Man, you're stupid. First, you couldn't realize I was talking about the Segway, and now you're claiming that *not* having a gyroscopic actuator with a 60 Hz sampling rate would complicate things! Because like, you wouldn't know how the person's leaning. Attention dumbass: you don't have to set up the machine to take input from the direction a person is leaning! That was just his cutesy way of adding a gimmick. Have you ever heard of a *button*? Yes, you can have a button that tells it to go forward or backward! And you know what? It might -- just might -- be less expensive and massive than a 60 Hz gyroscope!
Geez, I bet back in '89 you said something like, "How can you play Mike Tyson's Knockout without the Power Glove? How will it know when you're swinging your fist? Oh, sure, you could use the standard controller -- but that would introduce technological complications!"
Actually, I had a similar idea. You could sell futures that pay out when the state lottery reads a certain number. You're effectively selling a lottery ticket, but because it's a "futures contract", it's legal. You can offer lower prices or higher rewards too, since you don't have to give a huge share of your revenues to the state... except for business taxes of course;-)
I didn't know all Segways were intended to be used for climbing stairs. Nor did I know that it was also supposed to be used as a wheelchair by people with paralyzed legs. Well, now I do.
I understand that, but the advice was giving position, not orientation. If it merely meant to stay out of the boss's line of fire, it should have just said that. Referencing parallelism just confuses the matter.
Batteries aren't very energy dense -- not with current technology anyway. Hybrids only use them to supplement the gas tank. Hydrogen and gasoline are very, very energy dense.
Improvisation doesn't contradict me. You can improvise while planning the code. You can come up with better ideas while typing it and re-plan the function. I'd like to know how the got the result that buy just charging forward with typing, you get better code.
I'm curious how they measured the drop off in ability, and the article doesn't say.
I can guarantee you it's through some kind of cognitive tests, i.e., "do you remember this?" after being given information. The problem is, these tests, like any, do have a margin of error. A margin of error that probably is greater than 0.3%, which is why I really don't see how they declared that 0.3% statistically significant. That's not even 0.3% difference in ability; that's 0.3% difference in the *change* in ability. So if a non-educated person's mental abilities decline 30%, the study says educated people will have their mental ability decline 30.09%. Wow, this is justification enough not to get educated! Seriously, how could you ever deem such a difference significant, given the huge number of potential factors and test errors? How do you isolate the influence of education to that precision?
I hope this isn't the significance threshold they use on those "coffee stops cancer" studies!
Try to avoid being parallel to them when they stop. Unless, of course, it's the sort of boss who blasts the whole screen apart from the thin corridor directly in front of them. In this case stay where you are.
Also, what does this even mean? The boss is a point. You are a point. How is one point parallel to another? Did I sleep through half of the axioms of Euclidean geometry?
Of course that's true, but it's also absurd to say that consumption of oil follows an infinite series. When we have a cupful of oil left, shall we only extract half a cup? Where is the remaining 1/4096th of a dodo?
Irrelevant. You claimed it was a tautology -- necessarily true. It's not.
Exactly, you'll never be able to predict what they're capable of, and there are things they won't be capable of even though you predicted they would be.
And there are things they will be capable of even though you predicted they won't be. One small difference: people who actually invest their own money predicated on these beliefs tend to disagree with you. If they're so obviously wrong, why not steal their profits?
A good practice is to comment function and classes before coding.
I hope you don't *just* comment the functions and classes before coding! You should have the function planned out completely before you type anything. It's extremely tempting to just hammer away, but that always, always wastes time. "Think before to do."
This is not a claim, it's a tautology. Finite resources, continually consumed. In other words, eventual depletion.
It's not a tautology. Go get a math book. Find the sum of 1+1/2+1/4+1/8+1/16... It's finite. If humans "continually consume" a resource, but cut consumption by half each year, they never consume zero, yet could continue forever and only consume a finite amount, possibly less than the total amount. Sorry, but I don't have empirical evidence of this mathematical principle. Guess that invalidates it.
You do have a preference for the abstract because I had to bleed you like a stone to get concrete examples in place of your exposition of economic theory.
