Good & Expensive Gas

I am a student of economics. I believe that many of our issues in life can be attributed to economics. Obesity - cheap food. Pollution - unrecognized consequences (and thus no financial consequences). Waste - cheap whatever we are wasting. Lack of Education - cheap jobs. War - underpaid leadership. If things were to appropriately represent their cost and value then our habits would change as the cost of those things changed.

I know I may piss of people when I say this, but like mom or dad said, "You won't understand this until your older, but this is in your best interest." I am HAPPY to see the price of gas go up. We have gotten fat and lazy and because of this we are losing our edge. This "we" that I speak of is mostly aimed at the United States citizenry because that is where I see the consequences of cheap gas. Our electricity is cheap so we leave everything running all day long. Our gas is cheap so we drive down the street to the corner store and eat in our cars (with the AC on). So many things we do, just because we can.

Time.com wrote an article talking about 10 Things You Can Like About $4 Gas and the best part is that none of the things on the list even talk about the international politics or the development of technology.

Lets get on the ball people - accountability pays for itself in the long term - just like mom and dad said.

Double Standards

Do we support Israel because they help the balance of power in the Mideast? Similar to how we supported Iraq versus Iran, or Afghanistan versus the Soviet Union or how China helps out North Korea or Russia helps Iran or Venezuela helps Cuba? Each of these groups are looking to tie up the resources and focus of their global competitors via the creation of a greater number of enemies for their enemy...nothing surprising here I guess. The whole world is playing each other off of each other.

I see the double standard as Israel and a small portion of its Ultra-Orthodox population is sexist in the same way the south of the United States is racist or the same way the Taliban was oppressive. The world is a complicated beast that is tied up within itself. There are levels of complication inside of the levels of complication.

Hrmm...hypocrites. We are that sometimes. But is this pragmatism a needed evil in the world? Is pragmatism the excused used by those without the inner strength to stick with their morals? I find myself in spots where my logic and emotion and principle are at odds with what will get the short term job done and it pushes hard on me to decide whether I should make the powers that be happy in the short term or whether I should eschew their smiles in exchange for what I truly believe in. Gotta push. Gotta try.

$300,000,000 Million for Nukes?

I call Bullshit.

"North Korea reached a tentative agreement in February on a deal to begin to close down its nuclear program in exchange for $300 million in energy and financial aid."

China has approx. $1.3 Trillion in American currency in their holdings. That is less than .01% of that number. The cost of building a nuclear program? If you include all of the research. I would guess it will move very close to that number. Energy resources? $300 Million worth? That wouldn't feed the US for very long, and really, in exchange for nuclear power, won't feed North Korea very long. If a solution as simple as this little diddy that they decided to allow out to the world was there then we would have jumped in a long time ago. I think we have fools governing ourselves acting in their own best interest. I wonder.

Snowless winter first for Tokyo

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6407771.stm

This the first time no snow has fallen in winter since records began in 1876, the agency said.

And they played down a direct link to global warming.

"We believe El Nino can be one factor (of course el nino comes every few years...maybe 15-20 times since 1876). Another theory is that the seasonal southward movement of cold air from the Arctic region was not sustained and weak (So why then after 131 year would those patterns change?)"," one official from the agency said.

"It's a bit of stretch to link this directly to global warming. But the winter was very warm, for sure."