Getting Finances Done

Yes, young grasshopper, you must have a financial mind like water...

To achieve stress-free productivity, you need to have a system you can trust 100%. If you have any unresolved items not in your system, you will never be able to trust it completely and always have some degree of worry, anxiety, or concern that you’re “missing something.” When you have a trusted system, you can achieve a “mind like water” in your personal productivity. You will respond in perfect proportion to the inputs in your life.

http://www.gettingfinancesdone.com/blog/archives/2007/04/applying-gtd-principles-to-your-personal-finances-part-1/

How To Get Financial Peace of Mind

Some good personal financial advice in here...

• Get out of debt.
• Pay your bills as soon as they come in. 
  
• Make your payments automatic.
• Develop a financial security net.
• Review your finances at least weekly.
• Talk about money with your partner.

http://zenhabits.net/2007/04/financial-zen-how-to-get-financial-peace-of-mind/

A Nosedive Into The Desert

Very interesting blog... this guy has done some remarkable analysis of Saudi oil production and expects that they've peaked and will go into a near continuous state of decline.

In this post, I extend my analysis of Saudi Arabian production backwards four years earlier than my post of last week. I explain in detail how the evidence strongly suggests that since late 2004, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) has entered rapid decline of their oil production, at least for the time being.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2331

Your new IT budget: $10

Someone that gets it.

Service-oriented software, when done correctly in a platform-agnostic way can be flexible, cheap, and can motivate many small businesses to allow them to innovate. Let me make a prediction: large-scale IT in small-to-medium businesses is going to rapidly decline. The era of IT shops having 5-10% (or more) of corporate budgets is over, and good riddance. Now, the following offer from Google comes with advertising, but what do small companies care? Why deploy big email/web servers with the corporate apps and why pay the Microsoft tax? You can run the full Google suite below on Linux on cheap hardware with broadband internet access, which you are most likely paying for anyway.

From the article:

It's pretty amazing to think about what a company can now get for $10 a year:
And, by incorporating some other free Google services, the company also gets:

• A complete, web-based IT infrastructure for its business
• A custom corporate portal/intranet for its employees
• Corporate e-mail service
• Corporate instant messaging
• Calendar software and services
• Web-site design software
• Web-site hosting
• Word-processing software
• Spreadsheet software
• Web-site analytics

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/12/your_new_it_bud.php

A few filthy rich own half the world

The middle class is well and truly dead. How does this bode for countries like Canada, who were built for and by the middle class? Time will tell...

"The richest two per cent of adults in the world own more than half of global household wealth, according to a study released on Tuesday.
In 2000 the richest one per cent of adults owned 40 per cent of global wealth, a report by the Helsinki-based World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University (UNU-WIDER) said.
Its comprehensive study of personal wealth has revealed that the richest 10 per cent of adults accounted for 85 per cent of the total global assets. In contrast, the bottom half of the world adult population owned barely one per cent of global wealth."
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/725095.cms

Forget Oil Independence

While President Bush said his goal was to cut dependence on foreign oil by 75 percent by 2025, a Department of Energy agency says that his goal is about as attainable as my goal of playing centerfield for the Oakland A's.

The Energy Information Administration says oil consumption in North America (mostly from the U.S.) will increase by 38 percent between 2003 and 2030, while the global demand for oil (due in large part to China and India) will increase by 47 percent to 118 million barrels per day.

The country expected to provide the most of the additional supply will be (say it with me) Iran!
http://blog.wired.com/cars/index.blog?entry_id=

Study: Money Won't Make You Happy

"Would you be happier if you were richer?" ask Princeton researcher Daniel Kahneman, PhD, and colleagues. Kahneman shared the 2002 Nobel Prize for applying the principles of psychology to economics.

Their answer: No. It's just an illusion that wealth brings happiness.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,201749,00.html

The 25-Cent Elephant

"Two elephants for 25 cents is only a bargain if you need two elephants and you have 25 cents." Im not sure where that saying comes from, but its a colorful way of expressing a really important idea: that whether or not something is a "bargain" depends on more than just the price tag.
Pretty much everyone knows that "shopping on sale" and "hunting for bargains" lets you save money. And thats true... except that its not quite as easy as it looks. Why do you think stores trumpet "Sales!" and "Bargains!"? Not to give away their merchandise, thats for sure. Even if you dont buy the item at its original sales price, youre still buying, after all. And if you dont do your homework, your "bargain" might end up costing you a lot more than it should have.
http://www.spendingwisely.com/articles/0408/000032.html

The Stock & Real Estate Bubble Will Burst In 2010

It wont be as extreme as the Great Depression. But it will be worse than the 70s downturn, and I think it will be worse than what Japan saw from 1990 to 2003. Maybe well see unemployment at 15 percent, give or take. The worst part of it is youre going to see deflationary trends in prices from a shrinking work force. Deflation is the enemy of asset prices.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70034-0.html?tw=wn_tophead_11

Oilsands worlds largest source of new crude oil by 2010

The oilsands will become the most important source of new oil in the world by 2010, as conventional crude supplies dry up, CIBC World Markets says in its monthly report.Alberta will sit on one of the most valuable energy sources in the world by that time, and one of the few still open to private investment, Jeff Rubin, chief economist at CIBC World Markets, the banks wholesale banking arm, said.
http://www.cbc.ca/calgary/story/ca-oilsands-crude20060111.html?ref=rss

