I think, submitter, the result is "love".

Seriously, markets are so stupidly jittery in the stupidest ways... some people should be banned from investing.

WTFEver

Great, right at vacation time.


Matthew was here.

i never trusted those koreans!

Big oil, Bush, Republicans, wingnut, personal attack, CEO salaries, golden parachute, record profits, gouging, price fixing conspiracy, supply, demand, free market, monopoly, biodiesel, hydrogen, ethanol, peak oil, blending requirements, solar, smart car, hybrid, SUV, Hummer, missles.

Gasoline still less than a gallon of milk, right?

its all bullshot

Could we do without the magic 8 ball thing for a while? It's kind of tired. How about chicken bones, tarot cards, D20, crystal ball, anything else?

If the North Koreans do acquire long range missle ability, it's potentially not good for oil. They could share it with Iran, they could hit Alaska. On the other hand, it doesn't take much for the price gouging to be justified.

purplesmoke420: Gasoline still less than a gallon of milk, right?


No.
Gas $3.03
Milk $2.63
unless it is milk monday at the local gas stop, then milk is $1.99.

Do you mean a "missile", submitter?

/spelling nazi

Major Thomb - Big oil, Bush, Republicans, wingnut, personal attack, CEO salaries, golden parachute, record profits, gouging, price fixing conspiracy, supply, demand, free market, monopoly, biodiesel, hydrogen, ethanol, peak oil, blending requirements, solar, smart car, hybrid, SUV, Hummer, missles

It's the end of the wooorld as we know it,
It's the end of the wooorld as we know it,
It's the end of the wooorld as we know it,
And I feeeel fiiiine...

/you forgot Lenny Bruce

Major Thomb

Hey, we didn't start the fire...

$2.63 for a gallon of milk? You pay that much for a half gallon here.

I saw in another thread yesterday that we should be grateful because we pay far less for fuel than many other countries.

That's great! There sure were a lot of them "haters" that were saying this could be a problem for our country, what with interest rates going up, housing forfeitures rising as home prices are starting to drop. And let's not talk about the inflation that isn't happening - unless you shop for groceries and other associated luxuries like that!

What scares the crap out of me the most is that many of the predictions we have heard might be starting to come true. I'm sure there's going to be at least one idiot that will come in here and say that the Democrats want this country to fail.

Or, is there another brand new talking point out today that I missed?

purplesmoke420: I'd bet you that if I bought milk 40 gallons at a time instead in invididual containers I could easily buy it for less than $2.50 a gallon.

As seen on /.

"Outlook not so good"

The magic 8-ball knows everything!
I'll ask it about Exchange next.

Ya..but but a gallon of gas is STILL cheaper than a gallon of white out! Right, but I guess if cars ran on white out or milk, it would be cheaper because of the mass quantities.

Wow, that 8 ball joke never gets old....


/I'm a big fat liar

Anyone else think that all the oil companies advertising on TV lately is just silly? It makes me somewhat ill.

For Christ's sake, people! DO NOT SHAKE THE MAGIC 8-BALL! YOU GET BUBBLES IN IT THAT WAY! Just flip it over and back! Flip it over and back! How hard is that?

I love my Magic 8-ball.

Magic 8-ball, will people finally learn from their mistakes and not shake you in the future?

"Signs point to yes."

Excellent!

I'm sure there's going to be at least one idiot that will come in here and say that the Democrats want this country to fail.

Or one idiot who will say that George Bush caused inflation and "decreasing" home prices.

Oil prices at record high due to . . . (shakes magic eight ball) . . . Korean missle tests

...cloudy skies
...cracks in the sidewalk
...wind changing direction

North Korea is screwing themselves this way. I seriously doubt they can afford much in the way of oil, now.

So I drop off some dry cleaning this morning and notice the minivan is running low on gas. I drive across the street to the local BP station. The first thing that catches my eye are little neon pink post-it notes on the gas pumps.

OUT OF GAS

I swear - people in suburban Atlanta are the FIRST TO PANIC when gas prices go up. These are also the first people to fly out to Publix to buy $800 worth of food and milk when a snowflake is spotted on weather radar.

