Monopoly: Real Edition

I get this feeling that Google is taking over the world. Since their humble start on September 4th of 1998, Google has grown steadily from being a little-known search engine into a world-renowned superpower of sorts, with the Letters "GOOGLE" adorning people's homepages around the world.

We mostly know Google for their search engine stuff but we all know they have expanded beyond that, now venturing deep into the fields of web-hosted mail systems, video services (having taken over YouTube a little while back, I think) and computer software, too (Chrome browser, which I haven't gotten around to downloading yet, although I do think it will be somewhat like Firefox, which Google has practically developed too). What most people don't know is that Google makes most of its revenue not from any of these video, web search or software enterprises directly. It actually makes 99% of its revenue through advertising. Don't you find those stupid google ads annoying? I mean you find them everywhere, and although they are apparently targeted to the readers of the sites that they are placed on, I never find myself clicking on them anyhow. Good thing blogger (WHICH IS OWNED BY GOOGLE =000, I think. At least, I can log into Blogger with my GMail address) doesn't have any ads, unlike Xanga or whatever.

I hope one day I can be SUPER SUCCESS and run a world-dominating company like Google worth like thirty billion or whatever.

But for now I gotta concetrate on keeping my grades up... I really am not enjoying chemistry at all.

kamster

Gas is Good

Gas, gas, gas. This stupid three letter word often causes frustration, anger and long lineups at the pumps. As the price at the pump goes up and down, we can only hope that it will go down and stay down at prices a la the 90s, where gas never, ever, was more than a dollar a litre.

But what causes the price of gas to fluctuate? Gas is produced from crude oil, and to be really specific about it, it's more like the price of crude oil is fluctuating massively, which in turn affects what we see at the pump. Crude oil is extracted I think from all over the place, a lot in Canada and a lot in the Gulf of Mexico, and so when Hurricane Katrina and those other natural disasters tore through that part of the states, they recked a whole bunch of these floating oil rigs. And if you know the least bit about economics, you will understand that when supply goes down, demand goes up, and so does price.

Now, many of these oil rigs have been repaired and so the flow of oil has resumed. This means supply has increased and so there's less demand (remember when gas first dipped below $1.30 a litre? Remember how damn long those lineups were? Look at them now. Even when prices are below a dollar now - as they usually are - the lineups aren't nearly as long as they were). After people got their fillup of gas, demand went down and so prices have gone down as well.

What this means is a really sweet deal for us consumers and SUV-drivers, and a crappy deal for people who have stocks in gas. Too bad, so sad.

kamster

My Odour of Body

Whoawhoawhoawhoa Obama is going to be the new president!!! Hooray for America! Ok so actually won the election like six days ago, and I am kind of slowing getting around to it, but yes, it is indeed quite exciting. For those who have been keeping up with the news since the primaries twenty-two months ago, Illinois Senator Barack Obama is definitely come a long way from being relatively unknown just several years ago to taking centre stage on the American political scene.

Obama's claim of bringing change to America got through to millions of Americans, it seems, and in the end he prevailed over his older competitor, Senator John McCain. This is a pretty momentous decision that the American people have made; this election saw several swing states (Colorado, Ohio, Virginia) turn blue for the first time in many years. I guess Obama's youth, charisma and eloquence was enough to woo undecided voters in the last few days. As well, I believe race played a big part in this election; Barack Obama is the first African American president to have taken office in the U.S., and with slavery but a hundred and a few years ago and the civil rights movement half a century ago, it is safe to say that few expected a black man to take office. For African Americans in America and everywhere else in the world, this is just one more step towards the equality that minority groups seek.

But I'm not going to delve too deeply into these touchy issues. WHAT! I'm not Anderson Cooper, gosh! By god Erica Hill is good looking...

WHAT? OK YEAH THE ELECTION:

This past election has been quite an exciting one; I believe (but don't quite me) that this election had 80% of the US' population out and voting, a record I think. As well, news stations like CNN had, reportedly, their highest ever number of viewers on election night too! To sum it up, this election had the most people tuned in and the most people voting... perhaps 2008-2009 will be the political season when people start caring about the fate of the world's most influential country, what with the credit crunch, oil crisis and worsening foreign relations that has defined the U.S of A. recently.

Lastly, just wanted to say that it was very gracious of McCain to concede like that after the expected loss. When all his supporters started booing, I got kinda pissed but I'm glad he tried to shut them up... otherwise people would hate him even more, hehe. Anyways I'm just glad the young'un got into office instead of McCain, although we won't know exactly how many of his promises he will be able to keep. Let's hope more than less, for the good of the U.S. and all the other countires inextricably tied to it.

kamster

p.s. November 11th; never forget.