Post of the Month...

Because I dislike those phone robots so very much...

"For a list of all the ways
technology has failed to improve the quality of life
please press three."

-Alice Kahn

Peak Oil in Ten Minutes

Kevin Drum has the run down.

G20 and Puppies

A good laugh, from Politico:

The difficulty in working out and coordinating world policy while America's hands are effectively tied until Obama takes office was unintentionally made clear in the statement the group produced announcing that it  had  agreed to work toward "strengthening transparency and accountability, "enhancing sound regulation" "promoting integrity in financial markets," "reinforcing international cooperation" and "reforming international financial institutions." 

The anti-good-things-that-pretty-much-everyone-wants-in-principle lobby did not return phone calls by press time but is widely expected to oppose the agreement, and also to come out against puppies and sunsets. 

Let's win this thing

Mr. Obama’s favorability is the highest for a presidential candidate running for a first term in the last 28 years of Times/CBS polls. Mrs. Palin’s negative rating is the highest for a vice-presidential candidate as measured by The Times and CBS News. Even Dan Quayle, with whom Mrs. Palin is often compared because of her age and inexperience on the national scene, was not viewed as negatively in the 1988 campaign.

Noted without comment.

Via Daily Kos.

Herman Daly Rocks

If only I could be this clever (From Michael Pollan's "Farmer in Chief"):

What was once a regional food economy is now national and increasingly global in scope — thanks again to fossil fuel. Cheap energy — for trucking food as well as pumping water — is the reason New York City now gets its produce from California rather than from the “Garden State” next door, as it did before the advent of Interstate highways and national trucking networks. More recently, cheap energy has underwritten a globalized food economy in which it makes (or rather, made) economic sense to catch salmon in Alaska, ship it to China to be filleted and then ship the fillets back to California to be eaten; or one in which California and Mexico can profitably swap tomatoes back and forth across the border; or Denmark and the United States can trade sugar cookies across the Atlantic. About that particular swap the economist Herman Daly once quipped, “Exchanging recipes would surely be more efficient.”

Credit-Cards are the New Mortgages

It seems that credit cards have been chopped up and securitized just like mortgages, and we're probably about to see a lot more defaults. The scariest part for me:

That's bad news for players like JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America that have largely sidestepped—and even benefited from—the mortgage mess but have major credit-card operations.

Bank of America was just profiled as one of the smart ones, and I said to myself "At least we have a few big banks that aren't on the verge of collapse." Sigh.

Via Matt Yglesias.

We don't need no water...

Nice.