Joe lay back on his elbows and smiled to himself. The soft sand was piled up under the blanket and made a kind of chaise-longue for him. His eyes were fixed on Steph and their dog, Boomer, playing together on the wet sand. There was a fundamental beauty to seeing them so carefree and happy; Steph had her ‘real’ smile on her face.
Joe cast his mind back to the first row that had errupted from him saying that he wanted to get a dog. Steph had been adamant that she disliked, even hated, dogs and that there would never be a place for a dog in their lives. They were too busy, too socially active, too young, too recently cohabiting to even consider that kind of responsibility. She had gone on to be quite clear that her veto was partly predicated on the fact that she fully expected that if they did keep a dog, she would do all of the work.
Of couse it didn’t work out that way. Three weeks later Boomer was living with them and even though Joe tried to do all of the work, Boomer really was Steph’s dog.
---
This Ficlet, as with all of my 'Friday' Ficlets, was inspired by a photograph on Flickr. In the spirit of the Creative Commons ideal (these stories are published under a CC license) I will find a photo on Flickr each week that is published there under a Creative Commons License and write a story that occurs to me when looking at the picture. This week's picture is here:
Photo by Sharkbait - Please click the photo to see the original version on flickr.com
You can see the original post on Ficlets.com by clicking here.
Dario looked down on the Rathaus square and wondered how many times he had studied this scene over the decades that he had perched here on Saint Michael’s sword. He lifted his gaze from the Weihnachtsmarkt and stared at the Tannenbaum on the island in the Alster – a shame, he preferred the fountain. None of the people below enjoying Glühwein and Flammekuchen had any idea that what appeared to be a raven perched high above them was not so simple a creature after all. He took some personal delight in their ignorance. The wind was whipping by, and Dario was cursing Julius’s desire to meet in Hamburg. Why not Venice, after all it was December; why choose somewhere so cold? He supposed that Julius had business near by that would not keep, at least he hoped that was so, not that Julius was amused by Dario perishing up here in the wind off the Elbe. A large Barn Owl landed on the parapet below Dario, bobbed in greeting and then he heard in his mind; “Hello old friend, I haven’t kept you waiting I hope..?” --- You can see the original post on Ficlets.com by clicking here.
Why on earth would Comcast buy Plaxo to (apparently) compete with YouTube & Flickr?
I think there will be obvious signs of the result of this combination by the end of this in terms of Comcast products. When we'll do that on specific platforms, we don't know yet. I think one of the biggest things to look forward to is not just things Plaxo has already built, but really bringing the social web to the notion of navigating, of making decisions about what you want to watch. ... Our plan is to really weave the social fabric into all those platforms so that when you go to your TV set or you go to Fancast.com, you're watching what your friends have recommended
Plaxo's big thing is managing & sharing address books, not streaming media, nor recording what media you're consuming. I can't picture having any desire to share that kind of info there, either.
At least as Plaxo is now, I just see it as a handy social / business networking contacts site, where if someone I have in Address Book on my Macbook updates their Plaxo information, my computers gets that change automatically. That's handy.
But I don't see much point in broadcasting that I'm recording "Lost" and "Battlestar Galactica" on the EyeTV each week, and I don't really care -- or, more importantly, want to know -- if people in my address book are going to be watching those shows, or, say, a football game, or "American Idol".
I don't get it. Perhaps I just lack imagination.
Maybe next Verizon will buy LinkedIn for their, uhh, media expertise. Yeah, that's the ticket.
A lot of the things I've written about on here are simply facets of big trends driving the world today. You could punt and say that the big trends are just "global warming", or "peak oil", or "peak food", or "the credit crunch", but even those seem like facets of the broader globalization trends going on. If it were just the USA putting out greenhouse gases, consuming oil & other resources, and driving the credit markets, then the problems we're having now might (maybe) still be happening, but less acute. But the big national economies are all interdependent now, and depend crucially of the rapid growth of big new economies like China, India, Brazil, and others.
On one level, the growth of these emerging nations is unquestionably a good thing. It raises the standard of living in the growing countries, provides cheap goods & services to the developed nations, and opens up new markets on both sides. But it raises problems as well: as the standard of living in the emerging countries comes up, so does their level of consumption, increasing the strain on global resources and amplifying trends like climate change and habitat destruction, raising questions about whether this is all sustainable into the future, or whether it brings back a Malthusian crisis.
