Month: October 2003

This time of year I always find difficult, as the seasons lengthen and the winter rapidly approaches. I without a doubt miss the warmer days that have just passed and begin thinking longingly of the warmer months yet ahead. Even the time when the days reverse course and begin to lengthen still remains some time in the distance, when Christmas carols are sung and the winter solstice beckons. Even still, it takes so long before the merest moments of the day begin to brighten just a little longer.

As I was out on my walk this evening (well bundled, I might add! It’s already so cold), I found myself time and again taken back to, of all things, my consumerist tendancies toward very badly wanting to buy a Nintendo Gamebody Advance. Why I can’t say, seeing as how I’m outside the core market of, well, children, and how I know I’ll never use it once hte novelty wears off. I already have a Gamecube and a PS2 gathering dust, with games I’ve bought and never even opened. Honestly, who has the time? And the money could be better spent a million and one ways. I would love to apply that toward the money to frame the paintings I picked up in Hong Kong, say, or some of the other frames I need for photos and sketches collected on my travels. Or take the small rug I’d like to buy for my living room. Or some Halloween decorations. And yet I still find myself drawn to that darn Gamebody Advance…

To keep tracking of those soldiers killed in Iraq, the NY Times has started a rolling log on its inside pages. Every few days it updates the list as it receives confirmation from the Pentagon.

If I were the White House, this is not the kind of press I would want to see.

Last night I watched Far From Heaven, a surprisingly good drama about tension and change that occurred in the life of a successful family in 1950s Connecticutt just prior to the Civil Rights movement’s big push. Cathy, the wife of a successful business sales executive, is confronted with choices and change as she navigates her way through a series of events started when she discovers her husband with another man. She befriends her gardener, a strong black man in a city still polarized over race. As life moves forward, she is forced to react to the slander and gossip, making difficult choices that in the end cost her much. Definitely a movie I enjoyed.

I also watched Bloody Sunday last Saturday, which was an extremely powerful recreation of the protests and riots that led to the deaths of 13 in Northern Ireland by British soldiers and sparked much of the ensuing violence in Northern Ireland over the next several decades.

This story talks about a research paper that may cast doubt on whether the RIAA has sufficient grounds to verify an individual really was sharing files, should the case proceed to court.

BusinessWeek had a different article on the hybrid technology finding its way in to upcoming models and specifically addresses the emphasis Toyota has put on the technology. What I find most disturbing about the article is the conclusion, where the author beings with the line Sounds great. Now if only the hybrids can actually make money. BusinessWeek has a tendancy to alternate between the praising the long-term vision that Executives so often seem to lack, such as pushing a whole new method to replace the original combustion engine, and the shortsightedness that is emphasized on Wall Street and that is echoed in comments such as the one above.

Honestly, the value that Toyota is gaining from selling its first generation Prius hybrid, despite losing an estimated $8,000 a car initially, is incalcuble. They are the first in the marketplace with a “mass-market” car, giving them a perception advantage. They have real-world data to drawn on regarding performance, durability, safety, and marketing that provide them with an advantage over their competitors. This is already paying dividends in the next generation of cars and their announcement to offer more hybird models over the next few years. In fact, the value is summed up best by a quote in the same article from a Honda executive: “If Toyota can drive the cost of the technology down, they will have a 5-to-10-year lead on every other manufacturer.”

BusinessWeek’s most recent issue featured a new “smarter” look, but some of the writing is as dumb as ever. Always striking me as prone to overbroad, partially innacurate statements, this week’s commentary on energy prices contained several sweeping generalizations that are definitely misleading at best.

Take this line about the recent runnup in gas prices. Because refiners underestimated demand, they cut back on production. Then, when summer driving came in above expectations, prices shot up, allowing refiners’ profit margins to triple or more.

True, they may have cut back on production. But not all of those production cutbacks were intended. A variety of factors affected gas prices in mid-August, including the normal high summer demand leading up to Labor Day, higher crude oil prices, generally low gasoline stock and disruptions such as a broken gasoline pipeline in Arizona, refinery problems in California and the blackout-related refinery shutdowns.The recent blackout halted refining operations in the Northeast and Midwest. Nowhere is there mention of any of the more likely culprits in the BusinessWeek analysis.

They also throw out the line that pats US on the back for our conservation effort. In the U.S., output per unit of energy, adjusted for inflation, is up 77% since 1973, the year of the first Arab oil embargo. While it is true from the data that energy efficiency had increased significantly during the years after the Oil Embargo, the demand for energy has increased dramatically during the years since. And at the same time, measures to further increase efficiency have not taken root, as energy prices have remained relatively favorable since the embargo. According to a 1998 report from the US Energy Information Administration, per capita consumption of energy has not significantly changed, indicating that energy usage has increased per person each year since 1983. So depsite our increased efficiency AND population growth, each person today uses more energy than a person going about his or her day in 1983, on average.

Finally, there’s no real mention of the lack of new refining capacity in the country. Perhaps that’s because the Department of Energy faults deregulation for removing the incentive to create new capacity, something that the anti-regulation BusinessWeek finds disturbing. According to the DoE’s web site

The United States experienced a steep decline in refining capacity between 1981 and the mid-1990s. Between 1981 and 1989, for instance, the number of U.S. refineries fell from 324 to 204, representing a loss of 3 MMBD in operable capacity, while refining capacity utilization increased from 69% to 86%. Much of the decline in U.S. refining capacity resulted from the 1981 deregulation (elimination of price controls and allocations), which effectively removed the major prop from underneath many marginally profitable, often smaller, refineries.

Without the spare capacity that this provided, any disruption in refinery activity, such as a blackout coupled with a pipeline interruption and some routine maintenance is enough to lead to price spikes. But for some unknown reason, BusinessWeek didn’t find it necessary to look in to these issues.

This one last statement in the BusinessWeek article, however, I fully agree with. Global growth isn’t exactly torrid.