Veel huvitavaid artikleid
The Future of Money: It’s Flexible, Frictionless and (Almost) Free – Wired’is ilmunud artikkel raha või õigemini maksevõimaluste tulevikust, kus panganduse piisavalt murenenud vundament on aktiivselt asunud õõnestama mitmed väiksemad tegijad:
A generation ago, when people made the choice to switch to plastic, credit cards did not just replicate cash; they fundamentally changed how we used money. The ease with which people could make purchases encouraged them to buy much more than they had in the past. Entrepreneurs suddenly had access to easy — though high-interest — loans, providing a spark to the economy. Now, while it may be hard to predict what innovations PayPal’s platform will enable, it’s safe to say that the payment industry is going to change dramatically. As money becomes completely digitized, infinitely transferable, and friction-free, it will again revolutionize how we think about our economy.
Eraldi küsimus loomulikult, kas pangad lasevad sellel juhtuda. Rahapesu ja organiseeritud kuritegevus on piisavad argumendid, et agiteerida riigiesindajate jõulisemat sekkumist, kuid ühestki riigist sõltumatu raha on sellele vaatamata silmapiiril.
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Endless Oil – satun olema üks nendest inimestest, kes ei arva, et nafta lähima saja aasta jooksul otsa saab (postitus 2005. aastast ja postitus 2008. aastast). Põhjuseks on hinnad, mis suunavad ja informeerivad – ühelt poolt leidma alternatiive ja teiselt poolt kasutusel võtma uusi tehnoloogiaid, mis ennast kõrgemate hindade juures õigustavad. BusinessWeek heitis hiljuti üpris optimistliku pilgu naftaga varustamise tulevikku:
Schoonebeek will not flood the world with crude. But its success presents a stiff challenge to those who argue that oil production is in irreversible decline. Consumer demand, technology, and global politics are shifting in a way that could spell a future of oil abundance, not of catastrophic dearth. As Leonardo Maugeri, a senior executive at Italian oil major ENI (E), puts it: “There will be enough oil for at least 100 years.”
Many analysts and industry executives have little doubt that there’s plenty of oil in the ground. “Only about 32% of the oil [in reserves] is produced,” says Val Brock, Shell’s head of business development for enhanced oil recovery. Shell estimates 300 billion barrels and maybe more might be squeezed out of existing fields, much of it once thought beyond retrieval. Peter Jackson, IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates’ London-based senior director for oil industry activity, has reviewed data from the world’s biggest fields. His conclusion: 60% of their reserves remain available.
The fact that there’s still oil for the taking is driving Shell and other majors to come up with new technologies, which are expensive to develop but worth it when crude is riding high. While the price has fallen considerably from the peak of $147 per barrel in 2008, it is still far above what many oilmen expected a few years ago. “You will see companies going into the deep water, going into the arctic, using the best technology,” says Maugeri, who sees the oil industry as a dynamic system that responds rapidly to changes in the economic and political environment.
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Gravity Emerges from Quantum Information, Say Physicists – gravitatsioon kui kvantinformatsioonist esile kerkiv (emergent) nähtus on piisav kõva pähkel, et seda mitte rohkem lahti seletada vaid soovitada artiklit, mis pakub välja uue viisi gravitatsioonist mõtlemiseks:
One of the hottest new ideas in physics is that gravity is an emergent phenomena; that it somehow arises from the complex interaction of simpler things.
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Some physicists are convinced that the properties of information do not come from the behaviour of information carriers such as photons and electrons but the other way round. They think that information itself is the ghostly bedrock on which our universe is built.
Arvestades 19. sajandi füüsika mõju majandusteadusele võib vahelduseks juhtuda, et majandusteadusel on midagi füüsikale pakkuda. Üpris lihtsatele reeglitele allutatud indiviidide vaheline kaubandus, mis viib turgude kui esile kerkiva nähtusteni, on ikkagi hulgaliselt tähelepanu pälvinud.
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Up from Slavery – tõenäoliselt ei igatse keegi Eestis taga sajanditetagust “vabaduse kuldajastut”, kuid USA’s on see tendents kahetsusväärselt levinud liberaalsema maailmavaatega inimeste seas. Hiljuti tuletas David Boaz meelde, et mingit põhjust ei ole ignoreerida osade inimeste vabaduste ulatusliku piiramist:
I’ve probably been guilty of similar thoughtless and ahistorical exhortations of our glorious libertarian past. And I’m entirely in sympathy with Hornberger’s preference for a world without an alphabet soup of federal agencies, transfer programs, drug laws, and so on. But I think this historical perspective is wrong. No doubt one of the reasons that libertarians haven’t persuaded as many people as we’d like is that a lot of Americans don’t think we’re on the road to serfdom, don’t feel that we’ve lost all our freedoms. And in particular, if we want to attract people who are not straight white men to the libertarian cause, we’d better stop talking as if we think the straight white male perspective is the only one that matters. For the past 70 years or so conservatives have opposed the demands for equal respect and equal rights by Jews, blacks, women, and gay people. Libertarians have not opposed those appeals for freedom, but too often we (or our forebears) paid too little attention to them. And one of the ways we do that is by saying “Americans used to be free, but now we’re not”—which is a historical argument that doesn’t ring true to an awful lot of Jewish, black, female, and gay Americans.
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The ‘Great’ Roubini: Wrong Again and Again – Nouriel Roubinist ilmus pärast finantskriisi hulgaliselt artikleid ja tema enda kirjutatu pälvis hulgaliselt tähelepanu, kuid nüüd kus olukord on stabiliseerumas ei ole Roubini padupessimism enam sugugi nii tabav. Prohvetist on saanud kõigest veel üks tõekuulutaja paljude teiste sarnaste seas:
Except that the credit dominos lined up in Roubini’s mind never fell. Delinquencies on all classes of debt did indeed rise last year, as one would expect in a recession. But the deterioration never came close to triggering the mass insolvency Roubini expected. Corporate debt in particular was never remotely stressed. Most recently, card, auto, and mortgages have all shown clear signs of improvement—exactly what you’d expect at the start of an economic recovery. Commercial real estate remains a challenge, but doesn’t figure to be a rerun of subprime. Roubini got it all wrong.
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Boaz’i artikkel tekitas USA libertaalsetes ringkondades tõsise diskusioonitormi. Selle põhjusteks on teatud ajaloolised pinged erinevate libertaalsete instituutide vahel.
Kindlasti tasuks lugeda ka Hornbergeri vastust Boazile: http://reason.com/archives/2010/04/09/up-from-serfdom
“Let’s consider, say, the year 1880. Here was a society in which people were free to keep everything they earned, because there was no income tax. They were also free to decide what to do with their own money—spend it, save it, invest it, donate it, or whatever. People were generally free to engage in occupations and professions without a license or permit. There were few federal economic regulations and regulatory agencies. No Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, bailouts, or so-called stimulus plans. No IRS. No Departments of Education, Energy, Agriculture, Commerce, and Labor. No EPA and OSHA. No Federal Reserve. No drug laws. Few systems of public schooling. No immigration controls. No federal minimum-wage laws or price controls. A monetary system based on gold and silver coins rather than paper money. No slavery. No CIA. No FBI. No torture or cruel or unusual punishments. No renditions. No overseas military empire. No military-industrial complex.”