In one year, Barrett Brown made himself into one of the best-known public faces of the hacker collective Anonymous—and now he's stepping away from the group.
"There's little quality control in a movement like that, which was not a huge problem when the emphasis was on assisting with North African revolutions and those who came on board thus tended to be of a certain sort," he told Ars this week.
Despite the recent drop in oil prices, the outlook for the remainder of the year is not good. If the IEA numbers are correct the world is probably burning more oil each day than is coming out of the ground, with the difference being made up from the 2.6 billion barrel stockpiles held by the OECD countries. Every day brings new stories of coal, electric power and oil product shortages in some corner of the world.
Tokyo has gotten around to admitting that the meltdown of the reactors at Fukushima is more serious than had been thought and that it will take a longer time to recover from the disaster. In the meantime, industrial production is suffering and the demand for imported energy is increasing.
Meanwhile, once inflation is taken into account, most people's incomes are set to fall, after 15 years of virtual stagnation. Between 1996-7 and 2007-8, the earnings of someone in the middle of the income distribution rose (1997 prices) from £16,000 to £17,100 – barely £100, or less than 0.7% a year. Even the increase for those quite near the top of the income scale, better off than 90% of their fellow citizens, was unspectacular. Their inflation-discounted pay crept up from £36,700 to £41,500, or less than £450 (1.2%) a year. The top 0.1% scooped the jackpot.
Last week, lots of experts were predicting that lower oil prices would lead to lower fuel prices at the pumps this summer. I wondered about that because Tom Whipple had noted that gasoline stocks were very low. The Kansas City Star takes the fuel stocks story a bit further:
In a break with Wall Street tradition, the Rochedale Securities research analyst issued a very rare sell rating last week -- on Goldman Sachs, no less.
In Djokovic Rules and Djokovic Still Rules, I've already described how well I think Djokovic is playing this year. Many media pages, like the Wall Street Journal article below, are now devoted to the gluten-free diet he adopted last year - before the streak.
This is a guest post by Scott Huler, author of “On the Grid: A Plot of Land, An Average Neighborhood, and the Systems that Make Our World Work.”
It’s been a year since the publication of On the Grid, my book about tracing and understanding everyday infrastructure systems, so I have now spent a year talking to people about their wires and pipes — and I have terrible news. Not about infrastructure itself, which is amazing and growing only more so. No — it’s about whether we get to have any more of it.
Novak Djokovic defeated Rafael Nadal 6-4, 6-4 in the final of the Internazionali BNL d'Italia in Rome, aka the Italian Open, stretching his unbeaten streak to 39 matches and seven titles, but more importantly, beating Nadal in consecutive red clay court matches. It was a tough, high quality match, well-played by both men.
The U.S. housing market is going through an adjustment of historic proportions. Before 2006, when the housing slump commenced, American home builders regularly built as many as 2 million new houses annually, rarely less than a million. This amount was needed to keep up with new household formation, immigration, homeowners moving up, and replacement due to obsolescence. Since then the number of new houses built has dropped drastically—the seasonally adjusted annual figure announced by the federal government in February 2011 was about 400,000! What's going on?
On February 21, 2011, The Straddler met with Peter Temin at his office at MIT to seek his perspective on recent events and, more generally, the field of economics.
Yes, jobs are being created, but what kinds of jobs paying what kinds of wages? Can those jobs sustain a modest lifestyle and pay the bills? Or are we living through a McJobs recovery?
In 2009 a British family living in a four-bedroom house became the subject of a subversive energy experiment about modern slavery.
While the foursome flicked on gadgets one Sunday with the abandon of Roman patricians, an army of volunteers (The Human Power Station) furiously pedalled 100 bicycles next door to generate the needed energy.
The unsuspecting family, of course, had no idea they had been unplugged from a power grid fueled largely by fossil fuels.
