I've been saying since high school (17 years) that we need this technology.
Maybe, but I think technology might just skip right past the e-paper stage, and go straight to the 3DVisor
. Yes, paper still has some advantages right now, but these things are already available at $899 a pop. Expensive, yes, but the price will come down eventually, and the price of portable devices is already not that cheap. Maybe best of all it runs off the power of a USB port, so you could hook it up to a PDA and simulate a 105 inch monitor while riding in the bus, on an airplane, sitting on the throne, whatever.
It's already something I'd like to buy, and the features are just going to continue to be expanded. Forget printing out a paper and handing it to your coworker. With 3D capability and a head tracking device, you can just simulate paper right in your visor.
So when all the jobs are outsourced and everyone around the world is making $8/hr in the new Global Economy, who is going to be able to afford $200 for an operating system? Or $500 for Office? Or $1500 for Adobe?
If Microsoft only had to pay $8/hr to its employees it wouldn't need to charge anywhere near $200 for an OS to make the same profit.
Not that that's going to happen. There are plenty of jobs available at more than $8/hr.
It's 48 hours before a hurricane hits. EVERYONE knows it's coming and are made painfully aware of the possibilities. Things look bad, people are told to evacuate.
Actually it was more like 24 hours before the hurricane hit when the mandatory evacuation order came, whereas it should have come 72 hours before. Further, there was no transportation provided to those without cars - many people wanted to leave, but couldn't. Those who couldn't leave were told to stay at the stadium, where they didn't even have food and water available for them.
Next time around the mandatory evacuations should come much earlier, and there should be transportation provided. In fact, they should have traffic lanes going out of the city which can be dedicated solely to high occupancy vehicles. All of this can be planned ahead of time so that 48 hours is plenty of time to evacuate everyone. It can be done, and it must be done, and people shouldn't be told to return until those evacuation plans are in place.
It's now 24 hours before the hurricane hits. Many people have fled as the storm has strengthened.
Finally the mayor decides to call for a mandatory evacuation.
It's clear that this is going to be a nasty storm.
I seriously doubt that the vast majority of those who stayed realized the severity of what was going to happen; this should have been made clear.
Com'on man. How the hell are state and local officials supposed to forcefully evacuate thousands of people in hours?
In 72 hours, with a good evacuation plan, providing the transportation rather than just telling people that they can leave if they want, there shouldn't be over 10 thousand people still in the city when the shit goes down.
Would some idiots refuse to leave? Of course. But it wouldn't have been nearly as bad.
Isn't this supposed to be a free country, where you can (within limits) choose your own destiny? Why do you expect the government to come to your house and FORCE YOU TO LEAVE when a storm is staring you in the fucking face?
I'm not saying they should force anyone to leave. They can't even really do that. Like you said, it's a free country. All I'm saying is they should have told people that they had to leave while they still had a chance to all get out. And that means providing transportation for those who can't provide their own. It also means either a) building enough roads so that people can evacuate in the time you give them, or b) issuing the evacuation order earlier, when it's less clear whether or not it's going to be necessary.
The NFIP is self-supporting for the average historical loss year, which means that operating expenses and flood insurance claims are not paid for by the taxpayer, but through premiums collected for flood insurance policies. The Program has borrowing authority from the U.S. Treasury for times when losses are heavy, however, these loans are paid back with interest.
Thanks for the information. I didn't know that. Flood insurance rates for zone 1 are very high here, so I find it somewhat hard to believe they can be that highly subsidised, but I know where to go to look up more info about it, anyway.
Require improved building codes for hurricane resistance.
I don't see the point in that. Unless the hurricane hits you dead on, or you live in a mobile home or something, the wind isn't going to be what gets your home, it's the water, and I'm not sure how you're going to improve the building code to handle that. Besides, if you have insurance then it's not the government's problem anyway, it's the insurance company's.
Don't allow people to build directly on flood plains. Don't drain hurricane-buffering wetlands for million dollar condos.
Maybe. Though the real problem isn't the million dollar condos (they'll buffer the hurricane too). They'll be insured, and the residents will have no problem evacuating them before the hurricane hits. Filling up the floodplains with low-income housing with people with no insurance is another story, but even then, the problem would have been much lessened if the evacuation was handled better. I read the night before the hurricane hit that it was basically a 50/50 chance that the levees were going to break, so it's not like this should have been a surprise. There should not have been thousands of people left in that city when the storm came ashore. The government screwed up bad on that one, at the local, state, and federal levels.
