Princeton University geologist Ken Deffeyes predicted that global oil production would peak on Thanksgiving Day, 2005. In 2005, daily global oil production averaged 85 million barrels per day. Daily petroleum liquids production in July was 96 million barrels per day.
For the past six months global oil prices have been falling steeply. Today West Texas Intermediate was selling for $43.20 per barrel. That means the price per barrel is just over $31 in inflation adjusted 2000 dollars. CNBC cite analysts who project that the price will fall further into the $30s per barrel range soon. Should the price fall to $30 dollars, that would be about $22 per barrel in 2000 dollars. That would be nearly back to what the price was 15 years ago.
NYMEX
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Peak slime is much like peak derp. You marvel at the current Peak and think to yourself that it truly can't go any higher, but then 10 years down the road you look back and realize how naive you were.
And our state income tax, which is over 13% for some, and a killer property tax, and a very high sales tax, yet all of it is still not enough (to hear some people). They desperately want Prop 13 overturned, which keeps your property tax amount from rising dramatically due to market forces, keeping your burden relatively constant and predictable for this one tax only -- because in their minds, Prop 13 is what caused the educational decline in the state (despite the incredible increase in dollars-per-pupil since the law passed).
If the weather wasn't so perfect and the lack of insects wasn't so wonderful, I'd seriously think of moving.
$2.29 and falling in TX. They recently tuned the light stills in refineries to favor gas over diesel as $3.00 diesel has alrready been priced into the economy. No sense in letting the trucking companies get rich. Add $0.84 for federal and state tax, and also the fact that ethanol costs $1.90/gal wholesale. $2.00 gas is really $.30 gas.
Nothing they say is really about efficacy or conserving or whatever it's all about positioning themselves to command resources and production factors.
The more control they have over those things the more control they have over everything.
In one of her books Jane Jacobs pointed out that regions that required vast irrigation systems to grow food and sustain life had tyrannical governments since the person that controlled the water controlled everyone's life. And you had to knuckle under to survive.
I thought "peak oil" referred to the point at which the planet stopped producing easily-discovered oil at a rate faster than human beings could easily discover it. IOW, "peak oil" doesn't refer to oil production but to oil discovery. (Or some sort of nonsense, I forget exactly what the guys busily moving the goalposts told me the new meaning was - but they did assure me that peak oil was an indisputable scientific fact and that peak oil occurred in 1988. Or 1998. Or 2003. Or 2011.)
I thought "peak oil" referred to the point at which the planet stopped producing easily-discovered oil at a rate faster than human beings could easily discover it.
Well the definition of "easily-discovered" (or more accurately "easily-recoverable") changes as technology improves and the economics changes. So it's a shifting meaningless term.
Peak oil, an event based on M. King Hubbert's theory, is the point in time when the maximum rate of extraction of petroleum is reached, after which the rate of production is expected to enter terminal decline.
Peak oil makes sense on the surface. If every barrel of oil has a cost of extraction, then by the law of large numbers that cost per barrel will be normally distributed. When you see the growth of production start tapering, you can now fit what you have seen in the past to a normal distribution in the future, predict the peak, and predict the supply past the peak.
So, yes, this makes sense ... to a geologist.
An economist, on the other hand, knows that it is quite a bit more complicated than that. In particular, the cost of extraction will change as extraction technologies change, and the amount desired at the current cost of extraction will change as demand for current uses changes, as new uses are discovered, and as substitutes for prior uses are found.
So under one realm of extraction technology and usage pattern of oil, the bell curve taper appears very clearly and geologists then predict peak oil. Then in an even more gruesome failure to comprehend economics, they predict Peak Oil as the downfall of western civilization.
In the meantime, higher prices induce new technologies that change the cost of extraction for the backside of the original bell curve, putting us on a different bell curve -- and we have no idea what it looks like. Granted, again by the law of large numbers the sum of these bell curves is another bell curve. But the peak of that cumulative bell curve is entirely unpredictable from prior observation.
My understanding is that it's the peak of the proven oil reserves. Then my understanding is that "proven oil reserves" is defined as the amount of oil that can be recovered (at a marketable cost). So if the cost of oil is high the oil reserves goes up and if the price is low the oil reserves goes down. All without any oil being found or produce.
"Princeton University geologist Ken Deffeyes predicted that global oil production would peak on Thanksgiving Day, 2005."
And author of "When Oil Peaked"
Reviewed in April of this year, such: "If you want to know what actual Petroleum Geologists think about the world oil supply this book is a must read!"
It is too bad. Ken Deffeyes has big cameo of sorts in Annals of a Former World, and it is where I was first introduced to the guy - a much more interesting person there. Among the most notable observations he and the author made while in the wilds of Nevada was a crazy UFO sighting...totally out of the book's character, but whatever.
Either way, the guy has his derps along with everything else.
Nah thank China dumping their currency from helicopters, every factory from here to Mongolia shutting down, 300 million Americans finally realizing the are dead broke and should stop buying shit, and of course 6 years of Quantitative Easing forever.
The reds have been throwing the greens under the bus since at least as far back as the financial crisis (bless it). In Bolivia, Morales is totally taking a shit on the eco-fanatics. Same in Ecuador. The delicious part is that the more they pump out, the lower the price, requiring more to be pumped out. Also, the next economic crisis is going to create a lot more bus-trammeled greens.
Fracking is the best thing to happen since the unregulated Internet. And just like with the unregulated Internet, the progfascists will focus their powers of destruction upon it.
They're having pretty mixed results. NY banned and some stupid place like New Brunswick but interestingly California is going forward with fracking and does not seem inclined to stop. Not what I would have expected five years ago. The UK looks like it will, finally, go forward with fracking.
The reds have been throwing the greens under the bus since at least as far back as the financial crisis (bless it). In Bolivia, Morales is totally taking a shit on the eco-fanatics. Same in Ecuador. The delicious part is that the more they pump out, the lower the price, requiring more to be pumped out. Also, the next economic crisis is going to create a lot more bus-trammeled greens.
Ah to be fair some African nations have criminalized homosexuality at the behest of Evangelical organizations. But that isn't quite the same intensity of insanity.
Mexico's drug cartel's are incredibly vicious and their wars kill more than ISIS has, and that is in the Christian world. Still not a result of Christianity so Obama is still an idiot.
TSA sux (check)
You cant even butthump in some places in America, and that's wrong (check)
TSA really sux (check)
Modern Feminists are cray cray (check)
Patriot Act sux (check)
MAN The TSA sux (check)
....
she seems to be keeping it real, old-school edition, from what i can tell
Drilling permits the regime has a say on are in paperwork hell. And I guarantee Obama will pull some shit like declaring ANWR and the like National Monuments sometime in early 2017.
Damn Ron! According to Wingnut.com Obama stopped all [sic] drilling in the US!
You sound like a little girl when you talk in absolutes like that. Or worse.
Most of the new drilling is happening in private lands, thanks to fracking and horizontal drilling and not because of anything Obama has done. The reason for all the new drilling was precisely because of the higher prices in 2014 and because of the loose monetary policies of the Fed which created a bubble in energy. Most of the new investments are unsustainable, something the ABCT predicted to the T.
Ron has been pretty right on almost every issue except forcing vaccines on people. He was right about GMO food, fracking, a little off on global warming.
If 18 years of no global warming (a time longer then he has covered the subject here at reason) while CO2 emissions skyrocket is only "a little off" how many years until he is a lot off?
Nobody gives a hoot about "a little warming". It's at 2C of warming and higher where the bad stuff is supposed to really start happening. If it's only 0.25C of warming this century, we are actually better off than with no warming at all.
