Found the most interesting calculations about this fuel subsidy brouhaha at boso.me.uk (http://www.boso.me.uk/2012/01/arithmetic-of-fuel-subsidy-by-wale.html). Quite a read.
Introduction to fuel subsidy
1
Subsidy Removal: Comparison of Gasoline Pump Price
Subsidy removal is the latest front burner of public discourse in Nigeria today and there is no shortage of facts to back either argument. Too bad many of these arguments ain’t backed by reality.
I have mashed data from World Bank and CIA Fact book about the average price of a liter of gasoline across different countries which you can download here. The exchange rate used at the time of computation at the World Bank was N147 to a Dollar.
The table below shows the prices at the 18 cheapest locations too bad I can’t just drive there for a fill up:
| Country Name | $ 2010 | NGN 2010 | Output bbl/day |
| Venezuela | 0.02 | 3.40 | 2,375,000 |
| Iran | 0.10 | 14.33 | 4,252,000 |
| Saudi Arabia | 0.16 | 23.64 | 10,520,000 |
| Libya | 0.17 | 25.11 | 1,789,000 |
| Qatar | 0.19 | 28.07 | 1,437,000 |
| Bahrain | 0.21 | 31.02 | 46,430 |
| Turkmenistan | 0.22 | 32.50 | 202,400 |
| Kuwait | 0.23 | 33.98 | 2,450,000 |
| Oman | 0.31 | 45.80 | 867,900 |
| Algeria | 0.32 | 47.27 | 2,078,000 |
| Yemen | 0.35 | 51.70 | 258,800 |
| Brunei | 0.39 | 57.61 | 159,400 |
| Nigeria | 0.44 | 65.00 | 2,458,000 |
| United Arab Emirates | 0.47 | 69.43 | 2,813,000 |
| Egypt | 0.48 | 70.91 | 662,600 |
| Ecuador | 0.53 | 78.30 | 485,600 |
| Malaysia | 0.59 | 87.16 | 664,800 |
| Sudan | 0.62 | 91.59 | 514,300 |
Back to blogging
Two things got me off blogging over the last 2months+.
First I divorced my previous web host because they got too cranky, nagging and wanted things I couldn’t give (more money!) despite the fact that their performance was just marginally better than a Russian Lada car raising a dust storm on a back road in Western Sahara. Along the line my bro hooked me up with another host but didn’t kind of fancy her (or it?). It lacked the pizzazz to make my blood sizzle. So like what boys do, I went searching for that fancy host. Found one, paid top dollars and guess what, absolutely rubbish! Too bad, premium wine down the basket, so back to the host I spurned – the one from my bro. maybe elders do know what is good for us after all.
Then I got into another function at work that practically sucked all the time I have. In fact, the few minutes I could eke out each day are spent thinking of how I could invent a time expander. Since Einstein said that time is relative, maybe I could find a way to get more minutes per hour, especially between 12 midnight and 5AM in the morn.
On a serious note, I’m actively considering my interest in ColdFusion. I have stick this for so long but I think Adobe is too greedy and too shortsighted that in 5 years, only dinosaurs would know how to write CF. Getting a decent hosting for a CF site is like asking for a pink elephant with wings. I could search forever.
Time to start punishing my friends with those crazy posts!
Download Nigerian Stock Exchange Historical Stock Price Dataset
Some months ago I was trying to do some data analysis on historical equity data with Geek Impressario, Femi Aluko, but we practically ran into brick walls: no data. There wasn’t any easy place to get daily prices in one single place.
I turned to a friend who had one but then due to some vague business secrecy, I was told to hug an electric pole (told in a nice way that I actually looked forward to that shocking experience).
So like what geeks are known for, our impresario sat down and cooked some codes, helped with a generous dose of caffeine and bush meat and presto, a scrapper was born to scour the web for fragments and we built a database of the stock prices from January 1, 2000 till date.
But we won’t be asking you to hug the next shocking thing you can lay your hands on, we have decided to give out part of the data to anyone who needs to download and use for any type of analysis or financial weapon of mass destruction that can be cooked up.
The data is available for download in CSV from Google Docs. The data we have made available ends at December 31, 2010.
By the way, download and use this data at your own peril. We make absolutely no claim that this is not more than a collection of numerical junks.
In 100 years, 9 women will deliver a child in a month
100 years ago was 1911 – life was hard (simple if you read the romantic part of history). Planes were still toys. There was no TV or X-Factor. Rick Dees wasn’t even born then. The concept of the connected meme was still 30+ years into the future. Kids born out of wedlock were called bastards and most women couldn’t even vote. If you wanted to talk to your friend, you simply walked over.
Life wasn’t hard – it was a different universe!
So what about 100 years’ time? Like 2111?
There probably wouldn’t be internet anymore. Everything would just be connected. Maybe there wouldn’t be computers again. I imagine a life where computing is done in the proper cloud. Or if computing manages to stay around, processors would be optical and laptops would have 1Pb memories. Storage wouldn't be measured in Gigabytes. It wouldn't be even measured again. Just create content and store and store. Mobile communication devises would be embedded in your body running off your glucose. Probably synching your contacts with your thoughts. Imagine!
Electricity would have gone fully wireless since some dude should have finally cracked cold fusion and sparks are now sent via induction (if you don’t know what that is, don’t ask). You never know, power might even be free. Free as in you buy a TV and then it comes with free power for life – just like Kindles come with free 3G bandwidth. Or did I mention TV? Maybe that wouldn’t even exist. Talk about immersive entertainment: 100% holographic. 3D should have gone extinct. When you sleep, you can order for a dream.
The concept of marriage must have been thrashed. Now, you just hook up. No need waiting anxiously for 9 months to know what pops out. Just head over to local hospital and upload your DNA (or do it online), mix and match and have a cuddly baby delivered in a week with lifetime access to free updates – updating DNA or access to vaccines for all manners of virus that bad dudes would be inventing. I know that is what we call health insurance now but then it would be super sexy. A new sex designation is now 20% of the population – people neither male nor female. Don’t be scared, Australia already has that: Male, Female, X! What do we call those; dudes? Head or tail you lose: if you use the male pronoun for them you get sued, if you use the female pronoun, you get punched. Oh, I forgot to add, kids won’t even need dads anymore. Or even mums too. Someone would have discovered asexual reproduction. But then who takes care of child support?
Cars would be fully electric with inbuilt cold fusion engines. 0 – 60mph would be in 2 seconds: Jeremy Clarkson eat your heart out! Hypersonic is the only way to fly: Lagos to New York in 1 hour. Someone would be offering beta of teleportation. I’m still wondering what would have become of trains. With cold fusion, Dubai and Abu Dhabi must have gone burst. Too bad, time travel would still remain un-cracked if not we should have seen some of those dudes coming around to show us things. Maybe they are even around, and helped the NTC to neutralize Gadhafi. Maybe not.
Education would have changed. Language would be converging, to Mandarin. A new world order? That is crossed finger discussion. Climate change anarchists would have been discovered as liars. Someone should have hacked the weather – developers would be starting a new rain forest in the Sahara.
You never know, someone could have discovered immortality or a crude alternative to it. There would be a park where dinosaurs would be allowed to roam. There would be total recall, no need to study, you simply can’t forget. Communication would be thought driven and you can back up your mind to the cloud. So if you lose it from a trip on LSD, the local clinic down the road can do a restore.
Those are things that could happen but on the flip side, a virus could have taken over US nuclear arsenals and what is left of us would be some hardy cockroaches (those are the only things that just won’t die a nuclear fallout) starting the slow progress of evolving into another human: 1,000,000,000 years in the making.