Don't abandon Florida, simply require everybody to be self-insured. Insurance subsidies of people who want to enjoy ocean views force people living in trailer parks in Des Moines chip in to guarantee that people who build on the barrier islands of North Carolina (which repeatedly get wiped out) are close enough to repayment so ensure that the FEMA assistance will be enough for them to rebuild the same house in the same dangerous location.
Does FEMA really subsidize the insurace of people in flood zones? If so, that's definitely not a good thing. But considering that here in Florida those in zone 1 pay ten times as much in flood insurance as those in zone 2, I doubt it's true.
Again, the problem isn't the lack of insurance. If people want to take a chance, then they might just lose their house. The problem, in New Orleans, is that the word to evacuate wasn't given in time, and that much of the population of the city didn't have the means to evacuate. AFAIK, FEMA spends most of its money saving lives, not building houses.
My two cents: rebuild the port but not the houses. If people want to live there, let them assume their own risks.
The government probably shouldn't and won't be involved in building many individual buildings (beyond government buildings). If the private industry/citizens want to build there, the government shouldn't disallow them. But there needs to be a complete evacuation plan first.
But it seems that wealthy people build expensive houses in repeatedly flooded areas and get the Goverment to bail them out time after time.
What bail-outs are you talking about, though? Most wealthy people who live in these flood zones have insurance which cover the rebuilding. If they have losses beyond their insurance they'll get a tax deduction, but that's just the way taxes work - if they lost the money in the stock market or in a business venture they'd get a deduction too.
It may be just my perception though, since I have sense enough to not build where the water can reach, and am not privy to their finances.
Well, I think maybe it is just your perception, because I really don't know what bail outs you're talking about.
The government did bail out the airline companies after 9/11, by paying off the victims in return for not suing the airlines, but that's really a different matter than this.
Yeah, these people in New Orleans only lived there because of the promise of governmental disaster relief. Sure, half their family will be killed, they'll have no food or water for days, and they'll be homeless for months, but after half of them are dead the President will show up and make a speech, some soldiers will carry the dead bodies away, and they'll get a tax break, and that'll make it all worth it.
There might be a correlation there, but to think that people are putting themselves into these situations because of the governmental disaster relief is just ridiculous.
Prices will dip a bit, probably, but $35 [a barrel, for crude oil, presumably] within the year seems pretty ridiculous.
Agreed. Besides, much of the recent rise in gasoline prices is due to a rise in refining costs, not oil prices. Oil spiked too, but not as much.
"I sure know I didn't fill up my tank at $3.00/gallon. I'll wait a week or two 'til it's down to $2.50 again." Could be longer than that. I've heard some reports that it will take a month or two to get those refineries back online.
You might be right. I was going on the fact that it takes about 10 days to refine the oil released from the strategic oil reserves. But if the refineries are a bottleneck, I guess that doesn't matter.
At any rate, thanks for correcting my misconception about oil futures.
No problem. I had to double check it with regard to commodities first, since I've only ever dealt directly with single-stock futures. But with stock futures, that's one of the main benefits - you don't have to take out a margin loan (with interest which is only tax-deductible if you itemize).
This is a true story, right? I ask this, because recently Slashdot linked to a story on the Onion without making any indication that the story was untrue. But someone pointed out the presence of the "It's funny. Laugh." icon on the story. But I just looked at this story, and it has the same icon on it.
Oil prices are in a speculative bubble right now. On top of this, we have some temporary problems with the refineries, and we have millions of barrels of oil from the strategic reserve that were just released. Furthermore, this whole $3.00/gallon thing has probably woken a lot of people up and demand will likely be going down. Remember, oil is a cartel-controlled market, so prices are largely determined by demand.
Sure, there are a lot of events that could cause oil prices to explode, but so long as these events don't occur you can expect oil prices to come down and gasoline prices to come way down.
I sure know I didn't fill up my tank at $3.00/gallon. I'll wait a week or two 'til it's down to $2.50 again.
Yeah, losing millions of dollars just so you can make a statistic that maybe 0.001% of the country would even look at let alone understand. That makes a lot of sense.
If you really believe that, the futures are free for you to invest in. Buy 'em up cheap and you'll be rich.
It's not that I don't think it isn't worth cleaning up the environment, it's that I think there's better ways to spend the resources with the same ultimate goal.
If you think there are better ways to spend the resources, then you don't think it's worth it (worth spending the resources) to clean up the environment. Nothing wrong with that, I agree that at some point you're probably spending too much money for it to be worth it.
If it sits better with you, then call it a tax break instead of a grant.
I don't think we should be giving tax breaks selectively to companies that are researching alternative energy sources either.
It's really not any different from what the US government has been doing for well over a century, except that it's in a different industry. You do realize that the US government has a *long* history of offering tax breaks to help in the development of new industries that can help its ultimate goals, right?
