The Slamlander

Right up front, I believe that the answer to both questions is a resounding NO. The problem is the overall economy¹. They also make a good case for blaming a large part of this on US Sanctions. But the real reason is that long-term investments haven’t been happening. They are so far behind the eight-ball that it will take massive capital investments to increase the oil flow. In any case, it’s a complex set of issues.

The Saudis make a good case, and I have no reason to not believe them, that oil production actually exceeds demand, slightly². All the talking heads are mystified as to why this doesn’t drive prices down. But it isn’t current supply/demand that’s driving the markets right now. Instead, it’s future supply/demand coupled with a current flight to safety, by institutional investors³ .

Fundamental Issue: No new oil exploration

1. The average age for a geologist is 40 and there are very few new geologists entering the field. The days of Jed Clampet are long gone and you can’t find new oil without a team of geologists.
2. There hasn’t been any large-scale exploration in almost 20 years⁴.
3. It takes 10-15 years from the time a deposit is found until it is brought into production⁵
4. Oil is a mineral and can even be found in space. Unlike coal, it isn’t a fossil fuel. It’s rare but it’s not as limited as we thought⁶ .

The modern Russian-Ukrainian theory⁷ of deep, abiotic petroleum origins is by no means simply an academic proposition. After its first enunciation by N. A. Kudryavtsev in 1951, the modern theory was extensively debated and exhaustively tested. Significantly, the modern theory not only withstood all tests put to it, but also it settled many previously unresolved problems in petroleum science, such as that of the intrinsic component of optical activity observed in natural petroleum, and also it has demonstrated new patterns in petroleum, previously unrecognized, such as the paleontoogical and trace-element characteristics of reservoirs at different depths. Most importantly, the modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of deep, abiotic petroleum origins has played a central role in the transformation of Russia (then the U.S.S.R.) from being a “petroleum poor” entity in 1951 to the largest petroleum producing and exporting nation on Earth.⁸

Fundamental Issue: Maximum extraction capacity

1. The Saudis have already stepped up production to maximum. Without major investment, they cannot do any more.
2. Given customers that want to divorce themselves from Arab Oil⁹ , why should they make the investment¹⁰ ?
3. All real analysis determine that real demand is actually slightly less than current production.
4. BTW, Petrochemical Engineers are as scarce as geologists.¹¹

Fundamental Issue: aging production infrastructure.

1. We, globally, are at close to our absolute peak of refinery capacity¹².
2. No new refineries have been constructed, in the US, in 30 years¹³ .
3. It takes 10-15 years to bring a refinery online, at full capacity¹⁴.

Fundamental Issue: Weakened economic market.

1. Currency markets are in chaos with the falling US Buck.
2. EU economy isn’t looking good
3. Emerging markets are weakening.
4. Banks have been weakened with the sub-prime debacle
5. Years of cheap and easy cash have inflated US and UK housing and Real Estate markets¹⁵ .
6. Oil and gold are the only steady gainers against the Falling Buck.

The Speculator’s, cornered!

What they are calling Speculators, aren’t¹⁶ . The real players driving prices beyond 140USD per barrel  are the large institutional investors looking for a safe place to put their money. They dare not use the banks while they’re still doing 30BUSD write downs, the NYSE is expected to drop below 10K before Christmas, Real Estate isn’t a good idea, and inflation is a serious issue. That only leaves oil and gold. Are speculators pumping the market into a bubble? I don’t think so. They look at all the issues above, and realize that oil is going up and staying there for, at least, the next 10 years. Oil and gold are the only safe places for money these days.

Notes:

1. According to OPEC [↩]
2. stated a few weeks ago on CNBC [↩]
3. Mutual funds and fixed income, long-term investment houses. In case you don’t know this; these are the guys that manage the returns on your 401K. You can stop them but then don’t complain about lackluster returns. [↩]
4. I wrote about this a few years back [↩]
5. Remember the Alaska Pipeline, 10+ years to build and another 10 before we saw the first drops of oil. [↩]
6. We just have to work a lot harder to find and develop it, see Abiotic Oil, more references can be found in this list. [↩]
7. The fundamental problem is that it is a Russian-Ukrainian theory and some Cold War thinking still applies, in the US. [↩]
8. Russian confirmation is here. [↩]
9. Here is old George, getting the US into trouble again [↩]
10. Better to lend to US banks, at 11-12% [↩]
11. Worse,  with various oil industry retrenchments, in the past 30 years,  huge numbers of them went into another line of work. [↩]
12. even if we pumped more oil, we can’t refine it [↩]
13. Although many have been decommissioned [↩]
14. faster/cheaper to build a nuclear plant, maybe? [↩]
15. That balloon is now deflating [↩]
16. That’s just a political device [↩]

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–> Sorry, due to spammers, I am only taking comments at LiveJournal, for now. Thank you, The Slamlander

I dropped the Link Summaries feature last night. It looked like they were more of a nuisance than a benefit¹ .

