Why is this quote from a relatively unknown Northern Illinois University professor being reprinted everywhere, as if his opinion about what the 1940 Census may contain is the most important factoid about the 1940 Census? It's not as if the debate over the efficacy of the New Deal had been set aside until the 1940 data might provide a definitive answer.
I guess he was just so happy to be asked for his opinions by NPR, that he could not help but include his own "Big Government is Best" spin.
But we already knew that the unemployment rate was still 14.8% by 1940, after seven years of New Deal policies. And there was evidence that the economy would have recovered much faster if the Roosevelt Administration had done the exact opposite from the policies it implemented. That's also the case today, with respect to the Obama Administration.
I didn't even have to read that it was an IPCC report -- I just needed to see "UN experts" in the headline.
International Perpetrators of a Criminal Conspiracy. "Oil for Food" was reasonably profitable, but their goal is to steal trillions with the climate scam.
Nothing like that... but you asked me to believe that oil is unique in that it is sometimes in short supply, but apparently never abundant. I think they said that about natural gas, too, but now it's about 1/3 the price of previous years.
Crude oil is like some metals, in that it takes years and not months to increase production. But it's still governed by the laws of supply and demand, and higher prices inevitably lead to increased production. When oil companies release their annual reports on economically recoverable reserves, these reserves go up or down depending on the price of crude oil.
You may think oil prices are already pretty volatile, but in fact a plentiful supply of speculators keeps the price from ever dropping too low, in the absence of commercial buyers, or from climbing too high in the absence of producer hedging.
It wasn't until I pointed out that speculators don't take delivery that you even seemed aware of that, so I'm going to say you seem to just be trying to throw things out in the hopes that some kind of defense sticks.
I didn't realize I needed to present credentials in order to comment, but I actually tried my hand at commodity speculating in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I made some money, lost some money, and in the end about broke even. Later I took a degree in economics. I've been reading about markets for 35+ years and participating in them for nearly that long; so I know about the roles of hedgers and speculators.
Speculators smooth out the volatility of markets, by buying when producers want to sell and there are not commercial buyers, or by selling when the producers are not available to sell. The speculators make money off the margin between the bid and offer, and the more speculators there are then the narrower that margin is. They do not "literally buy something to artificially drive up prices"; they buy something because they think the price will rise, but for every buyer there is a seller who thinks the next price movement will be lower.
And if you think speculators only trade from the long side, buying in expectation of higher prices, then YOU are the one who needs to learn more about the operation of markets.
Yes, I know that a speculator who does not want to take delivery (or make delivery, if he is short) must liquidate his position before the end of trading in that contract.
I also know that if a price increase is based on temporary buying, that this creates a lucrative opportunity for sellers.
Finally, I know that the crude oil market is more than 80 million barrels a day worldwide. No individual, not corporation, no cartel of corporations or even a cartel of oil-producing nations can really control the price of crude, except for very temporarily.
I know markets better than you do, so understand pretty well who is the naive one here.
<quote><p>Meanwhile, in other countries, where cities are carefully laid out such that they can be efficiently serviced with mass transit, it remains popular even among well-to-do people; and, consequently, it is also well-funded, allowing it to operate efficiently, which is why those people don't mind using it.</p></quote>
Those other countries are much smaller, geographically, with high population densities. For instance over 31 million people live in the metrolopolitan employment area of Tokyo -- roughly a circle less than 100km in diameter. From the western San Fernando Valley to the southern end of Orange County, the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area must be at least 200km, and is much less densely populated.
Density is the key factor, I think, because density determines whether other forms of transportation can work at all. Only when other forms cannot work, then mass transit becomes necessary.
There appears to be a remarkable lack of knowledge here about how markets work, or about the positive role of speculators in a market. They provide liquidity, which reduces transaction costs.
Here's an example. Suppose a company wants to build a new refinery, to take advantage of a relatively cheap source of oil in North Dakota. The refinery will start operating in two years, and he wants some kind of insurance or guarantee about the price he will have to pay for oil for at least eight years, until the construction costs are amortized. He can buy futures contracts for crude oil and sell futures contracts for gasoline and distillate fuels; but what if there aren't enough hedgers to take the opposite sides of these transactions? The only way he can buy these contracts for crude oil is if someone is willing to sell them -- these sellers are called speculators. And the people who buy his contracts for future production of gasoline and distillates? Also speculators.
It costs at least $1 per barrel per month to buy and store crude oil. So if the price does not rise at least $1 every month, someone who decides to stockpile oil is guaranteed to lose money on the deal.
Crude oil is now $6/barrel higher than it was one year ago. So, explain to me how "the speculators" are making a big profit from this buy-and-hold strategy?
