tagged w/ Bubble
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NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft has entered the solar system's final frontier, a vast, turbulent expanse where the Sun's influence ends and the solar wind crashes into the thin gas between stars. ...... In November 2003, the Voyager team announced it was seeing events unlike any encountered before in the mission's then 26-year history. The team believed the unusual events indicated Voyager 1 was approaching a strange region of space, likely the beginning of this new frontier called the termination shock region. There was controversy at that time over whether Voyager 1 had indeed encountered the termination shock or was just getting close. "The consensus of the team now is that Voyager 1, at 8.7 billion miles from the Sun, has at last entered the heliosheath, the region beyond the termination shock," said Dr. John Richardson from MIT, Principal Investigator of the Voyager plasma science investigation.... http://www.makeahistory.com/index.php/submit-an-article/42955-voyager-entersNASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft has entered the solar system's final frontier, a... more
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worrg
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1 year ago
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Another great thing freezing video, this time it's a bubble icing over. freaky/awesomesAnother great thing freezing video, this time it's a bubble icing over.... more
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Reports of Chinese ghost cities have been trickling in for over a year. Previously, these reports were nothing more than abstract statistics but new images put a very real face on those figures.
Like a cheesy sci-fi flick where the human population has mysteriously vanished, these ghost cities sit eerily vacant while dead leaves collect in unswept and unused foyers. This is not Hollywood’s latest blockbuster but a stark reality.
Finance Asia reports that about 64 million apartments and houses have remained empty over the last 6 months. A truly shocking statistic considering that this figure represents potential housing for roughly 200 million people or almost two-thirds of the population of The United States.
Using the excuse that Chinese prefer buying to renting, Asian financial analysts are shaking off these insane figures as long-term investments. The idea is savvy investors recently flush with capital but fearful of a fickle stock market invest in property even though there are limited renters available to occupy them. But it is not beyond reason to suspect a financial bubble is forming or something far worse.
Al-Jazeera TV spoke with Patrick Chovanec of Tsinghua University who explained the situation in over-simplified terms, “Who wants to be the mayor who reports that he didn’t get 8% GDP growth this year? Nobody wants to come forward with that. So the incentives in the system are to build. And if that’s the easiest way to achieve that growth, then you build.” However an 8% growth does not begin to touch the 15% housing excess reported in these figures.
The truth of this situation is that these new cities and developments are money pits. Even though the properties sit completely vacant and ready to be lived in, occupation is not fiscally possible because they are in fact still born cities; created without the possibility of sustaining themselves. And so a bubble in the economy is formed. Like a cancer, that bubble will infect and corrupt any markets with which it comes in contact. These ‘investments’ are like ‘roach motels’ – your money goes in but it does not come out.
Looking to the future, it is obvious that this situation will further complicate. How long can investments sit around without generating revenue? We are familiar with concepts like junk bonds and derivatives, abstract markets that have created similar bubbles in our economy. But these ghost cities are actual physical manifestations of junk economics. These are fully realized projects representing billions in investment dollars and they are simply collecting dust!
One cannot help to question who gave the green light for these billion dollar projects and what is in fact the endgame for a prospectus with this scope.
more pics at link...
Jason Douglass
Infowars.com
December 20, 2010Reports of Chinese ghost cities have been trickling in for over a year. Previously,... more
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“Bubble“ is a sexy, wickedly funny short film by the Spanish filmmakers Pedro Casablanc and Gabriel Olivares. The film tells a story of the sexy escapades of Margaret and Pili, two girlfriends living in a sleepy, little town. Margaret dreams of getting her driver’s license, buying a new car and leaving the town forever. But until then, she and Pili have to depend on Pili’s brother, Horten, to pick them up and drive them around on their sexy hijinks. And they certainly take a big advantage of the situation, and as often as they can! However, one day poor Margaret is shocked to learn that she’s pregnant: her old reliable method of bubbly contraception has failed to work. Ooops!
This piece includes a number of color photographs, as well as the naughty, comedic short film.
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2010/12/14/the-bubbles-they-just-didnt-work/“Bubble“ is a sexy, wickedly funny short film by the Spanish filmmakers... more
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"Don't Let Me Fall" song by Lenka.
"Follow The Bubble" was produced by "The Coca-Cola Content Factory" which is an internal creative team currently based in Paris, France."Don't Let Me Fall" song by Lenka.
