All non-Facebook jobs would allow you to say the same thing.
If you truly find it morally reprehensible, please let me encourage you to pay attention to your inner compass. There are many, many other places for a software engineer to work.
This is the most alarming and interesting point for me:
"Facebook will market you your future before you’ve even gotten there, they’ll use predictive algorithms to figure out what’s your likely future and then try to make that even more likely. They’ll get better at programming you – they’ll reduce your spontaneity. And they can use your face and name to advertise through you, that’s what you’ve agreed to."
The order in which you are presented with items in your feed, which likes by which friends you see, your previous actions (most of which you cannot likely recall, but all of which facebook has a perfect memory), and many other details are not only used to advertise to you - they're used to build you into the type of person that will be more susceptible to advertising in the future.
Molding and shaping opinion and personality is nothing new, but it has never been this precise, this interactive, and this pervasive. The stimulus, response, and reward loop has never been tighter. Those who use these services are being trained to exhibit particular valuable traits and behaviors, and the level of control over these manipulations will only improve as data is collected and algorithms are refined.
If you've been using a service like Facebook for several years, they know who you have been at each point in time. Imagine you've traversed states A, B, and C and are predicted to be moving toward D. If state F or Z is more valuable (and can be arrived at from state D), then perhaps through several months of training you can be led to it instead. If you're not continually aware of each small nudge in a particular direction, then your mind is absorbing and adjusting to these changes without you knowing about it.
I'd love to read more about this, and am sort of morbidly fascinated by the methods by which these mechanisms operate, and just how powerful these types of control can get.
I work in a related area (prediction, though not in the AdTech market) and keep myself up to date on the literature.
Imagine you've traversed states A, B, and C and are predicted to be moving toward D. If state F or Z is more valuable (and can be arrived at from state D), then perhaps through several months of training you can be led to it instead.
Nothing like this exists beyond very general models. There are some mood-state models, but they are short term (people argue if hourly data is too sparse for them to be useful).
The general models are roughly what you'd expect: if you are 18-22 you are likely to be a student, 55+ considering retirement. I've never seen any research on pushing people along paths, beyond things like education ads trying to get people to take courses, job ads trying to get people to change jobs and dating ads trying to get people to change partners.
Whilst general models maybe possible, my suspicion is that there are too many confounding factors for them to be very useful.
Based on the ads I have seen Google hasn't yet moved from "this guy is looking for an apartment so lets show him ads for the same apartment deal site for months" to "this guy has looked for a apartments for a short time and now doesn't, lets show him ads for some curtains" so it seems even the best predictors aren't very good yet.
But surely as more and more data is gathered over the next decade , this sort of thing could become feasible ?
For eg: I know for a fact that FB is betting very heavily on travel advertising. FB wants to be the go to place for travel companies to advertise their products , so FB has an incentive to make people travel more.
They could do this prominently highlighting when people travel to a certain tourist spot etc...
It wouldn't be just about gathering data, but also developing the algorithms that are capable of that specialization to each person. No matter how good your data is, the lack of an algorithm to examine the data and recognize applications for each unique person to manipulate behavior using a strategy that must recognize it's own applicability at that moment is going to be the huge hurdle.
I would like to say I don't use FB. I do, but only give them my mug with big sunglasses on. Big sunglasses! I only give up an email address. I never go to that account. That account is for "the one that got away". It didn't work out as planned. To be perfectly honest, I don't like my picture taken, or even asked for. I gave it to DMV, and reluctantly gave it to Costco. (Costco will never get another picture. I only utilize their pharmacy, and that doesn't require a membership picture.)
I have another fake FB account, and gave them a fake picture--Eddie Haskel's head shot. I only use at as a convent way to enter certain websites. Once FB is gone--it's going to be deactivated.
I have a feeling I'm older than most of you. Giving up my picture, and personal information is very hard.
I used to think it was because I was sensitive over my appearance. I look like Shrek. Big Irish head.
I don't think that's the reason. I'm just a private person, and honestly don't like being photographed? And even more important, I don't like being pigeonholed by FB, or any marketing website.
I hope people in the future refuse to give up their image, and personal likes/dislikes. Or, demand complete control over all data they give up.
It does get very tiring to be out and about with friends and they all wish to take several group photos of different sets of the people you're with, at different times during the outing/meetup, from different smartphones (ie the same photo just from someone else's phone). This happened the other day. Even as we were about to eat, they happily waited before digging in so that some pictures of the food could be taken. Mind you, these are people in their 30s and 40s.
