The US military has warned that surplus oil production capacity could disappear within two years and there could be serious shortages by 2015 with a significant economic and political impact.

Reminds me of a comment from another time:

Imagine for a moment, then, that we're discussing an experiment involving microbes in a petri dish. The culture medium in the dish contains 5% of a simple sugar that the microbes can eat, and 95% of a more complex sugar they don't have the right enzymes to metabolize. We put a drop of fluid containing microbes into the dish, close the lid, and watch. Over the next few days, a colony of microbes spreads through the culture medium, feeding on the simple sugar.
Then a mutation happens, and one microbe starts producing an enzyme that lets it feed on the more abundant complex sugar. Drawing on this new food supply, the mutant microbe and its progeny spread rapidly, outcompeting the original strain, until finally the culture medium is full of mutant microbes. At this point, though, the growth of the microbes is within hailing distance of the limits of the supply of complex sugar. As we watch the microbes through our microscopes, we might begin to wonder whether they can produce a second mutation that will let them continue to thrive. Yet this obvious question misleads, because there is no third sugar in the culture medium for another mutation to exploit.
The point that has to be grasped here is as crucial as it is easy to miss. The mutation gave the microbes access to an existing supply of highly concentrated food; it didn't create the food out of thin air. If the complex sugar hadn't existed, the mutation would have yielded no benefit at all. As the complex sugar runs out, further mutations are possible - some microbes might end up living on microbial waste products; others might kill and eat other microbes; still others might develop some form of photosynthesis and start creating sugars from sunlight - but all these possibilities draw on resources much less concentrated and abundant than the complex sugar that made the first mutation succeed so spectacularly. Nothing available to the microbes will allow them to continue to flourish as they did in the heyday of the first mutation. -- John Michael Greeg, The innovation fallacy

After Cameron shook the movie experience with Avatar 3D, movie studios have started jumping the bandwagon by adding an extra dimension to their shoots in post-production. The results are ugly! Have these people any standards at all?

Katzenberg, Bay and Cameron think that after-the-shoot 3D will so degrade the viewing experience that people will not want to pay extra for it. And since 3D is so expensive, without the extra income the 3D market could collapse altogether.

In other words, viewers will not buy shitty movies from late comers to the game, unless they movies are done right. Doh!

The strategy is simple: as viewer, watch Avatar once, then shun any production that is not "natively" 3D and of at least comparable quality. Studios and producers will get the point, and fast.

For what it's worth, I plan myself to wait 3-4 years before I visit a 3D screen again.

Today's conversation added to the list of concerns evolving around my mind at the moment:

• will China invade Siberia when oil becomes scarce? or Iran?
• what will be the form of the next conflict between Japan and China?
• who will end up controlling North Korea?
• why doesn't the ECB propose to invest in a deep and far-fetching solution for the American mortgage crisis? Why doesn't China propose either?
• How is the obligation to carry identity documents helping against “terrorism”?
• what will be the long term evolution of the current tendency of governments to alienate citizens into criminals and “protect” them against themselves?

Evidence shows clearly that we will not be able to eat fish in the future unless strong global policing action is taken now. We know already that future generations will never enjoy cod as a popular and usual dish. Still, even so-called “developed” countries make irrational political moves about fishing and short-sightedness combined with global disinterest runs rampant.

Overfishing is a canonical example of a tragedy of the commons. In other words, everyone is responsible, and nobody cares.

A topic I was debating the other day with a new colleague was: why should we care? Another I was debating longer ago with an older friend was: should we take responsibility for other people's actions and reduce our demand for fish to induce a decrease in production?

The conclusion was straightforward: any purely rational approach based on a fundamentally individualistic philosophy (where everyone should be only responsible for their own actions) dictates unsustainable behaviors. This is a logical conclusion, leaving choices to be made:

• not be rational: let God dictate what is “good for you,” possibly reducing your environmental footprint. Possibly effective, but unpredictable.
• empathize with fellow humans worldwide and time-wide (of the future), then take responsibility for other people's actions and act. Likely effective, but equally unlikely to happen within current morals and value systems.
• not do anything.