"Follow The Bubble" was... more
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Check out this beautiful spot in 3D. "Follow The Bubble" was produced by "The Coca-Cola Content Factory" which is an internal creative team currently based in Paris, France.Check out this beautiful spot in 3D. "Follow The Bubble" was produced by... more
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Get your hand son some kind of mega bath foam bomb, place it into a bucket of water and watch as your friends bedroom fills with bubbles. Added bonus if they were having a flying dream, wtf clouds. Though also looks handy for home made foam party.Get your hand son some kind of mega bath foam bomb, place it into a bucket of water... more
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A fantastic hypnotic video, which has a higher video quality option on youtube. Lovely stuff.A fantastic hypnotic video, which has a higher video quality option on youtube. Lovely... more
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Several articles have reported on the apparent unavoidable doomsday scenario triggered by the explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon rig. Don't believe everything you read and don't go buying up guns, canned food and water just yet...
"For several days, bloggers and journalists have been passing around a news story about how the BP oil disaster will unleash a "giant methane bubble" and initiate a mass extinction. Yes, it's a myth. And we've busted it.
In this article, called "Doomsday: How BP Gulf disaster may have triggered a 'world-killing' event," a guy named Terrence Aym takes some information he got from a "Mega Disasters" TV special on undersea methane bubbles and mixes it with comments about how there are "giant rifts" beneath the sea and an "information blackout." He proposes that a "twenty mile methane bubble" dislodged by the BP oil disaster will erupt from the ocean floor, causing tidal waves and giant explosions. The sad part about all this is that news organizations and blogs took the story seriously.
While it's true that there are methane bubbles (and methane ice) beneath the ocean floor, they are not about to erupt from Gulf and destroy all life on Earth. This morning I spoke with two Earth scientists, Dave Valentine of UC Santa Barbara and Chris Reddy of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, who study methane and oil seeps from the sea floor. Valentine has just been out to the Gulf to study the methane levels there, and told io9:
During our recent cruise to the Gulf we observed significantly elevated levels of methane at water depth greater than 2500 feet, in the vicinity of the Deepwater Horizon spill site. While the total quantity of methane and other hydrocarbons is enough to cause problems with the regional ecosystem, there is no plausible scenario by which this event alone will cause global-scale extinctions.
So yes, there is a methane seep. No, it will not cause tidal waves or explode.
Another fishy fact in the methane bubble doomsday story is Aym's description of how methane bubbles are what caused the End Permian mass extinction event 250 million years ago - a mass extinction that I wrote about recently, here. Many scientists do believe that atmospheric changes and ocean anoxia (de-oxygenization) were to blame for that extinction - but even Gregory Ryskin, the scientist whose highly speculative work is cited in the article, doesn't try to claim this as the sole cause, nor does he believe that one bubble of methane could bring down the biosphere instantly. The End Permian extinction took millennia to happen.
So the BP oil spill isn't going to end the world - it's just going to kill a lot of ocean life. And already-existing methane seeps may be doing slow, deadly damage to our climate. All this makes it even more obvious that we need to invest in alternate forms of energy. But who wants to hear difficult, complicated pieces of information, when we could just be screaming about doomsday?"Several articles have reported on the apparent unavoidable doomsday scenario triggered... more
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suzane
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1 year ago
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I'm back in the Current offices after a little over a week in Paris partly for work (Le Web) and partly for play (can you blame me?).
Beautiful city aside (and as far as cities go, I just don't think it gets better than Paris, I really don't), a reoccurring conversation I had with people actually working in the tech sector in Paris is that Paris just isn't a great tech hub. Which surprises me, since being a large metropolitan city I'd just have assumed there would be more of a community there. On the surface it didn't seem otherwise... I observed as many iPhones, wifi-enabled cafes, and general modern goings on that I do here at home in San Francisco, and I certainly felt among "my people" while attending the Le Web conference, one of the largest tech conferences in the world.
Still, I kept meeting Parisian developers/bloggers/etc. at various tech-oriented meetups last week who'd explain how difficult it is to live in Paris and still feel part of the overall energy of the Internet crowd. Which is disappointing to me, because I'd like to have believed that with all the tools available to us just a few short weeks from 2010, it matters less than ever where you physically reside, and more how participatory you are online. What if I want to move to London someday? Or Delhi? Tokyo? Am I going to feel out of the loop of insider-y Silicon Valley?
I do happen to live in San Francisco, so maybe I'm just extra naive about how the rest of the world feels about where all the action is. And don't get me wrong, I'm well aware that amazing ideas are coming from all ends of the Earth on a regular basis and am certainly not suggesting otherwise. It was just slightly heartbreaking to be in a world-class city like Paris and keeping hearing about the lack of a tech community. PARIS!?
So, where do you fall in this debate? Does my experience sound familiar to you? Do you live somewhere that feels squarely outside this silly bubble? Or was I just talking to the wrong people? Weigh in and school me, because I really am curious.
