How North Dakota Became Saudi Arabia

By STEPHEN MOORE 

Harold Hamm, discoverer of the Bakken fields of the northern Great Plains, on

English: Flag of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

America's oil future and why OPEC's days are numbered.

Harold Hamm, the Oklahoma-based founder and CEO of Continental Resources, the 14th-largest oil company in America, is a man who thinks big. He came to Washington last month to spread a needed message of economic optimism: With the right set of national energy policies, the United States could be "completely energy independent by the end of the decade. We can be the Saudi Arabia of oil and natural gas in the 21st century."

"President Obama is riding the wrong horse on energy," he adds. We can't come anywhere near the scale of energy production to achieve energy independence by pouring tax dollars into "green energy" sources like wind and solar, he argues. It has to come from oil and gas.

You'd expect an oilman to make the "drill, baby, drill" pitch. But since 2005 America truly has been in the midst of a revolution in oil and natural gas, which is the nation's fastest-growing manufacturing sector. No one is more responsible for that resurgence than Mr. Hamm. He was the original discoverer of the gigantic and prolific Bakken oil fields of Montana and North Dakota that have already helped move the U.S. into third place among world oil producers.

How much oil does Bakken have? The official estimate of the U.S. Geological Survey a few years ago was between four and five billion barrels. Mr. Hamm disagrees: "No way. We estimate that the entire field, fully developed, in Bakken is 24 billion barrels."

If he's right, that'll double America's proven oil reserves. "Bakken is almost twice as big as the oil reserve in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska," he continues. According to Department of Energy data, North Dakota is on pace to surpass California in oil production in the next few years. Mr. Hamm explains over lunch in Washington, D.C., that the more his company drills, the more oil it finds. Continental Resources has seen its "proved reserves" of oil and natural gas (mostly in North Dakota) skyrocket to 421 million barrels this summer from 118 million barrels in 2006.

"We expect our reserves and production to triple over the next five years." And for those who think this oil find is only making Mr. Hamm rich, he notes that today in America "there are 10 million royalty owners across the country" who receive payments for the oil drilled on their land. "The wealth is being widely shared."
One reason for the renaissance has been OPEC's erosion of market power. "For nearly 50 years in this country nobody looked for oil here and drilling was in steady decline. Every time the domestic industry picked itself up, the Saudis would open the taps and drown us with cheap oil," he recalls. "They had unlimited production capacity, and company after company would go bust."

Zina Saunders

Today OPEC's market share is falling and no longer dictates the world price. This is huge, Mr. Hamm says. "Finally we have an opportunity to go out and explore for oil and drill without fear of price collapse." When OPEC was at its peak in the 1990s, the U.S. imported about two-thirds of its oil. Now we import less than half of it, and about 40% of what we do import comes from Mexico and Canada. That's why Mr. Hamm thinks North America can achieve oil independence.

Continue Reading ...
The Weekend Interview with Harold Hamm: How North Dakota Became Saudi Arabia - WSJ.com

Related articles

• US May Become No. 1 Oil Producer
• A Skeptic Looks at Alternative Energy
• Our Ridiculous Approach to Retirement
• Don't Innovate, Imitate
• Continental Resources Announces New Five-Year Plan To Triple Production And Proved Reserves
• The Terrifying Background of the Man Who Ran a CIA Assassination Unit
• Sex is best when you lose your head

Q&A: The Surprising Upside of Getting Old

Americans have tremendous fear of aging — and a great deal of prejudice against the elderly. But, as the joke has it, being old is better than the alternative. And, despite our fears, new research suggests that being old is also a lot better than it looks.22

I spoke with Dr. Marc Agronin, whose new book, How We Age: A Doctor’s Journey Into the Heart of Growing Old, explores these issues through the rich stories of his patients’ lives. Agronin is the psychiatrist for the Miami Jewish Health Systems, a nonprofit that is the largest provider of health care for seniors in the Southeast.

What led you to want to work with older people?
When I went to medical school, I knew I wanted to go into psychiatry, that was a given. In my second year, by a chance encounter I began working with a geriatric psychiatrist and I loved the work. I took an immediate interest in working with older patients. They reminded me not only of my grandparents but also of my wonderful aunts and uncles. I felt that there was so much I could learn from these elders that I was just drawn to it and never looked back.