I have a "preference" for giving you a meaningful understanding of what's going on. Isolated cases here and there aren't going to teach you much, since you can't control the experiment and vary only one input or get statistically significat results. You have to understand the underlying phenomena. There are no examples of a finite good's price accruing at the interest rate, because other factors always come into play. However, we know people will seek out ways to make easy money, we know such attempts compete with the interest rate, and we know that holding a good off the market until a later period can make money. These provide an understanding of the stabilizing forces at play regarding consumption of finite goods. Such knowledge allows you to look at a large number of "concrete examples" and understand whether they were flukes, isolated events, or inevitable marketplace results.
Incorrect predicitions of the depletion of the world's copper reserves were based on an incorrect appreciation of the size of those reserves. I am making no prediction as to when the oil reserves will dry up. As I said, I make no claims.
Well, then you're smarter than the ever-wrong Peak Oil crowd, which sticks to incorrect falsifiable predictions. But I guess that means you again reject the scientific method for this.
By the way, the non-depletion of copper was not due to "incorrect reserve estimates" -- it was because people figured out how to do more with less and sought alternatives. Concepts you never bother to account for. People aren't blind sheep, haphazardly walking into a catastrophe. They know there's money to be made finding energy, or copper, or diamonds. You'll never be able to predict what they'll be capable of, or else you would have done it yourself already.
Uh... no I'm not. What I said was So all I'm saying is don't be so sure that the world will behave like economic "theory" suggests. Implicit in that statement is I'm not making any particular claim about oil.
Don't insult my intelligence. You said "Oil running out is a concrete and inevitable (given continued consumption) event with no precedent." You're making a particular claim about oil.
Actually, you're not responding to my posts. You're just responding to your idea of my posts, which may be symptomatic of your preference for the abstract over the concrete!
I have no such preference, my post is no indicator thereof, and by asserting an event's non-repeatability, you reject "concrete observations", like, I don't know, I said the last time you tried to wow us with your insights.
Now, I hesitate to say this in case you ignore my previous paragraph. But here goes. Diamond and copper are not the same as oil - we don't all depend on them and there are non-fringe alternatives. If copper runs out, my peecee still works even though it depends on copper. Yes, they are important commodities, but they are not the same.
It doesn't matter. You're just inventing ad hoc differences to reconcile an indefensible position. Diamond and copper hunting respond to demand, just like oil. "Necessity" doesn't matter at all. The same signals that make people find more energy make people find more copper and diamonds. Your supporting facts are wrong, in any case. Copper was, a hundred years ago, vital for everything the economy depended on. It was being depleted at an enormous rate. Idiots like you were claiming civilization would collapse as a result of an unforseen dropoff in copper extraction, while simultaneously not backing up that "firm" belief with actual purchases of copper futures. Copper didn't run out. Is that concrete enough for you?
I think you're missing, or I'm not well explaining, my point about the similarity between the economic theory and the Pythagorean Theorem. Within certain definite assumptions, they necessarily hold; you don't need to "test" them. I'd say more on that, but I think the point is moot -- once you're allege that a non-repeatable event will happen, you reject empirical methodology at least as much as you claim I do, and thus have no basis to claim that the oil will catastrophically run out. As I pointed out elsewhere, if you really believed this, you'd buy oil futures. Very rich people are aware of the same evidence you are; why aren't they bidding up oil futures contracts as well?
You're essentially claiming that you know more than all of the people actually acting in the market. You don't. I don't. To be sure, assuming the oil in the universe if fixed, one of these must happen:
1) Oil will run out. 2) People will switch to another energy source before oil runs out.
"Peak Oil" goes further than this and says that *when* oil runs out, it will be a catastrophic surprise. This is ridiculous. Even if everyone studying energy markets and investing in energy futures misses this, the shock *cannot* be sudden. When you take a 50% pay cut, you don't eat 50% less, drink 50% less, care for your children 50% less, take 50% fewer showers, and so on. Rather, you toss the lowest ranked things on your priority list: entertainment, fancy clothes, DVD's, etc. Likewise, as oil becomes more sharply more scarce, food won't get stuck in the Midwest. The most trivial uses of oil will be abandoned. Stores will stock goods shipped from slightly less far away, and so on. Peak Oil just satisfies the anti-capitalist wet dream that they "were right all along" while those evil rich blindly consumed, but one day they'll be forced to suffer for not realizing this. That's why you don't hear about Peak Diamond or Peak Copper, goods which obey the same market conditions as oil.
