Odd. Your sig shows antiwar.com. I know the editor -- Justin Raimondo. I see him at many anarcho-capitalist conferences. The ebook I linked to was written by Rothbard who coined the term anarcho-capitalist and was a key influence on Raimondo.
Have you heard of the Free State Project or Free Talk Live?
I have and I do support these functions (I have donated to some other ones as well). I actually behind a micromovement in the Chicago area called the Free Trailer Park Project. I'm attempting to get a bunch of geeks to move to the town I live in (less than 500 residents) so we can boot out the current government, buy the property entirely from the previous owners, and work at developing some sort of co-op to handle costs, insurance, security and overall "governance." In effect we can downsize government by just not voting for government.
So far I have only had about 50 people look into moving, but considering you can move into my community for under $15,000 (as low as $4,000 if you don't mind a repo unit), you can live very comfortably and cheaper than you'd believe. I'm less than 40 minutes from both Chicago and Milwaukee. I publish a newsletter called "Mobile Home Millionaire" and have the strong drive to get more geeks out of the debt arena and into the wealth creation market.
I won't move to NH, yet. I have too many opportunities in the Midwest, but I'd move once those opportunities are gone.
Proper pricing can only come about when information about supply is both accurate and widespread, as you well know
Actually, I don't agree with this economic thought. I'm not 100% sure but I believe it is a Keynesian model fallacy -- it is a fallacy nonetheless.
Capitalism (as I define it) means a voluntary cooperation of two parties with a mutual profit made by both parties. Neither party needs to divulge their secrets as to what their profit is, or to divulge how much of the item they are trading they have. A consumer never tells the retailer how many dollars they have or what they'll profit from the use of the item -- the retailer never tells the consumer how much profit they're making from the sale or how much of the product they can get.
Transparency is irrelevant to the trade -- both parties are trying to maximize their gains. If you look at the price of a product and you won't be able to walk away with a gain, you won't buy that product at that price. If you're holding onto a product to sell and the consumer is offering a price lower than your cost, you won't sell the product.
The free market is better suited by people keeping secrets. These secrets also help to drive the costs down and the quality up -- which helps both the producer and the consumer in the long run.
Don't get the idea that anarcho-capitalism is in any way related to this guy's beliefs about the scarcity of oil.
Anarcho-capitalists believe that prices are set by supply and demand (either of which can be manipulated by government regulation). Insider information in a given market will only offer there very short term profits if the market is relatively free of regulations offering others the ability to compete. Oil, in my opinion, is no different. As the oil manipulators try to extend their profits (by raising prices or pushing for there to fearmongering in order to short prices), other forms of energy will be brought to market by the many innovators out there.
Scarcity of oil? When I see high prices, I'll believe there is a scarcity. As long as the price of oil is consistent with the quantity of dollars in the economy, I don't see any price increases, and I don't see any real scarcity in the short term (meaning my life).
It's funny -- I recently sold all my brick and mortar houses and condos and bought a trailer for my family. The day I bought my trailer is the first day I had ever even stepped in one. I have more square footage in my trailer (soon to be 3000 square feet if things go well) than I did in almost any previous house or condo (except 2) and all my utilities are significantly cheaper. Higher R-values give me a huge savings over owning a 50 year old house!
My dad owns a 2200 square foot house about an hour from where I live. His gas bill was over $550 last month. My trailer home is just under his total and I paid under $90 last month. His house is set to about 68 degrees, my significant other likes to sweat me to death.
I'm trying to buy out the trailer park from the current owner to set up a co-op so we can look into other ways to save money -- including finding alternative energy sources to save even more money. By backing away from what is forced down our throats, I believe we can save even more on top of the high efficiency living (and lack of a bubble).
Don't believe the hype -- I bet all these hype editors are looking to make huge gains in the stocks they're shorting:)
The hope is that alternatives address the problems before high inflation becomes an issue.
I believe that high inflation has already begun -- look at the housing and stock market bubbles for proof there. This is also why I have been a gold bug since 1999 and have lived completely on the gold currency standard for the past 18 months.
People will buy less gas at US$10 a gallon and even less at US$20.
Actually, this is not true. I firmly believe that gas is US$3+ per gallon in the US due to currency inflation by the Fed (see my other links regarding M3 money stock inflation). US$10/gallon based on today's money supply is too high, but US$10 per gallon could be low if they inflated the money supply 4 times the current value (leaving US$10 per gallon to be cheaper than we have it today).
