Thursday, June 5, 2008

Understanding Peak Oil Can Be Sexy



Hat tip to Wagga for this find.

In case you missed it Peak Oily Cassandra can be found at Zillow Book.

11 comments:

wagga said...

Nice Hubberts.

Casey Serin said...

After I clicked the videos, only to see a scantily-clad woman, my libido declined faster than Saudi Arabia's proven crude reserves. ;-)

Akubi said...

Someone should tell the Saudis to ShoveItUptheirAss.com.
And the only hope for this country is to STOP DRIVING or flying (admittedly slightly sad about that one).

Ogg the Caveman said...

In other news, I'm still Internet-impaired. It's Comcastic!

Casey Serin said...

In other news, I'm still Internet-impaired.

Peak Bandwidth? ;-)

Akubi said...

@Ogg,
In other news, I'm still Internet-impaired.
That must suck. I guess you can't watch YouTube...
I bet Casey is consuming all of the bandwidth.

Casey Serin said...

I bet Casey is consuming all of the bandwidth.

Video-intensive... uhhh... "alternative lifestyle™ " sites tend to do that. ;-)

Akubi said...

Hi Casey,
Yes, I figured as much.
BTW, it appears that the snowflake generation continues past yours:
It in fact is a boot to every student's head urging them NOT to work hard since they get NO MATERIAL RECOGNITION THAT EXTENDS BEYOND THOSE WHO DO LESS.

This is an explicit and intentional act, it has been going on for more than 20 years, and it is why we are here in this nation today.

Ogg the Caveman said...

@ Akubi: Don't give up hope just yet.

I found the rant you linked to entertaining but, ironically, intellectually lazy. The author makes a couple of very typical mistakes. First, he assumes that his experience is universal. When I was in school we spent a good bit more than a half hour on compund interest, in the context of investing even.

I probably would have given him the same answer to the pizza question when I was 18. Not because I didn't know how to do the math -- I did, although I'd probably have to look it up today -- but because answering random math questions from weird old guys was just not something I did without a good reason.

But what really bothers me is that he assumes that the things he sees are due to a conspiracy and expects us to agree, even though he's given no evidence whatsoever. A statement like the one you quoted needs to be backed up, if not by evidence then at least a notion of what the supposed conspirators would gain from it. I can see arguing that the powers that be would benefit from a stupid populace, but a lazy populace? That cries out for explanation.

Maybe schools these days *are* failing kidz when it comes to teaching math and a work ethic, but the schools of his day didn't do too well with critical thinking.

His rants are fun, but I wouldn't take them too seriously.

Mitchell said...

What's bogus about the pizza thing is the notion of a "S&P 500 index fund that would return, on average, 10% annually" for fifty years.

In fact, it's interesting to ask how it is that a bank can afford to give you interest at all. I suppose that, in theory, the interest a depositor gets paid, is a portion of the interest the bank gets paid on the loans it makes using the money of its depositors. (Though a bank these days may derive income from other sorts of investments too.) Which in turn implies that the capacity to pay interest depends on the profitability of the bank. But who gets taught that? Instead, that savings accrue interest is just a sort of nice background fact of nature, like the availability of oil.

For me, one of the intriguing developments in recent years is the widespread currency that ideas like "fractional reserve banking is the root of all monetary evil" are getting, due mostly to the candidacy of Ron Paul, the current credit crunch, and of course the Internet. For now, the peak-oil people and the abolish-the-Fed people are still mostly in different camps - the latter view the former as hard-left doomers whose anti-civilization attitude exacerbated the energy crisis in the first place, by blocking nuclear power, drilling in Alaska, etc. But you can see signs of a synthesis here and there.

Maybe the Gulf states, after getting ultra-rich at the end of the Oil Age, will be the financial superpowers of the next, and will impose an Islamic no-usury system on everyone else. The Islamophobes are right - the Muslims do want to impose Sharia on the West; just not via the dress code, but via the bank account! Run for your lives! They can have my interest payments when they pry my bankcard from my cold, dead fingers.

Mitchell said...

In support of Denninger's contention that financial education is just as important as sex education.