May
26
2008
As the price of oil heads ever higher ($131.57 Friday close for Brent Crude), we are led to believe that this is a fundamental supply and demand issue. The supply is drying up, and getting ever more expensive to extract, and the demand is growing unchecked, with the entry of China and Russia into the oil hungry nations.
A colleague of mine pointed me to an article on Bloomsberg which suggested that the current price is more to do with speculation, than with core supply and demand issues. Specifically, speculators are buying July futures to cover their short positions. While this is a supply and demand issue of sorts, it suggests that the real issue is not the fundamental supply.
I guess the next few weeks and months will tell us whether this is the case or not. If it’s true, it would suggest that the artificial bubble that exists now (if that’s what it really is) is likely to burst, and oil prices will crash.
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May
25
2008
David McWilliams, that eternal doomsayer, has an interesting post on his blog recently. Here’s a snippit that sums up his view:
We have already seen how the slump in stamp duty has affected the coffers. But long-term, no country ever got rich by its people buying and selling property to each other with money borrowed from foreigners.
While I’m not an economist, I’m not sure that I completely agree with this argument. Sure, property has been bought with money borrowed from foreigners, but it will be repaid (hopefully) to those foreigners from salaries earned by selling goods and services on the international market. Granted that an internal property market per se is not a desirable thing, but surely it’s symptomatic of the behaviour of the wider economy.
On top of his usual doom-and-gloom, he does offer some hope for the future, and SFI gets an honourable mention:
Ireland has so much to offer risk takers – both our own and international – in terms of raw material. For example, Science Foundation Ireland is slated to invest €7 billion in scientific research over the next ten years. This will go to waste unless we also bring in the necessary commercial skills that can harness this research and build it into something that will be for sale. The idea should be to build companies of our own rather than just being a conveyor belt of talent for the multinationals.
I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment.
It’s worth pointing out that SFI’s budget is nothing close to €7billion over the next ten years. According to the Strategy for Science, Technology and Innovation, 2006-2013, SFI has an allocation of €1.4 b|n – a far sight from €7 b|n. Also worth noting is that that the current SSTI expires in 2013. I don’t believe that plans or budgets have been allocated beyond that – certainly not to 2018 as McWilliams implies.
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May
13
2008
I’m waiting for a colleague to arrive from Vienna. I type in his flight number into Google at 13:45, and bam – I know that his flight has arrived.
I know that this flight search functionality has been around for a while, but it’s the first time that I’ve used it. I’m particularly impressed (although I probably shouldn’t be) that it works for non-US flights.
Neat.
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May
6
2008
Pat asks have we over innovated?, to which Robin gives a resounding no.
Pat’s argument could be extended to plenty of other areas of technology. Take social networking, the tech-du-jour. How many of your friends have LinkedIn pages? How many are on Facebook? MySpace? blogs? Twitter? etc., etc., etc…. I think the simple fact is that many people never catch up. There will always be a spectrum of technology users, some in the vanguard and some in the rearguard. Waiting for the rearguard to catchup means stagnation.
Stagnation notwithstanding, one of the problems with this level of innovation is that if you miss a wave, it’ll be difficult, if not impossible to catch the next one, because you’ll have no frame of reference for it. How do you explain to your mother, who can’t program the VCR, what a Facebook page is, and what’s it’s for? You can’t, that’s how. The leap of understanding is simply too great for the vast majority of people to make.
So we should continue to innovate, create, push the boundaries. But don’t expect that we’ll always manage to drag the masses behind us.
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