2013/08/31

Changed Habits

What Are You Buying On-Line These Days?

There's a bit of discussion about how soon consumers in Australia are going to head back to local retailers once they realise and feel the impact of the Australia Dollar having gone down.
David Jones boss Paul Zahra said today that he didn't think consumers would fully register that their online purchases from, say, US rival Nordstrom, had gone up in price until they paid their credit card.
How this plays out for Australian retailers over the medium term will be interesting to watch, assuming the Australian dollar remains at this level or even falls further.

If, after the election, the government decides to impose a 10 per cent GST on online purchases under $1000, the competition game between Australian and offshore retailers will become more interesting. (The GST imposition probably isn't close. It costs the Treasury coffers $700 million to $1 billion a year - depending whose numbers you use - in forgone tax but the cost of administration doesn't make it compelling yet.

It certainly wouldn't provide a cure-all for retailers and the particularly challenged premium department stores. If you exclude the small improvement in the first quarter of 2012-2013, David Jones has been experiencing quarterly sales declines for almost two years.

Now, I don't know about you, but I was never really a shopper at David Jones or Myer/Grace Brothers so all of this is actually not an area I would dare to claim great knowledge. It seems to me that the impact on retailing of the parity period which we can roughly say was 2010-2013 was that it also coincided with the explosion of on-line shopping. The argument has always run that if the dollar wasn't so high, the customers would head back to retailers but clearly this isn't happening and Paul Zahra is clutching at straws as to explaining why they're not coming back... or haven't comeback "yet."

Which reminds one of course of the "yet" dialogue in 'High Fidelity'. If I said to you that you haven't felt the pain of the lower Aussie Dollar in your credit card statement ....'yet' ... do you think that will drive you to shop at David Jones? I mean, really...

Jokes aside, the reason I didn't shop at David Jones before was probably because they didn't have what I wanted. it seems what I want - judging from my recent purchase is guitar gizmos which I know are not sold at David Jones or Myer - are simply not on the shelves of Australian retailers.

Take this little valve Pre-amp that arrived from China today. It's a 12AX7 valve preamp for a guitar which I got for $40 including postage. I don't know if it's any good yet (there's that word!) because I haven't plugged it in, but it goes without saying nobody stocks it in Australia; nobody probably even knows about it in Australia, let alone a buyer; and there probably isn't a really big market for it in Australia. I can say two more things about it that are certain. 1)  It's disposable income I didn't spend at David Jones or Myer or an Australian musical instrument retailer. 2) The opportunity cost of spending it on-line with some weird electronics goods seller in ShenZen China had nothing to do with GST considerations. Zilch. Nada. Absolutely none.

I suspect the real problem for retailers is that they can't get specialist enough to compete with the truly weird and bizarre on-line sellers. I mean, let's say on a whim I wanted a Derek Jeter rookie baseball card from 1992. Or a hand signed LP copy of Van Halen I by the guys in the band. Or one of Robert Fripp's guitars. There's no way a retailer in Australia is going to be able to meet that kind of demand from a random individual and simultaneously stock and sell enough of what sells to a wider, more general market, to keep trading.

And that's just me being idiosyncratic. I imagine many other people have experienced the same thing. That they can find parts and things and bits and bobs that were so hard to get through traditional retail that they'd given up - and suddenly the options are there. The world is getting weirder and wilder in its demands and there's not a shot in hell of keeping up with this change in demand.

So I don't think it's really a problem of relative pricing that is driving this move to on-line shopping. It's actually a qualitative shift in people's shopping preferences and they're not coming back any time soon.

2013/08/29

'Oblivion'

Forgetting Other Movies Exist

Spoiler alert.

No, really. In this one I'll definitely have to spoil it for you so if you hate spoilers, don't read on.

Okay now? Good.

You've seen this movie in many guises before. It's just been jumbled up and put together from parts of other films. It's a film that almost looks authentic and original and it's not. It's a clone just like the main character.

What's Good About It

Some marvelous cinematography and design. it's a rare film that takes you to a place you've never seen and show you a light that is new and refreshing. This film has it in spades.

The UTCC (The Ubiquitous Tom Cruise Character) isn't too annoying in this film, unlike say, in 'Jack Reacher'. In this one, he is playing a character imaginatively named Jack Harper. That should've been the give away that the main character was going to be some kind of clone. Perhaps it's even a kind of meta-textual irony, as in: "Hey look, all his characters are the same!"

It's hard to say because in most part the film takes itself pretty seriously. In most instances, that would be good except...

What's Bad About It

... this film is like an identikit science fiction movie. Post-Apocalyptic settings don't come more hard and fast than this movie. The New York City in ruins harks back to both 'Planet of the Apes' and 'A.I.'. The helicopter harks back to the sky-hover vehicles in 'Minority Report' and hey, Tom cruise was in that one too. There are scavengers on the Post Apocalyptic landscape, an they're like something right out of 'Mad Max'. Then these drones come around and attack people - and they're unrelenting like the robots in 'I Robot'. The Robot Drones have a POV shot, and lo and behold it's like the Termo-vision from 'The Terminator'. Weirder still, for a machine designed by aliens, it's conveniently  got English text in the read outs. So Tom Cruise's Jack sets off to find one of these drones and finds himself in the library having a shoot out with the post-Apocalyptic scavengers in a defunct library in a sequence that looks like 'I Am Legend' and look, he gets his foot trapped and dragged across the floor by a trap pulley, just as Will Smith was catching monsters... Eventually Jack is talking to a wise old black guy who fills him in on the exposition and of course you'd swear that could've been  Morpheus from 'The Matrix', but it's not, it's Morgan Freeman playing a version of a guy that could have been Morpheus. Then Jack meets his clone self and realises he is one of many clones all kept apart artificially, but sharing memory fragments, just like Sam Rockwell in 'Moon'. The memory fragments feature the moment he proposed to his wife on the observation deck of the Empire State Building and of course this harks back to 'Sleepless In Seattle' which took its cue from 'An Affair to Remember'. Finally, he heads up to confront the alien craft in the sky and is taken in by the big mothership, like 'Independence Day' there, he sees banks upon banks of himself as clones - a bit like Buzz Lightyear does in 'Toy Story'. Eventually, he comes to a platform, and confronts an alien AI, that speaks through a red singular eye (Machine Messiah!). the red singular eye is suspiciously like the red light of HAL 9000 from '2001: A Space Odyssey'. Then, Jack blows them all up by flicking a switch, much like Bruce Willis does in the climactic moment of Armageddon'.

I'm sure I missed a few more. And it all could have been a wonderful film if you didn't know any of these other good films.

