S & P 500 Following Gasoline Price Surges
Chart of the Day looks at how the stock market has responded to significant increases in gasoline prices over the past 25 years.
Yergin on the Coming Energy Crisis
Daniel Yergin, Author of the excellent: The Prize on the coming energy crisis:
Man’s technical ingenuity has collided with nature’s rage in the Gulf of Mexico, and the outcome has been an integrated energy disaster. The full scope will not be understood until the waters recede, the damage to platforms and refineries is assessed, and the extent of damage to underwater pipelines from undersea mudslides is determined. Yet what has happened is on a scale not seen before, and the impact of the price spikes and dislocations will roll across the entire economy. Even as we confront the human tragedy, the consequences will also force us to think more expansively about energy security, and to focus harder on a matter which other events have already emphasized: The need for new infrastructure and investment in our energy sector.
Kelo Politics
Mike Beebe, Arkansas’s attorney general and a Democratic gubernatorial candidate, said some complacent things about the state property rights after Kelo. Republican Asa Hutchinson pounced. The tussle suggests that takings will be an issue in the campaign, with each candidate trying to demonstrate his property rights bona fides. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reports:
Massachusetts Turns off Microsoft Office
The State of Massachusetts is moving its workers away from Microsoft Office toward open source tools.
Ray Kurzweil
Glenn Reynolds interviews Kurzweil, with some interesting charts on US science and technology education.
The Customer is Always Wrong: EFF’s Guide to DRM and Online Music
Electronic Frontier Foundation:
Many digital music services employ digital rights management (DRM) — also known as “copy protection” — that prevents you from doing things like using the portable player of your choice or creating remixes. Forget about breaking the DRM to make traditional uses like CD burning and so forth. Breaking the DRM or distributing the tools to break DRM may expose you to liability under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) even if you’re not making any illegal uses.
In other words, in this brave new world of “authorized music services,” law-abiding music fans often get less for their money than they did in the old world of CDs (or at least, the world before record companies started crippling CDs with DRM, too). Unfortunately, in an effort to attract customers, these music services try to obscure the restrictions they impose on you with clever marketing.
Before and After New Orleans Satellite Photos
Don Park has posted satellite photos before and after Hurricane Katrina, via GlobeXplorer.
Inside the Tax Shelter Mess
Some very useful questions and answers from Business Week:
Are the deals illegal?
The IRS says so, but the courts have not yet ruled on the matter. The IRS has a mixed record in shuttering such transactions. Under what is known as the economic-substance test, the IRS has claimed that shelter deals done solely to reduce taxes are improper. But federal courts have sometimes ruled that such transactions are O.K., even if they carry no economic risk or opportunity for reward beyond their tax savings.
Newest & very scary report on Gulf of Mexico oil production
Theoildrum.com carries a post on hurrricane damage to oil production facilities in the Gulf of Mexico:
There are MANY production platforms missing (as in not visible from the air). This means they have been totally lost. I am talking about 10’s of platforms, not single digit numbers. Each platform can have from 4 to 100+ wells on it. . . .
We are looking at YEARS to return to the production levels we had prior to the storm. The eastern Gulf of Mexico is primarily oil production…
YEARS, people. I know what this means – hope everyone else gets it too…
Click here to read the full post.