Economist James Hamilton, in his recent NBER paper, argues for economists’ inherent inability to predict oil prices. Luckily, we have Ana Anaya:
“Gas prices will definitely go up, I have to tell you,” she said. “I’m sorry to say.”
(ht Somegye)
What I Learned Before the Sun Came Up This Morning
My Christmas toy is a Kill A Watt, a cool little goober that you plug into an outlet to see how much electricity something uses. Today’s calculation: the desktop computer, despite being off, is responsible for about 2 percent of my average household electricity consumption.
Die, vampire! With my power strip that has an off switch, I drive a stake through your heart!
Gasoline Consumption Still Down
I remain amazed at this graph from EIA:
gasoline consumption
Consumption for the third week of December (the most recent available) jumped over the previous week, but it’s still 6 percent below the same week a year ago. Look at the right-hand tail on that graph!
The price, meanwhile, is $1.44 per gallon below last year at this time. You’ll recall from that economics class that you took many years ago that, ceteris paribus, (Gawd I’ve been wanting to say that!) a reduction in price leads to an increase in the quantity demanded. But ceteris is not paribus currently, on account of the whole economy being in the crapper and all, which means that income elasticity has taken hold, and we’re demanding an awful lot less gasoline.
The Energy Costs of Desalination
From my colleague Sean Olson, in today’s Albuquerque Journal (ad gated):
While desalinating water could become a valuable tool to support a growing New Mexico, residents will have to be ready to bite the bullet when it comes to the huge energy cost associated with the technique.
Experts say that cost comes in two forms: on water bills and in the environment.
“Here we are, trying to reduce energy use, and we’re looking at (water) options that use significant amounts of energy,” said Santa Fe water policy analyst Consuelo Bokum.
Feral Pigeons: Notes From a Blog Post I Never Got Around to Writing
- Went bicycling looking for killdeer. Found one, but in the process also saw more than a hundred pigeons. (I counted. Somewhere I wrote down the number. It was something like 167, but when the subject is counting pigeons, you shouldn’t trust three-digit accuracy.)
- There’s a great book about feral pigeons, called Feral Pigeons. Google books has it.
- Pigeons do well in cities in part because they’re cliff-dwelling creatures. We build artificial cliffs for them.
- Feral pigeons arrived in North America circa 1606 in Nova Scotia and Virginia.
- Darwin wrote about pigeons.
- Pigeons are the Warren Buffetts of birds. What they do looks absolutely ordinary, yet they do it with a spectacular success that is unmatched.
- My sister, Lisa, hates pigeons.
In a perfect world, I’d have the time to sketch out a path through story space that touches all those bases, but I’m off to bed, so I’ll let you imagine the line of argument I might use.
pigeon
Food Prices Rise
Has the global food price slide finally stopped? The Economist food price index is up 10 percent over last week.
Deflation
I’ve never lived through deflation, and don’t much understand its implications, so I’m reading Ben Bernanke’s Essays on the Great Depression
Consumer Price Index, with and without energy
Elephant Diaries: The Overhead of Print
Jeff Jarvis, who has (for better or worse) become something of a new media guru stalking the land of the old, caused a bit of a stir in my world when he posted last Saturday on the amazing success of the LA Times news web operation:
David Westphal reports an important and historic crossing of the Rubicon for a major newspaper, recounting a discussion with LA Times editor Russ Stanton at USC: “Stanton said the Times’ Web site revenue now exceeds its editorial payroll costs.”
His response?
So why not go ahead and turn off the presses and the trucks and turn the Times into a pure news enterprise, disaggregated from its production and distribution businesses?
That’s frankly breathtaking in its ignorance of the customers the Times is trying to serve. A million people a day (a million!) still fork over money to buy the print product. Those people are LA Times customers.
There are problems with the print product business model, to be sure. But for a supposedly smart business guru to suggest that a company abandon that many paying customers – as opposed to, say, figuring out how to continue selling them a product they seem to want? In what universe does that make any sense at all?
There are important lessons to learn from the LA Times on line success, but abandoning print is not one of them.
Elephant Diaries: The Confusion
There’s a common confusion among “Netizens” about the reason for the mainstream news media’s demise – the notion that newspapers are in decline because they have not done their job of informing the public well enough. Paul Mulshine, reporting from Newark, offers a different explanation:
They assume newspapers are going out of business because we aren’t doing what we in fact do amazingly well, which is to quickly analyze and report on complex public issues. The real reason they’re under pressure is much more mundane. The Internet can carry ads more cheaply, particularly help-wanted and automotive ads.
So if you want a car or a job, go to the Internet. But don’t expect that Web site to hire somebody to sit through town-council meetings and explain to you why your taxes will be going up. Soon, newspapers won’t be able to do it either.
(h/t Eric)
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Water in the Desert Edition
On the lessons from Chaco (ad gated):
New Mexico has always been a dry place, at least on the time scales that matter for the ancient civilizations Henderson and Robbins were trying to understand. Our history could be written as a story of people forever searching for a stable water supply to support the cities they were trying to build.