He also uses "begs the question" when he should use "raises the question". I know a lot of people who would not find anything wrong with his sig at all, including the anti-grammar sentiment. If it's a joke, I don't find it funny either (and most people wouldn't even get the joke). If it isn't, then he isn't very good at English.
Third point: "fear" of gays. BYU is a church school. LDS doctrine states that homosexuality is bad, so the church's school isn't going to allow anybody to encourage behavior that goes against church doctrine.
Oh, I see. So prejudice is OK if the church says so. Gotcha.
Let me be perfectly clear. Step 1: Oil companies go bankrupt when investors becomes aware of declining production rates (why the fuck would you invest in something that is guaranteed to produce less and less). Step 2: The market crashes, since almost everything is dependent on oil. Step 3: General public panic and things go to hell.
Why won't the traders/companies/oil companies/ everyone else take into account the fact that oil will run out and invest/plan accordingly?
-because there's no point since once the market collapses all the money they could make by taking that into account will be useless.
Lol no. Most people are like you, and don't have any reason to believe the market will collapse. Most people think we have much more accessible oil than we really do.
Why will the market collapse and money become useless?
-because nobody will take into account in any way the fact that oil will run out.
Our consumption rate of oil is going up. Our dependency is GROWING. Our supply is dwindling. No one is ready for oil's price to skyrocket.
Have a look at the UK during the second world war.
They were pretty dependent on oil even then and yet when the military was grabbing all they could and the germans were sinking the ships carrying the rest you know what happened?
Food still got transported, things got a little more scarce, oil cost more, oil got rationed, people came up with alternative means of transport.
It didn't all grind to a halt overnight.
Now what you're talking about is far less traumatic, no uboats for one thing.
Baaahahahaha! You are seriously comparing 1940s to now??? If they were "pretty dependent" in 1940, then now they are "super mother fucking ridiculously dependent". In 1940 the world was consuming 5 million barrels a day, compared to now where we consume over 80 million barrels a day. Back then ICE powered transportation was new and expensive, so there were plenty of other kinds of transportation methods. In 1940 the world population was about 2.3 billion compared to our current 6.9 billion. In 1940 the average person consumed.8 barrels a year, and now they consume 4.2 barrels a year. So yes, it's going to hurt a lot worse than it did in 1940.
And after black Thursday all the contracts were void?
no.
Well, after the banks were tapped people couldn't get their money anymore. I believe that a world with a lot more people in it will tap the banks much faster.
No.
they just get gradually more and more expensive to run. as they get more and more expensive to run more and more people switch to other types of engine.
(oh sure, they wouldn't do that since the economy will collapse and hence there's no point in investing in plants to produce electric engines or in companies which build nuclear plants)
WTF. I start with the assumption that oil price will skyrocket and go on to explain how all the ICEs become useless after such an event. Then you think it's relevant to point out that the ICEs don't become useless because the oil price won't skyrocket. Way to contribute nothing there.
"peak oil" just means that supply will gradually decrease and the price will increase.
every investor in the field knows that that's going to happen.
So I'm guessing you didn't ever google "peak oil". Because it is an elaborate theory worth at least reading and given critical thought. Dismissing it for no reason doesn't do you any good, at least exercise your brain before dismissing it.
Me: Only if the infrastructure was in place to make the easy switch. Let's stay in reality here.
HungryHobo: *goes round and round in the circular logic*
Which of course nobody will build because there's no point since the economy will collapse and all the money they'd make would be useless.
Ah, I forgot to respond to your first statement. "My theory" didn't just pop itself into my head. Just google "peak oil" and you will find a ridiculous amount of information that explains this theory. So no, my theory does not assume that nobody sees what I see, because I didn't even know about the theory until very recently. Granted, there aren't many people who know about it, but there are definitely a lot more than "nobody".
But they are being greedy. They know that if they release their real numbers a very simple analysis will show that there is cause for some real concern. All you have to look at is how much economically feasible (aka, oil that doesn't net a loss in energy to produce) oil we have left, how much we expect to find by looking at oil deposit discovery trends, and how much oil we have been consuming recently. I'm confident this analysis would show that we only have a few years of oil left, and thus a public panic would ensue. The oil companies want to delay this panic as long as possible to ensure that they can live off of their wealth in the meantime, whilst also preparing for the coming meltdown.
