Tuesday June 07, 2005

GM to cut 25000 jobs in U.S. by 2008

urbansurvival.com -> biz.yahoo.com :

General Motors Corp. plans to eliminate 25,000 jobs in the United States by 2008 and to close plants as part of a strategy to revive its struggling North American operations.

Speaking to shareholders at GM's 96th annual shareholder meeting in Delaware Tuesday morning, Chairman and Chief Executive Rick Wagoner said the capacity and job cuts will generate annual savings of roughly $2.5 billion.

He noted that health-care expenses add $1,500 to the cost of each vehicle. This puts GM at a "significant disadvantage versus foreign-based competitors," and said GM has conducted "intense discussions" with the unions about how to reduce health-care costs, he said.

- While the demise of fuel-guzzling SUV's looks imminent due to the twin impacts of high oil prices and high labour costs, we should also spare a thought for those who are going to lose their jobs. We can see now that the cutting of GM & Ford bonds to junk status was only the opening act. GM and Ford are major employers in the USA, and if you include the parts makers, that's a big chunk of America's manufacturing (especially with China having taken away almost everything else). You can be sure that we have not seen the worst of it yet ...

(2005-06-07 23:09:40 SGT) [Biz] Permalink

Climate change : Drought

peakoil.com -> bbc.co.uk :

England and Wales have had their driest November to March period in 30 years, Met Office figures reveal. The dry spell spanned two complete seasons across most of the UK with five consecutive months of below-average rainfall ... parts of central and south England had just 60% of their average rainfall.

peakoil.com -> planetark.com, abcnews.go.com :

The rate of rural suicide in Australia is amongst the highest in the world as farmers battle the stress of years of drought, failed crops, mounting debt and slowly decaying towns ... the Land newspaper recently ran a drought headline - "The cost: suicide every four days" ... after surviving a catastrophic 2002-03 drought - the worst in 100 years - many farmers thought they'd never see such hardships again. Yet 2005 is shaping up as a return to those horror conditions, with dams bone-dry and sun-baked farmlands cracking ...

gulf-times.com :

"I've never experienced having no crops sown at this time of year in my 30-odd years on the land," [Australian farmer] Donges said. "(And) I've never experienced two bad years in a row." "If it turns out to be the mother of all droughts then there's going to be a lot of pain. This is the crunch year. People have been tightening belts (but) nobody can prepare for this. It's not written in the record books. It's uncharted waters." ... Donges points across the valley to the brown hills beyond. "Normally this time of year it would be all green here," he said amid the choking dust ...

peakoil.com -> planetark.com :

Spain had the driest September-to-March period this year since records started in 1947, and there has been very little rain since then ... Spain's drought-hit wheat crop is expected to shrink by a third from last year and the barley harvest by 40 percent ... one farmers' union said in some southern areas, where the harvest started in May, the drought had reduced yields so much that the grain was not worth harvesting ... water reserves stand at just 59 percent of capacity.

taipeitimes.com :

In what is said to be one of the worst droughts in 60 years, water consumption will be strictly regulated as reservoirs begin to empty ... water is being rationed in half of Spain to save it for domestic use, as parts of the country suffer the worst drought for 60 years ... weeks before the tourist season starts, swimming pools are empty, city fountains are turned off and golf courses have been ordered to reduce watering ...

guardian.co.uk :

Portugal has accused Spain of stealing its water as the two Iberian countries battle a drought that has seriously reduced levels in rivers flowing across their border ... Portugal has demanded €6m (?4m) in compensation from Spain after levels of water in the Douro river have fallen below limits established in a bilateral agreement. The source of many of Portugal's big rivers start in Spain ... Portugal is experiencing its worst drought for 60 years, with reserves along the Douro down to around 50% just as the summer starts.

news.ft.com :

Thailand's economy contracted for the first time since 2001 in the first quarter of this year as the catastrophic December tsunami, drought and rising oil prices took their toll, the country's national planning agency said yesterday ... the government figures show drought took a heavy toll. Agricultural output contracted by 8.2 per cent year-on-year, the fifth consecutive quarter of agricultural contraction. Crucial rice and sugar cane production were hardest hit, while fishery production also shrank as a result of lower shrimp exports.

