apple juice

guilty for loving burgers. I wish the costs were upfront at the register. I’m telling you, a carbon tax is a good idea. Free markets rely on good information, and when you don’t have the full story when you make your decisions at the store – we make “sub-optimal” decisions.

Great article in Slate magazine about the demand for oil in developing countries. What I always find ironic about the “drill, baby, drill” nonsense is that it basically won’t work to lower our energy costs. If a higher price will be paid for the gas outside of the US – that’s where it will go.

I read elsewhere that the natural gas hoopla is the same situation. That natural gas will come out of the ground (fracked or otherwise) and head straight overseas if someone is willing to pay more.

I’m 100% behind one of the conclusions of this article: raise the gas tax. It will drive our consumption down and prepare our infrastructure for the near future where gas is likely to be a LOT more expensive anyway.

I’d tune up those bikes and move to the city if I were you…

The New Gas Guzzlers

In the real world, nothing magical will occur when the lines between rich-world and developing-world oil consumption cross in the near future. But the shift is emblematic of a changed reality that hasn’t yet been fully processed by Americans. We’re used to living in a world where rich countries were the whole ballgame and the American economy was so much bigger than Germany’s or Japan’s that we could afford to treat the global economy and the American one as largely coextensive. Those days are gone. In the near future, trends in global commodity prices—most of all the highly variable price of gasoline—are more likely to be driven by policy changes in Asia than in the United States, making America’s perennial game of political whining about the price of gasoline even more ridiculous than usual.

we received this report from daycare a couple days ago:

Emi fell right to sleep during rest time this afternoon! I let her nap from 1:15 – 1:45. She was less than thrilled when I woke her – and when I asked if she wanted to color she said, “No. I just want to listen to Bon Iver and not talk to anyone!” #cutesthipsterever

while I applaud her choice of music, I’m sensing a moody, brooding teenager phase coming on…

By the way, Senna is a great movie that you should watch.

Here is a video of Formula One great Ayrton Senna demonstrating the techique in a Honda NSX. You’ll note he’s wearing a button-down shirt, dress pants, Italian loafers, and no helmet while burying the speedometer on his way around the track.

(Via kottke.org.)

One of the things about our globalized world is that the realities of economic activities are not close to the places of consumption. It’s clear to me that if we simply had more information about the costs of our actions, more people would be concerned about nature.

This series of photographs from the oil sands of Alberta, Canada is pretty amazing. The scale of the operations is absolutely staggering.

Canadian Oil Sands Flyover

The size of the truck in the picture is 50 feet long. The lake on the left is waste water being skimmed for chemicals.

After selling our first-generation AppleTV a while back, I purchased the new 3rd gen 1080p version a couple months ago. We love it, and it is working great with the whole ecosystem.

There are holes, however, in the content. Obviously Apple has a TV, Movie and Music store that they do not want to cannabalize, but there is plenty of content available on the web that you can’t easily access on AppleTV.

If I were a betting man, I would place good money on Apple bringing the App Store concept (subscriptions and all) to the AppleTV in the coming months. The new grid of icons on the homescreen is just screaming for awesome 3rd-party apps.

I’ve blogged before about my internet options and linked to charts showing that Americans pay more money for less bandwidth than just about every other developed nation in the world.

Lawrence Lessig makes this point (among others) in this speech at WiscNet Future Technology Conference. The larger context of this speech is the corrupting influence of money in government, but I’ve started right about the section where he talks about broadband.

I think the solution in this case (at least for minneapolis) is to build out the network that was made for our municipal wifi. I want to subscribe on principle, but at 6Mbps, it is not exactly fast. However, if I could have fiber to my house, then we’d be talking!