I may have avoided your specification that it be grounded in certain empirical observations, if that's what you're getting at, but I didn't avoid the question of the economic theory behind the claim, and I didn't do it ignorantly. I explained the mechanism for intertemporal reallocation of finite goods, and why any deviation from interest rate price growth would tend to be reversed by profit seeking entrepreneurs. I didn't provide the empirical observations, partly because there aren't any*, and partly because it seemed like you also wanted to know the general basis for the claim. The claim starts with some assumptions, and tells what you would expect to see, for use as a baseline. Deviations from that expectation thus show deviations from the assumptions. Do you demand empirical evidence of the Pythagorean Theorem?
*There are no instances of a good for which no additional supply is ever found, and expectations of future availability never change.
Yes, dumbass, I know that the energy still ultimately (could) come from fossil fuels. That's why I specifically said, anything that can generate electricity can power your car. And yes, there will be an energy loss due to the transfer, like there is, you know, with every energy source. The difference is that you're buying the cheapest source of energy at any given time; you're not limited to oil.
You need to look more long-term than that. Over longer time periods, the gain doesn't look so impressive. And like I said, with something as value-light (low value per unit volume) as oil, you don't actually suck it out and put it in a warehouse when you hoard it -- you buy a future that guarantees extraction and delivery at a later date. So why aren't those futures being bid up? Well, actually they are rather high right now, but you have to remember the political climate. If oil companies fear an arbitrary "windfall" tax, or there looms a risk that someone will just cut off oil supply arbitrarily, they discount the returns to oil exploration, even with high futures prices.
But if you think they're all wrong, don't tell me -- outwit the thousands who have invested billions, and buy the futures yourself!
Yes, the theory doesn't consider the possibility that politicians will do something stupid, like order an invation of a nation that controls some of the supply. I agree. But military interventions are unnecessary to continue the flow of oil. They disrupt, rather than support the flow of oil to people who use it. If governments didn't intervene militarily, oil would be even cheaper. Few governments are going to turn down all the money that can be made from selling oil, socialist rhetoric aside. Remember that Saddam wasn't cutting off his oil supply; the US was, through sanctions. Without them, he'd be perfectly willing to sell. The point of the theory is that market signals correct temporal imbalances, discounting at the interest rate.
As you know economic theory is a model of reality; so what is the basis in reality of your economist's claim?
Fine, I'll give the lesson.
Assume there's are a few owners of some natural resource, and people are carelessly buying that resource, without regard for the future, exactly as you expect. Then some entrepreneur will notice that "hey, supply will drop off at this rate in a few years, and the price will shoot up. I can make a fortune if I just buy some now, hold it, and sell it in the future!" (Yes, this isn't a logical necessity, but to believe otherwise, you have to believe that people knowingly avoid obvious, huge opportunities to make money.) This tendency will equalize use across all periods, as expectations of future use draw people to hold it off the market now.
However, this leaves one thing out: when you buy something, you're forgoing interest on the money spent to buy it. So it won't completely equalize. Rather, in order to justify holding something off the market until "later", the expected gain in value must exceed the interest that would accrue on the invested money. So the resource use will be equalized across all periods, but with future periods discounted by the interest rate.
(Side note: the hoarding off the market is not always accomplished through direct purchase-and-hold, as storage can be expensive. Rather, it can take the form of someone buying futures contracts which specify that the resource simply won't be extracted until a later date.)
And again, keep in mind that this law assumes a static environment, where no new resources are found or lost -- it was just used as a baseline for what to predict in the absence of external changes. In reality, estimates of future supply, and thus current price, are constantly changing. When new information enters the market, people revise their bids, and prices shift. But you can't in advance anticipate that new information, or else it wouldn't be new information!
