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The Ripple Effects of the price of Oil

An analysis of the ripple effects of cheap oil –

The [1974] oil shock altered power relations between the world’s main geopolitical players and created new ones. Higher oil prices had many unexpected consequences—from breeding oil wars to fueling the international spread of Islamic fundamentalism thanks to funding from newly super-rich countries like Saudi Arabia. Today’s drop in crude-oil prices, which began in the summer of 2014, may be as disruptive as the quadrupling of oil prices that created the oil shock of 1974.

It’s amazing how much of an impact the price of oil has on the geopolitical and financial landscape – and it would be fascinating to see the development of oil alternatives shake out into an entirely new landscape. Underlying all that is a fundamental factor that plays into the climate change discussion as well – it’s all about energy, and humans need it increasingly so to maintain the modern living standards we’ve become so used to in the developed world.

This goes without examining the more micro-level changes – with low oil prices, will airfares drop? Will people suddenly take more holidays in further off destinations? Will people resume buying high fuel consumption cars, too late for car companies like Ford & Holden to reverse their courses? How does that change cultural consciousness around energy use? All those things changed because the nominal price for something so fundamental to our lifestyle changes one way or another; is the price oil a proxy for all manner of things?

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Aussie victory in the Cricket World Cup – at a cost

Greg Baum in the SMH today –

Cocooned in sycophancy, the Australians seem not to grasp nor care how poorly this behaviour sits with the other half of a cricket-following public they repeatedly and ever more deeply divide, even in their finest hours.

They also do not seem to care or grasp how it rankles with opponents, and how insufferably arrogant it makes them look. Do they really think they are the only country that plays with passion and pride? Do they think they patented the will to win? Do they think they have cornered the market in competitiveness?

The Aussie attitudes on the cricket field are exactly why I can’t support them in a neutral match, despite having grown up in Australia and taking equal pride in the country’s efforts in other sporting endeavours. Perhaps it is because in so many other sports, the Aussies are the underdogs or at best equally matched by others in the world – while in cricket, their consistent form and distance from the rest of the pack make them arrogant in a way they don’t reveal elsewhere, or maybe it is something specific to the culture of the current team.

When you’re missing respect for an opponent, you find it easy to gloat, not just revel in a victory, and it reveals an ugly side to the players that leads to neutrals being turned away from anything but begrudging admiration for skills.

Enough has been said about the Aussies attitudes in the aftermath of previous matches and this tournament that I hope Cricket Australia and the team management take notice – boorish players such as those lead to a disengagement in the community, and that will invariably lead to lower crowds and lower participation in the long run.

(not even touching the booze-filled aftermath, though I’d make a point of comparisons with AFL and NRL grand final winners and the attitudes and outcomes they had at the end of their matches, and leave it at that.)

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The Great SIM Heist

In 2010, GCHQ and the NSA hacked a company responsible for producing a huge number of mobile SIMs and stole all the security keys:

With these stolen encryption keys, intelligence agencies can monitor mobile communications without seeking or receiving approval from telecom companies and foreign governments. Possessing the keys also sidesteps the need to get a warrant or a wiretap, while leaving no trace on the wireless provider’s network that the communications were intercepted. Bulk key theft additionally enables the intelligence agencies to unlock any previously encrypted communications they had already intercepted, but did not yet have the ability to decrypt.

It’s not so much the brazen nature of the hack – mostly built on social engineering through hacking their personal emails – as it is their ability to wiretap without any kind of oversight or leaving a trace. This exports the fundamentally digital nature of these communications, that a tap is easy and undetectable because bits leave no fingerprints and suffer no degradation.

That the agencies for the UK and the USA have done it so broadly – not merely looking at services within their jurisdictions, but globally – is now standard fare. You can only imagine the furore if it had been perpetrated by China, Russia or even puny little North Korea. It’d be evidence of the police state, the surveillance possible too massive to ignore.

That these revelations continue to come years after Manning and Wikileaks, that this is still Snowden’s work coming to light, is likely a good thing, but in the short term, I despair at what this indicates is happening behind the scenes, stuff that we wouldn’t even believe would be happening, because that truth would be stranger than fiction.

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Since Records Began

2014 is the hottest average temperature on Earth since records began.

It’s only half a degree (Celsius) up on the 20th Century average, but that’s still half a degree in a human lifetime. This is no longer a geological-scale process of warming.

To bring this back home quite succinctly, this animation demonstrates the process of rising temperatures very well.

Two points to make a note on – the 1944 record stood for 36 years, until 1980; note also the massive jump between 1997 (a record year) and 1998 (another record year) – and it’s not as though that record stood for years, it was surpassed not very long after at all.