Reason for high oil prices? Speculators. Biggest speculators?

Oil futures speculation is what I've been saying all along. The price of gas is phoney.
Energy cost is a matter of national security. Our economy depends on it. The Congress has to act on this immediately--without the usual partisanship.
That big investment institutions are involved is scandalous.

 

Daniel,

It would be much much easier to implement your suggestions if the US simply banned any and all businesses. Everything service or thing we touch and buy would simply be controlled by a governmental cooperative. Money and all forms of Capitalism as we know it would be banned too. No need for those pesky minimum wage laws, proposed executive pay caps, or excessive oil company profits. No stocks, no Wall Street, no speculators, everyone would have a REAL job - (shovels, farming - real work!) - er, that's if they chose to work.

The government would provide for EVERYONE a simple car, a simple apartment, and basic medical needs regardless of color, education, criminal history, work history, etc. Only basic food staples would be provided. No other foods outside those of government rations would be allowed. Those who decided to better themselves and others outside of the cooperative authority would be severely punished. Intellectuals, inventors, and those who tried to "outwit" the cooperative would be dealt with accordingly.

Ah, (hum along with me) ...'Imagine all the people'...

Utopia at last!!!

Rick
#4 2006

 

What does that mean? Why pick gas? How about the entire US financial system?

Exactly what is congress to do? What can congress do? Tax more? Tax less? Declare war on oil producing contries? Declare war on oil consuming countries? Help me out here.

Like Enron was on previous energy "shortages"? Why shouldn't they be involved? Their only reason for existing as an institution is to make money and this is a really good area to make money.

(PS-Read between the lines closely. Believe it or not, I am not mocking you.)

 

Daniel's first two ideas are not unreasonable at all. Absolutely nothing in them deserves the overreaction given. They deserve constructive criticism, not bashing. (The first two are worth discussion. I'm not so keen on the third, given the immense abuse occuring already. The last one is 100% correct. Note that the Opening Gambit was (hopefully) humor)

 

As long as the bathing beauties had their representatives on your board of directors, that might be OK.

The biggest problem I see is that this is just a modification of the existing SEC financial structure. It still keeps employee interaction out of key company stategic decisions till too late. It also has the possibility of degrading to a common run on the companies assets. Sort of like how the US congress is putting the whole country in debt, yet they "represent the people". However, it cannot be worse than the system in place now.

This is already been "gamed" around. Companies already "provide" CEOs with company aircraft, houses, cars, etc. without showing up on the CEO pay stub. The allocation of the company profits must be completely allocated up front such that executive pay is regulated as any other employees pay.

We have to part ways here. Free=Abuse.

YES!!!

 

I hate to nitpick, but that isn't entirely correct. Although true that capitalism is to thank for the modern mass produced, cheap, disposable personal computer, it is *not* responsible for computers being developed

Computers were first widely developed and deployed to meet the Air Force requirement to predict the tracks of inbound Soviet bombers during the Cold War.

In the Alaskan and Canadian Arctic (DEW line), across Canada (Pinetree and Mid Canada Line), and Greenland (DEW DYE sites) there existed a network of radar sites, spaced about every 50 miles. This system could only track Soviet bombers, it was never intended to track SLBM's or ICBM's

Through a combination of microwave repeater and tropospheric scatter they were connected to a network of about 20 computer command and control bunkers in the US

This system was devised in the early 1950's by experts at MIT. The working group that brainstormed this idea resulted in MITRE Corp. One fellow in particular - Joseph Carl Robnett (J.C.R) Licklider - was instrumental iin his vision of the Universal Network, to become ARPANet

When the MIT experts finalized their brainstorming, IBM and Western Electric were involved in making it a reality. IBM constructed the computer, designated AN/FSQ-7 and called SAGE - Semi Automatic Ground Environment

It was a vacuum tube monster, two actually per site for backup, with around 120,000 vacuum tubes per site. The sites were "networked" by Western Electric using a combination of telephone frame bays, microwave, and tropo-scatter.

The contraption was housed in a windowless 4 story concrete building, designed to resist close nuclear blast effect. Each site needed 3 MW of onsite diesel electric power generation, to run the computer and the 120 tons of air conditioning

In Canada, the Bell Canada company was contracted to "network" the radar sites in Canada, which led to the installation of a large number of microwave towers all across Canada. The microwave towers still standing were repurposed as cell phone base stations

Even what we now call The Internet had its beginning as a military project, the already mentioned ARPANet. ARPANet was designed as a resiliant, robust communications network to survice surprise Soviet attack

Of course, in hindsight, they should have known that none of it would have worked as intended, if war really had broken out between the US and USSR

This was hinted at when Dr Nicholas Christofilos proposed that a nuclear bomb detonated exoatmospheric would generate an enormous amount of electromagnetic energy. Dr Christofilos had a lot of influence, Project Argus was conducted in secret to test his theory, and it was proven correct. We now call this EMP or Electro Magnetic Pulse.

The results of Argus so alarmed the military/scientific community that a couple of nuclear tests in the Pacific were specifically developed to verify the Argus results. Operation Hardtack shot Teak disrupted all HF communications in the Pacific.

