neutrino23

The Economy Can't Be That Bad if Thousands Can Pay $100 for a Ballgame

It is very difficult to gauge the success of a business by the feel of the crowd. I'll agree, the upscale restaurants I've been to lately have been quite crowded. On the other hand, if business is down 10% that means just one empty table or one empty seat at the bar, or people are ordering the less expensive dishes or wines.

Also, spending $100 on something is not that important. In fact, $100 purchases might increase in a down period. If I decide not to purchase a car or home this year I can then spend several thousand on small purchases and still come out tens of thousands to the good. This is why we measure things and keep statistics. Anyway, I was born in 1951 and as a kid I recall that ten cents bought a good candy bar which now goes for about a dollar so while $100 is an emotional benchmark it's not what it used to be.

Finally, I have to disagree with Mark about unemployment. The official rate may be near 10% but alternate sources put it closer to 20%.
www.shadowstats.com/al...

The official rate is a narrowly defined statistic. It only counts people actively looking for work and excludes many others. It is not true that if the unemployment rate is X% then (100-X)% are employed.

Will Oil Traders Get Squeezed?

Stockpiling oil now is an intriguing idea. If it can be stored inexpensively underground that could be a huge benefit a few years down the road.

Crude Usage: Three Cubic Miles and Growing

The point is to illustrate that we are heading for a cliff at a rapid rate and there is no plan in place to avoid going over the cliff. Road Runner bemoans the lack of a solution in this article. That is the whole point. There is no obvious solution.

Oil is both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that it is truly the most remarkable fuel. Nothing comes close to it in energy density, portability, storability, ease of transport, and cost to obtain it. Imagine, 1,700kwH per barrel and all we need to get it is stick a pipe in the ground and all we need to do to use it is light a match to it. The curse, of course, is that once your hooked on it you want to keep using it yet there is a finite supply. We are now about at the point where demand is increasing but the rate of production will start to fall.

The responses fall into roughly three categories:
Cornucopians think that technology will somehow save us, that there are vast amounts of undiscovered oil waiting for us, and on and on.
Doomers, as the name implies, see the world as we know it coming to an end. Technological society will end and we'll go back to subsistence farming.
Another group thinks we'll somehow muddle through. There will be extreme hard times, population will shrink to about 2 billion people, but some sort of technological society will survive.

Peak Oil's Bell Is Ringing

What makes this even more serious for the US is the Export Land Model. This describes how oil producing countries experience increasing demand and decreasing supply so that exports fall faster than production falls. As large importer what is really important to us is not just worldwide oil supply but the amount of oil available for export.

Mexico is a good example. Till recently they were our number two source of imported oil. Mexico is suffering a strong decline in oil production such that their exports will probably reach zero by about 2010 or 2011. Instead of being a supplier they will then compete with us for oil on the world market. As a side note, the Mexican government gets some $60B a year from oil exports. What happens to the stability of our neighbor to the south when those funds dry up?