What will 2009 bring? Will the price of oil be up or down in a year? Will the Obama Administration be the change we need? Or were hoping for? Will the economy crash and burn, flatten out, or begin to recover? Will geopolitical wrangling in Gaza or Iraq and Iran, Eastern Europe or Pakistan spill over into larger scale instability or violence? Will people get serious?
I'll go ahead and say I don't really have the foggiest. I think it's becoming increasingly clear that prediction itself is something we don't understand. That's one of the things I take away from Nassib Taleb and from Philip Tetlock's 'Expert Political Judgement' - an epistemological look at political prediction.
I think the only safe bet is that climate change and the human forcings driving it will get worse; and most in the wealthy world will remain oblivious to the scale of personal material sacrifice required by the coming resource and environmental constraints.
Anyway, those musings aside: a couple fun things to begin the year on. First a parody coal industry commercial from freeloveforum and the second is an (unintentional?) self-parody from the coal industry association called "Frosty the coal man." Yes.
I'm going to take a break for a week or so till the start of the semester and then pick up as our class get started.
~SZ
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