Kunstler writes like a total moron and is also constantly projecting his own misery onto everyone else. For example:
"The United States is the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, yet its inhabitants are strikingly unhappy. Accordingly, we present to the rest of mankind, on a planet rife with suffering and tragedy, the spectacle of a clown civilization. Sustained on a clown diet rich in sugar and fat, we have developed a clown physiognomy. We dress like clowns. We move about a landscape filled with cartoon buildings in clownmobiles, absorbed in clownish activities. We fill our idle hours enjoying the canned antics of professional clowns... Death, when we acknowledge it, is just another pratfall on the boob tube. Bang! You're dead!"
So Kunstler is massively unhappy and assumes the rest of us must hate ourselves as much as he does. Kunstler also has the narcissist's ability to assume that his subjective emotions are actually objective facts that only an idiot could disagree with. See: his petulant diatribes about the suburbs.
He also wrote this six days after 9/11. Hint to Kunstler: maybe you should wait a little more than a week after a national tragedy to start making wild, sweeping claims about how it will change American architecture.
I once wrote to Kunstler and got a reply. I said that since there are massive amounts of methane and propane on Jupiter and elsewhere, it's possible that the so-called fossil fuels on Earth were also formed some other way and that they may not run out.
In his response, he basically said "great! we'll build a pipeline to Jupiter!"
As I said before:
Here it comes, folks. The wisdom of James Howard Kunstler:
"The poor agricultural peasants of the southern United States, however, resorted to religion because they led very hard lives, had low literacy rates, and and knew few other ways of understanding their predicament besides the structured superstition of primitive Protestantism, transmitted orally."
Wow! He actually calls them superstitious, illiterate peasants.
"City people of the early 20th century, who had grown up on a high tide of scientific advancement and accepted its victories over superstition and ignorance as self-evident, were suddenly confronted by an aggressive new wave of anti-intellectualism..."
"Regular assaults on the authority of reason from a large, well-organized faction of inflamed simpletons became a chronic annoyance to the democratic polity founded on the idea that the participants could think rationally."
This guy must sniff 2 glasses of his own farts a day.
Even deeper derp is your conflation of the above passage with poorly penning prose. That he has disdain for "low-culture Americana" does not mean that he does not write well.
You do concede the possibility that one who harbors a snotty disdain for low-culture Americana may, nonetheless, be able to express it with humor and satire and in a compelling and thought provoking manner?
Not tonight, but in the near future, I will furnish you with some examples.
If you read the comments to his blog, you will discover that there are many who would beg to differ with your assessment.
" The American public, we the people, lately swoon into a morass of multi-dimensional failure: failure to control their economic lives, to regulate their appetites and their bodies, to understand what is happening to them, to fend off the propaganda and distractions that disable them, and to properly express and direct their wrath at those elements of the polity who deserve it. True, their awful, epic failures at this moment in history are largely engineered and aggravated by those who have captured the polity and turned it into a looting and racketeering engine. The net result, though, is a self-reinforcing circle of degradation that rots the collective ethos of the public while it destroys the vessel of the republic that contains it.
Societies that act as though they are hostage to these forces of degradation are able to pretend that they are helpless in the face of them; that the public bears no responsibility for its own choices or for the disintegration of the polity they live under. ...""
WOW DEEP STUFF.
(fast foward similar blather)
"'Im serenely convinced that, among other things, the banking system is going to implode so hard and fast well before the nominating conventions that the nation will be in a state of near chaos. What's out there now is just a tired dumb-show replaying the shopworn themes of an era that is about to slam to a close."
I think he cut-pastes that conclusion to every single thing he's ever written.
Man, I love his nonsensical collectivism about the 'American people.' America is so diverse that there is no such thing as the 'American people' and anyone who says there is is either running for political office or is engaged in propaganda.
Why do you ascribe his references to the "American people" as "nonsensical collectivism" within the context of his essay?
What have the "American people" done to pull the plug on the IRS?
What have the "American people" done to terminate the income tax?
What have the "American people" done to prevent a 20 trillion dollar public debt?
What have the "American people" done to jettison the FBI, the CIA, the NSA and the FED?
What have the "American people" done to stop feeding the military industrial, national security, national surveillance state?
What have the "American people" done to put down the warfare / welfare state?
Kunstler's use of the term "American people" is accurate when viewed in the light of asking and answering questions such as I posed. That not every single American supports the income tax is not in dispute; but asking the question what have the "American people" done to abolish the income tax is not "nonsensical collectivism".
I read his bullshit over 10 years ago and I swear it was exactly the same content-free swooning about the Looming American Decline in this same faux-highbrow manner.
The actual economic/political facts of the day are meaningless, and he simply takes his cookie-cutter Snooty-Moan template and slaps a few current-events details in, Mad-Libs style
He's a good contender for a "random essay generator", he's so fucking cliche.
I'd rank him among the top 5 dumbest, worst contemporary-culture-writers in America. He's a fancy-man's Alex Jones for dumb-but-pretentious leftists.
You claim he's not a good writer. You say he sucks and cite some passages without any explanation as to why the passage you cite supports your contention that he is not a good writer.
That you proclaim that he is not good, just does not carry the day.
Besides, does he touch a nerve? Why play the victim or vicarious victim? It is okay to have disdain for low-brow / low culture Americana, isn't it? Or is that some sacred, collective cow?
You are just emoting; you are making unsupported generalized statements - unrelated to the point I made above.
The irony being that is all Kuntz does.
What are your specific language, literary, prosaic, satirical or syntactical criticisms of the excerpt?
"I read his bullshit over 10 years ago and I swear it was exactly the same content-free swooning about the Looming American Decline in this same faux-highbrow manner.
The actual economic/political facts of the day are meaningless, and he simply takes his cookie-cutter Snooty-Moan template and slaps a few current-events details in, Mad-Libs style
He's a good contender for a "random essay generator", he's so fucking cliche."
Sorry, i had to step out for a moment. my "QED" was from my phone, one-handed
Dude, with due respect =
- your butthurt and posturing about "syntactical criticisms" is a case study in "who the hell reads this JHK garbage and walks away impressed?"
My excerpted example there is something a 9th grade english teacher would go, "GET TO YOUR POINT ALREADY" and "BE SPECIFIC" and "REDUNDANT X4" in red-crayon.
JHK is not wasting further words on. If you churn out 3-4 paragraphs *before* even getting to the actual subject of your piece? You're a fucking idiot. He does it every time has has anything to say. and those throat-clearing exercises he does haven't changed an iota in 10 years. Its a moaning word-salad of dumb.
I'm sorry you're a big fan of one of the most godawful writers in america. It says more about you than him. God have mercy on your soul.
If you genuinely enjoy his recycling-the-same-point schtick? nothing i say will change your mind, and I am sure nothing you could submit would do the same for me. If you were a huge fan of concise, sharply-reasoned, strongly evidenced commentary, you wouldn't be reading him in the first place. My explaining to you how that sort of thing 'works' is a waste of time.
Yes, like Bailey, he does recycle some points; that, alone, however, does not mean that he does not write well.
Yes, I am a huge fan of concise, sharply reasoned, strongly evidenced commentary.
I am also a fan of sharply reasoned pithy polemics. A short essay is not necessarily poorly written because its commentary is not strongly evidenced.
I am also a huge fan of people who write well even if their principles and views are not mine.
Here, you can not contest the fact that the marketplace has judged him to be a good writer. Are there any Reason scribes who have written 7-8 novels as well as a number of non-fiction books with total sales anywhere near his?
" A short essay is not necessarily poorly written because its commentary is not strongly evidenced."
Kuntz piece =
1 -Paragraph 1-10 - americans are fat and lazy and stupid and culture decline and technology glut blah blah blah
2 - Conclusion - the banking system will collapse in 6 months
3 - BUY MY BOOKS!!!!
Dianetics also sold well. I am told. Doritos is bigger than Rap music. You will bench-press a 3,000lb White Rhino while singing Ave Maria backwards before I reconsider just how fucking awful Kuntz is as a writer.
Also - don't give me this bullshit about how "oh, his content is weak, but he's *really a good writer*" (or 'stylist')
As though this motherfucker were chekov-meets-montaigne-meets-ben-jonson.
