Tuesday Links

• At high speed, on the road to a driverless future.
• Weakness in air cargo industry.
• Tom Murphy corrects some common bad thinking about entropy.
• Prosecutors claim Liberty Reserve handled $6 billion in criminal transactions over seven years and was the leading online money-launderer.  That's a big number, and yet also not, in the context of a $74 trillion global economy.

Weekend Links

• No clear evidence that tornadoes are likely to get worse under climate change.  Well, that's something.
• How a big bank failure could unfold.
• The jet stream - what it is and how it's changing.  This is a very good, long, primer on the changes in the weather that appear to be occurring as a result of the melting arctic.  I blogged about this last April.
• Could Europe surprise to the upside?
• Suicide on the rise.  I expect the causes are complex, but at a minimum this is consistent with something I would predict as we continue to move towards the singularity: humans need a sense of meaning, and in the industrial west, a lot of us are used to this coming from work.  As the economy starts to need fewer of us, I expect more depression and suicide.
• China contemplating economic reform, and perhaps slower growth.
• Climate change creates some high-class problems too.

Natural Disaster Vulnerability vs Income

Extreme Weather Possibly Increasing Power Outages?

Thursday Links

• The above is Markit's PMI index for Chinese manufacturing.  The scale is from the beginning of 2008 through May 2013.  Thus the big dip near the beginning is associated with the great recession.  The recovery, initially strong, has become anemic in the last couple of years.  It was a bit better in the last six months, but May's number is anemic again.  This is presumably associated with weak demand for manufactured goods in contracting Europe and the weakly growing US.
• America's greenest office building.
• Asset values probably are being propped up by the Fed.
• Norbert Wiener back in 1949 on the coming age of the machines.

April Saudi Oil Production

The above graph summarizes the data on Saudi oil production (and oil rig count on the right scale).  The feature of most current interest is the large production cut that was implemented in the last months of 2012 (more background here).

It appears that in April there was a noticeable uptick in production of around 100-150kbd.  That is nowhere near enough to offset the cut in late 2012, but since it shows up in both sources with data available for April, it's most likely a robust feature of the data.

Tuesday Links

• The above is Eurostat's European construction index.  The great recession never ended as far as this is concerned - it's still falling rapidly six years after its peak.
• Syria may break into pieces.
• Losing the High Plains Aquifer.
• Google getting into the massive cloud computing business.
• Bruce Schneier on the future of privacy: none.

Known Software Vulnerabilities

Thursday Links

• Above is European and US GDP from Eurostat, including the latest data for Europe (Q1).  The European economy continues to shrink.  Some enterprising university over there needs to make Paul Krugman an offer he can't refuse so that he can nag their elites endlessly to reinflate the economy.
• The weather is really losing it in the US midwest.
• A bibliography of papers on artificial intelligence risk.

Oil Price Update

Tuesday Links

• The above is the Yen/$ exchange rate since 1970.  The uptick on the far right is the initial effects of Abenomics (essentially making somewhat credible threats to increase inflation by increasing the money supply).  Some more interesting charts here from Edward Hugh, along with a rather sceptical take.  I'm inclined to think it's a bit too soon to draw any firm conclusions.
• Someone may be studying how to perform destructive cyber-attacks on energy infrastructure.
• The children of the upper class and upper middle class are increasingly stressed out by the process of being prepared for today's hyper-competitive globalized society.
• Related: student debt and the crushing of the American dream.
• There are severe financial consequences to firmly predicting global doom and being wrong.
• Kevin Drum has a very good piece about the economic consequences of approach to singularity. His views and mine are rather similar in the short to medium term (and he even uses one of my graphs).  In the long term, I'm rather less optimistic about the "robotic paradise of leisure and contemplation" than he is.  That assumes that a highly intelligent economic system with no need at all for humans will continue to prioritize their welfare for many generations.  Building the system to guarantee that strikes me as very hard to do.
• This Bertrand Russell essay on the value of idleness was written in 1932, but still seems trenchant today (I'm personally struggling with how to think about these issues in the context of the approaching singularity).  H/T Ran Prieur.

April Oil Supply Little Changed

The April numbers are out from the IEA and OPEC, and the overall pattern of flat supply since 2012 is continuing (graph above, not zero-scaled).