Tech Market Recovery Keys

As a business culture, weve invested billions of dollars in bits and bytes and gadgets and features without investing similarly in the organizational changes necessary to deploy that technology effectively. Technology exists to build a better brand or to improve customer relations -- pick your objective. But we have been implementing technology over the past few years almost without regard for the changes that it demands of our organizations. And thats where the great opportunity lies. Quit looking for the next big thing. Put the technology thats sitting on the shelves to work, and do it with a clear purpose. Empower your employees to get something done. Change the process. Make a contribution to organizational effectiveness.
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/60/one.html?partner=rss

Natural Gas Costs To Double Next Month

The cost of heating your home in January is set rise sharply, with Direct Energy getting approval for rate increases of between 60 per cent and 80 per cent across the province.The bump means an average customer in southern Alberta will pay another $100 next month, while northern customers will see an average increase of about $60.
http://www.cbc.ca/calgary/story/ca-natural-gas20051230.html?ref=rss

Why Expensive Gas Is Good For The US

Rising oil prices are more than just an irritant or even an ominous nick out of the GDP. Theyre an invitation to corn and coal and hydrogen. For anyone with a fresh idea, expensive oil is as good as a subsidy - with no political strings attached. Indeed, every extra penny you pay at the pump is an incentive for some aspiring energy mogul to find another fuel.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.12/gas.html

Culture Jamming & Buy Nothing Day

A growing subculture of activists now proclaims the date Buy Nothing Day, and its members challenge themselves and others not to consume on consumerisms busiest day.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,69652,00.html?tw=rss.TOP

Alberta is about to get wildly rich and powerful

Energy has become a central obsession of international politics in recent years, as exploding economic growth in Asia and Americas ongoing love affair with gas-guzzling vehicles have accelerated the drain on world petroleum reserves. Terrorism, trade, the war in Iraq, nuclear diplomacy -- all of it, on some level, is related to the international preoccupation with energy, and access to affordable oil. So if Canada is to play a more significant global role in the years ahead, experts agree it will be due to the reeking, doughy black soil in northern Alberta, and the rest of the worlds keen desire to share it. "The oil sands give Canada one of the single greatest advantages of any state in the Western world," says Paul Chastko, a University of Calgary historian who recently published a book called Developing Albertas Oil Sands. "It gives Canada the ability to supply all of North America for the next 50 years without touching a drop of imported oil." It is, in short, an economic engine and political lever that any nation would desperately love to have.
http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/business/article.jsp?content=20050613_107308_107308

Dot-com mania, part II?

Now, 10 years after two key events in the history of the Internet -- the successful IPO of Netscape, which many cite as the beginning of Wall Streets love affair with Net stocks, and the founding of Yahoo! -- were in the midst of a new, lets say mini dot-com boom. (Netscape is now owned by Time Warner.)
http://money.cnn.com/2005/06/13/technology/internet/index.htm?section=money_latest

U.S. living beyond means, Dodge warns

Bank of Canada governor David Dodge offered a bankerly rebuke to the United States on Monday for its borrow-and-spendthrift ways, which he suggested are a threat to world economic stability.
Less directly, he chided nations such as China for rigging their currencies to boost exports while building up larger and larger foreign-exchange reserves, creating a lopsided world in which Asian savings finance U.S. spending.
http://www.cbc.ca/story/business/national/2005/05/30/dodge-warning050530.html

The Price Of Oil In Context

The price fluctuated through a fairly narrow band, spiking again at $30 a barrel when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. But after the first Gulf War, the price again headed south, hitting a low of close to $10 a barrel in the late 1990s. Since then, the trend has been up. There was a brief dip after the Americans toppled Saddam Hussein - but the price has now surpassed the highs it reached during the second Gulf War.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/oil/

The Problem With Abundance

What do traffic jams, obesity and spam have in common?They are all problems caused by abundance in a world more attuned to scarcity. By achieving the goal of abundance, technology renders the natural checks and balances of scarcity obsolete.The automobile made it possible for individuals to travel 100 kilometres in an hour. The result is that roads and parking must potentially accommodate everyone driving downtown from an area approximately 200 Km in diameter. The speed of travel reduces the constraints of distance. When we unthinkingly increase the speed at which we can travel, we increase the distance we travel without thinking.The human body was designed to survive on scarcity, and it has served us well over the past 50,000-plus years. On those rare occasions when food was abundant it was stored as fat in advance of future scarcity. Today we are surrounded by an excess of food and the body continues to follow a proven survival strategy ? it stores energy in fat for lean days which no longer arrive.
http://www.globetechnology.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20031007.gtdejageroct7/BNStory/Technology/

Are you worse off than Mom and Dad?

According to Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi, coauthors of "The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke," the average two-income middle class family today earns 75 percent more than the typical single-income family did 30 years ago. But todays family, they say, ends up with less money for everyday living expenses and savings. Why? The costs of housing and a good education are killing them.
http://money.cnn.com/2003/09/11/commentary/everyday/sahadi/index.htm