For you to claim you know "good writing" suggests you know what that actually is.
There's not a single sentence in the above-cited example which isnt lazy, shoddy, redundant, needlessly-wordy construction...sentences which still manage somehow to consistently contradict one another when considered in sequence.
He is a exemplar of "bad writing" in multiple dimensions. He consistently uses 10 'fat-laden' words where 3 skinny ones would probably express the same point. And in the process commits metaphor crimes-against-humanity that would embarrass any college freshman. (see: the "clowns" in irish's example)
He's horribly inarticulate, and dresses it up with dead-horse-beating repetition. Some of his paragraphs could be expressed better in 3 or 4 WORDS. The entire reason for the excess is to *dress stupidity up in fancy clothes*.
Which was the point i made to you earlier.
If you don't "get it", there's no amount of Hemingway-esque lecturing about how "simplicity is the key to effective language" that will ever get through to you. He only appeals to people who think "needlessly complex" somehow equates to "smart".
Even dumb, country-people recognize his bullshit. its only failed college-students that mistake his horrible pretensions as "good writing"
The key to effective communication does not require one to employ Hemingway's style.
Likewise, some generalized, undifferentiated bromide that "simplicity is the key to effective language" is claptrap usually proffered by those who lack the intellectual heft to comprehend scribes who do not genuflect at the altar of "simplicity".
Often, there is a current of envy undergirding the type of disdain you have demonstrated for Kunstler. He uses big words. He likes to engage in sesquipedalian logomachy. Sorry, "dumb, country-people" are not smart enough, with their sub 100 IQs and their worship of the warfare / welfare state, to be able to recognize bullshit, his, or otherwise.
He is not horribly inarticulate and your asseveration of the same impugns your credibility.
In a debate, I would bet that you would resort to more filler language than he would. For example, he would be far less apt to employ vulgarities. He would be far less likely to say, "you know" or "like" or "um" or "I mean" and he has a far richer vocabulary than do you.
His use of the clown metaphor is not an example of a "metaphors-crimes-against-humanity". Just because you say it is, doesn't mean that it is so. Prove it.
I exchanged rude emails on like 2 occasions with the Kuntz. My buddy would forward me his newsletter, and i'd write Kuntz back (detailing with stats) why he was wrong about basically everything, forwarding to about 20 other people in the process. He basically told me to fuck off and die. A charmer. I think i referred to him as "Dr. Doom-Snob"
A shrike is a butcher bird that impales its victims near its nest. It is a great character in 'Miss Lonelyhearts' by N. West. It is an automatic rifle, IT is ...... so on....
Hey Len! Long time no see. We need to do another meet up soon. Maybe the same place, and Sunday afternoon again. C. Anacreon would come, and maybe the mysterious Sevo.
Took an Army PT test today. Passed all events with a combined score of 210 out of 300. Ran 2 miles in 16m51s.
Army Strong. Army Smash.
Still waiting for clearance from Uncle Sam's meat inspectors. Feels good that if I was in the Army now, I'd be in good standing as far as fitness goes.
Jolly good. I'll keep that in mind. You're writing coherently. That means you're not taking nearly enough painkillers. You'll know you're taking enough when this happens:
We bought a fixer-upper in SoCal a couple years back. The wife has been hiring Chinese contractors to do the indoor fixing. My job is the outside. I hired El Salvadoran contractors to change the roof. We hired Mexicans for the electrical and HVAC. Not real Mexicans, of course, gen 1 or 2 American-Mexicans. You want someone who can RTFMs for that.
With that astounding hypocrisy I still favor a moratorium on most immigration to the US. We could have hired americans to do this work had the house cost half as much. American contractors do fine work and they are easier to deal with. Why did the house cost so much? Because massive immigration into SoCal had driven up the cost of the house we bought.
Yeah, why should having millions more people drive up the cost of real estate in a state where it's often difficult and expensive to build anything? It's a mystery!!
A Peak Oil believer once told me that we should look at Cuba to learn how to survive Peak Oil. My response was, "The only thing we can learn from Cuba is how to run a prison."
Heh... Sounds a whole lot like something I wrote almost exactly ten years ago:
Jennifer wrote: Even if my plans work out and I personally am quite comfortable, I'd just as soon NOT live through a revolution when a bunch of starving desperate people try something stupid.
Your new Honda Accord costs you $20,000. If you drive it 120,000 miles for 10 years and sell it for $4,000 all while filling it with $3 gas, you will have spent $3000 more on just the price of the car than on the gasoline to fill it.
At $1.50 a gallon of gas, the price of a car that you run into the ground is by far the greatest cost of the car. At $3 per gallon, gasoline gets into the ballpark of the price of the car. At $5, gasoline is probably the plurality and might become the majority expense of driving.
And yet people keep buying cars. We don't drive heaps that are found in the wastelands of Australia or Cuba and forced back into working order by migrant labor.
Gasoline is simply not that expensive. And there are alternatives that become long-term profitable well before $100 per barrel. There is neither starvation nor revolution around the corner.
It was 1978 when I first heard the world would run out of oil in 20 years. That was almost 40 years ago. Well, now we have more oil the we've ever had.
So when's the next time I'm gonna believe peak oil hysteria? Well, I'm not worried, because by then, nature will have completely restored the fossil fuel supply.
"China is cooling off quite a bit. Much of Europe is slipping back towards recession," Nelder said. If oil prices stay low for long, frackers may need to stand down. "There is a lower level [in price] where they just can't make money," he said.
So we might hit peak oil because prices are so low it's not profitable to pump more out of the ground?
The last barrel of oil pulled out of the ground will either cost an unbelievable fortune because the uses that oil has been limited to by low supply are beyond phenomenally valuable, or it will be absolutely worthless because all of today's uses of oil have been replaced by substitutes. Either way, there will still be other barrels of oil left in the ground -- barrels either too expensive or too worthless to extract.
Ohhh, looookkkk!!!! Pauly Krugman says someone is a racist! OMG, it's sooo original! Damn, those liberals, what else will they come up with, always some new amazingly fresh new surprises!
Is there something I don't know about fossil fuels? Because it seems like they should eventually run out. I mean, maybe not in our lifetimes, but unless they're being replenished at something close to the rate we're using them, then it seems like peak oil should be a question of when, not if.
"Is there something I don't know about fossil fuels? Because it seems like they should eventually run out."
One day the sun will go out....and one day the earth will stop spinning.
I don't know which will happen first....but at current trends at the rate at which oil is extracted the sun will go out and the earth will stop spinning before we run out of oil.
ant1sthenes|8.11.15 @ 9:03PM|#
"Is there something I don't know about fossil fuels? Because it seems like they should eventually run out. I mean, maybe not in our lifetimes, but unless they're being replenished at something close to the rate we're using them, then it seems like peak oil should be a question of when, not if."
Seemingly, there is something you don't know.
Please tell us when 'peak whale oil' occurred, why it did so and how the market for carbon fuels responded.
Oh, and that is your homework; I'll expect at least 500 words and cites, since you obviously need to do some research, given your ignorant post.
Tomorrow, by noon.
It is simply not tenable that we'd use all the oil on earth. All costs are opportunity costs, and extracting all the oil on earth requires presupposing some agent like a crazy trillionaire who wants to make it his life's work.
We have heard warnings over and over again from those who should know that we are soon going to run out of oil. Yet those same geologists have never mentioned the probability of running out of natural gas. Both are said to have come from the same source, as their name implies: fossil fuels. If it is possible to run out of oil, why is it never mentioned that we might run out of natural gas? Or, alternatively, if it is unlikely that we will ever exceed the amount of natural gas available, in much the same way we will never exceed the amount of water available, is it not possible that we will never exceed the amount of oil available? Just asking.