Sure I do. Doesn't make it right.
Most people don't give a shit about the needs of others, and are quite happy looking out for themselves. That's why we have labour laws and minimum wage....
It's not just oil companies selling them, but what they would get is a guaranteed rate at which they can sell their product. And despite the fact that you think prices are going to rise, obviously the market disagrees, and thinks that prices are going to fall.
We've got enough fuel to last us decades, particularly if this shale oil thing takes off, and because of that, there isn't enough of a desire in the free market to develop alternative fuels.
Nor is there much of a reason to worry about alternative fuels at this time. Of course, if taxes and thus prices go up significantly, suddenly there is a reason.
There *are* companies that are developping alternative fuel technologies, but do I really need to remind you what happened to the EV1? The car industry has already proven that it can create super-efficient vehicles and cars that run on alternative fuels. So how come you still can't buy a car that doesn't require gasoline or diesel?
Well, you could, but it'd be expensive. In any event, there isn't that much demand right now for a car that doesn't require gas or diesel. The design is there, the company proved they could make it. So as soon as the price of gas and diesel goes up enough to require the car, they'll have no problem bringing it back.
This is another reason why it's stupid for the government to research alternative technologies - the private industry has already designed many of them, people just don't want them right now.
I'm not saying that the government should be the ones developping alternative fuels, I'm saying that the government should be giving grants to the companies that *are* developping it, so that these companies can finish their development faster, and the government should be giving grants to promote the sale of alternative fuel vehicles.
And I'm saying giving grants is a waste of money. As long as the true cost of the fuel is included in the price paid by the consumer (including the cost of the pollution created), the private industry will have all the incentive it needs to make these new technologies.
The idea is to create an artificial demand for a product so that industry can spend resources developping the supply needed to lower the price naturally.
Companies are not *that* short-sighted. If there isn't a demand for a product, and there isn't going to be a demand for a product, then there's no point in developing a supply for that phantom demand. On the other hand, if there's no demand for a product now but there will be demand for the product in the future, investors are certainly willing to invest money now to get that payoff in the future.
Do you honestly think that we could clean up that much? I don't. Not without a significant decrease in the pollutants that we're putting out.
As the cost of the tax goes up, the amount of cleanup possible increases and the amount of gas burned (and thus the new creation of pollutants) decreases. At some point those numbers reach an equilibrium. That is where the price should be.
When the amount of energy we have is finite, we should be spending that energy where it'll have the biggest impact.
The amount of energy we have may be finite in theory, but in reality we will never use it all up, because as the price of that energy goes up the amount we can extract goes up as well.
There's nothing wrong with trying to clean up the environment, it's just that given the amount of resources available, we can have a bigger impact by spending them to cut back our output than by cleaning up what's already been released.
If people really don't think it's worth it to clean up the environment, then I suppose the cost to clean it is more than the damages caused by not cleaning it. In that case, let's just pay the people who are damaged by the pollution whatever's left. But throwing grants at companies who are going to do the research anyway is a big waste - and a form of corporate welfare.
Most companies and individuals run a deficit too. The point is that the budget has to be balanced, not that the actual spending always comes out dead-on.
When you buy an oil future, you're paying in advance for something that hasn't been produced yet.
No you aren't. When you're on the buy side of a futures contract, just like any other forward contract, you agree to pay later for something that will be delivered later. No actual money changes hands until the contract expires.
But the other fact that needs to be considered is that public transit is not nearly as well funded in the US as it is in Europe and elsewhere. This, in combination with the ruralized nature of many states, creates a situation where a pretty significant amount of fuel consumption is necessary.
I'm not saying the US should raise fuel prices to the level of Europe. I'm just saying that doing so would lower pollution, and as long as the increased fuel revenues were kept in the US it wouldn't cause a recession.
There would be other effects. In terms of inflation-adjusted values, people who live in the sprawling suburbs would see their disposable incomes go down relative to those who live in the city. There would be a shift of wealth from one group of people to another, but the inflation adjusted GDP, and thus the average wealth among everyone, wouldn't go down. Whether we'd actually see inflation or not depends more on how the Federal Reserve would react to the rising oil prices.
Considering the current necessity for oil and gas companies to invest worldwide in order to maintain profitability, I'd have to say there are no gauruntees in this regard.
Well, this thread was originally about government taxation, and I assume when the above poster said they wished oil prices were higher, they were saying they wished the government taxed it more heavily. Maybe they meant something else, but I doubt it. And if the increased prices are caused by government taxation, then the government can determine exactly where the money is going to go.