Considering the money supply keeps going up in an out of control fashion, it is very hard to even make apple to apple comparisons. I've started to use the demarcation of US$ instead of $. I believe I should actually use the term 0106US$ to signify what time frame I am comparing to. 0106US$3 per gallon seems decent to me compared to 0104US$1.50 when you take into account the inflationary manipulations by the Keysenians in charge of monetary policy.
No, were not going to "run out" of oil, but the scarcity of it will price it out of common reach and eventually out of nessecity.
I don't see that happening. If gas ends up being too expensive, other forms of energy creation and conversion will be found. So far as I can tell, the only time gas was ever too expensive is when government created price caps (forcing the supply way down as no one would sell at the artificially mandated prices) or when government destroyed the value of currency -- during war and hyperinflation cycles. Useful energy will always be more and more affordable as time goes on, unless we see overregulation (as we did during the California energy crisis). In fact, I believe we'll see crazy gas shortages in Hawaii in the next 3-10 months as their government decided to work on setting price caps.
I'm very open about my AdSense revenues (within Google's TOS of course) not covering more than a few pennies here and there. The main reason behind running AdSense is to find other ways to monetize my writings.
My AdSense revenues don't go up with slashdot impressions -- geeks don't click links. In fact, slashdot totally destroys CTR:)
All of my blogs are freely available -- one of them I used to charge US$150 a year for the same print newsletter. I don't know many people making US$15,000/year from a blog, I'm sure not:)
Finite meaning we'll run out? Finite meaning our geophysicists still don't really have a clue what is happening more than a few miles beneath the surface? Finite meaning we don't even know anymore if oil is created from dead life? Finite meaning once its gone we'll have no other energy sources to tap?
Sorry, but man is innovative, and in almost all of history we have only become better at doing everything the previous generation did. I have faith in man, and I have faith in profit -- this is what drives people to innovate and find solutions for even the poorest people (look at food production!).
My research is driven by the knowledge that supply and demand set prices (which can only be manipulated in the short term by monopolies and government intervention). I strongly believe that the price of oil (and the price of many other items) is competitive, and would be MUCH cheaper if we removed government's interventions in the market.
As I just mentioned in this post, supply and demand sets the price of a given product based on market functions beyond the industry you're looking at.
Fisher's book you linked to seems to forget that the price of oil is heavily affected by supply and demand on usable energy sources. If OPEC or anyone in control of the oil supply raised the price too fast, you'd see more money spent looking for ways to use other energy sources.
The price of oil is always fair until you involve excession government regulations, mandates, taxes and other requirements. I believe that government screws up supply and demand issues in the short term, but in the long term the free market rules win out.
You seem to be under the impression that the supply/demand equation applies fully to the oil industry, which it does not.
Actually, you made a common mistake when addressing supply/demand equations: you can't not attribute pricing within an industry necessarily to supply/demand issues within that industry.
For example, I believe oil is priced at a supply/demand ratio -- but not just the supply of oil and the demand of oil. I believe part of the supply/deman issue has to do with the demand for ENERGY. Oil's price is based on the market's ability to use oil at US$60/bbl more profitably than other energy sources. If oil was in short supply and the price rose too quickly, others would investigate other energy sources -- the supply of energy available could increase, at which point the demand on oil would decrease, destroying the profit.
Supply and demand issues are often times criticized because the reader doesn't understand the market is very flexible in giving consumers of a product a reasonable price while still giving manufacturers a reasonable profit. Both parties are profiting from the transaction, and the price is definitively set by supply and demand within and outside of the specific market you're looking at.
Then you can see that economists holding to Keynesian beliefs are the cranks -- and they're the ones teaching in our colleges and running our governments. Yeeesh.
Money is affected by supply and demand just like anything. If you print more money at low interest rates, the money runs into the economy raising prices.
Think about it: If I gave you US$1000 today for no good reason, would you stuff it in your mattress? No, you'd buy something or you'd put it in the stock market. Now look at the US$25 billion we printed last week out of thin air: this money ran into housing markets, stock markets and retail markets -- raising the prices to meet the added supply of money.
Actually, I never said we'd still be using oil in 1000 years.
