Technology – Page 21 – The Burning Platform

Using Photobucket to Post Graphics at TBP

I have offered and been taken up on the offer to write a simple tutorial on how to post images with comments here at TBP. Because you need an online photo hosting service to do that and Photobucket is free and easy, it is what I use. Therefore, it is what I’m going to tell you how to use.

I don’t know if bandwidth/data usage is an issue with you because it has been a long time since I’ve been on a “normal” internet connection. However, before you start uploading a lot of photos from your computer, you probably need to know if your service has a data limit like mine does. Our service out here in the hills has unlimited downloads from 11 p.m. until 5 a.m., which is why I’m sitting here at 1 a.m. working with graphics on Photobucket. I should be able to upload this in about ten minutes.

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If there are problems, just ask questions in the comments and I’ll address your questions. If you want to know how to turn screen shots into images you can upload, I can tell you how to do that too, but I just wanted to post the bare essentials for someone who wants to put a picture of their pet goldfish on the blog for all to admire.

Continue reading “Using Photobucket to Post Graphics at TBP”

Another Question for November 18, 2015

With raids being conducted and suspects being caught day in and day out, it appears that the EU and its agencies have thwarted much terrorist activity as of late.

What can their new found clairvoyance be attributed too?

INTERACTIVE TIMEWASTER

I’m not sure why I never posted about this here before. It’s been around for years. Use it to impress your friends and family or to get a kid interested in science or math.

The site is called Heavens-Above. You can use it to observe bright satellites like the International Space Station and many others.

From the left side of the page click on “Change your observing location”. You will be able to drill right down to a single point anywhere on Earth (your location) and then click save if you’d like, or not, for you paranoid types. After that click on “ISS” and it will generate a table for any visible passes (overflights) of the International Space Station visible from your location. If no table is displayed try again in a few days.

If you know your constellations you can even print out a map that plots the pass across your sky along with pass details by clicking on the date.

Data on the table is displayed by:

Date: There can be multiple passes in a single day visible from the same place.

Brightness: The lower the number, the brighter the ISS will appear. Negative numbers are best.

There are then three broader columns labeled Start, Highest Point and End. Each of these is broken down by:

Time: When a pass first becomes visible is at its max altitude or ends. Shown in local military time.

Alt: This is altitude in degrees above the horizon. Ninety degreees is straight up, 45 degrees is half way to the horizon etc.

Az: This is shown as compass directions for where in the sky the pass will appear, peak and disappear.

Continue reading “INTERACTIVE TIMEWASTER”

SSS SCHOOLS ADMIN ON FRACKING

Good news for frackers.

In mid-May 2015, domestic oil production increased by 300,000 bbl/day over the past 3 months to a grand total of 9.6 million bbl/day. This total domestic production is the highest it’s been since 1970, when domestic oil production started a long, 35 year slide to just under 5 million bbl/day in 2005.

In the 10 years since, the U.S. has added over 4.6 million bbl/day to its production, and fracking has accounted for 90% of that increase. For the math challenged, that’s 4.14 million bbl/day.

So why is domestic oil production increasing when so many predicted a death knell for the fracking industry as the global PRICE of oil plummeted from $110 a barrel to its current level of $60. It’s because the fracking companies still standing can profit from $60 a barrel and not the “conventional wisdom” that they need the global price of oil to remain at or above $80-85 a barrel. Several factors are in play.

—-Half of the NEW fracking wells started in September 2014 have been idled. Lower cost to the companies in energy consumed, equipment purchased or leased, and jobs required.

—-100,000 workers laid off. Huge savings to the companies in labor costs.

—-Less productive wells idled. Production at the best wells ramped up. Yes, this will deplete these wells even faster, but the companies have already identified promising replacements through …….

—-Skyrocketing technology in horizontal drilling, which can now burrow its way through the earth up to 15,000 feet using seismic imaging and a host of other breakthroughs to find what they’re looking for: huge amounts of recoverable oil. And the technology is working very, very well.

—-Bankruptcies. Sorry about the jobs lost or idled, but that’s how destructive capitalism works. The companies left standing are snapping up oil leases and idled equipment at fire sale prices, and …..

—-Institutional investors are watching closely. And they like what they see and have poured over $20 billion into the fracking companies in the past few months. This is precisely the OPPOSITE of what occurred in 1986 when the domestic oil industry collapsed and the banks and investors stampeded to the exits.