One more thing- my jet lag is at an all-time high, so please forgive any spelling/grammatical inconsistencies in this post. I no longer trust myself to make sense.I'm back in the Current offices after a little over a week in Paris partly for... more
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Mariana van Zeller and I just returned from our first trip to China. We’ve covered a lot of ground since joining Vanguard, but somehow never made it there before. Not that China hasn’t been on our radar. Its been difficult to miss China’s growing power and influence across the globe, an issue we highlighted in "Chinatown, Africa". (In fact, we’ll be talking about China’s influence in Africa this weekend at an MIT/USC event, if you’re around). In many year-end roundups, it was commented that in the last decade we witnessed China’s coming out party on the world stage. But just as many were giving the country its due for its explosive growth over the last several years, others began predicting dire days ahead for the emerging power. On the way back from China, I was reading about how renowned Wall Street short-seller James Chanos, a man infamous for betting and winning large on the collapse of Enron, is now looking to put his chips on a China crash. “China is Dubai times 1,000,” he says in the New York Times article. The piece on Chanos was followed up with a series of stories on the overheated real estate market in Beijing and other signs of bubbles in the Chinese economy. So is China teetering on the brink of collapse? After a little over a week in China, I feel the only thing I can say for sure is: I have no idea. But fortunately, I was in the region at the same time as some one who might and was thinking about the same things, but actually works on real deadlines. In today’s Times, Tom Friedman takes on the Chanos story. But I would add just one thing that if I were looking to invest in China I’d be watching for this year. While in China we met with several environmentalists who like many environmentalists around the world were deflated after the disappointment that was COP 15. So, we asked, what’s on the agenda for the year ahead? The answer was more or less the same from everyone. Last year, with the anticipation of COP 15, Chinese environmentalists were thinking globally. This year, they're acting locally. And 2010 will be a critical time in China. This is the year that the central government begins to formulate its next 5-year plan. And many in China are seizing the opportunity to push for China’s 12th 5-year plan to include a transition to a low-carbon economy. Anyone who’s been to Beijing -- and tried to breath there -- knows that what’s currently fueling China’s economic growth is unsustainable. Not unsustainable in the way crunchy granolas here speak of it, but in a gas-mask-is-the-new-Beijing-fashion sort of way. So if China’s political class are as smart as Tom Friedman often gives them credit for, then China’s next 5-year plan could be a game changer, building the critical mass for cleaner fuels and greener technology. And then you can bet that’s where the smart money will be. Mariana van Zeller and I just returned from our first trip to China. ... more
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Read more at: http://blog.shared-interest.com.
After all this intensive swapping, I think I deserve to celebrate the end the Fairtrade Fortnight with a nice relaxing soak in the bath, I might even treat myself to a glass of the Fairtrade wine I told you about earlier in the week!
Read more at: http://blog.shared-interest.com.Read more at: http://blog.shared-interest.com.
After all this intensive swapping, I... more
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Join AlterNet's collective investigative project into the bubble barons who got obscenely rich as they destroyed our economy. Help hold them accountable with Citizen Journalism.
February 24, 2010 |
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A century ago, the robber barons at the helm of the U.S. economy were easily identifiable titans of industry: Andrew Carnegie of Carnegie Steel, John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil, financier and steel magnate J.P. Morgan. It was easy to draw the link between the robber barons' brutal business practices and their immense wealth; it was clear that these businessmen were, quite literally, robbing the American people in the course of amassing their fortunes.
The influence of today's super-rich is significantly harder to trace. Much of their wealth is managed in opaque Wall Street investment vehicles and byzantine corporate structures. They are less likely to slap their names on their ventures, and their profitable relationships with the most destructive segments of our economy are hidden behind layers of corporate control. In our post-industrial economy, they amass wealth not by producing things with actual value, but rather by riding waves of speculation, such as the housing bubble, to dizzying heights of wealth.
Today's super-rich are not robber barons, but bubble barons: they extract their fortunes from intensifying cycles of imaginary wealth creation and destruction, live at a far remove from their businesses, and evade accountability in the public spotlight. The robber barons stood behind their economic crimes; the bubble barons, for the most part, do not.
Beginning today, AlterNet and LittleSis.org are partnering in an investigation of these bubble barons -- a select group of American multi-billionaires who saw astronomic gains in wealth during the housing bubble, and who so far have evaded all accountability in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Who are they? Where did their wealth come from? Where has it gone? How do they exercise their influence?
To find out, we need your help: Click here to sign up with LittleSis.org and join AlterNet's investigation of America's bubble barons. (E-mail citjo@alternet.org if you have any questions.)
