Yahoo just launched Pipes. It allows you, through a drag-and-drop interface, to create your own feeds from most any source, filter and massage the data in a number of ways, then output to rss, atom, or whatever.

You can publish pipes so they are shareable. Then others can take your pipe, save a copy, and modify it or use it as they want. While this is still fairly geeky stuff, it takes much of the grunt work out of the process.

Here’s a little Pipe I created to aggregate news on global warming, note that it displays the pipe itself too, so you can see how it works.

Yahoo has created a seriously useful app here.

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The European Commission plans to impose mandatory limits for CO2 emissions from cars by 2012. Predictably, right-tilting media as well as car makers oppose it, saying voluntary limits, carbon trading, and technology can solve the problem. While those approaches may help, and while some corporations genuinely are moving towards being carbon-neutral, others aren’t. Mandatory, enforceable limits seem the best approach, and it would hardly be the first time a government has banned or mandated something. Here in the States, lead-based paint and asbestos in walls was banned long ago, as well they needed to be.

In the coming years, the push towards reversing global warming will highlight one of the primary conflicts - remediating global warming is in near direct conflict with the profit motive. As long as the short-term profit motive is allowed to trump the long-term interests of all, we’ll never solve global warming.

New ideas and new economic structures are needed.

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Utah State University plans to produce biodiesel from pond algae that will be competitively priced by 2009. The algae “can produce up to 10,000 gallons of oil per acre and can be grown virtually anywhere.”

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When we last checked in on Casey Serin, he’d bought 8 homes in eight months with 100% financing, looking to fix and flip, make a fortune, then retire young.

Did it work? Here’s a clue. The name of his blog is I Am Facing Foreclosure. He’s facing multiple foreclosures and has a mountain of debt. Reading the chronicles of his mistakes and blunders is sobering indeed. Not sure how he’ll ever get out from under, especially considering that the recent bankruptcy laws make it much harder to do a BK and walk away from it all.

Worse, credit card companies now charge 30% interest on chronically late accounts, a rate that your old time neighborhood loan sharks might have been hesitant to charge.

Casey seems a hard working guy, if clueless, but really, what possessed a mortgage company to issue 100% financed loans on multiple properties to a 24 year old with no real estate experience or financial backing? Yes, he made about every mistake he could have, but the fault here isn’t just his. But he will be the financial road kill.

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