On the other side, I've spent the better part of the last decade abroad and realized last year that I don't have much "evidence" of my life, not in photos, not on FB (since I mostly just post articles). Not only do I share your aversion to having your picture taken, I never liked looking like a tourist when traveling (even the few sets of photos I took, most got lost over the years).
I've always thought I was above the whole "being manipulated by cultural trends" thing but isn't wanting evidence part of the whole Me culture?
I think taking photos when going out makers you an observer, and not a participater. You're living your life and those memories are in your head and your property. Nobody can take those away. Bravo. That sounds like the right motto for life to me.
Alternatively, people posting photos on Facebook are watching other people's lives and posting the evidence of it. That's sad.
In many(all?) states you can ask to have the photo omitted from your license, in which case they will print "Not valid for identification" on it.
I started doing this when they started adding dmv photos to a facial recognition database. I just use my passport for id, which I prefer anyway because it doesn't list my address, weight, or organ donation preferences.
I don't use Facebook. But I'm noticing these trends elsewhere - in online Ads. I was browsing for "interesting things" on Amazon recently, one such thing was a hand powered torch light. It was interesting because it recharged via mechanical energy but I knew that the dynamo would be crappy and it would stop working after a couple of days. So just left it there.
Then, magically, when I was reading a blog which had Google Ads in it, I saw an Ad on the right which showed "Hand-pump based rechargeable batteries" and I was like "That's so cool! I want to buy it", then realized how Google's algorithm was influencing me to buy things that I didn't even know existed.
Somehow Google was able to make out that I'm interested in things that are hand-powered. I'd like to think it was random, but I know that's not the case.
I don’t find it coincidental that around the time programmatic advertising became a norm for the advertising industry, adoption of ad blocking technologies started to spike. All that around 2011. From a point of view the online advertising industry is on a path of self-destruction. They’ll spook users too much that they’ll end up blocking ads altogether, regardless whether they’re targeted or not. It’s already happening and my guess is that it will continue on a steady pace. Once it reaches 50%, which I estimate will happen in the next two to three years, the online advertising industry will implode. At least every other week we read an article from a major venue that discusses the effects of ad blocking. The funny thing is that although they’re worrying their reaction till today is almost nonexistence. I’ve yet to witness a panel in a digital marketing conference where there is an honest discussion about the issue. They just don’t care, they only thing they care about is how to circumvent ad blocking technologies.
You've hit the nail on the head there. This is my exact experience. As I started to notice the retargeted ads, I found them creepy. That led to my initial research into using ad-blockers.
My first reaction though was abhorrence, and a refusal to ever deal with the company using that ad- retargeting. The practice feels like something a really scummy sly used car salesman would use.
>My first reaction though was abhorrence, and a refusal to ever deal with the company using that ad- retargeting.
I don't think you realize how many companies you've decided to not do business with.
>The practice feels like something a really scummy sly used car salesman would use.
How different is it from walking into Home Depot and talking with a salesperson about paints to touch up the home you're about to put on the market. Then, upon return a month later, that same salesperson recognizes you, inquires as to your new home and mentions a deal they're running on Sherwin Williams paint?
In that case, I've gone back to the store, so it's clear that I'm prepared to do business with them.
It's also a social interaction. If the sales person did that of their own volition, then I'd react positively.
However, I'd be less responsive if the information had been retrieved via, say, facial recognition in some way.
The difference is that one case is someone (or a business) wanting to help and improve my life -- and, yes, to sell me something. The other is someone wanting to ell me something.
>The difference is that one case is someone (or a business) wanting to help and improve my life -- and, yes, to sell me something.
I think you're being overly generous in the case of the former. The person's livelihood depends on selling you something. She or he is just wrapping it in a social patina that will prevent your "I'm being sold something" warning lights from going off.
Based on the people I have talked with, who are non-technical, and need an adblocker, it was youtubes commercials before the video that made them install the adblocker, not any idea about tracking.
Exactly. The monetizing of web services thru advertising, while extremly common now, is nothing but a short term (self-destructing) strategy, it can not be viable for the long future.
Occam's razor leads one to think that there is an obvious textual correllation from one hand-pimped thing tonthe next. In other words, a simple keyword based 'related to' algorithm, rather than a deep understanding of why you didn't want the flashlight and offered you the batteries instead.