Looking back at my post, though, it does have a little flame-bait sound to it, so I apologize for that. My intention was to get the following point across:
"We won't run out of oil in 1000 years because we'll have replaced oil completely before the price gets out of control."
I believe that we'll always have oil -- it will just not be a useful energy producing product with what innovation and the free market will bring us in even then next 50 years. I can't imagine what we'll be using in 20 years -- it won't be oil unless we continue to subsidize the manufacture of products that use oil.
I believe we'll stick with oil until it is too expensive to keep our standard of living increasing (as oil as provided). At this point, increasing oil costs will give innovators more reason to find other ways to convert unusable into usable energy. Solar, wind, fusion, who knows what will come. All I know is that mankind is extremely innovate, and we want to see better lives for our next generation.
In 100 years we might all be living in glass domed cities with perfect air, perfect water and the best living we've ever faced -- who really knows? Better yet, who cares, we just need to work hard now to reap the benefits of working hard -- added wealth for the community around us.
Yup, but thanks for another link:) I actually blogged about this a few weeks ago (I was the first blogger to get the news) and I predicted this exact situation a year ago. I spend almost 2 hours a day researching money supply issues world wide in order to get a better grasp on the market realities.
I have a sad feeling that the entire nation will learn a lesson as we did in the 80s (and 60s and 40s and 20s) that will probably need to be relearned in the 2020s -- fiat currency causes the boom/bust cycle.
I can't find the link from my PDA but do a search for Thomas Gold and abiogenic theory. There is much more oil according to T. Gold than the current biogenic scientists would ever have believed.
You do realize oil is a byproduct of dead materials from days gone by don't you? Which means when its used up its gone.
And yet there are numerous scientists who are starting to think that it may not be dead dinosaurs and dead trees. We're not familiar with the process as we haven't been able to duplicate it in the lab -- so its theory. Could there are bacteria deeper in the earth that creates oil as a byproduct? Who really knows. The fact that oil is cheaper and consistently priced against the money supply leads me to believe that oil is not getting any more scarce.
The oil that is "regenerating" may be pushed up from deeper wells under higher pressure. The oil that is being found that can be used for lubricants helps us conserve the oil that we're using for energy and not turning into lubricants.
It is a complex market, and I'm happy to let supply and demand set the proper price of items. I really wish oil wasn't subsidized so the market could do its best based on the unregulated price of goods.
Late 80s M3 figure: 3000 Current M3 figure: 10,000
Price in that time: tripled.
Interesting, eh?
Also, we're not looking into the 90 other ways to create oil other than drilling. There are enough sources of oil, as far as my research goes. Unfortunately this is a hard debate for me, I pay over US$1000 a year for certain newsletters and I can't openly share some of the information. The market backs me up by keeping the price of oil consistent with the supply of money.
No new oil fields have been discovered, I agree. Yet I've read between the lines and investigated some of the companies buying out "dry" fields and finding more that have magically refilled a certain amount. I also have been researching some companies with deeper drilling innovations that have found more oil as well. Right now, US$66 per barrel has many price manipulations in the price (including the M3 money supply explosion in the past 10 years finally catching up). I think oil is still cheap at this current price and as prices go up, innovation to find cheaper ways to drill and refine it will come to the market.
I'm not worried about it -- if there truly was an industry-affecting shortage, oil wouldn't be US$66, it would be US$1000.
Actually, I was speaking with a foreign investor who told me that some investors have been inquiring about buying old garbage dump sites. Would it be funny if the next property bubble came out of people buying garbage dumps so they could look for scarce materials we've thrown out for generations?
Right now, it is cheaper to throw stuff out rather than keep it. Even recycling is costlier, which means it isn't really doing anything. Once we see scarcities in the market, we'll be thinking twice about dumping items that would have value to reuse.
1983 was merely a decade after currency was removed from a gold standard that fixed the price of gold at a low price for almost 60 years -- no one knew the value of gold versus the dollar. I firmly believe that 83 was a gold bubble similar to the housing bubble we have today -- the US government performed an easy money inflationary situation for borrowers, who then ran like lemmings into gold (and other assets) as those prices went up from the previous day.