—-Finally, a coup de grace has been delivered to the radical environmental groups who have been fighting fracking for years based on spurious allegations that fracking threatens under ground water sources. Two days ago, the EPA released a multi-year study costing nearly $50 million dollars that it does not. The EPA study did not reveal ONE SINGLE INSTANCE of fracking fluids which compromised under ground water. Not one.

Fracking for oil is safe and critical to the economy and national security. Critical. I challenge the anti-frackers who have read these comments to present any case which refutes my analysis and firm support of the fracking industry. It will survive, and it will prosper. Greatly to the nation’s and individual’s benefit.

And I invite Admin to go first.

“Your” Car? Not So Much…

More attempts at control from our government/corporate owners…

by: Eric Peters

The government wants to control your car – how it’s made, what it comes equipped with and (of course) how you’re allowed to drive it. Now comes the other half of the pincers:

The car companies want to prevent you from working on the thing.

Modifications – performance enhancements – and even routine maintenance are to become illegal via the application (and enforcement) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to cars.

They are claiming propriety rights to thesoftware embedded in the computer – technically, the Electronic Control Unit or ECU – that pretty much runs a modern car. They claim – and you knew this was coming, right? – thatsaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaafety is threatened by people doing their own maintenance or tweaking/tuning as such might affect how the varioussaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaafety systems embedded in the car and controlled by the ECU operate.

A blind stroke victim ought to have seen this coming.

Cars, claim the car companies, are mobile computing devices – you know, like sail fawns – and so fall under the aegis of the DMCA. Have a read:

“Automobiles are inherently mobile, and increasingly they contain equipment that would commonly be considered computing devices… Many of the ECUs embodied in today’s motor vehicles are carefully calibrated to satisfy federal or state regulatory requirements with respect to emissions control, fuel economy, or vehicle safety. Allowing vehicle owners to add and remove programs at whim is highly likely to take vehicles out of compliance with these requirements, rendering the operation or re-sale of the vehicle legally problematic. The decision to employ access controls to hinder unauthorized “tinkering” with these vital computer programs is necessary in order to protect the safety and security of drivers and passengers and to reduce the level of non-compliance with regulatory standards. We urge the Copyright Office to give full consideration to the impacts on critical national energy and environmental goals, as well as motor vehicle safety, in its decision on this proposed exemption. Since the record on this proposal contains no evidence regarding its applicability to or impact on motor vehicles, cars and trucks should be specifically excluded from any exemption that is recommended in this area.”

Continue reading ““Your” Car? Not So Much…”

Mucks’ Minute (or maybe two)

The Argument for Fiat Money

Now that title got your attention, didn’t it?

Here in the middle of governmental chaos and confusion, political bickering and turmoil, moral decay and dishonesty, debt through the roof with mathematical proof that there is no way to pay it back and that will, at any rate, result in a Depression worse than the last “Great One” and before we’re through, if history is a guide, it will likely be a world wide Depression of a size never before seen or experienced. The killer drop in oil prices is simply the next bubble in line to pop! And there are dozens more right there in line to follow.

So, I am making a case for fiat money…

No, I’m not nuts, just trying making a point.

First, as we all know, all debt must be paid – all over the world. The debt may be repaid in real goods (gold, silver, productive output, etc) Most countries of lesser stature – but the group is growing by leaps and bounds- merely thumb their noses at creditors and default. Ireland just did that by offering (and getting ) payment of $0.10 on the dollar for the Bank of Irelands debt to the Euro-banks (which never made the Main Street Media in any form or fashion and only Reuters carried the story – to this day!).

Iceland, on the other hand, just told their European creditors to bugger off and defaulted on the whole debt. After suitable screams and wails from the EU Banks, Iceland is now on the healthy road to recovery, albeit with a greatly reduced (and temporary) access to debt markets. But they are growing again from a lower base which is better than sinking to a lower base yet through “austerity” and going deeper in debt and juggling fiat money loans while building an even more fragile pile which WILL FALL DOWN in the future.

That’s the honest way out of debt. Default, bankruptcy, a few mea culpa’s, a few years of suffering from depreciated currency and, followed by the start of honest growth (if that is at all possible in a world of depleting resources), all is well and things get better. Falling availability of resources is a whole ‘nuther story..

