Jake's Latest News
More on Peak Oil - Tuesday 24th February 2004
Its happening. Now. Bloomberg is reporting that oil supplies are “down 2.9% from a year ago”, suggesting oil production has already peaked. “‘If we don’t see a few big builds in gasoline inventories in the coming weeks, there’s talk we’ll see huge price spikes this summer because at the moment supplies are worryingly low,’ said Evers.” Expect oil prices to rise, and never fall again. We’ve reached the peak of the bell shaped curve of supply, and demand isn’t decreasing.
As I plan now to integrate peak oil into my dissertation, I have started a blog on the subject. For more on peak oil from me, check out that blog.
BBC License Fee Debate on Century FM
Just got off the phone with Century FM Manchester. They came across my essay on the BBC license fee and asked me to take part in a pre-recorded debate which is being aired tomorrow, Wednesday 25th February all day. I kind of stumbled over some of my words and missed out a lot of important points I’d have liked to have made, but generally did a fairly good job of putting forward some of the problems I have with the fee (they wanted me to focus on opposition rather than proposition arguments to balance the debate). Generally though, I’m in agreement with it, but in the future Internet (P2P) TV etc. will make the BBC practically redundant. Its just a matter of time.
Well, finally got round to replacing Newspro with a new blogging system. Back in the day when I started using Newspro on this site (January 2001) blogging wasn’t even a word, or at least I hadn’t heard of it. So it took a while to convert all the old news over to the new system, but its all in place now. I had to strip it down a lot though because I hated some of the ‘features’ it gave me, which just made things very user-unfriendly in my opinion. I’ll have a play around with getting it to work better when its not 2.10 in the morning. Amazing new feature: you can now post comments!!!
P2P Internet TV - Monday 23rd February 2004
Last year I wrote an essay on the BBC License fee, suggesting that Internet TV is the future of TV broadcasting, and that this will be fantastic for increasing freedom, reducing the stranglehold of an oligopoly of media companies and problems associated with them (such as censoring content, advertising ‘business-as-usual’ politics etc).
The issue stopping Internet TV catching on at the moment is the prohibitive cost of bandwidth to transmit a station. Do the maths: take a 160kbps stream. That’s 20KB/s, 1,200KB/minute, 72MB/hour, 1.7GB/day. And that’s just for one viewer. 100 concurrent viewers watching all day would require uploading 170GB/day, or 5,200GB/month. To get that with the hosting company which I use would cost ?17,000 per month. So not cheap. Only a rich philanthropist would be able to afford that without requiring extensive advertising to offset the costs.
If someone could develop a way to deliver Internet TV in a P2P way, that is sharing bandwidth between many clients rather than using a server/client architecture, then suddenly Internet TV can take off. Skype can do VoIP using peer-to-peer networks, and that works similarly - streaming bits of data in real-time. So surely similar technologies can be used for P2P Internet TV (discuss on Usenet)?
More Bleak Predictions - Wednesday 18th February 2004
Right, so I already predict unemployment on a massive scale due to technological unemployment (but bear in mind, that I do consider it to be a good thing once we get our minds out of the full-employment mindset). Now I’m adding another major society-changing prediction. A massive, unprecedented and permanent oil crisis is about to errupt. That is, the supply of oil has reached its peak (known as the ‘Peak Oil’) and will fall, falling a bell curve. Prices will hence increase (supply and demand) at a phenomenal rate. Be warned. And read more here.
Jobless Figures - Wednesday 11th February 2004
Apparently, unemployment has fallen to a two-and-a-half year low of 4.9%. But are the figures to be trusted and are they misleading? More people go to university now than ever before. In the past, those people would have been working or looking for jobs. Also, the figure doesn’t make any mention of what kind of jobs these are - are they all permanent jobs, or are they temporary? Are they full time, or part time? Are the jobs any fun, or are they degrading and McDonaldized? And if they are rationalized, is it possible that they won’t last long because machines will soon be able to do the same jobs instead? My dissertation on this subject is coming along well - going to start actually writing it next week perhaps, just a few more books to digest first.
Maybe I just being silly. Getting all worked up about an idea I have which the majority of society rejects. That we’re soon to be hit by massive social upheavel when unemployment rates rocket. But if I am correct in my assumption, then something has to be done about it, and now. We need an amended way of looking at the world and work. We need a new welfare system. At the moment, I see a basic income scheme (aka citizens’ income or national dividend) as a great solution. Over the next couple of weeks I plan to open basicincome.org.uk to get some ideas on the scheme flowing and increase public interest in it. If you’re interested in finding out more now, check out this site.
Ski Photos Online - Thursday 5th February 2004
I’ve just put my skiing photos online here.
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