If the government wanted, they could even give the money straight back to the people. So those who use less than an average amount of gasoline would find themselves with more disposable income, and those who use more than an average amount of gasoline would find themselves with less.
For alternative fuels, we're stuck at step 2. We know we can build H2-powered vehicles. We know how to make hydraulically-powered vehicles. We know how to make solar cars. We know how to make electrically powered cars that can be charged from the power grid. What we don't have, yet, is the ability to make these vehicles cheaply, and keep them powered cheaply.
But that's because the cost of developing the technology is more than the savings derived from developing it. The free market does a much better job than the government in determining when that cost ratio is exceeded. What the free market is bad at is determining the cost of the negative externalities like air pollution, and that's where government taxation comes in.
Spending the money on cleaning up the environment does nothing to improve the situation, because we'd still be dumping out hydrocarbons from our dependance on fossil fuels.
If we're removing hydrocarbons at the same rate as we're dumping them out, then the situation is most certainly improved.
We don't need to waste energy cleaning up the environment, we need to spend that energy finding ways to coexist with the environment in such a way that lets it clean itself up without sacrificing our existing standards of living.
As long as the cost of cleaning up the problems are paid by the people causing the problems, the free market will spend the money to do the research necessary. The government is almost never as efficient as the free market in doing something like this.
Another theory is that people will continue to buy gas in quantity, but significant portion of the population will be spending such a large part of their income on fuel that they won't have enough disposable income to continue driving the economy.
No serious person in the world thinks that the demand curve for gas is perfectly inelastic. If you raise the price of gas, less will be consumed, that's an indisputable fact.
Yes, there are certain negatives in addition to the benefit of less pollution. And yes, at some point the negatives outweigh the positives. Where that point is is different depending on your value of a clean Earth.
This, in combination with drastically increasing shipping fees due to fuel costs, will create an environment ripe for a recession.
Depends where the money is going. If it's going within the country, then the overall spending won't decrease, it'll just shift from one area to another. If the money is going outside the country, then yes, it'll cause a lower real GDP which defines a recession.
Second, in a situation where there is a finite resource, especially one that places a key role in so many parts of the economy, it is prudent not to pump it out of the ground and squander it as fast as possible.
I have to disagree there. Yes, squandering the resource is bad, but using it quickly isn't necessary a bad thing. This is also a situation which the market forces will handle just fine.
There's a reason every major country has a strategic petroleum reserve but doesn't have a strategic gummy bear reserve.
Sure, but that itself is a market force, just in the international market rather than a national one. Further, if the government didn't have a strategic petroleum reserve, private businesses would have bigger reserves (or investments in futures which passes on the reserve requirement to someone else). The US government is acting like any other market force in this regard.
Without a centralized policy decision there won't be cheap oil a few decades out and our economy (and/or the environment, if we have to switch to coal-powered hydrogen for example) will be in deep trouble.
In a few decades we won't need cheap oil, because we'll be more efficient with our oil consumption. This includes machines which burn less oil and machines which don't use oil at all. Making oil expensive now, when we need it the most, so that it's not expensive in the future, when we won't need it as much, is about the dumbest idea I've ever heard of.
If you'd taken a look at the parent I was responding to, you would have seen that nowhere were gas taxes mentioned.
And if you look to the parent of that post, you'll see that this thread was talking about taxing gasoline. Here's a refresher:
Maybe if your government didn't tax gasoline at a rate of over 100% (or in some countries, over 200%) it'd be cheaper? Of course, the US provides money for drilling and tax cuts for oil companies which may or may not be keeping the price down. Personally, I wish government would stop getting involved in both circumstances and let the market sort things out.
If we were talking about petrol taxes here, then that would be one thing. But, as it stands currently, we're just talking about people paying more for fuel.
So, care to explain what the benefit is of that?
One benefit is that fewer people will burn the fuel, so the Earth will be polluted less. As for the other benefits, it depends why people pay more for fuel, I suppose.
That doesn't seem like a problem out of the control of the government. In fact, by taxing and spending there is greater control over where the money goes.
I'm not saying this is necessarily the way to go. I believe that taxes should be kept as low as possible, but this is for political reasons (I should be able to determine where to spend the money I earn, not the government), not for economic reasons. I think a gas tax to support maintenance of the roads and to clean up the problems caused by burning fossil fuels is reasonable.
Some federal governments do have balanced budgets, and most if not all US state governments do as well. Could a government raise taxes without spending the money they raise? Sure, they could. Do they have to? Of course not. So just because a tax increase is correlated to a a recession you can't blame the recession on the tax increase, because the tax increase doesn't necessarily cause the recession.