Down Central America and South of the equator they have this default business down pat. North of the Equator not so much. Oh sure, Russia did it – but they had so many natural resources nobody noticed much except the banks that got bailed out. Further more the crash (and that is what it is) of oil prices will shortly see Russia and their captive cronies default again to much greater and world wide devastation than, say Zimbabwe or Greece (Greece is in a state of continuously defaulting under a “tent” of obfuscation) who tried a simple default but thanks to the EU who will nail their feet to the floor and torture them for years to come (unless they pull a typical Grecian reaction and burn the place down to stop it). For some reason they can’t bring themselves to give up the dole and work for a living.

Russia is a different bag. When they default this time, (after a likely crack-up first), all their dependent annexed countries will find the subsidies gone. Cuba will go very hungry as they now subsist on Russian handouts. Venezuela, a doomed country with nothing but oil between it and universal poverty will, shortly, go up in a poof of smoke and disintegrating civility and drop into a medieval existence of subsistence farming , small feudal villages and a 500% increase in the numbers of street vendors.

The current not so comedic problems with debt and budget in our own battered, dinged and buried beyond the neck (we’re barely breathing now!) in debt U.S.A. will continue into yet another “kick the can” attempt which will eventually (if not now) fail. I’d like for it to fail now and get it over with that’s a personal wish.

That doesn’t address the title of this article, does it? The Austrians want to return to the gold standard. The Republicans want to stop (all of a sudden, I might add) excessive Government spending, the Democrats desperately want to “kick that can” (at least past the 2016 Presidential farce) so that things can continue as they were/are – which isn’t going to happen.

Well, what the Republicans and Democrats want to happen will probably both happen – one after the other – and then game over. Or maybe sooner. The world will not allow the Democratic no-plan and the American people will throw out of office every Republican in Washington if the Republican’s really cut back spending to where it matters! Neither political party has the guts or statesmanship or leadership to do what’s necessary, so we will, very likely, follow Russia (at a slower and more painful rate) into and maybe under the pit of at least partial hyper-inflation before the deflationary bullet is not bitten but fired! Either way, we are well and truly doomed to a Depression of much greater extent than that of the 1930’s and world-wide at that – but no one wants to admit it.

BUT – big but.. what happens then? Most likely, the pendulum will swing and inflation will (properly) get blamed for all our problems and we’ll reset the economy by going to some sort of commodity money – based on gold and silver most likely, but it could be carrots, or wheat or something else our “new” Government figures they can control. (We will never, sadly, punish the real villains, ourselves, for allowing it to happen for the umpteenth time). Let’s assume it to be old style bi-metalism and an attempt to restate our medium of exchange (the dollar) to whatever the current world price of gold happens to be with silver priced at some fraction to that of gold.

Ah – says a large part of the audience, heaven is upon us and all will be well.

Which probably will not be a truism for the first few years to a decade or two.

But then we struggle up from our debtor/defaulter dungeon, climb back over the edge of the pit and wonder of wonders – start to grow economically speaking! After all, after an inflationary crash and depression, there are a lot of poor people, sadly in this case, probably fewer people as well, and a little bit of growth goes a long way in that situation. With or without resources.

One problem. Where does the “real” money come from to allow the growth that is so badly needed? I know the commodity money fans will say that we don’t need more money – prices will naturally fall as production slowly rises all with the same amount of money (thanks to better technology and higher productivity) – and that is true in the small limited sense. A fixed money supply does not, however encourage anything. This situation of “encouraging” things is handled by those who run the government at the behest of monied, influential PTB to their own benefit with no thought to the general public or economy at large.

Entrepreneurship is sometimes muzzled for lack of credit (after all, credit is just money that’s advanced on the premise that interest will be paid on it and it will be paid back in a set period of time, right?). Credit keeps you from spending years and years saving up a stake for a new business you just “know” will (maybe) be successful so monetary growth in a fixed money supply economy is limited to the growth of the commodity that the money is “fixed to”.

Now, from the human view, this is unacceptable because it just to damn slooooooow. We humans are “speed balls” when it comes to inventiveness and entrepreneurial ability provided we stop paying people not to work and knock off paying welfare moms (and their sperm suppliers) money for children produced. I doubt government will exist by then in any significant size other than local, perhaps state and bare bones federal so we may be able to get on with it anyway.