Notes:

1. The footnotes are still cool though [↩]

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–> Sorry, due to spammers, I am only taking comments at LiveJournal, for now. Thank you, The Slamlander

This comes from this article on the BBC, a consortium of twits. If you block port 25 then you have no mail. What they want is to block end-users from using port 25 and force them to use only the mail systems of their ISP. My systems don’t send spam but I will be treated like a spammer regardless. Sorry, I will not accept that. My ISP, BlueWin.CH, has proven themselves remarkably incompetent, over the years. There is also the contractual issue that our Internet access is unfiltered.

I got it, let’s isolate the UK from the Internet and let’s start with the BBC?

PS. Upon further research, I find that MAAWG has, as principle technical advisor, my old ICANN nemesis Dave Crocker. He first proposed this policy on the Network Solutions Domains Names lists, back in the late 90’s.¹

Notes:

1. It’s too damned small a world we live in. Yes, I slammed him on it then, as well. [↩]

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is unstable. It’s fine if you turn it off every day but leave it on all the time, like I do, and you will likely find it hung by morning.

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–> Sorry, due to spammers, I am only taking comments at LiveJournal, for now. Thank you, The Slamlander

Okay, this is only news if you’ve been living under a rock¹ someplace. On 19Jun08, the BBC ran this article.

My Reaction

Oh boy, I wonder how far they wandered this one from the standards? What’s this, a hole found already? I guess I’ll give this a pass until the birthing pangs are worked out … in a month or three.

In the meanwhile SG and I are using Firefox 2 on our Win2K machines, having replaced IE6, in that environment. This is now my recommendation since MS is no longer actively supporting that ancient browser. It’s too bad that IE7 will not run in a Win2K environment. At the moment, that is the preferred browser, under Windows greater than XP. Ergo, lacking the ability to run IE7 leads me to support Firefox, on Win2K clients and servers, in spite of how gruesomely fat and clunky it is. It is certain that IE6 has too many fatal vulnerabilities to be safe anymore, in any environment.

Even with Firefox 2, there are differences between them and neither are compliant with the supposed standard, the W3C. Specifically, CSS positioning from TOP differs between the two;

For Firefox, I do this, in the main CSS file

   1:  #p-cactions

<span class="lnum">   2:  </span>   {

   3:         position: absolute;

<span class="lnum">   4:  </span>       width: auto;

   5:         height: 2.5em;

<span class="lnum">   6:  </span>       <span class="kwrd">float</span>: right;

   7:         top: 210px;

<span class="lnum">   8:  </span>       left: 13.1em;

   9:         margin: 0;

<span class="lnum">  10:  </span>       white-space: nowrap;

  11:         width: 70%;

<span class="lnum">  12:  </span>       line-height: 1.1em;

  13:         overflow: visible;

<span class="lnum">  14:  </span>       background: none;

  15:         border-collapse: collapse;

<span class="lnum">  16:  </span>       padding-left: 0;

  17:         list-style: none;

<span class="lnum">  18:  </span>       font-size: 95%;

  19:     }

For IE7, I have to overload this CSS class with this, in the IE70.css file

   1:  #p-cactions {

<span class="lnum">   2:  </span>    z-index: 3;

   3:      top: 197px;

<span class="lnum">   4:  </span>}

   5:   

Note in particular, line 7 in the top example and line 3 in the bottom example. It is the same predicate top but with different values. I derived the correct values heuristically. They have to do with the tabs being located a precise  distance from the top of the page, on this site.

IE7 is closest to the W3C standard. Note that closest does not mean in compliance with. Both of them are wrong.

As a web developer, I am fairly afraid of the gnits that Firefox 3 will bring to the party. Firefox is still Mozilla, which is still Nutscrape. They’ll be different from MS even if MS complied 100% with the standard. It is simply their nature.

PS. The formatting on this one looks a hell of a lot better on my WordPress site.

1. or under a bridge, with no computer access. In which case, you still don’t care. [↩]

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–> Sorry, due to spammers, I am only taking comments at LiveJournal, for now. Thank you, The Slamlander

It’s been a busy few weeks. Currently, we are experiencing the Fete de Musique here in Nyon. There are bands playing everywhere and there is a Battle of the Bands competition as part of the music festival. Some of these guys are damned good, others are fairly tame. The French bands are real eye openers. It’s a different style and I don’t know why it never caught on in the US.

