The normal measures of who will be able to repay a loan and who won't have totally broken down.
Well, FICO is stupid. It bases its decisions on how much to lend based on whether or not you are paying the debt you already have, based on the hope that this asymptotic borrowing curve is the same as knowing one's ration of income to indebtedness, and it just isn't.
As unpopular as it may be with some people, what you are seeing today are the fruits of Reagan-era economic policy, "Reaganomics" or as G.H.W. Bush called it "Voodoo Economics."
This has nothing to do with Reagonomics. The idea behind Reagonomics was to lower the upper tax brackets from 70% down to a flatter rate so that people would be encouraged invest to invest their money and thus create a greater supply of consumer goods. This did exactly what it was supposed to do, as a whole the prices of consumer goods and commodities alike have largely been low, as investors sought the cheapest means of production. The essence of Reaganomics is that, we all have lots of stuff, and well, we do. So this aspect of Republican economics totally worked. Even Barrack Obama concedes, in his book, that in the USA, poor people have lots of stuff.
The critique of Reaganomics is, that, with its focus on investment, wage earners get screwed. You'll never see Democrats complain about having lots of stuff, and indeed, some will quitely condemn having so much stuff. Instead, you'll see them bemoan the social instability caused by Reaganomics. When you have investors able to shift their money around rapidly, you can leave social problems both when the money comes in and when it leaves. For every Silicon Valley or Shanghai or Dubai there is a Detroit. SO, the socialist retort is to not allow capital movement at all except via the will of the people, and, as a consequence, you can have a stabler society, except that, everyone has less stuff. North Korea is very stable, just like dead people are, and no one really has anything.
So now onto interest rates. Whether or not the Fed flooded people with low interest rates is not really the problem. You have low interest rates and low inflation because you need low inflation to have savings.
I do agree with you, though, that debt repayment by consumers will suppress economic growth in the short term, however, falling fuel prices will mitigate this somewhat. The problem is that everyone has borrowed too much. I've not seen too many figures indicating how much credit people are seeking, and, a ready indication of that figure would be a good tool for the fed to have and the people to see. I do believe that we shall public indebtedness decline and perhaps sharply. Just from my own perspective I've paid down about 30k worth of debt this year and I certainly have no plans to borrow soon, if ever. Like, I don't know that I'll ever take out another expensive car loan again...
But, if this happens, you see, people will need to save their money somewhere and it turns out that this savings can only go into precious few places. It can go under the mattress, which is stupid, it can go into commodities, which, I've argued might not be a bad move, or it can go into federal debt (treasuries), bank savings instruments, or securities, but all of those instruments are available to businesses as a means of obtaining cash for expansion and, you guessed it, the production of additional supply.
So, the moral of the story is, whether consumers choose to borrow and repay or save and buy, doesn't effect the overall course of Reaganomics all that much. All Reaganomics says is that investors are allowed to move their money about, just like consumers. The greatest irony of Reaganomics, we have achieved a sort of genuine sort of defacto socialism with it. There's a large percentage of the population that already does own stock of some kind, so much so, that one might well said that we as a people collectively do already own all the means to production.
Look, if you live in an environment where you are under pressure to sell loans regardless of the risk, then you are likely going to wind up with computer models that tell you that it is going to work.
Computer models always carry the assumptions of the authors and those assumptions can be altered to suit climate. In the case of Wall Street, the assumption was likely the number of defaults on an M.B.S. as a function of credit score... and the thing is, that I bet that is spooking everyone is, that, credit score may not be a good predictor of repayment. I bet a lot of people had a decent credit score, right up until they mailed in the keys to their house.
How about this one? Why should the entertainment and media businesses have rights to private property when they have been leading the populist charge to get rid of them for everyone else now for 100 years? Seriously, you tell me why I should support the arm of government supporting Bruce Springsteen's right to license his music for 70 years after he is dead, when the same man is prancing around the country complaining that a 7% return on one's investment in Exxon Mobil should be taxed out of existence?
Come on dude. They want everyone else to live and die by their populism, why not try it on them first? If the Boss wants to make money on his music, how about he plays live and charges for tickets, rather than sit back and have us all pretend that digital content can't be copied.
I love Cold Play, but I like V8 engines too, and sometimes, we just have to give it up for Mother Earth and progress.
Since Obama is going to create 5 million new jobs making windmills, then, if we lose 350,000 jobs by getting rid of copyrights, then, clearly there's still 4,650,000 jobs left. Maybe Madonna can work in a carbon sequestration plant, dressing up mother earth with her love.
Let's face it, GM has let go of more people in the last decades than all of the jobs in Hollywood, and a percentage of that is arguably because of liberal legislation who viewed the fallout as collateral damage in the fight for mother earth. It's high time conservatives start playing with the same deck of cards. If all of us who like oil and cars and stuff have to have our way of life upended in the name progress, then let's put hollywood on the table too. I can live without capitalized TV and you can too. If you want to make money off of a song more than once, play it more than once, that's what I say.
fundamental problem of the free culture movement: people perceive us as thieve
See, I think this a natural issue for Republicans to take up. I would rather say that it is not that you are thieves, it is that greedy hollywood wants to throw teenagers in jail for paying a tax on copying something that they can copy themselves.
Big copyrights are big government, I'd say.
Conservatives are reeling after three decades of getting torched by the liberals in the movies, songs and press, and are just itching for some payback. Yeah, you go stand in front of a crowd of Sarah Palin supporters and liberals want them to think that copying is a crime so they can loot the middle class with their copyright socialism. IT would be like waving a bloody finger in a kiddy pool filled with piranha. IF you sell copyright reform as a way to get rid of liberals, I guarantee you've immediately got 40% that's going to get a bitter pill this November, and then after that, you just need to get the non-riaa democrats to go with.
Alright, this election is a lost cause but a core item in the new Republican Party that must emerge is a more open stance on copyrights. Democrats and liberals are in bed with copyrights because, well, the copyright is the life blood of the liberal - books, movies, etc, all require copyrights to succeed, and Republicans should be more willing to go after this jugular by removing the artificial laws that ensnare the very masses the Democrats claim to love.
If Democrats can do windfall profits taxes and penalty taxes on Republican economic interests ranging from petroleum to corn, then it only makes sense to shorten copyright to ten years and wave all civil penalties for infringement against anyone who, to borrow a page from Obama, makes under $250,000 a year.
If, after all, America's middle class is so strapped, then, why should we be forcing them to pay for something that they are perfectly capable of copying for free? If Madonna wants to be a Democrat, she can die by their economics.
The point was that private companies are probably making satellites that exceed what military systems can do because the market is driving them to do so. Rather than believing the military has some super satellite that can count hairs on a head from 20,000 miles up in geo orbit, it might be more likely that private companies have passed them by when it comes to an end to end system. Even if the military's original data is better, I doubt that they could arrive at something more effective with a completely proprietary toolchain as the feds are won't to do, as opposed to a cheap PC style server set with some decent off the rack developer tools... either Windows or Linux with VS200x or Eclipse...
These are jet aircraft. They are enormously powerful aircraft with sufficient redundant power to deal with multiple engine failures. So, with all the engines on, you've got some zoom zoom if you want it. Remember that these things are derived from military bombers in design and as such even these big planes can do things that old Mustang prop aircraft would only dream of.
In fact, let's look at an A300 vs a P-51 Mustang... Mustang we think of as an agile fighter, the A300 as a lumberer. But... numbers tell the story. The Airbus, and really any modern commercial jet, will have a higher cruising speed, a higher climb rate, and better power to weight ratio than any world war II fighter aircraft.
So you yeah, in theory, you could quite literally g-loc your passengers, etc... that's why having the reinforced doors is the preferred anti-terrorism weapon. If you are a pilot with a terrorist banging on your door with a steakknife, all ya gotta do is push the stick foward and back and flatten the guy on the ceiling and then floor of the plane. You could quite literally kill the guy.
This is the EU basically trying to protect its markets for its own cell phone makers. I would think Nokia might be pushing for a regulation like this.
Watch carefully! There will probably be some nice sounding safety or environmental standard coming out of Washington somewhere that is the tit for this tat.
would seem to be a problem. I mean, if you get a few strikes of dust particles whacking your liquid mirror every couple of hours, won't it always have a bad picture?
Is that the government has just awarded a top secret no-bid contract to Google Earth so that they are the only ones pay 72 billion dollars for the state of the art in web based intelligence that the rest of us just use for free.
As much as Apple fans extol the "dock", if you leave the 3d graphics out of the equation, its just a baked over version of the "taskbar" like thing that came with OS/2 Warp, and honestly, its not as good.
It's not like you can send in a spy and they try and get a job at the Defense Ministry.. there is no terrorist defense ministry.
You have to send in a spy, and he or she is going to go around 2000 villages in northern Pakistan trying to find a terrorist ring. What do you do? Ask, "hey, do you know anyone who has an atomic bomb?"
In fact, you need to have lots of spies talking to lots of people, almost like a police state, and that set of spies has to be on top of the whole social fabric of the society in detail and in numbers. It turns out, in fact, that you DO need an army to stay on top of all of it!
Global demand is going down for the next few years and commodities are already
Crashing? Seriously, if you think long term that we are going to be able to go back to the economy where commodities were nearly free, please say so. Show me that Gawar sized field that has just been discovered, the newly uncovered vast anthracite deposits, those torrents of fresh water coming online from that long missing lake. Give me a link to that vast new copper strike and while we're at it, toss in cobalt, platinum and palladium as well. Please, tell me how the Chinese are going to do an about face and send 100 million newly made car owners back to the farms, and, how India is going to undo a decade of economic progress and send its people back to the hills. It just is not going to happen. Sure, there's a bit of a shock to the economy because of this change, but, this change is permanent. The resources are dwindling and demand is rising, long term.
Higher oil prices only benefit producers of crude.
So, how is that different from what I said before, where, the commodities sector is now the driving force in the economy? This is economic change, as I've said?
The fact that you think trucking companies are doing well proves you don't know what you're talking about.
UPS is profitable. I think they might have a few trucks....and, oh by the way, rail companies are doing really well as well.
You have said nothing to disprove my thesis, again, the economy has fundamentally changed so that commodities are more important than they have been in a long time. For decades commodities have been almost valueless and it was the manufacturing and services that added value, now, commodities are the thing that is important and everyone else is getting squeezed. If you want to prosper in this economy, you can either get in onto producing more commodities, or, you can have a service / support offering that allows people to livably use less of that commodity.
There's no need to rationalize NASA. You can't calculate an economic return for it any more than you can calculate the return of a brilliant song, but we sense that those are needed to enrich the human spirit. There are some challenges that great nations must undertake to further the human condition and understanding, like, as the Egyptians built massive monuments, so too the USA must lead the charge into space. When NASA sends back pictures of far away places, when Americans plant a flag on the moon, all of mankind gains from the experience.
I think that, now that government intervention in the economy is now on the table as a policy instrument, that's a good argument for Democrats to make. Let them be the party that wants to curtail forward looking science missions and exploration in favor of more short term social priorities.
On the other hand, let's have Republicans that instead of putting all of the science into the hands of the marketplace, recognize that government spending on the sciences and on technological infrastructure and education helps improve the business climate of the United States.
Any more, arguing over having government do something stupid, versus no government, is sometimes a false choice. When a private enterprise can actually finance missions to Mars and Jupiter profitably, then, by all means, there's no need for the government to do that. But in the meantime, we are on one planet, this is our solar system, the potential of space is nearly limitless, and we must remain committed to understanding it as much as possible.
You have a wonderfully shallow understanding of economics, and I'd be willing to bet it's accompanied by an equally firm belief that you're highly knowledgeable
My shallow understanding of economics tells me that every commodities company is making money hand over fist. Look at Exxon Mobil, ADM, any mining stock, all of those are up and up rather dramatically over the last year. Yes they have retrenched in the face of the global selloff, but, they are still at fairly high levels. Companies that directly service these firms are also doing really well. Drilling equipment providers, mining equipment providers, farming equipment providers, are all doing fairly well this year.
I've always been bothered that the USA could not be bothered to invest in its own LHC or better fusion system or do more to foster education in the sciences.
I think now that the bailout has put government economic intervention firmly back on the table and for the next generation, Republicans use their support for NASA as a springboard to try and get out in front and ask that government make investments in basic sciences so that American industries can reap the benefits down the road. Democrats are always going to push for federal spending for the disenfranchised over spending for business expansion, so, its only natural that Republicans become the party of building an America that is productive while the Democrats become the party of building an America that is livable.
Oil prices go up == feedstock prices go up == profit/wages go down.
Oil prices are everyone's base. If feedstocks are going up, you pass the cost in your produced product and get away with it. Trucking companies do this and make out well.
That oil will be sold on the global market and make essentially no difference in prices at both the consumer gas pump and the commercial feedstock suppliers. This isn't 1980 anymore, you might want to update your mental map.
You've made my point perfectly. Worldwide demand is so high, relative to production, that domestic attempts to flood supply or cut production don't have a long term impact on prices. Therefor, Obama's conservation plan cannot possibly work, which is what I said! He's living in the 1980s, not me.
Slashdot Mirror
The normal measures of who will be able to repay a loan and who won't have totally broken down.
Well, FICO is stupid. It bases its decisions on how much to lend based on whether or not you are paying the debt you already have, based on the hope that this asymptotic borrowing curve is the same as knowing one's ration of income to indebtedness, and it just isn't.
As unpopular as it may be with some people, what you are seeing today are the fruits of Reagan-era economic policy, "Reaganomics" or as G.H.W. Bush called it "Voodoo Economics."
This has nothing to do with Reagonomics. The idea behind Reagonomics was to lower the upper tax brackets from 70% down to a flatter rate so that people would be encouraged invest to invest their money and thus create a greater supply of consumer goods. This did exactly what it was supposed to do, as a whole the prices of consumer goods and commodities alike have largely been low, as investors sought the cheapest means of production. The essence of Reaganomics is that, we all have lots of stuff, and well, we do. So this aspect of Republican economics totally worked. Even Barrack Obama concedes, in his book, that in the USA, poor people have lots of stuff.
The critique of Reaganomics is, that, with its focus on investment, wage earners get screwed. You'll never see Democrats complain about having lots of stuff, and indeed, some will quitely condemn having so much stuff. Instead, you'll see them bemoan the social instability caused by Reaganomics. When you have investors able to shift their money around rapidly, you can leave social problems both when the money comes in and when it leaves. For every Silicon Valley or Shanghai or Dubai there is a Detroit. SO, the socialist retort is to not allow capital movement at all except via the will of the people, and, as a consequence, you can have a stabler society, except that, everyone has less stuff. North Korea is very stable, just like dead people are, and no one really has anything.
So now onto interest rates. Whether or not the Fed flooded people with low interest rates is not really the problem. You have low interest rates and low inflation because you need low inflation to have savings.
I do agree with you, though, that debt repayment by consumers will suppress economic growth in the short term, however, falling fuel prices will mitigate this somewhat. The problem is that everyone has borrowed too much. I've not seen too many figures indicating how much credit people are seeking, and, a ready indication of that figure would be a good tool for the fed to have and the people to see. I do believe that we shall public indebtedness decline and perhaps sharply. Just from my own perspective I've paid down about 30k worth of debt this year and I certainly have no plans to borrow soon, if ever. Like, I don't know that I'll ever take out another expensive car loan again...
But, if this happens, you see, people will need to save their money somewhere and it turns out that this savings can only go into precious few places. It can go under the mattress, which is stupid, it can go into commodities, which, I've argued might not be a bad move, or it can go into federal debt (treasuries), bank savings instruments, or securities, but all of those instruments are available to businesses as a means of obtaining cash for expansion and, you guessed it, the production of additional supply.
So, the moral of the story is, whether consumers choose to borrow and repay or save and buy, doesn't effect the overall course of Reaganomics all that much. All Reaganomics says is that investors are allowed to move their money about, just like consumers. The greatest irony of Reaganomics, we have achieved a sort of genuine sort of defacto socialism with it. There's a large percentage of the population that already does own stock of some kind, so much so, that one might well said that we as a people collectively do already own all the means to production.
Look, if you live in an environment where you are under pressure to sell loans regardless of the risk, then you are likely going to wind up with computer models that tell you that it is going to work.
Computer models always carry the assumptions of the authors and those assumptions can be altered to suit climate. In the case of Wall Street, the assumption was likely the number of defaults on an M.B.S. as a function of credit score... and the thing is, that I bet that is spooking everyone is, that, credit score may not be a good predictor of repayment. I bet a lot of people had a decent credit score, right up until they mailed in the keys to their house.
How about this revolutionary idea
How about this one? Why should the entertainment and media businesses have rights to private property when they have been leading the populist charge to get rid of them for everyone else now for 100 years? Seriously, you tell me why I should support the arm of government supporting Bruce Springsteen's right to license his music for 70 years after he is dead, when the same man is prancing around the country complaining that a 7% return on one's investment in Exxon Mobil should be taxed out of existence?
Come on dude. They want everyone else to live and die by their populism, why not try it on them first? If the Boss wants to make money on his music, how about he plays live and charges for tickets, rather than sit back and have us all pretend that digital content can't be copied.
It's absurd, there's no natural rights in this.
I love Cold Play, but I like V8 engines too, and sometimes, we just have to give it up for Mother Earth and progress.
Since Obama is going to create 5 million new jobs making windmills, then, if we lose 350,000 jobs by getting rid of copyrights, then, clearly there's still 4,650,000 jobs left. Maybe Madonna can work in a carbon sequestration plant, dressing up mother earth with her love.
Let's face it, GM has let go of more people in the last decades than all of the jobs in Hollywood, and a percentage of that is arguably because of liberal legislation who viewed the fallout as collateral damage in the fight for mother earth. It's high time conservatives start playing with the same deck of cards. If all of us who like oil and cars and stuff have to have our way of life upended in the name progress, then let's put hollywood on the table too. I can live without capitalized TV and you can too. If you want to make money off of a song more than once, play it more than once, that's what I say.
fundamental problem of the free culture movement: people perceive us as thieve
See, I think this a natural issue for Republicans to take up. I would rather say that it is not that you are thieves, it is that greedy hollywood wants to throw teenagers in jail for paying a tax on copying something that they can copy themselves.
Big copyrights are big government, I'd say.
Conservatives are reeling after three decades of getting torched by the liberals in the movies, songs and press, and are just itching for some payback. Yeah, you go stand in front of a crowd of Sarah Palin supporters and liberals want them to think that copying is a crime so they can loot the middle class with their copyright socialism. IT would be like waving a bloody finger in a kiddy pool filled with piranha. IF you sell copyright reform as a way to get rid of liberals, I guarantee you've immediately got 40% that's going to get a bitter pill this November, and then after that, you just need to get the non-riaa democrats to go with.
Copyright, long term, is a dead as a doornail.
Alright, this election is a lost cause but a core item in the new Republican Party that must emerge is a more open stance on copyrights. Democrats and liberals are in bed with copyrights because, well, the copyright is the life blood of the liberal - books, movies, etc, all require copyrights to succeed, and Republicans should be more willing to go after this jugular by removing the artificial laws that ensnare the very masses the Democrats claim to love.
If Democrats can do windfall profits taxes and penalty taxes on Republican economic interests ranging from petroleum to corn, then it only makes sense to shorten copyright to ten years and wave all civil penalties for infringement against anyone who, to borrow a page from Obama, makes under $250,000 a year.
If, after all, America's middle class is so strapped, then, why should we be forcing them to pay for something that they are perfectly capable of copying for free? If Madonna wants to be a Democrat, she can die by their economics.
I'm a Republican and I shouldn't be making this joke, but...
You know, its sounds like McCain is doing such a super job in the US Senate that we should keep him there.
You think it's funny, but it's not.
The point was that private companies are probably making satellites that exceed what military systems can do because the market is driving them to do so. Rather than believing the military has some super satellite that can count hairs on a head from 20,000 miles up in geo orbit, it might be more likely that private companies have passed them by when it comes to an end to end system. Even if the military's original data is better, I doubt that they could arrive at something more effective with a completely proprietary toolchain as the feds are won't to do, as opposed to a cheap PC style server set with some decent off the rack developer tools... either Windows or Linux with VS200x or Eclipse...
These are jet aircraft. They are enormously powerful aircraft with sufficient redundant power to deal with multiple engine failures. So, with all the engines on, you've got some zoom zoom if you want it. Remember that these things are derived from military bombers in design and as such even these big planes can do things that old Mustang prop aircraft would only dream of.
In fact, let's look at an A300 vs a P-51 Mustang... Mustang we think of as an agile fighter, the A300 as a lumberer. But... numbers tell the story. The Airbus, and really any modern commercial jet, will have a higher cruising speed, a higher climb rate, and better power to weight ratio than any world war II fighter aircraft.
So you yeah, in theory, you could quite literally g-loc your passengers, etc... that's why having the reinforced doors is the preferred anti-terrorism weapon. If you are a pilot with a terrorist banging on your door with a steakknife, all ya gotta do is push the stick foward and back and flatten the guy on the ceiling and then floor of the plane. You could quite literally kill the guy.
This is the EU basically trying to protect its markets for its own cell phone makers. I would think Nokia might be pushing for a regulation like this.
Watch carefully! There will probably be some nice sounding safety or environmental standard coming out of Washington somewhere that is the tit for this tat.
would seem to be a problem. I mean, if you get a few strikes of dust particles whacking your liquid mirror every couple of hours, won't it always have a bad picture?
Is that the government has just awarded a top secret no-bid contract to Google Earth so that they are the only ones pay 72 billion dollars for the state of the art in web based intelligence that the rest of us just use for free.
As much as Apple fans extol the "dock", if you leave the 3d graphics out of the equation, its just a baked over version of the "taskbar" like thing that came with OS/2 Warp, and honestly, its not as good.
That only makes sense if you think the guy in the desert recruiting suicide bombers gives a shit about email
Which guy? Where in the desert? Which desert?
No spy is going to find that!
But if spies could work, then so could computers.
It's not like you can send in a spy and they try and get a job at the Defense Ministry.. there is no terrorist defense ministry.
You have to send in a spy, and he or she is going to go around 2000 villages in northern Pakistan trying to find a terrorist ring. What do you do? Ask, "hey, do you know anyone who has an atomic bomb?"
In fact, you need to have lots of spies talking to lots of people, almost like a police state, and that set of spies has to be on top of the whole social fabric of the society in detail and in numbers. It turns out, in fact, that you DO need an army to stay on top of all of it!
Global demand is going down for the next few years and commodities are already
Crashing? Seriously, if you think long term that we are going to be able to go back to the economy where commodities were nearly free, please say so. Show me that Gawar sized field that has just been discovered, the newly uncovered vast anthracite deposits, those torrents of fresh water coming online from that long missing lake. Give me a link to that vast new copper strike and while we're at it, toss in cobalt, platinum and palladium as well. Please, tell me how the Chinese are going to do an about face and send 100 million newly made car owners back to the farms, and, how India is going to undo a decade of economic progress and send its people back to the hills. It just is not going to happen. Sure, there's a bit of a shock to the economy because of this change, but, this change is permanent. The resources are dwindling and demand is rising, long term.
Higher oil prices only benefit producers of crude.
So, how is that different from what I said before, where, the commodities sector is now the driving force in the economy? This is economic change, as I've said?
The fact that you think trucking companies are doing well proves you don't know what you're talking about.
UPS is profitable. I think they might have a few trucks....and, oh by the way, rail companies are doing really well as well.
You have said nothing to disprove my thesis, again, the economy has fundamentally changed so that commodities are more important than they have been in a long time. For decades commodities have been almost valueless and it was the manufacturing and services that added value, now, commodities are the thing that is important and everyone else is getting squeezed. If you want to prosper in this economy, you can either get in onto producing more commodities, or, you can have a service / support offering that allows people to livably use less of that commodity.
There's no need to rationalize NASA. You can't calculate an economic return for it any more than you can calculate the return of a brilliant song, but we sense that those are needed to enrich the human spirit. There are some challenges that great nations must undertake to further the human condition and understanding, like, as the Egyptians built massive monuments, so too the USA must lead the charge into space. When NASA sends back pictures of far away places, when Americans plant a flag on the moon, all of mankind gains from the experience.
I think that, now that government intervention in the economy is now on the table as a policy instrument, that's a good argument for Democrats to make. Let them be the party that wants to curtail forward looking science missions and exploration in favor of more short term social priorities.
On the other hand, let's have Republicans that instead of putting all of the science into the hands of the marketplace, recognize that government spending on the sciences and on technological infrastructure and education helps improve the business climate of the United States.
Any more, arguing over having government do something stupid, versus no government, is sometimes a false choice. When a private enterprise can actually finance missions to Mars and Jupiter profitably, then, by all means, there's no need for the government to do that. But in the meantime, we are on one planet, this is our solar system, the potential of space is nearly limitless, and we must remain committed to understanding it as much as possible.
Tell grandma to get a job and pay for her own pills... I want a rover!
You have a wonderfully shallow understanding of economics, and I'd be willing to bet it's accompanied by an equally firm belief that you're highly knowledgeable
My shallow understanding of economics tells me that every commodities company is making money hand over fist. Look at Exxon Mobil, ADM, any mining stock, all of those are up and up rather dramatically over the last year. Yes they have retrenched in the face of the global selloff, but, they are still at fairly high levels. Companies that directly service these firms are also doing really well. Drilling equipment providers, mining equipment providers, farming equipment providers, are all doing fairly well this year.
I've always been bothered that the USA could not be bothered to invest in its own LHC or better fusion system or do more to foster education in the sciences.
I think now that the bailout has put government economic intervention firmly back on the table and for the next generation, Republicans use their support for NASA as a springboard to try and get out in front and ask that government make investments in basic sciences so that American industries can reap the benefits down the road. Democrats are always going to push for federal spending for the disenfranchised over spending for business expansion, so, its only natural that Republicans become the party of building an America that is productive while the Democrats become the party of building an America that is livable.
Oil prices go up == feedstock prices go up == profit/wages go down.
Oil prices are everyone's base. If feedstocks are going up, you pass the cost in your produced product and get away with it. Trucking companies do this and make out well.
That oil will be sold on the global market and make essentially no difference in prices at both the consumer gas pump and the commercial feedstock suppliers. This isn't 1980 anymore, you might want to update your mental map.
You've made my point perfectly. Worldwide demand is so high, relative to production, that domestic attempts to flood supply or cut production don't have a long term impact on prices. Therefor, Obama's conservation plan cannot possibly work, which is what I said! He's living in the 1980s, not me.