That's a good point. You shouldn't listen to anyone claiming that level of certainty and precision. Some thoughts:
1) What happens when oil production passes that (if in fact it does)? Is the Peak Oil theory falsified/obsolete, or do you just "massage" the data, and bump up the date, but never question the assumptions of the theory?
2) If Peak Oil believers are so certain that energy will become scarce, and know exactly when, why haven't they bougth the necessary oil futures? Before you paper over this objection with a trite comeback:
a) Yes, many of them would deem that "immoral", but the greedy capitalists who have access to all their data and yet have no such compunctions, don't. They're not bidding up futures, why?
b) Yes, oil futures will actually be "worth something" even if oil falls off precipitously -- contracts are written so that even if they can't give you oil, they have to pay big money. Specify it in gold and you're set.
c) Yes, it may be more important to "avoid the peak" than get rich, but why not hedge your bets, if you really believe this stuff?
3) How are predictions of oil/energy running out fundamentally different from the earlier, very wrong predictions (happening many times in the 19th and 20th centuries)? What assumptions have been altered?
That's a good point. What I want to know is, why can't they embed some kind of water electrolysis system in the car. That way, if you need to refill on hyodrogen, just pour some water into a compartment, plug the car in, buy electricity, and the the car would collect the hydrogen for use as fuel. Since it draws its power ultimately from electricity, anything that can make electricity can fuel it.
What's wrong with this idea, and why aren't they doing it now?
I mean, what's the point of a game where a newbie can't defeat a seasoned player by smashing the buttons really fast?
Actually, there are games like this. In my experience, Bushido Blade 2 (and probably 1). After a lot of practice, following the combos, learning the "technique", testing different stances, I thought I had it "down". Then I invited a few friends over who beat the enemies with about the same success that I had, just by maching buttons.
You're making my point for me. If contradictory theories alternate every few years, that's a sign you need to collect a LOT more data before declaring anything as fact -- or even endorsing a dominant theory. It's okay if you change your theory. It's not "okay" if your original theory was premature to begin with. That's a sign of bad methodology.
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Man, you're stupid. First, you couldn't realize I was talking about the Segway, and now you're claiming that *not* having a gyroscopic actuator with a 60 Hz sampling rate would complicate things! Because like, you wouldn't know how the person's leaning. Attention dumbass: you don't have to set up the machine to take input from the direction a person is leaning! That was just his cutesy way of adding a gimmick. Have you ever heard of a *button*? Yes, you can have a button that tells it to go forward or backward! And you know what? It might -- just might -- be less expensive and massive than a 60 Hz gyroscope!
Geez, I bet back in '89 you said something like, "How can you play Mike Tyson's Knockout without the Power Glove? How will it know when you're swinging your fist? Oh, sure, you could use the standard controller -- but that would introduce technological complications!"
Where do they even find people like you?
Actually, I had a similar idea. You could sell futures that pay out when the state lottery reads a certain number. You're effectively selling a lottery ticket, but because it's a "futures contract", it's legal. You can offer lower prices or higher rewards too, since you don't have to give a huge share of your revenues to the state ... except for business taxes of course ;-)
I didn't know all Segways were intended to be used for climbing stairs. Nor did I know that it was also supposed to be used as a wheelchair by people with paralyzed legs. Well, now I do.
Someone remind me, is this the same guy who used a gyroscope with a 60 Hz sampling rate for stability rather than, I don't know, a third wheel?
I understand that, but the advice was giving position, not orientation. If it merely meant to stay out of the boss's line of fire, it should have just said that. Referencing parallelism just confuses the matter.
Batteries aren't very energy dense -- not with current technology anyway. Hybrids only use them to supplement the gas tank. Hydrogen and gasoline are very, very energy dense.
Improvisation doesn't contradict me. You can improvise while planning the code. You can come up with better ideas while typing it and re-plan the function. I'd like to know how the got the result that buy just charging forward with typing, you get better code.
I'm curious how they measured the drop off in ability, and the article doesn't say.
