."

  ¶ 3:58 PM 0 Comments

  Environmental Heresies DATA: Be sure to check out Tech Review's Environmental Heresies
By Stewart Brand. It's a great article about how environmentalism is changing and must continue to change. The article says that environmentalists must embrace technology (like GM foods and Nuclear power) that they have so far opposed -- which to me makes perfect sense. I've always considered myself an environmentalist, and have always supported advancing these technologies. To me, anything that is a step away from oil is a step in the right direction.

That’s great news for environmentalists (or it will be when finally noticed), but they need to recognize what caused the turnaround. The world population growth rate actually peaked at 2 percent way back in 1968, the very year my old teacher Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb. The world’s women didn’t suddenly have fewer kids because of his book, though. They had fewer kids because they moved to town.

Cities are population sinks-always have been. Although more children are an asset in the countryside, they’re a liability in the city. A global tipping point in urbanization is what stopped the population explosion. As of this year, 50 percent of the world’s population lives in cities, with 61 percent expected by 2030. In 1800 it was 3 percent; in 1900 it was 14 percent.

The environmentalist aesthetic is to love villages and despise cities. My mind got changed on the subject a few years ago by an Indian acquaintance who told me that in Indian villages the women obeyed their husbands and family elders, pounded grain, and sang. But, the acquaintance explained, when Indian women immigrated to cities, they got jobs, started businesses, and demanded their children be educated. They became more independent, as they became less fundamentalist in their religious beliefs. Urbanization is the most massive and sudden shift of humanity in its history. Environmentalists will be rewarded if they welcome it and get out in front of it. In every single region in the world, including the U.S., small towns and rural areas are emptying out. The trees and wildlife are returning. Now is the time to put in place permanent protection for those rural environments. Meanwhile, the global population of illegal urban squatters—which Robert Neuwirth’s book Shadow Cities already estimates at a billion—is growing fast. Environmentalists could help ensure that the new dominant human habitat is humane and has a reduced footprint of overall environmental impact.

  ¶ 12:19 PM 1 Comments

  Moving + New Job > Blogging ASSEMBLEME: I'll be posting less frequently for at least a month, and quite possibly up to three. Moving across the country and finding a new job is going to be eating up a fair amount of my time. ;-)  ¶ 12:14 PM 0 Comments

  Bubble Data DATA: Consumer Reports has a table that purports to tell which US housing markets are overpriced, which are undervalued, and which are at a fair value. This is good information to have for those thinking about moving from renting to buying, or those thinking about selling and renting -- especially with growing news about a possible real-estate bubble.

The Local Market Monitor, a Wellesley, Mass., real-estate consulting company, prepared for Consumer Reports this list of more than 125 housing markets in the U.S. The average home price is listed for each metropolitan area. Areas where real-estate values seem unusually high based on historical price/income ratios are rated as "overpriced. " Markets where prices and incomes were near equilibrium ratios, or the "affordable price," are listed as "fair value." Markets where home prices seem low relative to incomes are listed as "undervalued." The right-hand columns list annual price gains (or losses) through the third quarter of 2004, and quarter to quarter for 2004, according to data compiled by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO).

  ¶ 1:50 PM 0 Comments