28thavenue.net

I read blogs because I think all of the professional smart people on TV and in the magazines aren’t actually all that smart.

Today there was a good example where the TV folks got punked by hard math.

For the near future, Jenny and I won’t be able to claim we’re a 1 car family… I have my old Ford pickup down from the cabin right now — I even drove to work today. First time in 5 months…

I’m not sure if I’ll keep it down here over the winter, or what. Anyway, it’s fun to be able to tool around.

Believe it or not, it has been 5 years since I have purchased a computer — and because I buy parts every now and then I have to clarify that by computer, I mean mainboard and CPU.

I went to General Nanosystems this weekend and spent a surprisingly small amount of money to upgrade myself to an AMD Athlon 64 X2. That’s a dual core processor with a 64 bit instruction set (sweet!).

It’s nice to have something relatively modern, and it’s also nice that I didn’t have to shell out too much either. I was able to reuse a bunch of existing computer hardware laying around the house. So with my new 24″ LCD I’ve got a pretty nice little setup.

All the talk is about that tease, crude oil, and how it’s so going to hit $100 a barrel.

All I can say is thank goodness we built that inter-city high speed rail system in the US. If it wasn’t for that, we’d be scrood.

I’d be all over this, but unfortunately it’s not an honest graphic. Notice how the zoom factor is much different in the car picture than it is with the bus and bicycle picture.

The difference serves to emphasize the point of the poster, but it does so at the expense of making an honest argument. That’s too bad.

I just happened upon a blog post in which the author tries to tell us sleepy types that the rise in oil prices has nothing to do with oil, really, rather it’s because the dollar is declining so rapidly.

There’s some interplay there, I’m sure. If anyone has links to graphs that show oil prices for the past 5 years or so in Euros, Yen, and NOK, I’d be interested to see how they compare to the similar chart in dollars.

Still, you can buy lots of stuff with USD, and in many cases prices aren’t rising. Think about it — we’re being told that the dollar is falling. It’s becoming worth less worldwide. At the same time, the value of our homes in dollars is also falling. That’s a more worrisome situation. With one American house, you can get fewer dollars than you could two years ago, and those dollars that you do get are worth less. That’s sucky.

If you have one barrel of sweet crude, the dollars you get are worth less, but at least you’re getting more of them these days than you were before. I don’t happen to hold any barrels of sweet crude, unfortunately, but I do own a house. Well, the bank owns the house. I owe them dollars for it. I’m going to pay them back in cheap dollars, so I’m ok, I think.

I haven’t seen any mainstream media outlook take an honest look at the global oil production picture. Whenever supply falls short of demand (pushing prices higher), it’s always the weather, speculation, political unrest, or whatnot. One of the things I learned from The Intelligent Investor is to beware of recurring “non-recurring items.”

Weather is pretty much a constant. So is speculation and political unrest. If your oil market analyst is telling you that it’s the weather, quarter after quarter, at some point you have to look deeper. I think our ability to suck oil out of the planet is pretty much as good as it’s going to get right now. Too bad we have all of this stuff that only runs on oil.