Allright, well I thought this was obvious, but yes crude oil is not what normal people will hoard. Gasoline is.
You seem to have started with the assumption that the moment people have to pay twice as much to fill their tanks they'll start smashing in the heads of everyone around them in order to feast on the grey matter within.
No this isn't my assumption. My hypothesis is that once the market crashes and oil becomes unaffordable (as in it costs more to travel to work than your job pays) things will go to hell. It's really not that unreasonable, if the market crashes. Remember the first stock market collapse? That was one of these overnight catastrophes.
I'd say it's more that people thought what you were predicting was almost here, they gambled wrong and lost a lot of money.
Fine, but don't show me some bullshit 10 year snapshot graph to argue that oil prices have been steadily rising when they haven't. Especially when that graph cuts off the pertinent data that disproves your argument.
You keep talking in terms of oil cost.
it's energy cost not oil cost.
And we currently use 30 billion barrels (and rising) of oil a year as energy. Do all the hundreds of million ICEs that power the world magically turn into coal/natural gas/uranium engines when oil becomes unaffordable?
If oil price went through the roof people would use natural gas.
If oil and gas both go through the roof people start cracking coal for gas.
etc etc.
Only if the infrastructure was in place to make the easy switch. Let's stay in reality here.
economies take time to collapse and oil takes time to run out.
What are you talking about? Economies can be shattered extremely quickly. Black Thursday? Good point about the oil taking time to run out. It's been a hundred years and our consumption rate is still increasing.
The poeple who'll own it and who drive up the prices are comodities traders who won't actually have it in their possession and as such won't be able to trade it for sex in the road warrior style future you predict.
Exactly the reason people who know about peak oil don't invest in such ways. If you invest in oil commodities without having tangible access to them, what good is a piece of paper from the bank going to do you when the economy collapses?
If the price goes skyward then you can be sure companies will be going nuts trying to pull oil out of the less profitable places, if it costs 100 dollars to pull it out of the ground and you can only sell it for 80 then you're going to leave it there.
if you can sell it for 200 then you'll pull it out and sell it.
Not how it works. If it takes more energy to produce the oil than the amount of energy you get out of that oil, you do not make money, period. The flaw with your reasoning is that you think the cost of mining the oil stays constant. If it costs $100 to mine $80 worth of oil now, then when that oil is worth $200 it will cost more than $200 to retrieve it. The cost of retrieval is entirely dependent on the price of energy.
I'm just not seeing how we're going to wake up one day and suddenly money will be worthless,
It is definitely hard to believe, since the world economy has never had collapse of this magnitude. Nevertheless, I believe the evidence points to it.
nobody will do anything for a profit
Man...I never said that, why you gotta do dat? All I said was that people will start having a hoarding mentality. There will definitely be crime for profit and bartering for profit. However, things like food, water, and energy in general will be in such high demand that people will naturally hoard these resources.
And our infrastructure for such transportation methods that you suggest? Piddling in comparison to the oil infrastructure. It takes time for such transportation methods to ramp up to the level that oil is at. Time that we once had, but not anymore. How many electric powered shipping trucks do we have now? How many can we seriously expect to have in 5 years? Doesn't the fact that our oil consumption is still increasing even though our reserves are rapidly depleting suggest we are fucked? It would seem that the logical thing to do would be to use the oil however we wanted at first, then as we started to see limits to our supply we would start conserving and focus on developing alternative energy sources. Then, by the time oil reached permanent scarcity we would have phased out our dependence on it entirely.
Considering that the CIA has known about the problem of peak oil for over 30 years, yet we haven't built a nuke in 30 years suggests that the government doesn't work on the logic you employed. The only time the public would be willing to tolerate such risks is if they KNEW the economy was in imminent danger of collapse. However, the crux of the problem is that when the public becomes aware of the danger, that's when the economy collapses. I'm sure you've seen a microcosm of this effect, like when a snowstorm is predicted to hit and everyone buys out the local stores for food and generators. Imagine that on a world-wide scale. Hoarding mentality is what makes economies collapse.
Coal, brought to you by...oil. If you don't use oil to transport it, then you don't get to burn it at the current rates. If you transport it via pack mule, then you certainly burn less in a year. Don't forget the oil cost that went into building that plant...lots of parts getting shipped from all over the place.