But we’re not talking small stuff here, either. We’re talking about dragging 150- 200 million people – and much more if you consider the world at large – out of a much poorer place back up the human conditional ladder into some kind of higher location. (Please note the smaller population quoted for the US.. Scary? Bet your bippy it is)

Voila! We need more money! Fractional banking and more money/credit will do it as it will encourage borrowing for those with good ideas and allow people to buy more things and spend and increase demand for all sorts of good stuff like sofas and cars and houses and flat screens and transport and a replacement for that tent we’ve been living it and perhaps a diet that would include more than potatoes and dandelion greens and new shoes for the kids and – and – maybe with the new money we can restart the school down the road in the next town so we can stop home schooling the brats! In addition, with just a little more money to go around, Johnny Smith can borrow a little of it and start that wood cutting business he’s been wanting to do out on his property! What a wonderful idea and all it needs is more money than is allowed by locking in the supply of it to the “Cross of Gold” (and where have I heard that before?). Let’s print some!

Now we come to the crux of the problem. Commodity money doesn’t work fast enough because it limits the ability of the economy to grow by other means than technology and productivity improvements reducing the prices of goods and services. Commodity money is rigid. It doesn’t encourage anything, good or bad.

Please read that paragraph again.

Fiat money, which one gets when not using a commodity based money works fine for a little while. A little while. From the get-go the citizens get screwed because he who pockets and spends fiat currency first (i.e. governmental entities and banks) gets the most use out of it —– unless the issuance of said fiat currency is limited to no more than the HONEST value of the gross production of goods and services of the Country (or the State, or the local community) minus the outstanding debt that needs to be paid off sometime real soon now.

I’ll spell it out, P-R-O-D-U-C-T-I-O-N.

Not government spending (National, State or local), not welfare, not social programs of any kind, not education, not health and welfare – NOTHING but productive earnings of a country (and I include all three of the above whenever I say “country”). If the country actually earns more than it consumes, then it is able to tax itself a bit to handle things like national defense, interstate and international commerce negotiations, even local police if you’ve got some problem drunks. No fair counting anything other than production of goods and services required for those things that are in demand for both domestic and international use.

Also (and this will bring some boo-blahs), so called free trade where intelligence is hauled overseas and mixed with fiat money to put people to work at 1/20th the cost of domestic labor sucks and I am no fan of this destructive commercial behavior. Tariff the products when they return to our shores or what you end up with eventually is what we have today: We produce next to nothing, most all important production has moved off shore and all we have is the mathematically unworkable system of buying products produced in foreign countries by selling them debt that will never be paid back to get money to buy their products – a Ponzi scheme larger, by far, and enormous proportions never seen before that is now coming home to roost with our unstoppable unemployment, , ever lowering wages (compared to ever rising prices), skill loss, our manufacturing capability mostly dead, a consumer driven society dying from debt that can’t be paid and a future that will be a depression of far Greater Proportion than the last one.

We are and have been exporting our fiat financing to the rest of the world. So far they take it. Later, they won’t.

Now to get back on subject, a purely commodity form of money will not work efficiently for an advanced (if smaller) technological society. It hasn’t worked in the past and it won’t work in the future. Commodity money will arrest inflationary problems overnight once the general public see and understand that it will arrest inflation of the money supply. True. Overnight. The human race has been there and done that a number of times.

Fiat money, unanchored to anything, on the other hand, always destroys a civilization in which it is used as over time, venial rulers, kings, despots, tribal chiefs, emperors, presidents and congressmen find that it’s so much easier to print more fiat money (in the form of cash or credit – which is the same thing in two different siren suits) than it is to explain to the citizens why they should give up their hard earned “productive” money to the government to do things they don’t care about or want. This way, the government (of any sort or variety) can spend more than the country can produce and tax away to the government in the form of scalping excess production. These “upper caste rulers” can then buy votes (in a democracy) and fund huge police forces. Remember the TSA ordering a billion rounds of ammo? Has your local police force got a tank yet? My town does and I live in a little calm community on a lake in Central Florida. And, of course, in not so democratic countries, it’s easy. These politicians (and anonymous corporations and contributors who fund them) can stuff the pockets of favored people including those “governing” the country and their cronies and do all manner of mischief with money they have no business having. Especially now that there is virtually no limit to anonymous fiat cash that can be funneled to political parties with the newly passed “bribery special” funding bill that cleared both houses of Congress last weekend. Now we look forward to who can purchase the most crooked Congressional, Executive and Judicial people. As if we needed more of that crap anyway. Turns out that who spends the most wins the elections, determines the judicial appointments and who gets screwed and who doesn’t.