Conventional Oil did peak in 2005. What you have now is synthetic oil, called fracked shale oil, or Tar Sands from Canada, Russia, or Venezuela. Look at your graph. Oil will be at over $100/Barrell in 18 months, or about January 2017. This is a temporary downturn. We can have all the oil we want, Synthetic Oil, at $300/barrell in 2030. The British Government's Ministry of Defense estimated that price for oil in 2040, but it could happen much sooner.
There is no prediction for the future on that graph. Just because it dropped in the past, than rose doesn't mean it will happen again. Doesn't mean it won't either but the graph doesn't say that.
So synthetic oil huh? It's not
Composition by weight
Carbon 83 to 85%
Hydrogen 10 to 14%
Nitrogen 0.1 to 2%
Oxygen 0.05 to 1.5%
Sulfur 0.05 to 6.0%
Metals < 0.1%
? It must be made of unicorn tears and rainbows. It's oil. It's just a different recovery method.
How about peak Oyl?
Olive to see that!
*narrows gaze*
How can you narrow her gaze any more?
*blinks several times....begins slow clap*
Thanks to Peak Spinnick I yam what I yam, and what I iz iz pullin me money out of oil exploration.
Speaking of Peak Slime:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/new.....14762.html
Ruh-roh.
Peak slime is much like peak derp. You marvel at the current Peak and think to yourself that it truly can't go any higher, but then 10 years down the road you look back and realize how naive you were.
I've been saying for a while: not only is she not a shoe-in in the election, she may not even get nominated.
Wasn't that Sutra Oyl, the blonde bombshell that Bobby London added to the Oyl family in his 1986-1989 run on Thimble Theatre?
I thought Peak Oilers was when they lucked into yet another #1 pick this year and drafted Connor McDavid.
Nope, it was when Gretsky moved to LA.
I hope you deliberately misspelled his name.
Otherwise, it's a death penalty offense in Canada, right?
We don't have a death penalty, you barbarian!
It's forty lashes and a keelhauling.
Is that Canadian 'forty' or real forty?
The only difference is: With a Canadian forty they apologize after each stroke. Just like they do during sex.
what's a gresky. Is that like a lizard?
Cheap oil and $4.29/gallon because of "supply issues." YAY LA.
Supply issues? Try 61 cents State Tax and 19 cents Federal Tax. And then add on special CA gasoline formulation rules.
The gas taxes alone increase the cost by 20%.
And our state income tax, which is over 13% for some, and a killer property tax, and a very high sales tax, yet all of it is still not enough (to hear some people). They desperately want Prop 13 overturned, which keeps your property tax amount from rising dramatically due to market forces, keeping your burden relatively constant and predictable for this one tax only -- because in their minds, Prop 13 is what caused the educational decline in the state (despite the incredible increase in dollars-per-pupil since the law passed).
If the weather wasn't so perfect and the lack of insects wasn't so wonderful, I'd seriously think of moving.
Air conditioning and bug spray would be easy to afford with the difference.......and you could actually stand the people you are around....
I have a hundred black and brown windows plus a wasp nest in my backyard plus leaf floated bugs.
Our gas price hasn't moved since oil was at $60. It's still $2.79.
We have special blends of gas in CA, which raises the price. And there was a refinery issue not long ago as well.
$2.29 and falling in TX. They recently tuned the light stills in refineries to favor gas over diesel as $3.00 diesel has alrready been priced into the economy. No sense in letting the trucking companies get rich. Add $0.84 for federal and state tax, and also the fact that ethanol costs $1.90/gal wholesale. $2.00 gas is really $.30 gas.
There is no peak oil just like there's no peak derp.
Sad but true
Nothing they say is really about efficacy or conserving or whatever it's all about positioning themselves to command resources and production factors.
The more control they have over those things the more control they have over everything.
In one of her books Jane Jacobs pointed out that regions that required vast irrigation systems to grow food and sustain life had tyrannical governments since the person that controlled the water controlled everyone's life. And you had to knuckle under to survive.
That's what they want.
+1 Immortan Joe
I thought "peak oil" referred to the point at which the planet stopped producing easily-discovered oil at a rate faster than human beings could easily discover it. IOW, "peak oil" doesn't refer to oil production but to oil discovery. (Or some sort of nonsense, I forget exactly what the guys busily moving the goalposts told me the new meaning was - but they did assure me that peak oil was an indisputable scientific fact and that peak oil occurred in 1988. Or 1998. Or 2003. Or 2011.)
Well the definition of "easily-discovered" (or more accurately "easily-recoverable") changes as technology improves and the economics changes. So it's a shifting meaningless term.
Isn't it the point at which one more drop of oil more than half the earth's total of the black gold is recovered?
Peak oil, an event based on M. King Hubbert's theory, is the point in time when the maximum rate of extraction of petroleum is reached, after which the rate of production is expected to enter terminal decline.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil
Peak Oil is clearly based upon production. Here's a graph of the Hubbert curve of the US, which was considered the primary evidence for the theory:
https://goo.gl/AvgJIz
As you can tell from a glance at the chart, shale fracking pretty much destroyed the theory starting about 8 years ago.
Peak oil makes sense on the surface. If every barrel of oil has a cost of extraction, then by the law of large numbers that cost per barrel will be normally distributed. When you see the growth of production start tapering, you can now fit what you have seen in the past to a normal distribution in the future, predict the peak, and predict the supply past the peak.
So, yes, this makes sense ... to a geologist.
An economist, on the other hand, knows that it is quite a bit more complicated than that. In particular, the cost of extraction will change as extraction technologies change, and the amount desired at the current cost of extraction will change as demand for current uses changes, as new uses are discovered, and as substitutes for prior uses are found.
So under one realm of extraction technology and usage pattern of oil, the bell curve taper appears very clearly and geologists then predict peak oil. Then in an even more gruesome failure to comprehend economics, they predict Peak Oil as the downfall of western civilization.
In the meantime, higher prices induce new technologies that change the cost of extraction for the backside of the original bell curve, putting us on a different bell curve -- and we have no idea what it looks like. Granted, again by the law of large numbers the sum of these bell curves is another bell curve. But the peak of that cumulative bell curve is entirely unpredictable from prior observation.
Then that's going to take a while, and we won't know until way after that point.
In fact, if a significant chunk of the resource is more expensive to extract than synthesizing it industrially would be, then it'll never happen.
My understanding is that it's the peak of the proven oil reserves. Then my understanding is that "proven oil reserves" is defined as the amount of oil that can be recovered (at a marketable cost). So if the cost of oil is high the oil reserves goes up and if the price is low the oil reserves goes down. All without any oil being found or produce.
"Princeton University geologist Ken Deffeyes predicted that global oil production would peak on Thanksgiving Day, 2005."
And author of "When Oil Peaked"
Reviewed in April of this year, such: "If you want to know what actual Petroleum Geologists think about the world oil supply this book is a must read!"
Yep, there is no getting through to some folks.
What is the "market" you speak of? And what the Hell is a "price system"?
It is too bad. Ken Deffeyes has big cameo of sorts in Annals of a Former World, and it is where I was first introduced to the guy - a much more interesting person there. Among the most notable observations he and the author made while in the wilds of Nevada was a crazy UFO sighting...totally out of the book's character, but whatever.
Either way, the guy has his derps along with everything else.
"oil prices have been falling steeply"
Thanks Fracking!
Nah thank China dumping their currency from helicopters, every factory from here to Mongolia shutting down, 300 million Americans finally realizing the are dead broke and should stop buying shit, and of course 6 years of Quantitative Easing forever.
The recession we are in does not help either.
China wasn't dumping their currency they were hoovering it up and dumping USD assets.
They just lowered the price of the yuan today in a...*ahem*...surprise move.
Read my PM links link. They were propping the Yuan up by burning foreign asset reserves and are now propping it up less, by all of 2%.
It is interesting to note China is not purchasing US Treasury securities anymore when attempting yuan manipulations vis-a-vis dollars.
