except that a number of opec members have grossed as much $$ in 6 months during 2008 as they did in the ENTIRE YEAR of 2007. (no, I don't think that's FYs, either. As well, oil from western Asia is set to gross ONE TRILLION $USD this year!)

Although I've read from more than one source that the petrochem futures bulls are inflating the prices somewhat, I believe the majority of the blame for US's current inflation problems lies in the scummy Arabian oil barons selling crude for far more than it would be worth if we could drill off America's shores. The second most of the blame lies in the inept US federal reserve.

I've also been told that petro futures are a modern version of fool's gold.

And of course, thanks to a certain leftist political party here in our federal gov, WE CAN'T DRILL FROM OUR OWN NATIVE RESERVES.

(insert mandatory cussing, screaming, and flailing arms here)

"Their net income . . ."

. . . isn't necessarily wasted money. I suppose we're being a bit guilty of not seeing the forest through the trees: The question is, how much of that profit or how much of our taxes is being spent on something constructive, and how much of it is being spent on what we would consider wasteful.

The first step I suppose is to decide what's wasteful and what isn't. Unfortunately, we may have varying opinions and may not agree on what constitutes waste .

It would be, if oil had highly flexible price/demand ratios. It takes a big jump in price to cut demand a couple percent, adding a couple percent to the market will create a big drop in the price.

When it's a necessary use and you're hosed if you don't buy it, minute supply changes can have massive effects on price, and oil is one of the worst. Just a bill passing congress that lifted the moratorium on offshore drilling would drop futures substantially.

In other words, democratic systems are messy. I think the Churchill quote goes "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." Until someone has a better idea, we really just have to accept ongoing arguments about scarce resources, whether it be oil, tax revenue, or water (the new oil--wait 'til mid-century, you'll see).

I'm a small-r republican because I used to be a philosophical anarchist (the opposite of the bomb-throwing kind). Both democracy and capitalism need checks, at least until we have grown much closer to the Star Trek utopias or Iain Banks' Culture.

Ten years is a lie, you don't really believe your representatives do you?

When some crazy fuck spends a decade spouting nonsense about how global warming is caused by a trace element vital to the survival of flora, and then claims the warming will create a cascade effect that dooms the planet, I tend to write them off as a crazy fuck. Believing anything they say in relation to oil is a sign of mental instability.

ANWR is two years easy. Offshore drilling would take ten years to become fully operational. That's fully, as in every place they can drill is being drilled. It's a few months for them to move currently existing mobile platforms into new positions, and many of the areas border currently drilled areas, slant drilling will reach them. Months yet again. Only the harder to reach areas that don't have pre-existing infrastructure close to them are ten years away. Even the oil shale is supposed to be 3-5 years max. If it was signed today, ten years from now many of those pockets of oil would already be dry.

Now, value. Oil is not contingent on gasoline. Lubricants, plastics, fertilizers. Oil will be useful well beyond the fall of the combustion engine. Oil drilling is also extremely profitable at $60 a barrel, even oil shale, currently the most expensive extraction requirement, has a current estimated cost of $40 a barrel. That's a 50% rate of return on each barrel. It's refining that has shitty margins, and they refine vastly more than they drill right now.

Most politicians are habitual liars, and I'm not just picking on the idiot democrats. I can think of one republican senator I'd not like to see thrown out of office right now, and no he's not the ass fucker of a presidential nominee. Believing anything they say about drilling at this point is just begging to be fucked over.

Sure, if you want to devote the entire worlds farm land to making grease...

Biofuels are a pipe dream born of idiocy. The greenies pushing them are just so fucking stupid they can't tie their own shoes. Brazil can do it because Brazil is burning down the rain forests and planting unfertilized crops of heavy fertilizer requiring stuff that wipes the fertility of the ground out in just a few years, before then moving onto the next swath of trees. When they run out of rain forest, something that's doing more to warm the earth than the rest of industry on earth, they're fucked.

To do it without a rain forest to burn, you have to put more petroleum into the ground in the form of fertilizer than you get out in the form of fuel. You also need to find a substitute for food, because we wont be growing any.