The result of this is slow (don’t be too speedy, now!) depreciation of the fiat money doesn’t kill the golden goose very quickly as an excess of money encourages growth that is not necessarily productive, not necessarily safe (hence a percentage of the growth is false!) i.e serial bubbles; so standards of living usually climb for a while – sometimes a long while – thanks to technological progress and productivity gains that technology brings. This can go on for a long time – think five generations for the United States – not too shabby an effort even if it has now run off the tracks.

But sooner or later, the ruling scions, bankers, scam artists, politicians, stock sellers and check loan artists get greedy. Why? Because every time you add to the debt of the country, you cut down on the productivity of the country. The more debt you have to roll over and suffer paying the interest for it, the less money is available for productive (REAL production) purposes. So the gross production (and true products) of the country starts to fall. ROI falls. Savings crunch. The middle class is decimated by such bizarre policies as ZIRP (another name for paying for things by the government and keeping banks from folding up without really having to pay for it (which is a proven failed method that goes back to the Roman Empire with coin shaving et al)

THIS IS A POINT THAT WE HAVE ALREADY PASSED.. Mark that on your calendar.

Things tend to go to pot pretty fast after that happens because every fiat dollar of debt incurred beyond that point actually reduces production capability that much more and it is not linear. Mathematically, it turns out to be exponential so the curves of doom rise ever faster until they are unsustainable as they are now. So crash already and get it over with..

Now what do we do on the other side? What kind of money are we going to use when all the dung has been flung, the depressing future is in the past and we see the light of day and start thinking of eating more than one meal a day? (I apologize for the doomer slant – but I am not optimistic about the comfort of the coming period of time.)

First, our problem is not with start up money as we can cobble together a commodity based money to dig our way up the side of the pit. It may very well be that commodity money will be the only way we can do so. Time will tell.

Sooner or later, we will, once again, need more money than commodity money allows us to have because of the ever limited supply of the base commodity and that is the question. What can we use? History is not kind here. And further (as in Germany today) the memory still lives of worthless “money” (i.e. fiat), hardships unbelievable and a tough row to hoe to get themselves back into a decent level of prosperity (only 75 years of hard work and a large saving rate)..

Our problem is not money, you see, it is human nature. Human nature is what drives fiat money based systems into disaster, not what is used for the “money” or medium of exchange. Yes, I know the “real” requirements of money – intrinsic value, small, divisible, retains value over time, readily acceptable in trade, blah, blah, blah.…. Fiat money fills all those requirements if we would just stop printing so damn much of it in paper currency and issue of credit (be it loans or bonds or derivatives or whatever) all based on a nebulous “fractional” banking and credit system. I have ten bucks so I can loan out $100 because no one will ever want all their money back at one time ; a fairy tale that has sunk many a nation and oh so many individuals.

So, fellow voyagers, after exploring a good part of the in and outs of fiat money and credit I have come to the conclusion there is no valid reason to create a medium of exchange (paper and credit) that is not rigidly capped by the amount of gold, silver, increasing productivity and technological enhancements of the country involved.

Which kind of blows away the title of this Mucks’ Five Minutes piece (but that was to suck you into reading it in the first place!). There is truly no case for fiat money at all. Period.

One exception. In the event of true National Emergency (invasion or an asteroid) or someone nukes us that requires the Last World War to commence. Then, sadly, all bets are then off and we are in the soup again. That has happened time after time after time in history and history will always repeat – usually with different timing, flavors and smells and even outcomes, but repeat it will.

As for today’s debt problems? Forgetaboutit. The end game is baked in the cake. We are all going to get poorer by and by and as to investments, he who looses least wins!

But we still need to think about and discuss the other side of it all. Just in case there is another side.

Historic Rosetta Comet Landing

Rosetta’s Plasma Consortium (RPC) has uncovered a mysterious ‘song’ that Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is singing into space. The comet seems to be emitting a ‘song’ in the form of oscillations in the magnetic field in the comet’s environment. It is being sung at 40-50 millihertz, far below human hearing. To make the music audible to the human ear, the frequencies have been increased in this recording: https://soundcloud.com/esaops/a-singing-comet

The Philae lander has separated from the Rosetta orbiter, and is now on its way to becoming the first spacecraft to touch down on a comet.