The reds have been throwing the greens under the bus since at least as far back as the financial crisis (bless it). In Bolivia, Morales is totally taking a shit on the eco-fanatics. Same in Ecuador. The delicious part is that the more they pump out, the lower the price, requiring more to be pumped out. Also, the next economic crisis is going to create a lot more bus-trammeled greens.
Oops!
Fracking is the best thing to happen since the unregulated Internet. And just like with the unregulated Internet, the progfascists will focus their powers of destruction upon it.
They're having pretty mixed results. NY banned and some stupid place like New Brunswick but interestingly California is going forward with fracking and does not seem inclined to stop. Not what I would have expected five years ago. The UK looks like it will, finally, go forward with fracking.
"but interestingly California is going forward with fracking"
I'm really surprised at that. Apparently, The Other People's Money faction (oil taxes) beat out the NIMBY crowd.
The reds have been throwing the greens under the bus since at least as far back as the financial crisis (bless it). In Bolivia, Morales is totally taking a shit on the eco-fanatics. Same in Ecuador. The delicious part is that the more they pump out, the lower the price, requiring more to be pumped out. Also, the next economic crisis is going to create a lot more bus-trammeled greens.
Years ago the was a H&R regular that would go off on the fact Peak Oil was happening RIGHT NOW!!!
IIRC it was Jennifer.
CLIMATE CHANGE IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW!!!!
In my pants!
In fairness Suddam was better for women then Isis....
Fuck him and his two evil sons.
Agreed.
Just pointing out Jennifer was not wrong about everything.
I mean the women the two evil sons raped probably didn't have their head chopped off afterwards.
Plus 2 rapists is less then an army of rapists....so presumably less rapists means less rapes.
Are you getting relativist on me?
Yeah, I get the point and it's true but it really points to how vulnerable to uncivil and barbaric behavior the region is.
And screw you Obama with your bull shit. Nowhere in the Christian world do you see psycho behavior than we do in the Muslim Middle-East and Africa.
Ah to be fair some African nations have criminalized homosexuality at the behest of Evangelical organizations. But that isn't quite the same intensity of insanity.
Mexico's drug cartel's are incredibly vicious and their wars kill more than ISIS has, and that is in the Christian world. Still not a result of Christianity so Obama is still an idiot.
"Ah to be fair some African nations have criminalized homosexuality at the behest of Evangelical organizations."
They also burn witches in African Nations....
I think when witches are being burned you can't really pin criminalization of gays on christian missionaries.
"Are you getting relativist on me?"
No it is just one thing Jennifer said that i thought she was wrong about at the time but time has proved her right.
She is still wrong about Public Schools, climate change and peak oil though...probably wrong about other stuff too.
Who is this Jennifer and why haven't I met her?
"Jennifer was not wrong about everything."
Well, what has she said lately?
TSA sux (check)
You cant even butthump in some places in America, and that's wrong (check)
TSA really sux (check)
Modern Feminists are cray cray (check)
Patriot Act sux (check)
MAN The TSA sux (check)
....
she seems to be keeping it real, old-school edition, from what i can tell
Not in Kurdistan he wasn't.
There's no running from one's Net past anymore...
http://archive.org/web/web.php
You post it - you own it.
That dress I was wearing in 1997? That was just a phase!
Meh, the Wayback machine doesn't work like it used to. You won't every website covered on there.
Maybe she meant Pique oil?
Damn Ron! According to Wingnut.com Obama stopped all drilling in the US!
Don't you know that?
Psst hey shrike...shrike...let me tell you something you need to hear...
SELL EVERYTHING CUZ YOUR OBAMA BUBBLE ECONOMY IS ABOUT TO FUCK YOU IN THE ASS.
So, Obama really is the President from Halliburton?
Dick Cheney must be laughing maniacally while he sits in his volcano lair and strokes his obese Persian cat.
Obama is lassez-faire when it comes to drilling.
He hates coal - as do I. It is filthy. Fuck coal in its sorry coal-hole. Good riddance - the market says - "we prefer cleaner energy".
"Obama is lassez-faire when it comes to drilling."
Unless that drilling is in the gulf...or the Atlantic or the arctic or the Pacific..or on any federal lands what so ever or in Canada....
Wait a min...it is almost as if Obama is only for drilling where he has no authority to stop it.
Weird how that works.
The Little Dictator still has two years to effectively expand his authority.
Obama administration to propose new Atlantic coast oil drilling
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ob.....port-says/
And yet the proposal never happened no proposal no new drilling nahda
But yeah that must be why oil prices are falling...
Cuz back in January some scumbag CBS news reporter thought maybe Obama might maybe could think about maybe proposing it.
Righto Shriko sounds totally legit.
Ask turd about 8%
"The market says - "we prefer cleaner energy"."
Area retard does not know what a market is.
Obama and 'laissez-faire' are mutually exclusive.
Dude is not able to be laissez-faire.
Two lying hosers - back to back.
I lie?
/faints.
Drilling permits the regime has a say on are in paperwork hell. And I guarantee Obama will pull some shit like declaring ANWR and the like National Monuments sometime in early 2017.
Why must the evil cat be Persian?
Thought Siamese were the evil cats. Persians are accessories of the monocled.
Re: Peter Caca,
You sound like a little girl when you talk in absolutes like that. Or worse.
Most of the new drilling is happening in private lands, thanks to fracking and horizontal drilling and not because of anything Obama has done. The reason for all the new drilling was precisely because of the higher prices in 2014 and because of the loose monetary policies of the Fed which created a bubble in energy. Most of the new investments are unsustainable, something the ABCT predicted to the T.
Squeezing blood from a turnip may not be possible, but it's entirely possible to pull crude oil from rock.
Well, Rockabilly....
...rockasue...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yb_juTPQJUc
Some have suggested the good Rev Horton Heat and James Hetfield are the same person.
I've never heard that but there is definitely a resemblance. That would be funny as hell.
How about a debate between Ron "Mr. Monsanto" Bailey and James "The Long Emergency" Howard Kunstler?
The former wins.
On this issue, Ron is right and Kunstler is wrong.
However, Ron wishes he could pen the prose like JHR.
Ron has been pretty right on almost every issue except forcing vaccines on people. He was right about GMO food, fracking, a little off on global warming.
If 18 years of no global warming (a time longer then he has covered the subject here at reason) while CO2 emissions skyrocket is only "a little off" how many years until he is a lot off?
30?
50?
100?
More like 15 years, and some datasets show a little warming. Also, this may be a pause before increases resume. Still, you have a point.
Nobody gives a hoot about "a little warming". It's at 2C of warming and higher where the bad stuff is supposed to really start happening. If it's only 0.25C of warming this century, we are actually better off than with no warming at all.
please provide a single-paragraph example of Kuntzler's "good" prose, please.
run-on hyperbolic moaning, scattered with snotty disdain for low-culture americana, is all i recall.
Kunstler writes like a total moron and is also constantly projecting his own misery onto everyone else. For example:
"The United States is the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, yet its inhabitants are strikingly unhappy. Accordingly, we present to the rest of mankind, on a planet rife with suffering and tragedy, the spectacle of a clown civilization. Sustained on a clown diet rich in sugar and fat, we have developed a clown physiognomy. We dress like clowns. We move about a landscape filled with cartoon buildings in clownmobiles, absorbed in clownish activities. We fill our idle hours enjoying the canned antics of professional clowns... Death, when we acknowledge it, is just another pratfall on the boob tube. Bang! You're dead!"
So Kunstler is massively unhappy and assumes the rest of us must hate ourselves as much as he does. Kunstler also has the narcissist's ability to assume that his subjective emotions are actually objective facts that only an idiot could disagree with. See: his petulant diatribes about the suburbs.
Kunstler is also consistently wrong in every prediction he makes.
For example, after 9/11 he claimed America would stop building skyscrapers and all remaining skyscrapers would be dismantled.
He also wrote this six days after 9/11. Hint to Kunstler: maybe you should wait a little more than a week after a national tragedy to start making wild, sweeping claims about how it will change American architecture.