Once you sign up, you'll receive instructions about how you can help with our research. You will also receive instructions on how to use LittleSis, a platform for collaborative research on influential Americans, which we like to call an "involuntary facebook."
We've identified 67 "bubble barons" (also listed below) to target with this investigation. All are worth $2 billion or more, and all have ties to the industries that benefited most from the housing bubble: real estate and finance. Some, such as New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, have enjoyed increases of over 400 percent on what were substantial fortunes in the pre-bubble years. Others, such as former Enron trader John Arnold, are newly minted billionaires.
Following the bubble barons' money will be a key component of our investigation; naturally, this will entail a closer look at their charitable and political activities. Bloomberg, for one, supports public health initiatives through his family foundation. George Soros is a well-known funder of progressive causes through his Open Society Institute. The Koch brothers, on the other hand, are prominent backers of conservative organizations.
All of these fortunes were built on the illusion of a sound economy -- an illusion that came crashing down for most of the country in 2007 and 2008, as record numbers of Americans lost their homes to foreclosure and saw their jobs disappear.
But the illusion didn't come crashing down for the bubble barons. The U.S. government came to their rescue, in the form of massive, taxpayer-funded Wall Street bailouts and a monetary policy that rewards wealth, above all -- the bubble barons, above all. While Americans struggle under the burden of double-digit interest rates on mortgages and credit cards and see their savings accounts eek out gains measured in basis points, the bubble barons are essentially getting paid unprecedented amounts to sit on their money, simply because they have lots and lots of it.
More at the link above:Join AlterNet's collective investigative project into the bubble barons who got... more
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His words carry weight, which is why it’s sad to see him defend corporations’ preferred system of pollution regulation, the Cap and Trade supposed panacea.
In anticipation of Copenhagen’s climate summit, many journalists have been rightfully stressing the urgency for dramatic emissions reform, and are also calling for immediate action by the world’s leaders. These journalists say that it’s time to stop arguing with lunatics in the hopes of forming some pragmatic bipartisan legislation. There are the facts and then there are the lies. There is the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, the more respected summary of the science affecting the Arctic. Real-life scientists — not the idiots over at Red State — report there is more carbon stored in the Arctic’s methane hydrates than in every lump of coal and barrel of oil in the world. When the arctic melts (and it is melting,) that’s a big problem:
“If even 1% of the methane stored in Arctic-shelf hydrates were released to the atmosphere, it could cause really abrupt warming,” says Susan Joy Hassol, the analyst who along with 300 climate scientists wrote the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment…Some scientists believe that when this happened 250m years ago, it triggered the largest extinction event in history: 95% of marine animals and 70% of land-based animals died.
Then there’s the obsession over the e-mails of one group of scientists, who at worst can be accused of scientifically immoral practices. For the record, the IPCC still calls global warming “unequivocal” and rising human greenhouse-gas emissions were “very likely” the main cause. The actions of a handful of shady scientists hardly discredit a decade’s worth of scientific research. (Side note: Why didn’t Conservatives call for the End of Capitalism after Goldman Sachs fucked the planet? Those asshole deserved way more derision than a few bad apple scientists.) So it’s time to stop humoring the global warming deniers. It’s not like we tried to “meet half way” with the people that wanted to keep burning women who were accused of being witches.
We’re told the most rational rationalists (and also Senator James “truth squad” Inhofe) will meet in Copenhagen as part of an “Adults Only” conversation about how to deal with very real global warming. Unfortunately, the Rationalists seem to be treating the most effective anecdote to pollution — a carbon fee — as a secondary measure to the preferred system, Cap and Trade.
There are several reasons CT is inferior to carbon fees, or carbon taxes, according to the Carbon Tax Center.
1. Carbon taxes will lend predictability to energy prices, whereas cap-and-trade systems will aggravate the price volatility that historically has discouraged investments in less carbon-intensive electricity generation, carbon-reducing energy efficiency and carbon-replacing renewable energy.
2. Carbon taxes can be implemented much sooner than complex cap-and-trade systems. Because of the urgency of the climate crisis, we do not have the luxury of waiting while the myriad details of a cap-and-trade system are resolved through lengthy negotiations.
3. Carbon taxes are transparent and easily understandable, making them more likely to elicit the necessary public support than an opaque and difficult to understand cap-and-trade system.
4. Carbon taxes can be implemented with far less opportunity for manipulation by special interests, while a cap-and-trade system’s complexity opens it to exploitation by special interests and perverse incentives that can undermine public confidence and undercut its effectiveness.
5. Carbon taxes address emissions of carbon from every sector, whereas some cap-and-trade systems discussed to date have only targeted the electricity industry, which accounts for less than 40% of emissions.