The livestream – http://new.livestream.com/ESA/cometlanding

http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2014/11/12/rosetta-and-philae-separation-confirmed/

PEAK OIL, PEAK NATURAL GAS, OR PEAK BS? YOU DECIDE.

“I will drink every gallon of oil produced west of the Mississippi.”
—-1885, John Archbold, partner of Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller. Yikes. Texas, Oklahoma, California, most of Louisiana, and North Dakota are all west of the Mississippi.

“Within the next two to five years, the oil fields of this country will reach their maximum production, and from that time on we will face an ever increasing decline.”
—-1919, Van H. Manning, Director of the U.S. Bureau of Mines. In 1931, the east Texas oil field was discovered and created a glut of oil.

“U.S. oil production will likely peak between 1965 and 1970 and steadily decline thereafter.”
—-1956, M. King Hubbert, Shell Oil geologist and father of the Peak Oil Theory aka Hubbert’s Peak. He was right, until he wasn’t. U.S. oil production peaked in 1970 and bottomed out at 5 million bbl per day in 2008. Today it is 8.3 million bbl per day. Main reason? Hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling.

“Global oil production is 84 million bbl per day. I don’t believe you can get it any more than 84 million bbl per day. I don’t care what Abdullah, Putin or anyone else says about oil reserves or production.”
—-2005, T. Boone Pickens, billionaire oil tycoon. In 2013, global oil production was 90 million bbl a day.

“Peak Oil deniers are blithering idiots.”
—-2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014, James Quinn, Chairman Emeritus of the Department of Peak Oil Forensics, University of Pennsylvania. Heh. I made that one up.

Well, in the last decade, it appears that Russian ultra-nationalist Vladimir Putin is one-up on American oil expert T. Boone Pickens. Seems the Russian oil companies may have been whispering oil data in Putin’s ear that was not for international dissemination.

Let’s get real about Peak Oil. The U.S. Energy Information Agency states that there 1.6 trillion barrels of known oil deposits out there on the planet, and energy agencies in other countries, such as France and Russia, agree. That’s nearly 49 years of oil left for everyone on Earth at today’s production of 90 million bbl per day, assuming it is all consumed at the current rate of production, which it isn’t. Some is stored, and some is being replaced rapidly by other forms of energy such as natural gas (see below). Currently, production more than meets demand. The global price of oil is DROPPING.

New and significant deposits are being found all the time. In Russia, a 2.2 billion bbl deposit was found in April 2014 in the Astrakhan region north of the Caspian Sea. It is the largest announced oil find in Russia in 20 years. In Kenya, a 1 billion bbl deposit of light sweet crude was announced in September 2014. The list goes on and on in a variety of other locations such as Angola and Venezuela. Small potatoes you might say, but then there’s this blockbuster ……

“In March of 2009, the United States Geologic Survey (USGS) completed a reassessment of the in-place oil shale reserves in this (western) region and increased their estimate from about 1 trillion barrels of shale oil to 1.525 trillion barrels of shale oil. The Department of Energy (DOE) estimates that about 1.8 trillion barrels of shale oil potentially underlay Colorado, Utah and Wyoming.” The word trillion is not a misprint. The oil is there. And we can get it. At a price, of course.

While Peak Oil supporters argue truthfully that there is a finite amount of oil to be found on the planet, they don’t mention how much, just that it is getting more difficult and more expensive to recover, which is also true. Shell Oil believes there could be 300 billion more bbl of oil in the Gulf of Mexico seabed. That’s huge, but deep sea drilling is expensive. Same goes for the possible 16 billion bbl sitting in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and the trillion-plus shale oil in the West. And you can count on radical environmental activists creating a political and legal firestorm in all cases. National security be damned.

Peak oil supporters also ignore two other huge factors: technology and natural gas. The oil companies are currently working on new hydraulic fracturing processes that will enable them to squeeze out even more oil from fracked wells. As for natural gas, because of its current abundance, due in large part to drilling for oil, it is rapidly replacing fuel oil as a method for heating hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses, especially in the Northeast and Midwest. And how about those tens of thousands of vehicles that are currently burning liquid natural gas (methane) and compressed natural gas instead of diesel or highly refined gasoline. Natural gas has reduced our national consumption of oil by hundreds of thousands of bbl per day and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

The current heavy use of plentiful natural gas will inexorably lead to shouts of “Peak Natural Gas.” Don’t laugh. It’s happened before. In the 1970s, when clueless climate scientists were warning about the Earth getting colder and an impending Ice Age, the federal government “fixed” the problem of dwindling domestic natural gas resources.