Today I believe gold is undervalued almost 50% based on currency inflation and manipulations of the currency using imperialist mechanisms (war and threat of war) against other nations. I also believe that 2006 will be the year that the dollar starts a strong inflationary/devaluation cycle. I was bullish on gold in 1999 and started a newsletter that year -- and I've hit my target prices almost every 6 months since then. I was the only gold bug to publicly believe we'd see US$550 at the beginning of the year. I'm the only one who believes we'll see a BIG drop just before the end of the February as the futures market makes corrections (I foresee a US$100 drop almost), and I'm the only one who sees gold ending up at US$660-US$690 before Christmas.
I just noticed I said 1971 penny, I meant 1961, oops.
As the Fed inflates the currency (legal counterfeiting) prices rise. Gas has also had sideways manipulations in additional boutique fuels without licensing additional refineries, and some additional tax burdens inside and outside of this country. War also puts an added supply pressure on the oil we're currently pulling out of the earth, but I see no end to the new discoveries of wells I read about every week. Dig deeper, you'll find more. Leave dry wells alone, they'll regenerate.
Very interesting proposition. I suspect you will be successful IF you can hold your costs down.
That's part of the goal. Since this has a political bend to it, I am also receiving some donations for the cause to try to get things in motion to make some changes. It is very rare that the market becomes MORE free due to political changes -- usually we see less freedom.
Look into direct broadcast of concerts over the Net on a subscription basis as a revenue stream. I've been arguing that a LOT of fans of a band might want to see their favorite band do concerts on line once a week, rather than waiting a year for them to come back around on tour to their local area.
Already done. Bands will be able to sell subscriptions to their studio sessions -- live. If a fan likes the band they're seeing, they can buy the official CD and maybe get a 2 month subscription to their record studio time -- live (or archived). Nothing stops the fan from re-selling the archives themselves, of course, but this would be great free marketing.
I also have never understood why bands don't videotape and record every single one of their concerts and offer them for sale to fans (either on the spot, which is being done now by some bands, or later).
I am personally investing almost $25,000 into a real-time DVD production suite for specifically this reason. We're going to offer the concert venues a 50% take if they pay for 50% of the cost of videotaping the concert real time. We'll also let fans do their own recording, but they won't get access to our board! If fans can leave the show and pay $20 for a DVD of the show (with a quality engineered sound on it), the band can make good cash that way.
We're also offering an interesting pool of capitalist labor -- for people who want to learn to run sound or run video, we're letting them "volunteer" their time in exchange for having another trainee do the same for the volunteer's concerts. Keeping the costs down, offering people an education, and sharing the wealth -- capitalism at its finest.
You're grasping some of the ways small bands can make money in a free market -- without using copyright force. Even if we don't agree on the end result, I've added you as a friend:)
No, I'm returning definitions to where they originally were meant to be. Just as the term "liberal" changed from meaning libertarian to meaning socialist, the term "capitalism" has been destroyed from its true meaning.
What you call capitalism is actually a free market.
The are basically one and the same. The free market can not exist with a mutual trade of capital.
. Capitalism is an entirely separate beast which is predicated upon the (true) supposition that its tenets lead to exteme inequality, which is the utter antithesis of a free market; people can't be free to engage in unencumbered transactions when they do not approach on an approximately equal footing
This is not true. Every trade in a free market requires both parties to hide their intended profit as much as possible.
If you're trading one item you own (we'll call you the retailer) for a store of wealth called cash (we'll call him the consumer), you both have to hide your real profits. Both parties walk away believing they've made a profit from the trade -- the risk of losing is what gives you incentive to research the trade before entering in.
One party walks away with money worth more than the product they gave up, the other party walks away with a product worth more than the money they gave up -- both sides profited with absolutely no transparency in the transaction needed.
This is why I am against business regulations dealing with product quality. If you, the consumer, end up with a product that is worth less than the money you spent, you will stop buying from that retailer and you'll tell your peers to do the same. They'll look harder at the product offered at the retailer and make their own decision.
Capitalism IS voluntary cooperation with the mutual profit of both parties.
One of my insider mining newsletters that I subscribe to just mentioned how zinc might end up being the most rare material in the coming years. One guy said that pennies made before 1971 are worth more than 1c in copper, and that the newer pennies might soon be worth much more than 1c due to their high zinc content.
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Odd. Your sig shows antiwar.com. I know the editor -- Justin Raimondo. I see him at many anarcho-capitalist conferences. The ebook I linked to was written by Rothbard who coined the term anarcho-capitalist and was a key influence on Raimondo.
