Borealis, Again June 24, 2004March 25, 2012 Long time readers will know that I have written about a company called Borealis in this space many times. Two reasons. First, it is as loony and colorful story as one is likely to find . . . a preposterous number of red flags . . . and yet, as I have written before, Why would Boeing have allowed its name to be used in a press release if this were all nonsense? Why would it later have issued its own press release saying, in effect, this is not all nonsense? Why would IBM have invited Borealis’s CEO to speak at one of its regional conferences earlier this month? And why does that speech read so well? Yet why, if this stood any chance of being real, would those in the audience have rushed out to buy the stock? (The stock barely ever trades.) And that’s the second reason. To me, the stock is like a lottery ticket – but a lottery ticket that I have developed the insane belief may offer powerful odds. It would be quite different if the company had a single drug that might or might not extend the lives of some cancer patients by six months and were selling for $800 million. This company, with its 5 million shares outstanding at $6 each is selling for $30 million . . . less than some homes now sell for, or a new corporate jet . . . and if its claims prove true, it would be far more valuable than the aforesaid hypothetical drug company. So it can’t be true, or else, among other things, all the scientists and engineers who have by now been pitched by the company would have bought shares and told their friends to buy shares, bidding up the price. So trust me – it can’t be true, and it’s going to zero. But then why would Boeing . . . why would IBM . . . why . . . Several of you with vastly more technical background than I have explained over the years why all this is technologically impossible. A few have then come back to say you’re not quite so sure, though still doubtful. Anyway, if you have $600 to blow on a 100-share lottery ticket – and most people don’t! – read the speech and see what you think. If there’s a 10% chance this could pan out, two things could be true: first, and most evident, you have a 90% chance of losing your money. Second, it could be a very good bet. Why? Because if it panned out, it could easily be worth a 100 times what it is today. In which case you’d have a 10% chance of a 100-fold gain, which the mathematicians in the crowd will tell you is a very good bet to take. (Bet $1 ten times and you lose $9 the first nine times, then make $100 the tenth time. Repeat.) One must be very quick to add that this kind of logic could be applied to justify any speculation. It’s all in the assumptions one pulls out of the air. If there is only a one in a million chance Borealis technology is real and can be commercially exploited, then you would bet ten bucks a million times, losing $10 million, before finally, on the millionth time, making $1,000. I am dying to find out the end of the story. Promise me you will not gamble any money on this you cannot truly afford to lose without pain. But promise me also you won’t sell if it goes up a few points. You don’t take one-on-ten chances (let alone one-in-a-million chances) to turn $600 into $900.
Sculpture June 23, 2004February 27, 2017 PREDICTIVE TEXT Jeff: ‘T9 is awesome. Here’s their home page.’ ☞ There’s an on-line demo and even a training game. And for the words your cell phone’s predictive text doesn’t recognize – it will, in the future, once you spell them out the long slow way. SCULPTURE This nine foot-long syringe by sculptor Edie Brown incorporates a 55 gallon oil drum and is called, Oil Addiction. The U.S. uses 178 of these drums every second. It was placed in an exhibit of oil drum art for New Haven’s International Festival of Arts and Ideas and it won an award. (Do you know of an environmental organization that might want to display it? I think it would go well in the lobby of the Energy Department or Environmental Protection Agency, but not under this administration.) HATE Steve: ‘There are many reasons why one person may (however irrationally) hate another enough to commit a heinous act, and no one wants to see crimes against their own group be considered less deserving of punishment than another. However, it is the essence of hate crime statutes to make such a distinction and elevate some over others. To argue inclusion of gays and lesbians is to argue a step towards the effective repeal of the statutes, for when all cases are ‘special,’ none will be.’ ☞ Well said – but I think incorrect. It’s not just African Americans who are protected now, it’s people of ANY race, including white (even though there have obviously been more hate crimes against blacks than whites). It’s people of ANY religion who are protected (even though synagogues tend to be defiled more often than churches). And, yes, if a bunch of hateful gays hopped into their pick-up and found some apparently straight man at random, chained him to their truck, and dragged him through the streets of West Hollywood until he was decapitated – they would be guilty of a hate crime if hate crimes based on ‘sexual orientation’ were added to the existing 1968 federal statute. Because, yes, in a sense all people ARE special, and none should have to fear being targeted just because of who they are. More of your comments in the days to come.