What's Interesting About It

If it weren't for all the bad bits mentioned above, it's probably an okay movie.  You sort of wonder about the producers who let a director do this sort of thing. Talk about not having any original ideas, yet still managing to make a movie that went to market. It's a bit like if I made a car out of all these different bits of cars from different makes and then sold it as something original.

The Post-Apocalypse Fantasy

This sub-genre has been growing for a while. Maybe it started with 'On the Beach' where everywhere but Australia gets nuked and people quietly await their radiation death in Australia. Somehow I doubt it would go that way if it ever happened that Australia was the last outpost of civilisation remaining. It would be more like Satyricon or the last days of Rome. 'Planet of the Apes' and 'Mad Max' both couch their stories as after our civilisation has fallen. As the genre grows it seems we really like this idea that people would band together in paramilitary enclaves. So much so the survivalist fantasies seem to meld into one vision of huddled masses living in industrial buildings.

Somehow I don't think that's how it would go. We'd sooner become each man for himself and behave like the kids in 'Lord of the Flies' than turn into bands of resistance we see so often in these movies. It's almost worth doing a 'Lord of the Flies' for adults. I guess 'Lost' was meant to be that, but went off into a weird direction and lived up to its name.

All these films ignore just how much our lives are sitting atop the giant edifice of knowledge and structure of society built up over thousands of years. The survivalists are hoping that suddenly these restrictive laws and governments would suddenly vanish and leave behind these weird kinds of utopias but it won't happen that way for the simple reason that even the rudimentary of our lives depends on resources we cannot mine unless we have the great apparatus of civilisation. The more they make these films, the more hokey and silly the vision of a post-apocalypse becomes. When civilisation ends, it will be just that - the end of the world of homo sapiens. There won't be these heroic adventures.  Just death.

2013/08/27

News That's Fit To Punt - 26/Aug/2013

Mr. Rabbit On The Loose

I guess I'm not the only person a little perturbed by the polls suggesting a win by the Coalition on the 7th. Pleiades sent in this link that pretty much sums up the consternation:
The electoral atmosphere is surreal. We have a government on the back foot over its economic record - which has been outstanding when the global economic environment is taken into account.

And we have an opposition that appears to have successfully undermined the government's credibility, based on the government's record of fiscal debt and deficit, which has, in fact, been the foundation of the nation's success in avoiding the global financial crisis.

The Coalition tactic recalls the 1996 election. At every outdoor political event the opposition's debt truck would be lurking in the background, showing Australia's foreign debt ticking over at an alarming rate. Immediately after the election the truck was put way, never to be seen again. Nor was any policy - serious or otherwise - advanced by the Howard government to reverse this alarming growth in debt.

So it will be this time unless Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey are silly enough in office to ride roughshod over their advisers in Treasury, Finance and the Reserve Bank and impose austerity policies involving massive cuts in government spending. Such policies have proved spectacularly unsuccessful elsewhere in reducing deficits or unemployment.

The article goes on to say that climate policy is getting short shrift as a result of the major parties dumbing down their pitch. Well, climate policy itself is in danger of being obliterated if an Abbott-led Coalition wins. I'm a little surprised that the swinging voters who voted in Kevin Rudd with a mandate to put in an ETS, then turned on him when he couldn't get a deal in Copenhagen and decided to kick the can down, are now seriously contemplating voting in Tony Abbott who is clearly on record as a Climate Change Denier. I mean, really? Is that where we're headed?

But That's Not All! There's The Boats!

Here's another one from Pleaides... Out in Jakarta, they're a little alarmed that we're about to vote in Tony Abbott with his turn back the boats slogans.
The Australian opposition’s plan to disburse millions of dollars to Indonesian fishermen, which is partly to stem the flow of asylum seekers, is an insult to Indonesia as a nation, an international affairs expert has said.

Hikmahanto Juwana of the University of Indonesia criticized the plan and called it “humiliating” because it made Indonesian fishermen just “look like mercenaries who did dirty jobs.”

“I think the government should voice protests to the coalition’s very insensitive plan which clearly shows their poor knowledge about the situation in Indonesia,” he said in a statement made available to The Jakarta Post over the weekend.

The Australia’s opposition coalition has unveiled its plan for more regional action to stop people smuggling, pledging A$420 million for policy measures that include paying Indonesian villagers for information about smugglers and buying unseaworthy boats, according to Australian media.

When you spell it out like that, why yes, it is patronising and  reeks of Colonialist Paternalism. Of course Tony Abbott would be tone deaf (pardon the pun) to such sensitivities.  Though, it gets me that in this day and age that a leading politician from Australia basically has this kind of witheringly contemptuous outlook on Indonesia. How the hell is he going to get Indonesia to play ball with his idiotic plan if he's already starting on the "you're bunch of money-grubbing yokels" foot.

Not to mention that fact that the Coalition is going to do this on taxpayers' money having harangued the ALP government about bad management of funds. I guess that's Chutzpah for you.

The ALP's Just Losin' It All By Themselves

I'm sort of detached from the daily coverage of this election because a) I've made up my mind I'm not voting for Tony Abbott and the Coalition and; b) I hate being lied to so brazenly and c) I'm satisfied Julia Gillard isn't part of the equation; I'm happy not to go into the nitty-gritty of what's being said. Occasionally Clive Palmer makes me laugh with his handout of DVDs that has a bonus video of him wanting to make the Titanic II with people referring to him as "Professor Palmer". Yes, it's side-splittingly funny - so much so that I laughed so hard I hurt my intercostal muscles.

So it takes me by surprise that the ALP is doing so badly in the polls. What drugs are people on? Peter Hartcher's explanation is that Tony Abbott hasn't changed one bit; it's the ALP that's just going about losing support.
But most politically telling was the fact that Abbott's big speech was substantially the same one he gave on the same Brisbane stage at the same event three years ago. This conveys four central realities of Australian politics.

First, it tells us that this election is a case where the opposition is not winning, but where the government is losing. Australia is not rushing gleefully to embrace Abbott's Coalition but is instead rejecting Kevin Rudd and Labor.

You can tell because the main difference between the Abbott pitch of three years ago and his pitch on Sunday is that last time he wasn't winning the election campaign, and this time he is. Abbott is standing in the same place. The electorate is moving to him, not the other way around.

Second, it tells us that Abbott's Coalition has held its nerve, an unusual thing in a high-stakes contest. Instead of seeking to ingratiate itself by offering new goodies, the Liberal leader announced no new billion-dollar bonanzas, only some modest new help for apprentices, self-funded retirees and dementia research.

While John Howard's campaign launches were laden with billion-dollar offerings, the only billions in Abbott's speech were references to Labor deficits.

Third, this also tells us something about Australia. Abbott is appealing to a country disillusioned with politicians and their promises. The only credible promises are modest ones.