Have you heard of the Free State Project or Free Talk Live?
I have and I do support these functions (I have donated to some other ones as well). I actually behind a micromovement in the Chicago area called the Free Trailer Park Project. I'm attempting to get a bunch of geeks to move to the town I live in (less than 500 residents) so we can boot out the current government, buy the property entirely from the previous owners, and work at developing some sort of co-op to handle costs, insurance, security and overall "governance." In effect we can downsize government by just not voting for government.
So far I have only had about 50 people look into moving, but considering you can move into my community for under $15,000 (as low as $4,000 if you don't mind a repo unit), you can live very comfortably and cheaper than you'd believe. I'm less than 40 minutes from both Chicago and Milwaukee. I publish a newsletter called "Mobile Home Millionaire" and have the strong drive to get more geeks out of the debt arena and into the wealth creation market.
I won't move to NH, yet. I have too many opportunities in the Midwest, but I'd move once those opportunities are gone.
Proper pricing can only come about when information about supply is both accurate and widespread, as you well know
Actually, I don't agree with this economic thought. I'm not 100% sure but I believe it is a Keynesian model fallacy -- it is a fallacy nonetheless.
Capitalism (as I define it) means a voluntary cooperation of two parties with a mutual profit made by both parties. Neither party needs to divulge their secrets as to what their profit is, or to divulge how much of the item they are trading they have. A consumer never tells the retailer how many dollars they have or what they'll profit from the use of the item -- the retailer never tells the consumer how much profit they're making from the sale or how much of the product they can get.
Transparency is irrelevant to the trade -- both parties are trying to maximize their gains. If you look at the price of a product and you won't be able to walk away with a gain, you won't buy that product at that price. If you're holding onto a product to sell and the consumer is offering a price lower than your cost, you won't sell the product.
The free market is better suited by people keeping secrets. These secrets also help to drive the costs down and the quality up -- which helps both the producer and the consumer in the long run.
Don't get the idea that anarcho-capitalism is in any way related to this guy's beliefs about the scarcity of oil.
Anarcho-capitalists believe that prices are set by supply and demand (either of which can be manipulated by government regulation). Insider information in a given market will only offer there very short term profits if the market is relatively free of regulations offering others the ability to compete. Oil, in my opinion, is no different. As the oil manipulators try to extend their profits (by raising prices or pushing for there to fearmongering in order to short prices), other forms of energy will be brought to market by the many innovators out there.
Scarcity of oil? When I see high prices, I'll believe there is a scarcity. As long as the price of oil is consistent with the quantity of dollars in the economy, I don't see any price increases, and I don't see any real scarcity in the short term (meaning my life).
It's funny -- I recently sold all my brick and mortar houses and condos and bought a trailer for my family. The day I bought my trailer is the first day I had ever even stepped in one. I have more square footage in my trailer (soon to be 3000 square feet if things go well) than I did in almost any previous house or condo (except 2) and all my utilities are significantly cheaper. Higher R-values give me a huge savings over owning a 50 year old house!
:)
My dad owns a 2200 square foot house about an hour from where I live. His gas bill was over $550 last month. My trailer home is just under his total and I paid under $90 last month. His house is set to about 68 degrees, my significant other likes to sweat me to death.
I'm trying to buy out the trailer park from the current owner to set up a co-op so we can look into other ways to save money -- including finding alternative energy sources to save even more money. By backing away from what is forced down our throats, I believe we can save even more on top of the high efficiency living (and lack of a bubble).
Don't believe the hype -- I bet all these hype editors are looking to make huge gains in the stocks they're shorting
The hope is that alternatives address the problems before high inflation becomes an issue.
I believe that high inflation has already begun -- look at the housing and stock market bubbles for proof there. This is also why I have been a gold bug since 1999 and have lived completely on the gold currency standard for the past 18 months.
People will buy less gas at US$10 a gallon and even less at US$20.
Actually, this is not true. I firmly believe that gas is US$3+ per gallon in the US due to currency inflation by the Fed (see my other links regarding M3 money stock inflation). US$10/gallon based on today's money supply is too high, but US$10 per gallon could be low if they inflated the money supply 4 times the current value (leaving US$10 per gallon to be cheaper than we have it today).
