What’s the Question?

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Oh, yes: Why are BP’s profits down?

Analysts at banks including UBS, Bank of America and JPMorgan Cazenove now predict BP could unlock as much as $100 billion for investors, either by splitting its upstream exploration and production division from its refining and marketing arm, or selling off its entire US business.

BP’s shares are still trading 28% lower than they were at the time of the Macondo spill in April, despite oil prices soaring to $127 a barrel this year. Shell is up 13% over the same period.

A breakup? Is the writing on the wall that difficult to parse? Investors – I resent that term – may indeed only feel the company has only lost its way. But they are fooling themselves in their larger capacity as citizens grappling with how an oil giant deals with the future of transportation. What happens at those board meetings anyway? Do they really sit and listen to climate change deniers spout off? Really? Electric cars as the connection from the past to what’s next continue to dog the energy dinosaurs [sorry]. It’s powering those which is where the money is and will be, until people can figure how to live closer to work. What happened to Beyond Petroleum? Was it only an excellent marketing strategy?

Conflicting Ideas

That is, holding two (or more) conflicting ideas in your head at one time, and a butterfly net in your hand.

He envisioned them coming to the New World from Asia over millions of years in a series of waves.

Few professional lepidopterists took these ideas seriously during Nabokov’s lifetime. But in the years since his death in 1977, his scientific reputation has grown. And over the past 10 years, a team of scientists has been applying gene-sequencing technology to his hypothesis about how Polyommatus blues evolved. On Tuesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, they reported that Nabokov was absolutely right.

So… there are personal challenges and there are challenges that leap over the millennia. And sometimes these conflate or simply come together in one person. The point is, we could all be doing a lot more; don’t let yourself off so lightly. Come on, do something. Or something else.
Or else.


Downhill

If you live in a city this is all to familiar, especially in the during Northy winter-ness. You know, cut off from normal school-work routes, people… walk. Slide Ride kayaks down hillsides, of course. But out on the avenue, it’s funny to see people on foot outnumber vehicles five-to-one. It’s kinda the whole thing, in a nutshell. All brought on by a little winter.

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Hey, what if this is just what you did, with all your internets and text-y gadgets? Want to see a friend? Hike over to their ipad.