One more point about speculators: every futures contract has a buyer and a seller. For every dollar change in the price of a commodity, either the buyer wins and the seller loses, or vice-versa. Speculators, collectively speaking, often take both sides of the bet in roughly equal numbers.
We should build as many nuke plants as possible and start using the electric motor instead of the internal combustion engine.
Yes, and we should store the radioactive waste deep underground, below a huge mountain in Nevada, where it will be safe for tens of thousands of years or longer.
Oh wait, we're already doing that, or should be doing that, or something.
There are several refineries for sale right now, in the Philadelphia/Dover area and also in the US Virgin Islands. They have either shut down or will shut down in the coming weeks. So if anyone wants to get into the lucrative refining business cheaply, here's your opportunity.
You might want to check out "This Week In Petroleum", at the Energy Information Agency website. Most of the gasoline exports are from Gulf Coast refineries to Mexico and Latin America. Gasoline is in relatively short supply in the Mid-Atlantic states, but there is insufficient pipeline capacity to get it there, and because of federal laws only US-flagged tankers can haul gasoline from one US port to another.
So the solutions would seem to be, building more pipelines and ending the ban on foreign-flagged tankers. And stop blaming the refiners -- they must sell somewhere or reduce their operations, which would mean not just less gasoline but also less diesel and heating oil... leading to higher prices of both.
What is unusual about the last couple months is the route of the jet stream -- dipping down as far south as New Mexico, then flowing almost due north from Texas to Minnesota. That is why the Twin Cities enjoyed the weather last week that is more typical of Dallas-Fort Worth in March; we got their weather because the jet stream brought it to us. It sounds like Ottawa is also benefitting from this jet stream anomaly.
None of this has anything to do with climate, or climate change. It sucks for the ski resort owners, and the manufacturers of bags used for sandbagging to control flood waters. But I don't hear complaints from anyone else.
I guess not enough people were hitting the 20-articles-a-month limit. Maybe more people will decide to subscribe when they hit the 10-article limit? No, probably not.
In the article posted at alternet.com, toward the bottom: "By the way, the rest of the media was not blameless. CNN and the broadcast network news operations fared only slightly better in many cases. Even MSNBC, which had the best record of accurately informing viewers, has a ways to go before it can brag about it."
So they are all pretty bad, but Fox News Channel is the one mentioned in the headline, and MSNBC is supposed to be the one that's really fair and balanced? Pardon me if I think this study/survey is more biased than the news organizations it is supposed to be evaluating.
Quote: "A corporation is not the same as "your money". A corporation is an artificial, legal entity created by a state that has its own assets and its own liability. Most particularly, it can sue, be sued, own property, even go bankrupt, but the assets of the owners of the corporation are protected (snip) This is an extraordinary protection. And has absolutely no constitutional basis (but you're welcome to look for it yourself). Thus, the rights of a corporation are completely arbitrary, created by government and therefore changeable and may be regulated by government for any reason. (end of quote)
In fact the US Supreme Court ruled otherwise in Dartmouth v Woodward (1819); corporations and other groups or associations, as artificial persons, possess many of the rights of individual natural persons, and these are rights that a government agency can not take away.
Most of these rights predate the Constitution; they were found in English common law and even in Roman law.
While the Citizens United case overturned parts of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law (2002), it affirmed the basic rules that have applied to corporations for hundreds of years. It absolutely did not overturn 100 years of established corporate limits on campaign donations. Corporations cannot give to candidates, then or now, nor to parties, though they have always been able to create PACs.
Lastly, why should media companies have rights that all other corporations do not?
At a certain point we will have to get serious about our country's problems. We will need more tools than irony and sarcasm to solve these problems, and they will not go away on their own while we have a laugh.
Also, the Restoring Honor rally turned out not to be political, or at least not much. I was surprised, I thought it would be. It was more of a religious revival -- which, in a way, is what the March on Washington in 1963 was also about.
There may be political consequences though, but long-term consequences... the same as the MLK rally.
A couple other comments. Did you notice that thirty minutes after the Restoring Honor event, the Mall looked like no one had been there -- all the trash and garbage had been hauled away. After the Obama inauguration, it looked like Woodstock, or after 10 days into a garbage haulers' strike.
And lastly, there were no cars set on fire, no broken windows, no attacks on police, no teargas, as you might see at any leftwing event where more than 1000 attend.
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Why is this quote from a relatively unknown Northern Illinois University professor being reprinted everywhere, as if his opinion about what the 1940 Census may contain is the most important factoid about the 1940 Census? It's not as if the debate over the efficacy of the New Deal had been set aside until the 1940 data might provide a definitive answer.
I guess he was just so happy to be asked for his opinions by NPR, that he could not help but include his own "Big Government is Best" spin.