I can guarantee you it's through some kind of cognitive tests, i.e., "do you remember this?" after being given information. The problem is, these tests, like any, do have a margin of error. A margin of error that probably is greater than 0.3%, which is why I really don't see how they declared that 0.3% statistically significant. That's not even 0.3% difference in ability; that's 0.3% difference in the *change* in ability. So if a non-educated person's mental abilities decline 30%, the study says educated people will have their mental ability decline 30.09%. Wow, this is justification enough not to get educated! Seriously, how could you ever deem such a difference significant, given the huge number of potential factors and test errors? How do you isolate the influence of education to that precision?
I hope this isn't the significance threshold they use on those "coffee stops cancer" studies!
Try to avoid being parallel to them when they stop. Unless, of course, it's the sort of boss who blasts the whole screen apart from the thin corridor directly in front of them. In this case stay where you are.
Also, what does this even mean? The boss is a point. You are a point. How is one point parallel to another? Did I sleep through half of the axioms of Euclidean geometry?
Of course that's true, but it's also absurd to say that consumption of oil follows an infinite series. When we have a cupful of oil left, shall we only extract half a cup? Where is the remaining 1/4096th of a dodo?
Irrelevant. You claimed it was a tautology -- necessarily true. It's not.
Exactly, you'll never be able to predict what they're capable of, and there are things they won't be capable of even though you predicted they would be.
And there are things they will be capable of even though you predicted they won't be. One small difference: people who actually invest their own money predicated on these beliefs tend to disagree with you. If they're so obviously wrong, why not steal their profits?
A good practice is to comment function and classes before coding.
I hope you don't *just* comment the functions and classes before coding! You should have the function planned out completely before you type anything. It's extremely tempting to just hammer away, but that always, always wastes time. "Think before to do."
This is not a claim, it's a tautology. Finite resources, continually consumed. In other words, eventual depletion.
It's not a tautology. Go get a math book. Find the sum of 1+1/2+1/4+1/8+1/16... It's finite. If humans "continually consume" a resource, but cut consumption by half each year, they never consume zero, yet could continue forever and only consume a finite amount, possibly less than the total amount. Sorry, but I don't have empirical evidence of this mathematical principle. Guess that invalidates it.
You do have a preference for the abstract because I had to bleed you like a stone to get concrete examples in place of your exposition of economic theory.
I have a "preference" for giving you a meaningful understanding of what's going on. Isolated cases here and there aren't going to teach you much, since you can't control the experiment and vary only one input or get statistically significat results. You have to understand the underlying phenomena. There are no examples of a finite good's price accruing at the interest rate, because other factors always come into play. However, we know people will seek out ways to make easy money, we know such attempts compete with the interest rate, and we know that holding a good off the market until a later period can make money. These provide an understanding of the stabilizing forces at play regarding consumption of finite goods. Such knowledge allows you to look at a large number of "concrete examples" and understand whether they were flukes, isolated events, or inevitable marketplace results.
Incorrect predicitions of the depletion of the world's copper reserves were based on an incorrect appreciation of the size of those reserves. I am making no prediction as to when the oil reserves will dry up. As I said, I make no claims.
Well, then you're smarter than the ever-wrong Peak Oil crowd, which sticks to incorrect falsifiable predictions. But I guess that means you again reject the scientific method for this.
By the way, the non-depletion of copper was not due to "incorrect reserve estimates" -- it was because people figured out how to do more with less and sought alternatives. Concepts you never bother to account for. People aren't blind sheep, haphazardly walking into a catastrophe. They know there's money to be made finding energy, or copper, or diamonds. You'll never be able to predict what they'll be capable of, or else you would have done it yourself already.
Uh... no I'm not. What I said was So all I'm saying is don't be so sure that the world will behave like economic "theory" suggests. Implicit in that statement is I'm not making any particular claim about oil.
Don't insult my intelligence. You said "Oil running out is a concrete and inevitable (given continued consumption) event with no precedent." You're making a particular claim about oil.
Actually, you're not responding to my posts. You're just responding to your idea of my posts, which may be symptomatic of your preference for the abstract over the concrete!
I have no such preference, my post is no indicator thereof, and by asserting an event's non-repeatability, you reject "concrete observations", like, I don't know, I said the last time you tried to wow us with your insights.
Now, I hesitate to say this in case you ignore my previous paragraph. But here goes. Diamond and copper are not the same as oil - we don't all depend on them and there are non-fringe alternatives. If copper runs out, my peecee still works even though it depends on copper. Yes, they are important commodities, but they are not the same.