Abbott explicitly warns Australia ''don't expect miracles''. A Coalition government would ''respect the limits of government as well as its potential''.

At core, Abbott's promise is limited to uprooting much of Labor's legacy, while preserving work on a national disability insurance scheme and enlarging Australia's parental leave scheme.

Fourth, Abbott continues conspicuously to avoid the great, glaring problem at the centre of his policy structure: his budget. It was a mess at the last election, and remains unsolved to this day.

Be patient, and wait another week, the Liberals tell us.

What a joke, and we're falling for it like the fascists we are.

I've been thinking a bit about this and I imagine that there are basically a lot of old baby boomers who are unhappy with being shackled with the carbon pricing in their old age, translating into higher power bills when they don't even believe climate change. One also imagines a lot of Gen X people who are neck deep in mortgage hell wanting to punish the ALP government for the GFC and its aftermath. And I can well imagine there are quite a few misguided Gen Y types who -being Gen Y - want a laissez faire arrangement and they don't care how much they pay for their education. I meet these types now and then and it always strikes me that democracy is wasted on the free world. They have the vote; the right to vote in a free country in the first world and they want to waste it on a sloganeering blowhard.

Of all the things people could do, the worst thing would be to vote for Tony Abbott's coalition.  His government is not going to do anything but widen the gap between the wealthy and the poor and make us an even more hateful, self-possessed, mean-spirited country. He will be a Prime Minster you'd be ashamed to show anybody. But then, he did learn from the master of that sort of thing in John Howard.

2013/08/26

'Emperor'

The End Of The End Of World War II As We Know It

The events leading up to the surrender of Japan on 15th August 1945 is an interesting topic. There was quite a bit of politicking carried out by the heads of the military in Japan. Some of the meetings were pretty dramatic and poignant. The angst and the pride of proud men on the line, trying to salvage the un-salvage-able, hit a crescendo in early August 1945.  It's great fodder for an excellent movie. As it turns out (as Apple staff are told to say instead of "unfortunately"), this is not that movie.

What we have instead is a fairly ill-informed, loosely told crappy reconstruction of the earliest days of the MacArthur GHQ. For  start General Bonner Fellers is the romantic lead. Why, they could have had Curtis LeMay as the comic relief!

What's Good About It

Somebody had to approach the topic at some point in time; why on Earth did MacArthur let the Emperor of Japan avoid going to trial a the Tokyo Trials? It's a worthy question.  Of course, then they smother it in a bullshit romance flashback, but the film sort of gropes at a fairly interesting point about Japan between 1868 and 1945: Japan was a constitutional monarchy. So the immediate thrust of the film is try and pin the blame on the Emperor and the throne, only to find the Emperor as having been a sort of passenger of history who rubber stamped things.

All of this is handled in a very ham-fisted way, but the core of it is that they can't stick the Emperor on trial not only for reasons of realpolitik, but basically because the roles ascribed to the Emperor doesn't line up with dictators like Hitler or Mussolini.

What's Bad About It

The romantic subplot is terrible. It's just awful. And it takes up lots of screen time.

The directing is even worse. I don't know where they find these crappy directors. This Peter Webber fellow can't set up a scene without crossing the line over and over again. He's also a terrible director of actors, and seems to have no idea how editing works, so consequently seems to create scenes with no tension or rhythm. The sense of narrative is a mess and on the whole he seems to have been interested in all the wrong things, just so he can tell his crappy romantic story which probably has no basis in real life whatsoever. I thought Baz Luhrman was a particularly awkward, technically deficient director, but this Peter Webber is even worse. He has himself a really interesting topic and makes an utter balls up of it.

I don't know what else to say but this is a really crappy movie entertainment-wise as well as being a particularly shitty bit of film making.

What's Interesting About It

They keep making and remaking these Pocahontas stories where some white dude goes to another culture and falls in love with some local girl. Then the dude ends up being the meat in the sandwich of the story and well, you only have to look at successful examples like 'Witness' (the Amish) or 'Avatar' (aliens with blue skin) to see it's a ruse to get you an 'in' on the narrative about "the other". Of course the other painful one is 'The Last Samurai' which was preceded by 'James Clavell's Shogun' many years ago. You'd think that white people could get to Japan and just get on with whatever it is they need to do in the story instead having to spend 40minutes chasing skirt. But you know how it goes.

Some films are more deft at doing this insertion-of-romantic-hocus-pocus while films like this one stick out as a monument to the stupidity of the trope. Other films are worse on this count - like 'Dances With Wolves' where it turns out there's already a white woman who's gone native on the other side waiting or the white male hero to show up. It's the kind of narrative move that strains credulity but for the sake of getting on with the story, you grin and bear these bits. Sometimes there is what I like to call the 'Tatanka' where the white guy swaps vocab with the locals. Which sometimes has narrative bearing, but usually it's just another ruse to establish the white male hero is getting to see things form the perspective of the other. "our people think... blah-blah-blah."

The point being you'd think that sometimes sensible producers would say to their writers "look, that story trope has been done to death and it's harder and harder to do it better. If you don't have a good story angle, don't do it." The producers on this one, displaying an incredible naivety and possibly mediocre sensibilities, chose to go hard with the insertion-of-romantic-hocus-pocus, the Tatanka, and the obligatory "our people think blah-blah-blah".

Well, I  point both my index fingers at the heavens by my temple and say "Tatanka" to you!

Sometimes It's Shrouded In Secrecy, Sometimes It's Shrouded In Myth, But Sometimes It's Just Coated With Bullshit

Western historians really don't want to hear this but the two atomic bombs didn't really figure that much into the thinking of the ministers meeting with the Emperor in the days leading up to the end of the war. The records of what was discussed is actually out there, published long ago. Plenty of historians have gone through this material and it's pretty clear that when they dropped the first bomb on Hiroshima, the news merely dampened the mood in that room even further. You have to understand that Generals Anami and Itagaki were pretty keen to fight the Americans on land, hand to hand on the streets and inflict as much casualty on everybody and everything. That's what the generals wanted and were willing to repeat the Battle of Okinawa all over Japan.

You can just imagine the Emperor impassively listening to this tirade thinking, "what are these lunatics talking about?"

So what were they talking about? They were talking about the Potsdam Declaration. In particular they were particularly concerned as to how to interpret '...subject to...' and whether this meant that the Emperor would become the subject of the President of the United States or whether the people of Japan would become slaves. On the 9th the news of Nagasaki being bombed by the second atomic bomb came in and they were still arguing about what '...subject to...' meant. One can imagine remarks like the Clintonian "that would depend on what you meant by 'subject' and what you meant by 'to'" that would fit perfectly in such conversations.