But we already knew that the unemployment rate was still 14.8% by 1940, after seven years of New Deal policies. And there was evidence that the economy would have recovered much faster if the Roosevelt Administration had done the exact opposite from the policies it implemented. That's also the case today, with respect to the Obama Administration.
I didn't even have to read that it was an IPCC report -- I just needed to see "UN experts" in the headline.
International Perpetrators of a Criminal Conspiracy. "Oil for Food" was reasonably profitable, but their goal is to steal trillions with the climate scam.
If people cannot buy cars with a GPS display they like, they will simply order the car without one and then add it later.
There are too many federal agencies with too much money to spend. Do we really need this agency, or 95% of the rest of them?
Nothing like that... but you asked me to believe that oil is unique in that it is sometimes in short supply, but apparently never abundant. I think they said that about natural gas, too, but now it's about 1/3 the price of previous years.
Crude oil is like some metals, in that it takes years and not months to increase production. But it's still governed by the laws of supply and demand, and higher prices inevitably lead to increased production. When oil companies release their annual reports on economically recoverable reserves, these reserves go up or down depending on the price of crude oil.
You may think oil prices are already pretty volatile, but in fact a plentiful supply of speculators keeps the price from ever dropping too low, in the absence of commercial buyers, or from climbing too high in the absence of producer hedging.
"Gotcha"? Go back to your video games.
You are welcome to your opinions.
It wasn't until I pointed out that speculators don't take delivery that you even seemed aware of that, so I'm going to say you seem to just be trying to throw things out in the hopes that some kind of defense sticks.
I didn't realize I needed to present credentials in order to comment, but I actually tried my hand at commodity speculating in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I made some money, lost some money, and in the end about broke even. Later I took a degree in economics. I've been reading about markets for 35+ years and participating in them for nearly that long; so I know about the roles of hedgers and speculators.
Speculators smooth out the volatility of markets, by buying when producers want to sell and there are not commercial buyers, or by selling when the producers are not available to sell. The speculators make money off the margin between the bid and offer, and the more speculators there are then the narrower that margin is. They do not "literally buy something to artificially drive up prices"; they buy something because they think the price will rise, but for every buyer there is a seller who thinks the next price movement will be lower.
And if you think speculators only trade from the long side, buying in expectation of higher prices, then YOU are the one who needs to learn more about the operation of markets.
The country needs a lot more pipelines, for natural gas as well as crude oil and products.
And we need them yesterday.
Yes, I know that a speculator who does not want to take delivery (or make delivery, if he is short) must liquidate his position before the end of trading in that contract.
I also know that if a price increase is based on temporary buying, that this creates a lucrative opportunity for sellers.
Finally, I know that the crude oil market is more than 80 million barrels a day worldwide. No individual, not corporation, no cartel of corporations or even a cartel of oil-producing nations can really control the price of crude, except for very temporarily.
I know markets better than you do, so understand pretty well who is the naive one here.
<quote><p>Meanwhile, in other countries, where cities are carefully laid out such that they can be efficiently serviced with mass transit, it remains popular even among well-to-do people; and, consequently, it is also well-funded, allowing it to operate efficiently, which is why those people don't mind using it.</p></quote>
Those other countries are much smaller, geographically, with high population densities. For instance over 31 million people live in the metrolopolitan employment area of Tokyo -- roughly a circle less than 100km in diameter. From the western San Fernando Valley to the southern end of Orange County, the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area must be at least 200km, and is much less densely populated.
Density is the key factor, I think, because density determines whether other forms of transportation can work at all. Only when other forms cannot work, then mass transit becomes necessary.
There appears to be a remarkable lack of knowledge here about how markets work, or about the positive role of speculators in a market. They provide liquidity, which reduces transaction costs.
Here's an example. Suppose a company wants to build a new refinery, to take advantage of a relatively cheap source of oil in North Dakota. The refinery will start operating in two years, and he wants some kind of insurance or guarantee about the price he will have to pay for oil for at least eight years, until the construction costs are amortized. He can buy futures contracts for crude oil and sell futures contracts for gasoline and distillate fuels; but what if there aren't enough hedgers to take the opposite sides of these transactions? The only way he can buy these contracts for crude oil is if someone is willing to sell them -- these sellers are called speculators. And the people who buy his contracts for future production of gasoline and distillates? Also speculators.
It costs at least $1 per barrel per month to buy and store crude oil. So if the price does not rise at least $1 every month, someone who decides to stockpile oil is guaranteed to lose money on the deal.
Crude oil is now $6/barrel higher than it was one year ago. So, explain to me how "the speculators" are making a big profit from this buy-and-hold strategy?
One more point about speculators: every futures contract has a buyer and a seller. For every dollar change in the price of a commodity, either the buyer wins and the seller loses, or vice-versa. Speculators, collectively speaking, often take both sides of the bet in roughly equal numbers.
