Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[wierd]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-16/oil-companies-wonder-if-it-s-worth-looking-for-oil-anymore

It's a trend.

[pisskop]

Something something turkey black sea yesterday

[wierd]

Negative prices means it costs more to develop the find, than you get out of it. 

It's just as deadly as resources exhaustion.  Imagine say, if all manner of precious metals fell from the sky in a sustained (but small individual sizes) meteor shower event.  suddenly, you would be able to pan for the shit everywhere. Prices would tank.

OPEC recently flooded the market, combined with lower demand from nobody driving (because corona work from home is the new norm), which means the futures market tanked for oil.


I consider this to be a blip, not a trend-setter though. Its a sufficiently big blip that it could destroy capability to bring those resources to market later though.

[Maximum Spin]

Negative prices means it costs more to develop the find, than you get out of it. 

It's just as deadly as resources exhaustion.  Imagine say, if all manner of precious metals fell from the sky in a sustained (but small individual sizes) meteor shower event.  suddenly, you would be able to pan for the shit everywhere. Prices would tank.

It's marginally more complicated than that, but, more importantly, whether it's "just as deadly" is irrelevant to the question of whether it is the opposite of 'peak oil'.

[Frumple]

I mean. Prices would tank, but you'd also have a glut of resources, that might even be casually locally acquired. That's... not just as deadly. It's not deadly at all, even. More like really, really good. Businesses would get reorganized and there'd be disruptions, sure, but it's way, way better of an outcome than depletion, which just leaves you fucked with no particular recourse if there's no substitute...

[Reelya]

Paying off the *entire* national debt would ruin important government spending for a few decades, guesstimating, and it's not necessary.  But reducing the debt improves our financial situation going forward.  There are also downsides to foreign nations including China holding so much of our debt.  We owe China over a trillion dollars, and we have to respect that debt if we want to trade with the rest of the world (which we literally have to thanks to the globalized economy of cost-cutting).

They tried this in Europe mind you, and it didn't work the way people think. Think austerity.

You do need to ease into it, that's my point: that the status quo pont is deficits matching inflation, not deficits being zero dollars, because that is in itself more or less an artificial notion: if inflation is 2%, and a zero dollar deficit equals a 2% reduction per year, why 2% exactly and not 3% or 1%? There's no reason to favor any one of those specific rates of reduction of the debt without doing an actual analysis.

The problem in America is entirely because they massively exceeding the point of stability and have done for a long time, so just keeping pace with inflation is not in fact the cause of the problem.

[NJW2000]

To my mind, there's only one energy source that's reliable, renewable, safe and efficient enough for my liking: geothermal.

No political candidate has yet promised the public more volcanoes, but when they do, I will vote for them.

[Reelya]

Ah I just remembered why that "pay all the debt now" stuff actually failed.

In broader terms the point is to lower debt as a percentage of GDP. Why Europe fucked it up is because "austerity" while it promise to reduce government debt on paper also tanked GDP, which then reduced tax revenues, so putting upward pressure on deficits again, and recessions also cause deflation, which increases the values of debt in concrete financial terms.

The austerity stuff was based on what turned out to be flawed research, because of a typo in an excel spreadsheet by some Harvard economists in their paper. I'd argue these failed policies in Europe are a big reason that they have Brexit.

https://www.brettonwoodsproject.org/2012/12/art-571588/

The IMF triggered renewed debate over austerity (see Update 82, 80, 78, 76) when its October World Economic Outlook (WEO) revised growth forecasts down significantly for advanced, emerging and developing economies, after already having done so in three consecutive previous WEO editions. The IMF examined the economic impact of austerity policies by re-estimating so-called fiscal multipliers; it concluded that its economic models were incorrect.

The WEO section examining fiscal multipliers, co-authored by IMF chief economist Olivier Blanchard, found that “the negative short-term effects of fiscal cutbacks have been larger than expected because fiscal multipliers were underestimated” by a factor of two to three. The degree of under-estimation was found to be “large, negative and significant.” The analysis suggested that socio-economic factors were also more negatively affected than presumed, including “large and significant” effects on unemployment. Paul Krugman, Nobel prize-winning economist, writing in the New York Times offered “kudos to the Fund for having the courage to say this, which means … admitting its own analysis was flawed.”

Another way of saying this is that government spending has a large leverage effect on other spending, and if you yank out that plank, people stop investing, including in employees, and then the government itself loses out on the tax revenues from all that discretionary spending.

[Naturegirl1999]

I find it very interesting that this thread turns into the de facto Random Thoughts threa dfairly often. And I’m fine with it

[Eric Blank]

To be fair, as a broke-ass essential-employee consumer, the cheaper gas prices did nothing but help me. What sucks is that everything else I depend on comes from distant or overseas markets that are now harder to access.

[Maximum Spin]

To my mind, there's only one energy source that's reliable, renewable, safe and efficient enough for my liking: geothermal.

No political candidate has yet promised the public more volcanoes, but when they do, I will vote for them.

Admittedly, geothermal is great, but there isn't enough of it. (It's also, technically, a form of nuclear power.)

Nuclear power is an extremely safe and efficient power source. Chernobyl, the big disaster everyone thinks of that pretty much ruined nuclear power for the public, was a predictable engineering failure caused by the Soviets not even trying to be safe. Nuclear plant failures under reasonable safety measures have so far killed... maybe one person that I know of, at Fukushima Daiichi, whose cancer was declared to have been caused by the radiation by the Japanese government. Now, there may be others, for sure, but there are also a surprising number of people who have been killed in geothermal plant accidents. Meanwhile, nuclear waste, the other big scary thing people tend to mention, is a solved problem with breeder reactors and processes like REMIX and PUREX, to which the primary opposition has been "OMG plutonium!"

It's still not a magic problem-solving button and won't absolve us of the need to reduce the human population by more than half. But it'll be an effective way to power the civilisation that exists afterward.

[Rolan7]

I keep meaning to visit the Random Thoughts thread.  I've been trying to let the "strange" ideas out in nice controlled ways lately, and I think it's helping.  I certainly feel better than a few days ago, that's for sure.

As for debt:  Looks like Reelya and I are on the same page.  Having a certain amount of debt has fancy economic benefits, but a simpler benefit is the value of having money sooner.  Lots of huge corporations float a constant amount of debt because it lets them wield more money to increase profits... constantly (in microcosm).  Not having any loans could imply that a company doesn't have any ambition - which under capitalism's lifeblood of all-consuming expansion is a "red flag".  And of course small business are generally established in debt and tend to stay there, hopefully treading water by utilizing the capital.

I'm unclear how directly that applies to capitalist nations, but it's plainly true that austerity measures can hurt GDP and thus tax revenue.
Also the cleanest power source is hooking humanity up to an online massively multiplayer curated version of reality.

[ChairmanPoo]

My father has always operated on *not* having debt and he has done just fine 🤔

[Naturegirl1999]

Also the cleanest power source is hooking humanity up to an online massively multiplayer curated version of reality.

So like a matrix we can control, sounds good, but how will we get the nutrients we need?

[Reelya]

The problem is that it's not cheap enough. That's the real reasons there's no strong push for it. If it was all that cheap then they'd have to be holding back the reins of eager investors. They are not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#United_States


This is levelized cost of electricity measurements, which means it accounts for the life cycle of the plants.

The difference between these costings and some of the other costings is that some previous claims of it being cheaper only factored in the running costs of existing plants, omitting the construction costs, which are quite large.

Another factor is that if we massively boost nuclear with current tech then available uranium of sufficient quality wouldn't last very long, so it's not actually a viable thing to scale up to the point that it solves global warming.