It's painful to read this stuff. Whole cities were being laid to waste and the blowhard chiefs of the General Staff and Army minster Anami going on about how everybody in Japan was going to die in battle. Ascribing the end of the Pacific War to the 2 atomic bombs is incredibly optimistic reading of the impact of technology. If anything it was a bonus side show, as it didn't really sink into the retrograde heads of the General Staff and Army minister Anami.

One's natural inclination is to think  there must be more to the end of the war and the two atomic bombs than this; we are often betrayed by just how banal and prosaic the actors are, on history's great stage.

Showa Emperor Hirohito And Culpability

The more things I read and see about the late Showa Emperor, the more I'm persuaded to think that he didn't speak up enough. he didn't speak up much at all from what we can gather, and when he was a young man, it's easy to believe he he was totally cowered and intimidated by the great admirals and generals that fought in the war against Russia in 1904-1905. Even in the 16th year of his reign as Japan stumbled along into war with America, one feels he could have spoken out a bit more than insist on peace.

Some western and Chinese historians have decided that the Showa Emperor had a sideline in being a villainous conspirator with the Army generals and gave them tacit support for the push into China and Manchuria, but this is contradicted by the extensive Kido diaries. The man was a lot more alone and isolated on the throne. The film comes close to capturing just how isolated the Emperor was from his people. What it doesn't do is fill the gap in between with any kind of explanation or meaning. There's just this sable black gulf of willful ignorance and Rumsfeld-ian unknonwn-unknowns.

From all accounts, he interpreted his position under the Meiji Constitution as being a  ceremonious head of state who rubber stamped the decisions made in cabinet. He sat through his cabinet meetings, stony faced and impassive, but always keeping his opinions to himself and away from the ministers. During the 'February 26 Incident', when junior Army officers attempted to mount a coup in his name, he refused to lend any support to them, berated them for killing cabinet minsters, and threatened to lead the Imperial guard divisions himself to root out the young officers.

You sort of wonder why he didn't tell these crazy generals to get back in their box more often, in the lead up to the war.

2013/08/23

The Money That's Not There

Deficits? What Deficits?

A few weeks ago I made an observation over elsewhere on the interwebs which I forgot to note over here. Once upon a time in the 90's when Pauline Hanson was a tyro crank politician, she was much ridiculed for her views. They were in most part totally outlandish and powered by a kind of backward looking xenophobia that made your skin crawl, but in particular she had a solution for Australia's debt problem, which was "print more money."

The press went to town on this statement as a clear indication that this would not work because printing money wold cause a massive outbreak of inflation; the likes of which crippled the Weimar Republic, so clearly this was a stupid idea born out of a stupid person. So the narrative went. And who amongst us who bothered to study modern history didn't know of the crazy inflation that engulfed inter-war Germany as the Weimar Republic busily printed money to pay their reparations for World War I? Print money, you get Weimar Republic.

Fast forward 15 years and 5 years on from the GFC we find, in fact that is exactly the US Federal Reserve Bank is doing in its guise of Quantitative Easing, and even the Bank of Japan has joined the ranks of central banks 'printing money' with the celebrated 'Abenomics' in progress. The interesting thing is that inflation - the kind we read about in history books about the Weimar Republic - hasn't exactly broken out in neither the USA nor Japan. In fact the Bank of Japan is running the printing presses much faster than the US Fed, and it might not make its inflation target of 2%. Go figure that one out.

No Inflation. All that money printed, and still no inflation. If anything central banks in the advanced economies are scared shitless of a collapse in asset prices.

I hate to say all this because I really dislike Pauline Hanson, but if the amount of deficit of the Australian Government was the size that it was - such that it could be paid off by the selling of assets under John Howard - maybe the Hanson plan of printing money back then might have been better? That way, the Federal Government, and by extension we the people would still have those assets.

Or maybe government debt isn't as big a deal as the private sector is making out. What's really bad about Greece and the other distressed euro economies probably is the fact that they can't devalue their currency by printing their own money. But if we go by the - ahem, *gulp* - "Hansonomics", Greece ought to quit the Euro zone and just print whatever money it likes to pay its freaking debts. And as crazy as that sounds to educated minds the evidence seems to be the case. Stick that into your objectivity pipe and smoke it.

This brings me to this article here.
In a 34-page review for clients of how a Coalition government might change economic management, Mr Eslake, chief Australian economist for Bank of America Merrill Lynch, also highlights the potential for "significant and ongoing tensions" in an Abbott government between its "genuine economic liberals", such as shadow treasurer Joe Hockey, and those who are "more sceptical about markets ... including in many cases Tony Abbott as Prime Minister".

He predicts that the Coalition will ultimately adopt all of Labor's proposed budget savings measures, except for ending the tax break for cars bought through salary sacrifice.

Even so, Mr Eslake estimates, the Coalition has so far committed to $28.4 billion of tax cuts and $14.8 billion on new spending in the next four years, a total of $43.25 billion. But he estimates the nine savings measures the Coalition has announced so far would save only $13.44 billion over the same period.

"By our reckoning, over the remainder of the election campaign, the Coalition needs to announce additional savings measures totally in the vicinity of $30 billion over the four years to 2016-17 in order to be able credibly to claim that it would produce better bottom line outcomes than those projected (by Treasury and the Department of Finance), he said."

"That is a substantial sum, although it is considerably less than the $70 billion 'black hole' suggested by the government."

And that ought to give you a bit of a scare. If the polls are to be believed the incoming Liberal National Coalition Government is selling itself on being fiscal hawks and that 30billion will come out of something somewhere along the way in a fit of austerity worship. I don't know where it will come from, and by the sounds of it, neither does treasurer-to-be Jolly Joe Hockey, but knowing their political persuasion it's likely to come out of welfare cheques and education budgets.

Yet in a bigger picture sense, all this pain it will inflict on millions of people will basically hurt the economy anyway while doing not much good. It's almost enough for you to endorse Hansonomic Printing Presses and ask them to simply print the money to pay the freaking debt. It's what grown up countries do.

2013/08/22

Intractable Mess

ALP In The Middle
Pleiades sent in this link today for a quick look. It's an article by Antony Green - famous for his election coverage and breakdown of numbers - talking about just how difficult the Asylum Seeker issue has become.
With asylum seeker boat arrivals a very live debate in the 2013 election campaign, Vote Compass asked four questions on asylum seekers and immigration issues.

The results reveal a polarised electorate, but one where Coalition and Green supporters find themselves comfortably aligned with their parties' policy positions.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-08-21/vote-compass/4901844

---

The real division was among Labor voters. Overall 48 per cent of intending Labor voters oppose the new Labor policy while 40 per cent support it. Labor has made a major policy shift to ban asylum seekers who arrive by boat from settling in Australia, but either Labor supporters have yet to adjust their position on the new policy, or just as likely, there are differing opinions on the subject within Labor's support base.