Stupid June 22, 2004February 25, 2017 E-MAZING HOW STUPID I AM So I have this cell phone that lets me type in reminders and messages and the like, but with the 12-key phone keypad – an immediate problem for anyone who uses a 26-letter alphabet – and it’s got some ‘predictive text’ system that’s supposed to help but that never works so I quickly (and with some annoyance) went into the menu and found a way to turn ‘predictive text OFF.’ I did this because I am an idiot. It turns out that if I had been just a tiny bit more patient (or if I had read the manual), I would have seen how miraculous this really is. With predictive text ON, you just type the whole word without concern for the fact that, at first, it seems to be guessing wrong. Say you want to type AMERICA. You press the 2 key (abc) and it displays A. So far, so good. You then press the 6 key (mno) and is displays N. No! No! You wanted M! And even if you think to then press the 3 key (def) – although why would you, when it’s already gone off course? – it displays D. So now it reads AND where you would have wanted it to read AME . . . you are never going to get to AMERICA at this rate, you might just as well have headed for ANDYVILLE . . . so you quit in disgust, switch ‘predictive text OFF,’ and crawl back to your Neanderthal cave. Now comes a house guest who explains that you need only keep typing the word you want, and predictive text will generally figure it out by the time you get to the end. If I had just kept typing, by the time I looked up from the keypad to the display, I would have seen: AMERICA. And there’s more! When it does guess the wrong word, you just hit the STAR key and it pops up what it considers the next best alternative, which is usually the one you want. Or else press star again. If you are trying to type, say, Kozlowski, it’s not going to guess that, so gives you the ‘spell’ option for that one word, where you use the slow-old method (press the 2 key once for A, twice for B, three times for C). ‘It’s not new, you know,’ laughs my house guest. ‘Every six year old in Europe has been doing this for years.’ Over time, he says (long before you’re seven), you don’t even look at the keys any more. Your brain just knows which key to press for an M N or O. (Play around with the # key also, when you’re about to enter text. Depending on your phone, it will probably toggle on or off predictive text mode, and/or switch between ‘Sentence’ mode, where the first word starts with a capital letter and text mode where it does not.) AMAZING HOW STUPID THE ARMY IS Last week, the Senate voted to authorize the Army to add 20,000 new soldiers. Meanwhile, over the last five years, 9,682 soldiers serving in 161 different occupational specialties have been discharged for being gay or lesbian, including 88 linguists and 49 nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare specialists. For details, click here.
Personal Loans June 21, 2004January 21, 2017 Georgia: ‘Re Mark Holman and the $15 he owes you from 1970. If you found him and charged him interest on that $15 for the last 34 years, how much would he owe you?’ ☞ If I were charging the 18% credit card rate, it would come to $4,196.46 – plus late fees. At the 21% some cards charge, it would be more than twice that. With the $29 late fee each month, at 21%, it would come to $1,089,722.80. And at the 27% ‘default rate’ I saw on a recent Citibank credit card offer, with those late fees added in each month, you’re talking $4.4 million. You see why the credit card companies hope against hope you get into financial difficulty? John: ‘In the summer of 1959 I worked at the Concord Hotel in the Catskills as a page boy. The superintendent of service, my immediate supervisor, was a very nice man, but a compulsive gambler. From time to time, he would call me (and others) over to his desk and borrow $10 or $20. This was quite a lot of money for a page boy who worked for twenty-five- and fifty-cent tips, but I never had the