One obvious thing I've noticed is that whoever is serving ads to me (on YouTube for example) has an idea about my sex. A few months ago I did some research on period tracker apps (i.e. products exlusively for women) and immediately noticed a burst of advertising that assumed I was female.
Adsense bidding is going to offer advertisers advertising options based user profiles which are somehow anonymized. So it's not a case of falling into a "cluster": even though I'm a typical male in other respects, the strong correlation of certain pages/searches with particular gender-specific interests swamped everything else and made me apparently attractive to a new set of advertisers.
Any ad for tampons shown to a guy is a waste of space. Its in their interest to classify you by demographic as much as possible. Google has (had?) a page where you can view all your data and they had a list of all your interests (according to your searches presumably).
That's certainly the hope. But I'm not sure it will turn out as intended though. The thing about people on Facebook is that they are people on Facebook. It might capture some of who they are (or who they want people to think they are anyway) through the lens of social networking. But it's going to be at best a one dimensional view and I'm not sure how effective at summarizing or manipulating people (that part is coming later:).
"Mere" is a bit much. You're not an immortal superhero.
To answer your question: a non-technologist pays someone like you to fix it. Much like the way most people bring their cars to mechanics instead of spending hundreds of hours learning to fix the vehicles personally. This type of specialization is prerequisite to the large civilizations in which we live.
In this case fixing the issue required knowledge of how certs work in order to guess that there is a date issue. That's probably pretty rare at fix-your-computer shops.
It's pure luck that I'd seen this type of issue before because I'm one of those mere civilians: my Windows machine at work loses BIOS settings on power down. I've seen that until the date is restored, DropBox and several other things don't work.
The message is probably one we can all get behind in principle.
However, the internet has a real, physical infrastructure that is definitely owned and operated by behemoth organizations like governments and private corporations. In fact, the Internet was created by a government. What makes you think they'd give it up willingly?
If you want to create your own internet, you certainly can. But even if you find the monetary resources to do so, you'll need to house and operate the telecommunications equipment somewhere on Earth (or in LEO). And if you want to protect that equipment from hostile takeover, then you'll need some form of recognized sovereignty including a real military capable of defending your castle.
Cyberspace cannot (yet) escape the real bounds of physical reality. It seems as though some people think of it as a superset of the world, while it very much is still a subset dependent on its corporeal parent.
What about techniques that obscure the source of information?
Whether it be something like Tor, or something like a distributed database, internet communication may require hardware and physical location of data, but there are ways to allow information transmission without being strongly reliant on a fixed physical source.
Also, this capability is not limited to the internet.
Think very long distance wireless. It has yet to be invented but I believe one day it will be possible to communicate point-to-point across the globe with low power devices at high bandwidths. Such a technology would make these arguments moot. Certainly we have to be practical about our present situation but the broader idea of cyberspace is not limited to current technology. In 1996 moderates would have laugh if you suggested today's technology would become common place.
Where would you house the wireless endpoints? How would you obscure their source? These aren't magical devices. They're still real-world physical objects.
No, that's wrong. It's correct if you add the requirement that you're omnidirectional but if you want to let go of that requirement then low power, high bandwidth and long distance can be there at the same time.
There are some severe physical limitations to work around here. Higher frequencies support higher bandwidth, but they tend to go right through the ionosphere rather than treating the ground-ionosphere system as a waveguide. Lower frequencies can propagate further (like AM radio at night), but as you drop the frequency there's suddenly a lot less spectrum to go around. And you need huge antennas.
It stands to reason that the technology of the future does not yet make sense to us. Do you believe that we've already achieved the furthest possible wireless communication at low power? I think we can do better. This is pure speculation but I'm basing it on our past performance.
Yes, I believe we're at the limit of what we can do with electromagnetic radiation. That's not to say that there aren't other forms of wireless I haven't thought of, but we've been trying to squeeze bandwidth out of the electromagnetic spectrum for over a hundred years now, and its limitations are pretty well understood at this point. If we're all carrying neutrino-based communication devices in 2050, I'll be happily proven wrong.
This is not to say that there isn't exciting stuff going on in the QRP DX world (like JT65), but we're not breaking through the power-bandwidth-distance frontier, just finding interesting new ways to trade the three off against each other.