Considering the money supply keeps going up in an out of control fashion, it is very hard to even make apple to apple comparisons. I've started to use the demarcation of US$ instead of $. I believe I should actually use the term 0106US$ to signify what time frame I am comparing to. 0106US$3 per gallon seems decent to me compared to 0104US$1.50 when you take into account the inflationary manipulations by the Keysenians in charge of monetary policy.
No, were not going to "run out" of oil, but the scarcity of it will price it out of common reach and eventually out of nessecity.
I don't see that happening. If gas ends up being too expensive, other forms of energy creation and conversion will be found. So far as I can tell, the only time gas was ever too expensive is when government created price caps (forcing the supply way down as no one would sell at the artificially mandated prices) or when government destroyed the value of currency -- during war and hyperinflation cycles. Useful energy will always be more and more affordable as time goes on, unless we see overregulation (as we did during the California energy crisis). In fact, I believe we'll see crazy gas shortages in Hawaii in the next 3-10 months as their government decided to work on setting price caps.
I'm very open about my AdSense revenues (within Google's TOS of course) not covering more than a few pennies here and there. The main reason behind running AdSense is to find other ways to monetize my writings.
:)
:)
My AdSense revenues don't go up with slashdot impressions -- geeks don't click links. In fact, slashdot totally destroys CTR
All of my blogs are freely available -- one of them I used to charge US$150 a year for the same print newsletter. I don't know many people making US$15,000/year from a blog, I'm sure not
Finite meaning we'll run out? Finite meaning our geophysicists still don't really have a clue what is happening more than a few miles beneath the surface? Finite meaning we don't even know anymore if oil is created from dead life? Finite meaning once its gone we'll have no other energy sources to tap?
Sorry, but man is innovative, and in almost all of history we have only become better at doing everything the previous generation did. I have faith in man, and I have faith in profit -- this is what drives people to innovate and find solutions for even the poorest people (look at food production!).
My research is driven by the knowledge that supply and demand set prices (which can only be manipulated in the short term by monopolies and government intervention). I strongly believe that the price of oil (and the price of many other items) is competitive, and would be MUCH cheaper if we removed government's interventions in the market.
As I just mentioned in this post, supply and demand sets the price of a given product based on market functions beyond the industry you're looking at.
Fisher's book you linked to seems to forget that the price of oil is heavily affected by supply and demand on usable energy sources. If OPEC or anyone in control of the oil supply raised the price too fast, you'd see more money spent looking for ways to use other energy sources.
The price of oil is always fair until you involve excession government regulations, mandates, taxes and other requirements. I believe that government screws up supply and demand issues in the short term, but in the long term the free market rules win out.
You seem to be under the impression that the supply/demand equation applies fully to the oil industry, which it does not.
Actually, you made a common mistake when addressing supply/demand equations: you can't not attribute pricing within an industry necessarily to supply/demand issues within that industry.
For example, I believe oil is priced at a supply/demand ratio -- but not just the supply of oil and the demand of oil. I believe part of the supply/deman issue has to do with the demand for ENERGY. Oil's price is based on the market's ability to use oil at US$60/bbl more profitably than other energy sources. If oil was in short supply and the price rose too quickly, others would investigate other energy sources -- the supply of energy available could increase, at which point the demand on oil would decrease, destroying the profit.
Supply and demand issues are often times criticized because the reader doesn't understand the market is very flexible in giving consumers of a product a reasonable price while still giving manufacturers a reasonable profit. Both parties are profiting from the transaction, and the price is definitively set by supply and demand within and outside of the specific market you're looking at.
A lot of economists think it's actually the other way around -- i.e., that much of today's inflation is caused by rising commodity prices.
Which is why I don't trust them.
Read Rothbard's (FREE!) e-book: http://www.mises.org/money.asp
Then you can see that economists holding to Keynesian beliefs are the cranks -- and they're the ones teaching in our colleges and running our governments. Yeeesh.
Money is affected by supply and demand just like anything. If you print more money at low interest rates, the money runs into the economy raising prices.
Think about it: If I gave you US$1000 today for no good reason, would you stuff it in your mattress? No, you'd buy something or you'd put it in the stock market. Now look at the US$25 billion we printed last week out of thin air: this money ran into housing markets, stock markets and retail markets -- raising the prices to meet the added supply of money.
Actually, I never said we'd still be using oil in 1000 years.
