The whole blogging proposition is fascinating statistically, and socially.

I regularly look at the stats for this blog to see what is being read... And one of the things that truly stuns me is the amount of page views that material gets that was written and published ages ago.

Clearly its the google effect. The ability for people to search on a key word and to go wherever the search engine takes them....

For instance I remember reading with fascination the speech that Sean Penn gave several months ago and blogging about it and republishing it on this blog. Amazing how many page views it gets. But the one that really amazes me is the "Welcome Perceptric Media" link. Perceptric Media is continuing to attract attention, with One Minute World continuing to build eyeballs.... and the first customers are now signing up... The power of an idea and a lot of patience.

I was talking yesterday to Lachlan, who cuts my hair. He travels a lot. Next month he is going to Hawaii. Later in the year to Bali, and then later still to New York.

He told me that he and his partner are going to stay with friends there, who have recently been saying that they are now the working poor in New York, with a household income in the $2-3 Million. That is because people in the financial markets - the big swinging dicks of M&A - can get massive payouts. I read that a receptionist at one of the big firms got $75k last Christmas!

So they have massive discretionary income. But they have no more time than the rest of us.

This excellent text on Weekend Economist documents a major geo-political and economic shift related to Chris's recent blogs on the US $. This shift from the US to China is interestingly likened to similar shifts involved in the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.

Decadence?

Here is a fascinating story in the Chicago Tribune about the history of nuclear power....

At the moment uranium stocks are going through the roof. I had breakfast with a friend over the last weekend who is a substantial investor in resource stocks. He started talking to me about the uranium bubble - how mining companies are being pumped up on speculation that they may have some in the dirt. His view: Its gonna blow.

And since now the export of uranium from Australia seems to have become part of the Libs policy, it is worth seeing what was done last time round....

Here is a snippet from the Tribune story:

As Travelli wrestled with his own government, he had an unsettling encounter that unnerved him further.

In 1981, during the height of the Cold War, he was attending a nuclear conference in what was then West Germany when a thin man in black glasses and a black suit approached him, stony-faced. The details of that conversation always have stuck with Travelli:

"Is my understanding of U.S. policy correct, that you are trying to retrieve highly enriched uranium from research reactors?" the man asked.

"That is correct," Travelli replied.

"And the reason is to reduce the chance that this material might fall into the wrong hands?"

"That's right."

"And the primary emphasis is on reactors that the United States supplied to its allies?"

"Correct."

"Not those the Soviet Union supplied to her allies?"

"Correct."

The man smiled slowly, shook Travelli's hand and walked away.

Travelli did not know whether this man was a scientist, bureaucrat, spy or some combination. But the meeting made him realize he had little idea what the Soviets and their satellites were up to.

He soon would find out: Travelli became deeply involved with the reactor in Romania, a facility beset by problems since America provided it in the 1970s to Ceausescu, the repressive and mercurial dictator.

Those working at the reactor were not immune to Ceausescu's bizarre policies. Every spring and fall, buses would pull in front of the facility, and its scientists were herded aboard and driven to nearby fields to plant corn or pick tomatoes.

"Why can't they get the peasants to do this?" one of the scientists, Corneliu Costescu, recalled complaining. "We're nuclear scientists."

But Romania's dictator believed it was much easier to round up scientists at nuclear facilities than peasants in villages.

Travelli invited Costescu and two other Romanian physicists to America to study whether the bomb fuel used in their facility could be replaced by something safer. After months of work, the Romanian scientists concluded that it could. But higher-ups in Romania weren't convinced, especially because the U.S. refused to pay for the new fuel.

Normally, America didn't cover the cost of replacement fuel when swapping it for bomb-grade material. Instead, the U.S. waited until countries used up all theirs, then asked them to pay for the replacement fuel.

But Romania was operating its reactor less and less in order to conserve its highly enriched uranium. A standoff ensued, and several years passed with no progress.

During this long delay, Romania, unbeknownst to the U.S., used the American-supplied reactor to help separate plutonium, a serious violation of international rules governing the development of nuclear weapons.

Travelli and U.S. officials didn't learn of the Romanian action until after the Berlin Wall came down and Ceausescu was executed by his own people. In 1992, seven years after the nuclear infraction, the new Romanian government voluntarily reported the case to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The agency, satisfied that corrective action had been taken, reported the infraction to the UN Security Council for informational purposes only--one of just a handful of cases ever reported to the council.