The rich and greedy that know about this are certainly thinking about it. However, you still aren't getting my point about economic collapse. Post-collapse money is worthless, but assets are not. People will be unwilling to sell oil because of how useful it is for surviving and because they know they won't be able to get more later. Hoarding mentality. For those who hoarded more than enough to support themselves, yes they will barter with their surplus oil and most likely acquire some very nice assets. But it seriously won't take long for those with surplus to run out of surplus. And it certainly won't be easy to barter when most of the world is fighting for food and water.
Oh man, that graph is funny. You totally leave out the part where in 2009 a barrel of oil cost about $50. Not to mention the 20 years prior where some roller-coasters happened. The fact that oil went from $50 in '07 to $100 in '08 and back to $50 in '09 is a great indicator of how volatile the oil market is becoming.
You say going from 30 bill barrels to 0 is unrealistic, but I think what you are really saying is "our economy won't collapse." Which is fine, just argue that instead. I don't see what's so unrealistic about it IF the economy collapses. Now, when I say 0, I don't literally mean 0, I was being slightly hyperbolic. However, in regard to the average person, 0 is a pretty good estimate. At the point of permanent scarcity, I believe the military will most likely be in control of the remaining oil supplies.
Yes, we have enough uranium to meet our current demands for another 20 years or so, but we sure as hell don't have enough power plants. Consider the fact that it takes about 10 years to make a plant (don't forget to factor in the oil cost of BUILDING a plant), but our economy will have collapsed before that time. We would need 10,000 of the largest nukes to mitigate the energy discrepancy. Do you think we can build 10,000 nukes in under 10 years?
Nice, you really do know your history, that is exactly why the USSR collapsed. I admit that I simplified it, but in general what I said is true. The price of oil dropped because the US convinced the Middle East to flood the market with cheap oil. So cheap that USSR was pumping oil as fast as they could and soon after their production peaked. The CIA declassified this whole story so you can read all about it here
Basically, my argument is that the economy will collapse. Contracts are meaningless in a collapsed economy. Feel free to argue against this hypothesis, I have some good answers for a lot of questions. Just remember to take into account the collapsed economy in any "aftermath" arguments.
Heh, they don't just go up, they skyrocket. In fact, it becomes irrelevant how high the price becomes because no one can pay it. If the price of fuel was really represented simply by supply and demand, we would have seen this steady rise in price for a while now. Instead, fuel is the price the oil companies set it to be to support what our economy depends on. They manipulate the market by over-reporting their oil reserves, just like the link I provided earlier. They know damn well what would happen if they reported their real numbers. If what I suggest is correct, the REAL BIG problem we will have is going from an economy supported by 30 billion barrels of oil a year to 0. That is a stupidly big amount of energy that we need to compensate for. So no, investing in alt energy won't do me any good because money will be worthless by then. Furthermore, alt energy is primarily developed by oil companies, so investing in them is still investing in companies that I believe will collapse. And to make matters worse, all of our alt energy is HIGHLY dependent on oil to research, develop, and produce. Uranium, coal, and other such fuels must be mined (oil powered machinery) and shipped to be converted into energy. Solar panels and wind mills use exotic materials that must also be mined and shipped, and as we run out of those materials the same problem arises in regard to energy return on investment. Hydro is pretty good but that alone certainly can't mitigate the energy discrepancy.
If you want a really good example of what happens when oil demand outstrips oil supply, take a look at how the US won the Cold War. Basically, we made the USSR's economy collapse by making their oil peak. The US got into an arms race with the USSR which was fueled by oil on both sides. The US kept ramping up production and the Soviets kept in step. However, the US had a larger supply of oil and eventually the USSR had too high of a demand for oil for their supply to support. Then their economy collapsed.
Well it's not like one day oil will cost 50 dollars a barrel and the next it'll all be gone.
You're right that we won't go from having affordable oil to no oil overnight. However, we can go from having affordable oil to unaffordable oil overnight. That is pretty much what I meant by "economic collapse". You mention ships, but ironically ships play the smallest role in the shipping industry. A ridiculous amount of the earth's population is dependent on airplanes and trucks for their supplies (even harbor cities need trucks to ship from the docks) and those run strictly on oil derivatives.