In the United States real (inflation adjusted) GDP is largely determined through external supply-side issues (imports and exports). Most economists also believe it at least can be affected by monetary policy and government spending. But gas taxes alone aren't going to affect the GDP.
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I've been saying since high school (17 years) that we need this technology.
Maybe, but I think technology might just skip right past the e-paper stage, and go straight to the 3DVisor
. Yes, paper still has some advantages right now, but these things are already available at $899 a pop. Expensive, yes, but the price will come down eventually, and the price of portable devices is already not that cheap. Maybe best of all it runs off the power of a USB port, so you could hook it up to a PDA and simulate a 105 inch monitor while riding in the bus, on an airplane, sitting on the throne, whatever.It's already something I'd like to buy, and the features are just going to continue to be expanded. Forget printing out a paper and handing it to your coworker. With 3D capability and a head tracking device, you can just simulate paper right in your visor.
So when all the jobs are outsourced and everyone around the world is making $8/hr in the new Global Economy, who is going to be able to afford $200 for an operating system? Or $500 for Office? Or $1500 for Adobe?
If Microsoft only had to pay $8/hr to its employees it wouldn't need to charge anywhere near $200 for an OS to make the same profit.
Not that that's going to happen. There are plenty of jobs available at more than $8/hr.
It's 48 hours before a hurricane hits. EVERYONE knows it's coming and are made painfully aware of the possibilities. Things look bad, people are told to evacuate.
Actually it was more like 24 hours before the hurricane hit when the mandatory evacuation order came, whereas it should have come 72 hours before. Further, there was no transportation provided to those without cars - many people wanted to leave, but couldn't. Those who couldn't leave were told to stay at the stadium, where they didn't even have food and water available for them.
Next time around the mandatory evacuations should come much earlier, and there should be transportation provided. In fact, they should have traffic lanes going out of the city which can be dedicated solely to high occupancy vehicles. All of this can be planned ahead of time so that 48 hours is plenty of time to evacuate everyone. It can be done, and it must be done, and people shouldn't be told to return until those evacuation plans are in place.
It's now 24 hours before the hurricane hits. Many people have fled as the storm has strengthened.
Finally the mayor decides to call for a mandatory evacuation.
It's clear that this is going to be a nasty storm.
I seriously doubt that the vast majority of those who stayed realized the severity of what was going to happen; this should have been made clear.
Com'on man. How the hell are state and local officials supposed to forcefully evacuate thousands of people in hours?
In 72 hours, with a good evacuation plan, providing the transportation rather than just telling people that they can leave if they want, there shouldn't be over 10 thousand people still in the city when the shit goes down.
Would some idiots refuse to leave? Of course. But it wouldn't have been nearly as bad.
Isn't this supposed to be a free country, where you can (within limits) choose your own destiny? Why do you expect the government to come to your house and FORCE YOU TO LEAVE when a storm is staring you in the fucking face?
I'm not saying they should force anyone to leave. They can't even really do that. Like you said, it's a free country. All I'm saying is they should have told people that they had to leave while they still had a chance to all get out. And that means providing transportation for those who can't provide their own. It also means either a) building enough roads so that people can evacuate in the time you give them, or b) issuing the evacuation order earlier, when it's less clear whether or not it's going to be necessary.
So, I still don't see how this is a subsidy.
Thanks for the information. I didn't know that. Flood insurance rates for zone 1 are very high here, so I find it somewhat hard to believe they can be that highly subsidised, but I know where to go to look up more info about it, anyway.
Require improved building codes for hurricane resistance.
I don't see the point in that. Unless the hurricane hits you dead on, or you live in a mobile home or something, the wind isn't going to be what gets your home, it's the water, and I'm not sure how you're going to improve the building code to handle that. Besides, if you have insurance then it's not the government's problem anyway, it's the insurance company's.
Don't allow people to build directly on flood plains. Don't drain hurricane-buffering wetlands for million dollar condos.
Maybe. Though the real problem isn't the million dollar condos (they'll buffer the hurricane too). They'll be insured, and the residents will have no problem evacuating them before the hurricane hits. Filling up the floodplains with low-income housing with people with no insurance is another story, but even then, the problem would have been much lessened if the evacuation was handled better. I read the night before the hurricane hit that it was basically a 50/50 chance that the levees were going to break, so it's not like this should have been a surprise. There should not have been thousands of people left in that city when the storm came ashore. The government screwed up bad on that one, at the local, state, and federal levels.