Many people would think that would be a very depressing field of medicine.
I see that all the time and experienced it even when I was doing my training. The older patients were often the ones that the students didn’t want to be around.
[But] the difference wasn’t just in attitude for me: whenever I had experience with older individuals I quickly had deep appreciation for not only their life experience, but also the gratitude they had when someone younger would spend time with them. It was always a positive experience. I never regarded it as something frightening or unpleasant.
I love the stories they tell and hearing about history. So, for me, writing this book was natural — it would be full of stories.

Research now suggests that as we age, our moods improve and we actually grow happier.
There’s great potential. It didn’t occur to me right away how much people learn and grow as they age. That message really transformed my view of aging. I wasn’t trained to look for strengths, but found over time that those strengths are the things that get people through difficult times, whether psychological or spiritual or emotional. They also allow people not only to overcome challenges but even to thrive. The more I saw, the more impressed I was.
Aging, in spite of the inevitable [challenges], is a long process and has its rewards. Amid all the challenges, often the rewards not only balance things out, but most individuals experience a greater degree of well-being and a deeper sense of meaning than they do when they are younger. I often find I get a little taste of that. I feel when I’m with older individuals, I’m as close to the fountain of knowledge as one can get.

Jennifer Egan, "Black Box" : The New Yorker

Few snippets from Jennifer Egan's excellent short fiction work, “Black Box,” in the June 4 & 11, 2012 issue of The New Yorker, The Science Fiction Issue.

Jennifer Egan, "Black Box" : The New Yorker

-----

Some citizen agents have chosen not to
return.

They have left their bodies behind, and
now they shimmer sublimely in the
heavens.

-----

...Necessary ingredients for a successful projection: giggles; bare legs; shyness.

The goal is to be both irresistible and invisible.

When you succeed, a certain sharpness will go out of his eyes.

-----

Some powerful men actually call their beauties "Beauty."

Counter to reputation, there is a deep camaraderie among beauties.

If your Designated Mate is widely feared, the beauties at the house party where you've gone undercover to meet him will be especially kind.

Kindness feels good, even when it's based on a false notion of your identity and purpose.

-----

Posing as a beauty means not reading what you would like to read on a rocky shore in the South of France....

------

Eagerness and pliability can be expressed even in the way you climb from the sea onto chalky yellow rocks.

"You're a very fast swimmer," uttered by a man who is still submerged, may not be intended as praise...

------

...The directive "Relax" suggests that your discomfort is palpable.

"No one can see us" suggests that your discomfort has been understood as fear of physical exposure.

"Relax, relax," uttered in rhythmic, throaty tones, suggests that your discomfort is not unwelcome.

Newyorker Subscribers can read the full version of this story

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here Deborah Treisman talks with Jennifer Egan about her story “Black Box,” written as a series of Tweets. And Jonathan Lethem, Junot Díaz, and Sam Lipsyte share their science-fiction thoughts and book recommendations.
Listen to the mp3 on the player above, or right-click here to download.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/2012/06/04/120604on_audio_egan

Related articles

• Race, Religion, and Diversity in London After 9/11
• Lines from The Princess Bride that Double as Comments on Freshman Composition Papers.
• Richard Dawkins: the truth dogs reveal about evolution
• "Alone Together": An MIT Professor's New Book Urges Us to Unplug

Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm founder talks about the future of wireless technologies

JASON PONTIN @ technologyreview.com conducted an interesting Q/A session with Qualcomm founder Irwin Jacobs. Mr. Jacobs offered some inside details on the business side of things and provided guidance for future applications as well.

Qualcomm provided Google with the Snapdragon chip, to launch a phone that didn't require contracts with carriers. The business model didn't work. Why not? What other models might reduce the heavy weight the carriers exert upon innovation?