It doesn't matter. You're just inventing ad hoc differences to reconcile an indefensible position. Diamond and copper hunting respond to demand, just like oil. "Necessity" doesn't matter at all. The same signals that make people find more energy make people find more copper and diamonds. Your supporting facts are wrong, in any case. Copper was, a hundred years ago, vital for everything the economy depended on. It was being depleted at an enormous rate. Idiots like you were claiming civilization would collapse as a result of an unforseen dropoff in copper extraction, while simultaneously not backing up that "firm" belief with actual purchases of copper futures. Copper didn't run out. Is that concrete enough for you?
I think you're missing, or I'm not well explaining, my point about the similarity between the economic theory and the Pythagorean Theorem. Within certain definite assumptions, they necessarily hold; you don't need to "test" them. I'd say more on that, but I think the point is moot -- once you're allege that a non-repeatable event will happen, you reject empirical methodology at least as much as you claim I do, and thus have no basis to claim that the oil will catastrophically run out. As I pointed out elsewhere, if you really believed this, you'd buy oil futures. Very rich people are aware of the same evidence you are; why aren't they bidding up oil futures contracts as well?
You're essentially claiming that you know more than all of the people actually acting in the market. You don't. I don't. To be sure, assuming the oil in the universe if fixed, one of these must happen:
1) Oil will run out.
2) People will switch to another energy source before oil runs out.
"Peak Oil" goes further than this and says that *when* oil runs out, it will be a catastrophic surprise. This is ridiculous. Even if everyone studying energy markets and investing in energy futures misses this, the shock *cannot* be sudden. When you take a 50% pay cut, you don't eat 50% less, drink 50% less, care for your children 50% less, take 50% fewer showers, and so on. Rather, you toss the lowest ranked things on your priority list: entertainment, fancy clothes, DVD's, etc. Likewise, as oil becomes more sharply more scarce, food won't get stuck in the Midwest. The most trivial uses of oil will be abandoned. Stores will stock goods shipped from slightly less far away, and so on. Peak Oil just satisfies the anti-capitalist wet dream that they "were right all along" while those evil rich blindly consumed, but one day they'll be forced to suffer for not realizing this. That's why you don't hear about Peak Diamond or Peak Copper, goods which obey the same market conditions as oil.
You can't store electricity, dumbass. The purpose of my proposal was to consider another way to store energy.
I may have avoided your specification that it be grounded in certain empirical observations, if that's what you're getting at, but I didn't avoid the question of the economic theory behind the claim, and I didn't do it ignorantly. I explained the mechanism for intertemporal reallocation of finite goods, and why any deviation from interest rate price growth would tend to be reversed by profit seeking entrepreneurs. I didn't provide the empirical observations, partly because there aren't any*, and partly because it seemed like you also wanted to know the general basis for the claim. The claim starts with some assumptions, and tells what you would expect to see, for use as a baseline. Deviations from that expectation thus show deviations from the assumptions. Do you demand empirical evidence of the Pythagorean Theorem?
*There are no instances of a good for which no additional supply is ever found, and expectations of future availability never change.
Yes, dumbass, I know that the energy still ultimately (could) come from fossil fuels. That's why I specifically said, anything that can generate electricity can power your car. And yes, there will be an energy loss due to the transfer, like there is, you know, with every energy source. The difference is that you're buying the cheapest source of energy at any given time; you're not limited to oil.
You need to look more long-term than that. Over longer time periods, the gain doesn't look so impressive. And like I said, with something as value-light (low value per unit volume) as oil, you don't actually suck it out and put it in a warehouse when you hoard it -- you buy a future that guarantees extraction and delivery at a later date. So why aren't those futures being bid up? Well, actually they are rather high right now, but you have to remember the political climate. If oil companies fear an arbitrary "windfall" tax, or there looms a risk that someone will just cut off oil supply arbitrarily, they discount the returns to oil exploration, even with high futures prices.
But if you think they're all wrong, don't tell me -- outwit the thousands who have invested billions, and buy the futures yourself!