Don't abandon Florida, simply require everybody to be self-insured. Insurance subsidies of people who want to enjoy ocean views force people living in trailer parks in Des Moines chip in to guarantee that people who build on the barrier islands of North Carolina (which repeatedly get wiped out) are close enough to repayment so ensure that the FEMA assistance will be enough for them to rebuild the same house in the same dangerous location.
Does FEMA really subsidize the insurace of people in flood zones? If so, that's definitely not a good thing. But considering that here in Florida those in zone 1 pay ten times as much in flood insurance as those in zone 2, I doubt it's true.
Again, the problem isn't the lack of insurance. If people want to take a chance, then they might just lose their house. The problem, in New Orleans, is that the word to evacuate wasn't given in time, and that much of the population of the city didn't have the means to evacuate. AFAIK, FEMA spends most of its money saving lives, not building houses.
My two cents: rebuild the port but not the houses. If people want to live there, let them assume their own risks.
The government probably shouldn't and won't be involved in building many individual buildings (beyond government buildings). If the private industry/citizens want to build there, the government shouldn't disallow them. But there needs to be a complete evacuation plan first.
But it seems that wealthy people build expensive houses in repeatedly flooded areas and get the Goverment to bail them out time after time.
What bail-outs are you talking about, though? Most wealthy people who live in these flood zones have insurance which cover the rebuilding. If they have losses beyond their insurance they'll get a tax deduction, but that's just the way taxes work - if they lost the money in the stock market or in a business venture they'd get a deduction too.
It may be just my perception though, since I have sense enough to not build where the water can reach, and am not privy to their finances.
Well, I think maybe it is just your perception, because I really don't know what bail outs you're talking about.
The government did bail out the airline companies after 9/11, by paying off the victims in return for not suing the airlines, but that's really a different matter than this.
Yeah, these people in New Orleans only lived there because of the promise of governmental disaster relief. Sure, half their family will be killed, they'll have no food or water for days, and they'll be homeless for months, but after half of them are dead the President will show up and make a speech, some soldiers will carry the dead bodies away, and they'll get a tax break, and that'll make it all worth it.
There might be a correlation there, but to think that people are putting themselves into these situations because of the governmental disaster relief is just ridiculous.
Prices will dip a bit, probably, but $35 [a barrel, for crude oil, presumably] within the year seems pretty ridiculous.
Agreed. Besides, much of the recent rise in gasoline prices is due to a rise in refining costs, not oil prices. Oil spiked too, but not as much.
"I sure know I didn't fill up my tank at $3.00/gallon. I'll wait a week or two 'til it's down to $2.50 again." Could be longer than that. I've heard some reports that it will take a month or two to get those refineries back online.
You might be right. I was going on the fact that it takes about 10 days to refine the oil released from the strategic oil reserves. But if the refineries are a bottleneck, I guess that doesn't matter.
At any rate, thanks for correcting my misconception about oil futures.
No problem. I had to double check it with regard to commodities first, since I've only ever dealt directly with single-stock futures. But with stock futures, that's one of the main benefits - you don't have to take out a margin loan (with interest which is only tax-deductible if you itemize).
This is a true story, right? I ask this, because recently Slashdot linked to a story on the Onion without making any indication that the story was untrue. But someone pointed out the presence of the "It's funny. Laugh." icon on the story. But I just looked at this story, and it has the same icon on it.
Oil prices are in a speculative bubble right now. On top of this, we have some temporary problems with the refineries, and we have millions of barrels of oil from the strategic reserve that were just released. Furthermore, this whole $3.00/gallon thing has probably woken a lot of people up and demand will likely be going down. Remember, oil is a cartel-controlled market, so prices are largely determined by demand.
Sure, there are a lot of events that could cause oil prices to explode, but so long as these events don't occur you can expect oil prices to come down and gasoline prices to come way down.
I sure know I didn't fill up my tank at $3.00/gallon. I'll wait a week or two 'til it's down to $2.50 again.
Yeah, losing millions of dollars just so you can make a statistic that maybe 0.001% of the country would even look at let alone understand. That makes a lot of sense.
If you really believe that, the futures are free for you to invest in. Buy 'em up cheap and you'll be rich.
It's not that I don't think it isn't worth cleaning up the environment, it's that I think there's better ways to spend the resources with the same ultimate goal.
If you think there are better ways to spend the resources, then you don't think it's worth it (worth spending the resources) to clean up the environment. Nothing wrong with that, I agree that at some point you're probably spending too much money for it to be worth it.
If it sits better with you, then call it a tax break instead of a grant.
I don't think we should be giving tax breaks selectively to companies that are researching alternative energy sources either.
It's really not any different from what the US government has been doing for well over a century, except that it's in a different industry. You do realize that the US government has a *long* history of offering tax breaks to help in the development of new industries that can help its ultimate goals, right?