Actually if you want to make good predictions in general, you turn off the news entirely, and only look at statistics.
I once wrote to Kunstler and got a reply. I said that since there are massive amounts of methane and propane on Jupiter and elsewhere, it's possible that the so-called fossil fuels on Earth were also formed some other way and that they may not run out.
In his response, he basically said "great! we'll build a pipeline to Jupiter!"
As I said before:
Here it comes, folks. The wisdom of James Howard Kunstler:
"The poor agricultural peasants of the southern United States, however, resorted to religion because they led very hard lives, had low literacy rates, and and knew few other ways of understanding their predicament besides the structured superstition of primitive Protestantism, transmitted orally."
Wow! He actually calls them superstitious, illiterate peasants.
"City people of the early 20th century, who had grown up on a high tide of scientific advancement and accepted its victories over superstition and ignorance as self-evident, were suddenly confronted by an aggressive new wave of anti-intellectualism..."
"Regular assaults on the authority of reason from a large, well-organized faction of inflamed simpletons became a chronic annoyance to the democratic polity founded on the idea that the participants could think rationally."
This guy must sniff 2 glasses of his own farts a day.
http://reason.com/blog/2014/04.....nt_4443466
Are we moving some goalposts?
Did I contend that he was not an eschatological peak oil doomer?
BWAHAHA!!
Kunstler writes like a total moron and is also constantly projecting his own misery onto everyone else. For example:
Have to say I read the passage and laughed ass off. That was pretty damn funny.
I had no idea who this person was. He reads like a dumber Thomas Friedman.
Thomas Friedman has the mercy of being brief, and changing his point slightly every 2-3 years.
"a dumber Thomas Friedman"
Peak Derp defined.
Even deeper derp is your conflation of the above passage with poorly penning prose. That he has disdain for "low-culture Americana" does not mean that he does not write well.
Clown college? You can't eat that.
+1 new billboard
You do concede the possibility that one who harbors a snotty disdain for low-culture Americana may, nonetheless, be able to express it with humor and satire and in a compelling and thought provoking manner?
Not tonight, but in the near future, I will furnish you with some examples.
If you read the comments to his blog, you will discover that there are many who would beg to differ with your assessment.
His latest rambling =
" The American public, we the people, lately swoon into a morass of multi-dimensional failure: failure to control their economic lives, to regulate their appetites and their bodies, to understand what is happening to them, to fend off the propaganda and distractions that disable them, and to properly express and direct their wrath at those elements of the polity who deserve it. True, their awful, epic failures at this moment in history are largely engineered and aggravated by those who have captured the polity and turned it into a looting and racketeering engine. The net result, though, is a self-reinforcing circle of degradation that rots the collective ethos of the public while it destroys the vessel of the republic that contains it.
Societies that act as though they are hostage to these forces of degradation are able to pretend that they are helpless in the face of them; that the public bears no responsibility for its own choices or for the disintegration of the polity they live under. ...""
WOW DEEP STUFF.
(fast foward similar blather)
"'Im serenely convinced that, among other things, the banking system is going to implode so hard and fast well before the nominating conventions that the nation will be in a state of near chaos. What's out there now is just a tired dumb-show replaying the shopworn themes of an era that is about to slam to a close."
I think he cut-pastes that conclusion to every single thing he's ever written.
Man, I love his nonsensical collectivism about the 'American people.' America is so diverse that there is no such thing as the 'American people' and anyone who says there is is either running for political office or is engaged in propaganda.
Why do you ascribe his references to the "American people" as "nonsensical collectivism" within the context of his essay?
What have the "American people" done to pull the plug on the IRS?
What have the "American people" done to terminate the income tax?
What have the "American people" done to prevent a 20 trillion dollar public debt?
What have the "American people" done to jettison the FBI, the CIA, the NSA and the FED?
What have the "American people" done to stop feeding the military industrial, national security, national surveillance state?
What have the "American people" done to put down the warfare / welfare state?
Kunstler's use of the term "American people" is accurate when viewed in the light of asking and answering questions such as I posed. That not every single American supports the income tax is not in dispute; but asking the question what have the "American people" done to abolish the income tax is not "nonsensical collectivism".
I read his bullshit over 10 years ago and I swear it was exactly the same content-free swooning about the Looming American Decline in this same faux-highbrow manner.
The actual economic/political facts of the day are meaningless, and he simply takes his cookie-cutter Snooty-Moan template and slaps a few current-events details in, Mad-Libs style
He's a good contender for a "random essay generator", he's so fucking cliche.
I'd rank him among the top 5 dumbest, worst contemporary-culture-writers in America. He's a fancy-man's Alex Jones for dumb-but-pretentious leftists.
You are just emoting; you are making unsupported generalized statements - unrelated to the point I made above.
Again, how do your posts sustain the proposition that he is not a good writer?
Qed mfr
No. Basic logic, bro.
You claim he's not a good writer. You say he sucks and cite some passages without any explanation as to why the passage you cite supports your contention that he is not a good writer.
That you proclaim that he is not good, just does not carry the day.
Besides, does he touch a nerve? Why play the victim or vicarious victim? It is okay to have disdain for low-brow / low culture Americana, isn't it? Or is that some sacred, collective cow?
Qed mfr
You are just emoting; you are making unsupported generalized statements - unrelated to the point I made above.
The irony being that is all Kuntz does.
What are your specific language, literary, prosaic, satirical or syntactical criticisms of the excerpt?
"I read his bullshit over 10 years ago and I swear it was exactly the same content-free swooning about the Looming American Decline in this same faux-highbrow manner.
The actual economic/political facts of the day are meaningless, and he simply takes his cookie-cutter Snooty-Moan template and slaps a few current-events details in, Mad-Libs style
He's a good contender for a "random essay generator", he's so fucking cliche."
You should try reading more.
Those are not specifics; you should try reading more.
What are your specific language, literary, prosaic, satirical or syntactical criticisms of the excerpt?
Sorry, i had to step out for a moment. my "QED" was from my phone, one-handed
Dude, with due respect =
- your butthurt and posturing about "syntactical criticisms" is a case study in "who the hell reads this JHK garbage and walks away impressed?"
My excerpted example there is something a 9th grade english teacher would go, "GET TO YOUR POINT ALREADY" and "BE SPECIFIC" and "REDUNDANT X4" in red-crayon.
JHK is not wasting further words on. If you churn out 3-4 paragraphs *before* even getting to the actual subject of your piece? You're a fucking idiot. He does it every time has has anything to say. and those throat-clearing exercises he does haven't changed an iota in 10 years. Its a moaning word-salad of dumb.
I'm sorry you're a big fan of one of the most godawful writers in america. It says more about you than him. God have mercy on your soul.
Further =
If you genuinely enjoy his recycling-the-same-point schtick? nothing i say will change your mind, and I am sure nothing you could submit would do the same for me. If you were a huge fan of concise, sharply-reasoned, strongly evidenced commentary, you wouldn't be reading him in the first place. My explaining to you how that sort of thing 'works' is a waste of time.
godspeed.
Yes, like Bailey, he does recycle some points; that, alone, however, does not mean that he does not write well.
Yes, I am a huge fan of concise, sharply reasoned, strongly evidenced commentary.
I am also a fan of sharply reasoned pithy polemics. A short essay is not necessarily poorly written because its commentary is not strongly evidenced.
I am also a huge fan of people who write well even if their principles and views are not mine.
Here, you can not contest the fact that the marketplace has judged him to be a good writer. Are there any Reason scribes who have written 7-8 novels as well as a number of non-fiction books with total sales anywhere near his?
" A short essay is not necessarily poorly written because its commentary is not strongly evidenced."
Kuntz piece =
1 -Paragraph 1-10 - americans are fat and lazy and stupid and culture decline and technology glut blah blah blah
2 - Conclusion - the banking system will collapse in 6 months
3 - BUY MY BOOKS!!!!
