Wednesday, June 25, 2008

I Don't Wanna Grow Up

Can we call it Tom Waits week? Ok, let's! Here's a brilliant video from I Don't Wanna Grow Up off 1992's Bone Machine.

I Know it Hurts But...

$4 a gallon gas, huh, good God
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing
Listen to me

Ok... maybe not. Nice piece over at the Atlantic today from Megan McArdle about how the pressures of $4 and possibly soon-to-be $5 a gallon gas are having an impact on supply chain management nationwide.

"The good news is that we have information technology that people in the 1975 couldn't even have dreamt of, which is grinding away at the problem of making our economy incrementally more efficient. If the price of oil does come down, we'll emerge from this substantially more productive--good for us, good for our descendants, good for the planet."

While high gas prices and the state of the economy are justifiably going to be a campaign issue this fall, and while I know they're causing a good bit of pain to many Americans. It's nice to see some documentation of the upside, part of which involves people thinking about how to do the things they do more efficiently. It would be lovely if people just worried about that all the time, but when gas is supercheap, people don't so much think about whether they need to drive from here to there. Apparently also large corporations don't think about whether they can consolidate shipments of this or that, etc.

hat tip: Andrew Sullivan