Looking back at my post, though, it does have a little flame-bait sound to it, so I apologize for that. My intention was to get the following point across:
"We won't run out of oil in 1000 years because we'll have replaced oil completely before the price gets out of control."
I believe that we'll always have oil -- it will just not be a useful energy producing product with what innovation and the free market will bring us in even then next 50 years. I can't imagine what we'll be using in 20 years -- it won't be oil unless we continue to subsidize the manufacture of products that use oil.
I believe we'll stick with oil until it is too expensive to keep our standard of living increasing (as oil as provided). At this point, increasing oil costs will give innovators more reason to find other ways to convert unusable into usable energy. Solar, wind, fusion, who knows what will come. All I know is that mankind is extremely innovate, and we want to see better lives for our next generation.
In 100 years we might all be living in glass domed cities with perfect air, perfect water and the best living we've ever faced -- who really knows? Better yet, who cares, we just need to work hard now to reap the benefits of working hard -- added wealth for the community around us.
That is why I love capitalism without force.
Yup, but thanks for another link :) I actually blogged about this a few weeks ago (I was the first blogger to get the news) and I predicted this exact situation a year ago. I spend almost 2 hours a day researching money supply issues world wide in order to get a better grasp on the market realities.
I have a sad feeling that the entire nation will learn a lesson as we did in the 80s (and 60s and 40s and 20s) that will probably need to be relearned in the 2020s -- fiat currency causes the boom/bust cycle.
I can't find the link from my PDA but do a search for Thomas Gold and abiogenic theory. There is much more oil according to T. Gold than the current biogenic scientists would ever have believed.
You do realize oil is a byproduct of dead materials from days gone by don't you? Which means when its used up its gone.
And yet there are numerous scientists who are starting to think that it may not be dead dinosaurs and dead trees. We're not familiar with the process as we haven't been able to duplicate it in the lab -- so its theory. Could there are bacteria deeper in the earth that creates oil as a byproduct? Who really knows. The fact that oil is cheaper and consistently priced against the money supply leads me to believe that oil is not getting any more scarce.
The oil that is "regenerating" may be pushed up from deeper wells under higher pressure. The oil that is being found that can be used for lubricants helps us conserve the oil that we're using for energy and not turning into lubricants.
It is a complex market, and I'm happy to let supply and demand set the proper price of items. I really wish oil wasn't subsidized so the market could do its best based on the unregulated price of goods.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/WM3NS/ 28
Late 80s M3 figure: 3000
Current M3 figure: 10,000
Price in that time: tripled.
Interesting, eh?
Also, we're not looking into the 90 other ways to create oil other than drilling. There are enough sources of oil, as far as my research goes. Unfortunately this is a hard debate for me, I pay over US$1000 a year for certain newsletters and I can't openly share some of the information. The market backs me up by keeping the price of oil consistent with the supply of money.
No new oil fields have been discovered, I agree. Yet I've read between the lines and investigated some of the companies buying out "dry" fields and finding more that have magically refilled a certain amount. I also have been researching some companies with deeper drilling innovations that have found more oil as well. Right now, US$66 per barrel has many price manipulations in the price (including the M3 money supply explosion in the past 10 years finally catching up). I think oil is still cheap at this current price and as prices go up, innovation to find cheaper ways to drill and refine it will come to the market.
I'm not worried about it -- if there truly was an industry-affecting shortage, oil wouldn't be US$66, it would be US$1000.
Actually, I was speaking with a foreign investor who told me that some investors have been inquiring about buying old garbage dump sites. Would it be funny if the next property bubble came out of people buying garbage dumps so they could look for scarce materials we've thrown out for generations?
Right now, it is cheaper to throw stuff out rather than keep it. Even recycling is costlier, which means it isn't really doing anything. Once we see scarcities in the market, we'll be thinking twice about dumping items that would have value to reuse.
1983 was merely a decade after currency was removed from a gold standard that fixed the price of gold at a low price for almost 60 years -- no one knew the value of gold versus the dollar. I firmly believe that 83 was a gold bubble similar to the housing bubble we have today -- the US government performed an easy money inflationary situation for borrowers, who then ran like lemmings into gold (and other assets) as those prices went up from the previous day.
