• The TSA Is Coming To A Highway Near You
• No Insurance Pay-Out On Greek Debt
• Inflationary Environment: Why Inflation Is Just Creating A Tax On The U.S. Economy
• Grantham Goes Marxist!
• Auto Sales Pick Up Pace Despite Rising Gas Prices
• Obama Seeks to End Subsidies for Oil and Gas Companies
• A Dynamic Function For EROEI
• Why Is North Korea Always Short On Food?

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Economy

The TSA Is Coming To A Highway Near You (June C.)

Believe it or not, only 7 years ago, TSOs went by a more deserving title, “airport security screeners.” At the time, their title and on the job appearance consisted of a white shirt and black pants. This was fitting because airport security screening is exactly what’s required of the position. However, this is no longer the case.

No Insurance Pay-Out On Greek Debt (ewilkerson)

Billions of dollars in credit default insurance will not be paid out to investors in Greek debt, an industry body has ruled, turning down two requests for a pay-out to be triggered over a debt swap.

The International Swaps and Derivatives Association decided there had not been a credit event yet in Greece ahead of next week’s €206bn debt swap but left the door open for a different decision in the future.

Inflationary Environment: Why Inflation Is Just Creating A Tax On The U.S. Economy (David B.)

But let’s use the doctored government numbers for a moment. Using the doctored numbers, what inflation has done to all of us is still absolutely horrific. Just check out the chart below. This is what the Federal Reserve was designed to do. It was designed to constantly expand the money supply and create inflation that never ends…

Grantham Goes Marxist! (Ilene)

Grantham points out that a company is now free to spend money to influence political outcomes and need tell no one, least of all its own shareholders, the technical owners. So, rich industries can exert so much political influence that they now have a dangerous degree of influence over Congress. And the issues they most influence are precisely the ones that matter most, the ones that are most important to society’s long-term wellbeing, indeed its very existence.

Auto Sales Pick Up Pace Despite Rising Gas Prices (jdargis)

Automakers sold 12.8 million cars and trucks last year, and the last time sales surpassed 14 million was 2007. That same year, General Motors, the Ford Motor Company and Chrysler lost more than $44 billion. The sales gains reported Thursday were achieved without the big discounts that helped many sales booms in the past. And even though many shoppers were drawn to small and less gas-thirsty models, buyers paid an average of $1,943 more for a car than last year, the biggest year-over-year increase in recent memory, according to TrueCar.com.

Energy

Obama Seeks to End Subsidies for Oil and Gas Companies (jdargis)

The president criticized Republicans who have called for the country to increase its own oil production, declaring that “anyone who tells you we can drill our way out of this problem doesn’t know what they’re talking about.” With the United States consuming more than 20 percent of the world’s oil while having only 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves, Mr. Obama said “we can’t rely on fossil fuels from the last century.”

A Dynamic Function For EROEI (ewilkerson)

The post below is a reproduction of a paper published in the open access journal Sustainability by Michael Dale, Susan Krumdieck, and Pat Bodger (Vol. 3). The article is a first in creating a dynamic function where Energy Return on Energy Investment changes of an energy resource are estimated over time. In this manner it becomes possible to get an estimate of how much net energy a given fossil oil, gas, coal or renewable energy source yields during its lifetime. The created EROI function is based on theoretical considerations of energy technology development and resource depletion.

Environment

Why Is North Korea Always Short On Food? (jdargis)

Poor growing conditions, fertilizer shortages, and general mismanagement. On the most basic level, the terrain and climate in North Korea aren’t great for farming. The country is mountainous, and the growing seasons are short. (North Korea is at approximately the same latitude as New England, but prevailing air currents make it even colder.) In defiance of nature, North Korea’s isolationist leaders decided in the 1950s that domestic farmers had to fulfill all the country’s food needs. They instituted intensive agricultural practices to maximize yield from their limited arable land, relying on heavy irrigation and copious pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers. They scraped by for decades with only occasional famines, but the system totally collapsed in the 1980s, when the Soviet Union cut the supply of subsidized fossil fuels, from which many of the DPRK’s agricultural chemicals are derived.

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