Wow.

5 billion of our 6.9 billion people now have a mobile phone.

In the year 2000, about 720 million people had a cellphone. That’s 2 million new contracts per day.

BP chief thrown out of Alaska

The House Energy Committee called BP’s pipeline chief to Washington. After the second hearing in a month, Kevin Hostler has decided to quit.

The 800-mile Trans-Alaska Pipeline System transports 700,000 barrels of oil per day, about 15 percent of US crude oil production. BP’s severe policies has cut the 2010 budget to $1 billion, compared with $1.1 billion in 2009 and $1.3 billion in 2008.

Based on hundreds of pages of internal documents and interviews with more than a dozen senior employees on the safety and integrity of the pipeline, the ‘Business Practices, Employee Concerns Program and Compliance and Ethics Group’ will develop a plan for enhancing the open work environment to deal with issues of intimidation and fear.

“There is a risk ranking exercise that is used and the concern that the risk ranking is being used primarily for budget reductions and although work is shown as lower risk it still should be done to protect the environment.”

Alaskans are celebrating. The pipeline’s owners issued an executive obit:

“This is consistent with the recent employee survey that demonstrated there has been a reduction in employee comfort in reporting concerns to senior management.”

Stealing credit from her predecessor, Sarah Palin boasts on radio and TV, : “I had to set up our Petroleum Systems Integrity Office so that we could be there on the front lines making sure what the oil companies were telling us was legit when they were dealing with their corroded pipes that we find out and other lax maintenance issues….“

More than 100 recorded incidents of corroded pipes and “other lax maintenance issues” between 2001 and 2007 reveals Palin’s pipeline oversight was bogus

The industry of plucking

“More than one American in five thinks that buying lottery tickets constitutes a sound retirement plan.

“What a lottery sells is a dream. That dream is of great personal wealth, even if the lottery is the only game in the world in which your chances of winning are not greatly increased by playing.

From The Economist, here’s a firm and revealing ‘Special Report On Gambling’:

• Shuffle up and deal
• The risk instinct
• At war with luck
• Bet on the bot
• Log on, ante up
• Lengthening odds
• Cutting off the arms
• When the chips are down
• The dragon’s gambling den
• Come, all ye gullible
• Sure thing

“The most popular forms of gambling—slots, lotteries and casino games—are simply bad bets which players are likely to lose.”

Our new war on crime

Dana Blankenhorn:

Regulation is not anti-business. Regulation is crime prevention.

A properly-regulated market does not stifle innovation. It is not socialism.

Imagine Las Vegas without casino regulation. That’s today’s Wall Street.

That’s the reality of our time. We are ruled by a new criminal class, one surrounded by lawyers, flacks, and accountants, who not only believe they have a right to rape our land, kill our people and destroy our Constitution, but consider it a positive economic boon, necessary for economic growth.

There is nothing new here. If Mexico’s government can be mastered by drug dealers, then it’s the drug dealers who rule Mexico. If America’s government can be mastered by Wall Street or big business, then we are ruled by Wall Street and big business.

Before you sob, laugh out loud. The rich are tops in walking away from mortgages. “The rich are different: they are more ruthless.”

NYTimes:

Whether it is their residence, a second home or a house bought as an investment, the rich have stopped paying the mortgage at a rate that greatly exceeds the rest of the population.

More than one in seven homeowners with loans in excess of a million dollars are seriously delinquent. One in 12 mortgages below the million-dollar mark is delinquent.

Supply Side Trickle Down Free Market Tax Cuts

There’s nothing more to know about Reagan Republicans.

No hardware in your hand

The next mouse is no mouse. Pranav Mistry at MIT Media Lab has created a fully functional ‘Mouseless’ system that’s cost just $20 to build.

How long will we slog?

How long it will take to fix the post-80s frenzy of finance?

Ponder these charts of our total debt in the credit market. The green line is government debt; red line is private debt.

Austerity policies after the crash of 1929 triggered massive unemployment and misery for 13 years. Obviously shrinking spending and budgets by 10% of GDP/year was much too rapid.

How many years do we pay down the massive accumulated debt and interest of the free market fiasco?

Japan we can see. Tackling debt since 1998 at about 6%/year, less painful than outright depression, their debt load has been reduced by half.

Stuart Staniford calculates the overall process will spin out to 2025, adding that we don’t know the appropriate speed to offload debt. And this time it’s global.

Racism on the radio

Opining in a white pointy hat, Rush Limbaugh fuels that Winfrey and other African-Americans owe their success to their skin color. Urinating on his white robe, the pied piper flames:

“If Obama weren’t black, he’d be a tour guide in Honolulu or he’d be teaching Saul Alinsky Constitutional law or lecturing on it in Chicago.

“He wouldn’t have been voted president if he weren’t black.

“Somebody asked me over the — oh, I need to remember. Somebody asked me over the weekend, why does somebody earn a lot of money, have a lot of money. I said it’s because he`s black.  It was Oprah. No, it can’t be. Yes, it is.

“There’s a lot of guilt out there. To show we’re not racist, we’ll make this person wealthy and big and famous and so forth.”

Perhaps one of a few in 100 years, a professor is asking:

We need big innovative American businesses that can scale, export and employ millions of workers, many without a college degree. How are we going to get there?