6. Carbon tax revenues would most likely be returned to the public through dividends or progressive tax-shifting, while the costs of cap-and-trade systems are likely to become a hidden tax as dollars flow to market participants, lawyers and consultants.
Numbers 3 and 4 are biggies. Unlike the carbon tax, CT is extremely susceptible to manipulation by private industry. In The Great American Bubble Machine, journalist Matt Taibbi explains how the new game in town — the next bubble machine after subprime mortgages — is in carbon credits. Companies will need to have carbon credits in order to pollute, but Taibbi reports the new carbon credit market is virtually identical to the “commodities-market casino” that’s been so good to companies like Goldman Sachs.
The reason there’s been much more support for CT than the carbon tax is because — quite simply — CT will be great for business.
Here’s how it works: If the bill passes, there will be limits for coal plants, utilities, natural-gas distributors and numerous other industries on the amount of carbon emissions (a.k.a. greenhouse gases) they can produce per year. If the companies go over their allotment, they will be able to buy “allocations” or credits from other companies that have managed to produce fewer emissions. President Obama conservatively estimates that about $646 billion worth of carbon credits will be auctioned in the first seven years; one of his top economic aides speculates that the real number might be twice or even three times that amount.
The feature of this plan that has special appeal to speculators is that the “cap” on carbon will be continually lowered by the government, which means that carbon credits will become more and more scarce with each passing year. Which means that this is a brand new commodities market where the main commodity to be traded is guaranteed to rise in price over time. The volume of this new market will be upwards of a trillion dollars annually; for comparison’s sake, the annual combined revenues of all electricity suppliers in the U.S. total $320 billion.
Goldman has been pushing hard for CT because they’re going to make tons of money from it, and other industry hasn’t been zealously opposing CT because it’s not abundantly clear how the government is going to enforce it anyway.
[more at link]His words carry weight, which is why it’s sad to see him defend... more
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asherp
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2 years ago
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Samsam Bubbleman is a self-proclaimed 'Bubbleologist' - How big can you blow-up yours?Samsam Bubbleman is a self-proclaimed 'Bubbleologist' - How big can you... more
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This film explores the theory of money, and how today's monetary policies were formed.This film explores the theory of money, and how today's monetary policies were... more
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asherp
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2 years ago
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"It’s been interesting, to say the least, watching the public reaction to my Rolling Stone piece last week. I of course expected that some kind of highly unpleasant response would come my way from Goldman and its allies in the press, but I admit to being surprised a little by the form this response took. Obviously I don’t want to dwell on this business, because it’s beyond boring when someone in my position complains about his critics, but I feel like I have to say something about at least a few of the talking points of the inevitable Goldman counteroffensive, which in various forms (letters sent to me personally, public comments) have reached my desk in the last few days.
The most ludicrous of these, and the one that surprised me the most, is the accusation that my article was anti-Semitic propaganda. The first letter I got on this score I actually mistook for a joke sent to me by one of my friends. Then I got another one which I quickly realized was not a joke at all. “Isn’t it convenient,” it read, “that an Arab-American writer for Rolling Stone looks at Wall Street and picks the most prototypically Jewish firm around to demonize.”
The last time I heard something similar was a few years ago, when Debbie Schlussel, a severely dimwitted Detroit-based right-wing pundit, railed against my supposed Arabness after I wrote an article about the Lebanese population in Dearborn, Michigan. I wrote to her to let her know that I’m actually Irish and Filipino, and not at all an Arab, but never got a response. This time the charge is a little different, as several writers complained that my article was “a rehash of every classic anti-Jewish conspiracy theory” and “a pale copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
[continues at link]"It’s been interesting, to say the least, watching the public reaction to... more
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asherp
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From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression - and they're about to do it again.
The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindleddry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.
[more of the excellent peice of reporting by Matt Taibbi at the link]From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market... more
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asherp
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“Tonight, I propose a new tax cut for homeownership that says to every middle-income working family in this country, if you sell your home, you will not have to pay a capital gains tax on it ever — not ever.”
— President Bill Clinton, at the 1996 Democratic National Convention
By itself, the change in the tax law did not cause the housing bubble, economists say. Several other factors — a relaxation of lending standards, a failure by regulators to intervene, a sharp decline in interest rates and a collective belief that house prices could never fall — probably played larger roles.
But many economists say that the law had a noticeable impact, allowing home sales to become tax-free windfalls. A recent study of the provision by an economist at the Federal Reserve suggests that the number of homes sold was almost 17 percent higher over the last decade than it would have been without the law.“Tonight, I propose a new tax cut for homeownership that says to every... more
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