John Robb's Weblog

Tired 2.0

All of this seems so irrelevant to the future. Nothing really interesting or cool seems to be coming out of these Web 2.0 companies...

The next big thing. The monster trend that is going to fundamentally change your life like the Internet did, is being covered here... No fancy conferences, corporate sponsors, and IPOs. The entrepreneurs in this trend's space don't play by those rules.

Feedback

Murky View: Common sense is always good:

If you begin to "think like a terrorist”… with all their media saavy, opportunistic abilities… his post starts to simply look like common sense.

His conclusion? Another 9/11 is not likely… but it’s a black swan, so it would be completely unpredictable by definition anyway… he sees the terrorists using tactics that we have seen employed around the world, in Iraq, Russia, in Nigeria. These attacks will be against infrastructure. Oil, natural gas, and electrical hubs and infrastructure. There are thousands of miles of unprotected pipeline and grids in North America that could be attacked without anyone seeing anything. This would make finding the culprits much more difficult… and also require for less in the way of supplies.

Forcados

Nigerian open source guerrillas took out the Forcados terminal in Nigeria. It is an offshore oil platform capable of exporting 400,000 barrels of oil a day. The tanker loading facility was destroyed which has caused a suspension of exports from the facility.

``That the Nigerian military has been preparing for weeks only for their incompetence to be revealed in mere minutes is enough warning to oil companies and their workers that they stand no chance against any of our units in the event of an attack,'' Jomo Gbomo, a self-described spokesman for the militants (one of many), said in the statement.

Hmmm

Scoble makes the case for Puritan modesty.

The Minutemen

Pacific News. On the border with the Minutemen. Armed to the teeth. The paramlitary trend continues.

Nigeria

BBC. A Nigerian militant commander in the oil-rich southern Niger Delta has told the BBC his group is declaring "total war" on all foreign oil interests. The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta has given oil companies and their employees until midnight on Friday night to leave the region. It continues: Correspondents say the militants provide security for the smugglers. The group enjoys considerable local support and it is difficult to pinpoint exactly who is a member, he says. Mend's leaders tend to like to be faceless, our reporter says, and they usually send statements to the media via email. Sounds like a virtual state to me (economic means plus military capability).

Later today: Barely 24 hours after the Joint Military Task Force in the Niger Delta, Operation Restore Hope, bombarded illegal oil bunkerers' facilities in Okorenkoko, an Ijaw Community in Warri, a Shell Petroleum Develop-ment Company (SPDC) facility in Rivers State went up in flames yesterday, leading to the closure of a flow station with a daily production capacity of 37, 800 barrels. The huge fire, which will cost the oil company about $2.27 million (N295 million) daily in revenue, forced the closure of a flow station identified as Cawthorne Channel field, said to be close to the ill-fated facility.

Drugs and Trade

Black globalization is quickly surpassing the "good connectivity" extolled by Barnett for many countries. WOAI: One of the leading experts on Mexico and Mexican border issues in the US says illegal drug shipments from Mexico into the US is now a $20 billion a year business for the Mexican economy, making it the country's third largest source of income, behind oil and money sent home by Mexican citizens living legally, and illegally, in the United States. "The Mexican economy would collapse if vigorous action were taken, or at least there would be a very serious crisis, if you would cut off one fourth of their foreign earnings..."

All eyes on Cantarell

Tom Whipple: An energy consultant in Mexico City published parts of the study and later the Wall Street Journal got to examine the document. It seems there is only 825 feet between the gas cap over the oil and the water that is pushing into Cantarell from the bottom. This distance is closing at between 250 and 360 feet per year.The more pessimistic of the study's scenarios have Cantarell's production dropping from 2 million b/d to 875 thousand barrels a day by the end of next year and 520 thousand barrels a day by the end of 2008. If the pessimistic scenarios outlined in the PEMEX study come to pass, it will be very serious. The loss of nearly 1.5 million barrels a day of production capacity within three years will be very difficult to overcome either from other Mexican fields or from new production in other countries. Unlike political stoppages from exporters such as Iran or Nigeria , depletion can't be put right. Mexican exports will be seriously reduced or perhaps even eliminated forever.

Of course, I am a big believer in technology and the power of markets. However, there is a limit to how quickly these mechanisms can produce alternatives.

Aftershocks from a lack of transparency

The US government's reflexive action to classify the remainder deck of Abu Ghaib photos/video is causing aftershocks due to leaks of additional photos. If they had adopted a fully transparent approach, the damage would have been limited to a single incident. Of course, transparency would have helped limit the potential of this in the first place.

These aftershocks won't stop until the entire deck is released.

Apple to adopt Windows?

Dvorak makes a claim that Apple is going to adopt Windows for compatibility and dump OSX. However, the idea that deep compatibility is necessary has lots of legs.

The reason is corporate environments. Lots of my best employees want a Powerbook. The problem is that there is always one or two corporate apps that need Windows. Virtual PC is nice, but out of the box compatibility/dual boot/emulation is what I need. The cool part of the corporate marketplace for Apple is that it makes it possible for people to buy that expensive 17" Powerbook (spending $3,000 to properly outfit/leverage an employee that gets paid over $100 k is a no brainer in a corporate setting).