We should build as many nuke plants as possible and start using the electric motor instead of the internal combustion engine.
Yes, and we should store the radioactive waste deep underground, below a huge mountain in Nevada, where it will be safe for tens of thousands of years or longer.
Oh wait, we're already doing that, or should be doing that, or something.
There are several refineries for sale right now, in the Philadelphia/Dover area and also in the US Virgin Islands. They have either shut down or will shut down in the coming weeks. So if anyone wants to get into the lucrative refining business cheaply, here's your opportunity.
You might want to check out "This Week In Petroleum", at the Energy Information Agency website. Most of the gasoline exports are from Gulf Coast refineries to Mexico and Latin America. Gasoline is in relatively short supply in the Mid-Atlantic states, but there is insufficient pipeline capacity to get it there, and because of federal laws only US-flagged tankers can haul gasoline from one US port to another.
So the solutions would seem to be, building more pipelines and ending the ban on foreign-flagged tankers. And stop blaming the refiners -- they must sell somewhere or reduce their operations, which would mean not just less gasoline but also less diesel and heating oil... leading to higher prices of both.
What is unusual about the last couple months is the route of the jet stream -- dipping down as far south as New Mexico, then flowing almost due north from Texas to Minnesota. That is why the Twin Cities enjoyed the weather last week that is more typical of Dallas-Fort Worth in March; we got their weather because the jet stream brought it to us. It sounds like Ottawa is also benefitting from this jet stream anomaly.
None of this has anything to do with climate, or climate change. It sucks for the ski resort owners, and the manufacturers of bags used for sandbagging to control flood waters. But I don't hear complaints from anyone else.
Perhaps if the fascist totalitarian party in control of the regime in the US, is defeated in the November election, things might change?
I guess not enough people were hitting the 20-articles-a-month limit. Maybe more people will decide to subscribe when they hit the 10-article limit? No, probably not.
Watching TV for 10 hours a day will make you stupid. But there are no warnings on the screen.
Foolish parents, sending their children to a public school!
I don't have kids, but if I did they'd be home-schooled. And I wouldn't wait until they are 14 before introducing them to "Ender's Game".
In the article posted at alternet.com, toward the bottom:
"By the way, the rest of the media was not blameless. CNN and the broadcast network news operations fared only slightly better in many cases. Even MSNBC, which had the best record of accurately informing viewers, has a ways to go before it can brag about it."
So they are all pretty bad, but Fox News Channel is the one mentioned in the headline, and MSNBC is supposed to be the one that's really fair and balanced? Pardon me if I think this study/survey is more biased than the news organizations it is supposed to be evaluating.
Quote: "A corporation is not the same as "your money". A corporation is an artificial, legal entity created by a state that has its own assets and its own liability. Most particularly, it can sue, be sued, own property, even go bankrupt, but the assets of the owners of the corporation are protected (snip) This is an extraordinary protection. And has absolutely no constitutional basis (but you're welcome to look for it yourself). Thus, the rights of a corporation are completely arbitrary, created by government and therefore changeable and may be regulated by government for any reason. (end of quote)
In fact the US Supreme Court ruled otherwise in Dartmouth v Woodward (1819); corporations and other groups or associations, as artificial persons, possess many of the rights of individual natural persons, and these are rights that a government agency can not take away.
Most of these rights predate the Constitution; they were found in English common law and even in Roman law.
While the Citizens United case overturned parts of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law (2002), it affirmed the basic rules that have applied to corporations for hundreds of years. It absolutely did not overturn 100 years of established corporate limits on campaign donations. Corporations cannot give to candidates, then or now, nor to parties, though they have always been able to create PACs.
Lastly, why should media companies have rights that all other corporations do not?
What is the cost of a shooting war with China? Is it more or less than the cost of a trade war?
At a certain point we will have to get serious about our country's problems. We will need more tools than irony and sarcasm to solve these problems, and they will not go away on their own while we have a laugh.
Also, the Restoring Honor rally turned out not to be political, or at least not much. I was surprised, I thought it would be. It was more of a religious revival -- which, in a way, is what the March on Washington in 1963 was also about.
There may be political consequences though, but long-term consequences... the same as the MLK rally.
A couple other comments. Did you notice that thirty minutes after the Restoring Honor event, the Mall looked like no one had been there -- all the trash and garbage had been hauled away. After the Obama inauguration, it looked like Woodstock, or after 10 days into a garbage haulers' strike.
And lastly, there were no cars set on fire, no broken windows, no attacks on police, no teargas, as you might see at any leftwing event where more than 1000 attend.
The best way to beat the Taliban might start by learning how to think like a Taliban.
Indeed. Someone who has tried to build an improvised explosive device (IED) but failed, now has a new and improved how-to guide.