Sci Fi Movies that have made a big influence on Cinematography

THX1138

Solaris

Matrix

Brazil

Inception?

Too early to tell. Nolan has a distinctive feel, a bit reminiscent of Kubrick. Inception made good use of slow motion and was a great travelogue movie but how original and influential it is will take time to assess.

Sci Fi Movies that have made a big influence on design

This is not an exhaustive list of Sci-fi movies, but ones that I believe have had a lasting influence on design.

Metropolis

2001 a space Odyssey

Star Trek

Star Wars

Tron

Blade Runner

Ghost in the Shell

Akira

Hazy emissions

Tim Colebatch's article on the Turnbull/Xenophon/Frontier Economics emissions trading scheme discusses some interesting points. Particularly the bit about whether increasing the price of electricity is going to be more effective at reducing emissions than giving away free permits to polluters. In the governments scheme higher electricity prices would reduce demand (depending on elasticity) and provide a slightly less un-level playing field for solar and wind etc. The Frontier Economics scheme reasons that free permits will allow the coal generators to use the money they would have spent on permits to make long-term investments in new technology.

I'm not convinced that private enterprise has the capacity to make large long-term investments when the market hasn't so far shown much ability to price in the future effects of climate change. In my opinion quicker results would be seen by increasing electricity prices, and spreading the incentives to either reduce wastage or invest in distributed clean generation. Factoring in the costs of carbon pollution would allow clean technologies to be more competitive sooner. Favoring large scale solutions have concentrated investment into dirty coal powered fire stations located along way from where the energy is used making things like Trigeneration impractical.

More likely to go down than up?

After reading this article about the housing market I can summarise the following:

Demand side factors • Highest population growth rate in four decades • Low interest rates • Increased government first-home buyers grants versus • Record levels of private debt • increasing unemployment

Supply side factors • Rising building costs • Weak building levels • Finance difficulties • Developer uncertainty versus • Fast tracking of development

The Great Depression in a nutshell

In the panel discussion "The Crisis and How to Deal with It" Nouriel Roubini gave a good summary of how the stock market crash of 1929 turned into the Great Depression of 1933. Over the following four years government policy exacerbated the problems.

The four causes were:

1. " ..we didn't believe in a counter-cyclical monetary policy. The money supply contracted rather than being eased. Interest rates were not falling, and that made the credit crunch worse."
2. "nobody believed in counter-cyclical fiscal policy. The general theory of Keynes was written only in 1936; in the early 1930s, the government was raising taxes and cutting spending in order to maintain a balanced budget. That made the recession even more severe."
3. "there was a belief that banks should be allowed to collapse. Thousands of them collapsed, the credit crunch became even worse."
4. "by 1933, 75 percent of households had defaulted on their mortgages; they couldn't pay them. So a stock market crash became a Great Depression."

Roubini concludes with other elements "add currency wars internationally, trade wars, protectionism, and capital controls; then you had default by countries and the rise of totalitarian regimens in Germany and in Italy, in Japan, and Spain" and the consequences of using the wrong policy prescription - "World War II"

The buck stopped

The economist Mark Thoma has a good description of how bad incentives at ever step of the lending process in the US made the housing bubble worse. Australia doesn't have non-recourse loans, but the tax laws and FHB grants certainly added to the inflation of the housing bubble in Australia.

Taking bets you can't pay out on

Just as with collateralized debt obligations (CDO), credit default swaps (CDS) are difficult to really understand, even after reading several explanations. Both are however critical to understanding much of the current problems in the finance sector. I understood that they were a type of insurance financial institutions could buy to cover their investments, but I didn't get how they could bring down large institutions.

A post by Satyajit Das on his blog went straight over my head so I went looking for something like this to explain the concept better. This one helped a bit by showing the interconnectedness of the large institutions effectively insuring each other for related risks, but still didn't quite fully explain it for me.

This facinating article from Rolling Stone linked to from Peter Martin's blog has given me the best explanation so far. CDSs were insurance policies sold to cover investment risks by people who had used the wrong risk models. Unlike insuring cars against theft, where large numbers of cars are extremely unlikely to be stolen simultaneously, but the event of a market crash (mistakenly calculated to be exceptionally rare like mass theft) can bring down the value of all investments in concert. Some made lots of money selling them before the music stopped. CDSs also formed a kind of short as players were able to buy insurance on assets they didn't own, akin to taking out an insurance policy on your neighbour's house.