Sure I do. Doesn't make it right.
Most people don't give a shit about the needs of others, and are quite happy looking out for themselves. That's why we have labour laws and minimum wage....
Most of which we shouldn't have.
It's not just oil companies selling them, but what they would get is a guaranteed rate at which they can sell their product. And despite the fact that you think prices are going to rise, obviously the market disagrees, and thinks that prices are going to fall.
We've got enough fuel to last us decades, particularly if this shale oil thing takes off, and because of that, there isn't enough of a desire in the free market to develop alternative fuels.
Nor is there much of a reason to worry about alternative fuels at this time. Of course, if taxes and thus prices go up significantly, suddenly there is a reason.
There *are* companies that are developping alternative fuel technologies, but do I really need to remind you what happened to the EV1? The car industry has already proven that it can create super-efficient vehicles and cars that run on alternative fuels. So how come you still can't buy a car that doesn't require gasoline or diesel?
Well, you could, but it'd be expensive. In any event, there isn't that much demand right now for a car that doesn't require gas or diesel. The design is there, the company proved they could make it. So as soon as the price of gas and diesel goes up enough to require the car, they'll have no problem bringing it back.
This is another reason why it's stupid for the government to research alternative technologies - the private industry has already designed many of them, people just don't want them right now.
I'm not saying that the government should be the ones developping alternative fuels, I'm saying that the government should be giving grants to the companies that *are* developping it, so that these companies can finish their development faster, and the government should be giving grants to promote the sale of alternative fuel vehicles.
And I'm saying giving grants is a waste of money. As long as the true cost of the fuel is included in the price paid by the consumer (including the cost of the pollution created), the private industry will have all the incentive it needs to make these new technologies.
The idea is to create an artificial demand for a product so that industry can spend resources developping the supply needed to lower the price naturally.
Companies are not *that* short-sighted. If there isn't a demand for a product, and there isn't going to be a demand for a product, then there's no point in developing a supply for that phantom demand. On the other hand, if there's no demand for a product now but there will be demand for the product in the future, investors are certainly willing to invest money now to get that payoff in the future.
Do you honestly think that we could clean up that much? I don't. Not without a significant decrease in the pollutants that we're putting out.
As the cost of the tax goes up, the amount of cleanup possible increases and the amount of gas burned (and thus the new creation of pollutants) decreases. At some point those numbers reach an equilibrium. That is where the price should be.
When the amount of energy we have is finite, we should be spending that energy where it'll have the biggest impact.
The amount of energy we have may be finite in theory, but in reality we will never use it all up, because as the price of that energy goes up the amount we can extract goes up as well.
There's nothing wrong with trying to clean up the environment, it's just that given the amount of resources available, we can have a bigger impact by spending them to cut back our output than by cleaning up what's already been released.
If people really don't think it's worth it to clean up the environment, then I suppose the cost to clean it is more than the damages caused by not cleaning it. In that case, let's just pay the people who are damaged by the pollution whatever's left. But throwing grants at companies who are going to do the research anyway is a big waste - and a form of corporate welfare.
Most companies and individuals run a deficit too. The point is that the budget has to be balanced, not that the actual spending always comes out dead-on.
When you buy an oil future, you're paying in advance for something that hasn't been produced yet.
No you aren't. When you're on the buy side of a futures contract, just like any other forward contract, you agree to pay later for something that will be delivered later. No actual money changes hands until the contract expires.
I was pointing out the trend, not the magnitude.
But the other fact that needs to be considered is that public transit is not nearly as well funded in the US as it is in Europe and elsewhere. This, in combination with the ruralized nature of many states, creates a situation where a pretty significant amount of fuel consumption is necessary.
I'm not saying the US should raise fuel prices to the level of Europe. I'm just saying that doing so would lower pollution, and as long as the increased fuel revenues were kept in the US it wouldn't cause a recession.
There would be other effects. In terms of inflation-adjusted values, people who live in the sprawling suburbs would see their disposable incomes go down relative to those who live in the city. There would be a shift of wealth from one group of people to another, but the inflation adjusted GDP, and thus the average wealth among everyone, wouldn't go down. Whether we'd actually see inflation or not depends more on how the Federal Reserve would react to the rising oil prices.
Considering the current necessity for oil and gas companies to invest worldwide in order to maintain profitability, I'd have to say there are no gauruntees in this regard.
Well, this thread was originally about government taxation, and I assume when the above poster said they wished oil prices were higher, they were saying they wished the government taxed it more heavily. Maybe they meant something else, but I doubt it. And if the increased prices are caused by government taxation, then the government can determine exactly where the money is going to go.