Operation Dominic, shot Starfish Prime, not only disrupted all HF comms in the Pacific basin, it also caused extensive EMP damage to Hawaii. The proposed ABM system using the Spartan warhead was abandoned, as the impact of multiple 5 MT Spartan exoatmospheric EMP events over North America would be just as devastating as drect nuclear detonation

As a result, it was determined the entire system of SAGE control centers, the radar sites in the Arctic, and the microwave and tropo-scatter comms, would have been rendered useless after the first exoatmospheric detonation

But all that technological investment by the military, estimated at $22 billion in 1960 program funding dollars, did eventually give rise to the computer you are now looking at, hooked up via a high-speed connection to the Internet.

 

I disagree, my friend. You are advocating Stalinism. Stalinism was a disaster because in the end the government's interests do not coincide with the workers' interests.

I advocate giving the workers an equal say in the running of a company, and an equal share in the profits. A large company needs management, but the question is, Who will elect the managers? Presently, the investors do. Consider the following paradigms:

Capitalism: The investors select the managers. The company is operated for the benefit and profit of the investors, except when crooks weasel their way into management and rob the investors.

Stalinism: The government selects the managers. The company is run for the benefit of the government, which pretends to represent the workers, but which actually represents the ruling elite.

Socialism: The workers select the managers. In theory the company would be run for the benefit of the workers. Since no country has ever tried socialism, this remains a theory. An argument against this is the question of where investment capital would come from.

My New Suggestion: Investors select half the management, and workers select the other half. The company continues to operate in a free market economy and succeeds or fails on its merits and its ability to compete. But the importance of the workers, and the legitimacy of their claim to a share of the product of their labor is recognized. Workers and investors share half and half in the profits. The only new law that must be passed is that if you hire a wage worker, you must share with him the management of the company and the value of the product his labor produced. This may sound like the song of Lucifer to a robber baron, but it follows logically from the American ideal of the equality of rights.

I believe his point was that I can afford to buy a computer because my father, a capitalist businessman, made a lot of money and left 1/8 of it to me. (1/8 also went to my sister and each of my step-siblings, and 1/2 went to Uncle Sam.) I could have afforded to buy a computer without my inheritance, but it's true that at this point capitalism, via my father, has provided me with what I have.

 

Speculation is not "the" reason; it is one factor out of a great many. I brought it up because it is often left out of the discussion.

Note that there are a great many commodities whose prices are far less rational than gasoline. Gold and diamonds, for example, are bid up by people who want them for no other reason than that they are scarce. I am always amused by the folks who insist that money should be backed by gold so that it will have "real value." If gold was purchased only for its actual uses (e.g. electrical contacts) it would probably be worth $5 an ounce instead of over $900 an ounce. I wish I had bought it at $300. But of course, since it is a purely speculative price, with virtually no use value and very little production cost in its price, it was impossible to predict that it would rise so high.

 

If it were not for American capitalism we would have not been a perceived threat to the Soviet Union. We would have been a backward, agrarian country of little threat to the Soviet Union or anyone else for that matter and who by the way would have been entirely incapable of even manufacturing the housing necessary for a computer. Without capitalism, the world would most likely resemble most of East Germany as it was in the 60's and 70's. Backwards and utterly drab...

Rick
#4 2006

Rick
#4 2006

 

The short term problem is oil speculation. The not so long term problem is we have to reduce carbon emissions--which means alternative energy sources. So we have to reduce oil consumption.
This is a bad time for Bush/McCain to be pushing for off-shore drilling. What are they thinking? Maybe they aren't. I doubt even oil company executives want that--at this point. They are too busy investing in energy alternatives, anyways.

 

The question had to do with computers. Threats and perceived threats are mostly sabre-rattling and one-upmanship, with little basis in reality.

Eg, the so-called "missile gap" and Red Menace of the 1950's. The American public was absolutely terrified of the missile gap, as it implied the Reds were getting ready to "clobber" us

As it turned out, the Missile Gap was entirely fictional. The Corona spy satellite program immediately proved there was no danger from the Soviets, whose technology was downright prehistoric compared to ours. But that was very much Secret until NRO declassified the Corona data, almost 3 decades later

IBM really got a boost from the SAGE program, when they rolled out the S/340 solid state mainframe. The S/340 incorporated a lot of the lessons learned from SAGE. MITRE Corp learned a lot from SAGE as well.

The backbone of our PSTN is also based on Cold War fears and design philosophy, eg survivability. Companies like the Bell Company in the US, and Bell Canada in Canada, made a lot of money off military contracts hooking up all those radar sites scattered all across Canada and the Arctic. They also learned a lot about networking

Companies like EG&G were very instrumental in timing systems, photography (The Rapatronic camera system to capture initial nuclear detonation, the XR film technology, etc), and electronics (Neutron and x-ray resistant devices) to the public domain.

The Internet started off as ARPANet, a secure military communications network designed to survive sneak Soviet attack. In theory, 66% of the network could be knocked out, and the remaining network would still route data. Of course, they didn't plan for HAEMP, which threw a curveball at researchers after Dr Christofilos predicted it in the late 1950's

All of that was courtesy of military needs, not civillian needs or capitalist needs.