Thomas Malthus realized in 1798 (!!!) that human populations rise geometrically ("fast"), while natural resources rise linearly ("slow"), and eventually we're likely to hit a point where there aren't enough resources to feed everyone any more. The only problem is, Malthus ended up being wrong: the population has ballooned massively since 1798, and so has the global standard of living by almost any measure. The reason is often believed to be the Industrial Revolution., which brought about a wave of prosperity & growth that swept the world and is still improving lives today. While the pressures Malthus raised over 200 years ago are still present, many feel we can continue to stay ahead of them, while others point out that Malthus was right for all of human history up to his own time, and for all we know we won't be able to escape the trap he identified forever.
Enter Newsweek International editor Fareed Zakaria, who has coined the term "the rise of the rest" to describe where we stand now:
- Foreign Affairs, May/June 2008, "The Future of American Power: How America Can Survive the Rise of the Rest", by Fareed Zakaria"
- Newsweek, May 12 2008 issue, excerpt from Zakaria's "The Post-American World"
- NPR/PRI's Marketplace, May 12 2008 broadcast, interview with Zakaria, "Economic problem: 'The rise of the rest'"
- Bostonist blog, May 9 2008, article on a talk Zakaria gave about the book at Harvard
The main differences between what Zakaria is arguing and the themes I've been looking at include:
- Zakaria is the editor for Newsweek, and I'm just some guy, so people will actually listen to him.
- Zakaria has been watching these trends a lot longer, and thinking about them a lot more deeply, than I have, so people will actually pay attention to him.
- Zakaria seems to be a lot more optimistic about the long term outcomes than I currently feel, so maybe people will prefer his take on the situation to my bleaker one.
I'll finish with an excerpt from Zakaria's "Marketplace" piece:
Expensive oil is one facet of the signature trend of our age -- global growth. Last year 124 countries around the world grew at over 4 percent. This year, despite the American slowdown, growth in most of those countries remains robust. While we debate the current financial panic and impending recession, our future is not likely to be shaped by crisis and collapse. The real problems we will face will be the consequence of what I call the "rise of the rest" -- the rest of the world that is.
Look around, it's not just oil that is soaring. Almost every commodity is at a 200-year high. Wheat and rice prices have doubled and then kept on rising over the last two years. In some cases, demand is so high that we're actually running out of stuff. Helium, the gas used in balloons and MRI machines is in short supply globally. And it is the second-most abundant element in the universe.
The problems of growth are, of course, high quality problems. But on this scale they are problems we have never really experienced before. We know how to handle a recession. But how do we handle the rise of the rest? That will be the real challenge of the next decade, long after this recession has turned to recovery.
Luca sank into a wide stance and concentrated on remaining silent. The cold of the cave was making his breath visible, but he could only tell because of his ability to see its heat. He calmed his mind and deepened his breathing to slow his heart. This was instinctive to him; years of combat training had left him as much a creature of reflex as one of control. The orc was looking for him. Its torch had sputtered out and now it was moving towards where he had been a few moments before, jabbing with its weapon randomly, in an effort to stab Luca by luck. Luca watched, waiting to see if the stupid brute would turn back, but it seemed that the sudden loss of light had robbed it of any remaining wit. Silently Luca closed the gap between them, moving close to the ground and transferring his weight carefully and evenly so as not to disturb the cave floor. Once he was within a sword’s length he chose his moment and sprang, driving his sword in through the neck and down, killing it before it even heard him move. --- You can see the original post on Ficlets.com by clicking here.
Jenna stared up at the vaulted iron roof of the station. She wondered how many people walked through it every day and never noticed the stark beauty of its construction, or the melancholy of its evident, albeit slow, decay.
The shade was up there somewhere, she had spotted it by the stairs leading off towards the Hammersmith and City Line, and once it had noticed her it had flitted up into the rafters of the station.
Shades often flee from those among the living that can see them; Jenna was used to this kind of thing. Still she preferred it when they were curious rather than scared, it made it a lot easier to connect with them. She closed her eyes and stretched out with her emotional self, broadcasting waves of compassion upwards. She slowed her breathing and tried to focus on the shade and let the hustle and bustle of Paddington on a Friday evening fall away into the background. When she opened her eyes the shade was directly in front of her, its face looking right at her;
“Who are you?”
“Jenna.”