Since 2001 the Labor Party has struggled to produce policies on asylum seekers that straddle the divide between being tough and being compassionate. This struggle is reflected in the Vote Compass data for intended Labor voters.

It's clear that the polarisation surrounding this issue is actually making things intractable. I've been thinking about this very point for some time in as much as I can't seem to find too many people who wanted to try the Malaysian solution when Julia Gillard and Chris Bowen had that project as the desired policy course. Most people I knew either wanted to go the Abbott way and send boats back forcibly, or they wanted to just let anybody in without so much as a due process.

Even ringers like Clive Palmer has a policy position on this, and his is immediate on the spot processing and if they are found to be not refugees, they get sent back immediately. Which is all very nice for Clive but the reality is that some of these people are destroying their paperwork as they get on the boats to make it harder for immigration officials.

And this sort of brings me to the next point. The people on the far left of the spectrum who vehemently criticise the also numerous other end of the spectrum don't seem to want to have any process at all. This is sort of interesting in as much as it seems those people want to do away with the department of immigration entirely. If you listen closely to the far left, they're saying, let anybody who comes to Australia by boat, stay. They don't seem to understand that this massively incentivises people to get on boats; and that the people getting on the boats are counting on a sizable portion of Australians to feel pity and just let them in ("and why the hell not?" I hear them say).

All of this is surprising because Australia probably is well-served by its immigration department in most instances. Why the department and its processes don't get the benefit of the doubt and aren't allowed to process the asylum seekers actually escapes me.

Antony Green also goes on to point out that lack of education and income (or the lack thereof) also correlates with support or opposition to the policy. This is understandable given that they would be the most vulnerable to added competition from a sudden influx of low-skilled workers. They're not dumb. They know it means more competition and lowering of their bargaining power. And while the term xenophobia gets bandied about readily, you'd have to give the lowly-educated low-income demographic a break for being anxious. After all, we're living in a hollowing out economy where their jobs are more likely to be exported to 'Chindia' than those of the white collar demographic.

Similarly, the opposition to letting asylum seekers correlates with age as well. The older you are, the more likely you are to object - which, let's be fair, is probably an overhang of the White Australia Policy so that one probably deserves the 'xenophobia' label.

In any case it's clear that the ALP has got a real problem on its hands because  the issue sits exactly at the point where it splits the traditional blue collar voters from the varsity educated progressives. If the ALP ran on the most left-leaning policy of letting all Asylum Seekers that arrive by boats into Australia, they might feel better about themselves but the numbers say they will lose. So you can see how this necessitates the PNG solution. You wonder how the white collar ALP voter feels about this (seeing that they were the most likely Gillard supporters) on the day the ballot is cast. ...or will they donkey vote? it's 3 more weeks to wrestle with their consciences because like it or not, donkey voting will bring in Tony Abbott.

2013/08/21

'The Numbers Station'

Grosse Pointe Blunt

It was late on a Sunday night, and it was either this film or the Tom Cruise movie 'Oblivion' on offer. 'Oblivion' is over 2 hours long, while 'The Numbers Station' is a mere 1 hour 29minutes. That sealed the deal.  Afterwards I was able to watch episode 3 of 'Vikings' on SBS catchup TV.

It's a film that came and went with nary a bit of promotion in Australia. It's hard to be heard in the din and clamour for more and more comic book superhero movies, but sometimes a film is simply too small to get any purchase on the zeitgeist. It's a bit of a shame because it means that the thoughtful little films that made cinema truly wonderful are more likely to be missed, and then become infrequent.

This film isn't one of those deep and meaningful little films, it just seems to be a little pot-boiler made by indies.

What's Good About It

It's a tense little thriller, mostly set in one location. So it must have been relatively low budget. Considering the relatively low budget, it was a credible little action thriller. A bit of shooting, a bit of fighting, a bit of tense stand offs, and all the other trappings. It has one good trick in it.

What's Bad About It

The political landscape that affords the story is left deliberately blank in this film. This helps to make the conflict rather abstract, but at the same time robs us of the ability to empathise with the cause. Without a cause there's no rationalising away the feeling of "why are they doing all this any way?" It's the dead opposite of 'A Few Good Men' where Jack Nicholson gets up and tells the court why he's such a brutal bastard. This movie progresses on the assumption the cause doesn't matter but having watched it, I sort of disagree.

Maybe part of the problem of the creeping fascism engulfing the West is that it really does not allow itself to be opened up for inspection and dissection. It's a lurch to the  brutish side of life without nary an explanation. Plenty of films touch upon this as a problem but this film sort of blithely slips by, thus making it a more or less empty exercise.

What's Interesting About It

There's a bit in it where John Cusack's character Emerson describes his psychological profile. It's surprisingly similar to Martin Q. Blank's profile, as told by Martin Q. Blank in 'Grosse Pointe Blank'. I was thinking that maybe this film was the sequel to 'Grosse Pointe Blank'. It might have been, had it had a modicum of humour. Instead it's decidedly bleak and largely mannered - The affectations of the genre are a bit on the nose instead being turned on its head.

An Odd Look

It's not every day you come across a film that has a truly odd look,but this film has it. It is strangely grainy and under exposed in parts and yet some of the colours like yellows and greens seem to be saturated. So much so that it's hard to believe it was shot on 35mm. If somebody said it was a RED camera or some kind of digital format like the one used on 'Drive', I'd believe it.

2013/08/20

'42'

Finally Got To See It!

Australia is the land of cricket and vegemite. It's hard to get to see the best baseball movie of the year. I finally got to see it, so here's what I've got you guys.

A lot has been written about the film and a lot of it is mostly true. Yes, Jackie Robinson was a fine upstanding citizen as well as a fine ballplayer to take on the institutional racism within Major League baseball, and this is that story.

My own interest in Branch Rickey comes from a superlative article written about Branch Rickey by Gerald Holland in David Halberstam's 'The Best American Sports Writing of the Century' which goes into the man quite a bit. Some of that material gets picked up in the film.

What's Good About It

Chadwick Boseman as Jackie Robinson is a standout. Not only does he look quite like Robinson, he looks great swinging the bat. The script is concise given so much that is said is like the tip of the cultural iceberg. The directing is also understated and yet has a good deal of flash.

I don't know if this is going to stay in my head a memorable movie like say, 'Bull Durham', but some of the scenes involving Harrison Ford and Chadwick Boseman are really good. Especially the scene where Branch Rickey explains his motivation for trying to push for change.

The CGI Ebbets Field looks good, if a little too pristine. The seamlessness of the period production is great but you get the feeling that cars and objects are just to polished. Still, production design is wonderful and there's a lot of value on screen.