It started in 1938 with the Natural Gas Act, when the federal government decided it could regulate the construction of interstate natural gas pipelines under the guise of safety. That morphed into the federal government controlling the wellhead PRICE (uh, oh) of natural gas sent for resale through those interstate pipelines under the guise of cheap natural gas for the consumer. The capstone to this folly was in November, 1978 when the federal government passed the Natural Gas Policy Act, which created 30 (!!!!!) different categories of natural gas sales with varying ceiling prices set by the federal government.

The upshot to all this? Natural gas power plants couldn’t compete with plants using much cheaper coal, so they converted their steam turbines to burning coal. It gets worse. A full 50% of all coal plants operating in the U.S. today were built in the 1970s and 1980s. Did you know that? The result was/is dirtier air (“I love the smell of sulphur dioxide in the morning”) and hundreds of billions of extra tons of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere, compliments of the geniuses sitting in Congress and the White House.

“If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand.”
—-Milton Friedman

I can hardly wait for the next fix to Peak Whatever.

With appreciation to Russell Gold, who contributed some of the information above in his article, “Why Peak Oil Predictions Haven’t Come True – and Probably Won’t,” published in the Wall Street Journal, 29 Sep 14.

COMCAST SUCKS but they lowered my bill enough that I can deal with it.

Sometimes it pays to bitch about things. It probably helps that I’m good at bitching about things. If Comcast pisses me off one more time I’ll be offline for quite some time, at least until I can’t stand hearing my wife bitch about not having internet. I’ve been conditioning her for more than a year now to get used to the idea of not having cable TV but she is going to insist on having da interwebs for a while longer.

Comcast has recently been pissing me off and the trick to dealing with them is to only speak with their customer retention specialists. My bill for basic cable with no special or premium channels plus internet was $169/month. Long story short, I called them up and started bitching about it. One of their flunkies said he’d upgrade my account and lower my bill. This required a new modem but that’s was fine by me because my old one was eight years old. Of course this “upgrade” was promotional only and the price would automatically upgrade itself in twelve months but my bill then would still be about $8 cheaper thereafter than what I was paying. I figure what the hell, if I closed my account tomorrow I would not miss it.

The new modem they sent was a POS so I had to visit their store twice which gave me a whole litany of shit to bitch about. I called back and told them to cancel my account which automatically gets you transferred to customer retention. That guy falls all over himself giving me all kinds of discounts and adding new channels like HBO etc. I ask if these are permanent upgrades and discounts because if they are not he can proceed with closing my account. He assures me they are permanent and will not expire. My bill is now down to $104.

My latest bill arrives in the mail and is eight pages long with a ton of shit that makes no sense so I call back and ask for customer retention which is what I was told to do. I start asking questions about the bill and the guy immediately knocks another, permanent $15 off my bill. I didn’t get my questions answered but my bill is now only $89 with all kinds of movie channels (that I’ll never use and never wanted) plus all kinds of free On Demand crap (that I’ll never use and never wanted). Today I returned their Gateway because I bought my own modem and router for less than a hundred bucks so now my bill drops to $79/month all taxes and fees included. Oh, my internet speed is supposed to double next month, no charge. Internet pages already load faster than I can blink and movies/music streams flawlessly so I have no idea what good more speed will do.

Methinks Comcast is struggling to keep their customers. The funny part is that if their sales team and store employees weren’t working double quick time to piss people off, they wouldn’t have to cut my bill so much. The amount of aggravation they dole out, coupled with the monthly bill just isn’t worth it. The other funny thing is that I never even asked for any kind of discount. So, if you are a Comcast customer or any cable company customer, pick up the phone and start bitching. The worst that could happen is you end up with no discount but chances are they’ll be falling all over themselves to make you happy. Just make sure you are talking to customer retention and not their sales flunkies. So now I have another $90/month feed up to spend on hard assets. I might just call them up in six months and tell them to close my account just to see what happens.

