World without Oil.org

Let me first admit - I have a bias towards simulations and moreso towards game-based simulations.

World without Oil is one example why I have this bias. A few months ago an email exchange with a famous game designer Jane McGonigal introduced me to this game. And how soon have we come to this! The game simulated a world without oil and there is a whole lot of content on what people's responses have been to this crises. I guess that resource is now ripe to be tapped. I believe, the resource needs to be advertised and shared more.

Further I believe, the game now needs to be extended. Here are some ideas:

• First of all make the game global.
• It needs a downloadable mobile scoring app that can keep score for oil savings in 3-4 key areas. It could be - for example - everytime we go for a tank full we enter Odo reading and gas filled and cost/ charges we paid. We score higher if we travel more miles per gallon than average. We score higher for using subway etc.
• Make it include other resources as well - water, food, environment, money(considering US credit crises) etc. If we dont print an email - we get some points for saving a tree - etc.
• Hopefully we can simply enter that into a mobile phone / sms based web server and our points get updated twitter style - then we can blog about it- share it - earn identifiable and referable badges - like belts in karate. Everyone starts with Level 1 and lets say goes to Level 12 - they can display this badge on their website/blog etc.

I would love to brainstorm on this. If anyone is interested let me know!

Excess Money and its flow pattern

I am sure you people have already heard this podcast from Russ Roberts' interview of Gene Epstein on Gold Fed and money. There is something really interesting in the points he makes. Epstein talks about 2 ways US fed govt can monetize its deficit.

• First is the monetising of future revenues - pushing incomes up so that taxes go up and therefore government revenues.
• The second is creation of future debt Fed buying government notes and bonds and supplying money.
  

The interesting part is - the first goes through the economy across income classes (leading to distribution of the excess money) and therefore creates expected outcomes (inflation). The second, however, is cornered by "big money" (SWF and likes) and never goes into the system. Or actually it takes longer and and more complicated feedback loop to distribute the effects of the excess money. This leads (or led) everyone to believe - falsely - that system is still stable. The reality remains that system has just postponed its instability. Possibly, what we are seeing is the "mean reversion" after some of the effects became evident.

It would be wonderful to know what Yves Smith and others think on this one. Let me know what you think about this one.