What's Bad About It

Parts of it are a little too earnest and a little too sentimental - Though it's a matter of degree. In some ways it's not a film with a whole lot of philosophical depth, and the topic it is tackling is something that we sort of hope is way behind us in the rear vision mirror.

What's Interesting About It

The performances in this film are a little uneven and I don't think that Harrison Ford does a good job of being Branch Rickey, but there's something intriguing about the guy who brings Jackie Robinson to the Major Leagues, and Ford does a great job of presenting us with a very moral man. The greatest lines for Rickey come in the first act of the film, namely the observation that he's a methodist and Robinson is a methodist, and the admonition that he needs a man with the guts not to fight.

In fact, it's a funny thing about Harrison Ford hat he plays men with moral spine very well, which may explain his long tenure as the big star of the 70s through to the early 90s. Branch Rickey in this film is such a man, and there's nothing swashbuckling about a geriatric cigar-waving General Manager of a baseball team, there are some delightful to-and-fro with the dialogue.

Still, in some ways it's a very bland movie with very little to dissect. It's a film that is totally self-contained with its own meaning and messages. The film is a monument to a very definite moment in time; it's almost an attempt to freeze dry it rigid. As such the narrative never has a moving quality.

The Echoes Of Racism

In historic hindsight, America is a very weird place with its past with racial segregation. It is probably as weird as Australia under the White Australia Policy and South Africa under apartheid. The considerable double-think and cognitive dissonance that accompanied it must have been pretty substantial. It's even weirder when you look at the language used to describe Jackie Robinson's moment going into Major League baseball as "breaking the color line". You'd think that he broke the land speed record.

The film goes into some depth with the quality of prejudice and invective hurled at Robinson. It's ugly and stomach-churning. You wonder where all that energy for hatred and mean-spirited-ness went. I'm pretty sure it got repressed into the subconscious in a way that is thoroughly disturbing.

I Feel Sorry For

Alan Tudyk. Alan Tudyk plays the mean-spirited, nasty, racist, name-calling, abuse- hollering bastard of a manager of the Phillies, Ben Chapman. He's cast against type and he does his best mid-American dingbat hillbilly but he'll always be Hoban 'Wash' Washburn to me, and it just didn't sit right for me to be watching him go on and on with the 'n word'. He's a brave guy for taking on the role.

The Phillies and Pirates come in for a bit of stick - Phillies, and Philadelphia in general for being very resistant to accepting the Dodgers with Jackie Robinson. The Pirates get tick for being, well, from Pittsburgh, which is the running gag in the film.

The Number 42

Of course, the number 42 is also the answer Deepthought gives us as the meaning of life universe and everything - after which they must go and figure out the question. The number 42 just keeps accruing more meaning in the cultural space, with Jackie Robinson as well as this movie about Jackie Robinson; Mariano Rivera is the last Major League Player to be wearing 42, and the series finale of 'Buzz Lightyear Star Command; is '42'; not to mention the band Level 42.

I don't know what all this means, but the numbers 41 and 43 do not have as many references.

2013/08/12

'Identity Thief'

More Or Less BPD

I keep saying this but Borderline Personality Disorder is a great boon for dramatists and screenwriters. There's no end to the chaos a BPD character can introduce to ordinary life. In that vein we have 'Identity Thief', a film built around Melissa McCarthy's ability to play the most obnoxious kind of chaos hurler, matched against Jason Bateman's ability to play the most meek of American men. It's sadist's dream!

What's Good About It

I'm struggling with this one. There ought to be something likeable in this middling film, but it's hard to say what that is. The casting is ordinary, the writing is ordinary, the laughs are chuckles and not exactly coming hard and fast.

I might say that the best thing about this film is that Robert Patrick plays a really mean hillbilly cleaner. Jonathan Banks - Mike from 'Breaking Bad' - makes a cameo appearance of sorts that never really connects itself to the plot. It doesn't make much sense, but he brings a smile because his persona is consistent with Mike the cleaner from 'Breaking Bad'. It's pretty much that kind of movie.

What's Bad About It

It's slow and messy and not very well thought out. It takes until about 35minutes in to get the both of them in a car on the road to Denver from Florida an you come to realise that it's a road movie. "Surprise!" Well, it's certainly no 'Planes, Trains & Automobiles'; it's not even 'Due Date'. The usual tropes of crashed rented vehicles and hitching in the boonies of America turn up and none of is done with any wit. Its a shame because McCarthy and Bateman are fine actors who can make a good deal out of a good script. Alas, this is not that script.

The garbled, hoodlums-cahsing-after-the-main-characters subplot goes nowhere and sort of destroys itself on the runway without taking off. At least it wasn't the stock Russian Mafia in Black 4WDs with their Russian submachine guns letting loose. The lack of any explanation whatsoever about this part of the story forces the movie to spend lots of screen time on boring people -and they're boring because we never know what they're doing and what their story might be.

Yes, it's quite an ordinary movie.

What's Interesting About It

The film sort of comes at the interesting notion that the reason we have identities is so that we can track monies and attach them to names. The mechanism by which we do this is through banking. So banking has a privileged position when it comes to knowing who we are and what we do. Having started at that point, the comedy doesn't really go into exploring the ramifications of misplaced ciphers - i.e falsely applied identity - it then chooses to spend a great deal of time on the road with a BPD person.

When everybody is up in arms about the NSA spying through emails and whatnot, nobody seems to have the equal amounts of furious angst about just how much your bank has you and your identity by the short and curlies.

2013/08/09

Breaking Bad

What's Good About It

It's one big compelling bit of television with the slow burn of tension and anxiety. It's very well conceived and executed,right down to the nuance of angled shots and off-kilter compositions, oddball camera moves and exquisite attention to detail. most and best of all, it's incredibly thought-provoking and is a quietly discursive meditation on all manners of things philosophical, sociological moral and ethical, and perhaps even to do with generational demographics.

It has great characters that keep you watching if nothing else but to see what they do next; and really you couldn't ask for more than that from a TV series. The actors keep things very consistent through the series and never have an overstated moment. The dialogue is taut, the vision the series has of New Mexico is austere and yet meticulous, and possibly even loving. It's an excellent production.

What's Bad About It

Sometimes, because it's a TV series it loses focus and chooses to meander into side-stories.  The fly episode in Season 3 was tedious and the episodes about Marie and her kleptomania are a little dull except it offers us an insight that DEA agent and brother-in-law Hank might look the other way for family.