Dianetics also sold well. I am told. Doritos is bigger than Rap music. You will bench-press a 3,000lb White Rhino while singing Ave Maria backwards before I reconsider just how fucking awful Kuntz is as a writer.
Best of luck
Also - don't give me this bullshit about how "oh, his content is weak, but he's *really a good writer*" (or 'stylist')
As though this motherfucker were chekov-meets-montaigne-meets-ben-jonson.
For you to claim you know "good writing" suggests you know what that actually is.
There's not a single sentence in the above-cited example which isnt lazy, shoddy, redundant, needlessly-wordy construction...sentences which still manage somehow to consistently contradict one another when considered in sequence.
He is a exemplar of "bad writing" in multiple dimensions. He consistently uses 10 'fat-laden' words where 3 skinny ones would probably express the same point. And in the process commits metaphor crimes-against-humanity that would embarrass any college freshman. (see: the "clowns" in irish's example)
He's horribly inarticulate, and dresses it up with dead-horse-beating repetition. Some of his paragraphs could be expressed better in 3 or 4 WORDS. The entire reason for the excess is to *dress stupidity up in fancy clothes*.
Which was the point i made to you earlier.
If you don't "get it", there's no amount of Hemingway-esque lecturing about how "simplicity is the key to effective language" that will ever get through to you. He only appeals to people who think "needlessly complex" somehow equates to "smart".
Even dumb, country-people recognize his bullshit. its only failed college-students that mistake his horrible pretensions as "good writing"
The key to effective communication does not require one to employ Hemingway's style.
Likewise, some generalized, undifferentiated bromide that "simplicity is the key to effective language" is claptrap usually proffered by those who lack the intellectual heft to comprehend scribes who do not genuflect at the altar of "simplicity".
Often, there is a current of envy undergirding the type of disdain you have demonstrated for Kunstler. He uses big words. He likes to engage in sesquipedalian logomachy. Sorry, "dumb, country-people" are not smart enough, with their sub 100 IQs and their worship of the warfare / welfare state, to be able to recognize bullshit, his, or otherwise.
He is not horribly inarticulate and your asseveration of the same impugns your credibility.
In a debate, I would bet that you would resort to more filler language than he would. For example, he would be far less apt to employ vulgarities. He would be far less likely to say, "you know" or "like" or "um" or "I mean" and he has a far richer vocabulary than do you.
His use of the clown metaphor is not an example of a "metaphors-crimes-against-humanity". Just because you say it is, doesn't mean that it is so. Prove it.
OH I WOULD PAY-PER-VIEW THAT
I exchanged rude emails on like 2 occasions with the Kuntz. My buddy would forward me his newsletter, and i'd write Kuntz back (detailing with stats) why he was wrong about basically everything, forwarding to about 20 other people in the process. He basically told me to fuck off and die. A charmer. I think i referred to him as "Dr. Doom-Snob"
The Peak Oiler loons will never abandon their self-fulfilling prophecies.
Flipside - WTI is what $42/bbl? It peaked at $147/bbl in 2008.
Where is that inflation, you "sound money" loons?
You sound even crabbier than usual. Running low again on ram-butter for that ole favorite buttplug of yours?
I am crabbier than usual. I am thinking of changing my screen name to 'Palins Butt-chipper Woodplug'.
Good idea? I want to follow the cool Peanuts.
"changing my screen name to 'Palins Butt-chipper Woodplug'.
Good idea?"
You know what we all think of that. You are Shrike and you should have stuck with Shrike.
I am crabbier than usual.
Of course you are. I've been watching the markets, too.
Sell Sell Sell!!!
Stock up on ammo vodka and army rations THE BIG ONE IS HERE!!
Muahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!
Corning is right, you should have kept Shrike.
I wanted to.
I lost my password.
"shrike" is laced with meaning. I love the word.
A shrike is a butcher bird that impales its victims near its nest. It is a great character in 'Miss Lonelyhearts' by N. West. It is an automatic rifle, IT is ...... so on....
Good point. Your new handle is a much more apt descriptor of what you really are.
An ass toy?
The inflation is in the massive increase in the monetary base.
Who gives a fuck? Prices are stable for most things and falling for commodities.
I know. You can't admit all the "sound money" idiots are and always have been full of shit.
"Who gives a fuck?" -Anyone who looks beyond the present ie people much smarter than you.
Any day now, The Recovery will dawn. Just have to beat the QE horse harder.
"and falling for commodities."
Still much higher than they used to be only a decade and a half ago.
It is almost as if today there is no demand for commodities in 2015....
No that is impossible the Obama economy is in full recovery, stocks at all time highs unemployment is at 5%.
Oh lord Shrike where oh where did all that demand go?
Re: Peter Caca,
The economically ignorant moron still believes "inflation" means "higher prices", instead of the rapid increase in the money supply.
But since he asked for it ? http://www.shadowstats.com/img.....1437149489
In economics, inflation is a sustained increase in the general price level of goods and services in an economy over a period of time
Wikipedia.
Give up that nutty "sound money" bullshit. It is as stupid as "peak oil".
That's a weird way of admitting you're wrong.
Inflation and government meddling is why I'll never afford a house in the bay area
Flipside - WTI is what $42/bbl? It peaked at $147/bbl in 2008.
Where is that inflation, you "sound money" loons?
Longer answer aside, the cost of 'food and energy' - i.e. oil - isn't even included in CPI measures of inflation. Derp.
Dumbass, oil is falling to 6 year lows. Coal is at lows, as is natural gas. Food is over 40% off 2008 highs.
If "food and energy" were part of core inflation then we would be in a serious depression.
"Dumbass, oil is falling to 6 year lows. Coal is at lows, as is natural gas. Food is over 40% off 2008 highs."
And all still much higher than 15 years ago. You lose again.
You might see inflation if you bought your own groceries, but maybe Mom does that for you.
My generation has been rescued from the periods of inflation by changing how it is measured.
*perils
Hey Len! Long time no see. We need to do another meet up soon. Maybe the same place, and Sunday afternoon again. C. Anacreon would come, and maybe the mysterious Sevo.
What kind of an Olympian are you?
Modern Pentathlete apparently.
http://forzaitalianfootball.co.....t-are-you/
Your arbitrary evaluation has determined that I am a..."footballer"
It's not mine. Some group called Team GB.
And smile. You're a footballer!
That sport is not exactly a strong point with my people
I think I'm gonna go buy an epee and walk around with it.
To annoy my wife.
I'm a sailor? I have no interest in having seamen on my poopdeck!
Prediction: Shot putter
Result: Congratulations, you're...
A Marathon Runner!
The fuck?! Literally none of the questions I answered would work for a marathon runner. I think the results are randomized.
Apparently, I'm a server which has encountered an internal error.. I'll need to try again later. Not promising anything..
Anyone see king kong? the good one with Jeff Bridges?
Remember when the geologist said there was lots of oil on the island but it was not old enough to be used.
That whole thing was bullshit.
The "good one" has Fay Wray.
Abiotic, so there.
"Peak Oilers Shut Up Forever Please"
They'll shut up when the Rapture fans shut up. Never.
Peak Oilers Shut Up Forever Please
I'll admit. I larfed.
Can the malthusians, climate change zealots, and other assorted flavors of luddite also shut up forever?
Don't forget the Marxist "Capitalism is on its last legs!!" types.
OT:
Took an Army PT test today. Passed all events with a combined score of 210 out of 300. Ran 2 miles in 16m51s.
Army Strong. Army Smash.
Still waiting for clearance from Uncle Sam's meat inspectors. Feels good that if I was in the Army now, I'd be in good standing as far as fitness goes.
I think some victory music is in order
Wait are you joining the army?
Yep.
I am always available to support however I can. Anything I can help with, email me at swissservator - at - gmail.
Can you give him a kidney? 😉
Er...too late!
It's really not. Technically speaking.