If the government wanted, they could even give the money straight back to the people. So those who use less than an average amount of gasoline would find themselves with more disposable income, and those who use more than an average amount of gasoline would find themselves with less.
For alternative fuels, we're stuck at step 2. We know we can build H2-powered vehicles. We know how to make hydraulically-powered vehicles. We know how to make solar cars. We know how to make electrically powered cars that can be charged from the power grid. What we don't have, yet, is the ability to make these vehicles cheaply, and keep them powered cheaply.
But that's because the cost of developing the technology is more than the savings derived from developing it. The free market does a much better job than the government in determining when that cost ratio is exceeded. What the free market is bad at is determining the cost of the negative externalities like air pollution, and that's where government taxation comes in.
Spending the money on cleaning up the environment does nothing to improve the situation, because we'd still be dumping out hydrocarbons from our dependance on fossil fuels.
If we're removing hydrocarbons at the same rate as we're dumping them out, then the situation is most certainly improved.
We don't need to waste energy cleaning up the environment, we need to spend that energy finding ways to coexist with the environment in such a way that lets it clean itself up without sacrificing our existing standards of living.
As long as the cost of cleaning up the problems are paid by the people causing the problems, the free market will spend the money to do the research necessary. The government is almost never as efficient as the free market in doing something like this.
Another theory is that people will continue to buy gas in quantity, but significant portion of the population will be spending such a large part of their income on fuel that they won't have enough disposable income to continue driving the economy.
No serious person in the world thinks that the demand curve for gas is perfectly inelastic. If you raise the price of gas, less will be consumed, that's an indisputable fact.
Yes, there are certain negatives in addition to the benefit of less pollution. And yes, at some point the negatives outweigh the positives. Where that point is is different depending on your value of a clean Earth.
This, in combination with drastically increasing shipping fees due to fuel costs, will create an environment ripe for a recession.
Depends where the money is going. If it's going within the country, then the overall spending won't decrease, it'll just shift from one area to another. If the money is going outside the country, then yes, it'll cause a lower real GDP which defines a recession.
Second, in a situation where there is a finite resource, especially one that places a key role in so many parts of the economy, it is prudent not to pump it out of the ground and squander it as fast as possible.
I have to disagree there. Yes, squandering the resource is bad, but using it quickly isn't necessary a bad thing. This is also a situation which the market forces will handle just fine.
There's a reason every major country has a strategic petroleum reserve but doesn't have a strategic gummy bear reserve.
Sure, but that itself is a market force, just in the international market rather than a national one. Further, if the government didn't have a strategic petroleum reserve, private businesses would have bigger reserves (or investments in futures which passes on the reserve requirement to someone else). The US government is acting like any other market force in this regard.
Without a centralized policy decision there won't be cheap oil a few decades out and our economy (and/or the environment, if we have to switch to coal-powered hydrogen for example) will be in deep trouble.
In a few decades we won't need cheap oil, because we'll be more efficient with our oil consumption. This includes machines which burn less oil and machines which don't use oil at all. Making oil expensive now, when we need it the most, so that it's not expensive in the future, when we won't need it as much, is about the dumbest idea I've ever heard of.
If you'd taken a look at the parent I was responding to, you would have seen that nowhere were gas taxes mentioned.
And if you look to the parent of that post, you'll see that this thread was talking about taxing gasoline. Here's a refresher:
If we were talking about petrol taxes here, then that would be one thing. But, as it stands currently, we're just talking about people paying more for fuel.
So, care to explain what the benefit is of that?
One benefit is that fewer people will burn the fuel, so the Earth will be polluted less. As for the other benefits, it depends why people pay more for fuel, I suppose.
That doesn't seem like a problem out of the control of the government. In fact, by taxing and spending there is greater control over where the money goes.
I'm not saying this is necessarily the way to go. I believe that taxes should be kept as low as possible, but this is for political reasons (I should be able to determine where to spend the money I earn, not the government), not for economic reasons. I think a gas tax to support maintenance of the roads and to clean up the problems caused by burning fossil fuels is reasonable.
Some federal governments do have balanced budgets, and most if not all US state governments do as well. Could a government raise taxes without spending the money they raise? Sure, they could. Do they have to? Of course not. So just because a tax increase is correlated to a a recession you can't blame the recession on the tax increase, because the tax increase doesn't necessarily cause the recession.
In the United States real (inflation adjusted) GDP is largely determined through external supply-side issues (imports and exports). Most economists also believe it at least can be affected by monetary policy and government spending. But gas taxes alone aren't going to affect the GDP.