To Harass And Impose

It was a beautiful August Saturday night; high 70’s, low humidity and mostly sunny. A local restaurant on the main strip of our town (honestly it’s not that much of a strip) hosted a small car show. The owner of the restaurant is also the owner of the developed & undeveloped lots and mini-malls in the area that surrounds the restaurant. There is a rowdy bar a couple hundred yards away on the hill and the closest residential home is about 1/2 mile away (the ones visible below in the distance behind the trees on the left side). I cleaned up my MR2 and headed over with the family.

The proceeds from this particular get-together went to the Wounded Warrior Project. The majority of the cars fall into the category of hot rod, classic muscle cars and modern muscles cars. These small local shows are nice because these are real people who do the work themselves instead of paying someone to do the work for them. All enthusiasts are accepted and appreciated; even if you show up with a 25 year old car from Japan with only half a v8 powering it.

Some cars are nicely restored like this Plymouth ‘Cuda;

while others like this mid-engine Corvair with a v8 in the back seat are a bit more wild.

Around 7:15pm the burnout contest started. Kids and grandkids got excited as their dads and grandpas get their trucks and cars warmed up. This was to be done on the section of the privately owned road that connects the parking lots, all of which are owned by restaurant owner (who was also OK with his property being used for the burnout contest). There were staff coordinating it to make sure there was only one vehicle going at a time and that the area was safe before each exhibition of power.

I had seen this firebird’s engine compartment earlier and figured it would be a put on a good display; it didn’t disappoint.

Fun was being had in a safe manner by consenting people with a common interest on private property so the only thing missing was the friendly neighborhood storm troopers.

The thunderous burnout must have scared Officer Friendly because shortly a second car arrived:

2 weren’t enough to handle this riotous behavior of a middle-aged family man doing a burnout on a private drive so a third rallied to their position.

All this for a burnout; a burnout on private property with the property owner’s consent. There must not be any actual crimes being committed (crimes being someone rights being infringed). If the crime is so low that 3 cars can be spared to respond to a burnout contest on private property I don’t think the resources allocated to the police dept match up with the needs of the community. Then again it is the 30th of the month and quotas don’t fill themselves.

Why is it that these so-called public servants impose themselves on our lives? The staff and property owner even went to bat for the owner of the firebird.

The police officer’s presence and interference was unnecessary, unwarranted and unwanted. There wasn’t a single person there not visibly annoyed by their nuisance. This was private property, no harm was being done to anyway and the closest thing to property destruction would be the heavy black marks left on the pavement that will persist until the next heavy rain. Why do these Dudley Do-Wrongs storm into wreck the day? Why is this driver likely being charged with reckless driving (or similar violation) and the LEO isn’t being charged with trespassing? Mind your own business. We are treated as children even when we are grown adults; we are not provided the freedom to simply be left alone from the harassing, meddling, do-gooding and revenue milking.

The third LEO did not even join his brothers-in-arms, instead he drove around the parking lot and grass field looking for violations for which to add funds to the local coffers like non DOT tires, window tint etc… I wanted to investigate so I headed over and while doing so I stoked the fire a bit by loudly commenting that I wondered “…when the SWAT team was going to show up with tear gas to force everyone to disperse?” People chuckled but also nodded their heads in agreement and wanted to know why they aren’t minding their own business, this was not racing nor was it on a public road.

In reality the tear gas wasn’t necessary; they got what they likely wanted, people started clearing out early and heading home before plaques/announcement for best of show and best burnout (obviously) were even awarded. Their presence was tear gas enough. Just another day keeping everyone safe from inhaling smoke from tires and clutches; it’s for the safety of the chil’run don’tcha know…

More and more car shows are mostly attended by people whose hair is dominated by grey and white. They remember the “good ole days” when a car represented a coming of age and entry into a new level of freedom. The EPA, safety czars and increasingly aggressive and intrusive LEO’s have put a damper on this. You actually felt as if you owned the car and could use it without being harassed by rules created for our own good. The cars here and at most shows have heart, character and uniqueness but lack V2V communication, bluetooth, GPS, blackboxes and a baker’s dozen of dashboard claymores.

Car ownership isn’t a strong priority among millenials, they have recognized car ownership for what it is becoming; indentured servitude with overburdened rules from the state that increasingly look to those who dare to exercise autonomy as prime suspects that need to be taught a lesson, coerced and revenue milked.