I don't know if I can bring myself to watch the new one.  I am sure that it will be loaded up with special effects crap and have an absolutely inane plot.  Then again, the plotlines in the original series were kind of inane as well, but they all had a quirky charm to them.

If you had to ask me who my favorite Doctor was, it would have to be Tom Baker, with John Pertwee as my second choice.

Analysts Skeptical of Claims of a Large Mexican Oil Find

Analysts say they are skeptical of news this week from the Mexican state oil monopoly that exploratory drilling in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico shows signs of a giant new oil field.

Petróleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, says that early indications suggest that the field could be as large as 10 billion barrels. But analysts said that it was premature to make an estimate based on preliminary drilling.

"To me it's entirely speculative and hypothetical," said David Shields, an oil analyst and consultant in Mexico City.

Sounds like "political barrels" to me.  

Always consider the source and the hopeful language.

Nearly 1.6 billion barrels of oil, mostly in the Afghan-Tajik Basin, and about 15.7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, mainly in the Amu Darya Basin, could be tapped, said the U.S. Geological Survey and Afghanistan's Ministry of Mines and Industry.

More work remains to assess petroleum reserves, conduct seismic exploration and rehabilitate wells, say government and industry officials.

Yes, by itself only it will hardly make any difference compared to our current appetite for oil. But first the accumulative result from several such finds will make a difference, and second - sooner or later we will have to get used to live with much less. When that time comes such discoveries will look to us almost like we look at Ghawar today.

Economics is not just the study of exchange rates and taxation policy. Fundamentally, economics is a way of looking at problems that focuses on questions of what people value, what their costs are, and how they can use their resources to achieve their goals. It is this kind of thinking that seems to be absent in these papers.

The economic approach to global warming should focus on cost tradeoffs. How much does it cost to reduce carbon emissions to a certain level, and how much benefit do we get by those reductions? The most fundamental question is this: what is the optimal CO2 level we should aim to target?

I don't see any analysis of this question. Instead, the analyst pulls a CO2 level out of his hat. 450 ppm, or 500, or 550. The only thing these have in common is that they are multiples of 50 and are higher than where we are today (almost at 400, higher if we consider the contributions of other gasses). Then he talks about how we can get there.

But nowhere does he discuss how much more it will cost if the number turns out to be 550 over 500. Or if the number turns out to be 600, or whatever. We have to have estimates of these costs! Then we can compare the short-term cost of achieving a more stringent target with the long-term cost of letting the number get higher.

That is the fundamental economic question of global warming! It is the first question we must ask to even begin to decide what strategy to adopt. And yet we have hundreds of pages of economic analysis, and I haven't yet seen someone try to do this calculation, or even admit that this question exists.

Now, granted, this is an enormously difficult question to answer. At a minimum we must estimate the technological and economic capabilities of year 2100 Earth. Do they have starships and robots? Or are they back to horses and donkeys for transport? It's a ridiculously hard question. Certainly nobody in 1900 foresaw the world of 2000 in even the dimmest terms. Everything that happened was a total, complete and utter surprise.

Nevertheless this is the first step that must be accomplished to begin to estimate the costs of global warming. And that calculation is crucial to achieve a reasonable estimate of what CO2 level will minimize costs.

This is the economic way of thinking, and as I said it is spectacularly absent from the papers I have seen so far. Probably the reason is that it reveals the near-absurdity of the process of what we have to go through - guessing at inventions not yet invented, evaluating the creativity of generations yet unborn. Yet it has to be done.

I'll tell you how I would do it. I would curve-fit. I would extrapolate economic growth and technological improvements forward based on the record of the past few centuries. And since that record reveals ever-faster growth of technological capability, I would predict that late 21st century science and technology will be as far beyond our own as we are beyond the stone age:

http://hanson.gmu.edu/longgrow.html

In such a world, global warming can be dealt with as easily as we build an aquaduct today to bring water from a source hundreds of miles away. It is a modest engineering project, and the main difficulty is acquiring the legal rights-of-way. But the capability will be there, if we apply the simplest possible curve-fitting extrapolations.

So this is the other way that economic analyses of global warning are noticeably bereft of economic thinking: because thinking logically about the problem makes it go away. Dumb, curve-fitting based extrapolations from the past are the most unbiased method of predicting the future, and they predict that global warming will not be a major problem 50 or 100 years from now.

I've been thinking about money lately: how it works, the reality (and otherwise) of its value, the robustness of that, should it be re-instituted if it breaks, should there be controls on the 'scope' of money if so. Too soon for conclusions but my possibly perverse prejudices are forming some tentative conclusions.

For now I would suggest a few links if you are interested. My best guess is that the money system is more likely to break than not in the next 10 years. If so there may be some choice about how it is reformulated (the utility of a money system is probably beyond doubt, but the way it currently functions may be maladaptive).