courage to say no. By the end of my second summer, he owed me exactly $250. He had never made even one payment on this growing loan, even though we both knew the exact total. I never wanted to antagonize him because the following year I would be eligible to be a bellhop, a much more lucrative position. ‘Jump to 1996. My wife and I are attending a reunion of her very large family at another Catskill resort. As we are standing in the lobby I am looking at the Superintendent of Service desk, and the fellow’s name and face look strangely familiar. We look at each other, and after a moment or two we recognized that we had been fellow page boys some thirty-six years earlier. We spent fifteen minutes or so recalling all our fellow workers, our bosses and even some memorable guests. Towards the end of the conversation, he pointed out the man who had been superintendent of service at the Concord – he was now reservation manager at this resort. He brought the old ‘super’ out of his office. He remembered me well. We recalled many humorous incidents and many friends and co-workers. When I mentioned the earlier loan, his memory went sour, gave me a big bear hug, excused himself and returned to his office.’ ☞ Note that since 1959, $250 would have grown to $3,441 at 6% without late fees, or to $12,081 at 9%, or to $1.3 million at 21%. Add in $29 monthly late fees and ratchet the rate up to the 26% I see American Express charging a green card holder I know who chooses to extend his payments (while keeping $200,000 in a money market account – go figure), and you get to $57 million and change. Of course this is silly, because there were no credit cards in 1959, and the monthly late fee is a more still modern invention. ☞ Note, also, that for loans of any size, you may want to use CircleLending.com, as described here a couple of years ago. Had I done so over the years, my guess is that I would be at least several thousand dollars ahead. A BETTER WAY TO READ MOLLY Jerry Minkoff: ‘May I suggest that a better place to read Molly Ivins’ column is here. It’s posted more promptly, and they maintain an archive – e.g., the one you suggested Friday.’ TECHNICALLY, TODAY IS NO LONGER THAN ANY OTHER DAY But I love it anyway. Fiat lux.
Listen to Molly June 18, 2004February 25, 2017 “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy: that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” – John Kenneth Galbraith Did you see Molly Ivins’ June 8 column? It’s riddled with examples like this: Last January, Bush praised veterans during a visit to Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The same day, 164,000 veterans were told the White House was ‘immediately cutting off their access to the VA health care system.’ There is example after example like this. If you know someone who thinks President Bush is a straight shooter, you should send him or her Molly’s column. ‘With the release of the 2006 budget,’ she writes, ‘we’re constantly finding instances of programs that Bush, the candidate, proudly claims to support, while he prepares to cut them drastically in order to pay for making his tax cuts permanent.’ That’s not flip-flopping – it’s willful deception on a grand scale. And since you mention flip-flopping (I was just waiting for you to bring it up), it turns out that Senator Kerry has not done this in nearly the way Bush has spent $50+ million to have you believe. Independent critics have found these TV commercials to be grossly deceptive. Not that every Democratic ad is at all times 100% certifiably fair. But to quote James Carville again, from the 1992 campaign: ‘We say one plus one equals three, and the Bush folks say one plus one equals three thousand, and you write, ‘both campaigns wrong.” Anyway, I hope you’ll find time to consider the June 8 column. To find it, click this link . . . scroll to the bottom of her current column . . . pull down the ‘archive’ menu . . . and select June 8. (Sorry for the extra work.) Have a great weekend.