Too bad they won't do a piece on what happens in a small town when Walmart opens. In mine multiple campgrounds and small locally owned small businesses closed down. Not to mention the workforce is all people from out of town now earning a pittance, living on government assistance.
really? The small shops in my town could barely afford to pay employees minimum wage and their goods were much higher priced.
Walmart gave more people jobs at a better wage and reduced the costs of most goods for everyone.
I looked at their average wages on payscale.com (hard to libk from my phone) and the max for most positions is close to $15/hour. The minimum is above minimum wage.
Almost anyone can do these jobs and they are hardly a ’pittance’.
I looked at their average wages on payscale.com (hard to libk from my phone) and the max for most positions is close to $15/hour. The minimum is above minimum wage.
That's only been true within the last one or two years as Walmart attempted to avoid further labor-related litigation and unionization efforts. Prior to that, Walmart payed local minimum wage and frequently stiffed workers for time spent checking in and and out shifts.
You are seriously heartless. Many small communities utterly rely on buying groceries. Can you imagine not having anywhere to buy food and having to drive 3 hours just to get it?
Walmart drove into these small communities, destroyed the smaller stores, then realised after deliberately making either a loss or tiny profits it wasn't economically viable, then buggered off.
I think the only lesson I can see in this is that small communities should always oppose multinational retailers when there is a local option. Even if they have to spend a few dollars more. Otherwise, they'll be left with nothing.
If people in a community have to drive three hours for food, then there will be enough demand that someone will open a grocery store. When there's an economic vacuum left by a closing superstore, other, possibly smaller, stores will come back and fill it. It's simple economics.
When a company such as Walmart opens or closes a large store, there seems to be a mass of news articles explaining how the opening or closing is destroying the community.
When a large store comes in, people rarely consider that the new jobs will have benefits and advancement opportunities not found in the traditional mom-and-pop stores. When a large store closes, people rarely mention that it will leave room for new mom-and-pop stores to open.
The fact is, large stores have a pluses and minuses. Their opening or closing is more a result of local economic conditions than the cause.
This is the thing that I keep thinking about. If Walmart comes in and essentially extracts the wealth of the community (profits of the store) and then leaves, how long does it take for that community to recover? How long before they can actually afford to invest in more stores to fill the gap?
You're incredibly ignorant to the reality if you really think that a small town wiped of small businesses by Walmart will have any capital to start a grocery store when they leave. Have you ever actually lived in a small town where most if not all of the population is struggling to make ends meet?
Further, what the heck are you talking about with "benefits and advancement opportunities" at Walmart? The employees are on food stamps just to get by! Where does that leave them extra capital or "benefits" to that situation?
I'm actually in the grocery business and know the economics of opening stores - you can open a store for practically nothing: you start as a convenience store selling staples like toilet paper, long shelf life foods, local produce and whatever the owner makes themselves (ethnic food, apple pies, etc). Then, you slowly add SKUs as you grow.
The rich call this a "food desert," urbanites call this the bodega or corner korean market and europeans have zillions of these. I actually love shopping in these places - terrific & patient service and amazing finds if you're patient.
The food distribution business is beautiful that way - economies of scale are very gentle. It's the exact opposite of automobiles and infrastructure software.
p.s. amazon+UPS is another great stopgap for these communities, and surprisingly efficient if they setup a DC (distribution center) somewhere a few hrs away with more limited selection. It's the 2016 equivalent of the milkman.
As a matter of fact, I do live in a small town with a median household income of less than $30,000. There is a Walmart store. Most Walmart employees do not qualify for food stamps, but they do get health and other benefits not available at many local small businesses. There are relatively high paying jobs at the Walmart store -- much higher than are typically available at local small businesses. And, if a Walmart employee is willing to relocate, there is even more advancement potential.
I cannot imagine anywhere in the lower 48 United States where there could be a community in which people have to drive three hours to get food. If there is, the demand would certainly justify someone from inside or outside the community opening a grocery store. A large capital outlay would not be necessary.
>If people in a community have to drive three hours for food, then there will be enough demand that someone will open a grocery store. When there's an economic vacuum left by a closing superstore, other, possibly smaller, stores will come back and fill it. It's simple economics.
Real life doesn't always play out like simple (simplistic) economics.
E.g. sometimes nobody will do the investment to build one for years.
Or it will much smaller and more expensive that a Walmart, but enough to stiffle anybody opening a competitor.