But even after Romania's admission, the American government did not invest more in its effort to retrieve bomb-grade fuel worldwide.

This fascinating rave is hosted on Bruce Sterling's blog. I think the author, Tom Sherman, is on to something. I love his vision of quick and dirty video surrealism. Not sure about his concern about distinctions between amatuer and art video and his prediction of ever shorter, more ad like formats, but generally a great futuristic text.

One more comment. Independant video content producers will face the same type of problems faced currently by independant music creators. There will be such vast quantities of video online it will be very difficult to discover quality. Business models to support commercial digital production will not be apparent. Digital content creation may become a largely open source endeavour.

While the popular press focuses on whether the Democrats in the US are going to stop Bush from escalating the war in Iraq, or worse, initiating a war in Iran, are we missing an important piece of the puzzle: China and trade?

Stephen Roach, this week, writes in detail about the parallels between now and the period when the US was Japan-bashing. Interesting to contemplate the issues now with respect to a democratic empowered congress in the US with a large base of support from people whose jobs are disappearing East, because of an order of magnitude savings in production cost. These people used to be working class. Now they are middle class - the consumers of last resort - with growing mortgages and bigger flat panel TV's.

It is these same people who may well find themselves in a double crunch as their jobs disappear at the same time their homes go into negative equity..... at the same time that the dollar starts to crumble too.... see this story from Peter Schiff:

MacQuarrie Bank likes infrastructure. And they have been incredibly successful at it too in Australia.

They are moving relentlessly forward in other countries too. In the US its toll roads that have taken their fancy. They may hit a raw nerve though. According to thenewspaper.com they have apparently just announced a deal to purchase a chain of local newspapers that is the main voice of opposition to the toll road network that they are buying! And in the US people tend to get mobilized a lot more readily than in Australia...

So YouTube has a business model....

They are going to be doing 3 second pre-roll ads.

See the A VC blog and GigaOM for more....

The spin merchants of government are doing their work. They make sure that there are enough policy balls in the air to keep everyone confused. That way there can be no major wave of unified public opinion...

Global warming: Is it real? Is it caused by people? People are confounded by the questions that they have no way of intelligently answering, and the government can just get on with doing their work... ensuring that they stay in power.

Solving the problems in Iraq: Are the Iranians to blame? How do we give Iraq democracy? Take the focus off the fact that the US is now exporting the worst aspects of its societal problems into Iraq under the guise of democracy: racism, gangs, etc.... and putting its forces in place for a push into Iran.

When you see people like Bush and his cronies talking it is like looking at a CEO of a major corporation talking at an AGM. Their primary goal is to keep the shareholders in the dark while giving them the rhetoric about the great opportunities that are coming soon for the company.

And recently I have started to see companies follow the same sort of weird logic in dealing with their employees as both the Australian and US governments are using with their populations:

One company I know quite well recently (last year) went through a re-org. (It was the 3rd in so many years). The new structure now has the feel of the US government. People at or near the top who do not want anything to be reported to them that is contrary to the way they think. Specific orders given to the middle management that they may not communicate at any time to senior management without going through their direct report. Disobeying this has the threat of being fired.

The concept of "Its my way or the highway" has been around for a long time. But if you run a company (or a country) and are not putting smart people around you who can challenge your belief systems, your rhetoric, your strategies.... you run the risk of doing exactly what Bush is doing to the US and to the world - bankrupting it financially and morally.

And there is one thing that is different nowadays, and becoming more so every day. The ability to communicate rapidly. The ability to make decisions because of the wealth of information that is available. And the honeymoon will only last as long as the scrip that they dole out to the employees is going to yield quick profits for the recipients...

As Bob Dylan said in Talking World War III Blues:

"You can fool some of the people all of the time
and you can fool all of the people some of the time,
but you can't fool all of the people all of the time....
Abraham Lincoln said that.
You can be in my dream if I can be in yours.... and I said that...."

With the world going to hell in a handbasket, there is nothing like a bit of George Carlin to realize that it has been happening for a long time!

Here George serves up the revised 10 Commandments: