If you want to know just how ridiculous our agricultural programs are, consider this: for about half a century, we priced milk based on how far the cow was from Eau Claire, Wisconsin. No, I swear, I am not making this up. Apparently, the USDA scientifically determined that Eau Claire was the perfectest place in the entire world to keep cows, and that therefore the farther you were from that fabled city, the harder you must find it to produce milk.
Macro Man put up a post arguing that oil prices had risen to far to fast to be justified by the fundamentals. In response, someone calling themselves Moe Gamble said….
Oil started to go into a trading range on April 23. Saudi Arabia was bringing on 300,000 barrels a day, and the price would have stabilized for a couple of months.
What happened is that we had strikes in the UK and Nigeria that took roughly 380,000 barrels a day out of May supply. To make matters worse, this lack of supply was not spread smoothly through the month. It was bunched up into a couple of weeks, and the effect of those weeks just started to hit. Traders had to pull off shorts and the price zoomed up.
Also, it turned out that Saudi Arabia had lied about when those extra 300,000 barrels a day were coming online. They had announced to the press that production had started the third week of April. Now it looks like the new production really didn’t come online for another 2-3 weeks (if then).
Prices would normally come down in a few weeks as this production started returning to the inventory reports. But you can kiss that good-bye because we have a special situation right now–China and India have been holding off on purchases, and a flood of new demand will be hitting when they get their act together in the next week or two. India: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/BPCL_starts_rationing_fuel_supplies/articleshow/3061069.cms. China: http://in.reuters.com/article/asiaCompanyAndMarkets/idINPEK15115620080521.
This has been China’s normal cycle for at least the past year. Foot-dragging then massive buying when the diesel runs out. And now they are burning diesel in power plants to make up for a lack of coal related to the earthquake.
Meanwhile, Russia’s exports are off 3.3% from last year, and existing production has a decline rate somewhere between 4.5% and 8% (and rising).
That started off a back and forth discussion that was very interesting. You should read the whole thread.
This article on Burma from Spiegel should have been essay of the week. But it came out to late and I don’t want to want to wait until next week to bring it to peoples attention. It should be read.
This rant is a useful to reminder why many Jews were so committed to the recreation of Israel.
As this essay sets out to prove, there is no assurance that the sky will not fall any minute now. Consider yourself warned.
One of the overlaps between my old job duties and my new duties is monitoring an effort to improve our service to a key customer. As with a similar initiative about a year ago, I am frustrated with merely noting the problems we are having. I don’t think using extraordinary focus to compensate for systemic Click Here to continue reading.
The first signs of declining interest among the young in science and engineering appeared almost two decades ago, after Japan reached first-world living standards, and in recent years there has been a steady decline in the number of science and engineering students. But only now are Japanese companies starting to feel the real pinch.
By one ministry of internal affairs estimate, the digital technology industry here is already short almost half a million engineers.
Headhunters have begun poaching engineers midcareer with fat signing bonuses, a predatory practice once unheard-of in Japan’s less-cutthroat version of capitalism.
The problem is likely to worsen because Japan has one of the lowest birthrates in the world. “Japan is sitting on a demographic time bomb,” said Kazuhiro Asakawa, a professor of business at Keio University. “An explosion is going to take place. They see it coming, but no one is doing enough about it.”
This is happening all over the developed world. To much talent has been directed towards being a lawyer or a banker. Add that to a shortage of kids general and young engineers are going to be in high demand.
That anger is flowing in communities across the disaster zone. While the overall death toll has passed 21,500 and is expected to climb as high as 50,000, there is special tragedy — and perhaps a whiff of scandal — in the number of young people who died in collapsed schools. Communities like Juyuan have had an entire generation of young people wiped out. In the nearby city of Dujiangyan, more than 300 students were killed when the Xinjian Elementary School collapsed. Sixty miles away in the mountainside town of Hanwang, the scene repeated itself at the Dongqi Middle School, where an estimated 200 students died. Five children were killed when two schools even collapsed in Chongqing, the state-run Xinhua News Service reported. The city is more than 200 miles away from the quake’s epicenter.
Heard of a plague of grasshoppers? Well, there are enough birds (I’m assuming they’re starlings) in the sky in this video taken in California to be a plague of starlings. But what is even more intriguing is the sight they make when they fly around. It’s a huge number of birds making changing formations in the sky, swirling around and ballooning out making various elliptical shapes. There are many groups of them, and as they fly around it makes undulating black patterns as all the birds move to one spot or another.
For example, at one point, there are four sections of birds: a neatly-contained elliptical shape at the top, two smaller groups underneath, and a more scattered-apart group coming in from the bottom. The bottom group moves upward and forms a bulging “head”, compresses down into a dense mass and then puffs outward and dissipates. The top section of birds flies upward, condensing as it goes into a small black blob. Meanwhile one of the smaller, side-groups pushes a narrow arm into the other side group, which spreads out, swirls downward, thickens as it moves up, rushes forward and collides (or seems to; they’re really two distinct layers) with the small dark blob, which is so thick with birds it looks black. The group thins on one side as some birds go behind the dense blob, which seems to fall apart and collect again, undulating with the added birds; meanwhile on the other side, it swells out. That was only a few seconds worth; at another point there are even more groups. Anyway, you can go see for yourself!
Around the middle of the video they seem to disappear, but keep watching; they come back in an even more impressive display.
<div
(Posted by Good Doggy)