Human relationships come and go with the ease of television plotting when in fact you suspect some of these entries and exits, like Ted Beneke and Jane might have the potential to be even stickier than they end up being. There's a bit of repetition of the same emotional space that plagues some of the characters, for instance Jesse and the various traumas he is subjected to and witnesses, and Skyler's insistent demands that are actually destructive to her own relationship, both get a little monotonous at times.

What's Interesting About It

The main character Walter White essentially starts cooking meth to pay for his medical bills and then provide for his family after his death. This central action comes about because he discovers he has an inoperable lung cancer. So everything Walter does follows on from his prior acknowledgment of his own death. Right off the bat, Walter White is an existential hero, if a little uncertain as to where that leads him.

Yet it's great viewing because everything he does in the first 3 seasons until his cancer situation stabilises, flows out from this prior acknowledgment of his own mortality. There's something of 'Fight Club' in this prior acknowledgement that propels Walt into his journey. It's also interesting from an Australian point of view because if Walt got diagnosed with cancer in Australia in the manner that he does, he could count on medicare to pay for treatment and that would be the end of that.  The fact that the drama spins out as far as it does is so fascinating from this side of the Pacific Ocean.

The Anatomy Of Meth

America is the land of the Western. The bifurcated myth of the law man and the outlaw, both heroic and unrelenting, standing tall in a reified landscape defines so much of America's own cultural concerns. The Western myth has transmogrified into other genres and with it has gone the eternal chase. Some narratives lean on the law while others lean on the outlaw. And just as one law man catches up to one outlaw in on narrative, another area of crime opens up and a outlaw rises.

'Breaking Bad' of course moves right into the territory of methamphetamines with its manufacture, distribution, law enforcement and other assorted details. As it does so, it goes a very long way towards discrediting prohibition, even for a drug like methamphetamines. Together with 'The Wire' and 'Boardwalk Empire', 'Breaking Bad' presents a compelling narrative of how prohibition and the law enforcement that goes with it creates black markets which feed on the vulnerable.

Many people have stood up to have marijuana and THC made legal. But by presenting the meth 'trade' with such detail, 'Breaking Bad' offers us insight into why Prohibition in general is going to be a failed strategy for dealing with drug abuse. Other narcotics such as marijuana and heroin and cocaine are derived from plant materials. The fact that they can be grown makes them like commodities and with great market demand. In one sense, the third world only have to grow these to make the greatest returns on their investment, all thanks to the prohibition regime that seeks to limit the flow of he commodity. If that is the case with something that can be grown, then what about something that can be manufactured in a lab?

Should The Government Be Sitting On Your Pleasure Centre?

The series does a tremendous job of editing and thus juxtaposing the nexus of all manner of recreational drugs in our society. The show rightfully connects the act of lab manufacturing crystal meth with home brewing, and in doing so implicitly points to the meth lab cooks as moonshiners. The only difference being the drug of choice is methamphetamine and not alcohol. The show also draws an interesting line into our acceptance of over the counter pharmaceuticals which can be abused, as well as nicotine which is legal, marihuana which is beginning to cross over out of the shadow of illegality, and gambling which has its own addictive problems.

Steadily and surely, the show demonstrates that there is some fundamental problem with prohibitionist reasoning. If possible harm to our health is the issue, it begs the question why tobacco remains legal and other substances do not. If addiction, and the associated  addictive behaviour is the issue, then we could point to nicotine and tobacco as well as alcohol and caffeine. And caffeine drinks are perfectly legal while there are age restrictions on alcohol and smoking. Heroin is another substance that is heavily controlled by the state when in fact it could help greatly in the medical field as an anaesthetic. We as a society seem to have made this decision to nobble Anaesthetists in favour of removing the spectre of heroin addicts from our society.

The best guess I can say is that the government would not like us to have fun. The government would not like us to have fun because it might impact on our ability to work and be productive; and the state wants us all to be at maximal productivity because it funds taxes and government and the violence mechanisms. A military and police which, - in a very dark irony - we then use to prosecute and persecute the drug abusers and traffickers.

And all of this has created massive black markets for the banned substances worth somewhere in the order of 800billion dollars globally. Think about that figure. It's enough to wipe out global third world debt several times over. Instead, its swimming through the coffers of drug cartels and tin pot dictators in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. The drug trade isn't just killing the end user or the dealers who shoot one another in turf wars. It's robbing the world of the possibility of enough money to keep ever more people in abject poverty.

It raises the fundamental question, why the hell is government sitting on people's pleasure centres? Why is the government so keen to stop people enjoying themselves? The insanity that stems from the prohibitionist position is clearly untenable. There has to be a better solution than what's going on. Unsurprisingly, in the five years that the show has been running, some states in America have now legalised Marijuana. Uruguay has decided to regulate marihuana as other governments regulate tobacco products.

From Desire To Will

Nietzsche famously observed that our 'desire' dessicates into 'will'. It's a seemingly casual throwaway observation except it points out something very peculiar about our endeavours. We start off doing something because we like it, and we want to do it, but at some point we find ourselves doing the same thing under a different kind of emotional engine, one which connects to our will power, more than our desire.

It's fascinating how Walter and Jesse go from a carefree improvised meth lab on a recreational vehicle eventually moving to Gus' industrially designed meth lab, slaving away to produce quantity. For Jesse, the act of cooking meth goes from a fund sideline into a seriously dolorous and tedious *job* robs the glamour of being the outlaw from him. Similarly, once there is an established factory, Walt finds that he has been reduced to being a factory drone churning out product.

The world of 'Breaking Bad' is seemingly full of this kind of joy-sapping transformation, especially for the men. The only character not touched by this ennui is Hank, who remains a DEA detective out of a genuine desire to keep playing cops and robbers into his adult life. For hank, desire does no dessicate, although he is mightily challenged  by a couple of incidents which send him back into a near-infantile state.

The Odyssey And Walter White

Walter and Jesse find themselves in all kinds of interesting trouble, but it occurred to me somewhere late in season 5 that in fact Walter was a man simply trying to get home, and that all these obstacles and threats were things that kept him from home. You can see that across 5 seasons, and going into the final season garbled re-tellings of the Odyssey are scattered in the series.

For instance, his wife Skyler's affair with Ted Beneke echoes the suitors at the door for Penelope. The bombing by Tio that slays Gus leaves Gus temporarily one-eyed before he collapses and dies; thus Gus is shown to be the Cyclops. Jane and her drugs entraps Walter's traveling companion Jesse, so this is the lotus eater episode. The need to slay nine of Mark's trusted men is a metaphorical Scylla and Charybdis moment. The horrible poison massacre at the Cartel boss's house has echoes of the Circe episode.

To date, Walt himself is yet to encounter Calypso so far, but his ever dutiful son is on a search to find the true nature of his father, much as Telemachus goes looking for Odysseus. It's interesting that the echoes of the Odyssey can be found in this series.