I dont know whats more annoying - the 100th some-odd reiteration of the cliche in the headline, or the fact that it's true.

Oil prices at record high due to . . . (checks the facts) . . . artificially-imposed supply limitations coinciding with high summertime demand.


/does not work in oil industry or any related industry
//does possess a functional brain and analytical thinking skills

At least a gallon of gas will always be cheaper then a gallon of HP printer ink. So it must be a great deal!

Phil McKraken: North Korea is screwing themselves this way. I seriously doubt they can afford much in the way of oil, now.

that's ok, they can always auction off a nuclear weapon, that's gotta fetch big bucks on the free market.

Keep shaking that magic 8-ball, and maybe more petroleum will magically appear and we can keep driving our kewl kars forever:

http://www.kunstler.com/

July 3, 2006

Doug Noland's Credit Bubble Bulletin column, published every Friday on the Prudent Bear website, is about the most comprehensive and regularly intelligent view of the financial scene going. Noland ran an especially interesting piece this past week and it deserves some discussion (Note: you have to scroll way down to the end of his column under the sub-head Realty Check for this.)

In it, Noland says:

"...it appears certain that we are in the early stages of an enormous spending boom necessary to deal with the rapidly changing energy and climate backdrop. The scope of the required research and development could be unprecedented. The investment boom throughout the energy and alternative energy sectors appears poised to rival (and likely exceed) the technology boom. The auto companies will need to gear up to develop and sell smaller, more fuel efficient and cleaner automobiles. There will be rising demand for smaller, more energy efficient homes likely in milder climates, as well as demand for efficient appliances and heating and cooling systems. Across the board, businesses will be forced to be more energy efficient."

It is certainly plausible that our society's efforts will have to take a very sharp turn into different areas of endeavor than, say, suburban house-building, theme park promotion, celebutante infotainment services, casino management, and RV sales. And it would make sense that a lot of investment money would start heading to different destinations. Noland himself indicates that this shift could be disruptive. But he seems to come down on the side of an incipient transformative boom.

"For now, it is safe to assume that the current investment boom in ethanol, biodiesel, solar, geothermal, solar, nanotechnologies, oil and gas exploration, and myriad other energy, environmental and conservation technologies create an almost endless source of demand for financial, human and natural resources. And, importantly, for now the Credit system is able and willing to finance this boom."

I think Noland leaves out two crucial parts of the story. While much investment and the work of many people will go into re-shaping and retrofitting the infrastructure of daily life, the bottom line will be a society that has to make do on substantially less net energy than has been the case for the past hundred years. And any way that you cut it, less net energy means less net productive capacity and ultimately less net wealth generated. Since financial instruments are based on the hope and expectation that society will generate more wealth, then this is a predicament for finance generally.

Perhaps Noland posits some kind of superior lean-and-mean machine of a re-tooled economy that will actually generated more wealth using less energy, but personally I doubt this will be the outcome -- especially when you start adding up the externalities of climate change, geo-political conflict over remaining world energy resources, and domestic sociopolitical strife incurred as Americans fight over the table scraps of the 20th century. The model of an economy that produces more wealth as its basic energy inputs contract is a contradiction in terms, in essence just another perpetual motion device.

Which leads to the second thing Noland leaves out: the consequences of the massive mis-investments we have already incurred in the crap that is already out there, namely the gigantic easy-motoring utopia of suburbia. Wind, solar, bio-fuels, tar sands, coal-derived-liquids, used french-fry oil, nuclear fission -- none of these things will rescue American suburbia from the twilight of oil and natural gas. There is a great wish abroad in the land that these alt fuels would come to the rescue, but I believe it will never get beyond the wish stage. I think most of this mis-investment will end up simply written off as a dead loss. And the sheer loss of wealth incurred in this process would take us back to the previous point: socio-political turbulance. As suburbia hemorrhages value, the formerly middle classes will freak out over their personal losses.

Finally, it is interesting to see that Doug Noland has fallen into what has become a widespread delusion among people who ought to know better -- that energy and technology are virtually the same thing, mutually substitutable, that if you run out of energy just bring in new technology. This is really becoming the central misunderstanding of our time.