(2005-06-07 22:10:45 SGT) [Env] Permalink

Lowem on Books

Now, what is this? Spot has tagged me regarding some book meme. Hmm? What's a meme? If I remember right, it's something about an idea that somehow spreads through the popular culture. Let's see, step 1, look up "meme" on Wikipedia. Ah, I see, I'm quite familiar with the "All your base are belong to us" one (... and all your oil too, lol). According to memes.org, "Memes are Mind Viruses". Wikipedia also has a definition of memesphere, which sounds somewhat like a small subset of the blogosphere.

Okay, it seems relatively benign, and kind of interesting. Well, benign compared to the computer-based malware (viruses, worms, Trojan horses) that I have battled with. I will "answer" the call of this book meme, then :

How many books do I own?

Hmm. No idea. How do you count that? Are old, dusty textbooks from yesteryear counted? Non-fiction vs fiction books? "Coffee-table type" books? Only your "current working set" of books touched within the past, say, 2 years? Anywhere between 2 and 200 then, I'd suppose. It's made more complicated by the fact that I have one set at home, and the older ones back at my parents' place, and some of the sci-fi ones are sort of shared with my brother. So, the exact count is kind of hazy.

The last book I bought

Let's say we don't count the big chunk of children's books for Ken that Biow bought on my credit card, or the latest street directory, you know, this kind of thing. It should then be the 19th, and final book in the Star Wars New Jedi Order series, The Unifying Force. This marked the end of a 4-year journey starting from the first one, Vector Prime. Star Wars Episodes 7, 8 and 9 might never be made, but these books, together with Timothy Zahn's Thrawn Trilogy series provide more than ample material for the Star Wars "Expanded Universe" (i.e. beyond the movies). In fact, the idea of Coruscant, the galactic capital city/planet, reportedly originated from Timothy Zahn's novel "Heir to the Empire".

The last book I read

"The Oil Age is Over", a virtual book by Matt Savinar. He offered it for free download during the Nov 2004 U.S. election period. Yup, that's the last book I actually sat down and read, and it's a virtual PDF book, at that. The Internet has in the meantime filled in the rest of my information needs.

Five books that mean a lot to me

1. The Robotech Series

Not a single book, but a series. As you might have noticed, it's a recurring theme here. The kind of galaxy-spanning scope that I prefer for my sci-fi reading usually takes more than a single book to encompass. Robotech was the one that got me actually into the reading habit, back in secondary school when I found Volume 1 in the Chinese High library. That was way back in 1986. Not too bad when the fictional universe comes with its own TV series, toys and model kits. This is the one which made me sit down and actually look for the dictionary for the difficult words (at the time), and context-guess the rest. Two things actually, 1. made me read, 2. introduced me to sci-fi literature.

2. The Warstrider Series

By William Keith. A Battletech-like series with human-piloted mechs (giant combat robots). Not so well-known, and out of print now anyway, but it had a good depiction of what a Type 3 Civilization might look like. Not as famous as Vernor Vinge's books, but not too bad, all in all. Important ideas included the evolution of races from Type 2 to Type 3, an instantaneous galactic Internet, and harnessing the power of dual singularities (black holes).

3. The Foundation Series

By Isaac Asimov. The movie "I, Robot" only skimmed the surface of Asimov's works. The rest of it can be found in the Foundation Series, and in the other "Robot" books. Important ideas - the Three Laws of Robotics, as well as the Zeroth Law. Trantor, which predated Star Wars' Coruscant. The idea that human behaviour may be predictable, or modeled, in the large, but not on an individual level.

4. The Party's Over

At last, a single book. One of the most important books that I've ever read, though at the time I already had a good idea and grasp of Peak Oil and its consequences. Richard Heinberg puts it together nicely and explains the situation very clearly. Some people have called it "dark", but I wouldn't call it that. I would call it - realistic.

5. Guide to VGA Programming (?)

I can't remember the exact title, nor the author. But this was the one, that back in 1990, which was 15 years ago, secured my entry to geekdom, so to speak. From here, I learned how to program the VGA video card's port registers, access screen memory directly, and "refresh during vertical blanking", among other things. From here, I also picked up the details needed to write my own PCX graphics file reader routine, and move text around on the screen a thousand times faster than through the cumbersome OS/BIOS calls generally provided.

Five more people to tag :

1. Akikonomu
2. Doug Pardee (Creative Karma)
3. FatherOf4
4. Gwunwai/Jas
5. Mats Henricson

(2005-06-07 13:33:24 SGT) [Musings] Permalink Comments [3]

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