what the?

Where do you fall on the liberal - conservative political spectrum? (United States)
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Okay, so I'm pretty sure this confirms what I already knew. Although when I've taken other, more involved surveys, I've tended to fall a little less far left than that. Whatever. No, what bugs teh fuck out of me is the little sermonette. What it kinda tells me is that the person who wrote this quiz really can't quite get the cajones together to come out and say "I don't like liberals" and instead says something about being realistic and blah blah. I'll keep my ideals thank you, they are among the things which will get me through these Dark Ages.

oil shmoil, the curses of supply and demand

Oh yeah, today driving thru so. mpls, I saw a gas station down on like 46th or Ford Pkwy or thereabouts (not far from Ford pkwy & the River Road, near Edmond) that sums it up, pretty much. The Unleaded had 2.09 9/10 on it. The super unleaded (or whatever variation on "higher octane" they were using) just had the word "WOW" next to it.

No shit, buddy. That pretty much sums it all up. WOW. LIke you don't even have the strength to admit what the premium stuff runs you because you know it'll just depress everybody anyways. Just throw up your hands. WOW.

Okay, nevermind for two seconds that our oil industry is massively MASSIVELY subsidized by the government and that America has lagged very very far behind the trends worldwide of prices at the pump-- I mean, there's places that pay close to $2 per LITER, I'm sure. But what's the frickin' deal with supply and demand, anyways. Think about it for a second. The gas in the gas station's reservoirs is gas that has already been delivered. Probably the station got invoiced for that delivery a while ago. Maybe at the most, a week, depending on your business' daily volume and size of on-site storage. So we see gas prices go up in response to oil prices going up. Except the gas was already delivered at a different price. FUcking hell, the oil prices went up two days ago. No way in hell the refineries are turning out gas at the higher rate and delivering it to stations within 2 days. So in other words, teh hikes are anticipatory. No wonder so many managers do badly at Peter Senge's beer game exercise (cf. "THe Fifth Discipline"). Whatever. WHo wants to keep track of your inventory and supply chain so closely that they can perform anticipatory hikes in rates? Nerdy subgenius entrepreneurs, that's who! I am definitely a soft-skills guy. Give me a managerial problem that involves diversity, inclusion and human relations and I think I can do pretty well. But supply chain management messes with your head.

Is it any freakin' wonder Peak Oil messes with my shit so badly? Not to mention, our entire economy is TOTALLY fucked up when you think about it! Think of how many lives are staked on a system so dynamic and complex (in the complexity-order-chaos sense of 'complex') that shit like an oil price jump is immediately reflected at the pump, despite the cannot-deny logic of supply chain time delays. Or like my current dead horse, Peak Oil- our population, food supply, transportation, government, all sort of depend and fluctuate on the ability of one energy source to maintain its good EPR and everything goes haywire when it starts to sag. Fuck that, man. Jeez.

Or think about this: Alan Greenspan decides (probably pretty wisely, given the "irrational exuberance" of investors, and later totally exposed corruption of accounting firms, etc) that he's going to try to bring the economy in for a landing. Except he does it in this sort of weird ass way that depends on raising interest rates, but he's maybe just a TAD abrupt about the whole thing... WHAM. 2001 everyone goes broke. WTF? Alan Greenspan makes a tiny error that amounts to a matter more or less of *timing* (in other words, he like... farts at the wrong dinner function for christ's sake) and these guys freak out and crash the market within a few months? Who the fuck wants to live in a system that weak that it can't bear a little correction?

Howard Dean's voice gives out when he's trying to say "Yeah!" to his avid, excited supporters. Twelve hours later he's fucked. Dean's a memory. His guys raised $40 MILLION. If I had 40 MILLION DOLLARS, I could buy a house for everyone in my family (individually, not just for married couples, but every member of the family) and send all 20 grandkids to college. Then I'd have enough left over to live off the interest for like 50 years. I could also found a community dedicated to surviving the coming oil crash. Shit, someone needs to give me 40 million dollars. EXCEPT, I could lose it in like three weeks if I go on national teevee and like... get a kidney stone attack or admit to a reporter that "Yeah, as a student of Martin Luther, I don't really believe in free will, in a theological sense." Then something happens to cause the dollar to lose value against the (still defunct) Iraqi 250 dinar note, which causes minor fluctuations in the cost of illegal sevruga which pisses off the russian mob who kill a british pop star in a fit of pique, the death of whom reveals that, startlingly, the Prime Minister of Canada bets on hockey games. This results in a crash of the Colorado economy, and an accidental scrambling of attack jets from one of many many Colorado bases. The jets firebomb a random jungle town in SOuth America and the Venezuelan National Front or something unleashes a wave of terrorist acts.

It goes on and on. Red pills in everybody's palms, that's what it is. Just read the news, watch something happen locally, and consider the timing. We're living at the speed of insanity!
"We don't even live on earth anymore, they should just call it planet crazy!" - Danger D. Hotrod