We have invented a lot of nifty things in the past hundred years, but it has all been made possible by cheap fossil fuels and cheap electricity, which depends on the cheap fossil fuels. Even nuclear power, which was once (but no longer) heralded as "too cheap to meter," owes its existence to the fossil fuels that make all the mining, construction, and maintenance possible. The truth is, we have nothing better to plug into except the fossil fuels, and all the substitutes and schemes currently known will not even make up for a fraction of our losses as we enter the era of energy resource scarcity.

So, getting back to Noland's original point: might we enter a fabulous boom based on "a transformation of the global energy infrastructure?" We'll certainly try, but we'd better prepare ourselves to be disappointed, and to make other arrangements as that happens.

gas here (richmond, va)= 2.92 gal
milk here (wal-mart)= 3.19 gal

As much as I would love to hold Bush or "big oil" accountable for this one, I think it is the speculators whose teeth we need to attack with pliers (assuming that it isn't "big oil" themselves that "leak" the wilting oil reserve level stories). We give these guys too much economic power.

submitter is a retard due to...(loads bullets randomly into chamber) because he's an cliche propogating, greenlighter blowing, ass licking butt monkey

Bring it on. Muhahahah.

I have a gas card from my work. I get free gas. They consider it part of my "compensation." So not only do I not care how much gas is, I drive around looking for the most expensive Exxon station I can find. Because the way I figure it, the more gas I buy the more I get paid. Stick it to the man!

/Lives in the City. Commutes 3 miles to work. YMMV

"I'm sure there's going to be at least one idiot that will come in here and say that the Democrats want this country to fail.

Or one idiot who will say that George Bush caused inflation and "decreasing" home prices."

Well he sure as fark didn't help things...which of course is what you should expect from a fiscally responsible administration who's job is to think of it's people first, before thinking of themselves.

\what's so funny?

So much for the "we went to war over oil" argument.

Well he sure as fark didn't help things...

Neither does any other president. One's as useless as the next. And why do people associate an interest rate increase with a bad economy?

SuperCrackMonkey: I have a gas card from my work. I get free gas. They consider it part of my "compensation." So not only do I not care how much gas is, I drive around looking for the most expensive Exxon station I can find. Because the way I figure it, the more gas I buy the more I get paid. Stick it to the man!

...and the more income taxes you pay, no?

/works that way over here

Wow talk about silly. I've had estes rockets that work better than those korean things. Anyway I actually saw a 7-10 cent drop over the last day, went up on the 3rd/4th for some odd reason.

In the words of Evil Twin Skippy...
Bring it on!

awachtel said,

"Or one idiot who will say that George Bush caused inflation and "decreasing" home prices."

Exactly - because we all know that the President of the largest and most powerful nation on earth backed up by a Congress that gives him everything he wants has no effect over these economic matters in our country.

Did I get that talking point right?

We regulated out public utilities. How much longer do we wait before declaring gasoline a public utility? ;-)

awatchel

Neither does any other president. One's as useless as the next. And why do people associate an interest rate increase with a bad economy?

It's not necessarily the fact that interest rates have risen...Look around - this administration has redefined unemployment statistics so many times that your McJob is labeled as part of the manufacturing sector. The M3 statistic is no longer published (as of 2006, IIRC) - why would you not want to print the amount of cash out there unless you were printing it like crazy? And our trade deficit with China only grows, while the administration spends money willy-nilly...The housing market and anyone in it with an ARM or an interest-only mortgage is going to take a HUGE bath as mortgage payments double (or triple)...

How can you defend any of these practices?

Iona_Trailer: "So much for the "we went to war over oil" argument."

That is exactly wrong. We did indeed invade Iraq primarily to free up all the petroleum there, but the scheme backfired. The mujahedeen have essentially stopped production from the northern fields, and Iraqi production is now HALF what it was before we invaded. This has made the gap between global supply and demand even tighter, and this is driving the high prices.

IOW, the plan backfired, badly.

robbinsc

How can you defend any of these practices?

Defend those practices? Idiots like that VOTED for those practices. TWICE!

Evil Twin Skippy
Nice ride. Here's the one I'll be picking up in August



90mpg biatches!

\Walks to work anyway