To my surprise, yesterday I came home to find a package from my online friend/pen pal Crap Artist who's over in Berlin, Germany. We last sent each other packages in the fall, so I suppose this is the new round of springtime exchanges. Mr. Artist contained his goodies in a lovely envelope with a map printed on the inside and lined with beautiful German postage stamps:
- [Fist Polaroid] Piotr Uklanski - Untitled (Fist), 2008 from 5th berlin biennial for contemporary art
- [Supermarket Polaroid] Urrr, a supermarket aisle.
- [Stickers] Korean stickers a friend gave me.
- [Muscle Men] Got these in NYC a couple of years ago.
- [Green Sticker] From a conference on Micronations in Berlin.
- [Caderno] Caderno from Portugal (but bought in Berlin, http://www.serrote.com/)
- [Thank You Card] Thank You card for the awesome package I got from .tiff a while ago.
Bought in the Regional Assembly of Text, Vancouver - [Paper Bag] A nice paper bag from a German pharmacy.
- [Super Illustration in 3-D] Stereoscopig viewer, made by my brother-in-law.
As Paul Mison notes, the gas price surge is finally driving Americans to use more public transit, but not exactly at a breathtaking rate:
But … as of 2005, only 4.7 percent of American workers took mass transit to work. So even a 10% surge in mass transit ridership would take only around half a percent of drivers off the road.
Sure, usage is higher in Europe, but people always attribute that to higher population density. But does that explain it away?
[...]
Anyway, Canada has lots of open space, too — and it doesn’t even have $8 a gallon gas. Yet it still has usable public transit in a lot more cities than we do.
Fortunately, we'll have Chrysler pulling up the rear on this one:Canadian gasoline is somewhat more expensive than in the US — but not European-level expensive. Otherwise, Canada looks a lot like America, and Toronto almost speaks the same language, eh? Yet a high-quality transit system and different land-use planning make a big difference.
What’s more, as far as I can make out from the data, a lot more Canadians than Americans (as a percentage of the population) have switched to public transit over the past year; because the system is there, they have more flexibility.
All in all, this comparison is a reason not to believe apocalyptic warnings about the long-run effects of energy scarcity: there’s a lot of substitution possible. America’s main problem is that we have a capital stock — cars, public infrastructure, and housing — designed for dirt-cheap oil. And the transition may be nasty.
But even the Wall Street Journal doesn't think it's a good deal. They go on to say:As an alternative to the standard incentives, the company is offering $2.99 gasoline for the next three years to those buying selected new models. And you can get the cheap gas at almost any station, as it is subsidized through your credit card.
Well, actually I do think prices are going to rocket, but nevermind, they anticipate my objections:The bottom line? In most cases consumers are probably going to be better off taking the standard rebate than going for the subsidized gas. The savings on Let's Refuel America really only start to stack up if you think gasoline prices are going to rocket a lot higher in the years ahead.
Exactly. But, err....And if you think that's going to happen, what are you doing blowing, say, $29,000 on a brand new SUV that gets 15 miles to the gallon? You'd be better off scaling back to a secondhand Civic and ploughing your savings into a good energy fund.
...it's $3.69 at the cheap places down the street from my house, and pushing $3.85 elsewhere. I recently had what I expect to be my last sub-$50 full tank fillup, and can remember not so long ago when I could fill up my first car for under $10.The gas price would have to average more than $4.10 a gallon over the next three years before it made sense to take the subsidized gasoline.
I fully expect gas prices to hover in the low $4 range by fall, and only go up from there. Apparently, or so the article says, the gasoline futures market disagrees with me, but we'll see, won't we?
(On the flip side, when I first read about this program, I was worried that it was just going to stimulate consumption and exacerbate the problem, but apparently they cap how much fuel you can buy based on the projected mileage of the model you purchases, so that's less bad than I thought. Not great, but less bad.)
Next up, thoughts on Fareed Zakaia's the rise of the rest, but I'll save that for tomorrow, as it's now time to go play Boom Blox on the Wii. Yay escapism...
This post is very annoying to me. You must not know any poor people. We use our car for our work, buying and selling antiques, and gas is a HUGE expense for us. I agree that it has to go up so that alternatives are more viable, but the transition is extremely painful for us. We don’t visit friends, much less health clubs! Cable TV? Forget about it! Eating out? More like a big pot of soup that lasts 3 or 4 days. Where we live people drive 30 to 50 miles a day one way to work if they want to make more than 8 bucks an hour.
A break from all the apocalyptic gloom & doom I've been posting here -- some photos from our visit to the Franklin Park Zoo this weekend.