This is a neat tropical island way of explaining money, its dynamics and imbalances (with relevence to current situation) from first principles:
http://www.financialsense.com/fsu/editorials/2006/0205.html

Perhaps a more pointed view in a narrower scenario:
http://www.financialsense.com/fsu/editorials/schiff/2006/0316.html

Going back to economic theories of money as it currently functions:
http://www.benbest.com/polecon/monetary.html
http://landru.i-link-2.net/monques/mmm2.html#MODERN
(there may be some interesting stuff on it's parent site but I haven't had time to read there yet:
http://landru.i-link-2.net/monques/  )

Much older, more land wealth based, still interesting:
http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/trgRfl1.html
More recent, von Mises:
http://www.econlib.org/library/Mises/msT1.html
http://www.benbest.com/polecon/monetary.html

It will do you no harm (in the sense of wasting your time) to think about money - how and what it is, and is not. You may be surprised if you do, perhaps you will begin to see answers that are different from those constrained by the present 'economic solution space' ;)

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06075/671509.stm

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette often has the WSJ pay-only articles for free.

Personally, I don't think peak natural resources is a problem...as long as you have enough energy. Given enough energy, you can make or make substitutes for just about anything.  

OTOH...given very expensive energy, there may be shortages of commodities even though they are not scarce.  

China & India have joint ventures in oil, why not copper ?

The whole of your post? The whole of the reported Iranian position? The recent conciliatory moves you report? Just the last paragraph?

Please be more precise, your meaning is not clear to me.

I would be happy for Iran and the US to talk provided it is constructive and does not further polarize their positions and increase tensions and misunderstanding. With that in mind it might be best if any discussions were managed by a third party like Russia or France, perhaps, which had some understanding and sympathy with both sides.

Personally I find the probable Iranian role in southern Iraq(negative in US perception, validly) totally reasonable and logical given the bellicose utterances from the US regime towards Iran. I also think the Iranian role in fostering violence in Iraq reprehensible. I have always thought the US / UK invasion of Iraq unjustified, illegal and a war crime.

I doubt global peace can exist.  I believe it's just a dream.  There will always have to be someone at the top, and right now that is the U.S.  But I dread to think of the power vacuum  that will be created if we collapse.  I'm sure China will be more than happy to take on that role, and considering their Human Rights history, that doesn't sound any better.  

I wish I did have more of a say in our foreign policy, but all I can do is vote in elections.  And no matter who we put in office our policies won't change very much because of our 2 party system.  I think people here are just too afraid of change to vote for a real President that can actually mak a difference. Assuming one will ever run.  

I have frequently compared Ralph Nader's "political assassination" of Al Gore to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in 1914, which triggered World War I, and indirectly, World War II.  

It's amazing what one man can do, which raises an interesting, but now irrelevant, question--why did Ralph run?   In any case, each and every Nader voter in Florida can now proudly claim (indirect) credit for at least one fatality in Iraq, with probably a lot more to come.  

In a word - oil.  We in the US are so relatively comfortable thanks to the oil bubble upon which we obliviously float that we care not what our government does, so long as the comfort is protected.  "Nuke their ass, I want gas" bumper stickers adorn the trucks of the truly ignorant, but a subtler version of that attitude unfortunately, no, tragically, has a broad tacit acceptance.  Of course there are many more of us who believe otherwise, but via corporate dominance of the media, co-option of elections, fearmongering, divisive patriotism (yer with us or yer agin us) etc... the populace is kept in line.  Fascism - the control of the government by corporations, allowing for the sole societal goal of profit making - is descended upon our land.  It's not just BushCo either.  It goes way back, with a significant role played by the use of our 14th Amendment, ostensibly to give black men the right to vote, utilized far more to protect the "personhood" of corporations, which allows them to rape the land, murder the masses with their "externalized" toxins, and do pretty much anything they want to make a buck (or several billion), and there's ultimately no "person" to hold accountable.  Sorry, I guess that was more than a word...

http://mywebpages.comcast.net/bpayne37/index.htm#margolis

I would guess that a plurality of non-US people, possibly a majority thereof, would say the US is the greatest threat to world peace and stability.  

Iceland has made massive moves abroad, although from a position of strength.  The national gov't has almost paid off the national debt, export earnings are strong, 100% renewable electricity and almost 100% renewable (geothermal) heating.

New aluminum smelter (hydro powered) to produce 1.5% of world's Al coming online soon.

That is an interesting article. Seems to indicate there is further scope for improvement in China's interaction with global markets for raw materials. A two edged sword, that. The chinese tend to learn fast, and no doubt they will have read Andy's article. Quite significant for the direction of their continued growth and industrial development, too.