Nuclear power is a nice one though, alas nuclear fuels are also of limited supply. Probably vastly more than we think, but still limited. The only permanent solutions are cold fusion or harnessing the energy that burns off into space every day. Cold fusion may or may not be a pipe dream as well. The main problem isn't power though, it's storage. Even fuel cells are inadequate to the task right now, it requires massive weight to get high mileage out of them, and costs a fucking fortune. You need a low weight solution for small cars, and not one that adds ten grand to the price of a car that costs that much to start with. Batteries fucking suck. A combustion engine burning hydrogen on the other hand would be an extremely effective means of transport, if you could convince everyone, not to mention correctly, that they wouldn't blow up in a massive fireball the first time they had an accident.

Also, the other options are coming, regardless of the price of oil. Necessity is the mother of all inventions, and we know there's a finite end to oil. Price will have a substantial effect on the level of research being put into alternatives, but they're coming regardless. Even if the rate at which oil is replenished vastly outstrips our current thinking, we're going to hit that brick wall where the continuous flood becomes a trickle. The difference is some of us look at it from a historical perspective and are assuming the problem will solve itself before then, and some of us are convinced we need to actively discourage the use of oil in advance by coming up with crazy doomsday scenarios that are entirely unwarranted. We may already have a battery that takes the electric car from pipe dream to reality. Another five years or so should tell whether they have a functional and cost effective implementation. Something people don't seem to realize when jizzing themselves over a 4 hour recharge on a 30 thousand dollar car with a 50 mile range, is that 50 miles is insufficient for primary transportation for about two thirds of the country. That's less than an hour of driving.

Hmmm, I'm not entirely with you yet, but your frequent swearing and sexual reference's are slowly winning me over.

So basically, lets screw the pouch (as you might put it) to get short term world wide production up and the it will all be OK. For a couple more years at least.

Then when that party goes bad, we can swear at lefties some more.

Now I quite agree its ok so insult lefties, but the biggest mistake the right can make is to make this a them vs us issue. As opposed to the reality of a, peak of easy access oil, and world wide economy expansion based on an oil economy.

I'm not a Environmentalist, and I'm not even slightly liberal. I am a good economist though, and I assure you that even without Environmental considerations, it would be very wise to invest in Nuclear Energy and Hybird tech. The quest to a return to cheap oil is just going to wear your forehead out, and the brick wall won't mind a bit.

Really - just allow me a few years as the head of a malevolent dictatorship, and your benevolent kingship will look *much* better afterwards - Seems to be working for McCain anyway.

As an added bonus, you'll get badly needed experience of dodging my sexy but deadly ninja-assassin-gynoids while I'm in charge, which always looks good on a resume.

Unless you don't dodge, but in that case kingship might not be the job you want anyway - {G}

Jonnan

I think Plato's student Aristotle is more interesting here, not least because I'm regularly susceptible to the old academic claim that The Republic is a satire. In his Politics, Aristotle extends the three categories Plato uses by cross-cutting them with the core value judgement: good vs. bad. I think he was on to the more imporatant part of the analysis here b/c no form of government will work well if the leadership is, um, frakked in the head.

This means a bad democracy is mob rule, such as classical Athens occasionally saw. But good democracy takes advantage of the general tendency of groups to make better decisions than individuals (Aristotle is the first written claim here, the notion is not really scientific, but it is still persuasive--even marketing worth, what with that Web 2.0 natter).



Sort of. Unfortunately, the executive has extensive authority to establish regulations and can issue executive orders (even secret ones) covering a wide range of gov't activity. Congress is the source of fundamental legislation, but through history they have used that power to delegate *lots* to the executive, starting with the budget process changes early in the 20th and getting much messier through WWII, the Cold War, and the rise of regulatory bureaucracies in the post-war decades.

Perhaps more importantly, the Supremes cannot *always* declare a law or executive action unconstitutional. First, they can't start anything on their own--someone has to bring a suit before them. Second, they really do tend to uphold the judicial tradition of precedent, so their power is rarely as arbitrary as this line makes it sound. There are certainly exceptions to prove the rule, but on the whole they try to remain detached from the short-term flurries of public opinion.

Re "how the next leader is chosen," don't forget that democracy does not require an executive branch at all, much less a singular one. The debates that led to the US constitution included calls for our presidency to be plural, like the executive in some modern US cities and counties (commissions and boards with weak chairs and weak or no mayors).