I refer you to last month's update for a much more detailed explanation of the context.  April seems to have changed the picture so little that it doesn't make sense to repeat everything in there.

Weekend Links

• I can't help feeling a grudging sense of admiration at the audacity of this cyber-heist.
• The next pandemic.
• 400ppm.
• Sustainable biofuel production at work.

Poem for Friday

I don't feel like blogging this morning.  Accordingly, this post is being outsourced to poet and farmer Wendell Berry:

Even while I dreamed I prayed that what I saw was only fear
and no foretelling,
for I saw the last known landscape destroyed for the sake
of the objective, the soil bludgeoned, the rock blasted.
Those who had wanted to go home would never get there now.

I visited the offices where for the sake of the objective
the planners planned
at blank desks set in rows. I visited the loud factories
where the machines were made that would drive ever forward
toward the objective. I saw the forest reduced to stumps and gullies; I saw
the poisoned river, the mountain cast into the valley;
I came to the city that nobody recognized because it looked
like every other city.
I saw the passages worn by the unnumbered
footfalls of those whose eyes were fixed upon the objective.

Their passing had obliterated the graves and the monuments
of those who had died in pursuit of the objective
and who had long ago forever been forgotten, according
to the inevitable rule that those who have forgotten forget
that they have forgotten. Men, women, and children now
pursued the objective
as if nobody ever had pursued it before.

The races and the sexes now intermingled perfectly in
pursuit of the objective.
the once-enslaved, the once-oppressed were now free
to sell themselves to the highest bidder
and to enter the best paying prisons
in pursuit of the objective, which was the destruction
of all enemies,
which was the destruction of all obstacles, which was the destruction
of all objects,
which was to clear the way to victory, which was to clear the way
to promotion, to salvation, to progress,
to the completed sale, to the signature
on the contract, which was to clear the way
to self-realization, to self-creation, from which nobody who
ever wanted to go home
would ever get there now, for every remembered place
had been displaced; the signposts had been bent to the
ground and covered over.

Every place had been displaced, every love
unloved, every vow unsworn, every word unmeant
to make way for the passage of the crowd
of the individuated, the autonomous, the self-actuated, the homeless
with their many eyes opened toward the objective
which they did not yet perceive in the far distance,
having never known where they were going,
having never known where they came from.

Thursday Links

• Above - continued decline of retail trade in Europe.
• Vaunted venture-capital fund Kleiner Perkins has lost money on its green-tech investments.   I think probably this bet will be a winner eventually, but, as a sage investor friend once told me "Being right too early is just as bad as being wrong".  Making this kind of portfolio pay is going to take stronger government action to even up the playing field between renewables and fossil fuels (which don't currently pay their externalities of wrecking the global climate).
• One for the Annals of Unnecessary Innovations.
• How the town of Dryden, NY banned fracking and has so far made the ban stick in court.  I live in Dryden, and Marie McRae, mentioned in the story, lives just up the road from me.  I think the story underplays a bit the influence of Ithaca/Cornell in Dryden; the western part is very heavily influenced by commuters and I think it makes the town quite a bit more affluent and progressive than a typical rural upstate town.
• Another computer scientist concerned about what automation is doing to the economy and the middle class.
• It'a a good time of year to do an energy audit of your house, if you didn't already do so.  
• The paradigm seems to be shifting away from austerity.  If more expansionary thinking were to take hold, particularly in Europe, it considerably raises the odds of an oil price shock in the next few years.
• Return on equity for oil and gas producers in the US (2011/2012).  Pure oil producers did ok (not fantastic) with about 12% ROE, but pure natural gas producers were losing money hand-over-fist.  So US natural gas prices were unsustainably low, but US oil prices (ie mainly WTI probably) were roughly where they needed to be.

Short-Term Non-OECD Demand Trends

OECD Oil Consumption

Tuesday Links

• Even Hollywood script writers are now getting help from machines, it seems.
• Weather whiplash impacts Georgia - extreme drought to floods in four months.
• The scientist who saved more lives than any other in the 20th century: wow, there's an epitaph.  Mildly O/T.
• US government accuses China of cyber-attacks on US defense infrastructure.

US Wind Power Statistics

April PDSI Map for California and Nevada

From the West Wide Drought Tracker.  Lots of -5 and -6.  Looks like a very bad fire season indeed.

For newer readers who don't understand the PDSI scale, try this post.