>Can you imagine not having anywhere to buy food and having to drive 3 hours just to get it?<
That's a very real and serious problem for low-income and fixed-income consumers...many of whom are forced to shop wherever they reasonably can...
There are many "food deserts"--areas where it's difficult to buy affordable good quality food--in the U.S., especially in sparsely populated urban and rural areas...
It's true that if the need (demand) is great enough in an area a retailer of some sort will probably eventually open shop to fill the void...waiting for that to happen can be very painful for the poorest consumers...
The best hope for communities abandoned by Wal Mart may turn out to be franchises related to the "dollar store" concept...
How Dollar Stores Were Planted in the South and Bloomed...
> Can you imagine not having anywhere to buy food and having to drive 3 hours just to get it?
But why wouldn't smaller stores open again now walmart is gone?
Edit: Say what you want about them being mom & pop stores that somehow cant start up again, if it takes 3 hours to drive to a shop and back there is a market opportunity. People will pay more for groceries when it doesn't involve a 6 hour round trip. I thought the idea of Americas great free market is that this void would be filled?
The old mom and pops bootstrapped organically, grew both inventory and the know how to stock it over decades, in lockstep with the community.
Today, takes a big start cost to go from zero to viable, and the lack of intuitive mom and pop know how is a risk too. In these locations, that startup money itself will be risk adjusted, so expensive.
There's probably a lot of truth in what you say. But, the economy abhors a vacuum, and there will either be "something" that starts up, or in some cases not and those towns may die. The dead towns will have a complicated story that in many cases will probably include the death of local businesses by Walmart.
If I ran 7/11 or Shell, I might be thinking about how to put in gas 'n goes with a somewhat larger retail footprint, a larger percentage of life groceries than potato chips. That would have the backing of a large corp, so the first yearly lack of profit wouldn't kill mom and pop's retirement, and comes with knowledge of running the outlet and managing supply lines.
Bonus, you're gonna gas up before you make that three hour grocery run, maybe what they have at the gas station is good enough, or reduces the number of trips you need to make.
I'm not sure you quite grasp how hardscrabble these areas are, and 7/11 and Shell are both franchise operations in the first place. The capital still needs to come from somewhere, and gas has worse margins than grocery in the first place.
I understand the area is hardscrabble. And yes, 7/11 and Shell are franchises, that's the point. It's a response to the idea that mom and pop might not be able to step up to serve the community. That would be preferred, but if they don't, it's still possible to reduce the need for three hour drives, with a BigCorp that already knows how to do retail and already has the lines in place.
The knowledge you are referring to was never there in the first place. Large chains have largely centralized inventory management and the actual stores are little more than distribution centers and cash tills. And, even was that knowledge and capability there, the bigger problem remains that the invisible hand doesn't make the necessary capital to open a grocery store (and both its inventory and its plant assets) appear from nowhere. This is one of the trap corners that the unfettered free marketeers of the world would pretend don't exist, but they do and they're ugly.
Because the people that were running them and just barely getting by likely don't have the funds to open a new store. A lot of these places the building/infrastructure was just handed down generation to generation. Once it goes under, there's nothing left to start it back up.
And they won't make those loans in the absence of a viable business plan. (Plus, this isn't Silicon Valley. The prospective business owner is almost certainly going to need to put some of their own money in.) A lot of dying ex-resource extraction towns just don't present much of a business opportunity for anyone. I also suspect that a lot of readers here don't appreciate that really long drives to get to a "real" store is not that unusual across fairly large swaths of the US.
Try getting a business loan as e.g. a poor southerner ex-Walmart employee to open a new grocery store in Indianola, MS or Forkland, AL or tons of even smaller places...
With what capital? More likely that these old mining towns and more rural communities wont exist in a few generations. With younger people moving to the cities to find whatever work they can.
If you're investing on a longer-term horizon (a year or more), the monthly futures roll where the USO fund sells the current month's oil contracts (because it doesn't want the actual oil to be delivered) and buys the following month's oil futures (normally at a higher price than what it sold the current month's at) will eat into any returns you get from price appreciation.
To put some numbers to the example, let's say the fund has 100 barrels of oil, and the current month's price is $20, and next month is $21. When it rolls the contracts, it sells 100 barrels for $2000, and buys 95 barrels, with $5 left over.
Fast forward a month. Prices have gone up by $1 for all months oil. It will sell 95 barrels for $22 ($2090, plus the prior month's leftover $5) and buy 91 barrels for $23, with $2 left over.