Choose your future.

A few weeks ago Timothy Ferris' The Four Hour Workweek entered my reading agenda. The book certainly looks nice - hardcover, golden borders, and the inside is refreshingly sparse, spaced, easy to read.

The rationale for this book is appealing: most people seek a life of achievements outside work, but do not have either the means or time to reach those achievements. Tim wrote a book to explain his successful experience in reaching a life of (expensive) leisure involving only four hours of work a week, and proposes a model to follow to do the same.

The idea is simple: express the means for your achievements as dollars, and make other people work for you to get these dollars for you to spend. Once you got the money and time, profit! And then the book goes on and on about how to quit a job, create a side business, and pay people in India to manage the side business. The side business should involve selling information products (costless to create) at high price (high margins) to small markets (no risk for competitors).

A salesman's dream.

The important step is to find the right market. A business concept that holds. Find a virgin niche market - that is, people who need something that nobody provides yet, such that you could provide to them for a high price goods that don't cost much to produce. The ideal product: a collection of facts around a topic sold as a video on a DVD. The catch: finding the topic. It has to be narrow enough to match a need where people would want to spend money, broad enough to attract a sufficiently large number of customers to sustain the business, and uninteresting enough that no competitors will ever compete.

I'm not sure how many free niche markets are left out there. Tim says lots, I see none. Too bad, maybe I'm just not creative enough.

Then I think I knew I wouldn't finish reading when I understood that the key to finding free time and staying rich is to delegate work to lowly paid slaves^K“assistants” — preferably in India, since they have a “different scale of values” anyway, and foremost you can just dump one and get another at will if you're unsatisfied and even get a refund.

In other words, buy slaves in India to do your work for you, get the money from the business they run for you in your pocket and give them the leftovers.

In other words, you can leverage the gap of social and economic inequality in the world to make you even richer and contribute even more to inequality.

Not my cup of tea, so I'm not joining.

In a recent study made by the NBER (National Bureau of Echonomic Research) and commented recently on Slate, it is shown that

there is a negative relationship between real GDP per capita and the female-male difference in total work time per day — the sum of work for pay and work at home.

Some results commented on Slate are quite interesting and positive : women and men do work on average the same in rich countries, which somehow shows a positive balance between genders.

On the other hand, the article has another reading. It states that on average men work less than women in poor countries. I would be very curious to see the relationship between the difference of work time between men and women, on the one hand, and the wealth of the country on the other hand.

Is there a correlation? Is it so that a country "gets richer" when men work more?

Lovely potential for politically incorrect stuff.

This video was set as a decoration on the sidebar of a weblog I read every now and then: essaisconcepts. For the non-French-literate, the speaker on the video explains that some random idea is mistakenly considered as solid fact by most people, namely that work should be the basis for active life in society. The discourse — a sort of verbal essay — goes on explaining how building around this idea leads to misery and unhappiness, but unfortunately fails at presenting how to actually build otherwise. Or it may have been explained, but the explanation is not part of this recording.

Despite the missing (important) bits, I find this kind of energetic presentation refreshing. Witnessing this display of unconventional thinking in public is a relief, as it is symptomatic of shared hope for change in the future.

When I stumbled across this piece of politically incorrect art about the close relationship between religion and economics (reminds me of the one between religion and football) I felt amused at first, then scared about how obvious the link is and how very few people do actually notice.

And then I found a possibly explanation: many people do notice, but they do not care. Or sometimes, they do, but only to see the good side of it. There is a lot of money to be made, and religion is providing quite a few of them.

It was interesting to discover today an interesting example that this explanation might have something true about it. Even if it hasn't, I love the schadenfreude of imagining what the site makers think about their potential customers.