Google didn't press it very hard because they were then competing with other manufacturers who were making Android phones. And so between not being marketed actively and having more limited distribution and support, that model did not work. But there are certainly situations where you can buy phones retail and then sign up with an operator for the service. We'll see how that develops. There are also other models such as the one that Kindle started, and others have followed, where when you order a book using your Kindle, the information goes out over a cellular network, the book comes back over a cellular network, but you don't pay separately for it—it's just buried in the price of the book. We'll see a number of different business models, driven by competition, driven by the various applications.

What can the wireless industry do to keep up with and manage the unprecedented demands being placed on the network by the growth of mobile video?

The interest of subscribers in video became apparent in South Korea when we first launched some of the 3G services. Video on phones is just going to continue to increase. I don't think users are going to broadcast so much as want video on demand. And that does load the network down quite a bit. That's the reason we developed our MediaFLO technology [a service from Qualcomm that lets mobile carriers stream videos on cell phones]: we wanted a separate frequency band to provide a forward link that carries the videos to the phone. I suspect that additional forward-link-capacity spectrum will be made available and used to support video. The other way one gets spectrum is by having additional base stations. What we'll see is the network evolving to have more and more access points. Some may be in your home. But the spectrum's limited, so we'll have to do things such as reuse the same spectrum.

The mobile market is by no means now limited just to phones. How will Qualcomm change as tablets and other devices become increasingly common?

The key issue with these new devices will be that they'll need chips that use very little energy and provide a lot of computing power. We recognized this early on, and we set up a whole group to research the problem. That's where Snapdragon came from. Those chips were initially only in phones but are now moving up into other devices. This is an important area for Qualcomm, because I believe that tablets will probably become the major computing devices for most people.

Augmented reality has been a significant investment for Qualcomm. Why do you think that augmented reality will be such an important function on our mobile devices?

There are lots of interesting new capabilities. Say I'm in a foreign country: there's a street sign I can't read, so I hold up my phone, and it translates the sign for me. We're beginning to see other examples show up. You might do product comparisons in a shop. You could locate friends who are willing to be located when you approach an area. Since my memory is not as good as it once was, particularly for faces, one I like very much is the possibility of a phone's camera seeing a face and whispering in my ear who that person is.

Continue Reading here.

Walter Mosley: The Older You Are, The More You Live In The Past

Big Think Editors @ bigthink.com

Walter Mosley is the author of more than 34 critically acclaimed books, including the major bestselling mystery series featuring the character Easy Rawlins. His work has been translated into 21 languages and includes literary fiction, science fiction, political monographs, and a young adult novel.

"A lot of people get upset at young people," says Novelist Walter Mosley, "They say, 'Young people aren’t living up to their potential. Young people are interested in things which are shallow, which are meaningless, which are unimportant. But the truth is, is that the older you are, the more you’re thinking is historical, and the more historical things become—especially in our world today, where things change so quickly because of technology, the more they’re invalid."

Aspiring writers shouldn't measure their success in dollars and cents or fame, says Mosley, but rather in their ability to entertain people with their writing. "Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, you know, Victor Hugo. I mean all of these people, they’re popular writers. They’re writing to the broadest range of people," explains Mosley. "Yeah, it’s great literature, but it was popular literature when it was written.  And that’s the case with almost all of the literature that survives starting from Homer. You know? It’s the adventure; it’s the story; it’s the fight; it’s people falling in love; it’s people with deep, you know, personality disorders who succeed anyway; you know, beyond themselves. That’s what great literature is."  

Continue reading here.

 

Being Steve Jobs' Boss - Confessions of the last man to manage the singular inventor!

Businessweek.com had done an indepth feature on former PepsiCo and Apple President John Sculley, who was the last man to manage Steve Jobs! It's one of the more insighful stories i have read about the duo. I posted some insights that John Sculley had about working with and managing Steve Jobs below.

 

Jobs and Sculley in New York City, 1984 DIANA WALKER/CONTOUR/GETTY IMAGES

 

Steve Jobs was 28 years old in 1983 and already recognized as one of the most innovative thinkers in Silicon Valley. The Apple (AAPL) board, though, was not ready to anoint him chief executive officer and picked PepsiCo (PEP) President John Sculley, famous for creating the Pepsi Challenge, to lead the company. Sculley helped increase Apple's sales from $800 million to $8 billion annually during his decade as CEO, but he also presided over Jobs' departure, which sent Apple into what Sculley calls its "near-death experience." In his first extensive interview on the subject, Sculley tells Cultofmac.com editor Leander Kahney how his partnership with Jobs came to be, how design ruled—and still rules—everything at Apple, and why he never should have been CEO in the first place.