Jolly good. I'll keep that in mind. You're writing coherently. That means you're not taking nearly enough painkillers. You'll know you're taking enough when this happens:
https://youtu.be/N-9oBoPmSgE?t=55s
Gah. No thankee.
This stuff takes away aches and pains....but I guess I fail to see the more...recreational aspects of oxy.
I guess I am lucky. Knew too many long time rugby players always looking for more vicodin or such.
Trump literally just said the Mexicans are 'taking too many of our jobs.'
T-minus 25 minutes before the first youtube video pops up crosscutting Trump's speech with this.
FFS you have people stupid enough to believe that in H&R commentariat.
We bought a fixer-upper in SoCal a couple years back. The wife has been hiring Chinese contractors to do the indoor fixing. My job is the outside. I hired El Salvadoran contractors to change the roof. We hired Mexicans for the electrical and HVAC. Not real Mexicans, of course, gen 1 or 2 American-Mexicans. You want someone who can RTFMs for that.
With that astounding hypocrisy I still favor a moratorium on most immigration to the US. We could have hired americans to do this work had the house cost half as much. American contractors do fine work and they are easier to deal with. Why did the house cost so much? Because massive immigration into SoCal had driven up the cost of the house we bought.
I am really hoping the last paragraph is a brilliant joke.
+1
"I don't want to paint with a broad brush here, but every single contractor in the world is a miserable, incompetent thief."
Ron Swanson
Why did the house cost so much? Because massive immigration into SoCal had driven up the cost of the house we bought.
If you really think this is true, then you are extremely stupid.
If you think you have a right to a cheap house, you are monumentally stupid.
Yeah, why should having millions more people drive up the cost of real estate in a state where it's often difficult and expensive to build anything? It's a mystery!!
Gosh, maybe you should investigate why it is difficult and expensive to build anything.
Small quibble...
A house at 50% of California RE value is still not exactly cheap.
A Peak Oil believer once told me that we should look at Cuba to learn how to survive Peak Oil. My response was, "The only thing we can learn from Cuba is how to run a prison."
Use highly fuel-efficient 1950's automobiles?
Heh... Sounds a whole lot like something I wrote almost exactly ten years ago:
My response was, "The only thing we can learn from Cuba is how to run a prison."
They've got pretty good experience at managing a 50+ year economic depression too.
I was there in 2012. It's not just "pretty good," it's damn well superlative.
It was 1978 when I first heard the world would run out of oil in 20 years. That was almost 40 years ago. Well, now we have more oil the we've ever had.
So when's the next time I'm gonna believe peak oil hysteria? Well, I'm not worried, because by then, nature will have completely restored the fossil fuel supply.
Have we passed the peak of peak oil predictions?
Even NPR is surprised:
http://www.npr.org/2014/10/17/.....e-slippery
NPR is surprised that their leftist brethren have been wrong about everything for the past 100 years and then they're wrong on something else? Wut?
So we might hit peak oil because prices are so low it's not profitable to pump more out of the ground?
My advice is try not to dwell on phrases like that. You'll only hurt your brain.
The last barrel of oil pulled out of the ground will either cost an unbelievable fortune because the uses that oil has been limited to by low supply are beyond phenomenally valuable, or it will be absolutely worthless because all of today's uses of oil have been replaced by substitutes. Either way, there will still be other barrels of oil left in the ground -- barrels either too expensive or too worthless to extract.
"The stone age didn't end because we ran out of stones."
-former Saudi oil minister, paraphrased
Ohhh, looookkkk!!!! Pauly Krugman says someone is a racist! OMG, it's sooo original! Damn, those liberals, what else will they come up with, always some new amazingly fresh new surprises!
Trump, Teabaggers, and Racists
This thread is an example of why US conservatives are completely full of shit.
INFLATION! DERP!HERP! SOUND MONEY! DOOM! SHITBAG IRAN WAR! BUSH GOOD YEARS! GROWTH BAD !
You are a good person and have much to offer the world. Enjoy this soothing music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wfYIMyS_dI
Conservatives are Bible-Beating fucking Authoritarian Freedom Hating idiots.
Progs are no better though.
I will never apologize to the many Bushpig conservatives here.
Fuck them all.
You don't have to apologize. Why don't you just shut the fuck up instead? It's okay to do that when you have nothing to say.
No but seriously Shrike the stock bubble is about to pop and pop hard. Sell.
I think you are full of shit in almost everything but I really don't wish you to be in the poor house.
The worse thing that could happen if you sell and I am wrong is you miss out on a few months of stock gains.
"I think you are full of shit in almost everything but I really don't wish you to be in the poor house."
1) Why do you not want this asshole in the poor house? It would be so poetic?
2) What do I do with my RRSP and TFSA?
Is there something I don't know about fossil fuels? Because it seems like they should eventually run out. I mean, maybe not in our lifetimes, but unless they're being replenished at something close to the rate we're using them, then it seems like peak oil should be a question of when, not if.
There is so much of the stuff that we just can't run out basically. Further, if oil is produced abiotically, it's semi-renewable.
"Is there something I don't know about fossil fuels? Because it seems like they should eventually run out."
One day the sun will go out....and one day the earth will stop spinning.
I don't know which will happen first....but at current trends at the rate at which oil is extracted the sun will go out and the earth will stop spinning before we run out of oil.
If fossil fuels run out we'll naturally lose our ability to adapt and solve problems then the only thing left to do will be to curl up and die
ant1sthenes|8.11.15 @ 9:03PM|#
"Is there something I don't know about fossil fuels? Because it seems like they should eventually run out. I mean, maybe not in our lifetimes, but unless they're being replenished at something close to the rate we're using them, then it seems like peak oil should be a question of when, not if."
Seemingly, there is something you don't know.
Please tell us when 'peak whale oil' occurred, why it did so and how the market for carbon fuels responded.
Oh, and that is your homework; I'll expect at least 500 words and cites, since you obviously need to do some research, given your ignorant post.
Tomorrow, by noon.
Is there something I don't know about fossil fuels?
You apparently don't know how they are priced.
It is simply not tenable that we'd use all the oil on earth. All costs are opportunity costs, and extracting all the oil on earth requires presupposing some agent like a crazy trillionaire who wants to make it his life's work.
"...All costs are opportunity costs..."
This needs to be printed on signs and glued to the desks of every politico in the land, and it isn't.
Thx, Mike P!
One marker we will never reach is Peak Stupidity.
We have heard warnings over and over again from those who should know that we are soon going to run out of oil. Yet those same geologists have never mentioned the probability of running out of natural gas. Both are said to have come from the same source, as their name implies: fossil fuels. If it is possible to run out of oil, why is it never mentioned that we might run out of natural gas? Or, alternatively, if it is unlikely that we will ever exceed the amount of natural gas available, in much the same way we will never exceed the amount of water available, is it not possible that we will never exceed the amount of oil available? Just asking.
Conventional Oil did peak in 2005. What you have now is synthetic oil, called fracked shale oil, or Tar Sands from Canada, Russia, or Venezuela. Look at your graph. Oil will be at over $100/Barrell in 18 months, or about January 2017. This is a temporary downturn. We can have all the oil we want, Synthetic Oil, at $300/barrell in 2030. The British Government's Ministry of Defense estimated that price for oil in 2040, but it could happen much sooner.
I think you need to learn how to read a graph.
There is no prediction for the future on that graph. Just because it dropped in the past, than rose doesn't mean it will happen again. Doesn't mean it won't either but the graph doesn't say that.
So synthetic oil huh? It's not
Composition by weight
Carbon 83 to 85%
Hydrogen 10 to 14%
Nitrogen 0.1 to 2%
Oxygen 0.05 to 1.5%
Sulfur 0.05 to 6.0%
Metals < 0.1%
? It must be made of unicorn tears and rainbows. It's oil. It's just a different recovery method.
Damn it, we still haven't hit peak derp!!!
It's all a silly misunderstanding: they meant "pique oil."
Or PEAK oil.