Today I believe gold is undervalued almost 50% based on currency inflation and manipulations of the currency using imperialist mechanisms (war and threat of war) against other nations. I also believe that 2006 will be the year that the dollar starts a strong inflationary/devaluation cycle. I was bullish on gold in 1999 and started a newsletter that year -- and I've hit my target prices almost every 6 months since then. I was the only gold bug to publicly believe we'd see US$550 at the beginning of the year. I'm the only one who believes we'll see a BIG drop just before the end of the February as the futures market makes corrections (I foresee a US$100 drop almost), and I'm the only one who sees gold ending up at US$660-US$690 before Christmas.
I just noticed I said 1971 penny, I meant 1961, oops.
Check oil prices per gallon versus the following graph:
/ 28
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/WM3NS
As the Fed inflates the currency (legal counterfeiting) prices rise. Gas has also had sideways manipulations in additional boutique fuels without licensing additional refineries, and some additional tax burdens inside and outside of this country. War also puts an added supply pressure on the oil we're currently pulling out of the earth, but I see no end to the new discoveries of wells I read about every week. Dig deeper, you'll find more. Leave dry wells alone, they'll regenerate.
Very interesting proposition. I suspect you will be successful IF you can hold your costs down.
:)
That's part of the goal. Since this has a political bend to it, I am also receiving some donations for the cause to try to get things in motion to make some changes. It is very rare that the market becomes MORE free due to political changes -- usually we see less freedom.
Look into direct broadcast of concerts over the Net on a subscription basis as a revenue stream. I've been arguing that a LOT of fans of a band might want to see their favorite band do concerts on line once a week, rather than waiting a year for them to come back around on tour to their local area.
Already done. Bands will be able to sell subscriptions to their studio sessions -- live. If a fan likes the band they're seeing, they can buy the official CD and maybe get a 2 month subscription to their record studio time -- live (or archived). Nothing stops the fan from re-selling the archives themselves, of course, but this would be great free marketing.
I also have never understood why bands don't videotape and record every single one of their concerts and offer them for sale to fans (either on the spot, which is being done now by some bands, or later).
I am personally investing almost $25,000 into a real-time DVD production suite for specifically this reason. We're going to offer the concert venues a 50% take if they pay for 50% of the cost of videotaping the concert real time. We'll also let fans do their own recording, but they won't get access to our board! If fans can leave the show and pay $20 for a DVD of the show (with a quality engineered sound on it), the band can make good cash that way.
We're also offering an interesting pool of capitalist labor -- for people who want to learn to run sound or run video, we're letting them "volunteer" their time in exchange for having another trainee do the same for the volunteer's concerts. Keeping the costs down, offering people an education, and sharing the wealth -- capitalism at its finest.
You're grasping some of the ways small bands can make money in a free market -- without using copyright force. Even if we don't agree on the end result, I've added you as a friend
Unfortunately, you're making those up.
No, I'm returning definitions to where they originally were meant to be. Just as the term "liberal" changed from meaning libertarian to meaning socialist, the term "capitalism" has been destroyed from its true meaning.
What you call capitalism is actually a free market.
The are basically one and the same. The free market can not exist with a mutual trade of capital.
. Capitalism is an entirely separate beast which is predicated upon the (true) supposition that its tenets lead to exteme inequality, which is the utter antithesis of a free market; people can't be free to engage in unencumbered transactions when they do not approach on an approximately equal footing
This is not true. Every trade in a free market requires both parties to hide their intended profit as much as possible.
If you're trading one item you own (we'll call you the retailer) for a store of wealth called cash (we'll call him the consumer), you both have to hide your real profits. Both parties walk away believing they've made a profit from the trade -- the risk of losing is what gives you incentive to research the trade before entering in.
One party walks away with money worth more than the product they gave up, the other party walks away with a product worth more than the money they gave up -- both sides profited with absolutely no transparency in the transaction needed.
This is why I am against business regulations dealing with product quality. If you, the consumer, end up with a product that is worth less than the money you spent, you will stop buying from that retailer and you'll tell your peers to do the same. They'll look harder at the product offered at the retailer and make their own decision.
Capitalism IS voluntary cooperation with the mutual profit of both parties.
One of my insider mining newsletters that I subscribe to just mentioned how zinc might end up being the most rare material in the coming years. One guy said that pennies made before 1971 are worth more than 1c in copper, and that the newer pennies might soon be worth much more than 1c due to their high zinc content.
Time to horde pennies maybe.