For various reasons, we had to push the wedding out to mid-august. I still don’t have the Final Decree from the last one, although it’s close. The judge changed his mind and now wants a notarized sheet of answers to some basic questions. Mostly, this is to authenticate me¹ . A quick trip to Geneva and we got that done and sent off.

Since I no longer have to travel to Houston, we can afford to bring my daughter out here. Jenny is already working her end of the deal and getting a US Passport. On that front, she had a bad turn last week. She had moved from Livermore to Oakland² and as a consequence, had her lovely Honda stolen. She is quite heartbroken over it. They found the corpse in a chop-shop. It was a special model of high performance Honda CVCC Si. The only good thing about it is that she had a car loan and they made her carry full insurance, as a part of the deal. Good thing, I say. At least, the loan is covered³ and they will cover the rest of the value so she can get another car. The reason she moved was that she couldn’t afford the housing, in the tri-valley, and the cost of fuel⁴ from Livermore to Hayward, where she works. With the theft, she has now chopped about a $K from her recurring monthly expenses. If she can get a cheaper car without incurring another similar car loan, she could be better off.

She’s my daughter and I worry about her. She has no family left in the SF Bay Area⁵ and life’s not treating her real well, at the moment. All I can do is to give her advice and the link to the autotrader . My ex-wife, who Jenny did develop some attachment to, isn’t speaking to either of us. But she’s in Houston anyway. Jenny can’t stand her bio-mother, who is still in Orange County, South California. Ergo, Jenny is feeling rather lonely right now. Short of winning the Euro Millions, there is nothing much that I can do.

There are some techie things which I will cover in another post.

1. Notaries are only witnesses to the signing of a document. That the signatories are who they say they are. They do not validate the document itself. [↩]
2. Lake Merrit District [↩]
3. She had about 6K left on it [↩]
4. $4.60+ per gal [↩]
5. My sister, a not-so-nice person, lives in Santa Barbara and my brother lives in Simi Valley. Both are hundreds of miles away. [↩]

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–> Sorry, due to spammers, I am only taking comments at LiveJournal, for now. Thank you, The Slamlander

After getting this laptop, getting MS-Office 2007, getting enough RAM to make it work¹ , and upgrading Vista default to Vista Ultimate, I am finally able to load an entire book into word. After all of that and the associated aggravation, it opens and loads in "Compatibility Mode". Actually, I was expecting that from when I made the MSO97 -> MSO2000 jump. The problem is that Compatibility Mode isn’t, compatible that is. Sure, you can edit in the older version but headings, footers, margins, and other crap become static. Adding new pages becomes a real problem when the page numbers in the headings have to auto-increment. Ergo, only minor changes will be allowed in the older version thereafter. Can we say "Micro-shafted"?

This wouldn’t be a problem with a final draft but I still expect to be working on this in both places. I guess I now find out if I can dual-install from the same CDs² . If not then I will only be able to work on the books using the laptop. How lame is that?

The bottom-line is that I now have to decide which version to work in, MSO2007 or MSO2000. I cannot install MSO2000 on Vista, that’s why I had to get MSO2007 in the first place. Now to find out if MSO2007 will install on Win2K. There are times when Microsux sux³ worse than usual.

1. laptop came with only 1GB [↩]
2. Assuming that it will even install on Win2K Advanced server [↩]
3. That sucking sound you hear is Microsux vacuuming all the cash from your wallet and bank accounts [↩]

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–> Sorry, due to spammers, I am only taking comments at LiveJournal, for now. Thank you, The Slamlander

In the Cafe again¹ . Yesterday they changed the access key to WAP, from open. Believe it or not, you actually have to enter the dashes! It’s four groups of characters separated by dashes and you have to enter everything. Anyway, I couldn’t login from here yesterday and had to come back today for social reasons, to be polite. I don’t want them to think that I’m mad at them. But they are about to close and have already cut me off from the coffee.

ciao-

1. Free WiFi and good coffee [↩]

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–> Sorry, due to spammers, I am only taking comments at LiveJournal, for now. Thank you, The Slamlander

It’s the Web Calendar Project. I’m still playing around with it but it’s one of the coolest projects I’ve seen. I’s fully iCal compliant and you don’t have to give your information¹ to Google. This is just in time for the Caselle-Net public site redesign.

1. soul [↩]

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–> Sorry, due to spammers, I am only taking comments at LiveJournal, for now. Thank you, The Slamlander

I hope that you’re still having fun in Austin.