wspc_P34kO1l_0013

wspc_P34kO1l_0012

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Gas Prices, Gas Gouging, Peak Oil, Elasticity, Supply Demand
..

Never let on that you know what's coming.

---- "Magic GB Jazz" by: "AjT" http://beemp3.com/index.php?q=Album+de+Alain&st=album

Thesis:

This is a speech meant to persuade.

Although that implies that there would be some mode of thought that might imply some debate which would imply that I might wrong about the stance I took.

I seriously doubt that there can be any such error because I am reacting to any discoveries and adapting in kind, but not in direction, to any new facts which arise.

I am not going to try to persuade you of the correctness of my approach since I took the only approach that I saw as solving the most problems, including some that weren't anticipated in the least by the people who originally informed my own opinions about peak oil.

I have also drawn from my own experience. as well as the fractional ones evinced by the same people I have been studying.

Unlike most debaters and most debates, I am the first to admit that things are not black or white.

Heck, that aren't even gray. I'm overseeing over the construction of a rainbow.

Inductive reasoning, wherein I acquire facts and opinions in order to generate something more generic from the specifics, is tightly coupled with deductive reasoning, wherein I am attempting to test the rules as revealed to me in the first place.

I do these kinds of reasoning in order to come up with a suitable yet sufficiently open-ended kind of syllogism, or logical appeal, to solve the conundrums raised by peak oil. ([Greek: συλλογισμός — "conclusion," "inference"], [usually the categorical syllogism)] which can form a kind of logical argument in which one proposition [the conclusion] is inferred from two others [the premises] of a certain form. Thank Wikipedia for the actual definition: [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllogism ])

I am now well aware of the 256 rules for crafting syllogisms. (Many of which don't apply here.)

Of course, I am "not" constructing any syllogisms because they are too fractional and would require a level of problem decomposition too fine to be useful at this stage.

In that respect I am actively guilty of treading on the logic of my argument in the same way that I always accused database analyst of always mashing separate and distinct objects together instead of respecting the articulations presented by the inter-object relationships. "Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa..."

---- "Frogmouth" by: Bift http://amiestreet.com/music/bift/bift/frogmouth

Synthesis:

I achieved my understanding of peak oil by thinking of it not as a thing, or even as a series of things, of "if then" rules, but by thinking of it as a process, more specifically as a mathematical function of two intersecting curves.

The arguments for and against peak oil are illusory. They refer to specific instances none of which argue for or against peak oil but instead refer to degrees of the event of peak oil.

Peak oil consists of two intersecting curves, one of demand and the other one of supply.

The game of peak oil consists of reacting properly to the motion of the curves along the horizontal axis of oil and the vertical axis of price, and to the motion of their point of intersection which is the price point and its also where demand creation and demand destruction meet.

There's nothing to argue with. Its just two horizontally moving curves, one high-y sloping down to low-y and the other one low-y climbing up to high-y.

Like "Foghorn Leghorn"[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foghorn_Leghorn ] once famously said, "I say, I say ... you can argue with me son, but you cain't argue with mathematics."

Now the implications of the motion of the two curves are the rapidly rising and falling price of oil, and the steady trend upwards as supplies fall over the next century, world-wide.

Guys, remember taking your date out in your jalopy telling the gas jockey to "fill her up" while holding your arm over the roof line, out of eye shot of your date, and holding up one finger per dollar you actually wanted him to pour into the tank.

Of course not. You're probably all too young.

Since the seventies, its been a pose with both hands held up in supplication, tendering your wallet to the one armed bandit at the pump.

Some horizontal slides of the supply curve have never slid back to the position they originally held.

What's fun is that as supply destruction takes hold, just by OPEC withholding their oil, before the demand can react to the new equilibrium, the price at the pump jumps up vertiginously.

(Remember the summer of 2008, with $4.00+ price at the pump. Its got to do with the lag time between supply pricing and demand adjustments. Its even out of the hands of OPEC. The price went up immediately because the oil companies weren't going to do "you" any favors. OPEC upped the supply and even dropped their price but it takes even longer for the greed to dissipate. They weren't going to benefit by charging you less, now were they?)

So what do we have left to disagree about?

What direction we want the avalanche to fall? (Yeah ... You stand there... You wait... You get buried... I'm running, Jack. With my cane I need to take a good long time 'cause I'm not interested in playing "Frosty The Snowman.")