Laying Blame Where’s It’s Due June 17, 2004January 21, 2017 Cynthia: ‘I suppose it’s more emotionally gratifying to play the victim. My feeling is that you are compensating for your lack of AIDS activism during Reagan’s time by playing catch-up now. Why weren’t you writing about AIDS then?? Point the finger at yourself before you point it at Reagan.’ Joel Margolis: ‘What exactly did you want Reagan to say? ‘Hedonists of the world (that’s you drug addicts and homosexuals) stop being hedonists. Change your values. Change your morality. Change your actions. You liberals at CDC and the public health community have to immediately begin contact tracing of all AIDS patients so that we can stop this horrible disease now, rather than after hundreds of thousands have died of it.’ I’m sure that would have been effective. Every drug addict and homosexual would have changed his values and behavior. Immediately, if not sooner. It’s time homosexuals stopped blaming Reagan and the rest of America for their actions. Yes it was a tragedy that some hemophiliacs died because blood wasn’t properly screened in the early years of the AIDS outbreak. But that wasn’t the fault of Reagan. Perhaps if you and your homosexual friends had spoken out and said that no homosexual who is sexually active should give blood that might have helped. By the way, have you ever condemned the hedonists in the homosexual community for their behavior in causing AIDS?’ ☞ Rather than respond in full (where would one start?), let me limit it to this: I hope that, to be consistent, Joel is equally tough on the nation’s 400,000 lung cancer victims each year, and thinks we should stop wasting money trying to prevent or cure that completely avoidable disease. Quitting smoking and quitting sex are both reasonable things to require of people. End of story. Erik Olson: ‘I have two points regarding your June 15 column. First, the supposed excerpt from Reagan’s 1986 State of the Union address is the real example of ‘revisionist history.’ That myth was started in a December 2003 column by Deroy Murdock of the National Review, who recently acknowledged that he was mistaken, and that the passage actually wasn’t in the State of the Union after all. Reagan’s first major speech about AIDS was on April 1, 1987 [nearly 6 full years after the New York Times first broke the story], when he advocated a modest federal role in AIDS education. ‘And second, Larry Speakes’ clowning about AIDS in that 1982 press conference you quoted is not the only or most egregious example. Andrew Sullivan (June 10) and others have also pointed to this press conference from December 11, 1984 where the hilarity continued:’ MR. SPEAKES: Lester’s beginning to circle now. He’s moving in front.(Laughter.) Go ahead. Q: Since the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta (laughter) reports… MR. SPEAKES:This is going to be an AIDS question. Q: that an estimated MR. SPEAKES:You were close. Q: Well, look, could I ask the question, Larry? MR. SPEAKES:You were close. Q: An estimated 300,000 people have been exposed to AIDS, which can be transmitted through saliva. Will the President, as Commander-in-Chief, take steps to protect Armed Forces food and medical services from AIDS patients or those who run the risk of spreading AIDS in the same manner that they forbid typhoid fever people from being involved in the health or food services? MR. SPEAKES:I don’t know. Q: Could you – Is the President concerned about this subject, Larry MR. SPEAKES: I haven’t heard him express… Q: …that seems to have evoked so much jocular MR. SPEAKES: …concern. Q: reaction here? I – you know – Q: It isn’t only the jocks, Lester. Q: Has he sworn off water faucets Q: No, but, I mean, is he going to do anything, Larry? MR. SPEAKES: Lester, I have not heard him express anything on it. Sorry. Q: You mean he has no expressed no opinion about this epidemic? MR. SPEAKES: No, but I must confess I haven’t asked him about it. (Laughter.) Q: Would you ask him Larry? MR. SPEAKES: Have you been checked? (Laughter.) ☞ As you may know, the Senate passed a measure Tuesday, 65-33, that would include sexual orientation in the existing federal Hate Crimes statutes. A third of the Republican Senators even voted for it (albeit not the Republican leadership), and that is nothing if not progress. Even if you are one who opposes hate crimes statutes, the question is – since we do have them – why do two-thirds of Senate Republicans believe gays and lesbians should be excluded from their protection? My guess is that Cynthia, Joel, and Larry Speakes have ready answers. Which just means that those of us who disagree need to continue to engage them in respectful dialogue. If we do, I have no doubt the progress will continue. Friday: Good Golly, Ms. Molly!