Indeed, they are well aware. Shell fined $500 million for over-reporting gas reserves. If they were to report their real reserves and the rate at which new reserves were being found, their stock would nose-dive and our world's economy would collapse. We now consume close to 30 billion barrels of oil per year but find less than 4 billion per year. Our economy is completely dependent on oil. Think about how crucial the shipping industry is for our economy. How will it survive when it no longer has oil? How will we transport uranium, coal, natural gas, wind mills, and solar panels?
Actually, what the average American pays for oil is quite similar to how much Europeans pay. Oil is subsidized in various ways in the US, which means that Americans don't just pay for gas at the pump, but also in their taxes.
Right, like we really need to explore some dumbass rock.
Outer space is useless as far as I'm concerned.
Little knowledge can be gained by such endeavors.
Like we really need to burn more public funds via the gravity well that is the Earth.
Especially now that we have to deal with all this economic crisis bullshit.
Dumbasses. The people who made this ship are fucking dumbasses.
So, are we just gonna lie down and let these fucking scientists spend all our tax dollars like this?
Or are we gonna go kill us some politicians?
How much money are we gonna let these scientists waste?
A billion dollars?
RIIIIIIIIIIIGGGGGHT...
Don't fucking tell me this shit, it's all bullshit.
Why is it that for such a nerdy and cool subject as AI, slashdotters seem to know fuck all about it? If I ever see an article about learning machines, brain simulations, or petri dish brains I instantly read it and look for any juicy links. I can confidently say I have a vague understanding of AI and its progress. But from the responses I'm reading, I can tell I am leaps and bounds more knowledgeable (on this subject) than the average slashdot user. I was hoping that the opposite would be true and I would be treated to a forum full of juicy insights, but instead all I read is a bunch of AI bashing. Thank you for being part of the 1% of responses that were actually worth reading in here.
Slashdot Mirror
He also uses "begs the question" when he should use "raises the question". I know a lot of people who would not find anything wrong with his sig at all, including the anti-grammar sentiment. If it's a joke, I don't find it funny either (and most people wouldn't even get the joke). If it isn't, then he isn't very good at English.
All Vai does is play classical scales really fast.
Nice understatement.
Jimi wouldn't bother, his music had soul.
Subjective. Kinda like "strawberries taste awesome!" means nothing to someone who hates 'em.
Vai doesn't do anything that wasn't done much better well before Jimi's time.
Well that must mean he sucks...
Jimi didn't make versions of Vivaldi ether.
What's wrong with Vivaldi? More subjective dislike?
Third point: "fear" of gays. BYU is a church school. LDS doctrine states that homosexuality is bad, so the church's school isn't going to allow anybody to encourage behavior that goes against church doctrine.
Oh, I see. So prejudice is OK if the church says so. Gotcha.
Mod away - i have karma to burn.
Psssh, when you say that you almost always just get modded up :P
I like the "or anything" part. Real existential stuff :)
Mod parent up. Also, mod GP down. All it takes is a link to wikipedia and you get modded up here? What the hell...
You're using circular logic-
Let me be perfectly clear. Step 1: Oil companies go bankrupt when investors becomes aware of declining production rates (why the fuck would you invest in something that is guaranteed to produce less and less). Step 2: The market crashes, since almost everything is dependent on oil. Step 3: General public panic and things go to hell.
Why won't the traders/companies/oil companies/ everyone else take into account the fact that oil will run out and invest/plan accordingly? -because there's no point since once the market collapses all the money they could make by taking that into account will be useless.
Lol no. Most people are like you, and don't have any reason to believe the market will collapse. Most people think we have much more accessible oil than we really do.
Why will the market collapse and money become useless? -because nobody will take into account in any way the fact that oil will run out.
Our consumption rate of oil is going up. Our dependency is GROWING. Our supply is dwindling. No one is ready for oil's price to skyrocket.
Have a look at the UK during the second world war. They were pretty dependent on oil even then and yet when the military was grabbing all they could and the germans were sinking the ships carrying the rest you know what happened? Food still got transported, things got a little more scarce, oil cost more, oil got rationed, people came up with alternative means of transport. It didn't all grind to a halt overnight.
Now what you're talking about is far less traumatic, no uboats for one thing.
Baaahahahaha! You are seriously comparing 1940s to now??? If they were "pretty dependent" in 1940, then now they are "super mother fucking ridiculously dependent". In 1940 the world was consuming 5 million barrels a day, compared to now where we consume over 80 million barrels a day. Back then ICE powered transportation was new and expensive, so there were plenty of other kinds of transportation methods. In 1940 the world population was about 2.3 billion compared to our current 6.9 billion. In 1940 the average person consumed .8 barrels a year, and now they consume 4.2 barrels a year. So yes, it's going to hurt a lot worse than it did in 1940.
And after black Thursday all the contracts were void? no.
Well, after the banks were tapped people couldn't get their money anymore. I believe that a world with a lot more people in it will tap the banks much faster.
No. they just get gradually more and more expensive to run. as they get more and more expensive to run more and more people switch to other types of engine. (oh sure, they wouldn't do that since the economy will collapse and hence there's no point in investing in plants to produce electric engines or in companies which build nuclear plants)
WTF. I start with the assumption that oil price will skyrocket and go on to explain how all the ICEs become useless after such an event. Then you think it's relevant to point out that the ICEs don't become useless because the oil price won't skyrocket. Way to contribute nothing there.
"peak oil" just means that supply will gradually decrease and the price will increase. every investor in the field knows that that's going to happen.
So I'm guessing you didn't ever google "peak oil". Because it is an elaborate theory worth at least reading and given critical thought. Dismissing it for no reason doesn't do you any good, at least exercise your brain before dismissing it.
Me: Only if the infrastructure was in place to make the easy switch. Let's stay in reality here.
HungryHobo: *goes round and round in the circular logic* Which of course nobody will build because there's no point since the economy will collapse and all the money they'd make would be useless.
Ah, I forgot to respond to your first statement. "My theory" didn't just pop itself into my head. Just google "peak oil" and you will find a ridiculous amount of information that explains this theory. So no, my theory does not assume that nobody sees what I see, because I didn't even know about the theory until very recently. Granted, there aren't many people who know about it, but there are definitely a lot more than "nobody".
But they are being greedy. They know that if they release their real numbers a very simple analysis will show that there is cause for some real concern. All you have to look at is how much economically feasible (aka, oil that doesn't net a loss in energy to produce) oil we have left, how much we expect to find by looking at oil deposit discovery trends, and how much oil we have been consuming recently. I'm confident this analysis would show that we only have a few years of oil left, and thus a public panic would ensue. The oil companies want to delay this panic as long as possible to ensure that they can live off of their wealth in the meantime, whilst also preparing for the coming meltdown.
Crude oil isn't all that useful for surviving.
Allright, well I thought this was obvious, but yes crude oil is not what normal people will hoard. Gasoline is.
You seem to have started with the assumption that the moment people have to pay twice as much to fill their tanks they'll start smashing in the heads of everyone around them in order to feast on the grey matter within.
No this isn't my assumption. My hypothesis is that once the market crashes and oil becomes unaffordable (as in it costs more to travel to work than your job pays) things will go to hell. It's really not that unreasonable, if the market crashes. Remember the first stock market collapse? That was one of these overnight catastrophes.
I'd say it's more that people thought what you were predicting was almost here, they gambled wrong and lost a lot of money.
Fine, but don't show me some bullshit 10 year snapshot graph to argue that oil prices have been steadily rising when they haven't. Especially when that graph cuts off the pertinent data that disproves your argument.
You keep talking in terms of oil cost. it's energy cost not oil cost.
And we currently use 30 billion barrels (and rising) of oil a year as energy. Do all the hundreds of million ICEs that power the world magically turn into coal/natural gas/uranium engines when oil becomes unaffordable?
If oil price went through the roof people would use natural gas. If oil and gas both go through the roof people start cracking coal for gas. etc etc.
Only if the infrastructure was in place to make the easy switch. Let's stay in reality here.
economies take time to collapse and oil takes time to run out.
What are you talking about? Economies can be shattered extremely quickly. Black Thursday? Good point about the oil taking time to run out. It's been a hundred years and our consumption rate is still increasing.
The poeple who'll own it and who drive up the prices are comodities traders who won't actually have it in their possession and as such won't be able to trade it for sex in the road warrior style future you predict.
Exactly the reason people who know about peak oil don't invest in such ways. If you invest in oil commodities without having tangible access to them, what good is a piece of paper from the bank going to do you when the economy collapses?
If the price goes skyward then you can be sure companies will be going nuts trying to pull oil out of the less profitable places, if it costs 100 dollars to pull it out of the ground and you can only sell it for 80 then you're going to leave it there. if you can sell it for 200 then you'll pull it out and sell it.
Not how it works. If it takes more energy to produce the oil than the amount of energy you get out of that oil, you do not make money, period. The flaw with your reasoning is that you think the cost of mining the oil stays constant. If it costs $100 to mine $80 worth of oil now, then when that oil is worth $200 it will cost more than $200 to retrieve it. The cost of retrieval is entirely dependent on the price of energy.
I'm just not seeing how we're going to wake up one day and suddenly money will be worthless,
It is definitely hard to believe, since the world economy has never had collapse of this magnitude. Nevertheless, I believe the evidence points to it.
nobody will do anything for a profit
Man...I never said that, why you gotta do dat? All I said was that people will start having a hoarding mentality. There will definitely be crime for profit and bartering for profit. However, things like food, water, and energy in general will be in such high demand that people will naturally hoard these resources.
and oil companie
Nice post, subsidies are pants.
And our infrastructure for such transportation methods that you suggest? Piddling in comparison to the oil infrastructure. It takes time for such transportation methods to ramp up to the level that oil is at. Time that we once had, but not anymore. How many electric powered shipping trucks do we have now? How many can we seriously expect to have in 5 years? Doesn't the fact that our oil consumption is still increasing even though our reserves are rapidly depleting suggest we are fucked? It would seem that the logical thing to do would be to use the oil however we wanted at first, then as we started to see limits to our supply we would start conserving and focus on developing alternative energy sources. Then, by the time oil reached permanent scarcity we would have phased out our dependence on it entirely.
Considering that the CIA has known about the problem of peak oil for over 30 years, yet we haven't built a nuke in 30 years suggests that the government doesn't work on the logic you employed. The only time the public would be willing to tolerate such risks is if they KNEW the economy was in imminent danger of collapse. However, the crux of the problem is that when the public becomes aware of the danger, that's when the economy collapses. I'm sure you've seen a microcosm of this effect, like when a snowstorm is predicted to hit and everyone buys out the local stores for food and generators. Imagine that on a world-wide scale. Hoarding mentality is what makes economies collapse.
Coal, brought to you by...oil. If you don't use oil to transport it, then you don't get to burn it at the current rates. If you transport it via pack mule, then you certainly burn less in a year. Don't forget the oil cost that went into building that plant...lots of parts getting shipped from all over the place.
The rich and greedy that know about this are certainly thinking about it. However, you still aren't getting my point about economic collapse. Post-collapse money is worthless, but assets are not. People will be unwilling to sell oil because of how useful it is for surviving and because they know they won't be able to get more later. Hoarding mentality. For those who hoarded more than enough to support themselves, yes they will barter with their surplus oil and most likely acquire some very nice assets. But it seriously won't take long for those with surplus to run out of surplus. And it certainly won't be easy to barter when most of the world is fighting for food and water.
Oh man, that graph is funny. You totally leave out the part where in 2009 a barrel of oil cost about $50. Not to mention the 20 years prior where some roller-coasters happened. The fact that oil went from $50 in '07 to $100 in '08 and back to $50 in '09 is a great indicator of how volatile the oil market is becoming.
You say going from 30 bill barrels to 0 is unrealistic, but I think what you are really saying is "our economy won't collapse." Which is fine, just argue that instead. I don't see what's so unrealistic about it IF the economy collapses. Now, when I say 0, I don't literally mean 0, I was being slightly hyperbolic. However, in regard to the average person, 0 is a pretty good estimate. At the point of permanent scarcity, I believe the military will most likely be in control of the remaining oil supplies.
Yes, we have enough uranium to meet our current demands for another 20 years or so, but we sure as hell don't have enough power plants. Consider the fact that it takes about 10 years to make a plant (don't forget to factor in the oil cost of BUILDING a plant), but our economy will have collapsed before that time. We would need 10,000 of the largest nukes to mitigate the energy discrepancy. Do you think we can build 10,000 nukes in under 10 years?
Nice, you really do know your history, that is exactly why the USSR collapsed. I admit that I simplified it, but in general what I said is true. The price of oil dropped because the US convinced the Middle East to flood the market with cheap oil. So cheap that USSR was pumping oil as fast as they could and soon after their production peaked. The CIA declassified this whole story so you can read all about it here
Basically, my argument is that the economy will collapse. Contracts are meaningless in a collapsed economy. Feel free to argue against this hypothesis, I have some good answers for a lot of questions. Just remember to take into account the collapsed economy in any "aftermath" arguments.
Heh, they don't just go up, they skyrocket. In fact, it becomes irrelevant how high the price becomes because no one can pay it. If the price of fuel was really represented simply by supply and demand, we would have seen this steady rise in price for a while now. Instead, fuel is the price the oil companies set it to be to support what our economy depends on. They manipulate the market by over-reporting their oil reserves, just like the link I provided earlier. They know damn well what would happen if they reported their real numbers. If what I suggest is correct, the REAL BIG problem we will have is going from an economy supported by 30 billion barrels of oil a year to 0. That is a stupidly big amount of energy that we need to compensate for. So no, investing in alt energy won't do me any good because money will be worthless by then. Furthermore, alt energy is primarily developed by oil companies, so investing in them is still investing in companies that I believe will collapse. And to make matters worse, all of our alt energy is HIGHLY dependent on oil to research, develop, and produce. Uranium, coal, and other such fuels must be mined (oil powered machinery) and shipped to be converted into energy. Solar panels and wind mills use exotic materials that must also be mined and shipped, and as we run out of those materials the same problem arises in regard to energy return on investment. Hydro is pretty good but that alone certainly can't mitigate the energy discrepancy.
If you want a really good example of what happens when oil demand outstrips oil supply, take a look at how the US won the Cold War. Basically, we made the USSR's economy collapse by making their oil peak. The US got into an arms race with the USSR which was fueled by oil on both sides. The US kept ramping up production and the Soviets kept in step. However, the US had a larger supply of oil and eventually the USSR had too high of a demand for oil for their supply to support. Then their economy collapsed.
Well it's not like one day oil will cost 50 dollars a barrel and the next it'll all be gone.
You're right that we won't go from having affordable oil to no oil overnight. However, we can go from having affordable oil to unaffordable oil overnight. That is pretty much what I meant by "economic collapse". You mention ships, but ironically ships play the smallest role in the shipping industry. A ridiculous amount of the earth's population is dependent on airplanes and trucks for their supplies (even harbor cities need trucks to ship from the docks) and those run strictly on oil derivatives.
Indeed, they are well aware. Shell fined $500 million for over-reporting gas reserves. If they were to report their real reserves and the rate at which new reserves were being found, their stock would nose-dive and our world's economy would collapse. We now consume close to 30 billion barrels of oil per year but find less than 4 billion per year. Our economy is completely dependent on oil. Think about how crucial the shipping industry is for our economy. How will it survive when it no longer has oil? How will we transport uranium, coal, natural gas, wind mills, and solar panels?
Actually, what the average American pays for oil is quite similar to how much Europeans pay. Oil is subsidized in various ways in the US, which means that Americans don't just pay for gas at the pump, but also in their taxes.
Dunno if you've figured this out yet, but our government uses doublespeak. Anti-terrorism IS terrorism.
It took deaths on the Tour de France for cyclism to tackle the issue.
Wasn't it blood thickeners that were killing cyclists?
Heh, you nailed it. Was waiting for this reply before posting that I disagree entirely with everything I said :)
Right, like we really need to explore some dumbass rock.
Outer space is useless as far as I'm concerned.
Little knowledge can be gained by such endeavors.
Like we really need to burn more public funds via the gravity well that is the Earth.
Especially now that we have to deal with all this economic crisis bullshit.
Dumbasses. The people who made this ship are fucking dumbasses.
So, are we just gonna lie down and let these fucking scientists spend all our tax dollars like this?
Or are we gonna go kill us some politicians?
How much money are we gonna let these scientists waste?
A billion dollars?
RIIIIIIIIIIIGGGGGHT...
Don't fucking tell me this shit, it's all bullshit.
Why is it that for such a nerdy and cool subject as AI, slashdotters seem to know fuck all about it? If I ever see an article about learning machines, brain simulations, or petri dish brains I instantly read it and look for any juicy links. I can confidently say I have a vague understanding of AI and its progress. But from the responses I'm reading, I can tell I am leaps and bounds more knowledgeable (on this subject) than the average slashdot user. I was hoping that the opposite would be true and I would be treated to a forum full of juicy insights, but instead all I read is a bunch of AI bashing. Thank you for being part of the 1% of responses that were actually worth reading in here.