---- "Gunslinger" by: "Danny Weis" http://www.amazon.com/Sweet-Spot-Danny-Weis/dp/B000CA91D0

We got PSAs:

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Campus Safety urges students, faculty and staff to sign up for text alerts, online @ spc.edu/alerts

This will be used to inform students, faculty and staff in an emergency.

This was useful last year in the bomb scare.

To sign up, students must know their Spirit ID # (Bring their Saint Peter's College ID.)

----

Here's a proper, honest to goodness, real promo. :-)

Promo_WSPC_PeacockNation2008/12/05

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We've also got some cross promotion going with the web version of St. Peter College's own "Pauw Wow".

The perpetually available and comment capturing web version is "growing on" as opposed to the occasional "Dead Tree" edition which can only capture "a moment in time" for a minority of the news competing for a scarce resource, space with anything else on a fixed number of pages.

As Liebnitz famously once said: "The 'Power of the Press' belongs to those who own one."

But as anyone who can read will attest, the limitations of "that" business model are slowly bleeding to death all of the owners of the "dead tree" press.

The future of the press lies on-line with the internet mixing media according to their appropriateness to whatever is being reported.

From "Twitter" to IM, to e-mail, to FaceBook to Podcasts, to web-radio, to streaming content, to PDFs, to vodcasts, to YouTube, to MP3s, to app mash-ups, to whatever's next, the internet is emerging as the clear winner of the media wars.

So log on to http://pauwwow.com/ and grow with the media.

---- "If I Had One Wish" by: "DJ Suicide" http://www.crossphade.com/press.html

Synthesis Part Deux

As I asked before: "What have got left to disagree about?"

The shape of the world that will emerge from this lubricious debacle is up to us, entirely up to us.

If we do nothing things are going to change anyway and I can bet you that we won't like the change, because, like the Red Queen said, "It takes all the running I can do to stay in the same place."

So we're going to face a challenge.

How can we face it with the minimum amount of effort for the maximum benefit. Or we can be bull headed and suddenly discover that there's only three hundred and sixty million of us and there are nineteen times as many people competing for oil.

Oh and by the way we can forget about buying oil from Venezuela. The Chinese already have dibs on it. While we weren't looking, they've been turning all the foreign assets and debt that we've been forcing on them into hard currency and buying everything all over the planet with our own fiscal instruments.

Was Wal*Mart good for America?

Not only did we decimate our own production capacity by off-shoring everything, not only did we wreck our commercial infrastructure by building these huge soulless identical box stores where we all bought the same identical crap no matter what, but we sent all of that money to Asia to do it.

Now they hold so much of our debt that we've basically screwed the pooch.

If we're stupid enough not to get off the barrel, we can look forward to paying much, much more for our oil.

I figure we've got fifty years before we're hoisting a glass of "Penzoil" [ http://www.pennzoil.com/ ] like it was a $160,000, in 1985 dollars, bottle of 1787 Chateau Lafite Bordeaux. [ http://www.forbes.com/2003/11/19/cx_np_1119feat.html ]

Ok. We are idiots. We have not been paying attention and ignored that silky sound of sharpened tempered metal slicing into our own throats.

The choice is do we smarten up and pull back from oil now or does our collective head fall into the bloody basket.

Personally, it will happen on such a time scale that I don't have to care.

I have no issue and I have nothing riding on tomorrow.

The question is not mine, but its "yours."

Are you going to get off of oil nicely, with sure, measured steps, or will get your daughters' tubes tied and make your sons' into castrati.

---- "Last Tango In NYC" by: "The Four Bags" http://amiestreet.com/music/the-four-bags/offshore/last-tango-in-nyc

Conclusion:

The world is not nice, not fair, not gentle.

It makes mince meat out of the complacent.

Don't be complacent.

Now, how can we get ourselves out of this situation?

That is the thesis of the next speech.

---- "The Rosochacha" by: "Greg Federico"
Outro

The show notes, including the complete text of this episode, and any and all links to the artists featured, are on a server ... somewhere.

And this show is also being podcast in m4a format, which means that it you use a compatible player, like iTunes, you get the content divided up into chapters with images and "hot links" to the the web, on the topic of the chapter or to accompany the music.

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