A Smidgeon of Personal Finance June 16, 2004January 21, 2017 Well, it turns out Reagan never did say AIDS in his State of the Union address, so he seems to have used the word exactly once in his first 6 years in office. And if you thought yesterday’s Larry Speakes transcript was bad . . . But before we start all that again (I thought yesterday was your last word!), how about at least a smidgeon of personal finance? EARN A SMIDGEON EXTRA Andy Martin: ‘ING Direct‘s 5-year CD at the moment pays 4.4%. If you don’t make it to 5 years, and decide to do something else with the money, you forfeit half the rate and so earn only 2.2%. But that’s still higher than ING’s current 2.1% rate. So why not take the CD? Worst case, you earn a little more.’ SAVE A SMIDGEON Gary Diehl: ‘I have always been quick to use generics, but after having been given a large bottle of Tide detergent sometime back [If only Charles were satisfied with gifts like this!-A.T.] I discovered something interesting. Tide was so thick and powerful compared to the watery brand I usually used, it actually made the clothes feel soapy. So each time I washed using less, until I discovered that a quarter of the recommended amount worked great. Everything comes out very clean and smelling good. Sometimes if I have a truly grimy load I will go to a third. For bad stains I will pre-treat them with a spray bottle filled with (you guessed it) Tide. I switched over a year ago, my clothes are just as clean, and I spend less money keeping them that way.’ IT MAY SEEM LIKE A SMIDGEON TO YOU, BUT . . . Harry Mark: ‘A quote I thought you might enjoy (attributed to Anonymous): If you lend a guy twenty dollars and you never see him again, it was probably worth the money.‘ ☞ I lent Mark Holman $15 in the summer of 1970, back when $15 was more – especially to me – than it is now. And I never saw him again. And, I don’t want to frighten any of you, but: I’m still looking for him. Tomorrow: Laying Blame Where’s It’s Due
Your Last Words on This Topic June 15, 2004February 25, 2017 Last week, we had some discussion of the early AIDS crisis, which now affects about 60 million people worldwide. Several of you offered additional material or perspectives, so I wanted to give the topic one more day. Thanks to the Boston Phoenix for the following. Note that at the time of this press briefing, it had been 15 months since the New York Times ran its first story on what came to be known as AIDS. THE WHITE HOUSE Office of the Press Secretary PRESS BRIEFING BY LARRY SPEAKES October 15, 1982 The Briefing Room 12:45pm EDT Q: Larry, does the President have any reaction to the announcement – the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, that AIDS is now an epidemic and have over 600 cases? MR. SPEAKES: What’s AIDS? Q: Over a third of them have died. It’s known as “gay plague.” (Laughter.) No, it is. I mean it’s a pretty serious thing that one in every three people that get this have died. And I wondered if the President is aware of it? MR. SPEAKES: I don’t have it. Do you? (Laughter.) Q: No, I don’t. MR. SPEAKES: You didn’t answer my question. Q: Well, I just wondered, does the President – MR. SPEAKES: How do you know? (Laughter.) Q: In other words, the White House looks on this as a great joke? MR. SPEAKES: No, I don’t know anything about it, Lester. Q: Does the President, does anyone in the White House know about this epidemic, Larry? MR. SPEAKES: I don’t think so. I don’t think there’s been any – Q: Nobody knows? MR. SPEAKES: There has been no personal experience here, Lester. Q: No, I mean, I thought you were keeping – MR. SPEAKES: I checked thoroughly with Dr. Ruge this morning and he’s had no – (laughter) – no patients suffering from AIDS or whatever it is. Q: The President doesn’t have gay plague, is that what you’re saying or what? MR. SPEAKES: No, I didn’t say that. Q: Didn’t say that? MR. SPEAKES: I thought I heard you on the State Department over there. Why didn’t you stay there? (Laughter.) Q: Because I love you Larry, that’s why (Laughter.) MR. SPEAKES: Oh I see. Just don’t put it in those terms, Lester. (Laughter.) Q: Oh, I retract that. MR. SPEAKES: I hope so. Q: It’s too late. This transcript is taken from the prologue to Jon Cohen’s 2001 book, Shots in the Dark: The Wayward Search for an AIDS Vaccine, the full text of which can be found here. Brian Murphy: ‘With all this talk of the homosexual population and the lack of response by the CDC or Reagan’s administration, one often fails to remember those who were not gay and became infected because of a lack of policy and prevention methods. Tens of thousands of hemophiliacs around the world were supplied with infected blood. These individuals had to choose between death without an infusion or accept the risk of infection. I know this because my brother needed the transfusion when he was twelve after falling off his bike. He died from AIDS in 1997 at the age of 23.’ Name Withheld: ‘Ten years ago my brother, a heterosexual, non-drug abuser, died of AIDS dementia after four tough years. He was not one of the ‘untouchable’ groups allowed to die (for their sins, apparently). Reagan slept while all kinds of Americans died of AIDS. When my brother died in a hospice, many of the people dying there were hemophiliacs, abandoned by their government. Reagan had the ‘bully pulpit’ but did nothing. Feel free to publish this but withhold my name; I don’t want to traumatize my family any more than they have already been traumatized.’ John Bakke: ‘I want to point out something about the figures you had in your June 9 posting. Open the PDF you linked to, and go to page 6, from which the figures were taken. The figures you list include Medicaid and Medicare. For the purposes of considering whether Reagan promoted any sort of urgent response to HIV/AIDS, these figures can be ignored; it represents non-discretionary spending on futile care for people who lay dying, waiting for effective treatments that were barely being pursued. The correct figures to cite – the money that was voluntarily allocated to research – are [much smaller]. How much damage might have been avoided if the research had been more aggressive in the mid-1980s! I’d compare those early foot-dragging years to saving for retirement: starting early has a disproportionately large impact on later results.’ B Norse: ‘Reagan stood up for the LGBT community in the 1970’s when that was really tough to do [fighting California’s Briggs Amendment that would have barred gays from teaching in public schools]. He had zero political reasons to support us and many not to. But he did, because he was a good and decent human being. In that light, I don’t buy the argument that Reagan dragged his feet because it was just gays dying.’ ☞ That is a good perspective. My own assumption is that the foot-dragging was more a matter of avoiding an uncomfortable topic, and taking his cues from those around him, than any active animus toward his and Nancy’s gay friends. But to the thousands who needlessly died miserable deaths (even a six-month acceleration in the response curve would have saved huge numbers of people), the President’s friendly optimism is little consolation. And his waiting literally years and years to publicly address the crisis, or express sympathy for the suffering . . . well, if you lived through it, week after week after week after week, it is not an easy thing to forget. With thousands of his fellow Americans dying, and millions more afraid for their own health or for the health of loved ones, this was not a small oversight. Andy (not me, another Andy): ‘Like many gay men, you’ve embraced the myth, perpetuated by the left, that Reagan was indifferent to the AIDS Crisis. Even when confronted with budget figures, you dismiss the facts and hold tightly to your prejudices. Reagan’s Surgeon General was the predominant leader in the effort to fight AIDS in the 1980’s, and let’s face it – it doesn’t matter who was President back then, antiviral treatment didn’t exist and medical science wasn’t where it is today, and it wouldn’t be where it is today if it weren’t for the spending that took place during Ronald Reagan’s Presidency. ‘The 40th president spoke of AIDS no later than September 17, 1985. Responding to a question on AIDS research, the president said: [I]ncluding what we have in the budget for ’86, it will amount to over a half a billion dollars that we have provided for research on AIDS in addition to what I’m sure other medical groups are doing. And we have $100 million in the budget this year; it’ll be 126 million next year. So, this is a top priority with us. Yes, there’s no question about the seriousness of this and the need to find an answer. ‘President Reagan’s February 6, 1986 State of the Union address included this specific passage where he says the word ‘AIDS’ five times: We will continue, as a high priority, the fight against Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). An unprecedented research effort is underway to deal with this major epidemic public health threat. The number of AIDS cases is expected to increase. While there are hopes for drugs and vaccines against AIDS, none is immediately at hand. Consequently, efforts should focus on prevention, to inform and to lower risks of further transmission of the AIDS virus. To this end, I am asking the Surgeon General to prepare a report to the American people on AIDS. ‘Did Ronald Reagan make AIDS the #1 priority during his term in office? No, he didn’t. He was busy dealing with the economy, national defense and the cold war. But you know what? To a young man coming out of the closet during the Eighties, because of the efforts of his Surgeon General I learned that I couldn’t participate in anonymous sex without taking safety precautions. Because of that, I’m alive and healthy today. ‘The revisionist history and outright lies being spewed by the Democrats are really turning me off. If I thought the right wing commentators were annoying, I’m finding the current left wing whininess downright shrill. As an officer of the Democratic Party, you need to knock some of your people upside the head and tell them to knock it off. I’m one of those swing voters and you people are really pissing me off.’ ☞ Thanks, Andy. You’re right to set the record straight – a lot of people (including me, I think) have incorrectly asserted that President Reagan never publicly uttered the word until 1987. (That is the year he actually made a speech about it.) In fact, he never uttered the word in 1981, 1982, 1983, or 1984, but did utter it once in 1985 in response to a question and five times over the course of 30 seconds in 1986. Which is definitely better than nothing. But I don’t think the failure of Democrats and others to note those six instances is willful deception or revisionism, or that it changes the larger point very much – certainly not about 1981 or 1982 or 1983 or 1984, but even, perhaps, about 1985 and 1986. It was not until 1987 (so far as I can tell) that he spent more than a minute or so on the topic in a public address. As for the Surgeon General you credit with saving your life – and for whom I have the highest regard also – here is how the San Francisco Chronicle reported his own views: Dr. C. Everett Koop, Reagan’s surgeon general, has said that because of “intradepartmental politics” he was cut out of all AIDS discussions for the first five years of the Reagan administration. The reason, he explained, was “because transmission of AIDS was understood to be primarily in the homosexual population and in those who abused intravenous drugs.” The president’s advisers, Koop said, “took the stand, ‘They are only getting what they justly deserve.'” DO YOU PAY ESTIMATED TAX? IF SO, REMEMBER TO SEND IN YOUR 2ND QUARTERLY PAYMENT TODAY!
If You Own No Oil Stocks June 14, 2004January 21, 2017 Click here for thoughts on oil from a man aptly named Kevin Drum. (Kevin Kegger’s thoughts on the beer supply to follow next week.) Current demand for crude oil, he says, is about 80 million barrels per day . . . there is practically no spare producing capacity anywhere in the world . . . yet demand for oil increases by about 2 million barrels each year. On February 16, I linked to Stephen Leeb’s book, which predicts $100-a-barrel oil in the not too distant future. The little stock I suggested that day has so far gone exactly nowhere, and I don’t know whether it ever will. Worse still has been the Canadian gas producer I have suggested here for years, symbol CSPLF. I am nothing if not patient. (OK, I’m as impatient as the next guy. I am nothing if not stubborn.) But I’m looking at others, also, more mainstream – for example, I’ve just bought some Anadarko (APC) – because even though I don’t know anything about oil anyone else doesn’t know (an important caveat), and even though the stock prices of the more prominent energy companies surely already reflect much of what people do know, I would still guess that oil and gas producers may do well in the years ahead. We can ‘produce’ tremendous quantities of new energy in the U.S. over the next 10 or 20 years by more than doubling the fuel efficiency of our automotive fleet, by making our buildings more efficient, and so on. This is no doubt the single most important set of things we can do to enhance our future prosperity, health and security. But what about the Chinese? How much more fuel efficient can a bicycle get? As their economy, and the Indian economy, grow, won’t demand grow with it? So in the few decades before we succeed in powering our lives the way they do in sci-fi movies (something will glow green, is all I know), you might do worse than having an oil stock or two in your portfolio. But don’t bet too much. Markets have a way of confounding expectations. One smart friend of mine takes this view: ‘The Washington Monthly article has some facts wrong. Saudi spare capacity is greater than 1.5 million barrels a day. Spare capacity also exists in Kuwait, UAE, and elsewhere (Nigeria, Russia). Based on my experience, new wells can be completed quickly. They could increase capacity very rapidly and extensively in Saudi Arabia if they wanted. The price of oil is low compared to 1980. But without a cartel, the price would be $8 or less if easily available Saudi and Iraqi oil costing $2 came to market.’ Normally, of course, the time to buy something is when no one is thinking about it. Another reason to be wary. And still I think about all those bicycles.
The Presidential Debates – Really June 11, 2004March 25, 2012 The Presidential debates – an interesting preview.