Fast forward another month. Let's say you owned the entire fund and decided to liquidate it. Prices for your contract have gone up another $1, so you sell your 91 barrels for $24, receiving $2184, and adding the extra $2 in cash you had gives you $2186. That's a 9.3% return in two months.
Compare that to the price of oil as reported in the news - it's the front month contract, so on the face of it, oil has gone from $20 to $24 (20% increase) while you've only made 9.3%.
The numbers are somewhat exaggerated here, and it can work the other way (current month more expensive than forward month) but is uncommon. This is why USO has historically been a bad long-term proxy for the price of oil.
Note that this is SUPER RISKY investment fund. If you look at the chart it has major swings up and down. The fund is down 20% for 2016 (yikes!). But if you had held it from 2012 -> 2014 you would have gotten a 40% return on your investment.
I like Vanguard funds since they have a low management cost to them and they tend to be a little more conservative in their selection.
Good luck, remember me when you make your million!
I just exchanged a bunch of other funds for VGENX. These companies are some of the most profitable in history. Even with the recent massive price collapse, this fund has outperformed the market since 1984.
USO is an ETF based off of a basket of futures contracts. The problem with owning USO is that there is basically inefficiency when rolling futures contracts and there is a some decay in the price. If you truly want to play in oil, best to use the futures themselves. Futures are the highest leverage instruments available, so be careful to note their size, but there is nothing more risky about futures than the equivalent notional value of stocks.
Be careful, though, because when oil reaches its end game, the price will fall and never come back up. Are we there yet? Or is this just temporary drop? There's no way to know, now.
Wait, wouldn't the scarcity of oil force a premium on the price? Wouldn't a dwindling resource with lots of legacy uses and equipment requiring it command even higher prices than when it's abundant?
The oil end game isn't that we run out; its we find something better (electric cars) and oil loses its value and becomes a stranded asset in the ground.
Good for humanity, bad for O&G industries.
EDIT: I'm fairly confident this is the start of the end. The US Congress extended the production tax credit for renewables for 5 years, along with Tesla's Gigafactory ramping up production, which means we're going to be awash in renewable-generated power and have the capacity to store it (in cars, and in stationary storage).
Yes, that's what I meant. The oil game as we know it today--financially speaking--ends when future supplies are no longer considered to be the most important constraint on economic growth.
That's very hard to analyze because the issue is not just how oil is sourced and used, it is how people on average expect it to be sourced and used.
On the supply side, while producers like the Saudis are trying to undercut fracking with low prices now, they can't make people forget about fracking. If the Saudis try to raise prices again, then fracking becomes a viable competitor again.
On the demand site, the world is not going to forget about global warming. Population growth will keep slowing. Infrastructure will keep getting built and keep getting smarter.
At some point the supply and demand sides will diverge enough to knock oil from its privileged position as THE key resource for the economy. This is similar to earlier essential resources like food, clothing, water, shelter, mining, etc. We still spend a lot of money on these things, but there is no expectation that they are guaranteed growth industries.
The area I live in was supposed to be headed towards a fracking boom and it mostly fizzled. The combination of dropping prices and lower-than-expected output from test wells kept the drilling far more isolated than it was supposed to.
I suspect if prices rise again, those test wells may have proved to be profitable. However, the oil companies came through and leased tons of acreage already and spent lots of money on the leases. Even if prices come back, many of the leases would have either expired or the gas companies would have to pay for their extension provisions. Given the state of the companies that started leasing (CHK: down 86% since they leased my father-in-laws old farm property), I don't think they have the money to do that. Even if the original leaser sold the leases off, which happened in many cases, the new owner would still have to pony up the extension and then start drilling again, exposing themselves to OPEC under-cutting them again.
> The oil end game isn't that we run out; its we find something better (electric cars) and oil loses its value and becomes a stranded asset in the ground.
I think its about equally likely that the end game is that the price of oil (ultimately driven by energy to extract each unit) goes up until other things that are known are more cost effective for most uses; this doesn't make it "lose its value" -- the use value remains the same and the market clearing cost per unit is high -- but it shrinks the size of the market (there may be some uses for which it is still cost effective, but not as many) and is still bad for the oil & gas industry.