 Sculley reminisces about his experience:

What makes Steve's methodology different from everyone else's is that he always believed the most important decisions you make are not the things you do, but the things you decide not to do. He's a minimalist. I remember going into Steve's house, and he had almost no furniture in it. He just had a picture of Einstein, whom he admired greatly, and he had a Tiffany lamp and a chair and a bed. He just didn't believe in having lots of things around, but he was incredibly careful in what he selected.

 

 

 

Everything at Apple can be best understood through the lens of designing. Whether it's designing the look and feel of the user experience, or the industrial design, or the system design, and even things like how the boards were laid out. The boards had to be beautiful in Steve's eyes when you looked at them, even though when he created the Macintosh he made it impossible for a consumer to get in the box, because he didn't want people tampering with anything.

 

 

Apple is famous for the same kind of lifestyle advertising now. It shows people living an enviable lifestyle, courtesy of Apple's products. Hip young people grooving to iPods.

 

 

I don't take any credit for it. Steve's brilliance is his ability to see something and then understand it and then figure out how to put it into the context of his design methodology—everything is design.

 

 

An anecdotal story: A friend of mine was at meetings at Apple and Microsoft on the same day. And this was in the last year, so this was recently. He went into the Apple meeting (he's a vendor for Apple), and as soon as the designers walked in the room, everyone stopped talking, because the designers are the most respected people in the organization. Everyone knows the designers speak for Steve because they have direct reporting to him. It is only at Apple where design reports directly to the CEO.

 

 

Later in the day he was at Microsoft. When he went into the Microsoft meeting, everybody was talking and then the meeting starts and no designers ever walk into the room. All the technical people are sitting there trying to add their ideas of what ought to be in the design. That's a recipe for disaster.

 

 

Everyone around him knows he beats to a different drummer. He sets standards that are entirely different than any other CEO would set.

 

He's a minimalist and constantly reducing things to their simplest level. It's not simplistic. It's simplified. Steve is a systems designer. He simplifies complexity.

 

The reason why I said it was a mistake to have hired me as CEO was Steve always wanted to be CEO. It would have been much more honest if the board had said, "Let's figure out a way for him to be CEO. You could focus on the stuff that you bring, and he focuses on the stuff he brings."

I'm actually convinced that if Steve hadn't come back when he did—if they had waited another six months—Apple would have been history. It would have been gone, absolutely gone.

 

Continue reading here.

Steve Jobs’ outlook on life at 31 after resigning from Apple [1986].

 

 

 

 

How Nouriel Roubini Foresaw The Financial Crisis

Big Think Editors @ bigthink.com

 

New York University economics professor Nouriel Roubini famously predicted the most recent global financial crisis well before most of his peers did. He says he did this simply by looking at the data and considering it in the context of past bubbles. Roubini recently spoke with Big Think about how to see what’s really happening—even when most people don't agree with you.

The economic bubble (and burst) can be a lesson in avoiding group think, explains Roubini.  “The issue is not why myself or a few others got them, but why most the people, not just economists, don’t see them coming,” he says of the data of a looming economic collapse that should have set off more alarms.  The key problem, he says, is when there is a an economic bubble, “everybody lives in a bubble ... They don’t live in reality and they delude themselves.”
 
To see a bubble from the inside, Roubini adds, it’s important not to get blinded by your own incentive. "It’s very hard to be independent and speak the truth, even if you can be very smart," he says, if your pay is tied to the results you are expected to produce.  Independence from the results provides a clearer picture, he notes.

 

Continue reading here.

 

Steve Jobs' outlook on life at 31 after resigning from Apple [1986].