Gangsters And Massacres

By the end of Season 5, Walt has made a full journey into the world of hoodlums and crooks. He is no longer in denial that what he is doing is flat out illegal and has very little excuse. Indeed, we're led to an interesting point where we understand that although what prompted Walt into being the meth cook was the cancer, there was a greater, deeper resentment about the world that drives him hard towards this goal.

Just as Michael Corleone spends the better part of the first 'Godfather' movie in denial of his destiny, we come to realise Walt has been holding off this part of himself for a very long time. The great lie that he tells himself through the first 3 seasons is that he no other choice. He actually has a lot of choice - for instance, taking the money from his old colleagues who have now become rich. Instead, he tells them to go fuck themselves, and opts to cook meth. On the balance of things, one cannot help but come to the conclusion that Walt wants the murders and mayhem and the attendant thrills that come with being a criminal, the same way Hank wants to keep being a cop.

The prison massacre of the 9 guys who worked for Mike, then is a distant echo of the 'Saint Valentine Day Massacre' as well as the big massacre at the end of 'the Godfather'.

2013/08/03

Oil Stories

Which Peak Are We Climbing?

Around 2008, the big story was peak oil. The production of crude was going to peak, and that spelt a contracted future for energy for our civilization. since then, the world has gotten on to this business of fracking and as ugly as it may seem, it has changed the equation of our future consumption of oil as energy.

Heck, I admit: I was one of the people taken in by the Peak Oil argument - but only because the person who first introduced me to the notion had very good facts and figures. Of course, if you take a static snapshot of where we are and extrapolate, you ca imagine all kinds of scenarios. Neither he nor I imagined that fracking would come along, back in 2005-2006.

In that light I want to draw attention to a couple of articles worth getting your head around. The first is this one which discusses oil and gas in the context of a 'commodities supercycle'.
After eight years, the Oil Drum is closing down, giving up the long struggle to alert us all to ‘‘peak oil’’ and the dangers of an energy crunch. The theme has gone out of fashion, eclipsed by shale and US fracking.

The demise of Britain’s leading website for oil dissidents has been seized on by critics as an admission that peak oil is a Malthusian myth. It comes amid a spate of reports from global banks announcing the death of the commodity supercycle, slain by creative technology.

Yet if you stand back, it is hardly evident that the world is again enjoying an abundant supply of cheap energy, metals, or food. Commodity prices have held up remarkably well, given that we are in a global trade depression of sorts.

The eurozone is in the longest unbroken recession since the 1930s, with industrial production 13 per cent below the pre-Lehman peak. Growth in the US has averaged 1.1 per cent over the last three quarters as it grapples with the most drastic fiscal tightening since the Korean War.

Russia and Brazil have ground to a near halt. China’s growth is near zero on a GDP deflator basis. Oil imports were down 1.4 per cent in June from a year earlier. Imports of iron ore were down 9.1 per cent.

It all adds up to a prostrate global economy, yet Brent crude oil is still trading at $US106. There is no comparison with the collapse to $US11 in 1998. The CRB commodities index remains three times higher than a decade ago.

You might conclude that the supercycle is in rude good health given what has been thrown at it. A new Eos report by the American Geophysical Union, Peak Oil and Energy Independence: Myth and Reality, argues that global crude output has been stuck on a plateau near 75 million barrels per day (bpd) since 2005 despite enticing returns.

The way the article couches it, it seems the immediacy of peak oil is temporarily delayed, thanks to the development of fracking, which will stave off peak production of fossil fuels in general for a generation. It's pretty begrudging about the technological development aspect of what has led to the fracking business. The fact is, that a technological breakthrough came along and solved the problem of peak oil by changing the mode of our harvesting of fuel and energy. This is very much in line with Schumpeter's observations about a creative destruction of value, as well as why to date, the Malthusian crunch has not come about.

The other article is this one in the Economist which covers the possibility that our demand for oil may be peaking, so future demand for crude oil may be nothing like the extrapolation of the Malthusian alarmists.
The other great change is in automotive technology. Rapid advances in engine and vehicle design also threaten oil’s dominance. Foremost is the efficiency of the internal-combustion engine itself. Petrol and diesel engines are becoming ever more frugal. The materials used to make cars are getting lighter and stronger. The growing popularity of electric and hybrid cars, as well as vehicles powered by natural gas or hydrogen fuel cells, will also have an effect on demand for oil. Analysts at Citi, a bank, calculate that if the fuel-efficiency of cars and trucks improves by an average of 2.5% a year it will be enough to constrain oil demand; they predict that a peak of less than 92m b/d will come in the next few years. Ricardo, a big automotive engineer, has come to a similar conclusion.

Not surprisingly, the oil “supermajors” and the IEA disagree. They point out that most of the emerging world has a long way to go before it owns as many cars, or drives as many miles per head, as America.

But it would be foolish to extrapolate from the rich world’s past to booming Asia’s future. The sort of environmental policies that are reducing the thirst for fuel in Europe and America by imposing ever-tougher fuel-efficiency standards on vehicles are also being adopted in the emerging economies. China recently introduced its own set of fuel-economy measures. If, as a result of its determination to reduce its dependence on imported oil, the regime imposes policies designed to “leapfrog” the country’s transport system to hybrids, oil demand will come under even more pressure.

Basically, our policies and technological advances are working to constrain our demand for oil. It seems there will be enough of these to match the decline in production of oil with a decline in demand. I imagine this sits really badly with my friends in the environmental movement who have been praying and hoping for peak oil to crash our technological civilisation once and for all. I chalk all this up to Schumpeter and his creative destruction of values as well as the Kurzweil vision of a Technological Singularity. Collectively, we seem to be accelerating to a point of development, not slowing down. Calling this cargo-ism seems to be just as ideologically motivated as the sort of people who wanted peak oil to cripple our civilisation.

Certainly, this is an interesting vision of the near future:
The biggest impact of declining demand could be geopolitical. Oil underpins Vladimir Putin’s kleptocracy. The Kremlin will find it more difficult to impose its will on the country if its main source of patronage is diminished. The Saudi princes have relied on a high oil price to balance their budgets while paying for lavish social programmes to placate the restless young generation that has taken to the streets elsewhere. Their huge financial reserves can plug the gap for a while; but if the oil flows into the kingdom’s coffers less readily, buying off the opposition will be harder and the chances of upheaval greater. And if America is heading towards shale-powered energy self-sufficiency, it is unlikely to be as indulgent in future towards the Arab allies it propped up in the past. In its rise, oil has fuelled many conflicts. It may continue to do so as it falls. For all that, most people will welcome the change.

If this indeed comes to pass, the world is going to be a very different place to the 'Peak Oil' scenario.

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