Yes, the theory doesn't consider the possibility that politicians will do something stupid, like order an invation of a nation that controls some of the supply. I agree. But military interventions are unnecessary to continue the flow of oil. They disrupt, rather than support the flow of oil to people who use it. If governments didn't intervene militarily, oil would be even cheaper. Few governments are going to turn down all the money that can be made from selling oil, socialist rhetoric aside. Remember that Saddam wasn't cutting off his oil supply; the US was, through sanctions. Without them, he'd be perfectly willing to sell. The point of the theory is that market signals correct temporal imbalances, discounting at the interest rate.
As you know economic theory is a model of reality; so what is the basis in reality of your economist's claim?
Fine, I'll give the lesson.
Assume there's are a few owners of some natural resource, and people are carelessly buying that resource, without regard for the future, exactly as you expect. Then some entrepreneur will notice that "hey, supply will drop off at this rate in a few years, and the price will shoot up. I can make a fortune if I just buy some now, hold it, and sell it in the future!" (Yes, this isn't a logical necessity, but to believe otherwise, you have to believe that people knowingly avoid obvious, huge opportunities to make money.) This tendency will equalize use across all periods, as expectations of future use draw people to hold it off the market now.
However, this leaves one thing out: when you buy something, you're forgoing interest on the money spent to buy it. So it won't completely equalize. Rather, in order to justify holding something off the market until "later", the expected gain in value must exceed the interest that would accrue on the invested money. So the resource use will be equalized across all periods, but with future periods discounted by the interest rate.
(Side note: the hoarding off the market is not always accomplished through direct purchase-and-hold, as storage can be expensive. Rather, it can take the form of someone buying futures contracts which specify that the resource simply won't be extracted until a later date.)
And again, keep in mind that this law assumes a static environment, where no new resources are found or lost -- it was just used as a baseline for what to predict in the absence of external changes. In reality, estimates of future supply, and thus current price, are constantly changing. When new information enters the market, people revise their bids, and prices shift. But you can't in advance anticipate that new information, or else it wouldn't be new information!
That's a good point. You shouldn't listen to anyone claiming that level of certainty and precision. Some thoughts:
1) What happens when oil production passes that (if in fact it does)? Is the Peak Oil theory falsified/obsolete, or do you just "massage" the data, and bump up the date, but never question the assumptions of the theory?
2) If Peak Oil believers are so certain that energy will become scarce, and know exactly when, why haven't they bougth the necessary oil futures? Before you paper over this objection with a trite comeback:
a) Yes, many of them would deem that "immoral", but the greedy capitalists who have access to all their data and yet have no such compunctions, don't. They're not bidding up futures, why?
b) Yes, oil futures will actually be "worth something" even if oil falls off precipitously -- contracts are written so that even if they can't give you oil, they have to pay big money. Specify it in gold and you're set.
c) Yes, it may be more important to "avoid the peak" than get rich, but why not hedge your bets, if you really believe this stuff?
3) How are predictions of oil/energy running out fundamentally different from the earlier, very wrong predictions (happening many times in the 19th and 20th centuries)? What assumptions have been altered?
Why can't you liquify it and store it like gasoline then?
That's a good point. What I want to know is, why can't they embed some kind of water electrolysis system in the car. That way, if you need to refill on hyodrogen, just pour some water into a compartment, plug the car in, buy electricity, and the the car would collect the hydrogen for use as fuel. Since it draws its power ultimately from electricity, anything that can make electricity can fuel it.
What's wrong with this idea, and why aren't they doing it now?
I mean, what's the point of a game where a newbie can't defeat a seasoned player by smashing the buttons really fast?
Actually, there are games like this. In my experience, Bushido Blade 2 (and probably 1). After a lot of practice, following the combos, learning the "technique", testing different stances, I thought I had it "down". Then I invited a few friends over who beat the enemies with about the same success that I had, just by maching buttons.
You're making my point for me. If contradictory theories alternate every few years, that's a sign you need to collect a LOT more data before declaring anything as fact -- or even endorsing a dominant theory. It's okay if you change your theory. It's not "okay" if your original theory was premature to begin with. That's a sign of bad methodology.