I came across one of Steve Jobs' lesser known excerpts / Quotes, it gives real insight into his outlook on life at least in his younger years. The following is excerpted from a piece Joe Nocera wrote about Steve Jobs for Esquire in 1986, when Steve Jobs was 31, he had just resigned from Apple and was starting his new company NeXT.

Jobs at NeXT. Photo via waybeta.com

 

“Whenever you do any one thing intensely over a period of time,” he says, “you have to give up other lives you could be living.” He gives a shrug that implies that this is a small price. “You have to have a real single-minded kind of tunnel vision if you want to get anything significant accomplished,” Again, the same it’s- worth- it shrug. “Especially if the desire is not to be a businessman, but to be a creative person...

But isn’t he a businessman?

“My self- identity does not revolve around being a businessman, though I recognize that is what I do. I think of myself more as a person who builds neat things. I like building neat things. I like making tools that are useful to people. I like working with very bright people. I like interacting in the world of ideas, though somehow those ideas have to be tied to some physical reality. One of the things I like the most is dropping a new idea on a bunch of incredibly smart and talented people and then letting them work it out themselves. I like all of that very, very much.” There is a note of excitement in his voice. “I’ve had lots of girlfriends,” he adds. “But the greatest high in my life was the day we introduced the Macintosh.”

And Apple?

“Apple,” he says slowly, searching for the right analogy, “Apple is like an intense love affair with a girl you really, really like, and then she decides to drop you and go out with someone who’s not so neat.” Lewin, who is sitting next to Jobs, immediately chuckles at the seeming absurdity of the comparison, and that makes Jobs chuckle too. But Jobs truly did love Apple; in a weird way it seems right that he should compare it to a passionate affair.

Mostly he speaks about Apple with more sorrow than anger. There was a time when he thought he would always be connected to it— taking sabbaticals from time to time, but always coming back. Coming home. He clearly regrets that that possibility no longer exists.

He will not say anything at all about Sculley, nor will Sculley speak publicly about Jobs; not long ago the Apple president, under contract to write his autobiography, simply could not bring himself to “tell all” about how he bested Jobs. But both men are obviously saddened by their falling out.

One mutual friend recently bumped into a limo driver who occasionally drives both men. “Whenever Sculley or his wife gets in the car,” the driver said, “the first thing they ask is, ‘How’s Steve?’ ”We have almost arrived in San Francisco. “I think I have five more great products in me,” Jobs says, and then goes off on a long, rambling discourse on the joys of working on computers at this particular moment in history. He compares it to what it must have been like to work for Henry Ford when the automobile was still in its infancy and the technological boundaries were there to be broken. “It must have been the most incredible feeling,” he says, “to know that this was going to change America. And it did!” He grins suddenly. “If we can create the kind of company I think we can, it will give me an extreme amount of pleasure.”

 

The New York Times has graciously made the full piece -- reprinted as Chapter 2 in Nocera's 2008 Book Good Guys and Bad Guys -- available here. Embedded below as well.

Nocera_Ch2[1].pdf Download this file

Twitter's Biz Stone On Starting A Revolution

Fresh Air from WHYY Transcript

 

A visualization of how many tweets were sent on New Year's Eve 2010 in the United States.

Twitter's Biz Stone On Starting A Revolution:

On his reaction when the Internet was blocked during the recent Egypt protests

"Sadly, we've seen this happen. We've seen our services shut down before, but it was shocking to see the entire Internet shut down [in Egypt]. We'd talked about this before privately amongst ourselves. You can shut down a service and yet people will find ways to communicate. But we joked amongst ourselves [that] you'd have to shut down the entire Internet, you'd have to shut down the entire mobile phone structure if you really wanted to stop people from communicating. And then suddenly, we have news that the Internet is being shut down. And that was just an amazing thing to think about. Because you're not just shutting down communication between people who may or may not be opposing your regime, you're shutting down everything — commerce, all communication among individuals, emergency communication, everything. That's just mind-blowing to me."

 

"How a revolution comes to be is a mystery to me," he says. "It's important to credit the brave people that take chances to stand up to regimes. They're the star. What I like to think of services like Twitter and other services is that it's kind of a supporting role. We're there to facilitate and to foster and to accelerate those folks' missions."

Continue reading here.