Once industries transition away from tooling that uses gas/oil, there will be significant cost to re-tooling back to using oil or gas. At this point oil/gas losses value because there is a barrier to using it. If all cars on the road are electric cars, then oil refined into gasoline won't see much use and the price will drop (relative to the costs to harvest it). It's not like a rise in the price of electricity will send people with 100% electric cars running to the gas pump.
Well, my point was that the 100% electric cars don't run on gas. They would have to purchase a new car to take advantage of the gas prices, which is a higher barrier than just choosing to fill up with "electric fuel" or "liquid fuel" when your car is running low.
Because the cheapest watt to generate is the one you didn't have to generate in the first place.
On the other hand, Texas has so much wind power locally that they can't ship out of the state yet that some utilities give power away for free at night:
That's an interesting argument, but as the p[rice drops, less companies will be willing to drill it, and that will provide an upward pressure from lack of supply, will it not? At some point I imagine it will stabilize at a new price (based on then demand), I guess the question is do we have models of something like this happening before?
We reached peak oil, it just wasn't supply. It was demand.
Nifty redefinition, but I take this to confirm that the Peak Oil aficionados were kooks, just as they seemed to be. They and Paul Ehrlich will eventually be joined by many others in my "confirmed kook" bucket, but so far my "strongly suspected kook" bucket seems pretty accurate too.
Agreed but I doubt we are anywhere close to this. The majority of the world's critical transportation infrastructure is oil powered and the sunk cost is massive. Electric vehicles are only a blip. Oil has decades left as the "rate limiting reagent" of the industrial world.
This is definitely a buying opportunity for those with the money to make such investments.
We're never going to stop using petroleum (for fertilizer, plastics, other chemicals, etc.), but hopefully we'll stop burning it for fuel. While marginal sources like tar sands could likely never be used, the rest will most likely be used for something. Unless there's some revolution in Genetic engineering that lets us make all of these useful products from microbes.
If you stand for delivery, you pay to store and insure it. If you don't stand for delivery, you pay contango to roll over the contracts. Going long commodities with uncertain date of sale always costs money.
You mean ETFs? If not, what is an "oil share"? Futures contracts have maturity dates. At the end you sell them (at a price you might not like), roll them over (not free or even necessarily cheap) or take delivery on the oil (also usually not cheap, depending on your facilities).
You could buy and hold until a stock went to zero, for example.
Edit: Whoever is downvoting obviously has never seen this happen. There was just an article about it on HN the other day, describing how Dragon lost it all when the company they sold to plummeted to zero stock value.
That's certainly what I'm up to. MLPs are on sale right now -- and they give interesting benefits (large guaranteed dividends and capital deprecation on your income tax forms) if you're willing to buy and hold. I'm aiming for 10 years to financial independence; I might get there in 5, with the way things are going right now.
I don't think there's much risk of bankruptcy for high-cap MLPs, and for low-cap ones the risk is priced into the stock (and then some). The price of oil has to recover sooner or later; the Saudis don't have an economy unless they have high oil prices, and they're the ones behind the current glut. Kuwait is already negotiating with OPEC and non-OPEC producers to raise oil prices again...
I bought a treadmill desk recently. It's fantastic. I'm walking 15k steps at 2.3km/h daily, and slowly increasing the speed. I've dropped 3+kg and will soon have a healthy BMI again. After the first few days, the novelty wore off and I stopped noticing it while I worked. If I want a standing desk, I just turn the treadmill off.
One thing I've noticed is that I still have to sit down to maximize focus and think through certain problems. Alternating walking for 30-60 minutes, then sitting for a while feels natural.
I did lots of research on this before buying one, and have found what most people reported to be true: it's easy to type and be accurate with a mouse at speeds under 2mph.
Mine stops within five seconds, so taking calls etc. is not really a problem either. Plus you can stand motionless on the side rails while it slows down.
15k steps per day is awesome! I have no idea how much 3kg is but that's awesome too ;)
And it's cool to hear you say that last bit because I feel the same way. I really need to sit down to work through through a complicated problems that requires focus. Emails and phone calls are standing and furrowed brow activities are sitting.
I know you're half joking, but if you really don't have a feeling (or actual understanding) of the units of the metric system you should spend some time acquiring that knowledge. There are reasons that 95% of the world and the entire scientific community uses it.
i think treadmill desk is fantastic (i'm currently (for 6 months already) at the "cardboard boxes on the table" stage) and wondering - are you in the office with others, ie. what about noise?
